The American

H >> Henry James >> The American


"Well, we shall see. So they carry those parasols here--the menfolk?"

"Of course they do. They're great things. They understand comfort out
here."

"Where do you buy them?"

"Anywhere, everywhere."

"Well, Tristram, I'm glad to get hold of you. You can show me the ropes.
I suppose you know Paris inside out."

Mr. Tristram gave a mellow smile of self-gratulation. "Well, I guess
there are not many men that can show me much. I'll take care of you."

"It's a pity you were not here a few minutes ago. I have just bought a
picture. You might have put the thing through for me."

"Bought a picture?" said Mr. Tristram, looking vaguely round at the
walls. "Why, do they sell them?"

"I mean a copy."

"Oh, I see. These," said Mr. Tristram, nodding at the Titians and
Vandykes, "these, I suppose, are originals."

"I hope so," cried Newman. "I don't want a copy of a copy."

"Ah," said Mr. Tristram, mysteriously, "you can never tell. They
imitate, you know, so deucedly well. It's like the jewelers, with their
false stones. Go into the Palais Royal, there; you see 'Imitation' on
half the windows. The law obliges them to stick it on, you know; but you
can't tell the things apart. To tell the truth," Mr. Tristram continued,
with a wry face, "I don't do much in pictures. I leave that to my wife."

"Ah, you have got a wife?"

"Didn't I mention it? She's a very nice woman; you must know her. She's
up there in the Avenue d'Iena."

"So you are regularly fixed--house and children and all."

"Yes, a tip-top house and a couple of youngsters."

"Well," said Christopher Newman, stretching his arms a little, with a
sigh, "I envy you."

"Oh no! you don't!" answered Mr. Tristram, giving him a little poke with
his parasol.

"I beg your pardon; I do!"

"Well, you won't, then, when--when--"

"You don't certainly mean when I have seen your establishment?"

"When you have seen Paris, my boy. You want to be your own master here."

"Oh, I have been my own master all my life, and I'm tired of it."

"Well, try Paris. How old are you?"

"Thirty-six."

"C'est le bel age, as they say here."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that a man shouldn't send away his plate till he has eaten his
fill."

"All that? I have just made arrangements to take French lessons."

"Oh, you don't want any lessons. You'll pick it up. I never took any."

"I suppose you speak French as well as English?"

"Better!" said Mr. Tristram, roundly. "It's a splendid language. You can
say all sorts of bright things in it."

"But I suppose," said Christopher Newman, with an earnest desire for
information, "that you must be bright to begin with."

"Not a bit; that's just the beauty of it."

The two friends, as they exchanged these remarks, had remained standing
where they met, and leaning against the rail which protected the
pictures. Mr. Tristram at last declared that he was overcome with
fatigue and should be happy to sit down. Newman recommended in the
highest terms the great divan on which he had been lounging, and they
prepared to seat themselves. "This is a great place; isn't it?" said
Newman, with ardor.

"Great place, great place. Finest thing in the world." And then,
suddenly, Mr. Tristram hesitated and looked about him. "I suppose they
won't let you smoke here."

Newman stared. "Smoke? I'm sure I don't know. You know the regulations
better than I."

"I? I never was here before!"

"Never! in six years?"

"I believe my wife dragged me here once when we first came to Paris, but
I never found my way back."

"But you say you know Paris so well!"

"I don't call this Paris!" cried Mr. Tristram, with assurance. "Come;
let's go over to the Palais Royal and have a smoke."

"I don't smoke," said Newman.

"A drink, then."

And Mr. Tristram led his companion away. They passed through the
glorious halls of the Louvre, down the staircases, along the cool, dim
galleries of sculpture, and out into the enormous court. Newman looked
about him as he went, but he made no comments, and it was only when they
at last emerged into the open air that he said to his friend, "It seems
to me that in your place I should have come here once a week."

"Oh, no you wouldn't!" said Mr. Tristram. "You think so, but you
wouldn't. You wouldn't have had time. You would always mean to go, but
you never would go. There's better fun than that, here in Paris. Italy's
the place to see pictures; wait till you get there. There you have to
go; you can't do anything else. It's an awful country; you can't get a
decent cigar. I don't know why I went in there, to-day; I was strolling
along, rather hard up for amusement. I sort of noticed the Louvre as I
passed, and I thought I would go in and see what was going on. But if I
hadn't found you there I should have felt rather sold. Hang it, I don't
care for pictures; I prefer the reality!" And Mr. Tristram tossed off
this happy formula with an assurance which the numerous class of persons
suffering from an overdose of "culture" might have envied him.

The two gentlemen proceeded along the Rue de Rivoli and into the
Palais Royal, where they seated themselves at one of the little tables
stationed at the door of the cafe which projects into the great open
quadrangle. The place was filled with people, the fountains were
spouting, a band was playing, clusters of chairs were gathered beneath
all the lime-trees, and buxom, white-capped nurses, seated along the
benches, were offering to their infant charges the amplest facilities
for nutrition. There was an easy, homely gayety in the whole scene, and
Christopher Newman felt that it was most characteristically Parisian.

"And now," began Mr. Tristram, when they had tested the decoction
which he had caused to be served to them, "now just give an account of
yourself. What are your ideas, what are your plans, where have you
come from and where are you going? In the first place, where are you
staying?"

"At the Grand Hotel," said Newman.

Mr. Tristram puckered his plump visage. "That won't do! You must
change."

"Change?" demanded Newman. "Why, it's the finest hotel I ever was in."

"You don't want a 'fine' hotel; you want something small and quiet
and elegant, where your bell is answered and you--your person is
recognized."

"They keep running to see if I have rung before I have touched the
bell," said Newman "and as for my person they are always bowing and
scraping to it."

"I suppose you are always tipping them. That's very bad style."

"Always? By no means. A man brought me something yesterday, and then
stood loafing in a beggarly manner. I offered him a chair and asked him
if he wouldn't sit down. Was that bad style?"

"Very!"

"But he bolted, instantly. At any rate, the place amuses me. Hang your
elegance, if it bores me. I sat in the court of the Grand Hotel last
night until two o'clock in the morning, watching the coming and going,
and the people knocking about."

"You're easily pleased. But you can do as you choose--a man in your
shoes. You have made a pile of money, eh?"

"I have made enough"

"Happy the man who can say that? Enough for what?"

"Enough to rest awhile, to forget the confounded thing, to look about
me, to see the world, to have a good time, to improve my mind, and,
if the fancy takes me, to marry a wife." Newman spoke slowly, with
a certain dryness of accent and with frequent pauses. This was his
habitual mode of utterance, but it was especially marked in the words I
have just quoted.

"Jupiter! There's a programme!" cried Mr. Tristram. "Certainly, all that
takes money, especially the wife; unless indeed she gives it, as mine
did. And what's the story? How have you done it?"

Newman had pushed his hat back from his forehead, folded his arms, and
stretched his legs. He listened to the music, he looked about him at the
bustling crowd, at the plashing fountains, at the nurses and the babies.
"I have worked!" he answered at last.

Tristram looked at him for some moments, and allowed his placid eyes to
measure his friend's generous longitude and rest upon his comfortably
contemplative face. "What have you worked at?" he asked.

"Oh, at several things."

"I suppose you're a smart fellow, eh?"

Newman continued to look at the nurses and babies; they imparted to the
scene a kind of primordial, pastoral simplicity. "Yes," he said at last,
"I suppose I am." And then, in answer to his companion's inquiries,
he related briefly his history since their last meeting. It was an
intensely Western story, and it dealt with enterprises which it will be
needless to introduce to the reader in detail. Newman had come out
of the war with a brevet of brigadier-general, an honor which in this
case--without invidious comparisons--had lighted upon shoulders amply
competent to bear it. But though he could manage a fight, when need was,
Newman heartily disliked the business; his four years in the army
had left him with an angry, bitter sense of the waste of precious
things--life and time and money and "smartness" and the early freshness
of purpose; and he had addressed himself to the pursuits of peace
with passionate zest and energy. He was of course as penniless when he
plucked off his shoulder-straps as when he put them on, and the only
capital at his disposal was his dogged resolution and his lively
perception of ends and means. Exertion and action were as natural to
him as respiration; a more completely healthy mortal had never trod the
elastic soil of the West. His experience, moreover, was as wide as his
capacity; when he was fourteen years old, necessity had taken him by
his slim young shoulders and pushed him into the street, to earn that
night's supper. He had not earned it but he had earned the next night's,
and afterwards, whenever he had had none, it was because he had gone
without it to use the money for something else, a keener pleasure or
a finer profit. He had turned his hand, with his brain in it, to many
things; he had been enterprising, in an eminent sense of the term; he
had been adventurous and even reckless, and he had known bitter failure
as well as brilliant success; but he was a born experimentalist, and he
had always found something to enjoy in the pressure of necessity, even
when it was as irritating as the haircloth shirt of the mediaeval monk.
At one time failure seemed inexorably his portion; ill-luck became
his bed-fellow, and whatever he touched he turned, not to gold, but
to ashes. His most vivid conception of a supernatural element in the
world's affairs had come to him once when this pertinacity of misfortune
was at its climax; there seemed to him something stronger in life than
his own will. But the mysterious something could only be the devil,
and he was accordingly seized with an intense personal enmity to this
impertinent force. He had known what it was to have utterly exhausted
his credit, to be unable to raise a dollar, and to find himself
at nightfall in a strange city, without a penny to mitigate its
strangeness. It was under these circumstances that he made his entrance
into San Francisco, the scene, subsequently, of his happiest strokes of
fortune. If he did not, like Dr. Franklin in Philadelphia, march along
the street munching a penny-loaf, it was only because he had not the
penny-loaf necessary to the performance. In his darkest days he had had
but one simple, practical impulse--the desire, as he would have phrased
it, to see the thing through. He did so at last, buffeted his way into
smooth waters, and made money largely. It must be admitted, rather
nakedly, that Christopher Newman's sole aim in life had been to
make money; what he had been placed in the world for was, to his own
perception, simply to wrest a fortune, the bigger the better, from
defiant opportunity. This idea completely filled his horizon and
satisfied his imagination. Upon the uses of money, upon what one might
do with a life into which one had succeeded in injecting the golden
stream, he had up to his thirty-fifth year very scantily reflected. Life
had been for him an open game, and he had played for high stakes. He had
won at last and carried off his winnings; and now what was he to do with
them? He was a man to whom, sooner or later, the question was sure to
present itself, and the answer to it belongs to our story. A vague sense
that more answers were possible than his philosophy had hitherto
dreamt of had already taken possession of him, and it seemed softly and
agreeably to deepen as he lounged in this brilliant corner of Paris with
his friend.

"I must confess," he presently went on, "that here I don't feel at
all smart. My remarkable talents seem of no use. I feel as simple as a
little child, and a little child might take me by the hand and lead me
about."

"Oh, I'll be your little child," said Tristram, jovially; "I'll take you
by the hand. Trust yourself to me."

"I am a good worker," Newman continued, "but I rather think I am a poor
loafer. I have come abroad to amuse myself, but I doubt whether I know
how."

"Oh, that's easily learned."

"Well, I may perhaps learn it, but I am afraid I shall never do it by
rote. I have the best will in the world about it, but my genius doesn't
lie in that direction. As a loafer I shall never be original, as I take
it that you are."

"Yes," said Tristram, "I suppose I am original; like all those immoral
pictures in the Louvre."

"Besides," Newman continued, "I don't want to work at pleasure, any
more than I played at work. I want to take it easily. I feel deliciously
lazy, and I should like to spend six months as I am now, sitting under
a tree and listening to a band. There's only one thing; I want to hear
some good music."

"Music and pictures! Lord, what refined tastes! You are what my wife
calls intellectual. I ain't, a bit. But we can find something better for
you to do than to sit under a tree. To begin with, you must come to the
club."

"What club?"

"The Occidental. You will see all the Americans there; all the best of
them, at least. Of course you play poker?"

"Oh, I say," cried Newman, with energy, "you are not going to lock me up
in a club and stick me down at a card-table! I haven't come all this way
for that."

"What the deuce HAVE you come for! You were glad enough to play poker in
St. Louis, I recollect, when you cleaned me out."

"I have come to see Europe, to get the best out of it I can. I want to
see all the great things, and do what the clever people do."

"The clever people? Much obliged. You set me down as a blockhead, then?"

Newman was sitting sidewise in his chair, with his elbow on the back and
his head leaning on his hand. Without moving he looked a while at his
companion with his dry, guarded, half-inscrutable, and yet altogether
good-natured smile. "Introduce me to your wife!" he said at last.

Tristram bounced about in his chair. "Upon my word, I won't. She doesn't
want any help to turn up her nose at me, nor do you, either!"

"I don't turn up my nose at you, my dear fellow; nor at any one, or
anything. I'm not proud, I assure you I'm not proud. That's why I am
willing to take example by the clever people."

"Well, if I'm not the rose, as they say here, I have lived near it. I
can show you some clever people, too. Do you know General Packard? Do
you know C. P. Hatch? Do you know Miss Kitty Upjohn?"

"I shall be happy to make their acquaintance; I want to cultivate
society."

Tristram seemed restless and suspicious; he eyed his friend askance,
and then, "What are you up to, any way?" he demanded. "Are you going to
write a book?"

Christopher Newman twisted one end of his mustache a while, in silence,
and at last he made answer. "One day, a couple of months ago, something
very curious happened to me. I had come on to New York on some important
business; it was rather a long story--a question of getting ahead of
another party, in a certain particular way, in the stock-market. This
other party had once played me a very mean trick. I owed him a grudge, I
felt awfully savage at the time, and I vowed that, when I got a chance,
I would, figuratively speaking, put his nose out of joint. There was a
matter of some sixty thousand dollars at stake. If I put it out of his
way, it was a blow the fellow would feel, and he really deserved no
quarter. I jumped into a hack and went about my business, and it was
in this hack--this immortal, historical hack--that the curious thing I
speak of occurred. It was a hack like any other, only a trifle dirtier,
with a greasy line along the top of the drab cushions, as if it had been
used for a great many Irish funerals. It is possible I took a nap; I
had been traveling all night, and though I was excited with my errand,
I felt the want of sleep. At all events I woke up suddenly, from a sleep
or from a kind of a reverie, with the most extraordinary feeling in the
world--a mortal disgust for the thing I was going to do. It came upon
me like THAT!" and he snapped his fingers--"as abruptly as an old wound
that begins to ache. I couldn't tell the meaning of it; I only felt that
I loathed the whole business and wanted to wash my hands of it. The idea
of losing that sixty thousand dollars, of letting it utterly slide and
scuttle and never hearing of it again, seemed the sweetest thing in the
world. And all this took place quite independently of my will, and I sat
watching it as if it were a play at the theatre. I could feel it going
on inside of me. You may depend upon it that there are things going on
inside of us that we understand mighty little about."

"Jupiter! you make my flesh creep!" cried Tristram. "And while you sat
in your hack, watching the play, as you call it, the other man marched
in and bagged your sixty thousand dollars?"

"I have not the least idea. I hope so, poor devil! but I never found
out. We pulled up in front of the place I was going to in Wall Street,
but I sat still in the carriage, and at last the driver scrambled down
off his seat to see whether his carriage had not turned into a hearse.
I couldn't have got out, any more than if I had been a corpse. What was
the matter with me? Momentary idiocy, you'll say. What I wanted to get
out of was Wall Street. I told the man to drive down to the Brooklyn
ferry and to cross over. When we were over, I told him to drive me out
into the country. As I had told him originally to drive for dear life
down town, I suppose he thought me insane. Perhaps I was, but in that
case I am insane still. I spent the morning looking at the first green
leaves on Long Island. I was sick of business; I wanted to throw it all
up and break off short; I had money enough, or if I hadn't I ought to
have. I seemed to feel a new man inside my old skin, and I longed for
a new world. When you want a thing so very badly you had better treat
yourself to it. I didn't understand the matter, not in the least; but
I gave the old horse the bridle and let him find his way. As soon as I
could get out of the game I sailed for Europe. That is how I come to be
sitting here."

"You ought to have bought up that hack," said Tristram; "it isn't a
safe vehicle to have about. And you have really sold out, then; you have
retired from business?"

"I have made over my hand to a friend; when I feel disposed, I can take
up the cards again. I dare say that a twelvemonth hence the operation
will be reversed. The pendulum will swing back again. I shall be sitting
in a gondola or on a dromedary, and all of a sudden I shall want
to clear out. But for the present I am perfectly free. I have even
bargained that I am to receive no business letters."

"Oh, it's a real caprice de prince," said Tristram. "I back out; a poor
devil like me can't help you to spend such very magnificent leisure as
that. You should get introduced to the crowned heads."

Newman looked at him a moment, and then, with his easy smile, "How does
one do it?" he asked.

"Come, I like that!" cried Tristram. "It shows you are in earnest."

"Of course I am in earnest. Didn't I say I wanted the best? I know the
best can't be had for mere money, but I rather think money will do a
good deal. In addition, I am willing to take a good deal of trouble."

"You are not bashful, eh?"

"I haven't the least idea. I want the biggest kind of entertainment a
man can get. People, places, art, nature, everything! I want to see the
tallest mountains, and the bluest lakes, and the finest pictures and the
handsomest churches, and the most celebrated men, and the most beautiful
women."

"Settle down in Paris, then. There are no mountains that I know of, and
the only lake is in the Bois du Boulogne, and not particularly blue.
But there is everything else: plenty of pictures and churches, no end of
celebrated men, and several beautiful women."

"But I can't settle down in Paris at this season, just as summer is
coming on."

"Oh, for the summer go up to Trouville."

"What is Trouville?"

"The French Newport. Half the Americans go."

"Is it anywhere near the Alps?"

"About as near as Newport is to the Rocky Mountains."

"Oh, I want to see Mont Blanc," said Newman, "and Amsterdam, and the
Rhine, and a lot of places. Venice in particular. I have great ideas
about Venice."

"Ah," said Mr. Tristram, rising, "I see I shall have to introduce you to
my wife!"



CHAPTER III


He performed this ceremony on the following day, when, by appointment,
Christopher Newman went to dine with him. Mr. and Mrs. Tristram lived
behind one of those chalk-colored facades which decorate with their
pompous sameness the broad avenues manufactured by Baron Haussmann in
the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe. Their apartment was rich in the
modern conveniences, and Tristram lost no time in calling his visitor's
attention to their principal household treasures, the gas-lamps and the
furnace-holes. "Whenever you feel homesick," he said, "you must come up
here. We'll stick you down before a register, under a good big burner,
and--"

"And you will soon get over your homesickness," said Mrs. Tristram.

Her husband stared; his wife often had a tone which he found inscrutable
he could not tell for his life whether she was in jest or in earnest.
The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs.
Tristram a marked tendency to irony. Her taste on many points differed
from that of her husband, and though she made frequent concessions it
must be confessed that her concessions were not always graceful. They
were founded upon a vague project she had of some day doing something
very positive, something a trifle passionate. What she meant to do she
could by no means have told you; but meanwhile, nevertheless, she was
buying a good conscience, by installments.

It should be added, without delay, to anticipate misconception, that her
little scheme of independence did not definitely involve the assistance
of another person, of the opposite sex; she was not saving up virtue to
cover the expenses of a flirtation. For this there were various reasons.
To begin with, she had a very plain face and she was entirely without
illusions as to her appearance. She had taken its measure to a hair's
breadth, she knew the worst and the best, she had accepted herself. It
had not been, indeed, without a struggle. As a young girl she had spent
hours with her back to her mirror, crying her eyes out; and later
she had from desperation and bravado adopted the habit of proclaiming
herself the most ill-favored of women, in order that she might--as in
common politeness was inevitable--be contradicted and reassured. It
was since she had come to live in Europe that she had begun to take the
matter philosophically. Her observation, acutely exercised here, had
suggested to her that a woman's first duty is not to be beautiful, but
to be pleasing, and she encountered so many women who pleased without
beauty that she began to feel that she had discovered her mission. She
had once heard an enthusiastic musician, out of patience with a gifted
bungler, declare that a fine voice is really an obstacle to singing
properly; and it occurred to her that it might perhaps be equally true
that a beautiful face is an obstacle to the acquisition of charming
manners. Mrs. Tristram, then, undertook to be exquisitely agreeable, and
she brought to the task a really touching devotion. How well she would
have succeeded I am unable to say; unfortunately she broke off in the
middle. Her own excuse was the want of encouragement in her immediate
circle. But I am inclined to think that she had not a real genius for
the matter, or she would have pursued the charming art for itself. The
poor lady was very incomplete. She fell back upon the harmonies of the
toilet, which she thoroughly understood, and contented herself with
dressing in perfection. She lived in Paris, which she pretended to
detest, because it was only in Paris that one could find things to
exactly suit one's complexion. Besides out of Paris it was always more
or less of a trouble to get ten-button gloves. When she railed at this
serviceable city and you asked her where she would prefer to reside, she
returned some very unexpected answer. She would say in Copenhagen, or
in Barcelona; having, while making the tour of Europe, spent a couple
of days at each of these places. On the whole, with her poetic furbelows
and her misshapen, intelligent little face, she was, when you knew her,
a decidedly interesting woman. She was naturally shy, and if she had
been born a beauty, she would (having no vanity) probably have remained
shy. Now, she was both diffident and importunate; extremely reserved
sometimes with her friends, and strangely expansive with strangers. She
despised her husband; despised him too much, for she had been perfectly
at liberty not to marry him. She had been in love with a clever man
who had slighted her, and she had married a fool in the hope that
this thankless wit, reflecting on it, would conclude that she had no
appreciation of merit, and that he had flattered himself in supposing
that she cared for his own. Restless, discontented, visionary, without
personal ambitions, but with a certain avidity of imagination, she was,
as I have said before, eminently incomplete. She was full--both for
good and for ill--of beginnings that came to nothing; but she had
nevertheless, morally, a spark of the sacred fire.