The Truth About Tristrem Varick quotes

The world in which he lived, as well as the newspaper public, have had but one theory between them to account for it, and that theory is that Tristrem Varick was insane.

Tristrem Varick was not insane.

He had, perhaps, a fibre more or a fibre less than the ordinary run of men; that something, in fact, which is the prime factor of individuality and differentiates the possessor from the herd; but to call him insane is nonsense.

The floors of the bedrooms were carpeted with rugs that extended under the beds, a novelty in New York, and the bedsteads themselves, which were vast enough to make coffins for ten people, were curtained with chintz patterns manufactured in Manchester to frighten children.

In brief, Erastus Varick succeeded in making the house even less attractive than before, and altogether acted like a man in love.

After three years of marriage, Tristrem was born and Mrs. Varick died. The boy had the best of care and everything that money could procure.

Shortly after his return from foreign lands Erastus Varick was gathered to his fathers.

By his will he bequeathed to Tristrem a Panama hat and a bundle of letters.

The rest and residue of his property he devised to the St. Nicholas Hospital. The value of that property amounted to seven million dollars.

And again, when a tutor asked how it was that there was no W in the French language, Tristrem answered, “Because of Waterloo.”

Boys are generous in their enthusiasms; they like bravery, they are not deaf to wit, but perhaps of all other things they admire justice most.

And Tristrem seemed to exhale it. It is said that everyone has a particular talent for some one thing, whether for good or evil, and the particular talent which was accorded to Tristrem Varick was that of appreciation. He was a born umpire.

She just lacked being tall, and in her face and about her bare arms and neck was the perfume of health. She moved indolently, with a grace of her own.

She was not yet twenty, a festival of beauty in the festival of life.

At the rustle of her dress Tristrem had arisen. As the girl crossed the room he bethought him of a garden of lilies; though why, for the life of him, he could not have explained.

“Bah!” he exclaimed, “if the beggar doesn’t like what I write let him try and do better. I don’t care what any of them say. My books sell, and that’s the hauptsache. Besides, what’s the use in arguing with a newspaper?

It’s like talking metaphysics to a bull; the first you know, you get a horn in your navel.

” And while the novelist was expressing his disdain of all adverse criticism, and quoting Emerson to the effect that the average reviewer had the eyes of a bug and the heart of a cat, Tristrem discovered Mrs.

From Royal’s end of the table came intermittent shrieks of laughter. The novelist was evidently in his finest form. “Do you mean to tell me,” Miss Finch asked him across the table, “do you mean to say that you don’t believe in platonic affection?”

“I never uttered such a heresy in my life,” the novelist replied. “Of course I believe in it; I believe in it thoroughly⁠—between husband and wife.”

At this everyone laughed again, except Tristrem, who had not heard, and Mrs. Weldon, who had not understood. The latter, however, felt that Miss Finch was distinguishing herself, and she turned to Tristrem anew.

If that nature be inexperienced, unworn—in a word, if it be virginal, its earliest effects are those of a malady. On the other hand, if the nature on which it operates has received the baptism of fire, its effect is that of a tonic.

To the one it is a fever, to the other a bugle-call.

In the first instance, admiration is pursued by self-depreciation, desire is pinioned before conventional obstacles, and hope falters beneath a weight of doubt.

He awoke with the surprise and wonder of an inexperienced sensation; he awoke with the consciousness of being in love, wholly, turbulently, absurdly in love with a girl to whom he had not addressed a single word.

The general opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, there are, after all, very few people who know what love really is.

And among those that know, fewer there are that tell. A lexicographer, deservedly forgotten, has defined it as an exchange of fancies, the contact of two epiderms.

A lexicographer, deservedly forgotten, has defined it as an exchange of fancies, the contact of two epiderms. Another, wiser if less epigrammatic, announced it as a something that no one knew what, coming no one knew whence, and ending no one knew how.

But in whatever fashion it may be described, one thing is certain, it has been largely overrated.

In the case of Tristrem Varick it appeared in its most perfect form. The superlative is used advisedly. Love has a hundred aspects, a thousand toilets.

Tristrem was in no sense a diplomatist. In his ways there was a candor that was as unusual as it is delightful; yet such is the power of love that, in its first assault, the victim is transformed.

The miser turns prodigal, the coward brave, the genius becomes a simpleton, and in the simpleton there awakes a Machiavelli.

Tristrem passed a forenoon in trying to unravel as cruel a problem as has ever been given a lover to solve—how, in a city like New York, to meet a girl of whom he knew absolutely nothing, and who was probably unaware of his own …

“I can imagine a husband,” thought Tristrem, with a glimmer of that spirit of belated repartee which Thackeray called cab-wit, the brilliancy which comes to us when we are going home,

“I can imagine a husband whose greatest merit is his wife.”

“Bah! I am speaking in the first person.

I don’t believe in matrimony myself, I am too poor. And besides, I never heard of but one happy marriage, and that was between a blind man and a deaf-mute.

Though even then it must have been difficult to know what the woman thought. Now, in regard to Miss Raritan, half the men in the city are after her, pour le bon motif, s’entend;

Tristrem continued his way, oppressed. He was beset by an insidious dyscholia. He felt as one does who witnesses a festival in which there is no part for him.

The town reeked with love as a brewery reeks with beer.

The stars, the air, the very pavements told of it. It was omnipresent, and yet there was none for him.

We may prate as we will, but there are many things less endurable than the funeral of the best-beloved.

Death is by no means the worst that can come.

Whoso discovers that affection reposed has been given to an illusory representation; to one not as he is, but as fancy pictured him;

No, it was ill done, Weldon, and the lie was ignoble. And why had he told it? Their friendship, seemingly, had been so stanch, so unmarred by disagreement, that this lie was as a dash of blood on a white wall—an ineffaceable stain.

If there are years that count double, there are moments in which the hourglass is transfixed.

The entire scene, from Tristrem’s entrance to Weldon’s departure, was compassed in less than a minute, yet during that fragment of time there had been enacted a drama in epitome—a drama humdrum and ordinary indeed, but in which Tristrem found himself bidding farewell to one …

But now, abruptly, the shadows had gone, the blind alley had changed into a radiant avenue, the dead wall had parted like a curtain, and beyond was a new horizon, gold-barred and blue, and landscapes of asphodels and beckoning palms.

He was as one who, overtaken by sleep on the banks of the Styx, awakes in Arcadia.

His face was so eloquent with the bewitchments through which he roamed that, for the first time that evening, Miss Raritan smiled. She raised a finger warningly.

Miss Raritan looked at him, and hesitated before she spoke. Then catching his face in her two hands she drew it to her own.

“He said you were a goose,” she whispered, and touched her lips to his.

With this answer Tristrem was fain to be content. And presently, when he left the house, he reeled as though he had drunk beaker after flagon of the headiest wine.

At dawn he awoke refreshed.

The sun rose from the ocean like an indolent girl from a bath.

Before the house was astir he was out of doors exploring the land.

Its breast was bared to him, it lay at his feet, open-armed as though waiting his coming, and conjuring him to haste. “There is nothing sweeter,” it seemed to say, “nothing swifter, and naught more still.

I feed my lovers on lotus and Lethe.

There is no fairer couch in the world than mine. A sister’s kiss is not more chaste. I am better than fame, serener than hope; I am more than love, I am peace. I am unforsakable, and I never forsake.”

“There is nothing sweeter,” it seemed to say, “nothing swifter, and naught more still. I feed my lovers on lotus and Lethe. There is no fairer couch in the world than mine. A sister’s kiss is not more chaste.

I am better than fame, serener than hope; I am more than love, I am peace. I am unforsakable, and I never forsake.

”

“

It’s a popular prejudice to suppose that a poet must write.

The greatest of all never put pen to paper. What is there left to us of Linus and Musaeus? Siddartha did not write, Valmiki did not know how. The parables of the Christ were voiced, not written.

Rome has ghosts and memories of her own; in Paris there is a sparkle that is headier than absinthe; Berlin resounds so well to the beat of drums that even the pusillanimous are brave; but London is the great enchantress.

It is London alone that holds the secret of inspiring love and hatred as well.

Tristrem sniffed the fog with a sensation of that morbid pleasure which girls in their teens and women in travail experience when they crave and obtain repulsive food. Had he not hungered for it himself? and did she not breathe it too?

Raritan had sent word, the day before, that all letters should be held for her until further notice. She had been stopping with her daughter at the Hôtel du Rhin, but whether or not she was still there the clerk did not know.

The Rue Scribe is not far from the Place Vendôme

, in which the Hôtel du Rhin is situated, and it took Tristrem a little less than five minutes to get there. The concierge was lounging in her cubbyhole.

Mrs. Manhattan complained of this conduct to Nicholas, her husband, alleging that the young man was fatuous in his impertinence.

“My dear,” returned that wise habitué of the Athenaeum, “when a man gives away seven million, it is because he has forgotten how to be conventional.”

It was on a Sunday that the ship reached New York, and it was late in the afternoon before the passengers were able to disembark.

Several thousand years ago a thinker defined virtue as the agreement of the will and the conscience.

If the will were coercible the definition would be matchless. Unfortunately it is not. Will declines to be reasoned with; it insists, and in its insistence conscience, horrified or charmed, stands a witness to its acts.

Several thousand years ago a thinker defined virtue as the agreement of the will and the conscience. If the will were coercible the definition would be matchless. Unfortunately it is not.

Will declines to be reasoned with; it insists, and in its insistence conscience, horrified or charmed, stands a witness to its acts.

For a fortnight Tristrem had been married to an impulse against which his finer nature rebelled. It was not that the killing of such a one as Weldon was unjustifiable; on the contrary, it was rather praiseworthy than otherwise.

The river was yet some distance away.

It was such a pity, he told himself, such a pity, that he had not accepted the invitation of the sea.

That would have been so much better, so much surer, and so much more discreet. And then he fell to wondering about his grandfather, and his heart was filled with anguish. He would have done anything to save that old man from pain.

Then, as an individual, coated in blue and glistening as to his buttons, sauntered by, he seemed to understand. He left the railing at which he had stood, and, circling the park, set out in the direction of the river.

As he reached Second Avenue, a train of the elevated railway flamed about an adjacent corner, and swept like a dragon in midair, on, beyond, and out of sight.

To the right was a great factory, and as Tristrem continued his way through the unfamiliar street he wondered what the people in the train, what the factory-hands, and the dwellers in the neighborhood would say if they could surmise his errand.