I want to see all the great things, and do what the clever people do.""The clever people? Much obliged.You set me down as a blockhead, then?"Newman was sitting sidewise in his chair, with his elbow on the back and his head leaning on his hand.Without moving he looked a while at his companion with his dry, guarded, half-inscrutable, and yet altogether good-natured smile.
"Introduce me to your wife!" he said at last.
Tristram bounced about in his chair."Upon my word, I won't.She doesn'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, or anything.I'm not proud, I assure you I'm not proud.
That's why I am willing to take example by the clever people.""Well, if I'm not the rose, as they say here, I have lived near it.
I can show you some clever people, 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, any way?" he demanded.
"Are you going to write a book?"
Christopher Newman twisted one end of his mustache a while, in silence, and at last he 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 was rather a long story--a question of getting ahead of another party, in a certain particular way, in the stock-market.This other party had once played me a very mean trick.I owed him a grudge, I felt awfully savage at the time, and I vowed that, when I got a chance, I would, figuratively speaking, put his nose out of joint.
There was a matter of some sixty thousand dollars at stake.
If I put it out of his way, it was a blow the fellow would feel, and he really deserved no quarter.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 is possible I took a nap; I had been traveling 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 a reverie, with the most extraordinary feeling in the world--a mortal disgust for the thing I was going to do.It came upon me like THAT!" and he snapped his fingers--"as abruptly as an old wound that begins to ache.I couldn't tell the meaning of it;I only felt that I loathed the whole business and wanted to wash my hands of it.The idea of losing that sixty thousand dollars, of letting it utterly slide and scuttle and never hearing of it again, seemed the sweetest thing in the world.
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 of me.You may depend upon it that there are things going on inside of 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 marched in and bagged your sixty thousand dollars?""I have not the least idea.I hope so, poor devil! but I never found out.