The Complete Works of Henry James
Page 57
“From me, my child? How should I give lessons?”
“Pas de raisons! Ask him immediately!” said Mademoiselle Noemie, with soft brevity.
M. Nioche stood aghast, but under his daughter’s eye he collected his wits, and, doing his best to assume an agreeable smile, he executed her commands. “Would it please you to receive instruction in our beautiful language?” he inquired, with an appealing quaver.
“To study French?” asked Newman, staring.
M. Nioche pressed his finger-tips together and slowly raised his shoulders. “A little conversation!”
“Conversation—that’s it!” murmured Mademoiselle Noemie, who had caught the word. “The conversation of the best society.”
“Our French conversation is famous, you know,” M. Nioche ventured to continue. “It’s a great talent.”
“But isn’t it awfully difficult?” asked Newman, very simply.
“Not to a man of esprit, like monsieur, an admirer of beauty in every form!” and M. Nioche cast a significant glance at his daughter’s Madonna.
“I can’t fancy myself chattering French!” said Newman with a laugh. “And yet, I suppose that the more a man knows the better.”
“Monsieur expresses that very happily. Helas, oui!”
“I suppose it would help me a great deal, knocking about Paris, to know the language.”
“Ah, there are so many things monsieur must want to say: difficult things!”
“Everything I want to say is difficult. But you give lessons?”
Poor M. Nioche was embarrassed; he smiled more appealingly. “I am not a regular professor,” he admitted. “I can’t nevertheless tell him that I’m a professor,” he said to his daughter.
“Tell him it’s a very exceptional chance,” answered Mademoiselle Noemie; “an homme du monde—one gentleman conversing with another! Remember what you are—what you have been!”
“A teacher of languages in neither case! Much more formerly and much less to-day! And if he asks the price of the lessons?”
“He won’t ask it,” said Mademoiselle Noemie.
“What he pleases, I may say?”
“Never! That’s bad style.”
“If he asks, then?”
Mademoiselle Noemie had put on her bonnet and was tying the ribbons. She smoothed them out, with her soft little chin thrust forward. “Ten francs,” she said quickly.
“Oh, my daughter! I shall never dare.”
“Don’t dare, then! He won’t ask till the end of the lessons, and then I will make out the bill.”
M. Nioche turned to the confiding foreigner again, and stood rubbing his hands, with an air of seeming to plead guilty which was not intenser only because it was habitually so striking. It never occurred to Newman to ask him for a guarantee of his skill in imparting instruction; he supposed of course M. Nioche knew his own language, and his appealing forlornness was quite the perfection of what the American, for vague reasons, had always associated with all elderly foreigners of the lesson-giving class. Newman had never reflected upon philological processes. His chief impression with regard to ascertaining those mysterious correlatives of his familiar English vocables which were current in this extraordinary city of Paris was, that it was simply a matter of a good deal of unwonted and rather ridiculous muscular effort on his own part. “How did you learn English?” he asked of the old man.
“When I was young, before my miseries. Oh, I was wide awake, then. My father was a great commercant; he placed me for a year in a counting-house in England. Some of it stuck to me; but I have forgotten!”
“How much French can I learn in a month?”
“What does he say?” asked Mademoiselle Noemie.
M. Nioche explained.
“He will speak like an angel!” said his daughter.
But the native integrity which had been vainly exerted to secure M. Nioche’s commercial prosperity flickered up again. “Dame, monsieur!” he answered. “All I can teach you!” And then, recovering himself at a sign from his daughter, “I will wait upon you at your hotel.”
“Oh yes, I should like to learn French,” Newman went on, with democratic confidingness. “Hang me if I should ever have thought of it! I took for granted it was impossible. But if you learned my language, why shouldn’t I learn yours?” and his frank, friendly laugh drew the sting from the jest. “Only, if we are going to converse, you know, you must think of something cheerful to converse about.”
“You are very good, sir; I am overcome!” said M. Nioche, throwing out his hands. “But you have cheerfulness and happiness for two!”
“Oh no,” said Newman more seriously. “You must be bright and lively; that’s part of the bargain.”
M. Nioche bowed, with his hand on his heart. “Very well, sir; you have already made me lively.”
“Come and bring me my picture then; I will pay you for it, and we will talk about that. That will be a cheerful subject!”
Mademoiselle Noemie had collected her accessories, and she gave the precious Madonna in charge to her father, who retreated backwards out of sight, holding it at arm’s-length and reiterating his obeisance. The young lady gathered her shawl about her like a perfect Parisienne, and it was with the smile of a Parisienne that she took leave of her patron.
CHAPTER II
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 any one. 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.”
“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 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.”
“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?”