The American (37 page)

“What in the world are you thinking of so hard?” asked Newman.

“A subject that requires hard thinking to do it justice,” said Valentin. “My immeasurable idiocy.”

“What is the matter now?”

“The matter now is that I am a man again, and no more a fool than usual. But I came within an inch of taking that girl
au sérieux.
“
¹⁰

“You mean the young lady below stairs, in a
baignoire
, in a pink dress?” said Newman.

“Did you notice what a brilliant kind of pink it was?” Valentin inquired, by way of answer. “It makes her look as white as new milk.”

“White or black, as you please. But you have stopped going to see her?”

“Oh, bless you, no. Why should I stop? I have changed, but she hasn’t,” said Valentin. “I see she is a vulgar little wretch, after all. But she is as amusing as ever, and one
must
be amused.”

“Well, I am glad she strikes you so unpleasantly,” Newman rejoined. “I suppose you have swallowed all those fine words you used about her the other night. You compared her to a sapphire, or a topaz, or an amethyst—some precious stone; what was it?”

“I don’t remember,” said Valentin, “it may have been to a carbuncle!
¹¹
But she won’t make a fool of me now. She has no real charm. It’s an awfully low thing to make a mistake about a person of that sort.”

“I congratulate you,” Newman declared, “upon the scales having fallen from your eyes. It’s a great triumph; it ought to make you feel better.”

“Yes, it makes me feel better!” said Valentin gaily. Then, checking himself, he looked askance at Newman. “I rather think you are laughing at me. If you were not one of the family I would take it up.”

“Oh no, I’m not laughing, any more than I am one of the family. You make me feel badly. You are too clever a fellow, you are made of too good stuff, to spend your time in ups and downs over that class of goods. The idea of splitting hairs about Miss Nioche! It seems to me awfully foolish. You say you have given up taking her seriously; but you take her seriously so long as you take her at all.”

Valentin turned round in his place and looked awhile at Newman, wrinkling his forehead and rubbing his knees.
“Vous parlez d’or.
¹²
But she has wonderfully pretty arms. Would you believe I didn’t know it till this evening?”

“But she is a vulgar little wretch, remember, all the same,” said Newman.

“Yes; the other day she had the bad taste to begin to abuse her father, to his face, in my presence. I shouldn’t have expected it of her; it was a disappointment; heigho!”

“Why, she cares no more for her father than for her door-mat,” said Newman. “I discovered that the first time I saw her.”

“Oh, that’s another affair; she may think of the poor old beggar what she pleases. But it was low in her to call him bad names; it quite threw me off. It was about a frilled petticoat that he was to have fetched from the washer-woman’s; he appeared to have neglected this graceful duty. She almost boxed his ears. He stood there staring at her with his little blank eyes and smoothing his old hat with his coat-tail. At last he turned round and went out without a word. Then I told her it was in very bad taste to speak so to one’s papa. She said she should be so thankful to me if I would mention it to her whenever her taste was at fault; she had immense confidence in mine. I told her I couldn’t have the bother of forming her manners; I had had an idea they were already formed, after the best models. She had disappointed me. But I shall get over it,” said Valentin gaily.

“Oh, time’s a great consoler!” Newman answered with humorous sobriety. He was silent a moment, and then he added in another tone: “I wish you would think of what I said to you the other day. Come over to America with us, and I will put you in the way of doing some business. You have got a very good head if you will only use it.”

Valentin made a genial grimace. “My head is much obliged to you. Do you mean the place in a bank?”

“There are several places, but I suppose you would consider the bank the most aristocratic.”

Valentin burst into a laugh. “My dear fellow, at night all cats are gray! When one derogates
¹³
there are no degrees.”

Newman answered nothing for a minute. Then, “I think you will find there are degrees in success,” he said with a certain dryness.

Valentin had leaned forward again, with his elbows on his knees, and he was scratching the pavement with his stick. At last he said, looking up: “Do you really think I ought to do something?”

Newman laid his hand on his companion’s arm and looked at him a moment through sagaciously-narrowed eyelids. “Try it and see. You are not good enough for it, but we will stretch a point.”

“Do you really think I can make some money? I should like to see how it feels to have a little.”

“Do what I tell you, and you shall be rich,” said Newman. “Think of it.” And he looked at his watch and prepared to resume his way to Madame de Bellegarde’s box.

“Upon my word I will think of it,” said Valentin. “I will go and listen to Mozart another half hour—I can always think better to music—and profoundly meditate upon it.”

The marquis was with his wife when Newman entered their box; he was bland, remote, and correct as usual; or, as it seemed to Newman, even more than usual.

“What do you think of the opera?” asked our hero. “What do you think of the Don?”

“We all know what Mozart is,” said the marquis; “our impressions don’t date from this evening. Mozart is youth, freshness, brilliancy, facility—a little too great facility, perhaps. But the execution is here and there deplorably rough.”

“I am very curious to see how it ends,” said Newman.

“You speak as if it were a
feuilleton
in the
Figaro
,”
¹⁴
observed the marquis. “You have surely seen the opera before?”

“Never,” said Newman. “I am sure I should have remembered it. Donna Elvira
¹⁵
reminds me of Madame de Cintré; I don’t mean in her circumstances, but in the music she sings.”

“It is a very nice distinction,” laughed the marquis lightly. “There is no great possibility, I imagine, of Madame de Cintré being forsaken.”

“Not much!” said Newman. “But what becomes of the Don?”

“The devil comes down—or comes up,” said Madame de Bellegarde, “and carries him off. I suppose Zerlina
¹⁶
reminds you of me..”

“I will go to the
foyer
for a few moments,” said the marquis, “and give you a chance to say that the Commander—the man of stone
¹⁷
—resembles me.” And he passed out of the box.

The little marquise stared an instant at the velvet ledge of the balcony, and then murmured: “Not a man of stone, a man of wood.” Newman had taken her husband’s empty chair. She made no protest, and then she turned suddenly and laid her closed fan upon his arm. “I am very glad you came in,” she said. “I want to ask you a favour. I wanted to do so on Thursday, at my mother-in-law’s ball, but you would give me no chance. You were in such very good spirits that I thought you might grant my little favour then; not that you look particularly doleful now. It is something you must promise me; now is the time to take you; after you are married you will be good for nothing. Come, promise!”

“I never sign a paper without reading it first,” said Newman. “Show me your document.”

“No, you must sign with your eyes shut; I will hold your hand. Come, before you put your head into the noose. You ought to be thankful for me giving you a chance to do something amusing.”

“If it is so amusing,” said Newman, “it will be in even better season after I am married.”

“In other words,” cried Madame de Bellegarde, “you will not do it at all. You will be afraid of your wife.”

“Oh, if the thing is intrinsically improper,” said Newman, “I won’t go into it. If it is not, I will do it after my marriage.”

“You talk like a treatise on logic, and English logic into the bargain!” exclaimed Madame de Bellegarde. “Promise, then, after you are married. After all, I shall enjoy keeping you to it.”

“Well, then, after I am married,” said Newman serenely.

The little marquise hesitated a moment, looking at him, and he wondered what was coming. “I suppose you know what my life is,” she presently said. “I have no pleasure, I see nothing, I do nothing. I live in Paris as I might live at Poitiers.
¹⁸
My mother-in-law calls me—what is the pretty word?—a gad-about? accuses me of going to unheard-of places, and thinks it ought to be joy enough for me to sit at home and count over my ancestors on my fingers. But why should I bother about my ancestors? I am sure they never bothered about me. I don’t propose to live with a green shade on my eyes; I hold that things were made to look at. My husband, you know, has principles, and the first on the list is that the Tuileries are dreadfully vulgar. If the Tuileries are vulgar, his principles are tiresome. If I chose I might have principles quite as well as he. If they grew on one’s family tree I should only have to give mine a shake to bring down a shower of the finest. At any rate, I prefer clever Bonapartes to stupid Bourbons.”

“Oh, I see; you want to go to court,” said Newman, vaguely conjecturing that she might wish him to appeal to the United States legation to smooth her way to the imperial halls.

The marquise gave a little sharp laugh. “You are a thousand miles away. I will take care of the Tuileries myself; the day I decide to go they will be very glad to have me. Sooner or later I shall dance in an imperial quadrille. I know what you are going to say: ‘How will you dare?’ But I
shall
dare. I am afraid of my husband; he is soft, smooth, irreproachable, everything that you know; but I am afraid of him—horribly afraid of him. And yet I shall arrive at the Tuileries. But that will not be this winter, nor perhaps next, and meantime I must live. For the moment, I want to go somewhere else; it’s my dream. I want to go to the Bal Bullier.”

“To the Bal Bullier?” repeated Newman, for whom the words at first meant nothing.

“The ball in the Latin Quarter,
¹⁹
where the students dance with their mistresses. Don’t tell me you have not heard of it.”

“Oh yes,” said Newman; “I have heard of it; I remember now. I have even been there. And you want to go there?”

“It is silly, it is low, it is anything you please. But I want to go. Some of my friends have been, and they say it is awfully
drôle.
²⁰
My friends go everywhere; it is only I who sit moping at home.”

“It seems to me you are not at home now,” said Newman, “and I shouldn’t exactly say you were moping.”

“I am bored to death. I have been to the opera twice a week for the last eight years. Whenever I ask for anything my mouth is stopped with that: Pray, madam, haven’t you an opera-box? Could a woman of taste want more? In the first place, my opera-box was down in my
contrat
;
²¹
they have to give it to me. To-night, for instance, I should have preferred a thousand times to go to the Palais Royal. But my husband won’t go to the Palais Royal because the ladies of the court go there so much. You may imagine, then, whether he would take me to Bullier’s; he says it is a mere imitation—and a bad one—of what they do at the Princess Kleinfuss’s. But as I don’t go to the Princess Kleinfuss’s, the next best thing is to go to Bullier’s. It is my dream, at any rate; it’s a fixed idea.
²²
All I ask of you is to give me your arm; you are less compromising than anyone else. I don’t know why, but you are. I can arrange it. I shall risk something, but that is my own affair. Besides, fortune favours the bold. Don’t refuse me; it is my dream!”

Newman gave a loud laugh. It seemed to him hardly worth while to be the wife of the Marquis de Bellegarde, a daughter of the crusaders, heiress of six centuries of glories and traditions, to have centred one’s aspirations
upon the sight of a couple of hundred young ladies kicking off young men’s hats.
²³
It struck him as a theme for the moralist; but he had no time to moralise upon it. The curtain rose again; M. de Bellegarde returned, and Newman went back to his seat.

He observed that Valentin de Bellegarde had taken his place in the
baignoire
of Mademoiselle Nioche, behind this young lady and her companion, where he was visible only if one carefully looked for him. In the next act Newman met him in the lobby and asked him if he had reflected upon possible emigration. “If you really meant to meditate,” he said, “you might have chosen a better place for it.”

“Oh, the place was not bad,” said Valentin. “I was not thinking of that girl. I listened to the music, and without thinking of the play or looking at the stage, I turned over your proposal. At first it seemed quite fantastic. And then a certain fiddle in the orchestra—I could distinguish it—began to say as it scraped away: ‘Why not, why not?’ And then, in that rapid movement, all the fiddles took it up, and the conductor’s stick seemed to beat it in the air: ‘Why not, why not?’ I’m sure I can’t say! I don’t see why not. I don’t see why I shouldn’t do something. It appears to me really a very bright idea. This sort of thing is certainly very stale. And then I could come back with a trunk full of dollars. Besides, I might possibly find it amusing. They call me a
raffiné
;
²⁴
who knows but that I might discover an unsuspected charm in shop-keeping? It would really have a certain romantic, picturesque side; it would look well in my biography. It would look as if I were a strong man, a first-rate man, a man who dominated circumstances.”

“Never mind how it would look,” said Newman. “It always looks well to have half a million of dollars. There is no reason why you shouldn’t have them if you will mind what I tell you—I alone—and not talk to other parties.” He passed his arm into that of his companion, and the two walked for some time up and down one of
the less frequented corridors. Newman’s imaginatio began to glow with the idea of converting his bright impracticable friend into a first-class man of business He felt for the moment a sort of spiritual zeal, the zeal of the propagandist. Its ardour was in part the result of that general discomfort which the sight of all uninvested capital produced in him; so fine an intelligence as Bellegarde’s ought to be dedicated to high uses. The highest uses known to Newman’s experience were certain transcendent sagacities in the handling of railway stock. And then his zeal was quickened by his personal kindness for Valentin; he had a sort of pity for him which he was well aware he never could have made the Comte de Bellegarde understand. He never lost a sense of its being pitiable that Valentin should think it a large life to revolve in varnished boots
²⁵
between the Rue d’Anjou and the Rue de l’Université, taking the Boulevard des Italiens
²⁶
on the way, when over there in America one’s promenade was a continent, and one’s boulevard stretched from New York to San Francisco. It mortified him, moreover, to think that Valentin lacked money; there was a painful grotesqueness in it. It affected him as the ignorance of a companion, otherwise without reproach, touching some rudimentary branch of learning would have done. There were things that one knew about as a matter of course, he would have said in such a case. Just so, if one pretended to be easy in the world, one had money as a matter of course; one had made it! There was something almost ridiculously anomalous to Newman in the sight of lively pretensions unaccompanied by large investments in railroads; though I may add that he would not have maintained that such investments were in themselves a proper ground for pretensions. “I will make you do something,” he said to Valentin; “I will put you through. I know half-a-dozen things in which we can make a place for you. You will see some lively work. It will take you a little while to get used to the life, but you will work in before long, and at the end of six months—after you
have done a thing or two on your own account—you will like it. And then it will be very pleasant for you, having your sister over there. It will be pleasant for her to have you, too. Yes, Valentin,” continued Newman, pressing his friend’s arm genially, “I think I see just the opening for you. Keep quiet, and I’ll push you right in.”