been enterprising, in an eminent sense of the term;
he had been adventurous and even reckless, and he
had known bitter failure as well as brilliant success;
but he was a born experimentalist, and he had always
found something to enjoy in the pressure of necessity,
even when it was as irritating as the haircloth shirt
of the mediaeval monk. At one time failure seemed
inexorably his portion; ill-luck became his bed-fellow,
and whatever he touched he turned, not to gold, but
to ashes. His most vivid conception of a supernatural
element in the world’s affairs had come to him
once when this pertinacity of misfortune was at its
climax; there seemed to him something stronger in life
than his own will. But the mysterious something
could only be the devil, and he was accordingly seized
with an intense personal enmity to this impertinent
force. He had known what it was to have utterly
exhausted his credit, to be unable to raise a dollar,
and to find himself at nightfall in a strange city,
without a penny to mitigate its strangeness.
It was under these circumstances that he made his entrance
into San Francisco, the scene, subsequently, of his
happiest strokes of fortune. If he did not, like
Dr. Franklin in Philadelphia, march along the street
munching a penny-loaf, it was only because he had not
the penny-loaf necessary to the performance.
In his darkest days he had had but one simple, practical
impulse—the desire, as he would have phrased
it, to see the thing through. He did so at last,
buffeted his way into smooth waters, and made money
largely. It must be admitted, rather nakedly,
that Christopher Newman’s sole aim in life had
been to make money; what he had been placed in the
world for was, to his own perception, simply to wrest
a fortune, the bigger the better, from defiant opportunity.
This idea completely filled his horizon and satisfied
his imagination. Upon the uses of money, upon
what one might do with a life into which one had succeeded
in injecting the golden stream, he had up to his thirty-fifth
year very scantily reflected. Life had been for
him an open game, and he had played for high stakes.
He had won at last and carried off his winnings; and
now what was he to do with them? He was a man
to whom, sooner or later, the question was sure to
present itself, and the answer to it belongs to our
story. A vague sense that more answers were possible
than his philosophy had hitherto dreamt of had already
taken possession of him, and it seemed softly and
agreeably to deepen as he lounged in this brilliant
corner of Paris with his friend.
“I must confess,” he presently went on, “that here I don’t feel at all smart. My remarkable talents seem of no use. I feel as simple as a little child, and a little child might take me by the hand and lead me about.”
“Oh, I’ll be your little child,” said Tristram, jovially; “I’ll take you by the hand. Trust yourself to me.”
“I am a good worker,” Newman continued, “but I rather think I am a poor loafer. I have come abroad to amuse myself, but I doubt whether I know how.”