He wandered back to the divan and seated himself on the other side, in
view of the great canvas on which Paul Veronese had depicted the
marriage-feast of Cana. Wearied as he was he found the picture
entertaining; it had an illusion for him; it satisfied his conception,
which was ambitious, of what a splendid banquet should be. In the
left-hand corner of the picture is a young woman with yellow tresses
confined in a golden head-dress; she is bending forward and listening,
with the smile of a charming woman at a dinner-party, to her neighbor.
Newman detected her in the crowd, admired her, and perceived that she
too had her votive copyist—a young man with his hair standing on end.
Suddenly he became conscious of the germ of the mania of the
“collector;” he had taken the first step; why should he not go on? It
was only twenty minutes before that he had bought the first picture of
his life, and now he was already thinking of art-patronage as a
fascinating pursuit. His reflections quickened his good-humor, and he
was on the point of approaching the young man with another “_Combien?_”
Two or three facts in this relation are noticeable, although the
logical chain which connects them may seem imperfect. He knew
Mademoiselle Nioche had asked too much; he bore her no grudge for doing
so, and he was determined to pay the young man exactly the proper sum.
At this moment, however, his attention was attracted by a gentleman who
had come from another part of the room and whose manner was that of a
stranger to the gallery, although he was equipped with neither
guide-book nor opera-glass. He carried a white sun-umbrella, lined with
blue silk, and he strolled in front of the Paul Veronese, vaguely
looking at it, but much too near to see anything but the grain of the
canvas. Opposite to Christopher Newman he paused and turned, and then
our friend, who had been observing him, had a chance to verify a
suspicion aroused by an imperfect view of his face. The result of this
larger scrutiny was that he presently sprang to his feet, strode across
the room, and, with an outstretched hand, arrested the gentleman with
the blue-lined umbrella. The latter stared, but put out his hand at a
venture. He was corpulent and rosy, and though his countenance, which
was ornamented with a beautiful flaxen beard, carefully divided in the
middle and brushed outward at the sides, was not remarkable for
intensity of expression, he looked like a person who would willingly
shake hands with anyone. I know not what Newman thought of his face,
but he found a want of response in his grasp.
“Oh, come, come,” he said, laughing; “don’t say, now, you don’t know
me—if I have _not_ got a white parasol!”
The sound of his voice quickened the other’s memory, his face expanded
to its fullest capacity, and he also broke into a laugh. “Why,
Newman—I’ll be blowed! Where in the world—I declare—who would have
thought? You know you have changed.”
“You haven’t!” said Newman.
“Not for the better, no doubt. When did you get here?”
“Three days ago.”
“Why didn’t you let me know?”
“I had no idea _you_ were here.”
“I have been here these six years.”
“It must be eight or nine since we met.”
“Something of that sort. We were very young.”
“It was in St. Louis, during the war. You were in the army.”
“Oh no, not I! But you were.”
“I believe I was.”
“You came out all right?”
“I came out with my legs and arms—and with satisfaction. All that seems
very far away.”
“And how long have you been in Europe?”
“Seventeen days.”
“First time?”
“Yes, very much so.”
“Made your everlasting fortune?”
Christopher Newman was silent a moment, and then with a tranquil smile
he answered, “Yes.”
“And come to Paris to spend it, eh?”
“Well, we shall see. So they carry those parasols here—the men-folk?”
“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 jewellers, 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’Iéna.”
“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 âge_, 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 café 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 gaiety 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 mediæval 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 anyone, 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, anyway?” he demanded. “Are you going to
write a book?”
Christopher Newman twisted one end of his moustache 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!”