The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “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 thei
r 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.