The Ambassadors, by Henry James

the mere maiden, and yet was only as much married as that quantity
came to. She was in the brilliant acclaimed festal stage. Well,
might it last her long!
Strether rejoiced in these things for Chad, who was all genial
attention to the needs of his friends, besides having arranged that
his servant should reinforce him; the ladies were certainly
pleasant to see, and Mamie would be at any time and anywhere
pleasant to exhibit. She would look extraordinarily like his young
wife--the wife of a honeymoon, should he go about with her; but
that was his own affair--or perhaps it was hers; it was at any rate
something she couldn't help. Strether remembered how he had seen
him come up with Jeanne de Vionnet in Gloriani's garden, and the
fancy he had had about that--the fancy obscured now, thickly
overlaid with others; the recollection was during these minutes his
only note of trouble. He had often, in spite of himself, wondered
if Chad but too probably were not with Jeanne the object of a still
and shaded flame. It was on the cards that the child MIGHT be
tremulously in love, and this conviction now flickered up not a bit
the less for his disliking to think of it, for its being, in a
complicated situation, a complication the more, and for something
indescribable in Mamie, something at all events straightway lent
her by his own mind, something that gave her value, gave her
intensity and purpose, as the symbol of an opposition. Little
Jeanne wasn't really at all in question--how COULD she be?--yet
from the moment Miss Pocock had shaken her skirts on the platform,
touched up the immense bows of her hat and settled properly over
her shoulder the strap of her morocco-and-gilt travelling-satchel,
from that moment little Jeanne was opposed.
It was in the cab with Jim that impressions really crowded on
Strether, giving him the strangest sense of length of absence from
people among whom he had lived for years. Having them thus come out
to him was as if he had returned to find them: and the droll
promptitude of Jim's mental reaction threw his own initiation far
back into the past. Whoever might or mightn't be suited by what was
going on among them, Jim, for one, would certainly be: his instant
recognition--frank and whimsical--of what the affair was for HIM
gave Strether a glow of pleasure. "I say, you know, this IS about
my shape, and if it hadn't been for YOU--!" so he broke out as the
charming streets met his healthy appetite; and he wound up, after
an expressive nudge, with a clap of his companion's knee and an "Oh
you, you--you ARE doing it!" that was charged with rich meaning.
Strether felt in it the intention of homage, but, with a curiosity
otherwise occupied, postponed taking it up. What he was asking
himself for the time was how Sarah Pocock, in the opportunity
already given her, had judged her brother--from whom he himself, as
they finally, at the station, separated for their different
conveyances, had had a look into which he could read more than one
message. However Sarah was judging her brother, Chad's conclusion
about his sister, and about her husband and her husband's sister,
was at the least on the way not to fail of confidence. Strether
felt the confidence, and that, as the look between them was an
exchange, what he himself gave back was relatively vague. This
comparison of notes however could wait; everything struck him as
depending on the effect produced by Chad. Neither Sarah nor Mamie
had in any way, at the station--where they had had after all ample
time--broken out about it; which, to make up for this, was what our
friend had expected of Jim as soon as they should find themselves
together.
It was queer to him that he had that noiseless brush with Chad; an
ironic intelligence with this youth on the subject of his
relatives, an intelligence carried on under their nose and, as
might be said, at their expense--such a matter marked again for him
strongly the number of stages he had come; albeit that if the
number seemed great the time taken for the final one was but the
turn of a hand. He had before this had many moments of wondering if
he himself weren't perhaps changed even as Chad was changed. Only
what in Chad was conspicuous improvement--well, he had no name
ready for the working, in his own organism, of his own more timid
dose. He should have to see first what this action would amount to.
And for his occult passage with the young man, after all, the
directness of it had no greater oddity than the fact that the young
man's way with the three travellers should have been so happy a
manifestation. Strether liked him for it, on the spot, as he hadn't
yet liked him; it affected him while it lasted as he might have
been affected by some light pleasant perfect work of art: to that
degree that he wondered if they were really worthy of it, took it
in and did it justice; to that degree that it would have been
scarce a miracle if, there in the luggage-room, while they waited
for their things, Sarah had pulled his sleeve and drawn him aside.
"You're right; we haven't quite known what you mean, Mother and I,
but now we see. Chad's magnificent; what can one want more? If THIS
is the kind of thing--!" On which they might, as it were, have
embraced and begun to work together.
Ah how much, as it was, for all her bridling brightness--which was
merely general and noticed nothing--WOULD they work together?
Strether knew he was unreasonable; he set it down to his being
nervous: people couldn't notice everything and speak of everything
in a quarter of an hour. Possibly, no doubt, also, he made too much
of Chad's display. Yet, none the less, when, at the end of five
minutes, in the cab, Jim Pocock had said nothing either--hadn't
said, that is, what Strether wanted, though he had said much else--
it all suddenly bounced back to their being either stupid or
wilful. It was more probably on the whole the former; so that that
would be the drawback of the bridling brightness. Yes, they would
bridle and be bright; they would make the best of what was before
them, but their observation would fail; it would be beyond them;
they simply wouldn't understand. Of what use would it be then that
they had come?--if they weren't to be intelligent up to THAT point:
unless indeed he himself were utterly deluded and extravagant? Was
he, on this question of Chad's improvement, fantastic and away from
the truth? Did he live in a false world, a world that had grown
simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation--in the
face now of Jim's silence in particular--but the alarm of the vain
thing menaced by the touch of the real? Was this contribution of
the real possibly the mission of the Pococks?--had they come to
make the work of observation, as HE had practised observation,
crack and crumble, and to reduce Chad to the plain terms in which
honest minds could deal with him? Had they come in short to be sane
where Strether was destined to feel that he himself had only been
silly?
He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long
when once he had reflected that he would have been silly, in this
case, with Maria Gostrey and little Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet
and little Jeanne, with Lambert Strether, in fine, and above all
with Chad Newsome himself. Wouldn't it be found to have made more
for reality to be silly with these persons than sane with Sarah and
Jim? Jim in fact, he presently made up his mind, was individually
out of it; Jim didn't care; Jim hadn't come out either for Chad or
for him; Jim in short left the moral side to Sally and indeed
simply availed himself now, for the sense of recreation, of the
fact that he left almost everything to Sally. He was nothing
compared to Sally, and not so much by reason of Sally's temper and
will as by that of her more developed type and greater acquaintance
with the world. He quite frankly and serenely confessed, as he sat
there with Strether, that he felt his type hang far in the rear of
his wife's and still further, if possible, in the rear of his
sister's. Their types, he well knew, were recognised and acclaimed;
whereas the most a leading Woollett business-man could hope to
achieve socially, and for that matter industrially, was a certain
freedom to play into this general glamour.
The impression he made on our friend was another of the things that
marked our friend's road. It was a strange impression, especially
as so soon produced; Strether had received it, he judged, all in
the twenty minutes; it struck him at least as but in a minor degree
the work of the long Woollett years. Pocock was normally and
consentingly though not quite wittingly out of the question. It was
despite his being normal; it was despite his being cheerful; it was
despite his being a leading Woollett business-man; and the
determination of his fate left him thus perfectly usual--as
everything else about it was clearly, to his sense, not less so. He
seemed to say that there was a whole side of life on which the
perfectly usual WAS for leading Woollett business-men to be out of
the question. He made no more of it than that, and Strether, so far
as Jim was concerned, desired to make no more. Only Strether's
imagination, as always, worked, and he asked himself if this side
of life were not somehow connected, for those who figured on it
with the fact of marriage. Would HIS relation to it, had he married
ten years before, have become now the same as Pocock's? Might it
even become the same should he marry in a few months? Should he
ever know himself as much out of the question for Mrs. Newsome as
Jim knew himself--in a dim way--for Mrs. Jim?
To turn his eyes in that direction was to be personally reassured;
he was different from Pocock; he had affirmed himself differently
and was held after all in higher esteem. What none the less came
home to him, however, at this hour, was that the society over
there, that of which Sarah and Mamie--and, in a more eminent way,
Mrs. Newsome herself--were specimens, was essentially a society of
women, and that poor Jim wasn't in it. He himself Lambert Strether,
WAS as yet in some degree--which was an odd situation for a man;
but it kept coming back to him in a whimsical way that he should
perhaps find his marriage had cost him his place. This occasion
indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a time of sensible
exclusion for Jim, who was in a state of manifest response to the
charm of his adventure. Small and fat and constantly facetious,
straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he would have been
practically indistinguishable hadn't his constant preference for
light-grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very
little stories, done what it could for his identity. There were
signs in him, though none of them plaintive, of always paying for
others; and the principal one perhaps was just this failure of
type. It was with this that he paid, rather than with fatigue or
waste; and also doubtless a little with the effort of humour--never
irrelevant to the conditions, to the relations, with which he was
acquainted.
He gurgled his joy as they rolled through the happy streets; he
declared that his trip was a regular windfall, and that he wasn't
there, he was eager to remark, to hang back from anything: he
didn't know quite what Sally had come for, but HE had come for a
good time. Strether indulged him even while wondering if what Sally
wanted her brother to go back for was to become like her husband.
He trusted that a good time was to be, out and out, the programme
for all of them; and he assented liberally to Jim's proposal that,
disencumbered and irresponsible--his things were in the omnibus
with those of the others--they should take a further turn round
before going to the hotel. It wasn't for HIM to tackle Chad--it was
Sally's job; and as it would be like her, he felt, to open fire on
the spot, it wouldn't be amiss of them to hold off and give her
time. Strether, on his side, only asked to give her time; so he
jogged with his companion along boulevards and avenues, trying to
extract from meagre material some forecast of his catastrophe. He
was quick enough to see that Jim Pocock declined judgement, had
hovered quite round the outer edge of discussion and anxiety,
leaving all analysis of their question to the ladies alone and now
only feeling his way toward some small droll cynicism. It broke out
afresh, the cynicism--it had already shown a flicker--in a but
slightly deferred: "Well, hanged if I would if I were he!"
"You mean you wouldn't in Chad's place--?"
"Give up this to go back and boss the advertising!" Poor Jim, with
his arms folded and his little legs out in the open fiacre, drank
in the sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of
their vista to the other. "Why I want to come right out and live
here myself. And I want to live while I AM here too. I feel with
YOU--oh you've been grand, old man, and I've twigged--that it ain't
right to worry Chad. I don't mean to persecute him; I couldn't in
conscience. It's thanks to you at any rate that I'm here, and I'm
sure I'm much obliged. You're a lovely pair."
There were things in this speech that Strether let pass for the
time. "Don't you then think it important the advertising should be
thoroughly taken in hand? Chad WILL be, so far as capacity is
concerned," he went on, "the man to do it."
"Where did he get his capacity," Jim asked, "over here?"
"He didn't get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that over
here he hasn't inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for
business, an extraordinary head. He comes by that," Strether
explained, "honestly enough. He's in that respect his father's son,
and also--for she's wonderful in her way too--his mother's. He has
other tastes and other tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife
are quite right about his having that. He's very remarkable."
"Well, I guess he is!" Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. "But if
you've believed so in his making us hum, why have you so prolonged
the discussion? Don't you know we've been quite anxious about you?"
These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether
saw he must none the less make a choice and take a line. "Because,
you see, I've greatly liked it. I've liked my Paris, I dare say
I've liked it too much."
"Oh you old wretch!" Jim gaily exclaimed.
"But nothing's concluded," Strether went on. "The case is more
complex than it looks from Woollett."
"Oh well, it looks bad enough from Woollett!" Jim declared.
"Even after all I've written?"
Jim bethought himself. "Isn't it what you've written that has made
Mrs. Newsome pack us off? That at least and Chad's not turning up?"
Strether made a reflexion of his own. "I see. That she should do
something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore of
course come out to act."
"Oh yes," Jim concurred--"to act. But Sally comes out to act, you
know," he lucidly added, "every time she leaves the house. She
never comes out but she DOES act. She's acting moreover now for her
mother, and that fixes the scale." Then he wound up, opening all
his senses to it, with a renewed embrace of pleasant Paris. "We
haven't all the same at Woollett got anything like this."
Strether continued to consider. "I'm bound to say for you all that
you strike me as having arrived in a very mild and reasonable frame
of mind. You don't show your claws. I felt just now in Mrs. Pocock
no symptom of that. She isn't fierce," he went on. "I'm such a
nervous idiot that I thought she might be."
"Oh don't you know her well enough," Pocock asked, "to have noticed
that she never gives herself away, any more than her mother ever
does? They ain't fierce, either of 'em; they let you come quite
close. They wear their fur the smooth side out--the warm side in.
Do you know what they are?" Jim pursued as he looked about him,
giving the question, as Strether felt, but half his care--"do you
know what they are? They're about as intense as they can live."
"Yes"--and Strether's concurrence had a positive precipitation;
"they're about as intense as they can live."
"They don't lash about and shake the cage," said Jim, who seemed
pleased with his analogy; "and it's at feeding-time that they're
quietest. But they always get there."
"They do indeed--they always get there!" Strether replied with a
laugh that justified his confession of nervousness. He disliked to
be talking sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he could have
talked insincerely. But there was something he wanted to know, a
need created in him by her recent intermission, by his having
given from the first so much, as now more than ever appeared to
him, and got so little. It was as if a queer truth in his
companion's metaphor had rolled over him with a rush. She HAD been
quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her,
out of the big bowl of all his recent free communication, his
vividness and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even his eloquence,
while the current of her response had steadily run thin. Jim
meanwhile however, it was true, slipped characteristically into
shallowness from the moment he ceased to speak out of the
experience of a husband.
"But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before
her. If he doesn't work that for all it's worth--!" He sighed with
contingent pity at his brother-in-law's possible want of resource.
"He has worked it on YOU, pretty well, eh?" and he asked the next
moment if there were anything new at the Varieties, which he
pronounced in the American manner. They talked about the
Varieties--Strether confessing to a knowledge which produced again
on Pocock's part a play of innuendo as vague as a nursery-rhyme,
yet as aggressive as an elbow in his side; and they finished their
drive under the protection of easy themes. Strether waited to the
end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim had seen Chad as
different; and he could scarce have explained the discouragement
he drew from the absence of this testimony. It was what he had
taken his own stand on, so far as he had taken a stand; and if
they were all only going to see nothing he had only wasted his
time. He gave his friend till the very last moment, till they had
come into sight of the hotel; and when poor Pocock only continued
cheerful and envious and funny he fairly grew to dislike him, to
feel him extravagantly common. If they were ALL going to see
nothing!--Strether knew, as this came back to him, that he was
also letting Pocock represent for him what Mrs. Newsome wouldn't
see. He went on disliking, in the light of Jim's commonness, to
talk to him about that lady; yet just before the cab pulled up he
knew the extent of his desire for the real word from Woollett.
"Has Mrs. Newsome at all given way--?"
"'Given way'?"--Jim echoed it with the practical derision of his
sense of a long past.
"Under the strain, I mean, of hope deferred, of disappointment
repeated and thereby intensified."
"Oh is she prostrate, you mean?"--he had his categories in hand.
"Why yes, she's prostrate--just as Sally is. But they're never so
lively, you know, as when they're prostrate."
"Ah Sarah's prostrate?" Strether vaguely murmured.
"It's when they're prostrate that they most sit up."
"And Mrs. Newsome's sitting up?"
"All night, my boy--for YOU!" And Jim fetched him, with a vulgar
little guffaw, a thrust that gave relief to the picture. But he
had got what he wanted. He felt on the spot that this WAS the real
word from Woollett. "So don't you go home!" Jim added while he
alighted and while his friend, letting him profusely pay the
cabman, sat on in a momentary muse. Strether wondered if that
were the real word too.
III
As the door of Mrs. Pocock's salon was pushed open for him, the
next day, well before noon, he was reached by a voice with a
charming sound that made him just falter before crossing the
threshold. Madame de Vionnet was already on the field, and this
gave the drama a quicker pace than he felt it as yet--though his
suspense had increased--in the power of any act of his own to do.
He had spent the previous evening with all his old friends
together yet he would still have described himself as quite in the
dark in respect to a forecast of their influence on his situation.
It was strange now, none the less, that in the light of this
unexpected note of her presence he felt Madame de Vionnet a part
of that situation as she hadn't even yet been. She was alone, he
found himself assuming, with Sarah, and there was a bearing in
that--somehow beyond his control--on his personal fate. Yet she
was only saying something quite easy and independent--the thing
she had come, as a good friend of Chad's, on purpose to say.
"There isn't anything at all--? I should be so delighted."
It was clear enough, when they were there before him, how she had
been received. He saw this, as Sarah got up to greet him, from
something fairly hectic in Sarah's face. He saw furthermore that
they weren't, as had first come to him, alone together; he was at
no loss as to the identity of the broad high back presented to
him in the embrasure of the window furthest from the door.
Waymarsh, whom he had to-day not yet seen, whom he only knew to
have left the hotel before him, and who had taken part, the night
previous, on Mrs. Pocock's kind invitation, conveyed by Chad, in
the entertainment, informal but cordial, promptly offered by that
lady--Waymarsh had anticipated him even as Madame de Vionnet had
done, and, with his hands in his pockets and his attitude
unaffected by Strether's entrance, was looking out, in marked
detachment, at the Rue de Rivoli. The latter felt it in the air--
it was immense how Waymarsh could mark things---that he had remained
deeply dissociated from the overture to their hostess that we have
recorded on Madame de Vionnet's side. He had, conspicuously, tact,
besides a stiff general view; and this was why he had left Mrs.
Pocock to struggle alone. He would outstay the visitor; he would
unmistakeably wait; to what had he been doomed for months past but
waiting? Therefore she was to feel that she had him in reserve.
What support she drew from this was still to be seen, for, although
Sarah was vividly bright, she had given herself up for the moment
to an ambiguous flushed formalism. She had had to reckon more
quickly than she expected; but it concerned her first of all to
signify that she was not to be taken unawares. Strether arrived
precisely in time for her showing it. "Oh you're too good; but I
don't think I feel quite helpless. I have my brother--and these
American friends. And then you know I've been to Paris. I KNOW
Paris," said Sally Pocock in a tone that breathed a certain chill
on Strether's heart.
"Ah but a woman, in this tiresome place where everything's always
changing, a woman of good will," Madame de Vionnet threw off, "can
always help a woman. I'm sure you 'know'--but we know perhaps
different things." She too, visibly, wished to make no mistake; but
it was a fear of a different order and more kept out of sight. She
smiled in welcome at Strether; she greeted him more familiarly than
Mrs. Pocock; she put out her hand to him without moving from her
place; and it came to him in the course of a minute and in the
oddest way that--yes, positively--she was giving him over to ruin.
She was all kindness and ease, but she couldn't help so giving him;
she was exquisite, and her being just as she was poured for Sarah a
sudden rush of meaning into his own equivocations. How could she
know how she was hurting him? She wanted to show as simple and
humble--in the degree compatible with operative charm; but it was
just this that seemed to put him on her side. She struck him as
dressed, as arranged, as prepared infinitely to conciliate--with
the very poetry of good taste in her view of the conditions of her
early call. She was ready to advise about dressmakers and shops;
she held herself wholly at the disposition of Chad's family.
Strether noticed her card on the table--her coronet and her
"Comtesse"--and the imagination was sharp in him of certain private
adjustments in Sarah's mind. She had never, he was sure, sat with a
"Comtesse" before, and such was the specimen of that class he had
been keeping to play on her. She had crossed the sea very
particularly for a look at her; but he read in Madame de Vionnet's
own eyes that this curiosity hadn't been so successfully met as
that she herself wouldn't now have more than ever need of him. She
looked much as she had looked to him that morning at Notre Dame; he
noted in fact the suggestive sameness of her discreet and delicate
dress. It seemed to speak--perhaps a little prematurely or too
finely--of the sense in which she would help Mrs. Pocock with the
shops. The way that lady took her in, moreover, added depth to his
impression of what Miss Gostrey, by their common wisdom, had
escaped. He winced as he saw himself but for that timely prudence
ushering in Maria as a guide and an example. There was however a
touch of relief for him in his glimpse, so far as he had got it, of
Sarah's line. She "knew Paris." Madame de Vionnet had, for that
matter, lightly taken this up. "Ah then you've a turn for that, an
affinity that belongs to your family. Your brother, though his long
experience makes a difference, I admit, has become one of us in a
marvellous way." And she appealed to Strether in the manner of a
woman who could always glide off with smoothness into another
subject. Wasn't HE struck with the way Mr. Newsome had made the
place his own, and hadn't he been in a position to profit by his
friend's wondrous expertness?
Strether felt the bravery, at the least, of her presenting herself
so promptly to sound that note, and yet asked himself what other
note, after all, she COULD strike from the moment she presented
herself at all. She could meet Mrs. Pocock only on the ground of
the obvious, and what feature of Chad's situation was more eminent
than the fact that he had created for himself a new set of
circumstances? Unless she hid herself altogether she could show but
as one of these, an illustration of his domiciled and indeed of his
confirmed condition. And the consciousness of all this in her
charming eyes was so clear and fine that as she thus publicly drew
him into her boat she produced in him such a silent agitation as he
was not to fail afterwards to denounce as pusillanimous. "Ah don't
be so charming to me!--for it makes us intimate, and after all what
IS between us when I've been so tremendously on my guard and have
seen you but half a dozen times?" He recognised once more the
perverse law that so inveterately governed his poor personal
aspects: it would be exactly LIKE the way things always turned out
for him that he should affect Mrs. Pocock and Waymarsh as launched
in a relation in which he had really never been launched at all.
They were at this very moment--they could only be--attributing to
him the full licence of it, and all by the operation of her own
tone with him; whereas his sole licence had been to cling with
intensity to the brink, not to dip so much as a toe into the flood.
But the flicker of his fear on this occasion was not, as may be
added, to repeat itself; it sprang up, for its moment, only to die
down and then go out for ever. To meet his fellow visitor's
invocation and, with Sarah's brilliant eyes on him, answer, WAS
quite sufficiently to step into her boat. During the rest of the
time her visit lasted he felt himself proceed to each of the proper
offices, successively, for helping to keep the adventurous skiff
afloat. It rocked beneath him, but he settled himself in his place.
He took up an oar and, since he was to have the credit of pulling,
pulled.
"That will make it all the pleasanter if it so happens that we DO
meet," Madame de Vionnet had further observed in reference to Mrs.
Pocock's mention of her initiated state; and she had immediately
added that, after all, her hostess couldn't be in need with the
good offices of Mr. Strether so close at hand. "It's he, I gather,
who has learnt to know his Paris, and to love it, better than any
one ever before in so short a time; so that between him and your
brother, when it comes to the point, how can you possibly want for
good guidance? The great thing, Mr. Strether will show you," she
smiled, "is just to let one's self go."
"Oh I've not let myself go very far," Strether answered, feeling
quite as if he had been called upon to hint to Mrs. Pocock how
Parisians could talk. "I'm only afraid of showing I haven't let
myself go far enough. I've taken a good deal of time, but I must
quite have had the air of not budging from one spot." He looked at
Sarah in a manner that he thought she might take as engaging, and
he made, under Madame de Vionnet's protection, as it were, his
first personal point. "What has really happened has been that, all
the while, I've done what I came out for."
Yet it only at first gave Madame de Vionnet a chance immediately to
take him up. "You've renewed acquaintance with your friend--you've
learnt to know him again." She spoke with such cheerful helpfulness
that they might, in a common cause, have been calling together and
pledged to mutual aid.
Waymarsh, at this, as if he had been in question, straightway
turned from the window. "Oh yes, Countess--he has renewed
acquaintance with ME, and he HAS, I guess, learnt something about
me, though I don't know how much he has liked it. It's for Strether
himself to say whether he has felt it justifies his course."
"Oh but YOU," said the Countess gaily, "are not in the least what
he came out for--is he really, Strether? and I hadn't you at all in
my mind. I was thinking of Mr. Newsome, of whom we think so much
and with whom, precisely, Mrs. Pocock has given herself the
opportunity to take up threads. What a pleasure for you both!"
Madame de Vionnet, with her eyes on Sarah, bravely continued.
Mrs. Pocock met her handsomely, but Strether quickly saw she meant
to accept no version of her movements or plans from any other lips.
She required no patronage and no support, which were but other
names for a false position; she would show in her own way what she
chose to show, and this she expressed with a dry glitter that
recalled to him a fine Woollett winter morning. "I've never wanted
for opportunities to see my brother. We've many things to think of
at home, and great responsibilities and occupations, and our home's
not an impossible place. We've plenty of reasons," Sarah continued
a little piercingly, "for everything we do"--and in short she
wouldn't give herself the least little scrap away. But she added as
one who was always bland and who could afford a concession: "I've
come because--well, because we do come."
"Ah then fortunately!"--Madame de Vionnet breathed it to the air.
Five minutes later they were on their feet for her to take leave,
standing together in an affability that had succeeded in surviving
a further exchange of remarks; only with the emphasised appearance
on Waymarsh's part of a tendency to revert, in a ruminating manner
and as with an instinctive or a precautionary lightening of his
tread, to an open window and his point of vantage. The glazed and
gilded room, all red damask, ormolu, mirrors, clocks, looked south,
and the shutters were bowed upon the summer morning; but the
Tuileries garden and what was beyond it, over which the whole place
hung, were things visible through gaps; so that the far-spreading
presence of Paris came up in coolness, dimness and invitation, in
the twinkle of gilt-tipped palings, the crunch of gravel, the click
of hoofs, the crack of whips, things that suggested some parade of
the circus. "I think it probable," said Mrs. Pocock, "that I shall
have the opportunity of going to my brother's I've no doubt it's
very pleasant indeed." She spoke as to Strether, but her face was
turned with an intensity of brightness to Madame de Vionnet, and
there was a moment during which, while she thus fronted her, our
friend expected to hear her add: "I'm much obliged to you, I'm
sure, for inviting me there." He guessed that for five seconds
these words were on the point of coming; he heard them as clearly
as if they had been spoken; but he presently knew they had just
failed--knew it by a glance, quick and fine, from Madame de
Vionnet, which told him that she too had felt them in the air, but
that the point had luckily not been made in any manner requiring
notice. This left her free to reply only to what had been said.
"That the Boulevard Malesherbes may be common ground for us offers
me the best prospect I see for the pleasure of meeting you again."
"Oh I shall come to see you, since you've been so good": and Mrs.
Pocock looked her invader well in the eyes. The flush in Sarah's
cheeks had by this time settled to a small definite crimson spot
that was not without its own bravery; she held her head a good deal
up, and it came to Strether that of the two, at this moment, she
was the one who most carried out the idea of a Countess. He quite
took in, however, that she would really return her visitor's
civility: she wouldn't report again at Woollett without at least so
much producible history as that in her pocket.
"I want extremely to be able to show you my little daughter."
Madame de Vionnet went on; "and I should have brought her with me
if I hadn't wished first to ask your leave. I was in hopes I should
perhaps find Miss Pocock, of whose being with you I've heard from
Mr. Newsome and whose acquaintance I should so much like my child
to make. If I have the pleasure of seeing her and you do permit it
I shall venture to ask her to be kind to Jeanne. Mr. Strether will
tell you"--she beautifully kept it up--"that my poor girl is gentle
and good and rather lonely. They've made friends, he and she, ever
so happily, and he doesn't, I believe, think ill of her. As for
Jeanne herself he has had the same success with her that I know he
has had here wherever he has turned." She seemed to ask him for
permission to say these things, or seemed rather to take it, softly
and happily, with the ease of intimacy, for granted, and he had
quite the consciousness now that not to meet her at any point more
than halfway would be odiously, basely to abandon her. Yes, he was
WITH her, and, opposed even in this covert, this semi-safe fashion
to those who were not, he felt, strangely and confusedly, but
excitedly, inspiringly, how much and how far. It was as if he had
positively waited in suspense for something from her that would let
him in deeper, so that he might show her how he could take it. And
what did in fact come as she drew out a little her farewell served
sufficiently the purpose. "As his success is a matter that I'm sure
he'll never mention for himself, I feel, you see, the less scruple;
which it's very good of me to say, you know, by the way," she added
as she addressed herself to him; "considering how little direct
advantage I've gained from your triumphs with ME. When does one
ever see you? I wait at home and I languish. You'll have rendered
me the service, Mrs. Pocock, at least," she wound up, "of giving me
one of my much-too-rare glimpses of this gentleman."
"I certainly should be sorry to deprive you of anything that seems
so much, as you describe it, your natural due. Mr. Strether and I
are very old friends," Sarah allowed, "but the privilege of his
society isn't a thing I shall quarrel about with any one."
"And yet, dear Sarah," he freely broke in, "I feel, when I hear you
say that, that you don't quite do justice to the important truth of
the extent to which--as you're also mine--I'm your natural due. I
should like much better," he laughed, "to see you fight for me."
She met him, Mrs. Pocock, on this, with an arrest of speech--with a
certain breathlessness, as he immediately fancied, on the score of
a freedom for which she wasn't quite prepared. It had flared up--
for all the harm he had intended by it--because, confoundedly, he
didn't want any more to be afraid about her than he wanted to be
afraid about Madame de Vionnet. He had never, naturally, called her
anything but Sarah at home, and though he had perhaps never quite
so markedly invoked her as his "dear," that was somehow partly
because no occasion had hitherto laid so effective a trap for it.
But something admonished him now that it was too late--unless
indeed it were possibly too early; and that he at any rate
shouldn't have pleased Mrs. Pocock the more by it. "Well, Mr.
Strether--!" she murmured with vagueness, yet with sharpness, while
her crimson spot burned a trifle brighter and he was aware that
this must be for the present the limit of her response. Madame de
Vionnet had already, however, come to his aid, and Waymarsh, as if
for further participation, moved again back to them. It was true
that the aid rendered by Madame de Vionnet was questionable; it was
a sign that, for all one might confess to with her, and for all she
might complain of not enjoying, she could still insidiously show
how much of the material of conversation had accumulated between
them.
"The real truth is, you know, that you sacrifice one without mercy
to dear old Maria. She leaves no room in your life for anybody
else. Do you know," she enquired of Mrs. Pocock, "about dear old
Maria? The worst is that Miss Gostrey is really a wonderful woman."
"Oh yes indeed," Strether answered for her, "Mrs. Pocock knows
about Miss Gostrey. Your mother, Sarah, must have told you about
her; your mother knows everything," he sturdily pursued. "And I
cordially admit," he added with his conscious gaiety of courage,
"that she's as wonderful a woman as you like."
"Ah it isn't I who 'like,' dear Mr. Strether, anything to do with
the matter!" Sarah Pocock promptly protested; "and I'm by no means
sure I have--from my mother or from any one else--a notion of whom
you're talking about."
"Well, he won't let you see her, you know," Madame de Vionnet
sympathetically threw in. "He never lets me--old friends as we are:
I mean as I am with Maria. He reserves her for his best hours;
keeps her consummately to himself; only gives us others the crumbs
of the feast."
"Well, Countess, I'VE had some of the crumbs," Waymarsh observed
with weight and covering her with his large look; which led her to
break in before he could go on.
"Comment donc, he shares her with YOU?" she exclaimed in droll
stupefaction. "Take care you don't have, before you go much
further, rather more of all ces dames than you may know what to do
with!"
But he only continued in his massive way. "I can post you about the
lady, Mrs. Pocock, so far as you may care to hear. I've seen her
quite a number of times, and I was practically present when they
made acquaintance. I've kept my eye on her right along, but I don't
know as there's any real harm in her."
"'Harm'?" Madame de Vionnet quickly echoed. "Why she's the dearest
and cleverest of all the clever and dear."
"Well, you run her pretty close, Countess," Waymarsh returned with
spirit; "though there's no doubt she's pretty well up in things.
She knows her way round Europe. Above all there's no doubt she does
love Strether."
"Ah but we all do that--we all love Strether: it isn't a merit!"
their fellow visitor laughed, keeping to her idea with a good
conscience at which our friend was aware that he marvelled, though
he trusted also for it, as he met her exquisitely expressive eyes,
to some later light.
The prime effect of her tone, however--and it was a truth which his
own eyes gave back to her in sad ironic play--could only be to make
him feel that, to say such things to a man in public, a woman must
practically think of him as ninety years old. He had turned
awkwardly, responsively red, he knew, at her mention of Maria
Gostrey; Sarah Pocock's presence--the particular quality of it--had
made this inevitable; and then he had grown still redder in
proportion as he hated to have shown anything at all. He felt
indeed that he was showing much, as, uncomfortably and almost in
pain, he offered up his redness to Waymarsh, who, strangely enough,
seemed now to be looking at him with a certain explanatory
yearning. Something deep--something built on their old old
relation--passed, in this complexity, between them; he got the
side-wind of a loyalty that stood behind all actual queer
questions. Waymarsh's dry bare humour--as it gave itself to be
taken--gloomed out to demand justice. "Well, if you talk of Miss
Barrace I've MY chance too," it appeared stiffly to nod, and it
granted that it was giving him away, but struggled to add that it
did so only to save him. The sombre glow stared it at him till it
fairly sounded out--"to save you, poor old man, to save you; to
save you in spite of yourself." Yet it was somehow just this
communication that showed him to himself as more than ever lost.
Still another result of it was to put before him as never yet that
between his comrade and the interest represented by Sarah there was
already a basis. Beyond all question now, yes: Waymarsh had been in
occult relation with Mrs. Newsome--out, out it all came in the very
effort of his face. "Yes, you're feeling my hand"--he as good as
proclaimed it; "but only because this at least I SHALL have got out
of the damned Old World: that I shall have picked up the pieces
into which it has caused you to crumble." It was as if in short,
after an instant, Strether had not only had it from him, but had
recognised that so far as this went the instant had cleared the
air. Our friend understood and approved; he had the sense that they
wouldn't otherwise speak of it. This would be all, and it would
mark in himself a kind of intelligent generosity. It was with grim
Sarah then--Sarah grim for all her grace--that Waymarsh had begun
at ten o'clock in the morning to save him. Well--if he COULD, poor
dear man, with his big bleak kindness! The upshot of which crowded
perception was that Strether, on his own side, still showed no more
than he absolutely had to. He showed the least possible by saying
to Mrs. Pocock after an interval much briefer than our glance at
the picture reflected in him: "Oh it's as true as they please!--
There's no Miss Gostrey for any one but me--not the least little
peep. I keep her to myself."
"Well, it's very good of you to notify me," Sarah replied without
looking at him and thrown for a moment by this discrimination, as
the direction of her eyes showed, upon a dimly desperate little
community with Madame de Vionnet. "But I hope I shan't miss her too
much."
Madame de Vionnet instantly rallied. "And you know--though it might
occur to one--it isn't in the least that he's ashamed of her.
She's really--in a way--extremely good-looking."
"Ah but extremely!" Strether laughed while he wondered at the odd
part he found thus imposed on him.
It continued to be so by every touch from Madame de Vionnet. "Well,
as I say, you know, I wish you would keep ME a little more to
yourself. Couldn't you name some day for me, some hour--and better
soon than late? I'll be at home whenever it best suits you.
There--I can't say fairer."
Strether thought a moment while Waymarsh and Mrs. Pocock affected
him as standing attentive. "I did lately call on you. Last week--
while Chad was out of town."
"Yes--and I was away, as it happened, too. You choose your moments
well. But don't wait for my next absence, for I shan't make
another," Madame de Vionnet declared, "while Mrs. Pocock's here."
"That vow needn't keep you long, fortunately," Sarah observed with
reasserted suavity. "I shall be at present but a short time in
Paris. I have my plans for other countries. I meet a number of
charming friends"--and her voice seemed to caress that description
of these persons.
"Ah then," her visitor cheerfully replied, "all the more reason!
To-morrow, for instance, or next day?" she continued to Strether.
"Tuesday would do for me beautifully."
"Tuesday then with pleasure."
"And at half-past five?--or at six?"
It was ridiculous, but Mrs. Pocock and Waymarsh struck him as
fairly waiting for his answer. It was indeed as if they were
arranged, gathered for a performance, the performance of "Europe"
by his confederate and himself. Well, the performance could only
go on. "Say five forty-five."
"Five forty-five--good." And now at last Madame de Vionnet must
leave them, though it carried, for herself, the performance a
little further. "I DID hope so much also to see Miss Pocock.
Mayn't I still?"
Sarah hesitated, but she rose equal. "She'll return your visit with
me. She's at present out with Mr. Pocock and my brother."
"I see--of course Mr. Newsome has everything to show them. He has
told me so much about her. My great desire's to give my daughter
the opportunity of making her acquaintance. I'm always on the
lookout for such chances for her. If I didn't bring her to-day it
was only to make sure first that you'd let me." After which the
charming woman risked a more intense appeal. "It wouldn't suit you
also to mention some near time, so that we shall be sure not to
lose you?" Strether on his side waited, for Sarah likewise had,
after all, to perform; and it occupied him to have been thus
reminded that she had stayed at home--and on her first morning of
Paris--while Chad led the others forth. Oh she was up to her eyes;
if she had stayed at home she had stayed by an understanding,
arrived at the evening before, that Waymarsh would come and find
her alone. This was beginning well--for a first day in Paris; and
the thing might be amusing yet. But Madame de Vionnet's earnestness
was meanwhile beautiful. "You may think me indiscreet, but I've
SUCH a desire my Jeanne shall know an American girl of the really
delightful kind. You see I throw myself for it on your charity."
The manner of this speech gave Strether such a sense of depths
below it and behind it as he hadn't yet had--ministered in a way
that almost frightened him to his dim divinations of reasons; but
if Sarah still, in spite of it, faltered, this was why he had time
for a sign of sympathy with her petitioner. "Let me say then, dear
lady, to back your plea, that Miss Mamie is of the most delightful
kind of all--is charming among the charming."
Even Waymarsh, though with more to produce on the subject, could
get into motion in time. "Yes, Countess, the American girl's a
thing that your country must at least allow ours the privilege to
say we CAN show you. But her full beauty is only for those who know
how to make use of her."
"Ah then," smiled Madame de Vionnet, "that's exactly what I want to
do. I'm sure she has much to teach us."
It was wonderful, but what was scarce less so was that Strether
found himself, by the quick effect of it, moved another way. "Oh
that may be! But don't speak of your own exquisite daughter, you
know, as if she weren't pure perfection. I at least won't take that
from you. Mademoiselle de Vionnet," he explained, in considerable
form, to Mrs. Pocock, "IS pure perfection. Mademoiselle de Vionnet
IS exquisite."
It had been perhaps a little portentous, but "Ah?" Sarah simply
glittered.
Waymarsh himself, for that matter, apparently recognised, in
respect to the facts, the need of a larger justice, and he had with
it an inclination to Sarah. "Miss Jane's strikingly handsome--
in the regular French style."
It somehow made both Strether and Madame de Vionnet laugh out,
though at the very moment he caught in Sarah's eyes, as glancing at
the speaker, a vague but unmistakeable "You too?" It made Waymarsh
in fact look consciously over her head. Madame de Vionnet
meanwhile, however, made her point in her own way. "I wish indeed I
could offer you my poor child as a dazzling attraction: it would
make one's position simple enough! She's as good as she can be, but
of course she's different, and the question is now--in the light of
the way things seem to go--if she isn't after all TOO different:
too different I mean from the splendid type every one is so agreed
that your wonderful country produces. On the other hand of course
Mr. Newsome, who knows it so well, has, as a good friend, dear kind
man that he is, done everything he can--to keep us from fatal
benightedness--for my small shy creature. Well," she wound up after
Mrs. Pocock had signified, in a murmur still a little stiff, that
she would speak to her own young charge on the question--"well, we
shall sit, my child and I, and wait and wait and wait for you." But
her last fine turn was for Strether. "Do speak of us in such a way--!"
"As that something can't but come of it? Oh something SHALL come of
it! I take a great interest!" he further declared; and in proof of
it, the next moment, he had gone with her down to her carriage.
Book Ninth
I
"The difficulty is," Strether said to Madame de Vionnet a couple of
days later, "that I can't surprise them into the smallest sign of
his not being the same old Chad they've been for the last three
years glowering at across the sea. They simply won't give any, and
as a policy, you know--what you call a parti pris, a deep game--
that's positively remarkable."
It was so remarkable that our friend had pulled up before his
hostess with the vision of it; he had risen from his chair at the
end of ten minutes and begun, as a help not to worry, to move about
before her quite as he moved before Maria. He had kept his
appointment with her to the minute and had been intensely impatient,
though divided in truth between the sense of having everything
to tell her and the sense of having nothing at all. The short
interval had, in the face of their complication, multiplied his
impressions--it being meanwhile to be noted, moreover, that he
already frankly, already almost publicly, viewed the complication
as common to them. If Madame de Vionnet, under Sarah's eyes, had
pulled him into her boat, there was by this time no doubt whatever
that he had remained in it and that what he had really most been
conscious of for many hours together was the movement of the vessel
itself. They were in it together this moment as they hadn't yet
been, and he hadn't at present uttered the least of the words of
alarm or remonstrance that had died on his lips at the hotel. He
had other things to say to her than that she had put him in a
position; so quickly had his position grown to affect him as quite
excitingly, altogether richly, inevitable. That the outlook,
however--given the point of exposure--hadn't cleared up half so
much as he had reckoned was the first warning she received from him
on his arrival. She had replied with indulgence that he was in too
great a hurry, and had remarked soothingly that if she knew how to
be patient surely HE might be. He felt her presence, on the spot,
he felt her tone and everything about her, as an aid to that effort;
and it was perhaps one of the proofs of her success with him
that he seemed so much to take his ease while they talked.
By the time he had explained to her why his impressions, though
multiplied, still baffled him, it was as if he had been familiarly
talking for hours. They baffled him because Sarah--well, Sarah was
deep, deeper than she had ever yet had a chance to show herself.
He didn't say that this was partly the effect of her opening so
straight down, as it were, into her mother, and that, given
Mrs. Newsome's profundity, the shaft thus sunk might well have a reach;
but he wasn't without a resigned apprehension that, at such a rate
of confidence between the two women, he was likely soon to be moved
to show how already, at moments, it had been for him as if he were
dealing directly with Mrs. Newsome. Sarah, to a certainty, would
have begun herself to feel it in him--and this naturally put it in
her power to torment him the more. From the moment she knew he
COULD be tormented--!
"But WHY can you be?"--his companion was surprised at his use of
the word.
"Because I'm made so--I think of everything."
"Ah one must never do that," she smiled. "One must think of as few
things as possible."
"Then," he answered, "one must pick them out right. But all I mean
is--for I express myself with violence--that she's in a position to
watch me. There's an element of suspense for me, and she can see me
wriggle. But my wriggling doesn't matter," he pursued. "I can bear
it. Besides, I shall wriggle out."
The picture at any rate stirred in her an appreciation that he felt
to be sincere. "I don't see how a man can be kinder to a woman than
you are to me."
Well, kind was what he wanted to be; yet even while her charming
eyes rested on him with the truth of this he none the less had his
humour of honesty. "When I say suspense I mean, you know," he
laughed, "suspense about my own case too!"
"Oh yes--about your own case too!" It diminished his magnanimity,
but she only looked at him the more tenderly.
"Not, however," he went on, "that I want to talk to you about that.
It's my own little affair, and I mentioned it simply as part of
Mrs. Pocock's advantage." No, no; though there was a queer present
temptation in it, and his suspense was so real that to fidget was a
relief, he wouldn't talk to her about Mrs. Newsome, wouldn't work
off on her the anxiety produced in him by Sarah's calculated
omissions of reference. The effect she produced of representing her
mother had been produced--and that was just the immense, the
uncanny part of it--without her having so much as mentioned that
lady. She had brought no message, had alluded to no question, had
only answered his enquiries with hopeless limited propriety. She
had invented a way of meeting them--as if he had been a polite
perfunctory poor relation, of distant degree--that made them almost
ridiculous in him. He couldn't moreover on his own side ask much
without appearing to publish how he had lately lacked news;
a circumstance of which it was Sarah's profound policy not to betray
a suspicion. These things, all the same, he wouldn't breathe to
Madame de Vionnet--much as they might make him walk up and down.
And what he didn't say--as well as what SHE didn't, for she had
also her high decencies--enhanced the effect of his being there
with her at the end of ten minutes more intimately on the basis of
saving her than he had yet had occasion to be. It ended in fact by
being quite beautiful between them, the number of things they had a
manifest consciousness of not saying. He would have liked to turn
her, critically, to the subject of Mrs. Pocock, but he so stuck to
the line he felt to be the point of honour and of delicacy that he
scarce even asked her what her personal impression had been.
He knew it, for that matter, without putting her to trouble:
that she wondered how, with such elements, Sarah could still have
no charm, was one of the principal things she held her tongue about.
Strether would have been interested in her estimate of the elements--
indubitably there, some of them, and to be appraised according to
taste--but he denied himself even the luxury of this diversion. The
way Madame de Vionnet affected him to-day was in itself a kind of
demonstration of the happy employment of gifts. How could a woman
think Sarah had charm who struck one as having arrived at it
herself by such different roads? On the other hand of course Sarah
wasn't obliged to have it. He felt as if somehow Madame de Vionnet
WAS. The great question meanwhile was what Chad thought of his
sister; which was naturally ushered in by that of Sarah's
apprehension of Chad. THAT they could talk of, and with a freedom
purchased by their discretion in other senses. The difficulty
however was that they were reduced as yet to conjecture. He had
given them in the day or two as little of a lead as Sarah, and
Madame de Vionnet mentioned that she hadn't seen him since his
sister's arrival.
"And does that strike you as such an age?"
She met it in all honesty. "Oh I won't pretend I don't miss him.
Sometimes I see him every day. Our friendship's like that. Make
what you will of it!" she whimsically smiled; a little flicker of
the kind, occasional in her, that had more than once moved him to
wonder what he might best make of HER. "But he's perfectly right,"
she hastened to add, "and I wouldn't have him fail in any way at
present for the world. I'd sooner not see him for three months.
I begged him to be beautiful to them, and he fully feels it for
himself."
Strether turned away under his quick perception; she was so odd a
mixture of lucidity and mystery. She fell in at moments with the
theory about her he most cherished, and she seemed at others to
blow it into air. She spoke now as if her art were all an
innocence, and then again as if her innocence were all an art.
"Oh he's giving himself up, and he'll do so to the end. How can he
but want, now that it's within reach, his full impression?--which is
much more important, you know, than either yours or mine. But he's
just soaking," Strether said as he came back; "he's going in
conscientiously for a saturation. I'm bound to say he IS very good."
"Ah," she quietly replied, "to whom do you say it?" And then more
quietly still: "He's capable of anything."
Strether more than reaffirmed--"Oh he's excellent. I more and more
like," he insisted, "to see him with them;" though the oddity of
this tone between them grew sharper for him even while they spoke.
It placed the young man so before them as the result of her
interest and the product of her genius, acknowledged so her part in
the phenomenon and made the phenomenon so rare, that more than ever
yet he might have been on the very point of asking her for some
more detailed account of the whole business than he had yet
received from her. The occasion almost forced upon him some
question as to how she had managed and as to the appearance such
miracles presented from her own singularly close place of survey.
The moment in fact however passed, giving way to more present
history, and he continued simply to mark his appreciation of the
happy truth. "It's a tremendous comfort to feel how one can trust
him." And then again while for a little she said nothing--as if
after all to HER trust there might be a special limit: "I mean for
making a good show to them."
"Yes," she thoughtfully returned--"but if they shut their eyes
to it!"
Strether for an instant had his own thought. "Well perhaps that
won't matter!"
"You mean because he probably--do what they will--won't like them?"
"Oh 'do what they will'--! They won't do much; especially if Sarah
hasn't more--well, more than one has yet made out--to give."
Madame de Vionnet weighed it. "Ah she has all her grace!" It was a
statement over which, for a little, they could look at each other
sufficiently straight, and though it produced no protest from
Strether the effect was somehow as if he had treated it as a joke.
"She may be persuasive and caressing with him; she may be eloquent
beyond words. She may get hold of him," she wound up--"well, as
neither you nor I have."
"Yes, she MAY"--and now Strether smiled. "But he has spent all his
time each day with Jim. He's still showing Jim round."
She visibly wondered. "Then how about Jim?"
Strether took a turn before he answered. "Hasn't he given you Jim?
Hasn't he before this 'done' him for you?" He was a little at a
loss. "Doesn't he tell you things?"
She hesitated. "No"--and their eyes once more gave and took.
"Not as you do. You somehow make me see them--or at least feel them.
And I haven't asked too much," she added; "I've of late wanted so
not to worry him."
"Ah for that, so have I," he said with encouraging assent; so that--
as if she had answered everything--they were briefly sociable on it.
It threw him back on his other thought, with which he took another
turn; stopping again, however, presently with something of a glow.
"You see Jim's really immense. I think it will be Jim who'll do it."
She wondered. "Get hold of him?"
"No--just the other thing. Counteract Sarah's spell." And he
showed now, our friend, how far he had worked it out. "Jim's
intensely cynical."
"Oh dear Jim!" Madame de Vionnet vaguely smiled.
"Yes, literally--dear Jim! He's awful. What HE wants, heaven
forgive him, is to help us."
"You mean"--she was eager--"help ME?"
"Well, Chad and me in the first place. But he throws you in too,
though without as yet seeing you much. Only, so far as he does see
you--if you don't mind--he sees you as awful."
"'Awful'?"--she wanted it all.
"A regular bad one--though of course of a tremendously superior kind.
Dreadful, delightful, irresistible."
"Ah dear Jim! I should like to know him. I MUST."
"Yes, naturally. But will it do? You may, you know," Strether
suggested, "disappoint him."
She was droll and humble about it. "I can but try. But my
wickedness then," she went on, "is my recommendation for him?"
"Your wickedness and the charms with which, in such a degree as
yours, he associates it. He understands, you see, that Chad and I
have above all wanted to have a good time, and his view is simple
and sharp. Nothing will persuade him--in the light, that is, of my
behaviour--that I really didn't, quite as much as Chad, come over
to have one before it was too late. He wouldn't have expected it of
me; but men of my age, at Woollett--and especially the least likely
ones--have been noted as liable to strange outbreaks, belated
uncanny clutches at the unusual, the ideal. It's an effect that a
lifetime of Woollett has quite been observed as having; and I thus
give it to you, in Jim's view, for what it's worth. Now his wife
and his mother-in-law," Strether continued to explain, "have, as in
honour bound, no patience with such phenomena, late or early--which
puts Jim, as against his relatives, on the other side. Besides," he
added, "I don't think he really wants Chad back. If Chad doesn't
come--"
"He'll have"--Madame de Vionnet quite apprehended--"more of the
free hand?"
"Well, Chad's the bigger man."
"So he'll work now, en dessous, to keep him quiet?"
"No--he won't 'work' at all, and he won't do anything en dessous.
He's very decent and won't be a traitor in the camp. But he'll be
amused with his own little view of our duplicity, he'll sniff up
what he supposes to be Paris from morning till night, and he'll be,
as to the rest, for Chad--well, just what he is."
She thought it over. "A warning?"
He met it almost with glee. "You ARE as wonderful as everybody
says!" And then to explain all he meant: "I drove him about for his
first hour, and do you know what--all beautifully unconscious--he
most put before me? Why that something like THAT is at bottom, as
an improvement to his present state, as in fact the real redemption
of it, what they think it may not be too late to make of our
friend." With which, as, taking it in, she seemed, in her recurrent
alarm, bravely to gaze at the possibility, he completed his
statement. "But it IS too late. Thanks to you!"
It drew from her again one of her indefinite reflexions. "Oh 'me'--
after all!"
He stood before her so exhilarated by his demonstration that he
could fairly be jocular. "Everything's comparative. You're better
than THAT."
"You"--she could but answer him--"are better than anything." But
she had another thought. "WILL Mrs. Pocock come to me?"
"Oh yes--she'll do that. As soon, that is, as my friend Waymarsh--
HER friend now--leaves her leisure."
She showed an interest. "Is he so much her friend as that?"
"Why, didn't you see it all at the hotel?"
"Oh"--she was amused--"'all' is a good deal to say. I don't know--
I forget. I lost myself in HER."
"You were splendid," Strether returned--"but 'all' isn't a good
deal to say: it's only a little. Yet it's charming so far as it
goes. She wants a man to herself."
"And hasn't she got you?"
"Do you think she looked at me--or even at you--as if she had?"
Strether easily dismissed that irony. "Every one, you see, must
strike her as having somebody. You've got Chad--and Chad has
got you."
"I see"--she made of it what she could. "And you've got Maria."
Well, he on his side accepted that. "I've got Maria. And Maria has
got me. So it goes."
"But Mr. Jim--whom has he got?"
"Oh he has got--or it's as IF he had--the whole place."
"But for Mr. Waymarsh"--she recalled--"isn't Miss Barrace before
any one else?"
He shook his head. "Miss Barrace is a raffinee, and her amusement
won't lose by Mrs. Pocock. It will gain rather--especially if Sarah
triumphs and she comes in for a view of it."
"How well you know us!" Madame de Vionnet, at this, frankly sighed.
"No--it seems to me it's we that I know. I know Sarah--it's perhaps
on that ground only that my feet are firm. Waymarsh will take her
round while Chad takes Jim--and I shall be, I assure you delighted
for both of them. Sarah will have had what she requires--she will
have paid her tribute to the ideal; and he will have done about the
same. In Paris it's in the air--so what can one do less? If there's
a point that, beyond any other, Sarah wants to make, it's that she
didn't come out to be narrow. We shall feel at least that."
"Oh," she sighed, "the quantity we seem likely to 'feel'! But what
becomes, in these conditions, of the girl?"
"Of Mamie--if we're all provided? Ah for that," said Strether,
"you can trust Chad."
"To be, you mean, all right to her?"
"To pay her every attention as soon as he has polished off Jim.
He wants what Jim can give him--and what Jim really won't--though he
has had it all, and more than all, from me. He wants in short his
own personal impression, and he'll get it--strong. But as soon as
he has got it Mamie won't suffer."
"Oh Mamie mustn't SUFFER!" Madame de Vionnet soothingly emphasised.
But Strether could reassure her. "Don't fear. As soon as he has
done with Jim, Jim will fall to me. And then you'll see."
It was as if in a moment she saw already; yet she still waited.
Then "Is she really quite charming?" she asked.
He had got up with his last words and gathered in his hat and gloves.
"I don't know; I'm watching. I'm studying the case, as it were--
and I dare say I shall be able to tell you."
She wondered. "Is it a case?"
"Yes--I think so. At any rate I shall see.'
"But haven't you known her before?"
"Yes," he smiled--"but somehow at home she wasn't a case.
She has become one since." It was as if he made it out for himself.
"She has become one here."
"So very very soon?"
He measured it, laughing. "Not sooner than I did."
"And you became one--?"
"Very very soon. The day I arrived."
Her intelligent eyes showed her thought of it. "Ah but the day you
arrived you met Maria. Whom has Miss Pocock met?"
He paused again, but he brought it out. "Hasn't she met Chad?"
"Certainly--but not for the first time. He's an old friend." At
which Strether had a slow amused significant headshake that made
her go on: "You mean that for HER at least he's a new person--
that she sees him as different?"
"She sees him as different."
"And how does she see him?"
Strether gave it up. "How can one tell how a deep little girl sees
a deep young man?"
"Is every one so deep? Is she too?"
"So it strikes me deeper than I thought. But wait a little--between
us we'll make it out. You'll judge for that matter yourself."
Madame de Vionnet looked for the moment fairly bent on the chance.
"Then she WILL come with her?--I mean Mamie with Mrs. Pocock?"
"Certainly. Her curiosity, if nothing else, will in any case work
that. But leave it all to Chad."
"Ah," wailed Madame de Vionnet, turning away a little wearily, "the
things I leave to Chad!"
The tone of it made him look at her with a kindness that showed his
vision of her suspense. But he fell back on his confidence.
"Oh well--trust him. Trust him all the way." He had indeed no sooner
so spoken than the queer displacement of his point of view appeared
again to come up for him in the very sound, which drew from him a
short laugh, immediately checked. He became still more advisory.
"When they do come give them plenty of Miss Jeanne. Let Mamie see
her well."
She looked for a moment as if she placed them face to face.
"For Mamie to hate her?"
He had another of his corrective headshakes. "Mamie won't.
Trust THEM."
She looked at him hard, and then as if it were what she must always
come back to: "It's you I trust. But I was sincere," she said, "at
the hotel. I did, I do, want my child--"
"Well?"--Strether waited with deference while she appeared to hesitate
as to how to put it.
"Well, to do what she can for me."
Strether for a little met her eyes on it; after which something
that might have been unexpected to her came from him. "Poor little
duck!"
Not more expected for himself indeed might well have been her echo
of it. "Poor little duck! But she immensely wants herself," she
said, "to see our friend's cousin."
"Is that what she thinks her?"
"It's what we call the young lady."
He thought again; then with a laugh: "Well, your daughter will
help you."
And now at last he took leave of her, as he had been intending for
five minutes. But she went part of the way with him, accompanying
him out of the room and into the next and the next. Her noble old
apartment offered a succession of three, the first two of which
indeed, on entering, smaller than the last, but each with its faded
and formal air, enlarged the office of the antechamber and enriched
the sense of approach. Strether fancied them, liked them, and,
passing through them with her more slowly now, met a sharp renewal
of his original impression. He stopped, he looked back; the whole
thing made a vista, which he found high melancholy and sweet--full,
once more, of dim historic shades, of the faint faraway cannon-roar
of the great Empire. It was doubtless half the projection of his
mind, but his mind was a thing that, among old waxed parquets, pale
shades of pink and green, pseudo-classic candelabra, he had always
needfully to reckon with. They could easily make him irrelevant.
The oddity, the originality, the poetry--he didn't know what to
call it--of Chad's connexion reaffirmed for him its romantic side.
"They ought to see this, you know. They MUST."
"The Pococks?"--she looked about in deprecation; she seemed to see
gaps he didn't.
"Mamie and Sarah--Mamie in particular."
"My shabby old place? But THEIR things--!"
"Oh their things! You were talking of what will do something for
you--"
"So that it strikes you," she broke in, "that my poor place may?
Oh," she ruefully mused, "that WOULD be desperate!"
"Do you know what I wish?" he went on. "I wish Mrs. Newsome herself
could have a look."
She stared, missing a little his logic. "It would make a
difference?"
Her tone was so earnest that as he continued to look about he
laughed. "It might!"
"But you've told her, you tell me--"
"All about you? Yes, a wonderful story. But there's all the
indescribable--what one gets only on the spot."
"Thank you!" she charmingly and sadly smiled.
"It's all about me here," he freely continued. "Mrs. Newsome feels
things."
But she seemed doomed always to come back to doubt. "No one feels
so much as YOU. No--not any one."
"So much the worse then for every one. It's very easy."
They were by this time in the antechamber, still alone together, as
she hadn't rung for a servant. The antechamber was high and square,
grave and suggestive too, a little cold and slippery even in
summer, and with a few old prints that were precious, Strether
divined, on the walls. He stood in the middle, slightly lingering,
vaguely directing his glasses, while, leaning against the door-post
of the room, she gently pressed her cheek to the side of the
recess. "YOU would have been a friend."
"I?"--it startled him a little.
"For the reason you say. You're not stupid." And then abruptly, as
if bringing it out were somehow founded on that fact:
"We're marrying Jeanne."
It affected him on the spot as a move in a game, and he was even
then not without the sense that that wasn't the way Jeanne should
be married. But he quickly showed his interest, though--as quickly
afterwards struck him--with an absurd confusion of mind. "'You'?
You and--a--not Chad?" Of course it was the child's father who made
the 'we,' but to the child's father it would have cost him an
effort to allude. Yet didn't it seem the next minute that Monsieur
de Vionnet was after all not in question?--since she had gone on to
say that it was indeed to Chad she referred and that he had been in
the whole matter kindness itself.
"If I must tell you all, it is he himself who has put us in the
way. I mean in the way of an opportunity that, so far as I can yet
see, is all I could possibly have dreamed of. For all the trouble
Monsieur de Vionnet will ever take!" It was the first time she had
spoken to him of her husband, and he couldn't have expressed how
much more intimate with her it suddenly made him feel. It wasn't
much, in truth--there were other things in what she was saying that
were far more; but it was as if, while they stood there together so
easily in these cold chambers of the past, the single touch had
shown the reach of her confidence. "But our friend," she asked,
"hasn't then told you?"
"He has told me nothing."
"Well, it has come with rather a rush--all in a very few days; and
hasn't moreover yet taken a form that permits an announcement. It's
only for you--absolutely you alone--that I speak; I so want you to
know." The sense he had so often had, since the first hour of his
disembarkment, of being further and further "in," treated him again
at this moment to another twinge; but in this wonderful way of her
putting him in there continued to be something exquisitely
remorseless. "Monsieur de Vionnet will accept what he MUST accept.
He has proposed half a dozen things--each one more impossible than
the other; and he wouldn't have found this if he lives to a hundred.
Chad found it," she continued with her lighted, faintly flushed,
her conscious confidential face, "in the quietest way in the world.
Or rather it found HIM--for everything finds him; I mean finds
him right. You'll think we do such things strangely--but at my age,"
she smiled, "one has to accept one's conditions. Our young man's people
had seen her; one of his sisters, a charming woman--we know all
about them--had observed her somewhere with me. She had spoken
to her brother--turned him on; and we were again observed, poor Jeanne
and I, without our in the least knowing it. It was at the beginning
of the winter; it went on for some time; it outlasted our absence; it
began again on our return; and it luckily seems all right. The
young man had met Chad, and he got a friend to approach him--as
having a decent interest in us. Mr. Newsome looked well before he
leaped; he kept beautifully quiet and satisfied himself fully; then
only he spoke. It's what has for some time past occupied us. It
seems as if it were what would do; really, really all one could
wish. There are only two or three points to be settled--they depend
on her father. But this time I think we're safe."
Strether, consciously gaping a little, had fairly hung upon her
lips. "I hope so with all my heart." And then he permitted himself:
"Does nothing depend on HER?"
"Ah naturally; everything did. But she's pleased comme tout. She
has been perfectly free; and he--our young friend--is really a
combination. I quite adore him."
Strether just made sure. "You mean your future son-in-law?"
"Future if we all bring it off."
"Ah well," said Strether decorously, "I heartily hope you may."
There seemed little else for him to say, though her communication
had the oddest effect on him. Vaguely and confusedly he was
troubled by it; feeling as if he had even himself been concerned in
something deep and dim. He had allowed for depths, but these were
greater: and it was as if, oppressively--indeed absurdly--he was
responsible for what they had now thrown up to the surface. It was--
through something ancient and cold in it--what he would have
called the real thing. In short his hostess's news, though he
couldn't have explained why, was a sensible shock, and his
oppression a weight he felt he must somehow or other immediately
get rid of. There were too many connexions missing to make it
tolerable he should do anything else. He was prepared to suffer--
before his own inner tribunal--for Chad; he was prepared to suffer
even for Madame de Vionnet. But he wasn't prepared to suffer for
the little girl So now having said the proper thing, he wanted to
get away. She held him an instant, however, with another appeal.
"Do I seem to you very awful?"
"Awful? Why so?" But he called it to himself, even as he spoke, his
biggest insincerity yet.
"Our arrangements are so different from yours."
"Mine?" Oh he could dismiss that too! "I haven't any arrangements."
"Then you must accept mine; all the more that they're excellent.
They're founded on a vieille sagesse. There will be much more, if
all goes well, for you to hear and to know, and everything, believe
me, for you to like. Don't be afraid; you'll be satisfied." Thus
she could talk to him of what, of her innermost life--for that was
what it came to--he must "accept"; thus she could extraordinarily
speak as if in such an affair his being satisfied had an
importance. It was all a wonder and made the whole case larger. He
had struck himself at the hotel, before Sarah and Waymarsh, as
being in her boat; but where on earth was he now? This question was
in the air till her own lips quenched it with another. "And do you
suppose HE--who loves her so--would do anything reckless or cruel?"
He wondered what he supposed. "Do you mean your young man--?"
"I mean yours. I mean Mr. Newsome." It flashed for Strether the
next moment a finer light, and the light deepened as she went on.
"He takes, thank God, the truest tenderest interest in her."
It deepened indeed. "Oh I'm sure of that!"
"You were talking," she said, "about one's trusting him. You see
then how I do."
He waited a moment--it all came. "I see--I see." He felt he really
did see.
"He wouldn't hurt her for the world, nor--assuming she marries at
all--risk anything that might make against her happiness. And--
willingly, at least--he would never hurt ME."
Her face, with what he had by this time grasped, told him more than
her words; whether something had come into it, or whether he only read
clearer, her whole story--what at least he then took for such--reached
out to him from it. With the initiative she now attributed to Chad
it all made a sense, and this sense--a light, a lead, was what had
abruptly risen before him. He wanted, once more, to get off with
these things; which was at last made easy, a servant having, for
his assistance, on hearing voices in the hall, just come forward.
All that Strether had made out was, while the man opened the door
and impersonally waited, summed up in his last word. "I don't
think, you know, Chad will tell me anything."
"No--perhaps not yet."
"And I won't as yet speak to him."
"Ah that's as you'll think best. You must judge."
She had finally given him her hand, which he held a moment. "How
MUCH I have to judge!"
"Everything," said Madame de Vionnet: a remark that was indeed--
with the refined disguised suppressed passion of her face--what he
most carried away.
II
So far as a direct approach was concerned Sarah had neglected him,
for the week now about to end, with a civil consistency of chill
that, giving him a higher idea of her social resource, threw him
back on the general reflexion that a woman could always be amazing.
It indeed helped a little to console him that he felt sure she had
for the same period also left Chad's curiosity hanging; though on
the other hand, for his personal relief, Chad could at least go
through the various motions--and he made them extraordinarily
numerous--of seeing she had a good time. There wasn't a motion on
which, in her presence, poor Strether could so much as venture, and
all he could do when he was out of it was to walk over for a talk
with Maria. He walked over of course much less than usual, but he
found a special compensation in a certain half-hour during which,
toward the close of a crowded empty expensive day, his several
companions seemed to him so disposed of as to give his forms and
usages a rest. He had been with them in the morning and had
nevertheless called on the Pococks in the afternoon; but their
whole group, he then found, had dispersed after a fashion of which
it would amuse Miss Gostrey to hear. He was sorry again, gratefully
sorry she was so out of it--she who had really put him in; but she
had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the
disinterested burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a
Byzantine vault. It was just now, as happened, that for so fine a
sense as hers a near view would have begun to pay. Within three
days, precisely, the situation on which he was to report had shown
signs of an equilibrium; the effect of his look in at the hotel was
to confirm this appearance. If the equilibrium might only prevail!
Sarah was out with Waymarsh, Mamie was out with Chad, and Jim was
out alone. Later on indeed he himself was booked to Jim, was to
take him that evening to the Varieties--which Strether was careful
to pronounce as Jim pronounced them.
Miss Gostrey drank it in. "What then to-night do the others do?"
"Well, it has been arranged. Waymarsh takes Sarah to dine at
Bignons.
She wondered. "And what do they do after? They can't come straight
home."
"No, they can't come straight home--at least Sarah can't.
It's their secret, but I think I've guessed it." Then as she waited:
"The circus."
It made her stare a moment longer, then laugh almost to
extravagance. "There's no one like you!"
"Like ME?"--he only wanted to understand.
"Like all of you together--like all of us: Woollett, Milrose and
their products. We're abysmal--but may we never be less so!
Mr. Newsome," she continued, "meanwhile takes Miss Pocock--?"
"Precisely--to the Francais: to see what you took Waymarsh and me
to, a family-bill."
"Ah then may Mr. Chad enjoy it as I did!" But she saw so much in
things. "Do they spend their evenings, your young people, like
that, alone together?"
"Well, they're young people--but they're old friends."
"I see, I see. And do THEY dine--for a difference--at Brebant's?"
"Oh where they dine is their secret too. But I've my idea that it
will be, very quietly, at Chad's own place."
"She'll come to him there alone?"
They looked at each other a moment. "He has known her from a child.
Besides," said Strether with emphasis, "Mamie's remarkable. She's
splendid."
She wondered. "Do you mean she expects to bring it off?"
"Getting hold of him? No--I think not."
"She doesn't want him enough?--or doesn't believe in her power?"
On which as he said nothing she continued: "She finds she doesn't
care for him?"
"No--I think she finds she does. But that's what I mean by so
describing her. It's IF she does that she's splendid. But we'll
see," he wound up, "where she comes out."
"You seem to show me sufficiently," Miss Gostrey laughed, "where
she goes in! But is her childhood's friend," she asked, "permitting
himself recklessly to flirt with her?"
"No--not that. Chad's also splendid. They're ALL splendid!" he
declared with a sudden strange sound of wistfulness and envy.
"They're at least HAPPY."
"Happy?"--it appeared, with their various difficulties, to surprise
her.
"Well--I seem to myself among them the only one who isn't."
She demurred. "With your constant tribute to the ideal?"
He had a laugh at his tribute to the ideal, but he explained after
a moment his impression. "I mean they're living. They're rushing
about. I've already had my rushing. I'm waiting."
"But aren't you," she asked by way of cheer, "waiting with ME?"
He looked at her in all kindness. "Yes--if it weren't for that!"
"And you help me to wait," she said. "However," she went on, "I've
really something for you that will help you to wait and which you
shall have in a minute. Only there's something more I want from you
first. I revel in Sarah."
"So do I. If it weren't," he again amusedly sighed, "for THAT--!"
"Well, you owe more to women than any man I ever saw. We do seem to
keep you going. Yet Sarah, as I see her, must be great,"
"She IS "Strether fully assented: "great! Whatever happens, she
won't, with these unforgettable days, have lived in vain."
Miss Gostrey had a pause. "You mean she has fallen in love?"
"I mean she wonders if she hasn't--and it serves all her purpose."
"It has indeed," Maria laughed, "served women's purposes before!"
"Yes--for giving in. But I doubt if the idea--as an idea--has ever
up to now answered so well for holding out. That's HER tribute to
the ideal--we each have our own. It's her romance--and it seems to
me better on the whole than mine. To have it in Paris too," he
explained--"on this classic ground, in this charged infectious air,
with so sudden an intensity: well, it's more than she expected. She
has had in short to recognise the breaking out for her of a real
affinity--and with everything to enhance the drama."
Miss Gostrey followed. "Jim for instance?"
"Jim. Jim hugely enhances. Jim was made to enhance. And then
Mr. Waymarsh. It's the crowning touch--it supplies the colour.
He's positively separated."
"And she herself unfortunately isn't--that supplies the colour
too." Miss Gostrey was all there. But somehow--! "Is HE in love?"
Strether looked at her a long time; then looked all about the room;
then came a little nearer. "Will you never tell any one in the
world as long as ever you live?"
"Never." It was charming.
"He thinks Sarah really is. But he has no fear," Strether hastened
to add.
"Of her being affected by it?"
"Of HIS being. He likes it, but he knows she can hold out. He's
helping her, he's floating her over, by kindness."
Maria rather funnily considered it. "Floating her over in
champagne? The kindness of dining her, nose to nose, at the hour
when all Paris is crowding to profane delights, and in the--well,
in the great temple, as one hears of it, of pleasure?"
"That's just IT, for both of them," Strether insisted--"and all of
a supreme innocence. The Parisian place, the feverish hour, the
putting before her of a hundred francs' worth of food and drink,
which they'll scarcely touch--all that's the dear man's own
romance; the expensive kind, expensive in francs and centimes, in
which he abounds. And the circus afterwards--which is cheaper, but
which he'll find some means of making as dear as possible--that's
also HIS tribute to the ideal. It does for him. He'll see her
through. They won't talk of anything worse than you and me."
"Well, we're bad enough perhaps, thank heaven," she laughed. "to
upset them! Mr. Waymarsh at any rate is a hideous old coquette."
And the next moment she had dropped everything for a different
pursuit. "What you don't appear to know is that Jeanne de Vionnet
has become engaged. She's to marry--it has been definitely
arranged--young Monsieur de Montbron."
He fairly blushed. "Then--if you know it--it's 'out'?"
"Don't I often know things that are NOT out? However," she said,
"this will be out to-morrow. But I see I've counted too much on
your possible ignorance. You've been before me, and I don't make
you jump as I hoped."
He gave a gasp at her insight. "You never fail! I've HAD my jump.
I had it when I first heard."
"Then if you knew why didn't you tell me as soon as you came in?"
"Because I had it from her as a thing not yet to be spoken of."
Miss Gostrey wondered. "From Madame de Vionnet herself?"
"As a probability--not quite a certainty: a good cause in which
Chad has been working. So I've waited."
"You need wait no longer," she returned. "It reached me yesterday--
roundabout and accidental, but by a person who had had it from one
of the young man's own people--as a thing quite settled. I was only
keeping it for you."
"You thought Chad wouldn't have told me?"
She hesitated. "Well, if he hasn't--"
"He hasn't. And yet the thing appears to have been practically his
doing. So there we are."
"There we are!" Maria candidly echoed.
"That's why I jumped. I jumped," he continued to explain, "because
it means, this disposition of the daughter, that there's now
nothing else: nothing else but him and the mother."
"Still--it simplifies."
"It simplifies"--he fully concurred. "But that's precisely where we
are. It marks a stage in his relation. The act is his answer to
Mrs. Newsome's demonstration."
"It tells," Maria asked, "the worst?"
"The worst."
"But is the worst what he wants Sarah to know?"
"He doesn't care for Sarah."
At which Miss Gostrey's eyebrows went up. "You mean she has already
dished herself?"
Strether took a turn about; he had thought it out again and again
before this, to the end; but the vista seemed each time longer. "He
wants his good friend to know the best. I mean the measure of his
attachment. She asked for a sign, and he thought of that one. There
it is."
"A concession to her jealousy?"
Strether pulled up. "Yes--call it that. Make it lurid--for that
makes my problem richer."
"Certainly, let us have it lurid--for I quite agree with you that
we want none of our problems poor. But let us also have it clear.
Can he, in the midst of such a preoccupation, or on the heels of
it, have seriously cared for Jeanne?--cared, I mean, as a young man
at liberty would have cared?"
Well, Strether had mastered it. "I think he can have thought it
would be charming if he COULD care. It would be nicer."
"Nicer than being tied up to Marie?"
"Yes--than the discomfort of an attachment to a person he can never
hope, short of a catastrophe, to marry. And he was quite right,"
said Strether. "It would certainly have been nicer. Even when a
thing's already nice there mostly is some other thing that would
have been nicer--or as to which we wonder if it wouldn't. But his
question was all the same a dream. He COULDn't care in that way. He
IS tied up to Marie. The relation is too special and has gone too
far. It's the very basis, and his recent lively contribution toward
establishing Jeanne in life has been his definite and final
acknowledgement to Madame de Vionnet that he has ceased squirming.
I doubt meanwhile," he went on, "if Sarah has at all directly
attacked him."
His companion brooded. "But won't he wish for his own satisfaction
to make his ground good to her?"
"No--he'll leave it to me, he'll leave everything to me. I 'sort
of' feel"--he worked it out--"that the whole thing will come upon
me. Yes, I shall have every inch and every ounce of it. I shall be
USED for it--!" And Strether lost himself in the prospect. Then he
fancifully expressed the issue. "To the last drop of my blood."
Maria, however, roundly protested. "Ah you'll please keep a drop
for ME. I shall have a use for it!"--which she didn't however
follow up. She had come back the next moment to another matter.
"Mrs. Pocock, with her brother, is trusting only to her general
charm?"
"So it would seem."
"And the charm's not working?"
Well, Strether put it otherwise, "She's sounding the note of home--
which is the very best thing she can do."
"The best for Madame de Vionnet?"
"The best for home itself. The natural one; the right one."
"Right," Maria asked, "when it fails?"
Strether had a pause. "The difficulty's Jim. Jim's the note of
home."
She debated. "Ah surely not the note of Mrs. Newsome."
But he had it all. "The note of the home for which Mrs. Newsome
wants him--the home of the business. Jim stands, with his little
legs apart, at the door of THAT tent; and Jim is, frankly speaking,
extremely awful."
Maria stared. "And you in, you poor thing, for your evening with
him?"
"Oh he's all right for ME!" Strether laughed. "Any one's good
enough for ME. But Sarah shouldn't, all the same, have brought him.
She doesn't appreciate him."
His friend was amused with this statement of it. "Doesn't know, you
mean, how bad he is?"
Strether shook his head with decision. "Not really."
She wondered. "Then doesn't Mrs. Newsome?"
It made him frankly do the same. "Well, no--since you ask me."
Maria rubbed it in. "Not really either?"
"Not at all. She rates him rather high." With which indeed,
immediately, he took himself up. "Well, he IS good too, in his way.
It depends on what you want him for."
Miss Gostrey, however, wouldn't let it depend on anything--wouldn't
have it, and wouldn't want him, at any price. "It suits my book,"
she said, "that he should be impossible; and it suits it still
better," she more imaginatively added, "that Mrs. Newsome doesn't
know he is."
Strether, in consequence, had to take it from her, but he fell back
on something else. "I'll tell you who does really know."
"Mr. Waymarsh? Never!"
"Never indeed. I'm not ALWAYS thinking of Mr. Waymarsh; in fact I
find now I never am." Then he mentioned the person as if there were
a good deal in it. "Mamie."
"His own sister?" Oddly enough it but let her down. "What good will
that do?"
"None perhaps. But there--as usual--we are!"
III
There they were yet again, accordingly, for two days more; when
Strether, on being, at Mrs. Pocock's hotel, ushered into that
lady's salon, found himself at first assuming a mistake on the part
of the servant who had introduced him and retired. The occupants
hadn't come in, for the room looked empty as only a room can look
in Paris, of a fine afternoon when the faint murmur of the huge
collective life, carried on out of doors, strays among scattered
objects even as a summer air idles in a lonely garden. Our friend
looked about and hesitated; observed, on the evidence of a table
charged with purchases and other matters, that Sarah had become
possessed--by no aid from HIM--of the last number of the
salmon-coloured Revue; noted further that Mamie appeared to have
received a present of Fromentin's "Maitres d'Autrefois" from Chad,
who had written her name on the cover; and pulled up at the sight of
a heavy letter addressed in a hand he knew. This letter, forwarded
by a banker and arriving in Mrs. Pocock's absence, had been placed
in evidence, and it drew from the fact of its being unopened a sudden
queer power to intensify the reach of its author. It brought home
to him the scale on which Mrs. Newsome--for she had been copious
indeed this time--was writing to her daughter while she kept HIM in
durance; and it had altogether such an effect upon him as made him
for a few minutes stand still and breathe low. In his own room, at
his own hotel, he had dozens of well-filled envelopes superscribed
in that character; and there was actually something in the renewal
of his interrupted vision of the character that played straight
into the so frequent question of whether he weren't already
disinherited beyond appeal. It was such an assurance as the sharp
downstrokes of her pen hadn't yet had occasion to give him; but
they somehow at the present crisis stood for a probable
absoluteness in any decree of the writer. He looked at Sarah's name
and address, in short, as if he had been looking hard into her
mother's face, and then turned from it as if the face had declined
to relax. But since it was in a manner as if Mrs. Newsome were
thereby all the more, instead of the less, in the room, and were
conscious, sharply and sorely conscious, of himself, so he felt
both held and hushed, summoned to stay at least and take his
punishment. By staying, accordingly, he took it--creeping softly
and vaguely about and waiting for Sarah to come in. She WOULD come
in if he stayed long enough, and he had now more than ever the
sense of her success in leaving him a prey to anxiety. It wasn't to
be denied that she had had a happy instinct, from the point of view
of Woollett, in placing him thus at the mercy of her own initiative.
It was very well to try to say he didn't care--that she might
break ground when she would, might never break it at all if she
wouldn't, and that he had no confession whatever to wait upon her
with: he breathed from day to day an air that damnably required
clearing, and there were moments when he quite ached to precipitate
that process. He couldn't doubt that, should she only oblige him by
surprising him just as he then was, a clarifying scene of some sort
would result from the concussion.
He humbly circulated in this spirit till he suddenly had a fresh
arrest. Both the windows of the room stood open to the balcony, but
it was only now that, in the glass of the leaf of one of them,
folded back, he caught a reflexion quickly recognised as the colour
of a lady's dress. Somebody had been then all the while on the
balcony, and the person, whoever it might be, was so placed between
the windows as to be hidden from him; while on the other hand the
many sounds of the street had covered his own entrance and
movements. If the person were Sarah he might on the spot therefore
be served to his taste. He might lead her by a move or two up to
the remedy for his vain tension; as to which, should he get nothing
else from it, he would at least have the relief of pulling down the
roof on their heads. There was fortunately no one at hand to
observe--in respect to his valour--that even on this completed
reasoning he still hung fire. He had been waiting for Mrs. Pocock
and the sound of the oracle; but he had to gird himself afresh--
which he did in the embrasure of the window, neither advancing nor
retreating--before provoking the revelation. It was apparently for
Sarah to come more into view; he was in that case there at her
service. She did however, as meanwhile happened, come more into
view; only she luckily came at the last minute as a contradiction
of Sarah. The occupant of the balcony was after all quite another
person, a person presented, on a second look, by a charming back
and a slight shift of her position, as beautiful brilliant
unconscious Mamie--Mamie alone at home, Mamie passing her time in
her own innocent way, Mamie in short rather shabbily used, but
Mamie absorbed interested and interesting. With her arms on the
balustrade and her attention dropped to the street she allowed
Strether to watch her, to consider several things, without her
turning round.
But the oddity was that when he HAD so watched and considered he
simply stepped back into the room without following up his
advantage. He revolved there again for several minutes, quite as
with something new to think of and as if the bearings of the
possibility of Sarah had been superseded. For frankly, yes, it HAD
bearings thus to find the girl in solitary possession. There was
something in it that touched him to a point not to have been
reckoned beforehand, something that softly but quite pressingly
spoke to him, and that spoke the more each time he paused again at
the edge of the balcony and saw her still unaware. Her companions
were plainly scattered; Sarah would be off somewhere with Waymarsh
and Chad off somewhere with Jim. Strether didn't at all mentally
impute to Chad that he was with his "good friend"; he gave him the
benefit of supposing him involved in appearances that, had he had
to describe them--for instance to Maria--he would have conveniently
qualified as more subtle. It came to him indeed the next thing that
there was perhaps almost an excess of refinement in having left
Mamie in such weather up there alone; however she might in fact
have extemporised, under the charm of the Rue de Rivoli, a little
makeshift Paris of wonder arid fancy. Our friend in any case now
recognised--and it was as if at the recognition Mrs. Newsome's
fixed intensity had suddenly, with a deep audible gasp, grown thin
and vague--that day after day he had been conscious in respect to
his young lady of something odd and ambiguous, yet something into
which he could at last read a meaning. It had been at the most,
this mystery, an obsession--oh an obsession agreeable; and it had
just now fallen into its place as at the touch of a spring. It had
represented the possibility between them of some communication
baffled by accident and delay--the possibility even of some
relation as yet unacknowledged.
There was always their old relation, the fruit of the Woollett
years; but that--and it was what was strangest--had nothing
whatever in common with what was now in the air. As a child, as a
"bud," and then again as a flower of expansion, Mamie had bloomed
for him, freely, in the almost incessantly open doorways of home;
where he remembered her as first very forward, as then very
backward--for he had carried on at one period, in Mrs. Newsome's
parlours (oh Mrs. Newsome's phases and his own!) a course of
English Literature re-enforced by exams and teas--and once more,
finally, as very much in advance. But he had kept no great sense of
points of contact; it not being in the nature of things at Woollett
that the freshest of the buds should find herself in the same
basket with the most withered of the winter apples. The child had
given sharpness, above all, to his sense of the flight of time; it
was but the day before yesterday that he had tripped up on her
hoop, yet his experience of remarkable women--destined, it would
seem, remarkably to grow--felt itself ready this afternoon, quite
braced itself, to include her. She had in fine more to say to him
than he had ever dreamed the pretty girl of the moment COULD have;
and the proof of the circumstance was that, visibly, unmistakeably,
she had been able to say it to no one else. It was something she
could mention neither to her brother, to her sister-in-law nor to
Chad; though he could just imagine that had she still been at home
she might have brought it out, as a supreme tribute to age,
authority and attitude, for Mrs. Newsome. It was moreover something
in which they all took an interest; the strength of their interest
was in truth just the reason of her prudence. All this then, for
five minutes, was vivid to Strether, and it put before him that,
poor child, she had now but her prudence to amuse her. That, for a
pretty girl in Paris, struck him, with a rush, as a sorry state; so
that under the impression he went out to her with a step as
hypocritically alert, he was well aware, as if he had just come
into the room. She turned with a start at his voice; preoccupied
with him though she might be, she was just a scrap disappointed.
"Oh I thought you were Mr. Bilham!"
The remark had been at first surprising and our friend's private
thought, under the influence of it, temporarily blighted; yet we
are able to add that he presently recovered his inward tone and
that many a fresh flower of fancy was to bloom in the same air.
Little Bilham--since little Bilham was, somewhat incongruously,
expected--appeared behindhand; a circumstance by which Strether was
to profit. They came back into the room together after a little,
the couple on the balcony, and amid its crimson-and-gold elegance,
with the others still absent, Strether passed forty minutes that he
appraised even at the time as far, in the whole queer connexion,
from his idlest. Yes indeed, since he had the other day so agreed
with Maria about the inspiration of the lurid, here was something
for his problem that surely didn't make it shrink and that was
floated in upon him as part of a sudden flood. He was doubtless not
to know till afterwards, on turning them over in thought, of how
many elements his impression was composed; but he none the less
felt, as he sat with the charming girl, the signal growth of a
confidence. For she WAS charming, when all was said--and none the
less so for the visible habit and practice of freedom and fluency.
She was charming, he was aware, in spite of the fact that if he
hadn't found her so he would have found her something he should
have been in peril of expressing as "funny." Yes, she was funny,
wonderful Mamie, and without dreaming it; she was bland, she was
bridal--with never, that he could make out as yet, a bridegroom to
support it; she was handsome and portly and easy and chatty, soft
and sweet and almost disconcertingly reassuring. She was dressed,
if we might so far discriminate, less as a young lady than as an
old one--had an old one been supposable to Strether as so committed
to vanity; the complexities of her hair missed moreover also the
looseness of youth; and she had a mature manner of bending a
little, as to encourage and reward, while she held neatly together
in front of her a pair of strikingly polished hands: the
combination of all of which kept up about her the glamour of her
"receiving," placed her again perpetually between the windows and
within sound of the ice-cream plates, suggested the enumeration of
all the names, all the Mr. Brookses and Mr. Snookses, gregarious
specimens of a single type. she was happy to "meet." But if all
this was where she was funny, and if what was funnier than the rest
was the contrast between her beautiful benevolent patronage--such a
hint of the polysyllabic as might make her something of a bore
toward middle age--and her rather flat little voice, the voice,
naturally, unaffectedly yet, of a girl of fifteen; so Strether,
none the less, at the end of ten minutes, felt in her a quiet
dignity that pulled things bravely together. If quiet dignity,
almost more than matronly, with voluminous, too voluminous clothes,
was the effect she proposed to produce, that was an ideal one could
like in her when once one had got into relation. The great thing
now for her visitor was that this was exactly what he had done; it
made so extraordinary a mixture of the brief and crowded hour. It
was the mark of a relation that he had begun so quickly to find
himself sure she was, of all people, as might have been said, on
the side and of the party of Mrs. Newsome's original ambassador.
She was in HIS interest and not in Sarah's, and some sign of that
was precisely what he had been feeling in her, these last days, as
imminent. Finally placed, in Paris, in immediate presence of the
situation and of the hero of it--by whom Strether was incapable of
meaning any one but Chad--she had accomplished, and really in a
manner all unexpected to herself, a change of base; deep still
things had come to pass within her, and by the time she had grown
sure of them Strether had become aware of the little drama. When
she knew where she was, in short, he had made it out; and he made
it out at present still better; though with never a direct word
passing between them all the while on the subject of his own
predicament. There had been at first, as he sat there with her, a
moment during which he wondered if she meant to break ground in
respect to his prime undertaking. That door stood so strangely ajar
that he was half-prepared to be conscious, at any juncture, of her
having, of any one's having, quite bounced in. But, friendly,
familiar, light of touch and happy of tact, she exquisitely stayed
out; so that it was for all the world as if to show she could deal
with him without being reduced to--well, scarcely anything.
It fully came up for them then, by means of their talking of
everything BUT Chad, that Mamie, unlike Sarah, unlike Jim, knew
perfectly what had become of him. It fully came up that she had
taken to the last fraction of an inch the measure of the change in
him, and that she wanted Strether to know what a secret she
proposed to make of it. They talked most conveniently--as if they
had had no chance yet--about Woollett; and that had virtually the
effect of their keeping the secret more close. The hour took on for
Strether, little by little, a queer sad sweetness of quality, he
had such a revulsion in Mamie's favour and on behalf of her social
value as might have come from remorse at some early injustice. She
made him, as under the breath of some vague western whiff, homesick
and freshly restless; he could really for the time have fancied
himself stranded with her on a far shore, during an ominous calm,
in a quaint community of shipwreck. Their little interview was like
a picnic on a coral strand; they passed each other, with melancholy
smiles and looks sufficiently allusive, such cupfuls of water as
they had saved. Especially sharp in Strether meanwhile was the
conviction that his companion really knew, as we have hinted, where
she had come out. It was at a very particular place--only THAT she
would never tell him; it would be above all what he should have to
puzzle for himself. This was what he hoped for, because his interest
in the girl wouldn't be complete without it. No more would the
appreciation to which she was entitled--so assured was he that
the more he saw of her process the more he should see of her pride.
She saw, herself, everything; but she knew what she didn't want,
and that it was that had helped her. What didn't she want?--there
was a pleasure lost for her old friend in not yet knowing, as there
would doubtless be a thrill in getting a glimpse. Gently and
sociably she kept that dark to him, and it was as if she soothed
and beguiled him in other ways to make up for it. She came out with
her impression of Madame de Vionnet--of whom she had "heard so
much"; she came out with her impression of Jeanne, whom she had
been "dying to see": she brought it out with a blandness by which
her auditor was really stirred that she had been with Sarah early
that very afternoon, and after dreadful delays caused by all sorts
of things, mainly, eternally, by the purchase of clothes--clothes
that unfortunately wouldn't be themselves eternal--to call in the
Rue de Bellechasse.
At the sound of these names Strether almost blushed to feel that he
couldn't have sounded them first--and yet couldn't either have
justified his squeamishness. Mamie made them easy as he couldn't
have begun to do, and yet it could only have cost her more than he
should ever have had to spend. It was as friends of Chad's, friends
special, distinguished, desirable, enviable, that she spoke of
them, and she beautifully carried it off that much as she had heard
of them--though she didn't say how or where, which was a touch of
her own--she had found them beyond her supposition. She abounded in
praise of them, and after the manner of Woollett--which made the
manner of Woollett a loveable thing again to Strether. He had never
so felt the true inwardness of it as when his blooming companion
pronounced the elder of the ladies of the Rue de Bellechasse too
fascinating for words and declared of the younger that she was
perfectly ideal, a real little monster of charm. "Nothing," she said
of Jeanne, "ought ever to happen to her--she's so awfully right as
she is. Another touch will spoil her--so she oughtn't to BE touched."
"Ah but things, here in Paris," Strether observed, "do happen to
little girls." And then for the joke's and the occasion's sake:
"Haven't you found that yourself?"
"That things happen--? Oh I'm not a little girl. I'm a big
battered blowsy one. I don't care," Mamie laughed, "WHAT happens."
Strether had a pause while he wondered if it mightn't happen that
he should give her the pleasure of learning that he found her nicer
than he had really dreamed--a pause that ended when he had said to
himself that, so far as it at all mattered for her, she had in fact
perhaps already made this out. He risked accordingly a different
question--though conscious, as soon as he had spoken, that he
seemed to place it in relation to her last speech. "But that
Mademoiselle de Vionnet is to be married--I suppose you've heard of
THAT."
For all, he then found, he need fear! "Dear, yes; the gentleman
was there: Monsieur de Montbron, whom Madame de Vionnet
presented to us."
"And was he nice?"
Mamie bloomed and bridled with her best reception manner. "Any
man's nice when he's in love."
It made Strether laugh. "But is Monsieur de Montbron in love--
already--with YOU?"
"Oh that's not necessary--it's so much better he should be so with
HER: which, thank goodness, I lost no time in discovering for
myself. He's perfectly gone--and I couldn't have borne it for her
if he hadn't been. She's just too sweet."
Strether hesitated. "And through being in love too?"
On which with a smile that struck him as wonderful Mamie had a
wonderful answer. "She doesn't know if she is or not."
It made him again laugh out. "Oh but YOU do!"
She was willing to take it that way. "Oh yes, I know everything."
And as she sat there rubbing her polished hands and making the best
of it--only holding her elbows perhaps a little too much out--the
momentary effect for Strether was that every one else, in all their
affair, seemed stupid.
"Know that poor little Jeanne doesn't know what's the matter with
her?"
It was as near as they came to saying that she was probably in love
with Chad; but it was quite near enough for what Strether wanted;
which was to be confirmed in his certitude that, whether in love or
not, she appealed to something large and easy in the girl before
him. Mamie would be fat, too fat, at thirty; but she would always
be the person who, at the present sharp hour, had been
disinterestedly tender. "If I see a little more of her, as I hope
I shall, I think she'll like me enough--for she seemed to like me
to-day--to want me to tell her."
"And SHALL you?"
"Perfectly. I shall tell her the matter with her is that she wants
only too much to do right. To do right for her, naturally," said
Mamie, "is to please."
"Her mother, do you mean?"
"Her mother first."
Strether waited. "And then?"
"Well, 'then'--Mr. Newsome."
There was something really grand for him in the serenity of this
reference. "And last only Monsieur de Montbron?"
"Last only"--she good-humouredly kept it up.
Strether considered. "So that every one after all then will be
suited?"
She had one of her few hesitations, but it was a question only of a
moment; and it was her nearest approach to being explicit with him
about what was between them. "I think I can speak for myself. I
shall be."
It said indeed so much, told such a story of her being ready to
help him, so committed to him that truth, in short, for such use as
he might make of it toward those ends of his own with which,
patiently and trustfully, she had nothing to do--it so fully
achieved all this that he appeared to himself simply to meet it in
its own spirit by the last frankness of admiration. Admiration was
of itself almost accusatory, but nothing less would serve to show
her how nearly he understood. He put out his hand for good-bye
with a "Splendid, splendid, splendid!" And he left her, in her
splendour, still waiting for little Bilham.
Book Tenth
I
Strether occupied beside little Bilham, three evenings after his
interview with Mamie Pocock, the same deep divan they had enjoyed
together on the first occasion of our friend's meeting Madame de
Vionnet and her daughter in the apartment of the Boulevard
Malesherbes, where his position affirmed itself again as ministering
to an easy exchange of impressions. The present evening had a
different stamp; if the company was much more numerous, so,
inevitably, were the ideas set in motion. It was on the other
hand, however, now strongly marked that the talkers moved,
in respect to such matters, round an inner, a protected circle.
They knew at any rate what really concerned them to-night, and
Strether had begun by keeping his companion close to it.
Only a few of Chad's guests had dined--that is fifteen or twenty,
a few compared with the large concourse offered to sight by eleven
o'clock; but number and mass, quantity and quality, light,
fragrance, sound, the overflow of hospitality meeting the high tide
of response, had all from the first pressed upon Strether's
consciousness, and he felt himself somehow part and parcel of the
most festive scene, as the term was, in which he had ever in his
life been engaged. He had perhaps seen, on Fourths of July and on
dear old domestic Commencements, more people assembled, but he had
never seen so many in proportion to the space, or had at all events
never known so great a promiscuity to show so markedly as picked.
Numerous as was the company, it had still been made so by
selection, and what was above all rare for Strether was that, by no
fault of his own, he was in the secret of the principle that had
worked. He hadn't enquired, he had averted his head, but Chad had
put him a pair of questions that themselves smoothed the ground.
He hadn't answered the questions, he had replied that they were
the young man's own affair; and he had then seen perfectly that the
latter's direction was already settled.
Chad had applied for counsel only by way of intimating that he knew
what to do; and he had clearly never known it better than in now
presenting to his sister the whole circle of his society. This was
all in the sense and the spirit of the note struck by him on that
lady's arrival; he had taken at the station itself a line that led
him without a break, and that enabled him to lead the Pococks--
though dazed a little, no doubt, breathless, no doubt, and
bewildered--to the uttermost end of the passage accepted by them
perforce as pleasant. He had made it for them violently pleasant
and mercilessly full; the upshot of which was, to Strether's
vision, that they had come all the way without discovering it to be
really no passage at all. It was a brave blind alley, where to
pass was impossible and where, unless they stuck fast, they would
have--which was always awkward--publicly to back out. They were
touching bottom assuredly tonight; the whole scene represented the
terminus of the cul-de-sac. So could things go when there was a
hand to keep them consistent--a hand that pulled the wire with a
skill at which the elder man more and more marvelled. The elder
man felt responsible, but he also felt successful, since what had
taken place was simply the issue of his own contention, six weeks
before, that they properly should wait to see what their friends
would have really to say. He had determined Chad to wait, he had
determined him to see; he was therefore not to quarrel with the
time given up to the business. As much as ever, accordingly, now
that a fortnight had elapsed, the situation created for Sarah, and
against which she had raised no protest, was that of her having
accommodated herself to her adventure as to a pleasure-party
surrendered perhaps even somewhat in excess to bustle and to
"pace." If her brother had been at any point the least bit open to
criticism it might have been on the ground of his spicing the
draught too highly and pouring the cup too full. Frankly treating
the whole occasion of the presence of his relatives as an
opportunity for amusement, he left it, no doubt, but scant margin
as an opportunity for anything else. He suggested, invented,
abounded--yet all the while with the loosest easiest rein.
Strether, during his own weeks, had gained a sense of knowing
Paris; but he saw it afresh, and with fresh emotion, in the form of
the knowledge offered to his colleague.
A thousand unuttered thoughts hummed for him in the air of these
observations; not the least frequent of which was that Sarah might
well of a truth not quite know whither she was drifting. She was
in no position not to appear to expect that Chad should treat her
handsomely; yet she struck our friend as privately stiffening a
little each time she missed the chance of marking the great nuance.
The great nuance was in brief that of course her brother must treat
her handsomely--she should like to see him not; but that treating
her handsomely, none the less, wasn't all in all--treating her
handsomely buttered no parsnips; and that in fine there were
moments when she felt the fixed eyes of their admirable absent
mother fairly screw into the flat of her back. Strether, watching,
after his habit, and overscoring with thought, positively had
moments of his own in which he found himself sorry for her--
occasions on which she affected him as a person seated in a runaway
vehicle and turning over the question of a possible jump. WOULD
she jump, could she, would THAT be a safe placed--this question, at
such instants, sat for him in her lapse into pallor, her tight
lips, her conscious eyes. It came back to the main point at issue:
would she be, after all, to be squared? He believed on the whole
she would jump; yet his alternations on this subject were the more
especial stuff of his suspense. One thing remained well before
him--a conviction that was in fact to gain sharpness from the
impressions of this evening: that if she SHOULD gather in her
skirts, close her eyes and quit the carriage while in motion, he
would promptly enough become aware. She would alight from her
headlong course more or less directly upon him; it would be
appointed to him, unquestionably, to receive her entire weight.
Signs and portents of the experience thus in reserve for him had as
it happened, multiplied even through the dazzle of Chad's party.
It was partly under the nervous consciousness of such a prospect
that, leaving almost every one in the two other rooms, leaving
those of the guests already known to him as well as a mass of
brilliant strangers of both sexes and of several varieties of
speech, he had desired five quiet minutes with little Bilham, whom
he always found soothing and even a little inspiring, and to whom
he had actually moreover something distinct and important to say.
He had felt of old--for it already seemed long ago--rather
humiliated at discovering he could learn in talk with a personage
so much his junior the lesson of a certain moral ease; but he had
now got used to that--whether or no the mixture of the fact with
other humiliations had made it indistinct, whether or no directly
from little Bilham's example, the example of his being contentedly
just the obscure and acute little Bilham he was. It worked so for
him, Strether seemed to see; and our friend had at private hours a
wan smile over the fact that he himself, after so many more years,
was still in search of something that would work. However, as we
have said, it worked just now for them equally to have found a
corner a little apart. What particularly kept it apart was the
circumstance that the music in the salon was admirable, with two or
three such singers as it was a privilege to hear in private. Their
presence gave a distinction to Chad's entertainment, and the
interest of calculating their effect on Sarah was actually so sharp
as to be almost painful. Unmistakeably, in her single person, the
motive of the composition and dressed in a splendour of crimson
which affected Strether as the sound of a fall through a skylight,
she would now be in the forefront of the listening circle and
committed by it up to her eyes. Those eyes during the wonderful
dinner itself he hadn't once met; having confessedly--perhaps a
little pusillanimously--arranged with Chad that he should be on the
same side of the table. But there was no use in having arrived now
with little Bilham at an unprecedented point of intimacy unless he
could pitch everything into the pot. "You who sat where you could
see her, what does she make of it all? By which I mean on what
terms does she take it?"
"Oh she takes it, I judge, as proving that the claim of his family
is more than ever justified "
"She isn't then pleased with what he has to show?"
"On the contrary; she's pleased with it as with his capacity to do
this kind of thing--more than she has been pleased with anything
for a long time. But she wants him to show it THERE. He has no
right to waste it on the likes of us."
Strether wondered. "She wants him to move the whole thing over?"
"The whole thing--with an important exception. Everything he has
'picked up'--and the way he knows how. She sees no difficulty in
that. She'd run the show herself, and she'll make the handsome
concession that Woollett would be on the whole in some ways the
better for it. Not that it wouldn't be also in some ways the
better for Woollett. The people there are just as good."
"Just as good as you and these others? Ah that may be. But such
an occasion as this, whether or no," Strether said, "isn't the
people. It's what has made the people possible."
"Well then," his friend replied, "there you are; I give you my
impression for what it's worth. Mrs. Pocock has SEEN, and that's
to-night how she sits there. If you were to have a glimpse of her
face you'd understand me. She has made up her mind--to the sound
of expensive music."
Strether took it freely in. "Ah then I shall have news of her."
"I don't want to frighten you, but I think that likely. However,"
little Bilham continued, "if I'm of the least use to you to hold on
by--!"
"You're not of the least!"--and Strether laid an appreciative hand
on him to say it. "No one's of the least." With which, to mark how
gaily he could take it, he patted his companion's knee. "I must
meet my fate alone, and I SHALL--oh you'll see! And yet," he
pursued the next moment, "you CAN help me too. You once said to
me"--he followed this further--"that you held Chad should marry.
I didn't see then so well as I know now that you meant he should
marry Miss Pocock. Do you still consider that he should? Because
if you do"--he kept it up--"I want you immediately to change your
mind. You can help me that way."
"Help you by thinking he should NOT marry?"
"Not marry at all events Mamie."
"And who then?"
"Ah," Strether returned, "that I'm not obliged to say. But Madame
de Vionnet--I suggest--when he can.'
"Oh!" said little Bilham with some sharpness.
"Oh precisely! But he needn't marry at all--I'm at any rate not
obliged to provide for it. Whereas in your case I rather feel that
I AM."
Little Bilham was amused. "Obliged to provide for my marrying?"
"Yes--after all I've done to you!"
The young man weighed it. "Have you done as much as that?"
"Well," said Strether, thus challenged, "of course I must remember
what you've also done to ME. We may perhaps call it square. But
all the same," he went on, "I wish awfully you'd marry Mamie Pocock
yourself."
Little Bilham laughed out. "Why it was only the other night, in
this very place, that you were proposing to me a different union
altogether."
''Mademoiselle de Vionnet?" Well, Strether easily confessed it.
"That, I admit, was a vain image. THIS is practical politics.
I want to do something good for both of you--I wish you each so well;
and you can see in a moment the trouble it will save me to polish
you off by the same stroke. She likes you, you know. You console
her. And she's splendid."
Little Bilham stared as a delicate appetite stares at an overheaped
plate. "What do I console her for?"
It just made his friend impatient. "Oh come, you knows"
"And what proves for you that she likes me?"
"Why the fact that I found her three days ago stopping at home
alone all the golden afternoon on the mere chance that you'd come
to her, and hanging over her balcony on that of seeing your cab
drive up. I don't know what you want more."
Little Bilham after a moment found it. "Only just to know what
proves to you that I like HER."
"Oh if what I've just mentioned isn't enough to make you do it,
you're a stony-hearted little fiend. Besides"--Strether encouraged
his fancy's flight--"you showed your inclination in the way you
kept her waiting, kept her on purpose to see if she cared enough
for you."
His companion paid his ingenuity the deference of a pause. "I didn't
keep her waiting. I came at the hour. I wouldn't have kept her
waiting for the world," the young man honourably declared.
"Better still--then there you are!" And Strether, charmed, held
him the faster. "Even if you didn't do her justice, moreover," he
continued, "I should insist on your immediately coming round to it.
I want awfully to have worked it. I want"--and our friend spoke
now with a yearning that was really earnest--"at least to have done
THAT."
"To have married me off--without a penny?"
"Well, I shan't live long; and I give you my word, now and here,
that I'll leave you every penny of my own. I haven't many,
unfortunately, but you shall have them all. And Miss Pocock, I
think, has a few. I want," Strether went on, "to have been at
least to that extent constructive even expiatory. I've been
sacrificing so to strange gods that I feel I want to put on record,
somehow, my fidelity--fundamentally unchanged after all--to our
own. I feel as if my hands were embrued with the blood of
monstrous alien altars--of another faith altogether. There it is--
it's done." And then he further explained. "It took hold of me
because the idea of getting her quite out of the way for Chad
helps to clear my ground."
The young man, at this, bounced about, and it brought them face to
face in admitted amusement. "You want me to marry as a convenience
to Chad?"
"No," Strether debated--"HE doesn't care whether you marry or not.
It's as a convenience simply to my own plan FOR him."
"'Simply'!"--and little Bilham's concurrence was in itself a lively
comment. "Thank you. But I thought," he continued, "you had
exactly NO plan 'for' him."
"Well then call it my plan for myself--which may be well, as you
say, to have none. His situation, don't you see? is reduced now to
the bare facts one has to recognise. Mamie doesn't want him, and
he doesn't want Mamie: so much as that these days have made
clear. It's a thread we can wind up and tuck in."
But little Bilham still questioned. "YOU can--since you seem so
much to want to. But why should I?"
Poor Strether thought it over, but was obliged of course to admit
that his demonstration did superficially fail. "Seriously, there
is no reason. It's my affair--I must do it alone. I've only my
fantastic need of making my dose stiff."
Little Bilham wondered. "What do you call your dose?"
"Why what I have to swallow. I want my conditions unmitigated."
He had spoken in the tone of talk for talk's sake, and yet with an
obscure truth lurking in the loose folds; a circumstance presently
not without its effect on his young friend. Little Bilham's eyes
rested on him a moment with some intensity; then suddenly, as if
everything had cleared up, he gave a happy laugh. It seemed to say
that if pretending, or even trying, or still even hoping, to be
able to care for Mamie would be of use, he was all there for the
job. "I'll do anything in the world for you!"
"Well," Strether smiled, "anything in the world is all I want. I
don't know anything that pleased me in her more," he went on, "than
the way that, on my finding her up there all alone, coming on her
unawares and feeling greatly for her being so out of it, she
knocked down my tall house of cards with her instant and cheerful
allusion to the next young man. It was somehow so the note I
needed--her staying at home to receive him."
"It was Chad of course," said little Bilham, "who asked the next
young man--I like your name for me!--to call."
"So I supposed--all of which, thank God, is in our innocent and
natural manners. But do you know," Strether asked, "if Chad
knows--?" And then as this interlocutor seemed at a loss:
"Why where she has come out."
Little Bilham, at this, met his face with a conscious look--it was
as if, more than anything yet, the allusion had penetrated. "Do
you know yourself?"
Strether lightly shook his head. "There I stop. Oh, odd as it may
appear to you, there ARE things I don't know. I only got the sense
from her of something very sharp, and yet very deep down, that she
was keeping all to herself. That is I had begun with the belief
that she HAD kept it to herself; but face to face with her there
I soon made out that there was a person with whom she would have
shared it. I had thought she possibly might with ME--but I saw
then that I was only half in her confidence. When, turning to me
to greet me--for she was on the balcony and I had come in without
her knowing it--she showed me she had been expecting YOU and was
proportionately disappointed, I got hold of the tail of my
conviction. Half an hour later I was in possession of all the rest
of it. You know what has happened." He looked at his young friend
hard--then he felt sure. "For all you say, you're up to your eyes.
So there you are."
Little Bilham after an instant pulled half round. "I assure you
she hasn't told me anything."
"Of course she hasn't. For what do you suggest that I suppose her
to take you? But you've been with her every day, you've seen her
freely, you've liked her greatly--I stick to that--and you've made
your profit of it. You know what she has been through as well as
you know that she has dined here to-night--which must have put her,
by the way, through a good deal more."
The young man faced this blast; after which he pulled round the
rest of the way. "I haven't in the least said she hasn't been
nice to me. But she's proud."
"And quite properly. But not too proud for that."
"It's just her pride that has made her. Chad," little Bilham
loyally went on, "has really been as kind to her as possible.
It's awkward for a man when a girl's in love with him."
"Ah but she isn't--now."
Little Bilham sat staring before him; then he sprang up as if his
friend's penetration, recurrent and insistent, made him really
after all too nervous. "No--she isn't now. It isn't in the
least," he went on, "Chad's fault. He's really all right. I mean
he would have been willing. But she came over with ideas. Those
she had got at home. They had been her motive and support in
joining her brother and his wife. She was to SAVE our friend."
"Ah like me, poor thing?" Strether also got to his feet.
"Exactly--she had a bad moment. It was very soon distinct to her,
to pull her up, to let her down, that, alas, he was, he IS, saved.
There's nothing left for her to do."
"Not even to love him?"
"She would have loved him better as she originally believed him."
Strether wondered "Of course one asks one's self what notion a
little girl forms, where a young man's in question, of such a
history and such a state."
"Well, this little girl saw them, no doubt, as obscure, but she saw
them practically as wrong. The wrong for her WAS the obscure.
Chad turns out at any rate right and good and disconcerting, while
what she was all prepared for, primed and girded and wound up for,
was to deal with him as the general opposite."
"Yet wasn't her whole point"--Strether weighed it--"that he was to
be, that he COULD be, made better, redeemed?"
Little Bilham fixed it all a moment, and then with a small
headshake that diffused a tenderness: "She's too late. Too late
for the miracle."
"Yes"--his companion saw enough. "Still, if the worst fault of his
condition is that it may be all there for her to profit by--?"
"Oh she doesn't want to 'profit,' in that flat way. She doesn't
want to profit by another woman's work--she wants the miracle to
have been her own miracle. THAT'S what she's too late for."
Strether quite felt how it all fitted, yet there seemed one loose
piece. "I'm bound to say, you know, that she strikes one, on these
lines, as fastidious--what you call here difficile."
Little Bilham tossed up his chin. "Of course she's difficile--on
any lines! What else in the world ARE our Mamies--the real, the
right ones?"
"I see, I see," our friend repeated, charmed by the responsive
wisdom he had ended by so richly extracting. "Mamie is one of the
real and the right."
"The very thing itself."
"And what it comes to then," Strether went on, "is that poor awful
Chad is simply too good for her."
"Ah too good was what he was after all to be; but it was she
herself, and she herself only, who was to have made him so."
It hung beautifully together, but with still a loose end. "Wouldn't
he do for her even if he should after all break--"
"With his actual influence?" Oh little Bilham had for this
enquiry the sharpest of all his controls. "How can he 'do'--on any
terms whatever--when he's flagrantly spoiled?"
Strether could only meet the question with his passive, his
receptive pleasure. "Well, thank goodness, YOU'RE not! You
remain for her to save, and I come back, on so beautiful and full a
demonstration, to my contention of just now--that of your showing
distinct signs of her having already begun."
The most he could further say to himself--as his young friend turned
away--was that the charge encountered for the moment no renewed
denial. Little Bilham, taking his course back to the music, only
shook his good-natured ears an instant, in the manner of a terrier
who has got wet; while Strether relapsed into the sense--which had
for him in these days most of comfort--that he was free to believe
in anything that from hour to hour kept him going. He had
positively motions and flutters of this conscious hour-to-hour
kind, temporary surrenders to irony, to fancy, frequent instinctive
snatches at the growing rose of observation, constantly stronger
for him, as he felt, in scent and colour, and in which he could
bury his nose even to wantonness. This last resource was offered
him, for that matter, in the very form of his next clear
perception--the vision of a prompt meeting, in the doorway of the
room, between little Bilham and brilliant Miss Barrace, who was
entering as Bilham withdrew. She had apparently put him a
question, to which he had replied by turning to indicate his late
interlocutor; toward whom, after an interrogation further aided by
a resort to that optical machinery which seemed, like her other
ornaments, curious and archaic, the genial lady, suggesting more
than ever for her fellow guest the old French print, the historic
portrait, directed herself with an intention that Strether
instantly met. He knew in advance the first note she would sound,
and took in as she approached all her need of sounding it. Nothing
yet had been so "wonderful" between them as the present occasion;
and it was her special sense of this quality in occasions that she
was there, as she was in most places, to feed. That sense had
already been so well fed by the situation about them that she had
quitted the other room, forsaken the music, dropped out of the
play, abandoned, in a word, the stage itself, that she might stand
a minute behind the scenes with Strether and so perhaps figure as
one of the famous augurs replying, behind the oracle, to the wink
of the other. Seated near him presently where little Bilham had
sat, she replied in truth to many things; beginning as soon as he
had said to her--what he hoped he said without fatuity--"All you
ladies are extraordinarily kind to me."
She played her long handle, which shifted her observation; she saw
in an instant all the absences that left them free. "How can we be
anything else? But isn't that exactly your plight? 'We ladies'--
oh we're nice, and you must be having enough of us! As one of us,
you know, I don't pretend I'm crazy about us. But Miss Gostrey at
least to-night has left you alone, hasn't she?" With which she
again looked about as if Maria might still lurk.
"Oh yes," said Strether; "she's only sitting up for me at home."
And then as this elicited from his companion her gay "Oh, oh, oh!"
he explained that he meant sitting up in suspense and prayer. "We
thought it on the whole better she shouldn't be present; and
either way of course it's a terrible worry for her." He abounded in
the sense of his appeal to the ladies, and they might take their
choice of his doing so from humility or from pride. "Yet she
inclines to believe I shall come out."
"Oh I incline to believe too you'll come out!"--Miss Barrace, with
her laugh, was not to be behind. "Only the question's about WHERE,
isn't it? However," she happily continued, "if it's anywhere at
all it must be very far on, mustn't it? To do us justice, I
think, you know," she laughed, "we do, among us all, want you
rather far on. Yes, yes," she repeated in her quick droll way;
"we want you very, VERY far on!" After which she wished to know
why he had thought it better Maria shouldn't be present.
"Oh," he replied, "it was really her own idea. I should have
wished it. But she dreads responsibility."
"And isn't that a new thing for her?"
"To dread it? No doubt--no doubt. But her nerve has given way."
Miss Barrace looked at him a moment. "She has too much at stake."
Then less gravely: "Mine, luckily for me, holds out."
"Luckily for me too"--Strether came back to that. "My own isn't
so firm, MY appetite for responsibility isn't so sharp, as that I
haven't felt the very principle of this occasion to be 'the more
the merrier.' If we ARE so merry it's because Chad has understood
so well."
"He has understood amazingly," said Miss Barrace.
"It's wonderful--Strether anticipated for her.
"It's wonderful!" she, to meet it, intensified; so that, face to
face over it, they largely and recklessly laughed. But she
presently added: "Oh I see the principle. If one didn't one
would be lost. But when once one has got hold of it--"
"It's as simple as twice two! From the moment he had to do
something--"
"A crowd"--she took him straight up--"was the only thing? Rather,
rather: a rumpus of sound," she laughed, "or nothing. Mrs.
Pocock's built in, or built out--whichever you call it; she's
packed so tight she can't move. She's in splendid isolation"--
Miss Barrace embroidered the theme.
Strether followed, but scrupulous of justice. "Yet with every one
in the place successively introduced to her."
"Wonderfully--but just so that it does build her out. She's
bricked up, she's buried alive!"
Strether seemed for a moment to look at it; but it brought him to
a sigh. "Oh but she's not dead! It will take more than this to
kill her."
His companion had a pause that might have been for pity. "No, I
can't pretend I think she's finished--or that it's for more than
to-night." She remained pensive as if with the same compunction.
"It's only up to her chin." Then again for the fun of it: "She
can breathe."
"She can breathe!"--he echoed it in the same spirit. "And do you
know," he went on, "what's really all this time happening to me?--
through the beauty of music, the gaiety of voices, the uproar in
short of our revel and the felicity of your wit? The sound of
Mrs. Pocock's respiration drowns for me, I assure you, every other.
It's literally all I hear."
She focussed him with her clink of chains. "Well--!" she breathed
ever so kindly.
"Well, what?"
"She IS free from her chin up," she mused; "and that WILL be enough
for her."
"It will be enough for me!" Strether ruefully laughed. "Waymarsh
has really," he then asked, "brought her to see you?"
"Yes--but that's the worst of it. I could do you no good. And yet
I tried hard."
Strether wondered. "And how did you try?"
"Why I didn't speak of you."
"I see. That was better."
"Then what would have been worse? For speaking or silent," she
lightly wailed, "I somehow 'compromise.' And it has never been any
one but you."
"That shows"--he was magnanimous--"that it's something not in you,
but in one's self. It's MY fault."
She was silent a little. "No, it's Mr. Waymarsh's. It's the fault
of his having brought her."
"Ah then," said Strether good-naturedly, "why DID he bring her?"
"He couldn't afford not to."
"Oh you were a trophy--one of the spoils of conquest? But why in
that case, since you do 'compromise'--"
"Don't I compromise HIM as well? I do compromise him as well,"
Miss Barrace smiled. "I compromise him as hard as I can. But for
Mr. Waymarsh it isn't fatal. It's--so far as his wonderful
relation with Mrs. Pocock is concerned--favourable." And then, as
he still seemed slightly at sea: "The man who had succeeded with
ME, don't you see? For her to get him from me was such an added
incentive."
Strether saw, but as if his path was still strewn with surprises.
"It's 'from' you then that she has got him?"
She was amused at his momentary muddle. "You can fancy my fight!
She believes in her triumph. I think it has been part of her joy.
"Oh her joy!" Strether sceptically murmured.
"Well, she thinks she has had her own way. And what's to-night for
her but a kind of apotheosis? Her frock's really good."
"Good enough to go to heaven in? For after a real apotheosis,"
Strether went on, "there's nothing BUT heaven. For Sarah there's
only to-morrow."
"And you mean that she won't find to-morrow heavenly?"
"Well, I mean that I somehow feel to-night--on her behalf--too good
to be true. She has had her cake; that is she's in the act now of
having it, of swallowing the largest and sweetest piece. There
won't be another left for her. Certainly I haven't one. It can
only, at the best, be Chad." He continued to make it out as for
their common entertainment. "He may have one, as it were. up his
sleeve; yet it's borne in upon me that if he had--"
"He wouldn't"--she quite understood--"have taken all THIS trouble?
I dare say not, and, if I may be quite free and dreadful, I very
much hope he won't take any more. Of course I won't pretend now,"
she added, "not to know what it's a question of."
"Oh every one must know now," poor Strether thoughtfully admitted;
"and it's strange enough and funny enough that one should feel
everybody here at this very moment to be knowing and watching and
waiting."
"Yes--isn't it indeed funny?" Miss Barrace quite rose to it.
"That's the way we ARE in Paris." She was always pleased with a new
contribution to that queerness. "It's wonderful! But, you know,"
she declared, "it all depends on you. I don't want to turn the
knife in your vitals, but that's naturally what you just now meant
by our all being on top of you. We know you as the hero of the
drama, and we're gathered to see what you'll do."
Strether looked at her a moment with a light perhaps slightly
obscured. "I think that must be why the hero has taken refuge in
this corner. He's scared at his heroism--he shrinks from his
part."
"Ah but we nevertheless believe he'll play it. That's why,"
Miss Barrace kindly went on, "we take such an interest in you.
We feel you'll come up to the scratch." And then as he seemed
perhaps not quite to take fire: "Don't let him do it."
"Don't let Chad go?"
"Yes, keep hold of him. With all this"--and she indicated the
general tribute--"he has done enough. We love him here--
he's charming."
"It's beautiful," said Strether, "the way you all can simplify
when you will."
But she gave it to him back. "It's nothing to the way you will
when you must."
He winced at it as at the very voice of prophecy, and it kept him
a moment quiet. He detained her, however, on her appearing about
to leave him alone in the rather cold clearance their talk had
made. "There positively isn't a sign of a hero to-night; the
hero's dodging and shirking, the hero's ashamed. Therefore, you
know, I think, what you must all REALLY be occupied with is the
heroine."
Miss Barrace took a minute. "The heroine?"
"The heroine. I've treated her," said Strether, "not a bit like a
hero. Oh," he sighed, "I don't do it well!"
She eased him off. "You do it as you can." And then after another
hesitation: "I think she's satisfied."
But he remained compunctious. "I haven't been near her. I haven't
looked at her."
"Ah then you've lost a good deal!"
He showed he knew it. "She's more wonderful than ever?"
"Than ever. With Mr. Pocock."
Strether wondered. "Madame de Vionnet--with Jim?"
"Madame de Vionnet--with 'Jim.' " Miss Barrace was historic.
"And what's she doing with him?"
"Ah you must ask HIM!"
Strether's face lighted again at the prospect. "It WILL be amusing
to do so." Yet he continued to wonder. "But she must have some
idea."
"Of course she has--she has twenty ideas. She has in the first
place," said Miss Barrace, swinging a little her tortoise-shell,
"that of doing her part. Her part is to help YOU."
It came out as nothing had come yet; links were missing and
connexions unnamed, but it was suddenly as if they were at the
heart of their subject. "Yes; how much more she does it," Strether
gravely reflected, "than I help HER!" It all came over him as with
the near presence of the beauty, the grace, the intense,
dissimulated spirit with which he had, as he said, been putting off
contact. "SHE has courage."
"Ah she has courage!" Miss Barrace quite agreed; and it was as if
for a moment they saw the quantity in each other's face.
But indeed the whole thing was present. "How much she must care!"
"Ah there it is. She does care. But it isn't, is it," Miss
Barrace considerately added, "as if you had ever had any doubt of
that?"
Strether seemed suddenly to like to feel that he really never had.
"Why of course it's the whole point."
"Voila!" Miss Barrace smiled.
"It's why one came out," Strether went on. "And it's why one has
stayed so long. And it's also"--he abounded--"why one's going
home. It's why, it's why--"
"It's why everything!" she concurred. "It's why she might be
to-night--for all she looks and shows, and for all your friend 'Jim'
does--about twenty years old. That's another of her ideas; to be
for him, and to be quite easily and charmingly, as young as a
little girl."
Strether assisted at his distance. "'For him'? For Chad--?"
"For Chad, in a manner, naturally, always. But in particular
to-night for Mr. Pocock." And then as her friend still stared:
"Yes, it IS of a bravery But that's what she has: her high sense
of duty." It was more than sufficiently before them. "When Mr.
Newsome has his hands so embarrassed with his sister--"
"It's quite the least"--Strether filled it out--"that she should
take his sister's husband? Certainly--quite the least. So she has
taken him."
"She has taken him." It was all Miss Barrace had meant.
Still it remained enough. "It must be funny."
"Oh it IS funny." That of course essentially went with it.
But it brought them back. "How indeed then she must cared In
answer to which Strether's entertainer dropped a comprehensive
"Ah!" expressive perhaps of some impatience for the time he took to
get used to it. She herself had got used to it long before.
II
When one morning within the week he perceived the whole thing to be
really at last upon him Strether's immediate feeling was all
relief. He had known this morning that something was about to
happen--known it, in a moment, by Waymarsh's manner when Waymarsh
appeared before him during his brief consumption of coffee and a
roll in the small slippery salle-a-manger so associated with rich
rumination. Strether had taken there of late various lonely and
absent-minded meals; he communed there, even at the end of June,
with a suspected chill, the air of old shivers mixed with old
savours, the air in which so many of his impressions had perversely
matured; the place meanwhile renewing its message to him by the
very circumstance of his single state. He now sat there, for the
most part, to sigh softly, while he vaguely tilted his carafe, over
the vision of how much better Waymarsh was occupied. That was
really his success by the common measure--to have led this
companion so on and on. He remembered how at first there had been
scarce a squatting-place he could beguile him into passing;
the actual outcome of which at last was that there was scarce one
that could arrest him in his rush. His rush--as Strether vividly and
amusedly figured it--continued to be all with Sarah, and contained
perhaps moreover the word of the whole enigma, whipping up in its
fine full-flavoured froth the very principle, for good or for ill,
of his own, of Strether's destiny. It might after all, to the end,
only be that they had united to save him, and indeed, so far as
Waymarsh was concerned, that HAD to be the spring of action.
Strether was glad at all events, in connexion with the case, that
the saving he required was not more scant; so constituted a luxury
was it in certain lights just to lurk there out of the full glare.
He had moments of quite seriously wondering whether Waymarsh wouldn't
in fact, thanks to old friendship and a conceivable indulgence,
make about as good terms for him as he might make for himself.
They wouldn't be the same terms of course; but they might have the
advantage that he himself probably should be able to make none at
all.
He was never in the morning very late, but Waymarsh had already
been out, and, after a peep into the dim refectory, he presented
himself with much less than usual of his large looseness. He had
made sure, through the expanse of glass exposed to the court, that
they would be alone; and there was now in fact that about him that
pretty well took up the room. He was dressed in the garments of
summer; and save that his white waistcoat was redundant and bulging
these things favoured, they determined, his expression. He wore a
straw hat such as his friend hadn't yet seen in Paris, and he
showed a buttonhole freshly adorned with a magnificent rose.
Strether read on the instant his story--how, astir for the previous
hour, the sprinkled newness of the day, so pleasant at that season
in Paris, he was fairly panting with the pulse of adventure and had
been with Mrs. Pocock, unmistakeably, to the Marche aux Fleurs.
Strether really knew in this vision of him a joy that was akin to
envy; so reversed as he stood there did their old positions seem;
so comparatively doleful now showed, by the sharp turn of the
wheel, the posture of the pilgrim from Woollett. He wondered, this
pilgrim, if he had originally looked to Waymarsh so brave and well,
so remarkably launched, as it was at present the latter's privilege
to appear. He recalled that his friend had remarked to him even at
Chester that his aspect belied his plea of prostration; but there
certainly couldn't have been, for an issue, an aspect less
concerned than Waymarsh's with the menace of decay. Strether had
at any rate never resembled a Southern planter of the great days--
which was the image picturesquely suggested by the happy relation
between the fuliginous face and the wide panama of his visitor.
This type, it further amused him to guess, had been, on Waymarsh's
part, the object of Sarah's care; he was convinced that her taste
had not been a stranger to the conception and purchase of the hat,
any more than her fine fingers had been guiltless of the bestowal
of the rose. It came to him in the current of thought, as things
so oddly did come, that HE had never risen with the lark to attend
a brilliant woman to the Marche aux Fleurs; this could be fastened
on him in connexion neither with Miss Gostrey nor with Madame de
Vionnet; the practice of getting up early for adventures could
indeed in no manner be fastened on him. It came to him in fact
that just here was his usual case: he was for ever missing things
through his general genius for missing them, while others were for
ever picking them up through a contrary bent. And it was others
who looked abstemious and he who looked greedy; it was he somehow
who finally paid, and it was others who mainly partook. Yes, he
should go to the scaffold yet for he wouldn't know quite whom. He
almost, for that matter, felt on the scaffold now and really quite
enjoying it. It worked out as BECAUSE he was anxious there--it
worked out as for this reason that Waymarsh was so blooming. It
was HIS trip for health, for a change, that proved the success--
which was just what Strether, planning and exerting himself, had
desired it should be. That truth already sat full-blown on his
companion's lips; benevolence breathed from them as with the warmth
of active exercise, and also a little as with the bustle of haste.
"Mrs. Pocock, whom I left a quarter of an hour ago at her hotel,
has asked me to mention to you that she would like to find you at
home here in about another hour. She wants to see you; she has
something to say--or considers, I believe, that you may have: so
that I asked her myself why she shouldn't come right round. She
hasn't BEEN round yet--to see our place; and I took upon myself to
say that I was sure you'd be glad to have her. The thing's
therefore, you see, to keep right here till she comes."
The announcement was sociably, even though, after Waymarsh's wont,
somewhat solemnly made; but Strether quickly felt other things in
it than these light features. It was the first approach, from that
quarter, to admitted consciousness; it quickened his pulse; it
simply meant at last that he should have but himself to thank if he
didn't know where he was. He had finished his breakfast; he
pushed it away and was on his feet. There were plenty of elements
of surprise, but only one of doubt. "The thing's for YOU to keep
here too?" Waymarsh had been slightly ambiguous.
He wasn't ambiguous, however, after this enquiry; and Strether's
understanding had probably never before opened so wide and
effective a mouth as it was to open during the next five minutes.
It was no part of his friend's wish, as appeared, to help to
receive Mrs. Pocock; he quite understood the spirit in which she
was to present herself, but his connexion with her visit was
limited to his having--well, as he might say--perhaps a little
promoted it. He had thought, and had let her know it, that
Strether possibly would think she might have been round before. At
any rate, as turned out, she had been wanting herself, quite a
while, to come. "I told her," said Waymarsh, "that it would have
been a bright idea if she had only carried it out before."
Strether pronounced it so bright as to be almost dazzling. "But
why HASn't she carried it out before? She has seen me every day--
she had only to name her hour. I've been waiting and waiting."
"Well, I told her you had. And she has been waiting too." It was,
in the oddest way in the world, on the showing of this tone, a
genial new pressing coaxing Waymarsh; a Waymarsh conscious with a
different consciousness from any he had yet betrayed, and actually
rendered by it almost insinuating. He lacked only time for full
persuasion, and Strether was to see in a moment why. Meantime,
however, our friend perceived, he was announcing a step of some
magnanimity on Mrs. Pocock's part, so that he could deprecate a
sharp question. It was his own high purpose in fact to have
smoothed sharp questions to rest. He looked his old comrade very
straight in the eyes, and he had never conveyed to him in so mute a
manner so much kind confidence and so much good advice. Everything
that was between them was again in his face, but matured and
shelved and finally disposed of. "At any rate," he added, "she's
coming now."
Considering how many pieces had to fit themselves, it all fell, in
Strether's brain, into a close rapid order. He saw on the spot
what had happened, and what probably would yet; and it was all
funny enough. It was perhaps just this freedom of appreciation
that wound him up to his flare of high spirits. "What is she
coming FOR?--to kill me?"
"She's coming to be very VERY kind to you, and you must let me say
that I greatly hope you'll not be less so to herself."
This was spoken by Waymarsh with much gravity of admonition, and as
Strether stood there he knew he had but to make a movement to take
the attitude of a man gracefully receiving a present. The present
was that of the opportunity dear old Waymarsh had flattered himself
he had divined in him the slight soreness of not having yet
thoroughly enjoyed; so he had brought it to him thus, as on a
little silver breakfast-tray, familiarly though delicately--without
oppressive pomp; and he was to bend and smile and acknowledge, was
to take and use and be grateful. He was not--that was the beauty
of it--to be asked to deflect too much from his dignity. No wonder
the old boy bloomed in this bland air of his own distillation.
Strether felt for a moment as if Sarah were actually walking up and
down outside. Wasn't she hanging about the porte-cochere while
her friend thus summarily opened a way? Strether would meet her
but to take it, and everything would be for the best in the best of
possible worlds. He had never so much known what any one meant as,
in the light of this demonstration, he knew what Mrs. Newsome did.
It had reached Waymarsh from Sarah, but it had reached Sarah from
her mother, and there was no break in the chain by which it reached
HIM. "Has anything particular happened," he asked after a minute--
"so suddenly to determine her? Has she heard anything unexpected
from home?"
Waymarsh, on this, it seemed to him, looked at him harder than
ever. "'Unexpected'?" He had a brief hesitation; then, however,
he was firm. "We're leaving Paris."
"Leaving? That IS sudden."
Waymarsh showed a different opinion. "Less so than it may seem.
The purpose of Mrs. Pocock's visit is to explain to you in fact
that it's NOT."
Strether didn't at all know if he had really an advantage--
anything that would practically count as one; but he enjoyed for
the moment--as for the first time in his life--the sense of so
carrying it off. He wondered--it was amusing--if he felt as the
impudent feel. "I shall take great pleasure, I assure you, in any
explanation. I shall be delighted to receive Sarah."
The sombre glow just darkened in his comrade's eyes; but he was
struck with the way it died out again. It was too mixed with
another consciousness--it was too smothered, as might be said, in
flowers. He really for the time regretted it--poor dear old sombre
glow! Something straight and simple, something heavy and empty, had
been eclipsed in its company; something by which he had best known
his friend. Waymarsh wouldn't BE his friend, somehow, without the
occasional ornament of the sacred rage, and the right to the sacred
rage--inestimably precious for Strether's charity--he also seemed
in a manner, and at Mrs. Pocock's elbow, to have forfeited.
Strether remembered the occasion early in their stay when on that
very spot he had come out with his earnest, his ominous "Quit it!"--
and, so remembering, felt it hang by a hair that he didn't
himself now utter the same note. Waymarsh was having a good time--
this was the truth that was embarrassing for him, and he was having
it then and there, he was having it in Europe, he was having it
under the very protection of circumstances of which he didn't in
the least approve; all of which placed him in a false position,
with no issue possible--none at least by the grand manner. It was
practically in the manner of any one--it was all but in poor
Strether's own--that instead of taking anything up he merely made
the most of having to be himself explanatory. "I'm not leaving for
the United States direct. Mr. and Mrs. Pocock and Miss Mamie are
thinking of a little trip before their own return, and we've been
talking for some days past of our joining forces. We've settled it
that we do join and that we sail together the end of next month.
But we start to-morrow for Switzerland. Mrs. Pocock wants some
scenery. She hasn't had much yet."
He was brave in his way too, keeping nothing back, confessing all
there was, and only leaving Strether to make certain connexions.
"Is what Mrs. Newsome had cabled her daughter an injunction to
break off short?"
The grand manner indeed at this just raised its head a little.
"I know nothing about Mrs. Newsome's cables."
Their eyes met on it with some intensity--during the few seconds of
which something happened quite out of proportion to the time.
It happened that Strether, looking thus at his friend, didn't take
his answer for truth--and that something more again occurred in
consequence of THAT. Yes--Waymarsh just DID know about
Mrs. Newsome's cables: to what other end than that had they dined
together at Bignon's? Strether almost felt for the instant that it
was to Mrs. Newsome herself the dinner had been given; and, for
that matter, quite felt how she must have known about it and, as he
might think, protected and consecrated it. He had a quick blurred
view of daily cables, questions, answers, signals: clear enough
was his vision of the expense that, when so wound up, the lady at
home was prepared to incur. Vivid not less was his memory of what,
during his long observation of her, some of her attainments of that
high pitch had cost her. Distinctly she was at the highest now,
and Waymarsh, who imagined himself an independent performer, was
really, forcing his fine old natural voice, an overstrained
accompanist. The whole reference of his errand seemed to mark her
for Strether as by this time consentingly familiar to him, and
nothing yet had so despoiled her of a special shade of
consideration. "You don't know," he asked, "whether Sarah has been
directed from home to try me on the matter of my also going to
Switzerland?"
"I know," said Waymarsh as manfully as possible, "nothing whatever
about her private affairs; though I believe her to be acting in
conformity with things that have my highest respect." It was as
manful as possible, but it was still the false note--as it had to
be to convey so sorry a statement. He knew everything, Strether
more and more felt, that he thus disclaimed, and his little
punishment was just in this doom to a second fib. What falser
position--given the man--could the most vindictive mind impose?
He ended by squeezing through a passage in which three months before
he would certainly have stuck fast. "Mrs Pocock will probably be
ready herself to answer any enquiry you may put to her. But,"
he continued, "BUT--!" He faltered on it.
"But what? Don't put her too many?"
Waymarsh looked large, but the harm was done; he couldn't, do what
he would, help looking rosy. "Don't do anything you'll be sorry for."
It was an attenuation, Strether guessed, of something else that had
been on his lips; it was a sudden drop to directness, and was
thereby the voice of sincerity. He had fallen to the supplicating
note, and that immediately, for our friend, made a difference and
reinstated him. They were in communication as they had been, that
first morning, in Sarah's salon and in her presence and Madame de
Vionnet's; and the same recognition of a great good will was again,
after all, possible. Only the amount of response Waymarsh had then
taken for granted was doubled, decupled now. This came out when he
presently said: "Of course I needn't assure you I hope you'll
come with us." Then it was that his implications and expectations
loomed up for Strether as almost pathetically gross.
The latter patted his shoulder while he thanked him, giving the
go-by to the question of joining the Pococks; he expressed the joy he
felt at seeing him go forth again so brave and free, and he in fact
almost took leave of him on the spot. "I shall see you again of
course before you go; but I'm meanwhile much obliged to you for
arranging so conveniently for what you've told me. I shall walk up
and down in the court there--dear little old court which we've each
bepaced so, this last couple of months, to the tune of our flights
and our drops, our hesitations and our plunges: I shall hang about
there, all impatience and excitement, please let Sarah know, till
she graciously presents herself. Leave me with her without fear,"
he laughed; "I assure you I shan't hurt her. I don't think either
she'll hurt ME: I'm in a situation in which damage was some time
ago discounted. Besides, THAT isn't what worries you--but don't,
don't explain! We're all right as we are: which was the degree of
success our adventure was pledged to for each of us. We weren't,
it seemed, all right as we were before; and we've got over the
ground, all things considered, quickly. I hope you'll have a
lovely time in the Alps."
Waymarsh fairly looked up at him as from the foot of them. "I
don't know as I OUGHT really to go."
It was the conscience of Milrose in the very voice of Milrose, but,
oh it was feeble and flat! Strether suddenly felt quite ashamed for
him; he breathed a greater boldness. "LET yourself, on the
contrary, go--in all agreeable directions. These are precious
hours--at our age they mayn't recur. Don't have it to say to
yourself at Milrose, next winter, that you hadn't courage for
them." And then as his comrade queerly stared: "Live up to Mrs.
Pocock."
"Live up to her?"
"You're a great help to her."
Waymarsh looked at it as at one of the uncomfortable things that
were certainly true and that it was yet ironical to say. "It's
more then than you are."
"That's exactly your own chance and advantage. Besides," said
Strether, "I do in my way contribute. I know what I'm about."
Waymarsh had kept on his great panama, and, as he now stood nearer
the door, his last look beneath the shade of it had turned again to
darkness and warning. "So do I! See here, Strether."
"I know what you're going to say. 'Quit this'?"
"Quit this!" But it lacked its old intensity; nothing of it
remained; it went out of the room with him.
III
Almost the first thing, strangely enough, that, about an hour
later, Strether found himself doing in Sarah's presence was to
remark articulately on this failure, in their friend, of what had
been superficially his great distinction. It was as if--he alluded
of course to the grand manner--the dear man had sacrificed it to
some other advantage; which would be of course only for himself to
measure. It might be simply that he was physically so much more
sound than on his first coming out; this was all prosaic,
comparatively cheerful and vulgar. And fortunately, if one came to
that, his improvement in health was really itself grander than any
manner it could be conceived as having cost him. "You yourself
alone, dear Sarah"--Strether took the plunge--"have done him, it
strikes me, in these three weeks, as much good as all the rest of
his time together."
It was a plunge because somehow the range of reference was, in the
conditions, "funny," and made funnier still by Sarah's attitude, by
the turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so sensibly taken.
Her appearance was really indeed funnier than anything else--the
spirit in which he felt her to be there as soon as she was there,
the shade of obscurity that cleared up for him as soon as he was
seated with her in the small salon de lecture that had, for the
most part, in all the weeks, witnessed the wane of his early
vivacity of discussion with Waymarsh. It was an immense thing,
quite a tremendous thing, for her to have come: this truth opened
out to him in spite of his having already arrived for himself at a
fairly vivid view of it. He had done exactly what he had given
Waymarsh his word for--had walked and re-walked the court while he
awaited her advent; acquiring in this exercise an amount of light
that affected him at the time as flooding the scene. She had
decided upon the step in order to give him the benefit of a doubt,
in order to be able to say to her mother that she had, even to
abjectness, smoothed the way for him. The doubt had been as to
whether he mightn't take her as not having smoothed it--and the
admonition had possibly come from Waymarsh's more detached spirit.
Waymarsh had at any rate, certainly, thrown his weight into the
scale--he had pointed to the importance of depriving their friend
of a grievance. She had done justice to the plea, and it was to
set herself right with a high ideal that she actually sat there in
her state. Her calculation was sharp in the immobility with which
she held her tall parasol-stick upright and at arm's length, quite
as if she had struck the place to plant her flag; in the separate
precautions she took not to show as nervous; in the aggressive
repose in which she did quite nothing but wait for him. Doubt
ceased to be possible from the moment he had taken in that she had
arrived with no proposal whatever; that her concern was simply to
show what she had come to receive. She had come to receive his
submission, and Waymarsh was to have made it plain to him that she
would expect nothing less. He saw fifty things, her host, at this
convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was that their
anxious friend hadn't quite had the hand required of him.
Waymarsh HAD, however, uttered the request that she might find him
mild, and while hanging about the court before her arrival he had
turned over with zeal the different ways in which he could be so.
The difficulty was that if he was mild he wasn't, for her purpose,
conscious. If she wished him conscious--as everything about her
cried aloud that she did--she must accordingly be at costs to make
him so. Conscious he was, for himself--but only of too many
things; so she must choose the one she required.
Practically, however, it at last got itself named, and when once
that had happened they were quite at the centre of their situation.
One thing had really done as well as another; when Strether had
spoken of Waymarsh's leaving him, and that had necessarily brought
on a reference to Mrs. Pocock's similar intention, the jump was but
short to supreme lucidity. Light became indeed after that so
intense that Strether would doubtless have but half made out, in
the prodigious glare, by which of the two the issue had been in
fact precipitated. It was, in their contracted quarters, as much
there between them as if it had been something suddenly spilled
with a crash and a splash on the floor. The form of his submission
was to be an engagement to acquit himself within the twenty-four
hours. "He'll go in a moment if you give him the word--he assures
me on his honour he'll do that": this came in its order, out of
its order, in respect to Chad, after the crash had occurred. It
came repeatedly during the time taken by Strether to feel that he
was even more fixed in his rigour than he had supposed--the time he
was not above adding to a little by telling her that such a way of
putting it on her brother's part left him sufficiently surprised.
She wasn't at all funny at last--she was really fine; and he felt
easily where she was strong--strong for herself. It hadn't yet so
come home to him that she was nobly and appointedly officious.
She was acting in interests grander and clearer than that of her
poor little personal, poor little Parisian equilibrium, and all his
consciousness of her mother's moral pressure profited by this proof
of its sustaining force. She would be held up; she would be
strengthened; he needn't in the least be anxious for her.
What would once more have been distinct to him had he tried to
make it so was that, as Mrs. Newsome was essentially all moral pressure,
the presence of this element was almost identical with her own presence.
It wasn't perhaps that he felt he was dealing with her straight,
but it was certainly as if she had been dealing straight with HIM.
She was reaching him somehow by the lengthened arm of the spirit,
and he was having to that extent to take her into account;
but he wasn't reaching her in turn, not making her take HIM;
he was only reaching Sarah, who appeared to take so little of him.
"Something has clearly passed between you and Chad," he presently said,
"that I think I ought to know something more about. Does he put it all,"
he smiled, "on me?"
"Did you come out," she asked, "to put it all on HIM?"
But he replied to this no further than, after an instant, by
saying: "Oh it's all right. Chad I mean's all right in having
said to you--well anything he may have said. I'll TAKE it all--
what he does put on me. Only I must see him before I see you
again."
She hesitated, but she brought it out. "Is it absolutely necessary
you should see me again?"
"Certainly, if I'm to give you any definite word about anything."
"Is it your idea then," she returned, "that I shall keep on meeting
you only to be exposed to fresh humiliation?"
He fixed her a longer time. "Are your instructions from
Mrs. Newsome that you shall, even at the worst, absolutely and
irretrievably break with me?"
"My instructions from Mrs. Newsome are, if you please, my affair.
You know perfectly what your own were, and you can judge for
yourself of what it can do for you to have made what you have of
them. You can perfectly see, at any rate, I'll go so far as to
say, that if I wish not to expose myself I must wish still less to
expose HER." She had already said more than she had quite
expected; but, though she had also pulled up, the colour in her
face showed him he should from one moment to the other have it all.
He now indeed felt the high importance of his having it. "What is
your conduct," she broke out as if to explain--"what is your
conduct but an outrage to women like US? I mean your acting as if
there can be a doubt--as between us and such another--of his duty?"
He thought a moment. It was rather much to deal with at once; not
only the question itself, but the sore abysses it revealed.
"Of course they're totally different kinds of duty."
"And do you pretend that he has any at all--to such another?"
"Do you mean to Madame de Vionnet?" He uttered the name not to
affront her, but yet again to gain time--time that he needed for
taking in something still other and larger than her demand of a
moment before. It wasn't at once that he could see all that was
in her actual challenge; but when he did he found himself just
checking a low vague sound, a sound which was perhaps the nearest
approach his vocal chords had ever known to a growl. Everything
Mrs. Pocock had failed to give a sign of recognising in Chad as a
particular part of a transformation--everything that had lent
intention to this particular failure--affected him as gathered into
a large loose bundle and thrown, in her words, into his face. The
missile made him to that extent catch his breath; which however he
presently recovered. "Why when a woman's at once so charming and
so beneficent--"
"You can sacrifice mothers and sisters to her without a blush and
can make them cross the ocean on purpose to feel the more and take
from you the straighter, HOW you do it?"
Yes, she had taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but he
tried not to flounder in her grasp. "I don't think there's
anything I've done in any such calculated way as you describe.
Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of
everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to my having
come before you, and my having come was a result of our general
state of mind. Our general state of mind had proceeded, on its
side, from our queer ignorance, our queer misconceptions and
confusions--from which, since then, an inexorable tide of light
seems to have floated us into our perhaps still queerer knowledge.
Don't you LIKE your brother as he is," he went on, "and haven't
you given your mother an intelligible account of all that that
comes to?"
It put to her also, doubtless, his own tone, too many things, this
at least would have been the case hadn't his final challenge
directly helped her. Everything, at the stage they had reached,
directly helped her, because everything betrayed in him such a
basis of intention. He saw--the odd way things came out!--that he
would have been held less monstrous had he only been a little
wilder. What exposed him was just his poor old trick of quiet
inwardness, what exposed him was his THINKING such offence. He hadn't
in the least however the desire to irritate that Sarah imputed to him,
and he could only at last temporise, for the moment, with her
indignant view. She was altogether more inflamed than he had
expected, and he would probably understand this better when he
should learn what had occurred for her with Chad. Till then her
view of his particular blackness, her clear surprise at his not
clutching the pole she held out, must pass as extravagant. "I
leave you to flatter yourself," she returned, "that what you speak
of is what YOU'VE beautifully done. When a thing has been already
described in such a lovely way--!" But she caught herself up, and
her comment on his description rang out sufficiently loud. "Do you
consider her even an apology for a decent woman?"
Ah there it was at last! She put the matter more crudely than, for
his own mixed purposes, he had yet had to do; but essentially it
was all one matter. It was so much--so much; and she treated it,
poor lady, as so little. He grew conscious, as he was now apt to
do, of a strange smile, and the next moment he found himself
talking like Miss Barrace. "She has struck me from the first as
wonderful. I've been thinking too moreover that, after all, she
would probably have represented even for yourself something rather
new and rather good."
He was to have given Mrs. Pocock with this, however, but her best
opportunity for a sound of derision. "Rather new? I hope so with
all my heart!"
"I mean," he explained, "that she might have affected you by her
exquisite amiability--a real revelation, it has seemed to myself;
her high rarity, her distinction of every sort."
He had been, with these words, consciously a little "precious"; but
he had had to be--he couldn't give her the truth of the case
without them; and it seemed to him moreover now that he didn't
care. He had at all events not served his cause, for she sprang at
its exposed side. "A 'revelation'--to ME: I've come to such a
woman for a revelation? You talk to me about 'distinction'--
YOU, you who've had your privilege?--when the most distinguished woman
we shall either of us have seen in this world sits there insulted,
in her loneliness, by your incredible comparison!"
Strether forbore, with an effort, from straying; but he looked all
about him. "Does your mother herself make the point that she
sits insulted?"
Sarah's answer came so straight, so "pat," as might have been said,
that he felt on the instant its origin. "She has confided to my
judgement and my tenderness the expression of her personal sense of
everything, and the assertion of her personal dignity."
They were the very words of the lady of Woollett--he would have
known them in a thousand; her parting charge to her child. Mrs.
Pocock accordingly spoke to this extent by book, and the fact
immensely moved him. "If she does really feel as you say it's of
course very very dreadful. I've given sufficient proof, one would
have thought," he added, "of my deep admiration for Mrs. Newsome."
"And pray what proof would one have thought you'd CALL sufficient?
That of thinking this person here so far superior to her?"
He wondered again; he waited. "Ah dear Sarah, you must LEAVE me
this person here!"
In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even
perversely, he clung to his rag of reason, he had softly almost
wailed this plea. Yet he knew it to be perhaps the most positive
declaration he had ever made in his life, and his visitor's
reception of it virtually gave it that importance. "That's exactly
what I'm delighted to do. God knows WE don't want her! You take
good care not to meet," she observed in a still higher key,
"my question about their life. If you do consider it a thing
one can even SPEAK of, I congratulate you on your taste!"
The life she alluded to was of course Chad's and Madame de Vionnet's,
which she thus bracketed together in a way that made him wince
a little; there being nothing for him but to take home her
full intention. It was none the less his inconsequence that while
he had himself been enjoying for weeks the view of the brilliant
woman's specific action, he just suffered from any characterisation
of it by other lips. "I think tremendously well of her, at the
same time that I seem to feel her 'life' to be really none of my
business. It's my business, that is, only so far as Chad's own
life is affected by it; and what has happened, don't you see? is
that Chad's has been affected so beautifully. The proof of the
pudding's in the eating"--he tried, with no great success, to help
it out with a touch of pleasantry, while she let him go on as if to
sink and sink. He went on however well enough, as well as he could
do without fresh counsel; he indeed shouldn't stand quite firm, he
felt, till he should have re-established his communications with
Chad. Still, he could always speak for the woman he had so
definitely promised to "save." This wasn't quite for her the air
of salvation; but as that chill fairly deepened what did it become
but a reminder that one might at the worst perish WITH her? And it
was simple enough--it was rudimentary: not, not to give her away.
"I find in her more merits than you would probably have patience
with my counting over. And do you know," he enquired, "the effect
you produce on me by alluding to her in such terms? It's as if you
had some motive in not recognising all she has done for your
brother, and so shut your eyes to each side of the matter, in
order, whichever side comes up, to get rid of the other. I don't,
you must allow me to say, see how you can with any pretence to
candour get rid of the side nearest you."
"Near me--THAT sort of thing?" And Sarah gave a jerk back of her
head that well might have nullified any active proximity.
It kept her friend himself at his distance, and he respected for a
moment the interval. Then with a last persuasive effort he bridged
it. "You don't, on your honour, appreciate Chad's fortunate
development?"
"Fortunate?" she echoed again. And indeed she was prepared.
"I call it hideous."
Her departure had been for some minutes marked as imminent, and she
was already at the door that stood open to the court, from the
threshold of which she delivered herself of this judgement. It
rang out so loud as to produce for the time the hush of everything
else. Strether quite, as an effect of it, breathed less bravely;
he could acknowledge it, but simply enough. "Oh if you think THAT--!"
"Then all's at an end? So much the better. I do think that!" She
passed out as she spoke and took her way straight across the court,
beyond which, separated from them by the deep arch of the
porte-cochere the low victoria that had conveyed her from her own hotel
was drawn up. She made for it with decision, and the manner of her
break, the sharp shaft of her rejoinder, had an intensity by which
Strether was at first kept in arrest. She had let fly at him as
from a stretched cord, and it took him a minute to recover from the
sense of being pierced. It was not the penetration of surprise;
it was that, much more, of certainty; his case being put for him as
he had as yet only put it to himself. She was away at any rate;
she had distanced him--with rather a grand spring, an effect of pride
and ease, after all; she had got into her carriage before he could
overtake her, and the vehicle was already in motion. He stopped
halfway; he stood there in the court only seeing her go and noting
that she gave him no other look. The way he had put it to himself
was that all quite MIGHT be at an end. Each of her movements,
in this resolute rupture, reaffirmed, re-enforced that idea.
Sarah passed out of sight in the sunny street while, planted there
in the centre of the comparatively grey court, he continued merely
to look before him. It probably WAS all at an end.
Book Eleventh
[Note: In the 1909 New York Edition the following two chapters were placed
in the reverse of the order appearing below. Since 1950, most scholars have
agreed, because of the internal evidence of the two chapters, that an
editorial error caused them to be printed in reverse order. This Etext,
like other editions of the past four decades, corrects the apparent error.
-- Richard D. Hathaway, preparer of this electronic text]
I
He went late that evening to the Boulevard Malesherbes, having his
impression that it would be vain to go early, and having also, more
than once in the course of the day, made enquiries of the concierge.
Chad hadn't come in and had left no intimation; he had affairs,
apparently, at this juncture--as it occurred to Strether he so well
might have--that kept him long abroad. Our friend asked once for
him at the hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, but the only contribution
offered there was the fact that every one was out. It was with
the idea that he would have to come home to sleep that Strether
went up to his rooms, from which however he was still absent, though,
from the balcony, a few moments later, his visitor heard eleven
o'clock strike. Chad's servant had by this time answered for his
reappearance; he HAD, the visitor learned, come quickly in to dress
for dinner and vanish again. Strether spent an hour in waiting
for him--an hour full of strange suggestions, persuasions, recognitions;
one of those that he was to recall, at the end of his adventure, as
the particular handful that most had counted. The mellowest lamplight
and the easiest chair had been placed at his disposal by Baptiste,
subtlest of servants; the novel half-uncut, the novel lemon-coloured
and tender, with the ivory knife athwart it like the dagger in a
contadina's hair, had been pushed within the soft circle--a circle
which, for some reason, affected Strether as softer still after
the same Baptiste had remarked that in the absence of a further need
of anything by Monsieur he would betake himself to bed. The night
was hot and heavy and the single lamp sufficient; the great flare
of the lighted city, rising high, spending itself afar, played up
from the Boulevard and, through the vague vista of the successive
rooms, brought objects into view and added to their dignity.
Strether found himself in possession as he never yet had been;
he had been there alone, had turned over books and prints,
had invoked, in Chad's absence, the spirit of the place,
but never at the witching hour and never with a relish quite
so like a pang.
He spent a long time on the balcony; he hung over it as he had seen
little Bilham hang the day of his first approach, as he had seen
Mamie hang over her own the day little Bilham himself might have
seen her from below; he passed back into the rooms, the three that
occupied the front and that communicated by wide doors; and, while
he circulated and rested, tried to recover the impression that they
had made on him three months before, to catch again the voice in
which they had seemed then to speak to him. That voice, he had to
note, failed audibly to sound; which he took as the proof of all
the change in himself. He had heard, of old, only what he COULD
then hear; what he could do now was to think of three months ago as
a point in the far past. All voices had grown thicker and meant
more things; they crowded on him as he moved about--it was the way
they sounded together that wouldn't let him be still. He felt,
strangely, as sad as if he had come for some wrong, and yet as
excited as if he had come for some freedom. But the freedom was
what was most in the place and the hour, it was the freedom that
most brought him round again to the youth of his own that he had
long ago missed. He could have explained little enough to-day
either why he had missed it or why, after years and years, he
should care that he had; the main truth of the actual appeal of
everything was none the less that everything represented the
substance of his loss put it within reach, within touch, made it,
to a degree it had never been, an affair of the senses. That was
what it became for him at this singular time, the youth he had long
ago missed--a queer concrete presence, full of mystery, yet full of
reality, which he could handle, taste, smell, the deep breathing of
which he could positively hear. It was in the outside air as well
as within; it was in the long watch, from the balcony, in the
summer night, of the wide late life of Paris, the unceasing soft
quick rumble, below, of the little lighted carriages that, in the
press, always suggested the gamblers he had seen of old at Monte
Carlo pushing up to the tables. This image was before him when he
at last became aware that Chad was behind.
"She tells me you put it all on ME"--he had arrived after this
promptly enough at that information; which expressed the case
however quite as the young man appeared willing for the moment to
leave it. Other things, with this advantage of their virtually
having the night before them, came up for them, and had, as well,
the odd effect of making the occasion, instead of hurried and
feverish, one of the largest, loosest and easiest to which
Strether's whole adventure was to have treated him. He had been
pursuing Chad from an early hour and had overtaken him only now;
but now the delay was repaired by their being so exceptionally
confronted. They had foregathered enough of course in all the
various times; they had again and again, since that first night at
the theatre, been face to face over their question; but they had
never been so alone together as they were actually alone--their
talk hadn't yet been so supremely for themselves. And if many
things moreover passed before them, none passed more distinctly for
Strether than that striking truth about Chad of which he had been
so often moved to take note: the truth that everything came
happily back with him to his knowing how to live. It had been
seated in his pleased smile--a smile that pleased exactly in the
right degree--as his visitor turned round, on the balcony, to greet
his advent; his visitor in fact felt on the spot that there was
nothing their meeting would so much do as bear witness to that
facility. He surrendered himself accordingly to so approved a
gift; for what was the meaning of the facility but that others DID
surrender themselves? He didn't want, luckily, to prevent Chad
from living; but he was quite aware that even if he had he would
himself have thoroughly gone to pieces. It was in truth
essentially by bringing down his personal life to a function all
subsidiary to the young man's own that he held together. And the
great point, above all, the sign of how completely Chad possessed
the knowledge in question, was that one thus became, not only with
a proper cheerfulness, but with wild native impulses, the feeder of
his stream. Their talk had accordingly not lasted three minutes
without Strether's feeling basis enough for the excitement in which
he had waited. This overflow fairly deepened, wastefully abounded,
as he observed the smallness of anything corresponding to it on the
part of his friend. That was exactly this friend's happy case; he
"put out" his excitement, or whatever other emotion the matter
involved, as he put out his washing; than which no arrangement
could make more for domestic order. It was quite for Strether
himself in short to feel a personal analogy with the laundress
bringing home the triumphs of the mangle.
When he had reported on Sarah's visit, which he did very fully,
Chad answered his question with perfect candour. "I positively
referred her to you--told her she must absolutely see you. This was
last night, and it all took place in ten minutes. It was our first
free talk--really the first time she had tackled me. She knew I
also knew what her line had been with yourself; knew moreover how
little you had been doing to make anything difficult for her.
So I spoke for you frankly--assured her you were all at her service.
I assured her I was too," the young man continued; "and I pointed out
how she could perfectly, at any time, have got at me. Her difficulty
has been simply her not finding the moment she fancied."
"Her difficulty," Strether returned, "has been simply that she
finds she's afraid of you. She's not afraid of ME, Sarah, one
little scrap; and it was just because she has seen how I can fidget
when I give my mind to it that she has felt her best chance,
rightly enough to be in making me as uneasy as possible. I think
she's at bottom as pleased to HAVE you put it on me as you yourself
can possibly be to put it."
"But what in the world, my dear man," Chad enquired in objection to
this luminosity, "have I done to make Sally afraid?"
"You've been 'wonderful, wonderful,' as we say--we poor people who
watch the play from the pit; and that's what has, admirably, made
her. Made her all the more effectually that she could see you didn't
set about it on purpose--I mean set about affecting her as with fear."
Chad cast a pleasant backward glance over his possibilities of
motive. "I've only wanted to be kind and friendly, to be decent
and attentive--and I still only want to be."
Strether smiled at his comfortable clearness. "Well, there can
certainly be no way for it better than by my taking the onus. It
reduces your personal friction and your personal offence to almost
nothing."
Ah but Chad, with his completer conception of the friendly, wouldn't
quite have this! They had remained on the balcony, where, after their
day of great and premature heat, the midnight air was delicious;
and they leaned back in turn against the balustrade, all in harmony with
the chairs and the flower-pots, the cigarettes and the starlight.
"The onus isn't REALLY yours--after our agreeing so to wait together
and judge together. That was all my answer to Sally," Chad pursued--
"that we have been, that we are, just judging together."
"I'm not afraid of the burden," Strether explained; "I haven't
come in the least that you should take it off me. I've come very
much, it seems to me, to double up my fore legs in the manner of
the camel when he gets down on his knees to make his back convenient.
But I've supposed you all this while to have been doing a lot of
special and private judging--about which I haven't troubled you;
and I've only wished to have your conclusion first from you.
I don't ask more than that; I'm quite ready to take it as it has come."
Chad turned up his face to the sky with a slow puff of his smoke.
"Well, I've seen."
Strether waited a little. "I've left you wholly alone; haven't, I
think I may say, since the first hour or two--when I merely
preached patience--so much as breathed on you."
"Oh you've been awfully good!"
"We've both been good then--we've played the game. We've given
them the most liberal conditions."
"Ah," said Chad, "splendid conditions! It was open to them, open
to them"--he seemed to make it out, as he smoked, with his eyes
still on the stars. He might in quiet sport have been reading
their horoscope. Strether wondered meanwhile what had been open to
them, and he finally let him have it. "It was open to them simply
to let me alone; to have made up their minds, on really seeing me
for themselves, that I could go on well enough as I was."
Strether assented to this proposition with full lucidity, his
companion's plural pronoun, which stood all for Mrs. Newsome and
her daughter, having no ambiguity for him. There was nothing,
apparently, to stand for Mamie and Jim; and this added to our
friend's sense of Chad's knowing what he thought. "But they've made
up their minds to the opposite--that you CAN'T go on as you are."
"No," Chad continued in the same way; "they won't have it for a minute."
Strether on his side also reflectively smoked. It was as if their
high place really represented some moral elevation from which they
could look down on their recent past. "There never was the
smallest chance, do you know, that they WOULD have it for a moment."
"Of course not--no real chance. But if they were willing to think
there was--!"
"They weren't willing." Strether had worked it all out. "It wasn't
for you they came out, but for me. It wasn't to see for themselves
what you're doing, but what I'm doing. The first branch of their
curiosity was inevitably destined, under my culpable delay, to give way
to the second; and it's on the second that, if I may use the expression
and you don't mind my marking the invidious fact, they've been of late
exclusively perched. When Sarah sailed it was me, in other words,
they were after."
Chad took it in both with intelligence and with indulgence. "It IS
rather a business then--what I've let you in for!"
Strether had again a brief pause; which ended in a reply that
seemed to dispose once for all of this element of compunction.
Chad was to treat it, at any rate, so far as they were again
together, as having done so. "I was 'in' when you found me."
"Ah but it was you," the young man laughed, "who found ME."
"I only found you out. It was you who found me in. It was all in
the day's work for them, at all events, that they should come. And
they've greatly enjoyed it," Strether declared.
"Well, I've tried to make them," said Chad.
His companion did himself presently the same justice. "So have I.
I tried even this very morning--while Mrs. Pocock was with me. She
enjoys for instance, almost as much as anything else, not being, as
I've said, afraid of me; and I think I gave her help in that."
Chad took a deeper interest. "Was she very very nasty?"
Strether debated. "Well, she was the most important thing--she was
definite. She was--at last--crystalline. And I felt no remorse.
I saw that they must have come."
"Oh I wanted to see them for myself; so that if it were only for
THAT--!" Chad's own remorse was as small.
This appeared almost all Strether wanted. "Isn't your having seen
them for yourself then THE thing, beyond all others, that has come
of their visit?"
Chad looked as if he thought it nice of his old friend to put it
so. "Don't you count it as anything that you're dished--if you ARE
dished? Are you, my dear man, dished?"
It sounded as if he were asking if he had caught cold or hurt his
foot, and Strether for a minute but smoked and smoked. "I want to
see her again. I must see her."
"Of course you must." Then Chad hesitated. "Do you mean--a--Mother
herself?"
"Oh your mother--that will depend."
It was as if Mrs. Newsome had somehow been placed by the words
very far off. Chad however endeavoured in spite of this to reach
the place. "What do you mean it will depend on?"
Strether, for all answer, gave him a longish look. "I was speaking
of Sarah. I must positively--though she quite cast me off--see HER
again. I can't part with her that way."
"Then she was awfully unpleasant?"
Again Strether exhaled. "She was what she had to be. I mean that
from the moment they're not delighted they can only be--well what I
admit she was. We gave them," he went on, "their chance to be
delighted, and they've walked up to it, and looked all round it,
and not taken it."
"You can bring a horse to water--!" Chad suggested.
"Precisely. And the tune to which this morning Sarah wasn't
delighted--the tune to which, to adopt your metaphor, she refused
to drink--leaves us on that side nothing more to hope."
Chad had a pause, and then as if consolingly: "It was never of
course really the least on the cards that they would be 'delighted.'"
"Well, I don't know, after all," Strether mused. "I've had to come
as far round. However"--he shook it off--"it's doubtless MY
performance that's absurd."
"There are certainly moments," said Chad, "when you seem to me too
good to be true. Yet if you are true," he added, "that seems to be
all that need concern me."
"I'm true, but I'm incredible. I'm fantastic and ridiculous--
I don't explain myself even TO myself. How can they then,"
Strether asked, "understand me? So I don't quarrel with them."
"I see. They quarrel," said Chad rather comfortably, "with US."
Strether noted once more the comfort, but his young friend had
already gone on. "I should feel greatly ashamed, all the same,
if I didn't put it before you again that you ought to think,
after all, tremendously well. I mean before giving up beyond recall--"
With which insistence, as from a certain delicacy, dropped.
Ah but Strether wanted it. "Say it all, say it all."
"Well, at your age, and with what--when all's said and done--
Mother might do for you and be for you."
Chad had said it all, from his natural scruple, only to that
extent; so that Strether after an instant himself took a hand.
"My absence of an assured future. The little I have to show toward
the power to take care of myself. The way, the wonderful way,
she would certainly take care of me. Her fortune, her kindness,
and the constant miracle of her having been disposed to go even so far.
Of course, of course"--he summed it up. "There are those sharp facts."
Chad had meanwhile thought of another still. "And don't you really
care--?"
His friend slowly turned round to him. "Will you go?"
"I'll go if you'll say you now consider I should. You know," he
went on, "I was ready six weeks ago."
"Ah," said Strether, "that was when you didn't know I wasn't!
You're ready at present because you do know it."
"That may be," Chad returned; "but all the same I'm sincere. You
talk about taking the whole thing on your shoulders, but in what
light do you regard me that you think me capable of letting you
pay?" Strether patted his arm, as they stood together against the
parapet, reassuringly--seeming to wish to contend that he HAD the
wherewithal; but it was again round this question of purchase and
price that the young man's sense of fairness continued to hover.
"What it literally comes to for you, if you'll pardon my putting it
so, is that you give up money. Possibly a good deal of money."
"Oh," Strether laughed, "if it were only just enough you'd still be
justified in putting it so! But I've on my side to remind you too
that YOU give up money; and more than 'possibly'--quite certainly,
as I should suppose--a good deal."
"True enough; but I've got a certain quantity," Chad returned after
a moment. "Whereas you, my dear man, you--"
"I can't be at all said"--Strether took him up--"to have a 'quantity'
certain or uncertain? Very true. Still, I shan't starve."
"Oh you mustn't STARVE!" Chad pacifically emphasised; and so, in
the pleasant conditions, they continued to talk; though there was,
for that matter, a pause in which the younger companion might have
been taken as weighing again the delicacy of his then and there
promising the elder some provision against the possibility just
mentioned. This, however, he presumably thought best not to do,
for at the end of another minute they had moved in quite a different
direction. Strether had broken in by returning to the subject of
Chad's passage with Sarah and enquiring if they had arrived, in the
event, at anything in the nature of a "scene." To this Chad replied
that they had on the contrary kept tremendously polite; adding moreover
that Sally was after all not the woman to have made the mistake of
not being. "Her hands are a good deal tied, you see. I got so,
from the first," he sagaciously observed, "the start of her."
"You mean she has taken so much from you?"
"Well, I couldn't of course in common decency give less: only she
hadn't expected, I think, that I'd give her nearly so much. And
she began to take it before she knew it."
"And she began to like it," said Strether, "as soon as she began to
take it!"
"Yes, she has liked it--also more than she expected." After which
Chad observed: "But she doesn't like ME. In fact she hates me."
Strether's interest grew. "Then why does she want you at home?"
"Because when you hate you want to triumph, and if she should get
me neatly stuck there she WOULD triumph."
Strether followed afresh, but looking as he went. "Certainly--in a
manner. But it would scarce be a triumph worth having if, once
entangled, feeling her dislike and possibly conscious in time of a
certain quantity of your own, you should on the spot make yourself
unpleasant to her."
"Ah," said Chad, "she can bear ME--could bear me at least at home.
It's my being there that would be her triumph. She hates me in Paris."
"She hates in other words--"
"Yes, THAT'S it!"--Chad had quickly understood this understanding;
which formed on the part of each as near an approach as they had
yet made to naming Madame de Vionnet. The limitations of their
distinctness didn't, however, prevent its fairly lingering in the
air that it was this lady Mrs. Pocock hated. It added one more
touch moreover to their established recognition of the rare intimacy
of Chad's association with her. He had never yet more twitched away
the last light veil from this phenomenon than in presenting himself
as confounded and submerged in the feeling she had created at Woollett.
"And I'll tell you who hates me too," he immediately went on.
Strether knew as immediately whom he meant, but with as prompt a
protest. "Ah no! Mamie doesn't hate--well," he caught himself in
time--"anybody at all. Mamie's beautiful."
Chad shook his head. "That's just why I mind it. She certainly
doesn't like me."
"How much do you mind it? What would you do for her?"
"Well, I'd like her if she'd like me. Really, really," Chad declared.
It gave his companion a moment's pause. "You asked me just now if
I don't, as you said, 'care' about a certain person. You rather
tempt me therefore to put the question in my turn. Don't YOU care
about a certain other person?"
Chad looked at him hard in the lamplight of the window. "The
difference is that I don't want to."
Strether wondered. "'Don't want' to?"
"I try not to--that is I HAVE tried. I've done my best. You can't
be surprised," the young man easily went on, "when you yourself set
me on it. I was indeed," he added, "already on it a little; but you
set me harder. It was six weeks ago that I thought I had come out."
Strether took it well in. "But you haven't come out!"
"I don't know--it's what I WANT to know," said Chad. "And if I
could have sufficiently wanted--by myself--to go back, I think I
might have found out."
"Possibly"--Strether considered. "But all you were able to achieve
was to want to want to! And even then," he pursued, "only till our
friends there came. Do you want to want to still?" As with a
sound half-dolorous, half-droll and all vague and equivocal, Chad
buried his face for a little in his hands, rubbing it in a
whimsical way that amounted to an evasion, he brought it out more
sharply: "DO you?"
Chad kept for a time his attitude, but at last he looked up, and
then abruptly, "Jim IS a damned dose!" he declared.
"Oh I don't ask you to abuse or describe or in any way pronounce on
your relatives; I simply put it to you once more whether you're NOW
ready. You say you've 'seen.' Is what you've seen that you can't
resist?"
Chad gave him a strange smile--the nearest approach he had ever
shown to a troubled one. "Can't you make me NOT resist?"
"What it comes to," Strether went on very gravely now and as if he
hadn't heard him, "what it comes to is that more has been done for
you, I think, than I've ever seen done--attempted perhaps, but
never so successfully done--by one human being for another."
"Oh an immense deal certainly"--Chad did it full justice. "And you
yourself are adding to it."
It was without heeding this either that his visitor continued.
"And our friends there won't have it."
"No, they simply won't."
"They demand you on the basis, as it were, of repudiation and
ingratitude; and what has been the matter with me," Strether went
on, "is that I haven't seen my way to working with you for
repudiation."
Chad appreciated this. "Then as you haven't seen yours you
naturally haven't seen mine. There it is." After which he
proceeded, with a certain abruptness, to a sharp interrogation.
"NOW do you say she doesn't hate me?"
Strether hesitated. "'She'--?"
"Yes--Mother. We called it Sarah, but it comes to the same thing."
"Ah," Strether objected, "not to the same thing as her hating YOU."
On which--though as if for an instant it had hung fire--Chad
remarkably replied: "Well, if they hate my good friend, THAT comes
to the same thing." It had a note of inevitable truth that made
Strether take it as enough, feel he wanted nothing more. The young
man spoke in it for his "good friend" more than he had ever yet
directly spoken, confessed to such deep identities between them as
he might play with the idea of working free from, but which at a
given moment could still draw him down like a whirlpool. And
meanwhile he had gone on. "Their hating you too moreover--that
also comes to a good deal."
"Ah," said Strether, "your mother doesn't."
Chad, however, loyally stuck to it--loyally, that is, to Strether.
"She will if you don't look out."
"Well, I do look out. I am, after all, looking out. That's just
why," our friend explained, "I want to see her again."
It drew from Chad again the same question. "To see Mother?"
"To see--for the present--Sarah."
"Ah then there you are! And what I don't for the life of me make
out," Chad pursued with resigned perplexity, "is what you GAIN by it."
Oh it would have taken his companion too long to say! "That's
because you have, I verily believe, no imagination. You've other
qualities. But no imagination, don't you see? at all."
"I dare say. I do see." It was an idea in which Chad showed
interest. "But haven't you yourself rather too much?"
"Oh RATHER--!" So that after an instant, under this reproach and
as if it were at last a fact really to escape from, Strether made
his move for departure.
II
One of the features of the restless afternoon passed by him after
Mrs. Pocock's visit was an hour spent, shortly before dinner, with
Maria Gostrey, whom of late, in spite of so sustained a call on his
attention from other quarters, he had by no means neglected. And
that he was still not neglecting her will appear from the fact that
he was with her again at the same hour on the very morrow--with no
less fine a consciousness moreover of being able to hold her ear.
It continued inveterately to occur, for that matter, that whenever
he had taken one of his greater turns he came back to where she so
faithfully awaited him. None of these excursions had on the whole
been livelier than the pair of incidents--the fruit of the short
interval since his previous visit--on which he had now to report to
her. He had seen Chad Newsome late the night before, and he had
had that morning, as a sequel to this conversation, a second
interview with Sarah. "But they're all off," he said, "at last."
It puzzled her a moment. "All?--Mr. Newsome with them?"
"Ah not yet! Sarah and Jim and Mamie. But Waymarsh with them--
for Sarah. It's too beautiful," Strether continued; "I find I don't
get over that--it's always a fresh joy. But it's a fresh joy too,"
he added, "that--well, what do you think? Little Bilham also goes.
But he of course goes for Mamie."
Miss Gostrey wondered. "'For' her? Do you mean they're already
engaged?"
"Well," said Strether, "say then for ME. He'll do anything for me;
just as I will, for that matter--anything I can--for him. Or for
Mamie either. SHE'LL do anything for me."
Miss Gostrey gave a comprehensive sigh. "The way you reduce people
to subjection!"
"It's certainly, on one side, wonderful. But it's quite equalled,
on another, by the way I don't. I haven't reduced Sarah, since
yesterday; though I've succeeded in seeing her again, as I'll
presently tell you. The others however are really all right.
Mamie, by that blessed law of ours, absolutely must have a young
man."
"But what must poor Mr. Bilham have? Do you mean they'll MARRY
for you?"
"I mean that, by the same blessed law, it won't matter a grain if
they don't--I shan't have in the least to worry."
She saw as usual what he meant. "And Mr. Jim?--who goes for him?"
"Oh," Strether had to admit, "I couldn't manage THAT. He's
thrown, as usual, on the world; the world which, after all, by his
account--for he has prodigious adventures--seems very good to him.
He fortunately--'over here,' as he says--finds the world
everywhere; and his most prodigious adventure of all," he went on,
"has been of course of the last few days."
Miss Gostrey, already knowing, instantly made the connexion. "He
has seen Marie de Vionnet again?"
"He went, all by himself, the day after Chad's party--didn't I
tell you?--to tea with her. By her invitation--all alone."
"Quite like yourself!" Maria smiled.
"Oh but he's more wonderful about her than I am!" And then as his
friend showed how she could believe it, filling it out, fitting it
on to old memories of the wonderful woman: "What I should have
liked to manage would have been HER going."
"To Switzerland with the party?"
"For Jim--and for symmetry. If it had been workable moreover for
a fortnight she'd have gone. She's ready"--he followed up his
renewed vision of her--"for anything."
Miss Gostrey went with him a minute. "She's too perfect!"
"She WILL, I think," he pursued, "go to-night to the station."
"To see him off?"
"With Chad--marvellously--as part of their general attention. And
she does it"--it kept before him--"with a light, light grace, a
free, free gaiety, that may well softly bewilder Mr. Pocock."
It kept her so before him that his companion had after an instant a
friendly comment. "As in short it has softly bewildered a saner
man. Are you really in love with her?" Maria threw off.
"It's of no importance I should know," he replied. "It matters so
little--has nothing to do, practically, with either of us."
"All the same"--Maria continued to smile--"they go, the five, as I
understand you, and you and Madame de Vionnet stay."
"Oh and Chad." To which Strether added: "And you."
"Ah 'me'!"--she gave a small impatient wail again, in which
something of the unreconciled seemed suddenly to break out. "I
don't stay, it somehow seems to me, much to my advantage. In the
presence of all you cause to pass before me I've a tremendous sense
of privation."
Strether hesitated. "But your privation, your keeping out of
everything, has been--hasn't it?--by your own choice."
"Oh yes; it has been necessary--that is it has been better for you.
What I mean is only that I seem to have ceased to serve you."
"How can you tell that?" he asked. "You don't know how you serve me.
When you cease--"
"Well?" she said as he dropped.
"Well, I'll LET you know. Be quiet till then."
She thought a moment. "Then you positively like me to stay?"
"Don't I treat you as if I did?"
"You're certainly very kind to me. But that," said Maria, "is for
myself. It's getting late, as you see, and Paris turning rather
hot and dusty. People are scattering, and some of them, in other
places want me. But if you want me here--!"
She had spoken as resigned to his word, but he had of a sudden a
still sharper sense than he would have expected of desiring not to
lose her. "I want you here."
She took it as if the words were all she had wished; as if they
brought her, gave her something that was the compensation of her
case. "Thank you," she simply answered. And then as he looked at
her a little harder, "Thank you very much," she repeated.
It had broken as with a slight arrest into the current of their
talk, and it held him a moment longer. "Why, two months, or
whatever the time was, ago, did you so suddenly dash off? The
reason you afterwards gave me for having kept away three weeks wasn't
the real one."
She recalled. "I never supposed you believed it was. Yet," she
continued, "if you didn't guess it that was just what helped you."
He looked away from her on this; he indulged, so far as space
permitted, in one of his slow absences. "I've often thought of it,
but never to feel that I could guess it. And you see the
consideration with which I've treated you in never asking till now."
"Now then why DO you ask?"
"To show you how I miss you when you're not here, and what it does
for me."
"It doesn't seem to have done," she laughed, "all it might!
However," she added, "if you've really never guessed the truth I'll
tell it you."
"I've never guessed it," Strether declared.
"Never?"
"Never."
"Well then I dashed off, as you say, so as not to have the
confusion of being there if Marie de Vionnet should tell you
anything to my detriment."
He looked as if he considerably doubted. "You even then would have
had to face it on your return."
"Oh if I had found reason to believe it something very bad I'd have
left you altogether."
"So then," he continued, "it was only on guessing she had been on
the whole merciful that you ventured back?"
Maria kept it together. "I owe her thanks. Whatever her temptation
she didn't separate us. That's one of my reasons," she went on
"for admiring her so."
"Let it pass then," said Strether, "for one of mine as well. But
what would have been her temptation?"
"What are ever the temptations of women?"
He thought--but hadn't, naturally, to think too long. "Men?"
"She would have had you, with it, more for herself. But she saw
she could have you without it."
"Oh 'have' me!" Strether a trifle ambiguously sighed. "YOU," he
handsomely declared, "would have had me at any rate WITH it."
"Oh 'have' you!"--she echoed it as he had done. "I do have you,
however," she less ironically said, "from the moment you express a
wish."
He stopped before her, full of the disposition. "I'll express fifty."
Which indeed begot in her, with a certain inconsequence, a return
of her small wail. "Ah there you are!"
There, if it were so, he continued for the rest of the time to be,
and it was as if to show her how she could still serve him that,
coming back to the departure of the Pococks, he gave her the view,
vivid with a hundred more touches than we can reproduce, of what
had happened for him that morning. He had had ten minutes with
Sarah at her hotel, ten minutes reconquered, by irresistible pressure,
from the time over which he had already described her to Miss Gostrey
as having, at the end of their interview on his own premises, passed
the great sponge of the future. He had caught her by not announcing
himself, had found her in her sitting-room with a dressmaker and a
lingere whose accounts she appeared to have been more or less
ingenuously settling and who soon withdrew. Then he had explained
to her how he had succeeded, late the night before, in keeping
his promise of seeing Chad. "I told her I'd take it all."
"You'd 'take' it?"
"Why if he doesn't go."
Maria waited. "And who takes it if he does?" she enquired with a
certain grimness of gaiety.
"Well," said Strether, "I think I take, in any event, everything."
"By which I suppose you mean," his companion brought out after a
moment, "that you definitely understand you now lose everything."
He stood before her again. "It does come perhaps to the same
thing. But Chad, now that he has seen, doesn't really want it."
She could believe that, but she made, as always, for clearness.
"Still, what, after all, HAS he seen?"
"What they want of him. And it's enough."
"It contrasts so unfavourably with what Madame de Vionnet wants?"
"It contrasts--just so; all round, and tremendously."
"Therefore, perhaps, most of all with what YOU want?"
"Oh," said Strether, "what I want is a thing I've ceased to measure
or even to understand."
But his friend none the less went on. "Do you want Mrs. Newsome--
after such a way of treating you?"
It was a straighter mode of dealing with this lady than they had as
yet--such was their high form--permitted themselves; but it seemed
not wholly for this that he delayed a moment. "I dare say it has
been, after all, the only way she could have imagined."
"And does that make you want her any more?"
"I've tremendously disappointed her," Strether thought it worth
while to mention.
"Of course you have. That's rudimentary; that was plain to us long
ago. But isn't it almost as plain," Maria went on, "that you've
even yet your straight remedy? Really drag him away, as I believe
you still can, and you'd cease to have to count with her
disappointment."
"Ah then," he laughed, "I should have to count with yours!"
But this barely struck her now. "What, in that case, should you
call counting? You haven't come out where you are, I think, to
please ME."
"Oh," he insisted, "that too, you know, has been part of it.
I can't separate--it's all one; and that's perhaps why, as I say,
I don't understand." But he was ready to declare again that this
didn't in the least matter; all the more that, as he affirmed,
he HADn't really as yet "come out." "She gives me after all, on
its coming to the pinch, a last mercy, another chance. They don't
sail, you see, for five or six weeks more, and they haven't--she
admits that--expected Chad would take part in their tour. It's
still open to him to join them, at the last, at Liverpool."
Miss Gostrey considered. "How in the world is it 'open' unless you
open it? How can he join them at Liverpool if he but sinks deeper
into his situation here?"
"He has given her--as I explained to you that she let me know
yesterday--his word of honour to do as I say."
Maria stared. "But if you say nothing!"
Well, he as usual walked about on it. "I did say something this
morning. I gave her my answer--the word I had promised her after
hearing from himself what HE had promised. What she demanded of
me yesterday, you'll remember, was the engagement then and there to
make him take up this vow."
"Well then," Miss Gostrey enquired, "was the purpose of your visit
to her only to decline?"
"No; it was to ask, odd as that may seem to you, for another delay."
"Ah that's weak!"
"Precisely!" She had spoken with impatience, but, so far as that
at least, he knew where he was. "If I AM weak I want to find it
out. If I don't find it out I shall have the comfort, the little
glory, of thinking I'm strong."
"It's all the comfort, I judge," she returned, "that you WILL have!"
"At any rate," he said, "it will have been a month more. Paris may
grow, from day to day, hot and dusty, as you say; but there are
other things that are hotter and dustier. I'm not afraid to stay
on; the summer here must be amusing in a wild--if it isn't a tame--
way of its own; the place at no time more picturesque. I think I
shall like it. And then," he benevolently smiled for her, "there
will be always you."
"Oh," she objected, "it won't be as a part of the picturesqueness
that I shall stay, for I shall be the plainest thing about you.
You may, you see, at any rate," she pursued, "have nobody else.
Madame de Vionnet may very well be going off, mayn't she?--and
Mr. Newsome by the same stroke: unless indeed you've had an assurance
from them to the contrary. So that if your idea's to stay for them"--
it was her duty to suggest it--"you may be left in the lurch.
Of course if they do stay"--she kept it up--"they would be part of
the picturesqueness. Or else indeed you might join them somewhere."
Strether seemed to face it as if it were a happy thought; but the
next moment he spoke more critically. "Do you mean that they'll
probably go off together?"
She just considered. "I think it will be treating you quite
without ceremony if they do; though after all," she added, "it
would be difficult to see now quite what degree of ceremony properly
meets your case."
"Of course," Strether conceded, "my attitude toward them is extraordinary."
"Just so; so that one may ask one's self what style of proceeding
on their own part can altogether match it. The attitude of their
own that won't pale in its light they've doubtless still to work
out. The really handsome thing perhaps," she presently threw off,
"WOULD be for them to withdraw into more secluded conditions,
offering at the same time to share them with you." He looked at
her, on this, as if some generous irritation--all in his interest--
had suddenly again flickered in her; and what she next said indeed
half-explained it. "Don't really be afraid to tell me if what now
holds you IS the pleasant prospect of the empty town, with plenty
of seats in the shade, cool drinks, deserted museums, drives to the
Bois in the evening, and our wonderful woman all to yourself." And
she kept it up still more. "The handsomest thing of ALL, when one
makes it out, would, I dare say, be that Mr. Chad should for a
while go off by himself. It's a pity, from that point of view,"
she wound up, "that he doesn't pay his mother a visit. It would
at least occupy your interval." The thought in fact held her a
moment. "Why doesn't he pay his mother a visit? Even a week, at
this good moment, would do."
"My dear lady," Strether replied--and he had it even to himself
surprisingly ready--"my dear lady, his mother has paid HIM a visit.
Mrs. Newsome has been with him, this month, with an intensity that
I'm sure he has thoroughly felt; he has lavishly entertained her,
and she has let him have her thanks. Do you suggest he shall go
back for more of them?"
Well, she succeeded after a little in shaking it off. "I see.
It's what you don't suggest--what you haven't suggested.
And you know."
"So would you, my dear," he kindly said, "if you had so much as
seen her."
"As seen Mrs. Newsome?"
"No, Sarah--which, both for Chad and for myself, has served all
the purpose."
"And served it in a manner," she responsively mused, "so extraordinary!"
"Well, you see," he partly explained, "what it comes to is that she's
all cold thought--which Sarah could serve to us cold without its
really losing anything. So it is that we know what she thinks of us."
Maria had followed, but she had an arrest. "What I've never made
out, if you come to that, is what you think--I mean you personally--
of HER. Don't you so much, when all's said, as care a little?"
"That," he answered with no loss of promptness, "is what even Chad
himself asked me last night. He asked me if I don't mind the loss--
well, the loss of an opulent future. Which moreover," he hastened
to add, "was a perfectly natural question."
"I call your attention, all the same," said Miss Gostrey, "to the
fact that I don't ask it. What I venture to ask is whether it's to
Mrs. Newsome herself that you're indifferent."
"I haven't been so"--he spoke with all assurance. "I've been the
very opposite. I've been, from the first moment, preoccupied with
the impression everything might be making on her--quite oppressed,
haunted, tormented by it. I've been interested ONLY in her seeing
what I've seen. And I've been as disappointed in her refusal to
see it as she has been in what has appeared to her the perversity
of my insistence."
"Do you mean that she has shocked you as you've shocked her?"
Strether weighed it. "I'm probably not so shockable. But on the
other hand I've gone much further to meet her. She, on her side,
hasn't budged an inch."
"So that you're now at last"--Maria pointed the moral--"in the sad
stage of recriminations."
"No--it's only to you I speak. I've been like a lamb to Sarah.
I've only put my back to the wall. It's to THAT one naturally
staggers when one has been violently pushed there."
She watched him a moment. "Thrown over?"
"Well, as I feel I've landed somewhere I think I must have been thrown."
She turned it over, but as hoping to clarify much rather than to
harmonise. "The thing is that I suppose you've been disappointing--"
"Quite from the very first of my arrival? I dare say. I admit I
was surprising even to myself."
"And then of course," Maria went on, "I had much to do with it."
"With my being surprising--?"
"That will do," she laughed, "if you're too delicate to call it MY
being! Naturally," she added, "you came over more or less for
surprises."
"Naturally!"--he valued the reminder.
"But they were to have been all for you"--she continued to piece it
out--"and none of them for HER."
Once more he stopped before her as if she had touched the point.
"That's just her difficulty--that she doesn't admit surprises.
It's a fact that, I think, describes and represents her; and it
falls in with what I tell you--that she's all, as I've called it,
fine cold thought. She had, to her own mind, worked the whole
thing out in advance, and worked it out for me as well as for
herself. Whenever she has done that, you see, there's no room
left; no margin, as it were, for any alteration. She's filled as
full, packed as tight, as she'll hold and if you wish to get
anything more or different either out or in--"
"You've got to make over altogether the woman herself?"
"What it comes to," said Strether, "is that you've got morally and
intellectually to get rid of her."
"Which would appear," Maria returned, "to be practically what
you've done."
But her friend threw back his head. "I haven't touched her. She
won't BE touched. I see it now as I've never done; and she hangs
together with a perfection of her own," he went on, "that does
suggest a kind of wrong in ANY change of her composition. It was
at any rate," he wound up, "the woman herself, as you call her the
whole moral and intellectual being or block, that Sarah brought me
over to take or to leave."
It turned Miss Gostrey to deeper thought. "Fancy having to take at the
point of the bayonet a whole moral and intellectual being or block!"
"It was in fact," said Strether, "what, at home, I HAD done.
But somehow over there I didn't quite know it."
"One never does, I suppose," Miss Gostrey concurred, "realise in
advance, in such a case, the size, as you may say, of the block.
Little by little it looms up. It has been looming for you more and
more till at last you see it all."
"I see it all," he absently echoed, while his eyes might have been
fixing some particularly large iceberg in a cool blue northern sea.
"It's magnificent!" he then rather oddly exclaimed.
But his friend, who was used to this kind of inconsequence in him,
kept the thread. "There's nothing so magnificent--for making
others feel you--as to have no imagination."
It brought him straight round. "Ah there you are! It's what I said
last night to Chad. That he himself, I mean, has none."
"Then it would appear," Maria suggested, "that he has, after all,
something in common with his mother."
"He has in common that he makes one, as you say, 'feel' him. And
yet," he added, as if the question were interesting, "one feels
others too, even when they have plenty."
Miss Gostrey continued suggestive. "Madame de Vionnet?"
"SHE has plenty."
"Certainly--she had quantities of old. But there are different
ways of making one's self felt."
"Yes, it comes, no doubt, to that. You now--'
He was benevolently going on, but she wouldn't have it.
"Oh I DON'T make myself felt; so my quantity needn't be settled.
Yours, you know," she said, "is monstrous. No one has ever had so much."
It struck him for a moment. "That's what Chad also thinks."
"There YOU are then--though it isn't for him to complain of it!"
"Oh he doesn't complain of it," said Strether.
"That's all that would be wanting! But apropos of what," Maria went
on, "did the question come up?"
"Well, of his asking me what it is I gain."
She had a pause. "Then as I've asked you too it settles my case.
Oh you HAVE," she repeated, "treasures of imagination."
But he had been for an instant thinking away from this, and he came
up in another place. "And yet Mrs. Newsome--it's a thing to
remember--HAS imagined, did, that is, imagine, and apparently still
does, horrors about what I should have found. I was booked, by her
vision--extraordinarily intense, after all--to find them; and that
I didn't, that I couldn't, that, as she evidently felt, I wouldn't--
this evidently didn't at all, as they say, 'suit' her book.
It was more than she could bear. That was her disappointment."
"You mean you were to have found Chad himself horrible?"
"I was to have found the woman."
"Horrible?"
"Found her as she imagined her." And Strether paused as if for his
own expression of it he could add no touch to that picture.
His companion had meanwhile thought. "She imagined stupidly--so it
comes to the same thing."
"Stupidly? Oh!" said Strether.
But she insisted. "She imagined meanly."
He had it, however, better. "It couldn't but be ignorantly."
"Well, intensity with ignorance--what do you want worse?"
This question might have held him, but he let it pass. "Sarah
isn't ignorant--now; she keeps up the theory of the horrible."
"Ah but she's intense--and that by itself will do sometimes as
well. If it doesn't do, in this case, at any rate, to deny that
Marie's charming, it will do at least to deny that she's good."
"What I claim is that she's good for Chad."
"You don't claim"--she seemed to like it clear--"that she's good
for YOU."
But he continued without heeding. "That's what I wanted them to
come out for--to see for themselves if she's bad for him."
"And now that they've done so they won't admit that she's good even
for anything?"
"They do think," Strether presently admitted, "that she's on the
whole about as bad for me. But they're consistent of course,
inasmuch as they've their clear view of what's good for both of us."
"For you, to begin with"--Maria, all responsive, confined the
question for the moment--"to eliminate from your existence and if
possible even from your memory the dreadful creature that I must
gruesomely shadow forth for them, even more than to eliminate the
distincter evil--thereby a little less portentous--of the person
whose confederate you've suffered yourself to become. However,
that's comparatively simple. You can easily, at the worst, after
all, give me up."
"I can easily at the worst, after all, give you up." The irony was
so obvious that it needed no care. "I can easily at the worst,
after all, even forget you."
"Call that then workable. But Mr. Newsome has much more to forget.
How can HE do it?"
"Ah there again we are! That's just what I was to have made him do;
just where I was to have worked with him and helped."
She took it in silence and without attenuation--as if perhaps from
very familiarity with the facts; and her thought made a connexion
without showing the links. "Do you remember how we used to talk at
Chester and in London about my seeing you through?" She spoke as
of far-off things and as if they had spent weeks at the places
she named.
"It's just what you ARE doing."
"Ah but the worst--since you've left such a margin--may be still
to come. You may yet break down."
"Yes, I may yet break down. But will you take me--?"
He had hesitated, and she waited. "Take you?"
"For as long as I can bear it."
She also debated "Mr. Newsome and Madame de Vionnet may, as we were
saying, leave town. How long do you think you can bear it without them?"
Strether's reply to this was at first another question. "Do you mean
in order to get away from me?"
Her answer had an abruptness. "Don't find me rude if I say I should
think they'd want to!"
He looked at her hard again--seemed even for an instant to have an
intensity of thought under which his colour changed. But he
smiled. "You mean after what they've done to me?"
"After what SHE has."
At this, however, with a laugh, he was all right again. "Ah but
she hasn't done it yet!"
III
He had taken the train a few days after this from a station--
as well as to a station--selected almost at random; such days,
whatever should happen, were numbered, and he had gone forth under
the impulse--artless enough, no doubt--to give the whole of one of
them to that French ruralism, with its cool special green, into
which he had hitherto looked only through the little oblong window
of the picture-frame. It had been as yet for the most part but a
land of fancy for him--the background of fiction, the medium of
art, the nursery of letters; practically as distant as Greece, but
practically also well-nigh as consecrated. Romance could weave
itself, for Strether's sense, out of elements mild enough; and even
after what he had, as he felt, lately "been through," he could
thrill a little at the chance of seeing something somewhere that
would remind him of a certain small Lambinet that had charmed him,
long years before, at a Boston dealer's and that he had quite
absurdly never forgotten. It had been offered, he remembered, at a
price he had been instructed to believe the lowest ever named for a
Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on having to recognise,
all the same, as beyond a dream of possibility. He had dreamed--
had turned and twisted possibilities for an hour: it had been
the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase
of a work of art. The adventure, it will be perceived, was modest;
but the memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of
association, was sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the
picture he WOULD have bought--the particular production that had
made him for the moment overstep the modesty of nature. He was
quite aware that if he were to see it again he should perhaps have
a drop or a shock, and he never found himself wishing that the
wheel of time would turn it up again, just as he had seen it in the
maroon-coloured, sky-lighted inner shrine of Tremont Street.
It would be a different thing, however, to see the remembered mixture
resolved back into its elements--to assist at the restoration to
nature of the whole far-away hour: the dusty day in Boston, the
background of the Fitchburg Depot, of the maroon-coloured sanctum,
the special-green vision, the ridiculous price, the poplars, the
willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady
woody horizon.
He observed in respect to his train almost no condition save that
it should stop a few times after getting out of the banlieue;
he threw himself on the general amiability of the day for the hint of
where to alight. His theory of his excursion was that he could
alight anywhere--not nearer Paris than an hour's run--on catching a
suggestion of the particular note required. It made its sign, the
suggestion--weather, air, light, colour and his mood all favouring--
at the end of some eighty minutes; the train pulled up just at the
right spot, and he found himself getting out as securely as if to
keep an appointment. It will be felt of him that he could amuse
himself, at his age, with very small things if it be again noted
that his appointment was only with a superseded Boston fashion. He
hadn't gone far without the quick confidence that it would be
quite sufficiently kept. The oblong gilt frame disposed its
enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and river--
a river of which he didn't know, and didn't want to know, the name--
fell into a composition, full of felicity, within them; the sky
was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left was
white and the church on the right was grey; it was all there, in
short--it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France,
it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking about in it.
He did this last, for an hour, to his heart's content, making
for the shady woody horizon and boring so deep into his impression
and his idleness that he might fairly have got through them again
and reached the maroon-coloured wall. It was a wonder, no doubt,
that the taste of idleness for him shouldn't need more time to
sweeten; but it had in fact taken the few previous days; it had
been sweetening in truth ever since the retreat of the Pococks.
He walked and walked as if to show himself how little he had now to do;
he had nothing to do but turn off to some hillside where he might
stretch himself and hear the poplars rustle, and whence--in the
course of an afternoon so spent, an afternoon richly suffused too
with the sense of a book in his pocket--he should sufficiently
command the scene to be able to pick out just the right little
rustic inn for an experiment in respect to dinner. There was a
train back to Paris at 9.20, and he saw himself partaking, at the
close of the day, with the enhancements of a coarse white cloth and
a sanded door, of something fried and felicitous, washed down with
authentic wine; after which he might, as he liked, either stroll
back to his station in the gloaming or propose for the local
carriole and converse with his driver, a driver who naturally wouldn't
fail of a stiff clean blouse, of a knitted nightcap and of the genius
of response--who, in fine, would sit on the shafts, tell him what
the French people were thinking, and remind him, as indeed the whole
episode would incidentally do, of Maupassant. Strether heard his lips,
for the first time in French air, as this vision assumed consistency,
emit sounds of expressive intention without fear of his company.
He had been afraid of Chad and of Maria and of Madame de Vionnet;
he had been most of all afraid of Waymarsh, in whose presence,
so far as they had mixed together in the light of the town, he had
never without somehow paying for it aired either his vocabulary
or his accent. He usually paid for it by meeting immediately
afterwards Waymarsh's eye.
Such were the liberties with which his fancy played after he had
turned off to the hillside that did really and truly, as well as
most amiably, await him beneath the poplars, the hillside that made
him feel, for a murmurous couple of hours, how happy had been his
thought. He had the sense of success, of a finer harmony in
things; nothing but what had turned out as yet according to his plan.
It most of all came home to him, as he lay on his back on the grass,
that Sarah had really gone, that his tension was really relaxed;
the peace diffused in these ideas might be delusive, but it hung about
him none the less for the time. It fairly, for half an hour,
sent him to sleep; he pulled his straw hat over his eyes--
he had bought it the day before with a reminiscence of Waymarsh's--
and lost himself anew in Lambinet. It was as if he had found out
he was tired--tired not from his walk, but from that inward
exercise which had known, on the whole, for three months, so little
intermission. That was it--when once they were off he had dropped;
this moreover was what he had dropped to, and now he was touching
bottom. He was kept luxuriously quiet, soothed and amused by the
consciousness of what he had found at the end of his descent. It
was very much what he had told Maria Gostrey he should like to stay
on for, the hugely-distributed Paris of summer, alternately
dazzling and dusky, with a weight lifted for him off its columns
and cornices and with shade and air in the flutter of awnings as
wide as avenues. It was present to him without attenuation that,
reaching out, the day after making the remark, for some proof of
his freedom, he had gone that very afternoon to see Madame de Vionnet.
He had gone again the next day but one, and the effect of the two
visits, the after-sense of the couple of hours spent with her,
was almost that of fulness and frequency. The brave intention of
frequency, so great with him from the moment of his finding himself
unjustly suspected at Woollett, had remained rather theoretic,
and one of the things he could muse about under his poplars was
the source of the special shyness that had still made him careful.
He had surely got rid of it now, this special shyness; what had become
of it if it hadn't precisely, within the week, rubbed off?
It struck him now in fact as sufficiently plain that if he had
still been careful he had been so for a reason. He had really
feared, in his behaviour, a lapse from good faith; if there was a
danger of one's liking such a woman too much one's best safety was
in waiting at least till one had the right to do so. In the light
of the last few days the danger was fairly vivid; so that it was
proportionately fortunate that the right was likewise established.
It seemed to our friend that he had on each occasion profited to
the utmost by the latter: how could he have done so more, he at
all events asked himself, than in having immediately let her know
that, if it was all the same to her, he preferred not to talk about
anything tiresome? He had never in his life so sacrificed an
armful of high interests as in that remark; he had never so prepared
the way for the comparatively frivolous as in addressing it to
Madame de Vionnet's intelligence. It hadn't been till later that
he quite recalled how in conjuring away everything but the pleasant
he had conjured away almost all they had hitherto talked about;
it was not till later even that he remembered how, with their new tone,
they hadn't so much as mentioned the name of Chad himself.
One of the things that most lingered with him on his hillside was
this delightful facility, with such a woman, of arriving at a new tone;
he thought, as he lay on his back, of all the tones she might make
possible if one were to try her, and at any rate of the probability
that one could trust her to fit them to occasions. He had wanted her
to feel that, as he was disinterested now, so she herself should be,
and she had showed she felt it, and he had showed he was grateful,
and it had been for all the world as if he were calling for
the first time. They had had other, but irrelevant, meetings;
it was quite as if, had they sooner known how much they REALLY
had in common, there were quantities of comparatively dull matters
they might have skipped. Well, they were skipping them now,
even to graceful gratitude, even to handsome "Don't mention it!"--
and it was amazing what could still come up without reference to
what had been going on between them. It might have been, on analysis,
nothing more than Shakespeare and the musical glasses; but it had
served all the purpose of his appearing to have said to her:
"Don't like me, if it's a question of liking me, for anything obvious
and clumsy that I've, as they call it, 'done' for you: like me--
well, like me, hang it, for anything else you choose. So, by
the same propriety, don't be for me simply the person I've come to know
through my awkward connexion with Chad--was ever anything, by the way,
MORE awkward? Be for me, please, with all your admirable tact and trust,
just whatever I may show you it's a present pleasure to me to think you."
It had been a large indication to meet; but if she hadn't met it
what HAD she done, and how had their time together slipped along
so smoothly, mild but not slow, and melting, liquefying, into his
happy illusion of idleness? He could recognise on the other hand
that he had probably not been without reason, in his prior, his
restricted state, for keeping an eye on his liability to lapse
from good faith.
He really continued in the picture--that being for himself his
situation--all the rest of this rambling day; so that the charm was
still, was indeed more than ever upon him when, toward six o'clock
he found himself amicably engaged with a stout white-capped
deep-voiced woman at the door of the auberge of the biggest village,
a village that affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness and
crookedness, set in coppery green, and that had the river flowing
behind or before it--one couldn't say which; at the bottom, in
particular, of the inn-garden. He had had other adventures before this;
had kept along the height, after shaking off slumber; had admired,
had almost coveted, another small old church, all steep roof and
dim slate-colour without and all whitewash and paper flowers within;
had lost his way and had found it again; had conversed with rustics
who struck him perhaps a little more as men of the world than he had
expected; had acquired at a bound a fearless facility in French;
had had, as the afternoon waned, a watery bock, all pale and Parisian,
in the cafe of the furthest village, which was not the biggest;
and had meanwhile not once overstepped the oblong gilt frame.
The frame had drawn itself out for him, as much as you please;
but that was just his luck. He had finally come down again to the
valley, to keep within touch of stations and trains, turning his face
to the quarter from which he had started; and thus it was that he had
at last pulled up before the hostess of the Cheval Blanc, who met him,
with a rough readiness that was like the clatter of sabots over stones,
on their common ground of a cotelette de veau a l'oseille and a
subsequent lift. He had walked many miles and didn't know he was tired;
but he still knew he was amused, and even that, though he had been
alone all day, he had never yet so struck himself as engaged with
others and in midstream of his drama. It might have passed for
finished his drama, with its catastrophe all but reached: it had,
however, none the less been vivid again for him as he thus gave it
its fuller chance. He had only had to be at last well out of it to
feel it, oddly enough, still going on.
For this had been all day at bottom the spell of the picture--that
it was essentially more than anything else a scene and a stage,
that the very air of the play was in the rustle of the willows and
the tone of the sky. The play and the characters had, without his
knowing it till now, peopled all his space for him, and it seemed
somehow quite happy that they should offer themselves, in the
conditions so supplied, with a kind of inevitability. It was as if
the conditions made them not only inevitable, but so much more
nearly natural and right as that they were at least easier,
pleasanter, to put up with. The conditions had nowhere so asserted
their difference from those of Woollett as they appeared to him to
assert it in the little court of the Cheval Blanc while he arranged
with his hostess for a comfortable climax. They were few and
simple, scant and humble, but they were THE THING, as he would have
called it, even to a greater degree than Madame de Vionnet's old
high salon where the ghost of the Empire walked. "The" thing was
the thing that implied the greatest number of other things of the
sort he had had to tackle; and it was queer of course, but so it
was--the implication here was complete. Not a single one of his
observations but somehow fell into a place in it; not a breath of
the cooler evening that wasn't somehow a syllable of the text.
The text was simply, when condensed, that in THESE places such
things were, and that if it was in them one elected to move about
one had to make one's account with what one lighted on. Meanwhile
at all events it was enough that they did affect one--so far as the
village aspect was concerned--as whiteness, crookedness and
blueness set in coppery green; there being positively, for that
matter, an outer wall of the White Horse that was painted the most
improbable shade. That was part of the amusement--as if to show
that the fun was harmless; just as it was enough, further, that the
picture and the play seemed supremely to melt together in the good
woman's broad sketch of what she could do for her visitor's
appetite. He felt in short a confidence, and it was general, and
it was all he wanted to feel. It suffered no shock even on her
mentioning that she had in fact just laid the cloth for two persons
who, unlike Monsieur, had arrived by the river--in a boat of their
own; who had asked her, half an hour before, what she could do for
them, and had then paddled away to look at something a little
further up--from which promenade they would presently return.
Monsieur might meanwhile, if he liked, pass into the garden, such
as it was, where she would serve him, should he wish it--for there
were tables and benches in plenty--a "bitter" before his repast.
Here she would also report to him on the possibility of a
conveyance to his station, and here at any rate he would have the
agrement of the river .
It may be mentioned without delay that Monsieur had the agrement of
everything, and in particular, for the next twenty minutes,
of a small and primitive pavilion that, at the garden's edge, almost
overhung the water, testifying, in its somewhat battered state, to
much fond frequentation. It consisted of little more than a
platform, slightly raised, with a couple of benches and a table, a
protecting rail and a projecting roof; but it raked the full
grey-blue stream, which, taking a turn a short distance above,
passed out of sight to reappear much higher up; and it was clearly
in esteemed requisition for Sundays and other feasts. Strether sat
there and, though hungry, felt at peace; the confidence that had so
gathered for him deepened with the lap of the water, the ripple of
the surface, the rustle of the reeds on the opposite bank, the
faint diffused coolness and the slight rock of a couple of small
boats attached to a rough landing-place hard by. The valley on the
further side was all copper-green level and glazed pearly sky, a
sky hatched across with screens of trimmed trees, which looked
flat, like espaliers; and though the rest of the village straggled
away in the near quarter the view had an emptiness that made one of
the boats suggestive. Such a river set one afloat almost before
one could take up the oars--the idle play of which would be
moreover the aid to the full impression. This perception went so
far as to bring him to his feet; but that movement, in turn, made
him feel afresh that he was tired, and while he leaned against a
post and continued to look out he saw something that gave him a
sharper arrest.
IV
What he saw was exactly the right thing--a boat advancing round the
bend and containing a man who held the paddles and a lady, at the
stern, with a pink parasol. It was suddenly as if these figures,
or something like them, had been wanted in the picture, had been
wanted more or less all day, and had now drifted into sight, with
the slow current, on purpose to fill up the measure. They came
slowly, floating down, evidently directed to the landing-place near
their spectator and presenting themselves to him not less clearly
as the two persons for whom his hostess was already preparing a
meal. For two very happy persons he found himself straightway
taking them--a young man in shirt-sleeves, a young woman easy and
fair, who had pulled pleasantly up from some other place and, being
acquainted with the neighbourhood, had known what this particular
retreat could offer them. The air quite thickened, at their
approach, with further intimations; the intimation that they were
expert, familiar, frequent--that this wouldn't at all events be
the first time. They knew how to do it, he vaguely felt--and it
made them but the more idyllic, though at the very moment
of the impression, as happened, their boat seemed to have begun to
drift wide, the oarsman letting it go. It had by this time none
the less come much nearer--near enough for Strether to dream the
lady in the stern had for some reason taken account of his being
there to watch them. She had remarked on it sharply, yet her
companion hadn't turned round; it was in fact almost as if our
friend had felt her bid him keep still. She had taken in something
as a result of which their course had wavered, and it continued to
waver while they just stood off. This little effect was sudden and
rapid, so rapid that Strether's sense of it was separate only for
an instant from a sharp start of his own. He too had within the
minute taken in something, taken in that he knew the lady whose
parasol, shifting as if to hide her face, made so fine a pink point
in the shining scene. It was too prodigious, a chance in a million,
but, if he knew the lady, the gentleman, who still presented his back
and kept off, the gentleman, the coatless hero of the idyll,
who had responded to her start, was, to match the marvel, none other
than Chad.
Chad and Madame de Vionnet were then like himself taking a day in
the country--though it was as queer as fiction, as farce, that
their country could happen to be exactly his; and she had been the
first at recognition, the first to feel, across the water, the shock--
for it appeared to come to that--of their wonderful accident.
Strether became aware, with this, of what was taking place--
that her recognition had been even stranger for the pair in the boat,
that her immediate impulse had been to control it, and that she was
quickly and intensely debating with Chad the risk of betrayal.
He saw they would show nothing if they could feel sure he hadn't
made them out; so that he had before him for a few seconds his
own hesitation. It was a sharp fantastic crisis that had popped up
as if in a dream, and it had had only to last the few seconds to
make him feel it as quite horrible. They were thus, on either side,
TRYING the other side, and all for some reason that broke the stillness
like some unprovoked harsh note. It seemed to him again, within the
limit, that he had but one thing to do--to settle their common question
by some sign of surprise and joy. He hereupon gave large play to
these things, agitating his hat and his stick and loudly calling out--
a demonstration that brought him relief as soon as he had seen it
answered. The boat, in mid-stream, still went a little wild--
which seemed natural, however, while Chad turned round, half
springing up; and his good friend, after blankness and wonder,
began gaily to wave her parasol. Chad dropped afresh to his paddles
and the boat headed round, amazement and pleasantry filling the air
meanwhile, and relief, as Strether continued to fancy, superseding
mere violence. Our friend went down to the water under this odd
impression as of violence averted--the violence of their having
"cut" him, out there in the eye of nature, on the assumption that
he wouldn't know it. He awaited them with a face from which he
was conscious of not being able quite to banish this idea that they
would have gone on, not seeing and not knowing, missing their dinner
and disappointing their hostess, had he himself taken a line to match.
That at least was what darkened his vision for the moment. Afterwards,
after they had bumped at the landing-place and he had assisted their
getting ashore, everything found itself sponged over by the mere
miracle of the encounter.
They could so much better at last, on either side, treat it as a
wild extravagance of hazard, that the situation was made elastic by
the amount of explanation called into play. Why indeed--apart from
oddity--the situation should have been really stiff was a question
naturally not practical at the moment, and in fact, so far as we
are concerned, a question tackled, later on and in private, only by
Strether himself. He was to reflect later on and in private that
it was mainly HE who had explained--as he had had moreover
comparatively little difficulty in doing. He was to have at all
events meanwhile the worrying thought of their perhaps secretly
suspecting him of having plotted this coincidence, taking such
pains as might be to give it the semblance of an accident. That
possibility--as their imputation--didn't of course bear looking
into for an instant; yet the whole incident was so manifestly,
arrange it as they would, an awkward one, that he could scarce keep
disclaimers in respect to his own presence from rising to his lips.
Disclaimers of intention would have been as tactless as his
presence was practically gross; and the narrowest escape they
either of them had was his lucky escape, in the event, from making
any. Nothing of the sort, so far as surface and sound were
involved, was even in question; surface and sound all made for
their common ridiculous good fortune, for the general
invraisemblance of the occasion, for the charming chance that they
had, the others, in passing, ordered some food to be ready, the
charming chance that he had himself not eaten, the charming chance,
even more, that their little plans, their hours, their train, in
short, from la-bas, would all match for their return together to
Paris. The chance that was most charming of all, the chance that
drew from Madame de Vionnet her clearest, gayest "Comme cela se
trouve!" was the announcement made to Strether after they were
seated at table, the word given him by their hostess in respect to
his carriage for the station, on which he might now count. It
settled the matter for his friends as well; the conveyance--
it WAS all too lucky!--would serve for them; and nothing was more
delightful than his being in a position to make the train so definite.
It might have been, for themselves--to hear Madame de Vionnet--
almost unnaturally vague, a detail left to be fixed; though Strether
indeed was afterwards to remember that Chad had promptly enough
intervened to forestall this appearance, laughing at his companion's
flightiness and making the point that he had after all, in spite of
the bedazzlement of a day out with her, known what he was about.
Strether was to remember afterwards further that this had had for
him the effect of forming Chad's almost sole intervention; and
indeed he was to remember further still, in subsequent meditation,
many things that, as it were, fitted together. Another of them was
for instance that the wonderful woman's overflow of surprise and
amusement was wholly into French, which she struck him as speaking
with an unprecedented command of idiomatic turns, but in which she
got, as he might have said, somewhat away from him, taking all at
once little brilliant jumps that he could but lamely match. The
question of his own French had never come up for them; it was the
one thing she wouldn't have permitted--it belonged, for a person
who had been through much, to mere boredom; but the present result
was odd, fairly veiling her identity, shifting her back into a mere
voluble class or race to the intense audibility of which he was by
this time inured. When she spoke the charming slightly strange
English he best knew her by he seemed to feel her as a creature,
among all the millions, with a language quite to herself, the real
monopoly of a special shade of speech, beautifully easy for her,
yet of a colour and a cadence that were both inimitable and matters
of accident. She came back to these things after they had shaken
down in the inn-parlour and knew, as it were, what was to become of
them; it was inevitable that loud ejaculation over the prodigy of
their convergence should at last wear itself out. Then it was that
his impression took fuller form--the impression, destined only to
deepen, to complete itself, that they had something to put a face
upon, to carry off and make the best of, and that it was she who,
admirably on the whole, was doing this. It was familiar to him of
course that they had something to put a face upon; their
friendship, their connexion, took any amount of explaining--that
would have been made familiar by his twenty minutes with Mrs. Pocock
if it hadn't already been so. Yet his theory, as we know, had
bountifully been that the facts were specifically none of his
business, and were, over and above, so far as one had to do with
them, intrinsically beautiful; and this might have prepared him for
anything, as well as rendered him proof against mystification.
When he reached home that night, however, he knew he had been, at
bottom, neither prepared nor proof; and since we have spoken of
what he was, after his return, to recall and interpret, it may as
well immediately be said that his real experience of these few
hours put on, in that belated vision--for he scarce went to bed
till morning--the aspect that is most to our purpose.
He then knew more or less how he had been affected--he but half
knew at the time. There had been plenty to affect him even after,
as has been said, they had shaken down; for his consciousness,
though muffled, had its sharpest moments during this passage, a
marked drop into innocent friendly Bohemia. They then had put
their elbows on the table, deploring the premature end of their two
or three dishes; which they had tried to make up with another
bottle while Chad joked a little spasmodically, perhaps even a
little irrelevantly, with the hostess. What it all came to had
been that fiction and fable WERE, inevitably, in the air, and not
as a simple term of comparison, but as a result of things said;
also that they were blinking it, all round, and that they yet needn't,
so much as that, have blinked it--though indeed if they hadn't
Strether didn't quite see what else they could have done.
Strether didn't quite see THAT even at an hour or two past midnight,
even when he had, at his hotel, for a long time, without a light
and without undressing, sat back on his bedroom sofa and stared
straight before him. He was, at that point of vantage, in full
possession, to make of it all what he could. He kept making of it
that there had been simply a LIE in the charming affair--a lie
on which one could now, detached and deliberate, perfectly put
one's finger. It was with the lie that they had eaten and drunk
and talked and laughed, that they had waited for their carriole
rather impatiently, and had then got into the vehicle and, sensibly
subsiding, driven their three or four miles through the darkening
summer night. The eating and drinking, which had been a resource,
had had the effect of having served its turn; the talk and laughter
had done as much; and it was during their somewhat tedious progress
to the station, during the waits there, the further delays, their
submission to fatigue, their silences in the dim compartment of the
much-stopping train, that he prepared himself for reflexions to come.
It had been a performance, Madame de Vionnet's manner, and though
it had to that degree faltered toward the end, as through her ceasing
to believe in it, as if she had asked herself, or Chad had found
a moment surreptitiously to ask her, what after all was the use,
a performance it had none the less quite handsomely remained,
with the final fact about it that it was on the whole easier to
keep up than to abandon.
From the point of view of presence of mind it had been very
wonderful indeed, wonderful for readiness, for beautiful assurance,
for the way her decision was taken on the spot, without time to
confer with Chad, without time for anything. Their only conference
could have been the brief instants in the boat before they confessed
to recognising the spectator on the bank, for they hadn't been alone
together a moment since and must have communicated all in silence.
It was a part of the deep impression for Strether, and not the least
of the deep interest, that they COULD so communicate--that Chad
in particular could let her know he left it to her. He habitually
left things to others, as Strether was so well aware, and it in fact
came over our friend in these meditations that there had been as yet
no such vivid illustration of his famous knowing how to live.
It was as if he had humoured her to the extent of letting her lie
without correction--almost as if, really, he would be coming round
in the morning to set the matter, as between Strether and himself,
right. Of course he couldn't quite come; it was a case in which
a man was obliged to accept the woman's version, even when fantastic;
if she had, with more flurry than she cared to show, elected,
as the phrase was, to represent that they had left Paris that morning,
and with no design but of getting back within the day--if she had
so sized-up, in the Woollett phrase, their necessity, she knew best
her own measure. There were things, all the same, it was impossible
to blink and which made this measure an odd one--the too evident fact
for instance that she hadn't started out for the day dressed and hatted
and shod, and even, for that matter, pink parasol'd, as she had been
in the boat. From what did the drop in her assurance proceed as the
tension increased--from what did this slightly baffled ingenuity spring
but from her consciousness of not presenting, as night closed in,
with not so much as a shawl to wrap her round, an appearance that
matched her story? She admitted that she was cold, but only to
blame her imprudence which Chad suffered her to give such account
of as she might. Her shawl and Chad's overcoat and her other
garments, and his, those they had each worn the day before, were at
the place, best known to themselves--a quiet retreat enough, no
doubt--at which they had been spending the twenty-four hours, to
which they had fully meant to return that evening, from which they
had so remarkably swum into Strether's ken, and the tacit
repudiation of which had been thus the essence of her comedy.
Strether saw how she had perceived in a flash that they couldn't
quite look to going back there under his nose; though, honestly,
as he gouged deeper into the matter, he was somewhat surprised, as
Chad likewise had perhaps been, at the uprising of this scruple.
He seemed even to divine that she had entertained it rather for
Chad than for herself, and that, as the young man had lacked the
chance to enlighten her, she had had to go on with it, he meanwhile
mistaking her motive.
He was rather glad, none the less, that they had in point of fact
not parted at the Cheval Blanc, that he hadn't been reduced to
giving them his blessing for an idyllic retreat down the river.
He had had in the actual case to make-believe more than he liked,
but this was nothing, it struck him, to what the other event
would have required. Could he, literally, quite have faced the
other event? Would he have been capable of making the best of it
with them? This was what he was trying to do now; but with the
advantage of his being able to give more time to it a good deal
counteracted by his sense of what, over and above the central fact
itself, he had to swallow. It was the quantity of make-believe
involved and so vividly exemplified that most disagreed with his
spiritual stomach. He moved, however, from the consideration of
that quantity--to say nothing of the consciousness of that organ--
back to the other feature of the show, the deep, deep truth of
the intimacy revealed. That was what, in his vain vigil, he oftenest
reverted to: intimacy, at such a point, was LIKE that--and what in
the world else would one have wished it to be like? It was all
very well for him to feel the pity of its being so much like lying;
he almost blushed, in the dark, for the way he had dressed the
possibility in vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll.
He had made them--and by no fault of their own--momentarily pull it for
him, the possibility, out of this vagueness; and must he not therefore
take it now as they had had simply, with whatever thin attenuations,
to give it to him? The very question, it may be added, made him feel
lonely and cold. There was the element of the awkward all round, but
Chad and Madame de Vionnet had at least the comfort that they could talk
it over together. With whom could HE talk of such things?--unless
indeed always, at almost any stage, with Maria? He foresaw that
Miss Gostrey would come again into requisition on the morrow;
though it wasn't to be denied that he was already a little afraid
of her "What on earth--that's what I want to know now--had you
then supposed?" He recognised at last that he had really been trying
all along to suppose nothing. Verily, verily, his labour had been lost.
He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things.
Book Twelfth
I
Strether couldn't have said he had during the previous hours
definitely expected it; yet when. later on, that morning--though
no later indeed than for his coming forth at ten o'clock--he saw
the concierge produce, on his approach, a petit bleu delivered
since his letters had been sent up, he recognised the appearance as
the first symptom of a sequel. He then knew he had been thinking
of some early sign from Chad as more likely, after all, than not;
and this would be precisely the early sign. He took it so for
granted that he opened the petit bleu just where he had stopped, in
the pleasant cool draught of the porte-cochere--only curious to see
where the young man would, at such a juncture, break out. His
curiosity, however, was more than gratified; the small missive,
whose gummed edge he had detached without attention to the address,
not being from the young man at all, but from the person whom the
case gave him on the spot as still more worth while. Worth while
or not, he went round to the nearest telegraph-office, the big one
on the Boulevard, with a directness that almost confessed to a fear
of the danger of delay. He might have been thinking that if he didn't
go before he could think he wouldn't perhaps go at all. He at
any rate kept, in the lower side-pocket of his morning coat, a very
deliberate hand on his blue missive, crumpling it up rather tenderly
than harshly. He wrote a reply, on the Boulevard, also in the form
of a petit bleu--which was quickly done, under pressure of the place,
inasmuch as, like Madame de Vionnet's own communication, it consisted
of the fewest words. She had asked him if he could do her the very
great kindness of coming to see her that evening at half-past nine,
and he answered, as if nothing were easier, that he would present
himself at the hour she named. She had added a line of postscript,
to the effect that she would come to him elsewhere and at his own hour
if he preferred; but he took no notice of this, feeling that if he
saw her at all half the value of it would be in seeing her where he
had already seen her best. He mightn't see her at all; that was
one of the reflexions he made after writing and before he dropped
his closed card into the box; he mightn't see any one at all
any more at all; he might make an end as well now as ever,
leaving things as they were, since he was doubtless not to leave
them better, and taking his way home so far as should appear that
a home remained to him. This alternative was for a few minutes
so sharp that if he at last did deposit his missive it was perhaps
because the pressure of the place had an effect.
There was none other, however, than the common and constant pressure,
familiar to our friend under the rubric of Postes et Telegraphes--
the something in the air of these establishments; the vibration of
the vast strange life of the town, the influence of the types,
the performers concocting their messages; the little prompt Paris women,
arranging, pretexting goodness knew what, driving the dreadful
needle-pointed public pen at the dreadful sand-strewn public table:
implements that symbolised for Strether's too interpretative innocence
something more acute in manners, more sinister in morals, more fierce
in the national life. After he had put in his paper he had ranged
himself, he was really amused to think, on the side of the fierce,
the sinister, the acute. He was carrying on a correspondence,
across the great city, quite in the key of the Postes et Telegraphes
in general; and it was fairly as if the acceptance of that fact had
come from something in his state that sorted with the occupation of
his neighbours. He was mixed up with the typical tale of Paris, and so
were they, poor things--how could they all together help being?
They were no worse than he, in short, and he no worse than they--
if, queerly enough, no better; and at all events he had settled his
hash, so that he went out to begin, from that moment, his day of
waiting. The great settlement was, as he felt, in his preference
for seeing his correspondent in her own best conditions. THAT was
part of the typical tale, the part most significant in respect to
himself. He liked the place she lived in, the picture that each
time squared itself, large and high and clear, around her: every
occasion of seeing it was a pleasure of a different shade. Yet
what precisely was he doing with shades of pleasure now, and why
hadn't he properly and logically compelled her to commit herself
to whatever of disadvantage and penalty the situation might throw
up? He might have proposed, as for Sarah Pocock, the cold
hospitality of his own salon de lecture, in which the chill of
Sarah's visit seemed still to abide and shades of pleasure were
dim; he might have suggested a stone bench in the dusty Tuileries
or a penny chair at the back part of the Champs Elysees. These
things would have been a trifle stern, and sternness alone now
wouldn't be sinister. An instinct in him cast about for some form
of discipline in which they might meet--some awkwardness they would
suffer from, some danger, or at least some grave inconvenience,
they would incur. This would give a sense--which the spirit
required, rather ached and sighed in the absence of--that somebody
was paying something somewhere and somehow, that they were at least
not all floating together on the silver stream of impunity. Just
instead of that to go and see her late in the evening, as if, for
all the world--well, as if he were as much in the swim as anybody
else: this had as little as possible in common with the penal form.
Even when he had felt that objection melt away, however, the
practical difference was small; the long stretch of his interval
took the colour it would, and if he lived on thus with the sinister
from hour to hour it proved an easier thing than one might have
supposed in advance. He reverted in thought to his old tradition,
the one he had been brought up on and which even so many years of
life had but little worn away; the notion that the state of the
wrongdoer, or at least this person's happiness, presented some
special difficulty. What struck him now rather was the ease of it--
for nothing in truth appeared easier. It was an ease he himself
fairly tasted of for the rest of the day; giving himself quite up;
not so much as trying to dress it out, in any particular whatever,
as a difficulty; not after all going to see Maria--which would have
been in a manner a result of such dressing; only idling, lounging,
smoking, sitting in the shade, drinking lemonade and consuming
ices. The day had turned to heat and eventual thunder, and he now
and again went back to his hotel to find that Chad hadn't been
there. He hadn't yet struck himself, since leaving Woollett, so
much as a loafer, though there had been times when he believed
himself touching bottom. This was a deeper depth than any, and
with no foresight, scarcely with a care, as to what he should bring
up. He almost wondered if he didn't LOOK demoralised and
disreputable; he had the fanciful vision, as he sat and smoked,
of some accidental, some motived, return of the Pococks, who would
be passing along the Boulevard and would catch this view of him.
They would have distinctly, on his appearance, every ground for scandal.
But fate failed to administer even that sternness; the Pococks never
passed and Chad made no sign. Strether meanwhile continued to hold off
from Miss Gostrey, keeping her till to-morrow; so that by evening
his irresponsibility, his impunity, his luxury, had become--there was
no other word for them--immense.
Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picture--he was
moving in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever
canvas--he drew a long breath: it was so presented to him from the
first that the spell of his luxury wouldn't be broken. He wouldn't
have, that is, to become responsible--this was admirably in the air:
she had sent for him precisely to let him feel it, so that he
might go on with the comfort (comfort already established, hadn't
it been?) of regarding his ordeal, the ordeal of the weeks of
Sarah's stay and of their climax, as safely traversed and left
behind him. Didn't she just wish to assure him that SHE now took
it all and so kept it; that he was absolutely not to worry any
more, was only to rest on his laurels and continue generously to
help her? The light in her beautiful formal room was dim, though
it would do, as everything would always do; the hot night had kept
out lamps, but there was a pair of clusters of candles that
glimmered over the chimney-piece like the tall tapers of an altar.
The windows were all open, their redundant hangings swaying a
little, and he heard once more, from the empty court, the small
plash of the fountain. From beyond this, and as from a great
distance--beyond the court, beyond the corps de logis forming the
front--came, as if excited and exciting, the vague voice of Paris.
Strether had all along been subject to sudden gusts of fancy in
connexion with such matters as these--odd starts of the historic
sense, suppositions and divinations with no warrant but their
intensity. Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates,
the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the
omens, the beginnings broken out. They were the smell of
revolution, the smell of the public temper--or perhaps simply the
smell of blood.
It was at present queer beyond words, "subtle," he would have
risked saying, that such suggestions should keep crossing the
scene; but it was doubtless the effect of the thunder in the air,
which had hung about all day without release. His hostess was
dressed as for thunderous times, and it fell in with the kind of
imagination we have just attributed to him that she should be in
simplest coolest white, of a character so old-fashioned, if he were
not mistaken, that Madame Roland must on the scaffold have worn
something like it. This effect was enhanced by a small black fichu
or scarf, of crape or gauze, disposed quaintly round her bosom and
now completing as by a mystic touch the pathetic, the noble analogy.
Poor Strether in fact scarce knew what analogy was evoked for him
as the charming woman, receiving him and making him, as she could do
such things, at once familiarly and gravely welcome, moved over her
great room with her image almost repeated in its polished floor,
which had been fully bared for summer. The associations of the place,
all felt again; the gleam here and there, in the subdued light,
of glass and gilt and parquet, with the quietness of her own note
as the centre--these things were at first as delicate as if they
had been ghostly, and he was sure in a moment that, whatever he should
find he had come for, it wouldn't be for an impression that had
previously failed him. That conviction held him from the outset,
and, seeming singularly to simplify, certified to him that the objects
about would help him, would really help them both. No, he might
never see them again--this was only too probably the last time;
and he should certainly see nothing in the least degree like them.
He should soon be going to where such things were not, and it would be
a small mercy for memory, for fancy, to have, in that stress,
a loaf on the shelf. He knew in advance he should look back on the
perception actually sharpest with him as on the view of something
old, old, old, the oldest thing he had ever personally touched;
and he also knew, even while he took his companion in as the feature
among features, that memory and fancy couldn't help being enlisted
for her. She might intend what she would, but this was beyond anything
she could intend, with things from far back--tyrannies of history,
facts of type, values, as the painters said, of expression--
all working for her and giving her the supreme chance, the chance
of the happy, the really luxurious few, the chance, on a great
occasion, to be natural and simple. She had never, with him,
been more so; or if it was the perfection of art it would never--
and that came to the same thing--be proved against her.
What was truly wonderful was her way of differing so from time to
time without detriment to her simplicity. Caprices, he was sure
she felt, were before anything else bad manners, and that judgement
in her was by itself a thing making more for safety of intercourse
than anything that in his various own past intercourses he had had
to reckon on. If therefore her presence was now quite other than
the one she had shown him the night before, there was nothing of
violence in the change--it was all harmony and reason. It gave him
a mild deep person, whereas he had had on the occasion to which
their interview was a direct reference a person committed to
movement and surface and abounding in them; but she was in either
character more remarkable for nothing than for her bridging of
intervals, and this now fell in with what he understood he was to
leave to her. The only thing was that, if he was to leave it ALL
to her, why exactly had she sent for him? He had had, vaguely, in
advance, his explanation, his view of the probability of her
wishing to set something right, to deal in some way with the fraud
so lately practised on his presumed credulity. Would she attempt
to carry it further or would she blot it out? Would she throw over
it some more or less happy colour; or would she do nothing about it
at all? He perceived soon enough at least that, however reasonable
she might be, she wasn't vulgarly confused, and it herewith
pressed upon him that their eminent "lie," Chad's and hers, was
simply after all such an inevitable tribute to good taste as he
couldn't have wished them not to render. Away from them, during
his vigil, he had seemed to wince at the amount of comedy involved;
whereas in his present posture he could only ask himself how he
should enjoy any attempt from her to take the comedy back. He
shouldn't enjoy it at all; but, once more and yet once more, he
could trust her. That is he could trust her to make deception
right. As she presented things the ugliness--goodness knew why--
went out of them; none the less too that she could present them,
with an art of her own, by not so much as touching them. She let
the matter, at all events, lie where it was--where the previous
twenty-four hours had placed it; appearing merely to circle about
it respectfully, tenderly, almost piously, while she took up
another question.
She knew she hadn't really thrown dust in his eyes; this, the
previous night, before they separated, had practically passed
between them; and, as she had sent for him to see what the
difference thus made for him might amount to, so he was conscious
at the end of five minutes that he had been tried and tested. She
had settled with Chad after he left them that she would, for her
satisfaction, assure herself of this quantity, and Chad had, as
usual, let her have her way. Chad was always letting people have
their way when he felt that it would somehow turn his wheel for
him; it somehow always did turn his wheel. Strether felt, oddly
enough, before these facts, freshly and consentingly passive; they
again so rubbed it into him that the couple thus fixing his
attention were intimate, that his intervention had absolutely aided
and intensified their intimacy, and that in fine he must accept the
consequence of that. He had absolutely become, himself, with his
perceptions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the
droll mixture, as it must seem to them, of his braveries and his
fears, the general spectacle of his art and his innocence, almost
an added link and certainly a common priceless ground for them to
meet upon. It was as if he had been hearing their very tone when
she brought out a reference that was comparatively straight.
"The last twice that you've been here, you know, I never asked you,"
she said with an abrupt transition--they had been pretending before
this to talk simply of the charm of yesterday and of the interest
of the country they had seen. The effort was confessedly vain; not
for such talk had she invited him; and her impatient reminder was
of their having done for it all the needful on his coming to her
after Sarah's flight. What she hadn't asked him then was to state
to her where and how he stood for her; she had been resting on
Chad's report of their midnight hour together in the Boulevard
Malesherbes. The thing therefore she at present desired was
ushered in by this recall of the two occasions on which,
disinterested and merciful, she hadn't worried him. To-night
truly she WOULD worry him, and this was her appeal to him to let
her risk it. He wasn't to mind if she bored him a little:
she had behaved, after all--hadn't she?--so awfully, awfully well.
II
"Oh, you're all right, you're all right," he almost impatiently
declared; his impatience being moreover not for her pressure, but
for her scruple. More and more distinct to him was the tune to
which she would have had the matter out with Chad: more and more
vivid for him the idea that she had been nervous as to what he
might be able to "stand." Yes, it had been a question if he had
"stood" what the scene on the river had given him, and, though the
young man had doubtless opined in favour of his recuperation, her
own last word must have been that she should feel easier in seeing
for herself. That was it, unmistakeably; she WAS seeing for
herself. What he could stand was thus, in these moments, in the
balance for Strether, who reflected, as he became fully aware of
it, that he must properly brace himself. He wanted fully to appear
to stand all he might; and there was a certain command of the
situation for him in this very wish not to look too much at sea.
She was ready with everything, but so, sufficiently, was he; that
is he was at one point the more prepared of the two, inasmuch as,
for all her cleverness, she couldn't produce on the spot--and it
was surprising--an account of the motive of her note. He had the
advantage that his pronouncing her "all right" gave him for an
enquiry. "May I ask, delighted as I've been to come, if you've
wished to say something special?" He spoke as if she might have
seen he had been waiting for it--not indeed with discomfort, but
with natural interest. Then he saw that she was a little taken
aback, was even surprised herself at the detail she had neglected--
the only one ever yet; having somehow assumed he would know, would
recognise, would leave some things not to be said. She looked at
him, however, an instant as if to convey that if he wanted them
ALL--!
"Selfish and vulgar--that's what I must seem to you. You've done
everything for me, and here I am as if I were asking for more. But
it isn't," she went on, "because I'm afraid--though I AM of course
afraid, as a woman in my position always is. I mean it isn't
because one lives in terror--it isn't because of that one is
selfish, for I'm ready to give you my word to-night that I don't
care; don't care what still may happen and what I may lose. I don't
ask you to raise your little finger for me again, nor do I wish
so much as to mention to you what we've talked of before, either
my danger or my safety, or his mother, or his sister, or the girl
he may marry, or the fortune he may make or miss, or the right
or the wrong, of any kind, he may do. If after the help one has
had from you one can't either take care of one's self or simply
hold one's tongue, one must renounce all claim to be an object of
interest. It's in the name of what I DO care about that I've tried
still to keep hold of you. How can I be indifferent," she asked,
"to how I appear to you?" And as he found himself unable
immediately to say: "Why, if you're going, NEED you, after all?
Is it impossible you should stay on--so that one mayn't lose you?"
"Impossible I should live with you here instead of going home?"
"Not 'with' us, if you object to that, but near enough to us,
somewhere, for us to see you--well," she beautifully brought out,
"when we feel we MUST. How shall we not sometimes feel it? I've
wanted to see you often when I couldn't," she pursued, "all these
last weeks. How shan't I then miss you now, with the sense of your
being gone forever?" Then as if the straightness of this appeal,
taking him unprepared, had visibly left him wondering: "Where IS
your 'home' moreover now--what has become of it? I've made a
change in your life, I know I have; I've upset everything in your
mind as well; in your sense of--what shall I call it?--all the
decencies and possibilities. It gives me a kind of detestation--"
She pulled up short.
Oh but he wanted to hear. "Detestation of what?"
"Of everything--of life."
"Ah that's too much," he laughed--"or too little!"
"Too little, precisely"--she was eager. "What I hate is myself--
when I think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the
lives of others, and that one isn't happy even then. One does it
to cheat one's self and to stop one's mouth--but that's only at the
best for a little. The wretched self is always there, always
making one somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it's
not, that it's never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to TAKE.
The only safe thing is to give. It's what plays you least false."
Interesting, touching, strikingly sincere as she let these things
come from her, she yet puzzled and troubled him--so fine was the
quaver of her quietness. He felt what he had felt before with her,
that there was always more behind what she showed, and more and
more again behind that. "You know so, at least," she added, "where
you are!"
"YOU ought to know it indeed then; for isn't what you've been
giving exactly what has brought us together this way? You've been
making, as I've so fully let you know I've felt," Strether said,
"the most precious present I've ever seen made, and if you can't
sit down peacefully on that performance you ARE, no doubt, born to
torment yourself. But you ought," he wound up, "to be easy."
"And not trouble you any more, no doubt--not thrust on you even the
wonder and the beauty of what I've done; only let you regard our
business as over, and well over, and see you depart in a peace that
matches my own? No doubt, no doubt, no doubt," she nervously
repeated--"all the more that I don't really pretend I believe you
couldn't, for yourself, NOT have done what you have. I don't
pretend you feel yourself victimised, for this evidently is the way
you live, and it's what--we're agreed--is the best way. Yes, as
you say," she continued after a moment, "I ought to be easy and
rest on my work. Well then here am I doing so. I AM easy. You'll
have it for your last impression. When is it you say you go?" she
asked with a quick change.
He took some time to reply--his last impression was more and more
so mixed a one. It produced in him a vague disappointment, a drop
that was deeper even than the fall of his elation the previous
night. The good of what he had done, if he had done so much, wasn't
there to enliven him quite to the point that would have been ideal
for a grand gay finale. Women were thus endlessly absorbent, and
to deal with them was to walk on water. What was at bottom the matter
with her, embroider as she might and disclaim as she might--
what was at bottom the matter with her was simply Chad himself.
It was of Chad she was after all renewedly afraid; the strange
strength of her passion was the very strength of her fear; she clung
to HIM, Lambert Strether, as to a source of safety she had tested,
and, generous graceful truthful as she might try to be, exquisite
as she was, she dreaded the term of his being within reach.
With this sharpest perception yet, it was like a chill in the air
to him, it was almost appalling, that a creature so fine could be,
by mysterious forces, a creature so exploited. For at the end
of all things they WERE mysterious: she had but made Chad what
he was--so why could she think she had made him infinite?
She had made him better, she had made him best, she had made him
anything one would; but it came to our friend with supreme
queerness that he was none the less only Chad. Strether had the
sense that HE, a little, had made him too; his high appreciation
had as it were, consecrated her work The work, however admirable,
was nevertheless of the strict human order, and in short it was
marvellous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of comforts,
aberrations (however one classed them) within the common experience
should be so transcendently prized. It might have made Strether
hot or shy, as such secrets of others brought home sometimes do
make us; but he was held there by something so hard that it was
fairly grim. This was not the discomposure of last night; that had
quite passed--such discomposures were a detail; the real coercion
was to see a man ineffably adored. There it was again--it took
women, it took women; if to deal with them was to walk on water
what wonder that the water rose? And it had never surely risen
higher than round this woman. He presently found himself taking a
long look from her, and the next thing he knew he had uttered all
his thought. "You're afraid for your life!"
It drew out her long look, and he soon enough saw why. A spasm
came into her face, the tears she had already been unable to hide
overflowed at first in silence, and then, as the sound suddenly
comes from a child, quickened to gasps, to sobs. She sat and
covered her face with her hands, giving up all attempt at a manner.
"It's how you see me, it's how you see me"--she caught her breath
with it--"and it's as I AM, and as I must take myself, and of
course it's no matter." Her emotion was at first so incoherent that
he could only stand there at a loss, stand with his sense of having
upset her, though of having done it by the truth. He had to listen
to her in a silence that he made no immediate effort to attenuate,
feeling her doubly woeful amid all her dim diffused elegance;
consenting to it as he had consented to the rest, and even
conscious of some vague inward irony in the presence of such a fine
free range of bliss and bale. He couldn't say it was NOT no
matter; for he was serving her to the end, he now knew, anyway--
quite as if what he thought of her had nothing to do with it.
It was actually moreover as if he didn't think of her at all,
as if he could think of nothing but the passion, mature, abysmal,
pitiful, she represented, and the possibilities she betrayed.
She was older for him to-night, visibly less exempt from the
touch of time; but she was as much as ever the finest and
subtlest creature, the happiest apparition, it had been given him,
in all his years, to meet; and yet he could see her there as
vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a maidservant crying for
her young man. The only thing was that she judged herself as
the maidservant wouldn't; the weakness of which wisdom too,
the dishonour of which judgement, seemed but to sink her lower.
Her collapse, however, no doubt, was briefer and she had in a
manner recovered herself before he intervened. "Of course
I'm afraid for my life. But that's nothing. It isn't that."
He was silent a little longer, as if thinking what it might be.
"There's something I have in mind that I can still do."
But she threw off at last, with a sharp sad headshake, drying her
eyes, what he could still do. "I don't care for that. Of course,
as I've said, you're acting, in your wonderful way, for yourself;
and what's for yourself is no more my business--though I may reach
out unholy hands so clumsily to touch it--than if it were something
in Timbuctoo. It's only that you don't snub me, as you've had
fifty chances to do--it's only your beautiful patience that makes
one forget one's manners. In spite of your patience, all the
same," she went on, "you'd do anything rather than be with us here,
even if that were possible. You'd do everything for us but be
mixed up with us--which is a statement you can easily answer to the
advantage of your own manners. You can say 'What's the use of
talking of things that at the best are impossible?' What IS of
course the use? It's only my little madness. You'd talk if you
were tormented. And I don't mean now about HIM. Oh for him--!"
Positively, strangely, bitterly, as it seemed to Strether, she gave
"him," for the moment, away. "You don't care what I think of you;
but I happen to care what you think of me. And what you MIGHT,"
she added. "What you perhaps even did."
He gained time. "What I did--?"
"Did think before. Before this. DIDn't you think--?"
But he had already stopped her. "I didn't think anything. I
never think a step further than I'm obliged to."
"That's perfectly false, I believe," she returned--"except that you
may, no doubt, often pull up when things become TOO ugly; or even,
I'll say, to save you a protest, too beautiful. At any rate, even
so far as it's true, we've thrust on you appearances that you've
had to take in and that have therefore made your obligation. Ugly
or beautiful--it doesn't matter what we call them--you were
getting on without them, and that's where we're detestable. We
bore you--that's where we are. And we may well--for what we've
cost you. All you can do NOW is not to think at all. And I who
should have liked to seem to you--well, sublime!"
He could only after a moment re-echo Miss Barrace. "You're
wonderful!"
"I'm old and abject and hideous"--she went on as without hearing
him. "Abject above all. Or old above all. It's when one's old
that it's worst. I don't care what becomes of it--let what WILL;
there it is. It's a doom--I know it; you can't see it more than I
do myself. Things have to happen as they will." With which she
came back again to what, face to face with him, had so quite broken
down. "Of course you wouldn't, even if possible, and no matter
what may happen to you, be near us. But think of me, think of me--!"
She exhaled it into air.
He took refuge in repeating something he had already said and that
she had made nothing of. "There's something I believe I can still
do." And he put his hand out for good-bye.
She again made nothing of it; she went on with her insistence.
"That won't help you. There's nothing to help you."
"Well, it may help YOU," he said.
She shook her head. "There's not a grain of certainty in my
future--for the only certainty is that I shall be the loser in the
end."
She hadn't taken his hand, but she moved with him to the door.
"That's cheerful," he laughed, "for your benefactor!"
"What's cheerful for ME," she replied, "is that we might, you and
I, have been friends. That's it--that's it. You see how, as I
say, I want everything. I've wanted you too."
"Ah but you've HAD me!" he declared, at the door, with an emphasis
that made an end.
III
His purpose had been to see Chad the next day, and he had prefigured
seeing him by an early call; having in general never stood on ceremony
in respect to visits at the Boulevard Malesherbes. It had been
more often natural for him to go there than for Chad to come to the
small hotel, the attractions of which were scant; yet it nevertheless,
just now, at the eleventh hour, did suggest itself to Strether to begin
by giving the young man a chance. It struck him that, in the
inevitable course, Chad would be "round," as Waymarsh used to say--
Waymarsh who already, somehow, seemed long ago. He hadn't come the
day before, because it had been arranged between them that Madame de Vionnet
should see their friend first; but now that this passage had taken place
he would present himself, and their friend wouldn't have long to wait.
Strether assumed, he became aware, on this reasoning, that the
interesting parties to the arrangement would have met betimes, and
that the more interesting of the two--as she was after all--would
have communicated to the other the issue of her appeal. Chad would
know without delay that his mother's messenger had been with her,
and, though it was perhaps not quite easy to see how she could
qualify what had occurred, he would at least have been sufficiently
advised to feel he could go on. The day, however, brought, early
or late, no word from him, and Strether felt, as a result of this,
that a change had practically come over their intercourse. It was
perhaps a premature judgement; or it only meant perhaps--how could
he tell?--that the wonderful pair he protected had taken up again
together the excursion he had accidentally checked. They might
have gone back to the country, and gone back but with a long breath drawn;
that indeed would best mark Chad's sense that reprobation hadn't
rewarded Madame de Vionnet's request for an interview. At the end of
the twenty-four hours, at the end of the forty-eight, there was still
no overture; so that Strether filled up the time, as he had so often
filled it before, by going to see Miss Gostrey.
He proposed amusements to her; he felt expert now in proposing
amusements; and he had thus, for several days, an odd sense of
leading her about Paris, of driving her in the Bois, of showing her
the penny steamboats--those from which the breeze of the Seine was
to be best enjoyed--that might have belonged to a kindly uncle
doing the honours of the capital to an Intelligent niece from the
country. He found means even to take her to shops she didn't
know, or that she pretended she didn't; while she, on her side,
was, like the country maiden, all passive modest and grateful--
going in fact so far as to emulate rusticity in occasional fatigues
and bewilderments. Strether described these vague proceedings to
himself, described them even to her, as a happy interlude; the sign
of which was that the companions said for the time no further word
about the matter they had talked of to satiety. He proclaimed
satiety at the outset, and she quickly took the hint; as docile
both in this and in everything else as the intelligent obedient
niece. He told her as yet nothing of his late adventure--for as
an adventure it now ranked with him; he pushed the whole business
temporarily aside and found his interest in the fact of her
beautiful assent. She left questions unasked--she who for so long
had been all questions; she gave herself up to him with an
understanding of which mere mute gentleness might have seemed the
sufficient expression. She knew his sense of his situation had
taken still another step--of that he was quite aware; but she
conveyed that, whatever had thus happened for him, it was thrown
into the shade by what was happening for herself. This--though it
mightn't to a detached spirit have seemed much--was the major
interest, and she met it with a new directness of response,
measuring it from hour to hour with her grave hush of acceptance.
Touched as he had so often been by her before, he was, for his part
too, touched afresh; all the more that though he could be duly
aware of the principle of his own mood he couldn't be equally so
of the principle of hers. He knew, that is, in a manner--knew
roughly and resignedly--what he himself was hatching; whereas he
had to take the chance of what he called to himself Maria's
calculations. It was all he needed that she liked him enough for
what they were doing, and even should they do a good deal more
would still like him enough for that; the essential freshness of a
relation so simple was a cool bath to the soreness produced by
other relations. These others appeared to him now horribly
complex; they bristled with fine points, points all unimaginable
beforehand, points that pricked and drew blood; a fact that gave to
an hour with his present friend on a bateau-mouche, or in the
afternoon shade of the Champs Elysees, something of the innocent
pleasure of handling rounded ivory. His relation with Chad
personally--from the moment he had got his point of view--had been
of the simplest; yet this also struck him as bristling, after a
third and a fourth blank day had passed. It was as if at last
however his care for such indications had dropped; there came a
fifth blank day and he ceased to enquire or to heed.
They now took on to his fancy, Miss Gostrey and he, the image of
the Babes in the Wood; they could trust the merciful elements to
let them continue at peace. He had been great already, as he knew,
at postponements; but he had only to get afresh into the rhythm of
one to feel its fine attraction. It amused him to say to himself
that he might for all the world have been going to die--die resignedly;
the scene was filled for him with so deep a death-bed hush, so
melancholy a charm. That meant the postponement of everything else--
which made so for the quiet lapse of life; and the postponement
in especial of the reckoning to come--unless indeed the reckoning
to come were to be one and the same thing with extinction. It faced
him, the reckoning, over the shoulder of much interposing experience--
which also faced him; and one would float to it doubtless duly
through these caverns of Kubla Khan. It was really behind everything;
it hadn't merged in what he had done; his final appreciation of what
he had done--his appreciation on the spot--would provide it with
its main sharpness. The spot so focussed was of course Woollett,
and he was to see, at the best, what Woollett would be with everything
there changed for him. Wouldn't THAT revelation practically amount to
the wind-up of his career? Well, the summer's end would show;
his suspense had meanwhile exactly the sweetness of vain delay;
and he had with it, we should mention, other pastimes than Maria's
company--plenty of separate musings in which his luxury failed him
but at one point. He was well in port, the outer sea behind him,
and it was only a matter of getting ashore. There was a question
that came and went for him, however, as he rested against the
side of his ship, and it was a little to get rid of the obsession
that he prolonged his hours with Miss Gostrey. It was a question
about himself, but it could only be settled by seeing Chad again;
it was indeed his principal reason for wanting to see Chad.
After that it wouldn't signify--it was a ghost that certain words
would easily lay to rest. Only the young man must be there to
take the words. Once they were taken he wouldn't have a question left;
none, that is, in connexion with this particular affair. It wouldn't
then matter even to himself that he might now have been guilty of
speaking BECAUSE of what he had forfeited. That was the refinement
of his supreme scruple--he wished so to leave what he had forfeited
out of account. He wished not to do anything because he had missed
something else, because he was sore or sorry or impoverished,
because he was maltreated or desperate; he wished to do everything
because he was lucid and quiet, just the same for himself on all
essential points as he had ever been. Thus it was that while he
virtually hung about for Chad he kept mutely putting it: "You've
been chucked, old boy; but what has that to do with it?" It would
have sickened him to feel vindictive.
These tints of feeling indeed were doubtless but the iridescence of
his idleness, and they were presently lost in a new light from
Maria. She had a fresh fact for him before the week was out, and
she practically met him with it on his appearing one night. He hadn't
on this day seen her, but had planned presenting himself in due course
to ask her to dine with him somewhere out of doors, on one of the
terraces, in one of the gardens, of which the Paris of summer was
profuse. It had then come on to rain, so that, disconcerted, he changed
his mind; dining alone at home, a little stuffily and stupidly, and
waiting on her afterwards to make up his loss. He was sure within a
minute that something had happened; it was so in the air of the rich
little room that he had scarcely to name his thought. Softly lighted,
the whole colour of the place, with its vague values, was in cool
fusion--an effect that made the visitor stand for a little agaze. It
was as if in doing so now he had felt a recent presence--his recognition
of the passage of which his hostess in turn divined. She had scarcely
to say it--"Yes, she has been here, and this time I received her." It
wasn't till a minute later that she added: "There being, as I
understand you, no reason NOW--!"
"None for your refusing?"
"No--if you've done what you've had to do."
"I've certainly so far done it," Strether said, "as that you needn't
fear the effect, or the appearance of coming between us. There's
nothing between us now but what we ourselves have put there, and
not an inch of room for anything else whatever. Therefore you're
only beautifully WITH us as always--though doubtless now, if she
has talked to you, rather more with us than less. Of course if
she came," he added, "it was to talk to you."
"It was to talk to me," Maria returned; on which he was further
sure that she was practically in possession of what he himself hadn't
yet told her. He was even sure she was in possession of things
he himself couldn't have told; for the consciousness of them was
now all in her face and accompanied there with a shade of sadness
that marked in her the close of all uncertainties. It came out for
him more than ever yet that she had had from the first a knowledge
she believed him not to have had, a knowledge the sharp acquisition
of which might be destined to make a difference for him. The
difference for him might not inconceivably be an arrest of his
independence and a change in his attitude--in other words a
revulsion in favour of the principles of Woollett. She had really
prefigured the possibility of a shock that would send him swinging
back to Mrs. Newsome. He hadn't, it was true, week after week,
shown signs of receiving it, but the possibility had been none the
less in the air. What Maria accordingly had had now to take in was
that the shock had descended and that he hadn't, all the same,
swung back. He had grown clear, in a flash, on a point long since
settled for herself; but no reapproximation to Mrs. Newsome had
occurred in consequence. Madame de Vionnet had by her visit held
up the torch to these truths, and what now lingered in poor Maria's
face was the somewhat smoky light of the scene between them.
If the light however wasn't, as we have hinted, the glow of joy,
the reasons for this also were perhaps discernible to Strether even
through the blur cast over them by his natural modesty. She had
held herself for months with a firm hand; she hadn't interfered on
any chance--and chances were specious enough--that she might
interfere to her profit. She had turned her back on the dream that
Mrs. Newsome's rupture, their friend's forfeiture--the engagement
the relation itself, broken beyond all mending--might furnish forth
her advantage; and, to stay her hand from promoting these things,
she had on private, difficult, but rigid, lines, played strictly
fair. She couldn't therefore but feel that, though, as the end of
all, the facts in question had been stoutly confirmed, her ground
for personal, for what might have been called interested, elation
remained rather vague. Strether might easily have made out that
she had been asking herself, in the hours she had just sat through,
if there were still for her, or were only not, a fair shade of
uncertainty. Let us hasten to add, however, that what he at first
made out on this occasion he also at first kept to himself. He
only asked what in particular Madame de Vionnet had come for,
and as to this his companion was ready.
"She wants tidings of Mr. Newsome, whom she appears not to have
seen for some days."
"Then she hasn't been away with him again?"
"She seemed to think," Maria answered, "that he might have gone
away with YOU."
"And did you tell her I know nothing of him?"
She had her indulgent headshake. "I've known nothing of what you
know. I could only tell her I'd ask you."
"Then I've not seen him for a week--and of course I've wondered."
His wonderment showed at this moment as sharper, but he presently
went on. "Still, I dare say I can put my hand on him. Did she
strike you," he asked, "as anxious?"
"She's always anxious."
"After all I've done for her?" And he had one of the last flickers
of his occasional mild mirth. "To think that was just what I came
out to prevent!"
She took it up but to reply. "You don't regard him then as safe?"
"I was just going to ask you how in that respect you regard Madame
de Vionnet."
She looked at him a little. "What woman was EVER safe? She told
me," she added--and it was as if at the touch of the connexion--
"of your extraordinary meeting in the country. After that a quoi
se fier?"
"It was, as an accident, in all the possible or impossible chapter,"
Strether conceded, "amazing enough. But still, but still--!"
"But still she didn't mind?"
"She doesn't mind anything."
"Well, then, as you don't either, we may all sink to rest!"
He appeared to agree with her, but he had his reservation.
"I do mind Chad's disappearance."
"Oh you'll get him back. But now you know," she said, "why I went
to Mentone." He had sufficiently let her see that he had by this
time gathered things together, but there was nature in her wish to
make them clearer still. "I didn't want you to put it to me."
"To put it to you--?"
"The question of what you were at last--a week ago--to see for
yourself. I didn't want to have to lie for her. I felt that to
be too much for me. A man of course is always expected to do it--
to do it, I mean, for a woman; but not a woman for another woman;
unless perhaps on the tit-for-tat principle, as an indirect way of
protecting herself. I don't need protection, so that I was free to
'funk' you--simply to dodge your test. The responsibility was too
much for me. I gained time, and when I came back the need of a
test had blown over."
Strether thought of it serenely. "Yes; when you came back little
Bilham had shown me what's expected of a gentleman. Little Bilham
had lied like one."
"And like what you believed him?"
"Well," said Strether, "it was but a technical lie--he classed the
attachment as virtuous. That was a view for which there was much
to be said--and the virtue came out for me hugely There was of
course a great deal of it. I got it full in the face, and I haven't,
you see, done with it yet."
"What I see, what I saw," Maria returned, "is that you dressed up
even the virtue. You were wonderful--you were beautiful, as I've
had the honour of telling you before; but, if you wish really to
know," she sadly confessed, "I never quite knew WHERE you were.
There were moments," she explained, "when you struck me as grandly
cynical; there were others when you struck me as grandly vague."
Her friend considered. "I had phases. I had flights."
"Yes, but things must have a basis."
"A basis seemed to me just what her beauty supplied."
"Her beauty of person?"
"Well, her beauty of everything. The impression she makes. She
has such variety and yet such harmony."
She considered him with one of her deep returns of indulgence--
returns out of all proportion to the irritations they flooded over.
"You're complete."
"You're always too personal," he good-humouredly said; "but that's
precisely how I wondered and wandered."
"If you mean," she went on, "that she was from the first for you
the most charming woman in the world, nothing's more simple. Only
that was an odd foundation."
"For what I reared on it?"
"For what you didn't!"
"Well, it was all not a fixed quantity. And it had for me--it has
still--such elements of strangeness. Her greater age than his, her
different world, traditions, association; her other opportunities,
liabilities, standards."
His friend listened with respect to his enumeration of these
disparities; then she disposed of them at a stroke. "Those things
are nothing when a woman's hit. It's very awful. She was hit."
Strether, on his side, did justice to that plea. "Oh of course I
saw she was hit. That she was hit was what we were busy with; that
she was hit was our great affair. But somehow I couldn't think of
her as down in the dust. And as put there by OUR little Chad!"
"Yet wasn't 'your' little Chad just your miracle?"
Strether admitted it. "Of course I moved among miracles. It was
all phantasmagoric. But the great fact was that so much of it was
none of my business--as I saw my business. It isn't even now."
His companion turned away on this, and it might well have been yet
again with the sharpness of a fear of how little his philosophy
could bring her personally. "I wish SHE could hear you!"
"Mrs. Newsome?"
"No--not Mrs. Newsome; since I understand you that it doesn't
matter now what Mrs. Newsome hears. Hasn't she heard
everything?"
"Practically--yes." He had thought a moment, but he went on. "You
wish Madame de Vionnet could hear me?"
"Madame de Vionnet." She had come back to him. "She thinks just
the contrary of what you say. That you distinctly judge her."
He turned over the scene as the two women thus placed together for
him seemed to give it. "She might have known--!"
"Might have known you don't?" Miss Gostrey asked as he let it drop.
"She was sure of it at first," she pursued as he said nothing; "she
took it for granted, at least, as any woman in her position would.
But after that she changed her mind; she believed you believed--"
"Well?"--he was curious.
"Why in her sublimity. And that belief had remained with her, I
make out, till the accident of the other day opened your eyes. For
that it did," said Maria, "open them--"
"She can't help"--he had taken it up--"being aware? No," he mused;
"I suppose she thinks of that even yet."
"Then they WERE closed? There you are! However, if you see her as
the most charming woman in the world it comes to the same thing.
And if you'd like me to tell her that you do still so see her--!"
Miss Gostrey, in short, offered herself for service to the end.
It was an offer he could temporarily entertain; but he decided.
"She knows perfectly how I see her."
"Not favourably enough, she mentioned to me, to wish ever to see
her again. She told me you had taken a final leave of her. She
says you've done with her."
"So I have."
Maria had a pause; then she spoke as if for conscience. "She
wouldn't have done with YOU. She feels she has lost you--
yet that she might have been better for you."
"Oh she has been quite good enough!" Strether laughed.
"She thinks you and she might at any rate have been friends."
"We might certainly. That's just"--he continued to laugh--
"why I'm going."
It was as if Maria could feel with this then at last that she had
done her best for each. But she had still an idea. "Shall I tell
her that?"
"No. Tell her nothing."
"Very well then." To which in the next breath Miss Gostrey added:
"Poor dear thing!"
Her friend wondered; then with raised eyebrows: "Me?"
"Oh no. Marie de Vionnet."
He accepted the correction, but he wondered still. "Are you so
sorry for her as that?"
It made her think a moment--made her even speak with a smile. But
she didn't really retract. "I'm sorry for us all!"
IV
He was to delay no longer to re-establish communication with Chad,
and we have just seen that he had spoken to Miss Gostrey of this
intention on hearing from her of the young man's absence. It was
not moreover only the assurance so given that prompted him; it was
the need of causing his conduct to square with another profession
still--the motive he had described to her as his sharpest for now
getting away. If he was to get away because of some of the
relations involved in staying, the cold attitude toward them might
look pedantic in the light of lingering on. He must do both
things; he must see Chad, but he must go. The more he thought of
the former of these duties the more he felt himself make a subject
of insistence of the latter. They were alike intensely present to
him as he sat in front of a quiet little cafe into which he had
dropped on quitting Maria's entresol. The rain that had spoiled
his evening with her was over; for it was still to him as if his
evening HAD been spoiled--though it mightn't have been wholly the
rain. It was late when he left the cafe, yet not too late; he
couldn't in any case go straight to bed, and he would walk round
by the Boulevard Malesherbes--rather far round--on his way home.
Present enough always was the small circumstance that had
originally pressed for him the spring of so big a difference--the
accident of little Bilham's appearance on the balcony of the mystic
troisieme at the moment of his first visit, and the effect of it on
his sense of what was then before him. He recalled his watch, his
wait, and the recognition that had proceeded from the young
stranger, that had played frankly into the air and had presently
brought him up--things smoothing the way for his first straight
step. He had since had occasion, a few times, to pass the house
without going in; but he had never passed it without again feeling
how it had then spoken to him. He stopped short to-night on coming
to sight of it: it was as if his last day were oddly copying his
first. The windows of Chad's apartment were open to the balcony--
a pair of them lighted; and a figure that had come out and taken up
little Bilham's attitude, a figure whose cigarette-spark he could
see leaned on the rail and looked down at him. It denoted however
no reappearance of his younger friend; it quickly defined itself in
the tempered darkness as Chad's more solid shape; so that Chad's
was the attention that after he had stepped forward into the street
and signalled, he easily engaged; Chad's was the voice that,
sounding into the night with promptness and seemingly with joy,
greeted him and called him up.
That the young man had been visible there just in this position
expressed somehow for Strether that, as Maria Gostrey had reported,
he had been absent and silent; and our friend drew breath on each
landing--the lift, at that hour, having ceased to work--before the
implications of the fact. He had been for a week intensely away,
away to a distance and alone; but he was more back than ever, and
the attitude in which Strether had surprised him was something more
than a return--it was clearly a conscious surrender. He had
arrived but an hour before, from London, from Lucerne, from Homburg,
from no matter where--though the visitor's fancy, on the staircase,
liked to fill it out; and after a bath, a talk with Baptiste and a
supper of light cold clever French things, which one could see the
remains of there in the circle of the lamp, pretty and ultra-Parisian,
he had come into the air again for a smoke, was occupied at the moment
of Strether's approach in what might have been called taking up
his life afresh. His life, his life!--Strether paused anew, on
the last flight, at this final rather breathless sense of what
Chad's life was doing with Chad's mother's emissary. It was
dragging him, at strange hours, up the staircases of the rich;
it was keeping him out of bed at the end of long hot days;
it was transforming beyond recognition the simple, subtle,
conveniently uniform thing that had anciently passed with him for a
life of his own. Why should it concern him that Chad was to be
fortified in the pleasant practice of smoking on balconies, of
supping on salads, of feeling his special conditions agreeably
reaffirm themselves, of finding reassurance in comparisons and
contrasts? There was no answer to such a question but that he was
still practically committed--he had perhaps never yet so much known it.
It made him feel old, and he would buy his railway-ticket--feeling,
no doubt, older--the next day; but he had meanwhile come up four
flights, counting the entresol, at midnight and without a lift, for
Chad's life. The young man, hearing him by this time, and with
Baptiste sent to rest, was already at the door; so that Strether
had before him in full visibility the cause in which he was labouring
and even, with the troisieme fairly gained, panting a little.
Chad offered him, as always, a welcome in which the cordial and the
formal--so far as the formal was the respectful--handsomely met;
and after he had expressed a hope that he would let him put him up
for the night Strether was in full possession of the key, as it
might have been called, to what had lately happened. If he had
just thought of himself as old Chad was at sight of him thinking of
him as older: he wanted to put him up for the night just because
he was ancient and weary. It could never be said the tenant of
these quarters wasn't nice to him; a tenant who, if he might
indeed now keep him, was probably prepared to work it all still
more thoroughly. Our friend had in fact the impression that with
the minimum of encouragement Chad would propose to keep him
indefinitely; an impression in the lap of which one of his own
possibilities seemed to sit. Madame de Vionnet had wished him to
stay--so why didn't that happily fit? He could enshrine himself
for the rest of his days in his young host's chambre d'ami and draw
out these days at his young host's expense: there could scarce be
greater logical expression of the countenance he had been moved to
give. There was literally a minute--it was strange enough--during
which he grasped the idea that as he WAS acting, as he could only
act, he was inconsistent. The sign that the inward forces he had
obeyed really hung together would be that--in default always of
another career--he should promote the good cause by mounting guard
on it. These things, during his first minutes, came and went; but
they were after all practically disposed of as soon as he had
mentioned his errand. He had come to say good-bye--yet that was
only a part; so that from the moment Chad accepted his farewell the
question of a more ideal affirmation gave way to something else.
He proceeded with the rest of his business. "You'll be a brute, you
know--you'll be guilty of the last infamy--if you ever forsake her."
That, uttered there at the solemn hour, uttered in the place that
was full of her influence, was the rest of his business; and when
once he had heard himself say it he felt that his message had never
before been spoken. It placed his present call immediately on
solid ground, and the effect of it was to enable him quite to play
with what we have called the key. Chad showed no shade of
embarrassment, but had none the less been troubled for him after
their meeting in the country; had had fears and doubts on the
subject of his comfort. He was disturbed, as it were, only FOR
him, and had positively gone away to ease him off, to let him down--
if it wasn't indeed rather to screw him up--the more gently.
Seeing him now fairly jaded he had come, with characteristic good
humour, all the way to meet him, and what Strether thereupon
supremely made out was that he would abound for him to the end in
conscientious assurances. This was what was between them while the
visitor remained; so far from having to go over old ground he found
his entertainer keen to agree to everything. It couldn't be put
too strongly for him that he'd be a brute. "Oh rather!--if I should
do anything of THAT sort. I hope you believe I really feel it."
"I want it," said Strether, "to be my last word of all to you.
I can't say more, you know; and I don't see how I can do more,
in every way, than I've done."
Chad took this, almost artlessly, as a direct allusion. "You've
seen her?"
"Oh yes--to say good-bye. And if I had doubted the truth of what I
tell you--"
"She'd have cleared up your doubt?" Chad understood--"rather"--
again! It even kept him briefly silent. But he made that up.
"She must have been wonderful."
"She WAS," Strether candidly admitted--all of which practically
told as a reference to the conditions created by the accident of
the previous week.
They appeared for a little to be looking back at it; and that came
out still more in what Chad next said. "I don't know what you've
really thought, all along; I never did know--for anything, with
you, seemed to be possible. But of course--of course--" Without
confusion, quite with nothing but indulgence, he broke down, he
pulled up. "After all, you understand. I spoke to you originally
only as I HAD to speak. There's only one way--isn't there?--about
such things. However," he smiled with a final philosophy, "I see
it's all right."
Strether met his eyes with a sense of multiplying thoughts. What
was it that made him at present, late at night and after journeys,
so renewedly, so substantially young? Strether saw in a moment
what it was--it was that he was younger again than Madame de Vionnet.
He himself said immediately none of the things that he was thinking;
he said something quite different. "You HAVE really been to a distance?"
"I've been to England." Chad spoke cheerfully and promptly, but gave
no further account of it than to say: "One must sometimes get off."
Strether wanted no more facts--he only wanted to justify, as it
were, his question. "Of course you do as you're free to do. But I
hope, this time, that you didn't go for ME."
"For very shame at bothering you really too much? My dear man,"
Chad laughed, "what WOULDn't I do for you?"
Strether's easy answer for this was that it was a disposition he
had exactly come to profit by. "Even at the risk of being in your
way I've waited on, you know, for a definite reason."
Chad took it in. "Oh yes--for us to make if possible a still
better impression." And he stood there happily exhaling his full
general consciousness. "I'm delighted to gather that you feel
we've made it."
There was a pleasant irony in the words, which his guest,
preoccupied and keeping to the point, didn't take up. "If I had
my sense of wanting the rest of the time--the time of their being
still on this side," he continued to explain--"I know now why I
wanted it."
He was as grave, as distinct, as a demonstrator before a
blackboard, and Chad continued to face him like an intelligent
pupil. "You wanted to have been put through the whole thing."
Strether again, for a moment, said nothing; he turned his eyes
away, and they lost themselves, through the open window, in the
dusky outer air. "I shall learn from the Bank here where they're
now having their letters, and my last word, which I shall write in
the morning and which they're expecting as my ultimatum, will so
immediately reach them." The light of his plural pronoun was
sufficiently reflected in his companion's face as he again met it;
and he completed his demonstration. He pursued indeed as if for
himself. "Of course I've first to justify what I shall do."
"You're justifying it beautifully!" Chad declared.
"It's not a question of advising you not to go," Strether said, "but
of absolutely preventing you, if possible, from so much as thinking
of it. Let me accordingly appeal to you by all you hold sacred."
Chad showed a surprise. "What makes you think me capable--?"
"You'd not only be, as I say, a brute; you'd be," his companion
went on in the same way, "a criminal of the deepest dye."
Chad gave a sharper look, as if to gauge a possible suspicion.
"I don't know what should make you think I'm tired of her."
Strether didn't quite know either, and such impressions, for the
imaginative mind, were always too fine, too floating, to produce on
the spot their warrant. There was none the less for him, in the
very manner of his host's allusion to satiety as a thinkable
motive, a slight breath of the ominous. "I feel how much more she
can do for you. She hasn't done it all yet. Stay with her at
least till she has."
"And leave her THEN?"
Chad had kept smiling, but its effect in Strether was a shade of
dryness. "Don't leave her BEFORE. When you've got all that can be
got--I don't say," he added a trifle grimly. "That will be the
proper time. But as, for you, from such a woman, there will always
be something to be got, my remark's not a wrong to her." Chad let
him go on, showing every decent deference, showing perhaps also a
candid curiosity for this sharper accent. "I remember you, you
know, as you were."
"An awful ass, wasn't I?"
The response was as prompt as if he had pressed a spring; it had a
ready abundance at which he even winced; so that he took a moment
to meet it. "You certainly then wouldn't have seemed worth all
you've let me in for. You've defined yourself better. Your value
has quintupled."
"Well then, wouldn't that be enough--?"
Chad had risked it jocosely, but Strether remained blank. "Enough?"
"If one SHOULD wish to live on one's accumulations?" After which,
however, as his friend appeared cold to the joke, the young man as
easily dropped it. "Of course I really never forget, night or day,
what I owe her. I owe her everything. I give you my word of
honour," he frankly rang out, "that I'm not a bit tired of her."
Strether at this only gave him a stare: the way youth could
express itself was again and again a wonder. He meant no harm,
though he might after all be capable of much; yet he spoke of being
"tired" of her almost as he might have spoken of being tired of
roast mutton for dinner. "She has never for a moment yet bored me--
never been wanting, as the cleverest women sometimes are, in tact.
She has never talked about her tact--as even they too sometimes talk;
but she has always had it. She has never had it more"--he handsomely
made the point--"than just lately." And he scrupulously went further.
"She has never been anything I could call a burden."
Strether for a moment said nothing; then he spoke gravely, with his
shade of dryness deepened. "Oh if you didn't do her justice--!"
"I SHOULD be a beast, eh?"
Strether devoted no time to saying what he would be; THAT, visibly,
would take them far. If there was nothing for it but to repeat,
however, repetition was no mistake. "You owe her everything--very
much more than she can ever owe you. You've in other words duties
to her, of the most positive sort; and I don't see what other
duties--as the others are presented to you--can be held to go
before them."
Chad looked at him with a smile. "And you know of course about the
others, eh?--since it's you yourself who have done the presenting."
"Much of it--yes--and to the best of my ability. But not all--from
the moment your sister took my place."
"She didn't," Chad returned. "Sally took a place, certainly; but
it was never, I saw from the first moment, to be yours. No one--
with us--will ever take yours. It wouldn't be possible."
"Ah of course," sighed Strether, "I knew it. I believe you're
right. No one in the world, I imagine, was ever so portentously
solemn. There I am," he added with another sigh, as if weary
enough, on occasion, of this truth. "I was made so."
Chad appeared for a little to consider the way he was made;
he might for this purpose have measured him up and down.
His conclusion favoured the fact. "YOU have never needed any one
to make you better. There has never been any one good enough.
They couldn't," the young man declared.
His friend hesitated. "I beg your pardon. They HAVE."
Chad showed, not without amusement, his doubt. "Who then?"
Strether--though a little dimly--smiled at him. "Women--too."
"'Two'?"--Chad stared and laughed. "Oh I don't believe, for such
work, in any more than one! So you're proving too much. And what
IS beastly, at all events," he added, "is losing you."
Strether had set himself in motion for departure, but at this he
paused. "Are you afraid?"
"Afraid--?"
"Of doing wrong. I mean away from my eye." Before Chad could
speak, however, he had taken himself up. "I AM, certainly," he
laughed, "prodigious."
"Yes, you spoil us for all the stupid--!" This might have been, on
Chad's part, in its extreme emphasis, almost too freely
extravagant; but it was full, plainly enough, of the intention of
comfort, it carried with it a protest against doubt and a promise,
positively, of performance. Picking up a hat in the vestibule he
came out with his friend, came downstairs, took his arm,
affectionately, as to help and guide him, treating him if not
exactly as aged and infirm, yet as a noble eccentric who appealed
to tenderness, and keeping on with him, while they walked, to the
next corner and the next. "You needn't tell me, you needn't tell
me!"--this again as they proceeded, he wished to make Strether
feel. What he needn't tell him was now at last, in the geniality
of separation, anything at all it concerned him to know. He knew,
up to the hilt--that really came over Chad; he understood, felt,
recorded his vow; and they lingered on it as they had lingered in
their walk to Strether's hotel the night of their first meeting.
The latter took, at this hour, all he could get; he had given all
he had had to give; he was as depleted as if he had spent his last
sou. But there was just one thing for which, before they broke
off, Chad seemed disposed slightly to bargain. His companion needn't,
as he said, tell him, but he might himself mention that he had been
getting some news of the art of advertisement. He came out quite
suddenly with this announcement while Strether wondered if his revived
interest were what had taken him, with strange inconsequence, over
to London. He appeared at all events to have been looking into the
question and had encountered a revelation. Advertising scientifically
worked presented itself thus as the great new force. "It really
does the thing, you know."
They were face to face under the street-lamp as they had been the
first night, and Strether, no doubt, looked blank. "Affects, you
mean, the sale of the object advertised?"
"Yes--but affects it extraordinarily; really beyond what one had
supposed. I mean of course when it's done as one makes out that in
our roaring age, it CAN be done. I've been finding out a little,
though it doubtless doesn't amount to much more than what you
originally, so awfully vividly--and all, very nearly, that first
night--put before me. It's an art like another, and infinite like
all the arts." He went on as if for the joke of it--almost as if
his friend's face amused him. "In the hands, naturally, of a master.
The right man must take hold. With the right man to work it
c'est un monde."
Strether had watched him quite as if, there on the pavement without
a pretext, he had begun to dance a fancy step. "Is what you're
thinking of that you yourself, in the case you have in mind, would
be the right man?"
Chad had thrown back his light coat and thrust each of his thumbs
into an armhole of his waistcoat; in which position his fingers
played up and down. "Why, what is he but what you yourself, as I
say, took me for when you first came out?"
Strether felt a little faint, but he coerced his attention. "Oh
yes, and there's no doubt that, with your natural parts, you'd have
much in common with him. Advertising is clearly at this time of
day the secret of trade. It's quite possible it will be open to you--
giving the whole of your mind to it--to make the whole place hum
with you. Your mother's appeal is to the whole of your mind, and
that's exactly the strength of her case."
Chad's fingers continued to twiddle, but he had something of a drop.
"Ah we've been through my mother's case!"
"So I thought. Why then do you speak of the matter?"
"Only because it was part of our original discussion. To wind up
where we began, my interest's purely platonic. There at any rate
the fact is--the fact of the possible. I mean the money in it."
"Oh damn the money in it!" said Strether. And then as the young
man's fixed smile seemed to shine out more strange: "Shall you
give your friend up for the money in it?"
Chad preserved his handsome grimace as well as the rest of his
attitude. "You're not altogether--in your so great 'solemnity'--
kind. Haven't I been drinking you in--showing you all I feel
you're worth to me? What have I done, what am I doing, but cleave
to her to the death? The only thing is," he good-humouredly
explained, "that one can't but have it before one, in the cleaving--
the point where the death comes in. Don't be afraid for THAT.
It's pleasant to a fellow's feelings," he developed, "to 'size-up'
the bribe he applies his foot to."
"Oh then if all you want's a kickable surface the bribe's enormous."
"Good. Then there it goes!" Chad administered his kick with fantastic
force and sent an imaginary object flying. It was accordingly as if
they were once more rid of the question and could come back to what
really concerned him. "Of course I shall see you tomorrow."
But Strether scarce heeded the plan proposed for this; he had still
the impression--not the slighter for the simulated kick--of an
irrelevant hornpipe or jig. "You're restless."
"Ah," returned Chad as they parted, "you're exciting."
V
He had, however, within two days, another separation to face.
He had sent Maria Gostrey a word early, by hand, to ask if he might
come to breakfast; in consequence of which, at noon, she awaited
him in the cool shade of her little Dutch-looking dining-room.
This retreat was at the back of the house, with a view of a scrap
of old garden that had been saved from modern ravage; and though he
had on more than one other occasion had his legs under its small
and peculiarly polished table of hospitality, the place had never
before struck him as so sacred to pleasant knowledge, to intimate
charm, to antique order, to a neatness that was almost august.
To sit there was, as he had told his hostess before, to see life
reflected for the time in ideally kept pewter; which was somehow
becoming, improving to life, so that one's eyes were held and
comforted. Strether's were comforted at all events now--and the
more that it was the last time--with the charming effect, on the
board bare of a cloth and proud of its perfect surface, of the
small old crockery and old silver, matched by the more substantial
pieces happily disposed about the room. The specimens of vivid
Delf, in particular had the dignity of family portraits; and it was
in the midst of them that our friend resignedly expressed himself.
He spoke even with a certain philosophic humour. "There's nothing
more to wait for; I seem to have done a good day's work. I've let
them have it all round. I've seen Chad, who has been to London and
come back. He tells me I'm 'exciting,' and I seem indeed pretty
well to have upset every one. I've at any rate excited HIM. He's
distinctly restless."
"You've excited ME," Miss Gostrey smiled. "I'M distinctly restless."
"Oh you were that when I found you. It seems to me I've rather got
you out of it. What's this," he asked as he looked about him, "but
a haunt of ancient peace?"
"I wish with all my heart," she presently replied, "I could make
you treat it as a haven of rest." On which they fronted each other,
across the table, as if things unuttered were in the air.
Strether seemed, in his way, when he next spoke, to take some of
them up. "It wouldn't give me--that would be the trouble--what it
will, no doubt, still give you. I'm not," he explained, leaning
back in his chair, but with his eyes on a small ripe round melon--
"in real harmony with what surrounds me. You ARE. I take it too hard.
You DON'T. It makes--that's what it comes to in the end--a fool of me."
Then at a tangent, "What has he been doing in London?" he demanded.
"Ah one may go to London," Maria laughed. "You know I did."
Yes--he took the reminder. "And you brought ME back." He brooded
there opposite to her, but without gloom. "Whom has Chad brought?
He's full of ideas. And I wrote to Sarah," he added, "the first
thing this morning. So I'm square. I'm ready for them."
She neglected certain parts of this speech in the interest of
others. "Marie said to me the other day that she felt him to have
the makings of an immense man of business."
"There it is. He's the son of his father!"
"But SUCH a father!"
"Ah just the right one from that point of view! But it isn't his
father in him," Strether added, "that troubles me."
"What is it then?" He came back to his breakfast; he partook
presently of the charming melon, which she liberally cut for him;
and it was only after this that he met her question. Then moreover
it was but to remark that he'd answer her presently. She waited,
she watched, she served him and amused him, and it was perhaps with
this last idea that she soon reminded him of his having never even
yet named to her the article produced at Woollett. "Do you
remember our talking of it in London--that night at the play?"
Before he could say yes, however, she had put it to him for other
matters. Did he remember, did he remember--this and that of their
first days? He remembered everything, bringing up with humour
even things of which she professed no recollection, things she
vehemently denied; and falling back above all on the great
interest of their early time, the curiosity felt by both of them
as to where he would "come out." They had so assumed it was to be
in some wonderful place--they had thought of it as so very MUCH
out. Well, that was doubtless what it had been--since he had come
out just there. He was out, in truth, as far as it was possible
to be, and must now rather bethink himself of getting in again.
He found on the spot the image of his recent history; he was like
one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. THEY came out, on
one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in the
public eye, and went in on the other side. He too had jigged his
little course--him too a modest retreat awaited. He offered now,
should she really like to know, to name the great product of
Woollett. It would be a great commentary on everything. At this
she stopped him off; she not only had no wish to know, but she
wouldn't know for the world. She had done with the products of
Woollett--for all the good she had got from them. She desired no
further news of them, and she mentioned that Madame de Vionnet
herself had, to her knowledge, lived exempt from the information
he was ready to supply. She had never consented to receive it,
though she would have taken it, under stress, from Mrs. Pocock.
But it was a matter about which Mrs. Pocock appeared to have had
little to say--never sounding the word--and it didn't signify
now. There was nothing clearly for Maria Gostrey that signified
now--save one sharp point, that is, to which she came in time.
"I don't know whether it's before you as a possibility that,
left to himself, Mr. Chad may after all go back. I judge that it
IS more or less so before you, from what you just now said of him."
Her guest had his eyes on her, kindly but attentively, as if
foreseeing what was to follow this. "I don't think it will be for
the money." And then as she seemed uncertain: "I mean I don't
believe it will be for that he'll give her up."
"Then he WILL give her up?"
Strether waited a moment, rather slow and deliberate now, drawing
out a little this last soft stage, pleading with her in various
suggestive and unspoken ways for patience and understanding.
"What were you just about to ask me?"
"Is there anything he can do that would make you patch it up?"
"With Mrs. Newsome?"
Her assent, as if she had had a delicacy about sounding the name,
was only in her face; but she added with it: "Or is there
anything he can do that would make HER try it?"
"To patch it up with me?" His answer came at last in a conclusive
headshake. "There's nothing any one can do. It's over. Over for
both of us."
Maria wondered, seemed a little to doubt. "Are you so sure for her?"
"Oh yes--sure now. Too much has happened. I'm different for her."
She took it in then, drawing a deeper breath. "I see. So that as
she's different for YOU--"
"Ah but," he interrupted, "she's not." And as Miss Gostrey wondered
again: "She's the same. She's more than ever the same.
But I do what I didn't before--I SEE her."
He spoke gravely and as if responsibly--since he had to pronounce;
and the effect of it was slightly solemn, so that she simply exclaimed
"Oh!" Satisfied and grateful, however, she showed in her own next
words an acceptance of his statement. "What then do you go home to?"
He had pushed his plate a little away, occupied with another side
of the matter; taking refuge verily in that side and feeling so
moved that he soon found himself on his feet. He was affected in
advance by what he believed might come from her, and he would have
liked to forestall it and deal with it tenderly; yet in the
presence of it he wished still more to be--though as smoothly as
possible--deterrent and conclusive. He put her question by for
the moment; he told her more about Chad. "It would have been
impossible to meet me more than he did last night on the question
of the infamy of not sticking to her."
"Is that what you called it for him--'infamy'?"
"Oh rather! I described to him in detail the base creature he'd
be, and he quite agrees with me about it."
"So that it's really as if you had nailed him?"
"Quite really as if--! I told him I should curse him."
"Oh," she smiled, "you HAVE done it." And then having thought again:
"You CAN'T after that propose--!" Yet she scanned his face.
"Propose again to Mrs. Newsome?"
She hesitated afresh, but she brought it out. "I've never believed,
you know, that you did propose. I always believed it was really she--
and, so far as that goes, I can understand it. What I mean is,"
she explained, "that with such a spirit--the spirit of curses!--
your breach is past mending. She has only to know what you've done
to him never again to raise a finger."
"I've done," said Strether, "what I could--one can't do more.
He protests his devotion and his horror. But I'm not sure I've
saved him. He protests too much. He asks how one can dream of
his being tired. But he has all life before him."
Maria saw what he meant. "He's formed to please."
"And it's our friend who has formed him." Strether felt in it the
strange irony.
"So it's scarcely his fault!"
"It's at any rate his danger. I mean," said Strether, "it's hers.
But she knows it."
"Yes, she knows it. And is your idea," Miss Gostrey asked, "that
there was some other woman in London?"
"Yes. No. That is I HAVE no ideas. I'm afraid of them.
I've done with them." And he put out his hand to her. "Good-bye."
It brought her back to her unanswered question. "To what do you go
home?"
"I don't know. There will always be something."
"To a great difference," she said as she kept his hand.
"A great difference--no doubt. Yet I shall see what I can make of it."
"Shall you make anything so good--?" But, as if remembering what
Mrs. Newsome had done, it was as far as she went.
He had sufficiently understood. "So good as this place at this
moment? So good as what YOU make of everything you touch?"
He took a moment to say, for, really and truly, what stood about him
there in her offer--which was as the offer of exquisite service, of
lightened care, for the rest of his days--might well have tempted.
It built him softly round, it roofed him warmly over, it rested,
all so firm, on selection. And what ruled selection was beauty and
knowledge. It was awkward, it was almost stupid, not to seem to
prize such things; yet, none the less, so far as they made his
opportunity they made it only for a moment. She'd moreover
understand--she always understood.
That indeed might be, but meanwhile she was going on.
"There's nothing, you know, I wouldn't do for you."
"Oh yes--I know."
"There's nothing," she repeated, "in all the world."
"I know. I know. But all the same I must go." He had got it at last.
"To be right."
"To be right?"
She had echoed it in vague deprecation, but he felt it already
clear for her. "That, you see, is my only logic.
Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself."
She thought. "But with your wonderful impressions you'll have
got a great deal."
"A great deal"--he agreed. "But nothing like YOU. It's you who
would make me wrong!"
Honest and fine, she couldn't greatly pretend she didn't see it.
Still she could pretend just a little. "But why should you be so
dreadfully right?"
"That's the way that--if I must go--you yourself would be the first
to want me. And I can't do anything else."
So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest.
"It isn't so much your BEING 'right'--it's your horrible sharp eye
for what makes you so."
"Oh but you're just as bad yourself. You can't resist me when I
point that out."
She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away.
"I can't indeed resist you."
"Then there we are!" said Strether.