The American (15 page)
Authors: Henry James
“I supposed you knew I was a miserable letter-writer, and didn’t expect anything of me. I don’t think I have written twenty letters of pure friendship in my whole life; in America I conducted my correspondence altogether by telegrams. This is a letter of pure friendship; you have got hold of a curiosity, and I hope you will value it. You want to know everything that has happened to me these three months. The best way to tell you, I think, would be to send you my half-dozen guide-books, with my pencil-marks in the margin. Wherever you find a scratch, or a cross, or a ‘Beautiful!’ or a ‘So true!’ or a ‘Too thin!’ you may know that I have had a sensation of some sort or other. That has been about my history, ever since I left you. Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Italy—I have been through the whole list, and I don’t think I am any the worse for it. I know more about Madonnas and church-steeples than I supposed any man could. I have seen some very pretty things, and shall perhaps talk them over this winter, by your fireside. You see, my face is not altogether set against Paris. I have had all kinds of plans and visions, but your letter has blown most of them away.
’L’appétit vient en mangeant,’
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says the French proverb, and I find that the more I see of the world the more I want to see. Now that I am in the shafts,
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why shouldn’t I trot to the end of the course? Sometimes I think of the far East, and keep rolling the names of Eastern cities under my tongue; Damascus and Bagdad, Medina and Mecca. I spent a week last month in the company of a returned missionary, who told me I ought to be ashamed to be loafing about Europe when there are such big things to be seen out there. I do want to explore, but I think I would rather explore over in the Rue de l’Université. Do you ever hear from that pretty lady? If you can get her to promise she will be at home the next time I call, I will go back
to Paris straight. I am more than ever in the state of mind I told you about that evening; I want a first-class wife. I have kept an eye on all the pretty girls I have come across this summer, but none of them came up to my notion, or anywhere near it. I should have enjoyed all this a thousand times more if I had had the lady just mentioned by my side. The nearest approach to her was a Unitarian minister from Boston, who very soon demanded a separation, for incompatibility of temper. He told me I was low-minded, immoral, a devotee of ‘art for art’—whatever that is:
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all of which greatly afflicted me, for he was really a sweet little fellow. But shortly afterwards I met an Englishman, with whom I struck up an acquaintance which at first seemed to promise well—a very bright man, who writes in the London papers and knows Paris nearly as well as Tristram. We knocked about for a week together, but he very soon gave me up in disgust. I was too virtuous by half; I was too stern a moralist. He told me, in a friendly way, that I was cursed with a conscience; that I judged things like a Methodist and talked about them like an old lady. This was rather bewildering. Which of my two critics was I to believe? I didn’t worry about it, and very soon made up my mind they were both idiots. But there is one thing in which no one will ever have the impudence to pretend I am wrong; that is, in being your faithful friend,
C. N.”
N
ewman gave up Damascus and Bagdad and returned to Paris before the autumn was over. He established himself in some rooms selected for him by Tom Tristram, in accordance with the latter’s estimate of what he called his social position. When Newman learned that his social position was to be taken into account, he professed himself utterly incompetent, and begged Tristram to relieve him of the care. “I didn’t know I had a social position,” he said, “and if I have, I haven’t the smallest idea what it is. Isn’t a social position knowing some two or three thousand people and inviting them to dinner? I know you and your wife and little old Mr. Nioche, who gave me French lessons last spring. Can I invite you to dinner to meet each other? If I can, you must come to-morrow.”
“That is not very grateful to me,” said Mrs. Tristram, “who introduced you last year to every creature I know.”
“So you did; I had quite forgotten. But I thought you wanted me to forget,” said Newman, with that tone of simple deliberateness which frequently marked his utterance, and which an observer would not have known whether to pronounce a somewhat mysteriously humorous affectation of ignorance or a modest aspiration to knowledge; “you told me you disliked them all.”
“Ah, the way you remember what I say is at least very
flattering. But in future,” added Mrs. Tristram, “pray forget all the wicked things and remember only the good ones. It will be easily done, and it will not fatigue your memory. But I forewarn you that if you trust my husband to pick out your rooms, you are in for something hideous.”
“Hideous, darling?” cried Tristram.
“To-day I must say nothing wicked; otherwise I should use stronger language.”
“What do you think she would say, Newman?” asked Tristram. “If she really tried, now? She can express displeasure, volubly, in two or three languages; that’s what it is to be intellectual. It gives her the start of me completely, for I can’t swear, for the life of me, except in English. When I get mad I have to fall back on our dear old mother tongue. There’s nothing like it, after all.”
Newman declared that he knew nothing about tables and chairs, and that he would accept, in the way of a lodging, with his eyes shut, anything that Tristram should offer him. This was partly pure veracity on our hero’s part, but it was also partly charity. He knew that to pry about and look at rooms, and make people open windows, and poke into sofas with his cane, and gossip with landladies, and ask who lived above and who below—he knew that this was of all pastimes the dearest to Tristram’s heart, and he felt the more disposed to put it in his way as he was conscious that, as regards his obliging friend, he had suffered the warmth of ancient good-fellowship somewhat to abate. Besides, he had no taste for upholstery; he had even no very exquisite sense of comfort or convenience. He had a relish for luxury and splendour, but it was satisfied by rather gross contrivances. He scarcely knew a hard chair from a soft one, and he possessed a talent for stretching his legs which quite dispensed with adventitious facilities. His idea of comfort was to inhabit very large rooms, have
a great many of them, and be conscious of their possessing a number of patented mechanical devices—half of which he should never have occasion to use. The apartments should be light and brilliant and lofty; he had once said that he liked rooms in which you wanted to keep your hat on. For the rest, he was satisfied with the assurance of any respectable person that everything was “handsome.” Tristram accordingly secured for him an apartment to which this epithet might be lavishly applied. It was situated on the Boulevard Haussmann,
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on a first-floor, and consisted of a series of rooms, gilded from floor to ceiling a foot thick, draped in various light shades of satin, and chiefly furnished with mirrors and clocks. Newman thought them magnificent, thanked Tristram heartily, immediately took possession, and had one of his trunks standing for three months in his drawing-room.
One day Mrs. Tristram told him that her beautiful friend, Madame de Cintré, had returned from the country; that she had met her three days before, coming out of the Church of St. Sulpice;
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she herself having journeyed to that distant quarter
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in quest of an obscure lace-mender, of whose skill she had heard high praise.
“And how were those eyes?” Newman asked.
“Those eyes were red with weeping, if you please!” said Mrs. Tristram. “She had been to confession.”
“It doesn’t tally with your account of her,” said Newman, “that she should have sins to confess.”
“They were not sins; they were sufferings.”
“How do you know that?”
“She asked me to come and see her; I went this morning.”
“And what does she suffer from?”
“I didn’t ask her. With her, somehow, one is very discreet. But I guessed, easily enough. She suffers from her wicked old mother and her Grand Turk
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of a brother. They persecute her. But I can almost forgive
them, because, as I told you, she is a saint, and a persecution is all that she needs to bring out her saintliness and make her perfect.”
“That’s a comfortable theory for her. I hope you will never impart it to the old folks. Why does she let them bully her? Is she not her own mistress?”
“Legally, yes, I suppose; but morally, no. In France you must never say Nay to your mother, whatever she requires of you. She may be the most abominable old woman in the world, and make your life a purgatory; but after all she is
ma mère
,
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and you have no right to judge her. You have simply to obey. The thing has a fine side to it. Madame de Cintré bows her head and folds her wings.”
“Can’t she at least make her brother leave off?”
“Her brother is the
chef de la famille
, as they say; he is the head of the clan. With those people the family is everything; you must act, not for your own pleasure, but for the advantage of the family.”
“I wonder what
my
family would like me to do!” exclaimed Tristram.
“I wish you had one!” said his wife.
“But what do they want to get out of that poor lady?” Newman asked.
“Another marriage. They are not rich, and they want to bring more money into the family.”
“There’s your chance, my boy!” said Tristram.
“And Madame de Cintré objects,” Newman continued.
“She has been sold once; she naturally objects to being sold again. It appears that the first time they made rather a poor bargain; M. de Cintré left a scanty property.”
“And to whom do they want to marry her now?”
“I thought it best not to ask; but you may be sure it is to some horrid old nabob,
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or to some dissipated little duke.”
“There’s Mrs. Tristram, as large as life!” cried her
husband. “Observe the richness of her imagination. She has not asked a single question—it’s vulgar to ask questions—and yet she knows everything. She has the history of Madame de Cintré’s marriage at her fingers’ ends. She has seen the lovely Claire on her knees, with loosened tresses and streaming eyes, and the rest of them standing over her with spikes and goads and red-hot irons, ready to come down on her if she refuses the tipsy duke. The simple truth is that they have made a fuss about her milliner’s bill or refused her an opera-box.”
Newman looked from Tristram to his wife with a certain mistrust in each direction. “Do you really mean,” he asked of Mrs. Tristram, “that your friend is being forced into an unhappy marriage?”
“I think it extremely probable. Those people are very capable of that sort of thing.”
“It is like something in a play,” said Newman; “that dark old house over there looks as if wicked things had been done in it, and might be done again.”
“They have a still darker old house in the country, Madame de Cintré tells me, and there, during the summer, this scheme must have been hatched.”
“Must
have been; mind that!” said Tristram.
“After all,” suggested Newman, after a silence, “she may be in trouble about something else.”
“If it is something else, then it is something worse,” said Mrs. Tristram, with rich decision.
Newman was silent awhile, and seemed lost in meditation. “Is it possible,” he asked at last, “that they do that sort of thing over here? that helpless women are bullied into marrying men they hate?”
“Helpless women, all over the world, have a hard time of it,” said Mrs. Tristram. “There is plenty of bullying everywhere.”
“A great deal of that kind goes on in New York,” said Tristram. “Girls are bullied or coaxed or bribed, or all three together, into marrying nasty fellows. There is no
end of that always going on in the Fifth Avenue, and other bad things besides. The Mysteries of the Fifth Avenue!
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Someone ought to show them up.”
“I don’t believe it!” said Newman, very gravely. “I don’t believe that, in America, girls are ever subjected to compulsion. I don’t believe there have been a dozen cases of it since the country began.”
“Listen to the voice of the spread eagle!”
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cried Tris tram.
“The spread eagle ought to use his wings,” said Mrs. Tristram. “Fly to the rescue of Madame de Cintré!”
“To her rescue?”
“Pounce down, seize her in your talons, and carry her off. Marry her yourself.”
Newman, for some moments, answered nothing; but presently, “I should suppose she had heard enough of marrying,” he said. “The kindest way to treat her would be to admire her, and yet never to speak of it. But that sort of thing is infamous,” he added; “it makes me feel savage to hear of it.”
He heard of it, however, more than once afterward. Mrs. Tristram again saw Madame de Cintré, and again found her looking very sad. But on these occasions there had been no tears; her beautiful eyes were clear and still. “She is cold, calm, and hopeless,” Mrs. Tristram declared, and she added that on her mentioning that her friend Mr. Newman was again in Paris and was faithful in his desire to make Madame de Cintré’s acquaintance, this lovely woman had found a smile in her despair, and declared that she was sorry to have missed his visit in the spring and that she hoped he had not lost courage. “I told her something about you,” said Mrs. Tristram.