On which Strether saw that Chad was again at hand, and he afterwards scarce
knew, absurd as it may seem, what had then quickly occurred. The moment
concerned him, he felt, more deeply than he could have explained, and he had a
subsequent passage of speculation as to whether, on walking off with Chad, he
hadn’t looked either pale or red. The only thing he was clear about was
that, luckily, nothing indiscreet had in fact been said and that Chad himself
was more than ever, in Miss Barrace’s great sense, wonderful. It was one
of the connexions—though really why it should be, after all, was none so
apparent—in which the whole change in him came out as most striking.
Strether recalled as they approached the house that he had impressed him that
first night as knowing how to enter a box. Well, he impressed him scarce less
now as knowing how to make a presentation. It did something for
Strether’s own quality—marked it as estimated; so that our poor
friend, conscious and passive, really seemed to feel himself quite handed over
and delivered; absolutely, as he would have said, made a present of, given
away. As they reached the house a young woman, about to come forth, appeared,
unaccompanied, on the steps; at the exchange with whom of a word on
Chad’s part Strether immediately perceived that, obligingly, kindly, she
was there to meet them. Chad had left her in the house, but she had afterwards
come halfway and then the next moment had joined them in the garden. Her air of
youth, for Strether, was at first almost disconcerting, while his second
impression was, not less sharply, a degree of relief at there not having just
been, with the others, any freedom used about her. It was upon him at a touch
that she was no subject for that, and meanwhile, on Chad’s introducing
him, she had spoken to him, very simply and gently, in an English clearly of
the easiest to her, yet unlike any other he had ever heard. It wasn’t as
if she tried; nothing, he could see after they had been a few minutes together,
was as if she tried; but her speech, charming correct and odd, was like a
precaution against her passing for a Pole. There were precautions, he seemed
indeed to see, only when there were really dangers.
Later on he was to feel many more of them, but by that time he was to feel
other things besides. She was dressed in black, but in black that struck him as
light and transparent; she was exceedingly fair, and, though she was as
markedly slim, her face had a roundness, with eyes far apart and a little
strange. Her smile was natural and dim; her hat not extravagant; he had only
perhaps a sense of the clink, beneath her fine black sleeves, of more gold
bracelets and bangles than he had ever seen a lady wear. Chad was excellently
free and light about their encounter; it was one of the occasions on which
Strether most wished he himself might have arrived at such ease and such
humour: “Here you are then, face to face at last; you’re made for
each other—vous allez voir; and I bless your union.” It was
indeed, after he had gone off, as if he had been partly serious too. This
latter motion had been determined by an enquiry from him about
“Jeanne”; to which her mother had replied that she was probably
still in the house with Miss Gostrey, to whom she had lately committed her.
“Ah but you know,” the young man had rejoined, “he must see
her”; with which, while Strether pricked up his ears, he had started as
if to bring her, leaving the other objects of his interest together. Strether
wondered to find Miss Gostrey already involved, feeling that he missed a link;
but feeling also, with small delay, how much he should like to talk with her of
Madame de Vionnet on this basis of evidence.
The evidence as yet in truth was meagre; which, for that matter, was perhaps a
little why his expectation had had a drop. There was somehow not quite a wealth
in her; and a wealth was all that, in his simplicity, he had definitely
prefigured. Still, it was too much to be sure already that there was but a
poverty. They moved away from the house, and, with eyes on a bench at some
distance, he proposed that they should sit down. “I’ve heard a
great deal about you,” she said as they went; but he had an answer to it
that made her stop short. “Well, about you, Madame de Vionnet,
I’ve heard, I’m bound to say, almost nothing”—those
struck him as the only words he himself could utter with any lucidity;
conscious as he was, and as with more reason, of the determination to be in
respect to the rest of his business perfectly plain and go perfectly straight.
It hadn’t at any rate been in the least his idea to spy on Chad’s
proper freedom. It was possibly, however, at this very instant and under the
impression of Madame de Vionnet’s pause, that going straight began to
announce itself as a matter for care. She had only after all to smile at him
ever so gently in order to make him ask himself if he weren’t already
going crooked. It might be going crooked to find it of a sudden just only clear
that she intended very definitely to be what he would have called nice to him.
This was what passed between them while, for another instant, they stood still;
he couldn’t at least remember afterwards what else it might have been.
The thing indeed really unmistakeable was its rolling over him as a wave that
he had been, in conditions incalculable and unimaginable, a subject of
discussion. He had been, on some ground that concerned her, answered for; which
gave her an advantage he should never be able to match.
“Hasn’t Miss Gostrey,” she asked, “said a good word for
me?”
What had struck him first was the way he was bracketed with that lady; and he
wondered what account Chad would have given of their acquaintance. Something
not as yet traceable, at all events, had obviously happened. “I
didn’t even know of her knowing you.”
“Well, now she’ll tell you all. I’m so glad you’re in
relation with her.”
This was one of the things—the “all” Miss Gostrey would now
tell him—that, with every deference to present preoccupation, was
uppermost for Strether after they had taken their seat. One of the others was,
at the end of five minutes, that she—oh incontestably,
yes—differed less; differed, that is, scarcely at all—well,
superficially speaking, from Mrs. Newsome or even from Mrs. Pocock. She was
ever so much younger than the one and not so young as the other; but what
was there in her, if anything, that would have made it impossible he
should meet her at Woollett? And wherein was her talk during their moments on
the bench together not the same as would have been found adequate for a
Woollett garden-party?—unless perhaps truly in not being quite so bright.
She observed to him that Mr. Newsome had, to her knowledge, taken extraordinary
pleasure in his visit; but there was no good lady at Woollett who
wouldn’t have been at least up to that. Was there in Chad, by chance,
after all, deep down, a principle of aboriginal loyalty that had made him, for
sentimental ends, attach himself to elements, happily encountered, that would
remind him most of the old air and the old soil? Why accordingly be in a
flutter—Strether could even put it that way—about this unfamiliar
phenomenon of the femme du monde? On these terms Mrs. Newsome herself
was as much of one. Little Bilham verily had testified that they came out, the
ladies of the type, in close quarters; but it was just in these
quarters—now comparatively close—that he felt Madame de
Vionnet’s common humanity. She did come out, and certainly to his relief,
but she came out as the usual thing. There might be motives behind, but so
could there often be even at Woollett. The only thing was that if she showed
him she wished to like him—as the motives behind might conceivably
prompt—it would possibly have been more thrilling for him that she should
have shown as more vividly alien. Ah she was neither Turk nor Pole!—which
would be indeed flat once more for Mrs. Newsome and Mrs. Pocock. A lady and two
gentlemen had meanwhile, however, approached their bench, and this accident
stayed for the time further developments.
They presently addressed his companion, the brilliant strangers; she rose to
speak to them, and Strether noted how the escorted lady, though mature and by
no means beautiful, had more of the bold high look, the range of expensive
reference, that he had, as might have been said, made his plans for. Madame de
Vionnet greeted her as “Duchesse” and was greeted in turn, while
talk started in French, as “Ma toute-belle”; little facts that had
their due, their vivid interest for Strether. Madame de Vionnet didn’t,
none the less, introduce him—a note he was conscious of as false to the
Woollett scale and the Woollett humanity; though it didn’t prevent the
Duchess, who struck him as confident and free, very much what he had obscurely
supposed duchesses, from looking at him as straight and as hard—for it
was hard—as if she would have liked, all the same, to know him.
“Oh yes, my dear, it’s all right, it’s me; and who are
you, with your interesting wrinkles and your most effective (is it the
handsomest, is it the ugliest?) of noses?”—some such loose handful
of bright flowers she seemed, fragrantly enough, to fling at him. Strether
almost wondered—at such a pace was he going—if some divination of
the influence of either party were what determined Madame de Vionnet’s
abstention. One of the gentlemen, in any case, succeeded in placing himself in
close relation with our friend’s companion; a gentleman rather stout and
importantly short, in a hat with a wonderful wide curl to its brim and a frock
coat buttoned with an effect of superlative decision. His French had quickly
turned to equal English, and it occurred to Strether that he might well be one
of the ambassadors. His design was evidently to assert a claim to Madame de
Vionnet’s undivided countenance, and he made it good in the course of a
minute—led her away with a trick of three words; a trick played with a
social art of which Strether, looking after them as the four, whose backs were
now all turned, moved off, felt himself no master.
He sank again upon his bench and, while his eyes followed the party, reflected,
as he had done before, on Chad’s strange communities. He sat there alone
for five minutes, with plenty to think of; above all with his sense of having
suddenly been dropped by a charming woman overlaid now by other impressions and
in fact quite cleared and indifferent. He hadn’t yet had so quiet a
surrender; he didn’t in the least care if nobody spoke to him more. He
might have been, by his attitude, in for something of a march so broad that the
want of ceremony with which he had just been used could fall into its place as
but a minor incident of the procession. Besides, there would be incidents
enough, as he felt when this term of contemplation was closed by the
reappearance of little Bilham, who stood before him a moment with a suggestive
“Well?” in which he saw himself reflected as disorganised, as
possibly floored. He replied with a “Well!” intended to show that
he wasn’t floored in the least. No indeed; he gave it out, as the young
man sat down beside him, that if, at the worst, he had been overturned at all,
he had been overturned into the upper air, the sublimer element with which he
had an affinity and in which he might be trusted a while to float. It
wasn’t a descent to earth to say after an instant and in sustained
response to the reference: “You’re quite sure her husband’s
living?”
“Oh dear, yes.”
“Ah then—!”
“Ah then what?”
Strether had after all to think. “Well, I’m sorry for them.”
But it didn’t for the moment matter more than that. He assured his young
friend he was quite content. They wouldn’t stir; were all right as they
were. He didn’t want to be introduced; had been introduced already about
as far as he could go. He had seen moreover an immensity; liked Gloriani, who,
as Miss Barrace kept saying, was wonderful; had made out, he was sure, the
half-dozen other men who were distinguished, the artists, the critics and oh
the great dramatist—him it was easy to spot; but wanted—no,
thanks, really—to talk with none of them; having nothing at all to say
and finding it would do beautifully as it was; do beautifully because what it
was—well, was just simply too late. And when after this little Bilham,
submissive and responsive, but with an eye to the consolation nearest, easily
threw off some “Better late than never!” all he got in return for
it was a sharp “Better early than late!” This note indeed the next
thing overflowed for Strether into a quiet stream of demonstration that as soon
as he had let himself go he felt as the real relief. It had consciously
gathered to a head, but the reservoir had filled sooner than he knew, and his
companion’s touch was to make the waters spread. There were some things
that had to come in time if they were to come at all. If they didn’t come
in time they were lost for ever. It was the general sense of them that had
overwhelmed him with its long slow rush.
“It’s not too late for you, on any side, and you don’t
strike me as in danger of missing the train; besides which people can be in
general pretty well trusted, of course—with the clock of their freedom
ticking as loud as it seems to do here—to keep an eye on the fleeting
hour. All the same don’t forget that you’re young—blessedly
young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can;
it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in
particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what
have you had? This place and these impressions—mild as you may
find them to wind a man up so; all my impressions of Chad and of people
I’ve seen at his place—well, have had their abundant message
for me, have just dropped that into my mind. I see it now. I
haven’t done so enough before—and now I’m old; too old at any
rate for what I see. Oh I do see, at least; and more than you’d
believe or I can express. It’s too late. And it’s as if the train
had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to
know it was there. Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down
the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. The
affair—I mean the affair of life—couldn’t, no doubt, have
been different for me; for it’s at the best a tin mould, either fluted
and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully
plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one’s consciousness is
poured—so that one ‘takes’ the form as the great cook says,
and is more or less compactly held by it: one lives in fine as one can. Still,
one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the
memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too
intelligent to have it; I don’t quite know which. Of course at present
I’m a case of reaction against the mistake; and the voice of reaction
should, no doubt, always be taken with an allowance. But that doesn’t
affect the point that the right time is now yours. The right time is any
time that one is still so lucky as to have. You’ve plenty; that’s
the great thing; you’re, as I say, damn you, so happily and hatefully
young. Don’t at any rate miss things out of stupidity. Of course I
don’t take you for a fool, or I shouldn’t be addressing you thus
awfully. Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake.
For it was a mistake. Live!” ... Slowly and sociably, with full pauses
and straight dashes, Strether had so delivered himself; holding little Bilham
from step to step deeply and gravely attentive. The end of all was that the
young man had turned quite solemn, and that this was a contradiction of the
innocent gaiety the speaker had wished to promote. He watched for a moment the
consequence of his words, and then, laying a hand on his listener’s knee
and as if to end with the proper joke: “And now for the eye I shall keep
on you!”
“Oh but I don’t know that I want to be, at your age, too different
from you!”
“Ah prepare while you’re about it,” said Strether, “to
be more amusing.”
Little Bilham continued to think, but at last had a smile. “Well, you
are amusing—to me.”
“Impayable, as you say, no doubt. But what am I to myself?”
Strether had risen with this, giving his attention now to an encounter that, in
the middle of the garden, was in the act of taking place between their host and
the lady at whose side Madame de Vionnet had quitted him. This lady, who
appeared within a few minutes to have left her friends, awaited
Gloriani’s eager approach with words on her lips that Strether
couldn’t catch, but of which her interesting witty face seemed to give
him the echo. He was sure she was prompt and fine, but also that she had met
her match, and he liked—in the light of what he was quite sure was the
Duchess’s latent insolence—the good humour with which the great
artist asserted equal resources. Were they, this pair, of the “great
world”?—and was he himself, for the moment and thus related to them
by his observation, in it? Then there was something in the great world
covertly tigerish, which came to him across the lawn and in the charming air as
a waft from the jungle. Yet it made him admire most of the two, made him envy,
the glossy male tiger, magnificently marked. These absurdities of the stirred
sense, fruits of suggestion ripening on the instant, were all reflected in his
next words to little Bilham. “I know—if we talk of that—whom
I should enjoy being like!”
Little Bilham followed his eyes; but then as with a shade of knowing surprise:
“Gloriani?”
Our friend had in fact already hesitated, though not on the hint of his
companion’s doubt, in which there were depths of critical reserve. He had
just made out, in the now full picture, something and somebody else; another
impression had been superimposed. A young girl in a white dress and a softly
plumed white hat had suddenly come into view, and what was presently clear was
that her course was toward them. What was clearer still was that the handsome
young man at her side was Chad Newsome, and what was clearest of all was that
she was therefore Mademoiselle de Vionnet, that she was unmistakeably
pretty—bright gentle shy happy wonderful—and that Chad now, with a
consummate calculation of effect, was about to present her to his old
friend’s vision. What was clearest of all indeed was something much more
than this, something at the single stroke of which—and wasn’t it
simply juxtaposition?—all vagueness vanished. It was the click of a
spring—he saw the truth. He had by this time also met Chad’s look;
there was more of it in that; and the truth, accordingly, so far as
Bilham’s enquiry was concerned, had thrust in the answer. “Oh
Chad!”—it was that rare youth he should have enjoyed being
“like.” The virtuous attachment would be all there before him; the
virtuous attachment would be in the very act of appeal for his blessing; Jeanne
de Vionnet, this charming creature, would be exquisitely, intensely
now—the object of it. Chad brought her straight up to him, and Chad was,
oh yes, at this moment—for the glory of Woollett or whatever—better
still even than Gloriani. He had plucked this blossom; he had kept it
over-night in water; and at last as he held it up to wonder he did enjoy his
effect. That was why Strether had felt at first the breath of
calculation—and why moreover, as he now knew, his look at the girl would
be, for the young man, a sign of the latter’s success. What young man had
ever paraded about that way, without a reason, a maiden in her flower? And
there was nothing in his reason at present obscure. Her type sufficiently told
of it—they wouldn’t, they couldn’t, want her to go to
Woollett. Poor Woollett, and what it might miss!—though brave Chad indeed
too, and what it might gain! Brave Chad however had just excellently spoken.
“This is a good little friend of mine who knows all about you and has
moreover a message for you. And this, my dear”—he had turned to the
child herself—“is the best man in the world, who has it in his
power to do a great deal for us and whom I want you to like and revere as
nearly as possible as much as I do.”
She stood there quite pink, a little frightened, prettier and prettier and not
a bit like her mother. There was in this last particular no resemblance but
that of youth to youth; and here was in fact suddenly Strether’s sharpest
impression. It went wondering, dazed, embarrassed, back to the woman he had
just been talking with; it was a revelation in the light of which he already
saw she would become more interesting. So slim and fresh and fair, she had yet
put forth this perfection; so that for really believing it of her, for seeing
her to any such developed degree as a mother, comparison would be urgent. Well,
what was it now but fairly thrust upon him? “Mamma wishes me to tell you
before we go,” the girl said, “that she hopes very much
you’ll come to see us very soon. She has something important to say to
you.”
“She quite reproaches herself,” Chad helpfully explained:
“you were interesting her so much when she accidentally suffered you to
be interrupted.”
“Ah don’t mention it!” Strether murmured, looking kindly from
one to the other and wondering at many things.
“And I’m to ask you for myself,” Jeanne continued with her
hands clasped together as if in some small learnt prayer—“I’m
to ask you for myself if you won’t positively come.”
“Leave it to me, dear—I’ll take care of it!” Chad
genially declared in answer to this, while Strether himself almost held his
breath. What was in the girl was indeed too soft, too unknown for direct
dealing; so that one could only gaze at it as at a picture, quite staying
one’s own hand. But with Chad he was now on ground—Chad he could
meet; so pleasant a confidence in that and in everything did the young man
freely exhale. There was the whole of a story in his tone to his companion, and
he spoke indeed as if already of the family. It made Strether guess the more
quickly what it might be about which Madame de Vionnet was so urgent. Having
seen him then she had found him easy; she wished to have it out with him that
some way for the young people must be discovered, some way that would not
impose as a condition the transplantation of her daughter. He already saw
himself discussing with this lady the attractions of Woollett as a residence
for Chad’s companion. Was that youth going now to trust her with the
affair—so that it would be after all with one of his
“lady-friends” that his mother’s missionary should be
condemned to deal? It was quite as if for an instant the two men looked at each
other on this question. But there was no mistaking at last Chad’s pride
in the display of such a connexion. This was what had made him so carry himself
while, three minutes before, he was bringing it into view; what had caused his
friend, first catching sight of him, to be so struck with his air. It was, in a
word, just when he thus finally felt Chad putting things straight off on him
that he envied him, as he had mentioned to little Bilham, most. The whole
exhibition however was but a matter of three or four minutes, and the author of
it had soon explained that, as Madame de Vionnet was immediately going
“on,” this could be for Jeanne but a snatch. They would all meet
again soon, and Strether was meanwhile to stay and amuse
himself—“I’ll pick you up again in plenty of time.” He
took the girl off as he had brought her, and Strether, with the faint sweet
foreignness of her “Au revoir, monsieur!” in his ears as a note
almost unprecedented, watched them recede side by side and felt how, once more,
her companion’s relation to her got an accent from it. They disappeared
among the others and apparently into the house; whereupon our friend turned
round to give out to little Bilham the conviction of which he was full. But
there was no little Bilham any more; little Bilham had within the few moments,
for reasons of his own, proceeded further: a circumstance by which, in its
order, Strether was also sensibly affected.
