The American (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 5
V
When he had told Mrs. Tristram the story of his fruitless visit to Madame de Cintré she urged him not to be discouraged, but to carry out his plan of "seeing Europe" during the summer—after which he might return to Paris for the autumn and then settle down comfortably for the winter. "Claire de Cintré will be kept in a cool place for you," she reasoned; "she's not a woman who'll change her condition from one day to another." Newman made no distinct affirmation that he would come back to Paris; he even talked about Rome and the Nile, and abstained from professing any especial interest in Madame de Cintré's continued widowhood. This was a little of a false note in his usual distinctness, and may perhaps be regarded as characteristic of the incipient stage of that passion which is more particularly known as the romantic one. The truth is that the expression of a pair of eyes, that were both intense and mild, had become very familiar to his memory, and he would not easily have resigned himself to the prospect of never looking into them again. He communicated to Mrs. Tristram a number of other facts, of greater or less importance, as you choose; but on this particular point he kept his own counsel. He took a kindly leave of M. Nioche, having assured him that so far as he was concerned the blue-cloaked Madonna herself might have been present at his interview with Mademoiselle Noémie; and left the old man nursing his breast-pocket in an ecstasy which the sharpest paternal discomposure might have been defied to dissipate.
He started on his travels with all his usual appearance of slow-strolling leisure and all his essential directness and intensity of aim. No man seemed less in a hurry and yet no man enabled brief periods to serve him more liberally. He had practical instincts which signally befriended him in his trade of tourist. He found his way in foreign cities by divination, his memory was excellent when once his attention had been at all cordially given, and he emerged from dialogues in foreign tongues, of which he had formally not understood a word, in full possession of the particular item he had desired to elicit. His appetite for items was large, and although many of those he noted might have seemed woefully dry and colourless to the ordinary sentimental traveller, a careful inspection of the list would have shown that his toughness had sensitive spots. In the charming city of Brussels—his first stopping-place after leaving Paris—he asked a great many questions about the street-cars and took extreme satisfaction in the reappearance of this familiar symbol of American civilisation; but he was also greatly struck with the beautiful Gothic tower of the Hôtel de Ville and wondered if they might n't "get up" something like it in San Francisco. He stood long in the crowded square before this edifice, in imminent danger from carriage-wheels, listening to a toothless old cicerone mumble in broken English the touching history of Counts Egmont and Horn; and he wrote the names of these gentlemen—for reasons best known to himself-on the back of an old letter.
At the outset, on his leaving Paris, his curiosity had not been intense; passive entertainment, in the Champs Elysées and at the theatres, seemed about as much as he need expect of himself, and although, as he had said to Tristram, he wanted to see the mysterious and satisfying best, he had not the grand tour in the least on his conscience and was not given to worrying the thing that amused him. He believed serenely that Europe was made for him and not he for Europe. He had said he wanted to improve his mind, but he would have felt a certain embarrassment, a certain shame even—a false shame possibly—if he had caught himself looking intellectually into the mirror. Neither in this nor in any other respect had he a high sense of responsibility; it was his prime conviction that a man's life should be a man's ease and that no privilege was really great enough to take his breath away. The world, to his vision, was a great bazaar where one might stroll about and purchase handsome things; but he was no more conscious, individually, of social pressure than he admitted the claim of the obligatory purchase. He had not only a dislike but a sort of moral mistrust of thoughts too admonitory; one should n't hunt about for a standard as a lost dog hunts for a master. One's standard was the idea of one's own good-humoured prosperity, the prosperity which enabled one to give as well as take. To expand without too much ado—without "mean" timidity on one side or the bravado of the big appetite on the other—to the full compass of any such experience as was held to stir men's blood represented his nearest approach to a high principle. He had always hated to hurry to catch railroad-trains, and yet had always caught them; and just so an undue solicitude for the right side seemed a sort of silly dawdling at the station, a proceeding properly confined to women, foreigners and invalids. All this admitted, he enjoyed his journey, when once he had fairly entered the current, as intimately as if he had kept a diary of raptures. He lounged through Belgium and Holland and the Rhineland, through Switzerland and Northern Italy, planning about nothing and seeing all things. The guides and valets de place found him an excellent subject. He was always approachable, for he was much addicted to large lapses and long intervals, to standing about in the vestibules and porticoes of inns, and he availed himself little of the opportunities for impressive seclusion so liberally offered in Europe to gentlemen travelling with long purses. When an excursion, a church, a gallery, a ruin was proposed to him the first thing he usually did, after surveying his postulant in silence and from head to foot, was to sit down at a little table and order some light refreshment, of which he more often than not then forgot to partake. The cicerone, during this process, commonly retreated to a respectful distance; otherwise I am not sure that Newman would not have bidden him sit down and share, sit down and tell him as a decent creature if his church or his gallery were really worth one's trouble. At last he rose and stretched his long legs, beckoned to the man of monuments, looked at his watch and fixed his eye on his adversary. "What is it and how far?" And whatever the case, though he might seem to hesitate he never declined. He stepped into an open cab, made his conductor sit beside him to answer questions, bade the driver go fast (he had a particular aversion to slow driving), and rolled, in all probability through a dusty suburb, to the goal of his pilgrimage. When the goal was a disappointment, when the church was meagre or the ruin a heap of rubbish, he never protested nor berated his adviser; he looked with an impartial eye upon great monuments and small, made the guide recite his lesson, listened to it religiously, asked if there were nothing else to be seen in the neighbourhood, and drove back again at a rattling pace. It is to be feared that his perception of the difference between the florid and the refined had not reached the stage of confidence, and that he might often have been seen—as we have already seen him—gazing with culpable serenity at inferior productions. The wrong occasion was a part of his pastime in Europe as well as the right, and his tour was altogether a pastime. But there is sometimes nothing like the imagination of those people who have none, and Newman now and then, in an unguided stroll through a foreign city, before some lonely, sad-towered church or some angular image of one who had rendered civic service in an unknown past, had felt a singular deep commotion. It was not an excitement, not a perplexity; it involved an extraordinary sense of recreation.
He encountered by chance in Holland a young American with whom he fell for a time into a tacit travellers' partnership. They were men of different enough temper, but each in his way so true to his type that each might seem to have something of value to contribute to the association. Newman's comrade, whose name was Babcock, was a young Unitarian minister; a small, spare, neatly-attired man, with a strikingly candid countenance. He was a native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, and had spiritual charge of a small congregation in another suburb of the New England capital. His digestion was weak and he lived chiefly on Graham bread and hominy—a regimen to which he was so much attached that his tour seemed to him destined to be blighted when, on landing on the Continent, he found these delicacies fail to flourish under the table d'hôte system. In Paris he had purchased a bag of hominy at an establishment which called itself an American Agency and at which the New York illustrated papers were also to be procured, and he had carried it about with him and shown extreme serenity and fortitude in the somewhat delicate position of having his hominy prepared for him and served on odd occasions at the hotels he successively visited. Newman had once spent a morning, in the course of business, at Mr. Babcock's birthplace, and, for reasons too recondite to unfold, the memory of his visit always pressed the spring of mirth. To carry out his joke, which certainly seems poor so long as it is not explained, he used often to address his companion as "Dorchester." Fellow-aliens cling together, on a strange soil, in spite of themselves; but it was probable that at home these unnatural intimates must have met only to part. They had indeed by habit and form as little in common as possible. Newman, who never reflected on such matters, accepted the situation with great equanimity, but Babcock used to meditate over it privately; used often indeed to retire to his room early in the evening for the express purpose of considering it conscientiously and, as he would have said, with detachment. He was not sure it was a good thing for him to have given himself up so unreservedly to our hero, whose way of taking life was so little his own.
Newman was a spirit of easy power; Mr. Babcock even at times saw it clear that he was one of nature's noblemen, and certainly it was impossible not to feel strongly drawn to him. But would it not be desirable to try to produce an effect on him, to try to quicken his moral life and raise his sense of responsibility to a higher plane? He liked everything, he accepted everything, he found amusement in everything; he was not discriminating, his values were as vague and loose as if he had carried them in his trousers pocket. The young man from Dorchester accused Newman of a fault that he considered very grave and did his best himself to avoid—of what he would have called a want of moral reaction. Poor Mr. Babcock was extremely fond of pictures and churches, and kept Mrs. Jameson's volumes in his trunk; he regarded works of art as questions and his relations with them as experiences, and received peculiar impressions from everything he saw. But nevertheless in his secret soul he detested Europe and felt an irritated need to protest against Newman's easy homage to so compromised a charmer, mistress of a cynicism that appeared at times to have made him cynical. Mr. Babcock's moral malaise, I am afraid, lay deeper than where any definition of mine can reach it. He mistrusted the "European" temperament, he suffered from the "European" climate, he hated the "European" dinner hour; "European" life seemed to him unscrupulous and impure. And yet he had what he called an intimate sense of the true beautiful in life, and as this element was often inextricably associated with the above displeasing conditions, as he wished above all to be just and dispassionate and as he was furthermore extremely bent on putting his finger on the boundary-line, in the life of a School, between the sincere time and the insincere, he could not bring himself to decide that the kingdoms of the earth were utterly rotten. But he thought them in a bad way, and his quarrel with Newman was over some of the elements, insidious forms of evil, that this promiscuous feeder at the feast could swallow with no wry face. Babcock himself really knew as little about the forms of evil, in any quarter of the world, as about the forms of banking; his most vivid realisation of the most frequent form had been the discovery that one of his college classmates, a student of architecture in Paris, was carrying on a love-affair with a young woman who did n't in the least count on his marrying her. Babcock had described this situation to Newman, and our hero had applied an epithet marked by a rough but not unfriendly justice to the girl. The next day his companion asked him if he were certain he had used exactly the right word to characterise the young architect's mistress. Newman wondered and seemed amused. "There are a great many words to express that idea," he said; "you can take your choice!"
"Oh, I mean," said Babcock, "was she possibly not to be considered in a different light? Don't you think she really had believed in his higher nature?"
"I'm afraid I don't know," Newman replied. "Very likely she had; I've no doubt she judged it by her own." He was willing to meet his friend on any view of her.
"I didn't mean that either," said Babcock; "I'm not sure that she has a higher nature. I'm not sure—not very sure—every one has. I was only afraid I might have seemed yesterday not to remember—not to consider. Well, I think I 'll write to Percival about it."
And he had written to Percival (who had answered him in a manner that was indubitably cynical) and had reflected that Newman ought n't to be encouraged, after all, to read a cheap idealism into flagrant cases of immorality. The levity and brevity of his comrade's judgements very often shocked and depressed him. He had a way of damning people without further appeal, or else of appearing almost in sympathy with their sinister side, which seemed unworthy of a man whose conscience could still pretend to a squirm. And yet poor Babcock yearned toward him and remembered that even if, decidedly, his sensibility would never work straight, this was not a reason for giving him up. Goethe recommended seeing human nature in the most various forms, and Mr. Babcock thought Goethe perfectly splendid. He often tried in odd half-hours of conversation to explain what he meant by some of his principal doubts, but it was like offering to read from a technical treatise. The volume might deal lucidly with Mr. Babcock's subject, but what was Mr. Babcock's subject without Mr. Babcock's interest in it? Newman could entertain a respect for any man's subject and thought his friend fortunate to have so special a one. He accepted all the proofs of its importance that were thus anxiously offered him, and put them away in what he supposed a very safe place; but poor Babcock never afterwards recognised his gifts among the articles that Newman had in daily use.
They travelled together through Germany and into Switzerland, where for three or four weeks they trudged over rough passes and smooth and lounged by the edge and on the bosom of blue lakes. At last they crossed the Simplon and made their way to Venice. Mr. Babcock had become gloomy and even a trifle irritable; he seemed moody, absent, preoccupied; he got his plans into a tangle and talked one moment of doing one thing and the next of doing another. Newman led his own usual life, recklessly made acquaintances, took his ease in the galleries and churches, spent an unconscionable amount of time in strolling in Piazza San Marco, bought several spurious pictures and for a fortnight enjoyed Venice grossly. One evening, coming back to his inn, he found Babcock waiting for him in the little garden beside it. The young man walked up to him, looking very dismal, thrust out his hand and said with solemnity that he was afraid they must part. Newman expressed his surprise and regret; he wondered why a parting had become necessary. "Don't be afraid I'm tired of you," he said.
"You're not tired of me?" his companion asked, fixing him with clear but almost tragic eyes.
"Why the deuce should I be? You're a very nice man. Besides, I don't break down so easily."
"We don't understand each other," said poor Dorchester.
"Don't I understand you?" cried Newman. "Why, I hoped I did. But what if I don't; where's the harm?"
"I don't understand you" said Babcock. And he sat down and rested his head on his hand and looked up mournfully at his immeasurable friend.
"But why should you mind that if I don't?"
"It's very distressing to me. It keeps me in a state of unrest. It irritates me; I can't settle anything. I don't think it's good for me."
"You worry too much; that's what's the matter with you," said Newman.
"Of course it must seem so to you. You think I take all questions too hard, and I think you take them too superficially. We can never agree."
"But we've agreed very well all along."
"No, I have n't agreed," said Babcock, shaking his head. "I'm very uncomfortable. I ought to have separated from you a month ago."
"Oh, shucks! I'll agree to anything!" cried Newman.
Mr. Babcock buried his head in both hands. At last, looking up, "I don't think you appreciate my position," he observed. "I try to arrive at the truth about everything. And then you go too fast. There are things of which you take too little account. I feel as if I ought to go over all this ground we've traversed again by myself. I'm afraid I have made a great many mistakes."
"Oh, you need n't give so many reasons," said Newman. "You've simply had enough of me. You've all your right to that."
"No, no, I've not had enough of you!" his friend insisted. "It would be very wrong of me to have had enough."
"I give it up!" laughed Newman. "But of course it will never do to go on making mistakes. Go your way, by all means. I shall miss you; but you've seen I make friends very easily. You'll be lonely yourself; but drop me a line when you feel like it, and I'll wait for you anywhere."
"I think I'll go back to Milan. I'm afraid I did n't do justice to Luini."
"Poor old Luini!" said Newman.
"I mean I'm afraid I went too far about him. I don't think he's as true as he at first seems."
"Luini?" Newman exclaimed. "There's something in the look of his genius that's like the face of a beautiful woman. It's as if she were coming straight at you, or standing very close."
His companion frowned and winced. And it must be added that this was, for Newman, an unusually metaphysical flight, though in passing through Milan he had found a great attraction in the painter. "There you are again!" said Mr. Babcock. "Yes, we had better separate." And on the morrow he retraced his steps and proceeded to his revisions of judgement. But presently Newman heard from him.
Benjamin Babcock.
P. S. I am very unhappy about Luini.
This letter produced in Newman's mind a singular mixture of exhilaration and awe. Mr. Babcock's tender conscience at first seemed to him as funny as a farce, and his travelling back to Milan only to get into a deeper muddle to be, for reward of his pedantry, exquisitely and ludicrously just. Then he reflected that these are mighty mysteries; that possibly he himself was indeed almost unmentionably "appalling," and that his manner of considering the treasures of art and the privileges of life lacked the last, or perhaps even the very first, refinement. Newman had a great esteem, after all, for refinement, and that evening, during the half-hour that he watched the star-sheen on the warm Adriatic, he felt rebuked and humiliated. He was unable to decide how to answer this communication. His good-nature checked his snubbing his late companion's earnestness, and his tough, inelastic sense of humour forbade his taking it seriously. He wrote no answer at all, but a day or two after he found in a curiosity-shop a grotesque little statuette in ivory, of the sixteenth century, which he sent off to Babcock without a commentary. It represented a gaunt, ascetic-looking monk, in a tattered gown and cowl, kneeling with clasped hands and pulling a portentously long face. It was a wonderfully delicate piece of carving, and in a moment, through one of the rents of his gown, you espied a fat capon hung round the monk's waist. In Newman's intention what did the figure symbolise? Did it mean that he was going to try to be as impressed with the solemnity of things as the monk looked at first, but that he feared he should succeed no better than this personage proved on a closer inspection to have done? It is not supposable he intended a satire on Babcock's own asceticism, for this would have been a truly cynical stroke. He at any rate made his late companion a valuable little present.
He went, on leaving Venice, through the Tyrol to Vienna and then returned, westward, through South Germany. The autumn found him at Baden-Baden, where he spent several weeks. The charming place kept him from day to day; he was looking about him and deciding what to do for the winter. His summer had been very full, and as he sat under the great trees beside the miniature river that trickles past the Baden flower-beds he slowly rummaged it over. He had seen and done a great deal, enjoyed and observed a great deal; he felt older, yet felt it somehow, even at the age he had reached, as an advantage. He remembered Mr. Babcock and his desire to learn the great lesson, and he remembered also that he had profited little by his friend's exhortation to cultivate the same respectable habit. Could n't he scrape together a few great lessons? Baden-Baden was the prettiest place he had seen yet, and orchestral music in the evening, under the stars, was decidedly a great institution. This was the lesson that was clearest. But he went on to reflect that he had done very wisely to pull up stakes and come abroad; the world was apparently such an interesting thing to see. He had drawn a few morals of his own; he could n't say just which, but he had them there under his hat-band. He had done what he wanted; he had tackled the great sights and closed with the great occasions, he had given his mind a chance to "improve" if it would. He fondly believed it had improved a good deal. Yes, these waters of the free curiosity were very soothing, and he would splash in them till they ran dry. Forty-two years as he was on the point of numbering, he had a long course in his eye, and if the haze of the future was thick it was that of a golden afternoon. Where should he take the world next? I have said he remembered the eyes of the lady whom he had found standing in Mrs. Tristram's drawing-room; four months had elapsed and he had not forgotten them yet. He had looked—he had made a point of looking—into a great many other eyes in the interval, but the only ones he thought of now were Madame de Cintré's. If he wanted to make out where the golden afternoon hung heaviest would n't the place perhaps be in Madame de Cintré's eyes? He would certainly find something of interest there, call it all bravely bright or call it engagingly obscure.
But there came to him sometimes too, through this vague rich forecast, the thought of his past life and the long array of years (they had begun so early) during which he had had nothing in his head but his possible "haul." They seemed far away now, for his present attitude was more than a holiday, it was almost a repudiation. He had told Tom Tristram the pendulum was swinging back, and the backward swing, visibly, had not yet ended. Still, the possibility of hauls, which had dropped in the other quarter, wore to his mind a different aspect at different hours. In its train a thousand forgotten episodes came trooping before him. Some of them he looked complacently enough in the face; from some he averted his head. They were old triumphs of nerve, even of bluff, mere cold memories of the heat of battle, the high competitive rage. Some of them, as they lived again, he felt decidedly proud of; he admired himself as if he had been looking at another man. And in fact many of the qualities that make a great deed were there; the decision, the resolution, the courage, the celerity, the clear eye and the firm hand. Of certain other performances it would be going too far to say he was ashamed of them, for he had doubtless never had a stomach for dirty work. He had been blessed from the first with a natural impulse to disfigure with a direct unreasoning blow the painted face of temptation. In no man, verily, could a want of the stricter scruple have been less excusable. Newman knew the crooked from the straight at a glance, and the former had received at his hands, early and late, much putting in its place. None the less, however, some of his memories wore at present a graceless and sordid mien, and it struck him that if he had never incurred any quite ineffaceable stain he had never on the other hand followed the line of beauty, as a sought direction, for a single mile of its course. He had spent his years in the unremitting effort to add thousands to thousands, and now that he stood so well outside of it the business of mere money-getting showed only, in its ugliness, as vast and vague and dark, a pirate-ship with lights turned inward. It is very well, of a truth, to think meanly of money-getting after you have filled your pockets, and our friend, it may be said, should have begun somewhat earlier to moralise with this superiority. To that it may be answered that he might have made another fortune if he chose; and we ought to add that he was not exactly moralising. It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very brave and bristling world, and that it had not all been made by men "live" in his old mean sense.
During his stay at Baden-Baden he received a letter from Mrs. Tristram, scolding him for the scant tidings he had sent his friends and begging to be definitely assured that he had not even thought of not wintering within call of the Avenue d'Iéna. Newman replied as to the blast of a silver bugle.
"I supposed you knew I was a miserable letter-writer and did n't expect anything of me. I guess I've not struck off twenty letters of pure friendship in my whole life; in America I conducted my correspondence altogether by telegrams and by dictation to a shorthand reporter. This is a letter of friendship undefiled; you've got hold of a curiosity—you could really get something for it. If 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've had some one or other of the sensations I was after. That has been about my history ever since I left you. Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Italy—I've taken the whole list as the bare-backed rider takes the paper hoops at the circus, and I'm not even yet out of breath. I carry about six volumes of Ruskin in my trunk; I've seen some grand old things and shall perhaps talk them over this winter by your fireside. You see my face is n't 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,' says your proverb, and I find that the more sweet things I taste the more greedily I look over the table. Now that I'm in the shafts why should n'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, Trebizond, Samarcand, Bokhara. 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 is such a treat to be had out there. I do want more treats, but I think frankly I should like best to look for them in the Rue de l'Université. Do you ever hear from that handsome tall lady? If you can get her to promise she'll be at home the next time I call I'll go back to Paris straight. So there you have a bargain. I'm more than ever in the state of mind I told you about that evening; I want a companion for life and still want her to be a star of the first magnitude. I've kept an eye on all the possible candidates for the position who have come up this summer, but none of them has filled the bill or anything like it. I should have enjoyed the whole thing a thousand times more if I had had the lady just mentioned under my arm. The nearest approach to her was a cultivated young man from Dorchester Mass., who, however, very soon demanded of me a separation for incompatibility of temper. He told me I had n't it in me ever to raise a "tone," and he really made me half-believe him. 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. He pronounced me a poor creature, incapable of the joy of life—he talked to me as if I had come from Dorchester. This was rather bewildering. Which of my two critics was I to believe? I did n't worry about it and very soon made up my mind they don't know everything. You come nearer that than any one I've met, and I defy any one to pretend I'm wrong when I'm more than ever your faithful friendC. N."