Генри Джеймс – The American (страница 20)
“But you can be amused in America, too.”
“I couldn’t; I was always at work. But after all, that was my amusement.”
At this moment Madame de Bellegarde came back for another cup of tea, accompanied by the Count Valentin. Madame de Cintre, when she had served her, began to talk again with Newman, and recalling what he had last said, “In your own country you were very much occupied?” she asked.
“I was in business. I have been in business since I was fifteen years old.”
“And what was your business?” asked Madame de Bellegarde, who was decidedly not so pretty as Madame de Cintre.
“I have been in everything,” said Newman. “At one time I sold leather; at one time I manufactured wash-tubs.”
Madame de Bellegarde made a little grimace. “Leather? I don’t like that. Wash-tubs are better. I prefer the smell of soap. I hope at least they made your fortune.” She rattled this off with the air of a woman who had the reputation of saying everything that came into her head, and with a strong French accent.
Newman had spoken with cheerful seriousness, but Madame de Bellegarde’s tone made him go on, after a meditative pause, with a certain light grimness of jocularity. “No, I lost money on wash-tubs, but I came out pretty square on leather.”
“I have made up my mind, after all,” said Madame de Bellegarde, “that the great point is—how do you call it?—to come out square. I am on my knees to money; I don’t deny it. If you have it, I ask no questions. For that I am a real democrat—like you, monsieur. Madame de Cintre is very proud; but I find that one gets much more pleasure in this sad life if one doesn’t look too close.”
“Just Heaven, dear madam, how you go at it,” said the Count Valentin, lowering his voice.
“He’s a man one can speak to, I suppose, since my sister receives him,” the lady answered. “Besides, it’s very true; those are my ideas.”
“Ah, you call them ideas,” murmured the young man.
“But Mrs. Tristram told me you had been in the army—in your war,” said Madame de Cintre.
“Yes, but that is not business!” said Newman.
“Very true!” said M. de Bellegarde. “Otherwise perhaps I should not be penniless.”
“Is it true,” asked Newman in a moment, “that you are so proud? I had already heard it.”
Madame de Cintre smiled. “Do you find me so?”
“Oh,” said Newman, “I am no judge. If you are proud with me, you will have to tell me. Otherwise I shall not know it.”
Madame de Cintre began to laugh. “That would be pride in a sad position!” she said.
“It would be partly,” Newman went on, “because I shouldn’t want to know it. I want you to treat me well.”
Madame de Cintre, whose laugh had ceased, looked at him with her head half averted, as if she feared what he was going to say.
“Mrs. Tristram told you the literal truth,” he went on; “I want very much to know you. I didn’t come here simply to call to-day; I came in the hope that you might ask me to come again.”
“Oh, pray come often,” said Madame de Cintre.
“But will you be at home?” Newman insisted. Even to himself he seemed a trifle “pushing,” but he was, in truth, a trifle excited.
“I hope so!” said Madame de Cintre.
Newman got up. “Well, we shall see,” he said smoothing his hat with his coat-cuff.
“Brother,” said Madame de Cintre, “invite Mr. Newman to come again.”
The Count Valentin looked at our hero from head to foot with his peculiar smile, in which impudence and urbanity seemed perplexingly commingled. “Are you a brave man?” he asked, eying him askance.
“Well, I hope so,” said Newman.
“I rather suspect so. In that case, come again.”
“Ah, what an invitation!” murmured Madame de Cintre, with something painful in her smile.
“Oh, I want Mr. Newman to come—particularly,” said the young man. “It will give me great pleasure. I shall be desolate if I miss one of his visits. But I maintain he must be brave. A stout heart, sir!” And he offered Newman his hand.
“I shall not come to see you; I shall come to see Madame de Cintre,” said Newman.
“You will need all the more courage.”
“Ah, Valentin!” said Madame de Cintre, appealingly.
“Decidedly,” cried Madame de Bellegarde, “I am the only person here capable of saying something polite! Come to see me; you will need no courage,” she said.
Newman gave a laugh which was not altogether an assent, and took his leave. Madame de Cintre did not take up her sister’s challenge to be gracious, but she looked with a certain troubled air at the retreating guest.
One evening very late, about a week after his visit to Madame de Cintre, Newman’s servant brought him a card. It was that of young M. de Bellegarde. When, a few moments later, he went to receive his visitor, he found him standing in the middle of his great gilded parlor and eying it from cornice to carpet. M. de Bellegarde’s face, it seemed to Newman, expressed a sense of lively entertainment. “What the devil is he laughing at now?” our hero asked himself. But he put the question without acrimony, for he felt that Madame de Cintre’s brother was a good fellow, and he had a presentiment that on this basis of good fellowship they were destined to understand each other. Only, if there was anything to laugh at, he wished to have a glimpse of it too.
“To begin with,” said the young man, as he extended his hand, “have I come too late?”
“Too late for what?” asked Newman.
“To smoke a cigar with you.”
“You would have to come early to do that,” said Newman. “I don’t smoke.”
“Ah, you are a strong man!”
“But I keep cigars,” Newman added. “Sit down.”
“Surely, I may not smoke here,” said M. de Bellegarde.
“What is the matter? Is the room too small?”
“It is too large. It is like smoking in a ball-room, or a church.”
“That is what you were laughing at just now?” Newman asked; “the size of my room?”
“It is not size only,” replied M. de Bellegarde, “but splendor, and harmony, and beauty of detail. It was the smile of admiration.”
Newman looked at him a moment, and then, “So it IS very ugly?” he inquired.
“Ugly, my dear sir? It is magnificent.”
“That is the same thing, I suppose,” said Newman. “Make yourself comfortable. Your coming to see me, I take it, is an act of friendship. You were not obliged to. Therefore, if anything around here amuses you, it will be all in a pleasant way. Laugh as loud as you please; I like to see my visitors cheerful. Only, I must make this request: that you explain the joke to me as soon as you can speak. I don’t want to lose anything, myself.”
M. de Bellegarde stared, with a look of unresentful perplexity. He laid his hand on Newman’s sleeve and seemed on the point of saying something, but he suddenly checked himself, leaned back in his chair, and puffed at his cigar. At last, however, breaking silence,—“Certainly,” he said, “my coming to see you is an act of friendship. Nevertheless I was in a measure obliged to do so. My sister asked me to come, and a request from my sister is, for me, a law. I was near you, and I observed lights in what I supposed were your rooms. It was not a ceremonious hour for making a call, but I was not sorry to do something that would show I was not performing a mere ceremony.”
“Well, here I am as large as life,” said Newman, extending his legs.
“I don’t know what you mean,” the young man went on “by giving me unlimited leave to laugh. Certainly I am a great laugher, and it is better to laugh too much than too little. But it is not in order that we may laugh together—or separately—that I have, I may say, sought your acquaintance. To speak with almost impudent frankness, you interest me!” All this was uttered by M. de Bellegarde with the modulated smoothness of the man of the world, and in spite of his excellent English, of the Frenchman; but Newman, at the same time that he sat noting its harmonious flow, perceived that it was not mere mechanical urbanity. Decidedly, there was something in his visitor that he liked. M. de Bellegarde was a foreigner to his finger-tips, and if Newman had met him on a Western prairie he would have felt it proper to address him with a “How-d’ye-do, Mosseer?” But there was something in his physiognomy which seemed to cast a sort of aerial bridge over the impassable gulf produced by difference of race. He was below the middle height, and robust and agile in figure. Valentin de Bellegarde, Newman afterwards learned, had a mortal dread of the robustness overtaking the agility; he was afraid of growing stout; he was too short, as he said, to afford a belly. He rode and fenced and practiced gymnastics with unremitting zeal, and if you greeted him with a “How well you are looking” he started and turned pale. In your WELL he read a grosser monosyllable. He had a round head, high above the ears, a crop of hair at once dense and silky, a broad, low forehead, a short nose, of the ironical and inquiring rather than of the dogmatic or sensitive cast, and a mustache as delicate as that of a page in a romance. He resembled his sister not in feature, but in the expression of his clear, bright eye, completely void of introspection, and in the way he smiled. The great point in his face was that it was intensely alive—frankly, ardently, gallantly alive. The look of it was like a bell, of which the handle might have been in the young man’s soul: at a touch of the handle it rang with a loud, silver sound. There was something in his quick, light brown eye which assured you that he was not economizing his consciousness. He was not living in a corner of it to spare the furniture of the rest. He was squarely encamped in the centre and he was keeping open house. When he smiled, it was like the movement of a person who in emptying a cup turns it upside down: he gave you the last drop of his jollity. He inspired Newman with something of the same kindness that our hero used to feel in his earlier years for those of his companions who could perform strange and clever tricks—make their joints crack in queer places or whistle at the back of their mouths.