# The American (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 2

II
This personage wandered back to the divan and seated himself, on the other side, in view of the great canvas on which Paul Veronese has spread, to swarm and glow there for ever, the marriage-feast of Cana of Galilee. Weary as he was his spirit went out to the picture; it had an illusion for him; it satisfied his conception, which was strenuous, of what a splendid banquet should be. In the left-hand corner is a young woman with yellow tresses confined in a golden headdress; she bends forward and listens, with the smile of a charming person at a dinner-party, to her festal neighbour. Newman detected her in the crowd, admired her and perceived that she too had her votive copyist—a young man whose genius, like that of Samson, might have been in his bristling hair. Suddenly he was aware of the prime throb 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 pursuit that might float even so heavy a weight as himself. His reflexions quickened his good-humour 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 that 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, though he was equipped neither with guide book nor with opera-glass. He carried a white sun-umbrella lined with blue silk, and he strolled in front of the great picture, vaguely looking at it but much too near to see anything but the grain of the canvas. Opposite Christopher Newman he paused and turned, and then our friend, who had been observing him, had a chance to verify a suspicion roused by an imperfect view of his face. The result of the larger scrutiny was that he presently sprang to his feet, strode across the room and, with an outstretched hand, arrested this blank spectator. The gaping gentleman gaped afresh, but put out his hand at a venture. He was large, smooth and pink, with the air of a successfully potted plant, and though his countenance, ornamented with a beautiful flaxen beard carefully divided in the middle and brushed outward at the sides, was not remarkable for intensity of expression, it was exclusive only in the degree of the open door of an hotel—it would have been closed to the undesirable. It was for Newman in fact as if at first he had been but invited to "register."
Oh come, come," he said, laughing; "don't say now you don't know me—if I've not got a white parasol!"
His tone penetrated; the other's face expanded to ​its fullest capacity and then broke into gladness. "Why, Christopher Newman—I'll be blowed! Where in the world—? Who would have thought? You've carried out such extensive alterations."
"Well, I guess you've not," said Newman.
"Oh no, I hold together very much as I was. But when did you get here?"
"Three days ago."
"Then why did n't you let me know?"
"How was I to be aware—?"
"Why, I've been located here quite a while."
"Yes, it's quite a while since we last met."
"Well, it feels long—since the War."
"It was in Saint Louis, at the outbreak. You were going for a soldier," Newman said.
"Oh no, not I. It was you. Have you forgotten?"
"You bring it unpleasantly back."
"Then you did take your turn?"
"Oh yes, I took my turn. But that was nothing, I seem to feel, to this turn."
"How long then have you been in Europe?"
"Just seventeen days."
"First time you've been?"
"Yes, quite immensely the first."
Newman's friend had been looking him all over. "Made your everlasting fortune?"
Our gentleman was silent a little, and then with a tranquil smile, "Well, I've grubbed," he answered.
"And come to buy Paris up? Paris is for sale, you know."
"Well, I shall see what I can do about it. So they carry those parasols here—the men-folk?"
​"Of course they do. They're great things, these parasols. They understand detail out here."
"Where do you buy them?"
"Anywhere, everywhere."
"Well, Tristram, I'm glad to get hold of you. I guess you can tell me a good deal. I suppose you know Paris pretty correctly," Newman pursued.
Mr. Tristram's face took a rosy light. "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've just bought a picture. You might have put the thing through for me."
"Bought a picture? said Mr. Tristram, looking vaguely round the walls. "Why, do they sell them?"
"I mean a copy."
"Oh, I see. These"—and Mr. Tristram nodded at the Titians and Vandykes—"these, I suppose, are originals?"
"I hope so," said Newman. "I don't want a copy of a copy."
"Ah," his friend sagaciously returned, "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—and his grimace seemed a turn of the screw of discrimination—"I don't do so very much in pictures. They're one of the things I leave to my wife."
"Ah, you've acquired a wife?"
​"Did n't I mention it? She's a very smart woman. You must come right round. She's up there in the Avenue d'Iéna."
"So you're regularly fixed—house and children and all?"
"Yes; a tip-top house, and a couple of charming cubs."
"Well," sighed Christopher Newman, stretching his arms a little, "you affect me with a queer feeling that I suppose to be envy."
"Oh no, I don't," answered Mr. Tristram, giving him a little poke with his parasol.
"I beg your pardon; you do."
"Well, I shan't then, when—when—!"
"You don't certainly mean when I've seen your pleasant home?"
"When you've made yours, my boy. When you've seen Paris. You want to be in light marching order here."
"Oh, I've skipped about in my shirt all my life, and I 've had about enough of it."
"Well, try it on the basis of Paris. That makes a new thing of it. How old may you be?"
"Forty-two and a half, I guess."
"C'est le bel âge, as they say here."
Newman reflected. "Does that mean the age of the belly?"
"It means that a man should n't send away his plate till he has eaten his fill."
"It comes to the same thing. I've just made arrangements, anyhow, to take lessons in the language."
"Oh, you don't want any lessons. You'll pick it ​right up. I never required nor received any instruction."
"You speak it then as easily as English?"
"Easier! said Mr. Tristram roundly. "It's a splendid language. You can say all sorts of gay things in it."
"But I suppose," said Christopher Newman with an earnest desire for information, "that you must be pretty gay to begin with."
"Not a bit: that's just the beauty of it!"
The two friends, as they exchanged these remarks, which dropped from them without a pause, 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 lassitude 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, is n't it?" he broke out with enthusiasm.
"Great place, great place. Finest thing in the world." And then suddenly Mr. Tristram hesitated and looked about. "I suppose they won't let you smoke?"
Newman stared. "Smoke? I'm sure I don't know. You know the regulations better than I."
"I? I never was here before."
"Never! all your 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.
"What's that for?" Mr. Tristram growled as he 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 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 'd have come here once a week."
"Oh no, you wouldn't!" said Mr. Tristram. "You think so, but you would n't. You would n't have had time. You 'd 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 into that place to-day. I was strolling along, rather hard up for amusement. I sort of took in the Louvre as I passed, and I thought I might go up and see what was going on. But if I had n't found you there I should have felt rather sold. Hang it, I don't care for inanimate canvas or for cold marble beauty; I prefer the real thing!" And Mr. Tristram tossed off this happy formula with an assurance which the numerous class of persons suffering from an overdose of prescribed taste 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, or then projected, 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 it to be characteristically, richly Parisian.
"And now," began Mr. Tristram when they had tasted the decoction 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 hanging out?"
"At the Grand Hotel."
He put out all his lights. "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 superior, where your bell's answered and your personality recognised."
"They keep running to see if I've rung before I've touched the bell," said Newman, "and as for my personality they're always bowing and scraping to it."
"I suppose you're always tipping them. That's very bad style."
"Always? By no means. A man brought me something yesterday and then stood loafing about in a ​beggarly manner. I offered him a chair and asked him if he 'd sit down. Was that bad style?"
"I'll tell my wife!" Tristram simply answered.
"Tell the police if you like! He bolted right away, at any rate. The place quite fascinates me. Hang your 'superior' 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've made a pile of money, hey?"
"I've made about enough."
"Happy the man who can say that! But enough for what?"
"Enough to let up a while, to forget the whole question, to look about me, to see the world, to have a good time, to improve my mind and, if my hour strikes, to marry a wife." Newman spoke slowly, with a quaint effect of dry detachment and with frequent pauses. This was his habitual mode of utterance, but it was especially marked in the words just recorded.
"Jupiter, there's an order!" 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. Well, I haven't done it by sitting round this way."
​Tristram considered him again, allowing a finer curiosity to measure his generous longitude and retrace the blurred lines of his resting face. "What have you been in?"
"Oh, in more things than I care to remember."
"I suppose you're a real live man, hey?"
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 guess I am." And then in answer to his companion's enquiries he briefly exposed his record since their last meeting. It was, with intensity, a tale of the Western world, and it showed, in that bright alien air, very much as fine dessicated, articulated "specimens," bleached, monstrous, probably unique, show in the high light of museums of natural history. It dealt with elements, incidents, enterprises, which it will be needless to introduce to the reader in detail; the deeps and the shallows, the ebb and the flow, of great financial tides. Newman had come out of the war with a brevet of brigadier-general, an honour which in this case—without invidious comparisons—had lighted upon shoulders amply competent to carry it. But though he had proved he could handle his men, and still more the enemy's, with effect, when need was, he heartily disliked the business; his four years in the army had left him with a bitter sense of the waste of precious things—life and time and money and ingenuity and opportunity; and he had addressed himself to the pursuits of peace with passionate zest and energy. His "interests," already mature, had meanwhile, however, waited for him, so that the capital at ​his disposal had ceased to be solely his whetted, knife-edged resolution and his lively perception of ends and means. Yet these were his real arms, and exertion and action as natural to him as respiration: a more completely healthy mortal had never trod the elastic soil of great States of his option. His experience moreover had been as wide as his capacity; necessity had in his fourteenth year 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 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 defied example and precedent and probability, had adventured almost to madness and escaped almost by miracles, drinking alike of the flat water, when not the rank poison, of failure, and of the strong wine of success.
A born experimentalist, he had always found something to enjoy in the direct pressure of fate even when it was as irritating as the haircloth shirt of the mediæval monk. At one time defeat had seemed inexorably his portion; ill-luck had become his selfish bed-fellow, and whatever he touched had turned to ashes out of which no gleaming particle could be raked. His most vivid conception of a supernatural element in the world's affairs had come to him once when he felt his head all too bullyingly pummelled; there seemed to him something stronger in life than his personal, intimate will. But the mysterious something could only be a demon as personal as himself, and he ​accordingly found himself in fine working opposition to this rival concern. 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 had made his entrance into San Francisco, the scene subsequently of his most victorious engagements. 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 conclude the affair. He had ended by concluding many, had at last buffeted his way into smooth waters, had begun and continued to add dollars to dollars. It must be rather nakedly owned that Newman's only proposal had been to effect that addition; what he had been placed in the world for was, to his own conception, simply to gouge a fortune, the bigger the better, out of its hard material. This idea completely filled his horizon and contented 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 the eve of his fortieth year very scantly reflected. Life had been for him an open game, and he had played for high stakes. He had finally won and had 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 rich corner of Paris with his friend.
I must confess," he presently went on, that I don't here at all feel my value. My remarkable talents seem of no use. It's as if I were as simple as a little child, and as if 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'm a grand good worker," Newman continued, "but I've come abroad to amuse myself; though I doubt if I very well know how."
"Oh, that's easily learned."
"Well, I may perhaps learn it, but I'm afraid I shall never do it by rote. I've the best will in the world about it, but my genius does n't lie in that direction. Besides," Newman pursued, "I don't want to work at pleasure, any more than ever I played at work. I want to let myself, let everything go. I feel coarse and loose 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 first-class music."
"First-class music and first-class pictures? Lord, what refined tastes! You've what my wife calls a rare mind. I have n'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'll 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're not going to lock me up in a club and stick me down at a card-table! I have n't come all this way for that."
"What the deuce then have you come for? You were glad enough to play poker in Saint Louis, I recollect, when you cleaned me out."
"I've 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 best people do."
"The 'best' people? Much obliged. You set me down then as one of the worst?"
Newman was sitting sidewise in his chair, his elbow on the back and his head leaning on his hand. Without moving he played a while at his companion his dry, guarded, half-inscrutable and yet altogether good-natured smile. "Introduce me to your wife!"
Tristram bounced about on his seat. "Upon my word I 'll do nothing of the sort. She does n'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 nor anything. I'm not proud, I assure you I'm not proud. That's why I'm willing to take example by the best."
"Well, if I'm not the rose, as they say here, I've lived near it. I can show you some rare minds 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 heavy book?"
Christopher Newman twisted one end of his moustache in silence and finally 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's too long and too low a story to tell you now—a question of getting in ahead of another party on a big transaction and on information that was all my own. This other party had once played off on me one of the clever meannesses the feeling of which works in a man like strong poison. I owed him a good one, the best one he was ever to have got in his life, and as his chance here—for he was after it, but on the wrong tip—would have been a remarkably sweet thing, a matter of half a million, I saw my way to show him the weight of my hand. The good it was going to do me, you see, to feel it come down on him! 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's possible I took a nap; I had been travelling 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 reverie, ​with the most extraordinary change of heart—a mortal disgust for the whole proposition. It came upon me like that!—and he snapped his fingers—as abruptly as an old wound that begins to ache. I could n't tell the meaning of it; I only realised I had turned against myself worse than against the man I wanted to smash. The idea of not coming by that half-million in that particular way, of letting it utterly slide and scuttle and never hearing of it again, became the one thing to save my life from a sudden danger. 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 me. You may depend upon it that there are things going on inside 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 looked in and collared your half-million?"
"I haven't the least idea. I hope so, poor brute, 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 hack had n't turned into a hearse. I could n't have got out any more than if I had been a corpse. What was the matter with me? Momentary brain-collapse, you'll say. What I wanted to get out of was Wall Street. I told the man to drive to the Brooklyn ferry and 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 I had lost my wits ​on the way. Perhaps I had, but in that case my sacrifice of them has become, in another way, my biggest stroke of business. I spent the morning looking at the first green leaves on Long Island. I had been so hot that it seemed as if I should never be cool enough again. As for the damned old money, I've enough, already, not to miss it—you see how that spoils my beauty. I seemed to feel a new man under my old skin; at all events I longed for a new world. When you want a thing so very badly you probably had better have it and see. I did n't understand my case in the least, but gave the poor beast the bridle and let him find his way. As soon as I could get out of harness I sailed for Europe. That's how I come to be sitting here."
"You ought to have bought up that hack," said Tristram; "it is n't a safe vehicle to have about. And you've really wound up and sold out then? you've formally retired from business?"
"Well, I'm not at present transacting any—on any terms. There 'll be plenty to be done again if I don't hold out, but I shall hold out as long as possible. I dare say, however, that a twelvemonth hence the uncanny operation will be repeated in the opposite sense and the pendulum swing back again. I shall be sitting in a gondola or on a dromedary, or on a cushion at the feet of Beauty, and all of a sudden I shall want to clear out. But for the present I'm perfectly free. I've even arranged that I'm 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 considered a moment and then with all his candour, "How does one do it?" he asked.
"Come, I like that!" cried Tristram. "It shows you're in earnest."
"Of course I'm in earnest. Did n't I say I wanted the best? I know the best can't be had for mere money, but I'm willing to take a good deal of trouble."
"You're not too shrinking, hey?"
"I have n't the least idea—I must see. 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 elegant women."
"Settle down in Paris then. There are no mountains that I know of, higher than Montmartre, and the only lake's in the Bois de Boulogne and not particularly blue. But there's everything else: plenty of pictures and churches, no end of celebrated men, and several elegant women."
"But I can't settle down in Paris at this season, just as summer's coming on."
"Oh, for the summer go right up to Trouville."
"And what may Trouville be?"
"Well, a sort of French Newport—as near as they can come. All the Americans go."
"Is it anywhere near the Alps?"
"About as near as Newport 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've grand ideas for Venice."
"Ah," said Mr. Tristram, rising, "I see I shall have to introduce you to my wife. She 'll have grand ideas for you!"