Madame de Vionnet, having meanwhile come in, was at present close to them, and
Miss Barrace hereupon, instead of risking a rejoinder, became again with a look
that measured her from top to toe all mere long-handled appreciative
tortoise-shell. She had struck our friend, from the first of her appearing, as
dressed for a great occasion, and she met still more than on either of the
others the conception reawakened in him at their garden-party, the idea of the
femme du monde in her habit as she lived. Her bare shoulders and arms
were white and beautiful; the materials of her dress, a mixture, as he
supposed, of silk and crape, were of a silvery grey so artfully composed as to
give an impression of warm splendour; and round her neck she wore a collar of
large old emeralds, the green note of which was more dimly repeated, at other
points of her apparel, in embroidery, in enamel, in satin, in substances and
textures vaguely rich. Her head, extremely fair and exquisitely festal, was
like a happy fancy, a notion of the antique, on an old precious medal, some
silver coin of the Renaissance; while her slim lightness and brightness, her
gaiety, her expression, her decision, contributed to an effect that might have
been felt by a poet as half mythological and half conventional. He could have
compared her to a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud, or to a
sea-nymph waist-high in the summer surge. Above all she suggested to him the
reflexion that the femme du monde—in these finest developments of
the type—was, like Cleopatra in the play, indeed various and multifold.
She had aspects, characters, days, nights—or had them at least, showed
them by a mysterious law of her own, when in addition to everything she
happened also to be a woman of genius. She was an obscure person, a muffled
person one day, and a showy person, an uncovered person the next. He thought of
Madame de Vionnet to-night as showy and uncovered, though he felt the formula
rough, because, thanks to one of the short-cuts of genius she had taken all his
categories by surprise. Twice during dinner he had met Chad’s eyes in a
longish look; but these communications had in truth only stirred up again old
ambiguities—so little was it clear from them whether they were an appeal
or an admonition. “You see how I’m fixed,” was what they
appeared to convey; yet how he was fixed was exactly what Strether didn’t
see. However, perhaps he should see now.
“Are you capable of the very great kindness of going to relieve Newsome,
for a few minutes, of the rather crushing responsibility of Madame Gloriani,
while I say a word, if he’ll allow me, to Mr. Strether, of whom
I’ve a question to ask? Our host ought to talk a bit to those other
ladies, and I’ll come back in a minute to your rescue.” She made
this proposal to Miss Barrace as if her consciousness of a special duty had
just flickered-up, but that lady’s recognition of Strether’s little
start at it—as at a betrayal on the speaker’s part of a
domesticated state—was as mute as his own comment; and after an instant,
when their fellow guest had good-naturedly left them, he had been given
something else to think of. “Why has Maria so suddenly gone? Do you
know?” That was the question Madame de Vionnet had brought with her.
“I’m afraid I’ve no reason to give you but the simple reason
I’ve had from her in a note—the sudden obligation to join in the
south a sick friend who has got worse.”
“Ah then she has been writing you?”
“Not since she went—I had only a brief explanatory word before she
started. I went to see her,” Strether explained—“it was the
day after I called on you—but she was already on her way, and her
concierge told me that in case of my coming I was to be informed she had
written to me. I found her note when I got home.”
Madame de Vionnet listened with interest and with her eyes on Strether’s
face; then her delicately decorated head had a small melancholy motion.
“She didn’t write to me. I went to see her,” she
added, “almost immediately after I had seen you, and as I assured her I
would do when I met her at Gloriani’s. She hadn’t then told me she
was to be absent, and I felt at her door as if I understood. She’s
absent—with all respect to her sick friend, though I know indeed she has
plenty—so that I may not see her. She doesn’t want to meet me
again. Well,” she continued with a beautiful conscious mildness, “I
liked and admired her beyond every one in the old time, and she knew
it—perhaps that’s precisely what has made her go—and I dare
say I haven’t lost her for ever.” Strether still said nothing; he
had a horror, as he now thought of himself, of being in question between
women—was in fact already quite enough on his way to that, and there was
moreover, as it came to him, perceptibly, something behind these allusions and
professions that, should he take it in, would square but ill with his present
resolve to simplify. It was as if, for him, all the same, her softness and
sadness were sincere. He felt that not less when she soon went on:
“I’m extremely glad of her happiness.” But it also left him
mute—sharp and fine though the imputation it conveyed. What it conveyed
was that he was Maria Gostrey’s happiness, and for the least
little instant he had the impulse to challenge the thought. He could have done
so however only by saying “What then do you suppose to be between
us?” and he was wonderfully glad a moment later not to have spoken. He
would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous, and he drew back as well, with a
smothered inward shudder, from the consideration of what women—of
highly-developed type in particular—might think of each other. Whatever
he had come out for he hadn’t come to go into that; so that he absolutely
took up nothing his interlocutress had now let drop. Yet, though he had kept
away from her for days, had laid wholly on herself the burden of their meeting
again, she hadn’t a gleam of irritation to show him. “Well, about
Jeanne now?” she smiled—it had the gaiety with which she had
originally come in. He felt it on the instant to represent her motive and real
errand. But he had been schooling her of a truth to say much in proportion to
his little. “Do you make out that she has a sentiment? I mean for
Mr. Newsome.”
Almost resentful, Strether could at last be prompt. “How can I make out
such things?”
She remained perfectly good-natured. “Ah but they’re beautiful
little things, and you make out—don’t pretend—everything in
the world. Haven’t you,” she asked, “been talking with
her?”
“Yes, but not about Chad. At least not much.”
“Oh you don’t require ‘much’!” she reassuringly
declared. But she immediately changed her ground. “I hope you remember
your promise of the other day.”
“To ‘save’ you, as you called it?”
“I call it so still. You will?” she insisted. “You
haven’t repented?”
He wondered. “No—but I’ve been thinking what I meant.”
She kept it up. “And not, a little, what I did?”
“No—that’s not necessary. It will be enough if I know what I
meant myself.”
“And don’t you know,” she asked, “by this time?”
Again he had a pause. “I think you ought to leave it to me. But how
long,” he added, “do you give me?”
“It seems to me much more a question of how long you give me.
Doesn’t our friend here himself, at any rate,” she went on,
“perpetually make me present to you?”
“Not,” Strether replied, “by ever speaking of you to
me.”
“He never does that?”
“Never.”
She considered, and, if the fact was disconcerting to her, effectually
concealed it. The next minute indeed she had recovered. “No, he
wouldn’t. But do you need that?”
Her emphasis was wonderful, and though his eyes had been wandering he looked at
her longer now. “I see what you mean.”
“Of course you see what I mean.”
Her triumph was gentle, and she really had tones to make justice weep.
“I’ve before me what he owes you.”
“Admit then that that’s something,” she said, yet still with
the same discretion in her pride.
He took in this note but went straight on. “You’ve made of him what
I see, but what I don’t see is how in the world you’ve done
it.”
“Ah that’s another question!” she smiled. “The point is
of what use is your declining to know me when to know Mr. Newsome—as you
do me the honour to find him—is just to know me.”
“I see,” he mused, still with his eyes on her. “I
shouldn’t have met you to-night.”
She raised and dropped her linked hands. “It doesn’t matter. If I
trust you why can’t you a little trust me too? And why can’t you
also,” she asked in another tone, “trust yourself?” But she
gave him no time to reply. “Oh I shall be so easy for you! And I’m
glad at any rate you’ve seen my child.”
“I’m glad too,” he said; “but she does you no
good.”
“No good?”—Madame de Vionnet had a clear stare. “Why
she’s an angel of light.”
“That’s precisely the reason. Leave her alone. Don’t try to
find out. I mean,” he explained, “about what you spoke to me
of—the way she feels.”
His companion wondered. “Because one really won’t?”
“Well, because I ask you, as a favour to myself, not to. She’s the
most charming creature I’ve ever seen. Therefore don’t touch her.
Don’t know—don’t want to know. And
moreover—yes—you won’t.”
It was an appeal, of a sudden, and she took it in. “As a favour to
you?”
“Well—since you ask me.”
“Anything, everything you ask,” she smiled. “I shan’t
know then—never. Thank you,” she added with peculiar gentleness as
she turned away.
The sound of it lingered with him, making him fairly feel as if he had been
tripped up and had a fall. In the very act of arranging with her for his
independence he had, under pressure from a particular perception,
inconsistently, quite stupidly, committed himself, and, with her subtlety
sensitive on the spot to an advantage, she had driven in by a single word a
little golden nail, the sharp intention of which he signally felt. He
hadn’t detached, he had more closely connected himself, and his eyes, as
he considered with some intensity this circumstance, met another pair which had
just come within their range and which struck him as reflecting his sense of
what he had done. He recognised them at the same moment as those of little
Bilham, who had apparently drawn near on purpose to speak to him, and little
Bilham wasn’t, in the conditions, the person to whom his heart would be
most closed. They were seated together a minute later at the angle of the room
obliquely opposite the corner in which Gloriani was still engaged with Jeanne
de Vionnet, to whom at first and in silence their attention had been
benevolently given. “I can’t see for my life,” Strether had
then observed, “how a young fellow of any spirit—such a one as you
for instance—can be admitted to the sight of that young lady without
being hard hit. Why don’t you go in, little Bilham?” He remembered
the tone into which he had been betrayed on the garden-bench at the
sculptor’s reception, and this might make up for that by being much more
the right sort of thing to say to a young man worthy of any advice at all.
“There would be some reason.”
“Some reason for what?”
“Why for hanging on here.”
“To offer my hand and fortune to Mademoiselle de Vionnet?”
“Well,” Strether asked, “to what lovelier apparition
could you offer them? She’s the sweetest little thing I’ve
ever seen.”
“She’s certainly immense. I mean she’s the real thing. I
believe the pale pink petals are folded up there for some wondrous
efflorescence in time; to open, that is, to some great golden sun.
I’m unfortunately but a small farthing candle. What chance in such
a field for a poor little painter-man?”
“Oh you’re good enough,” Strether threw out.
“Certainly I’m good enough. We’re good enough, I consider,
nous autres, for anything. But she’s too good.
There’s the difference. They wouldn’t look at me.”
Strether, lounging on his divan and still charmed by the young girl, whose eyes
had consciously strayed to him, he fancied, with a vague smile—Strether,
enjoying the whole occasion as with dormant pulses at last awake and in spite
of new material thrust upon him, thought over his companion’s words.
“Whom do you mean by ‘they’? She and her mother?”
“She and her mother. And she has a father too, who, whatever else he may
be, certainly can’t be indifferent to the possibilities she represents.
Besides, there’s Chad.”
Strether was silent a little. “Ah but he doesn’t care for
her—not, I mean, it appears, after all, in the sense I’m speaking
of. He’s not in love with her.”
“No—but he’s her best friend; after her mother. He’s
very fond of her. He has his ideas about what can be done for her.”
“Well, it’s very strange!” Strether presently remarked with a
sighing sense of fulness.
“Very strange indeed. That’s just the beauty of it. Isn’t it
very much the kind of beauty you had in mind,” little Bilham went on,
“when you were so wonderful and so inspiring to me the other day?
Didn’t you adjure me, in accents I shall never forget, to see, while
I’ve a chance, everything I can?—and really to see, for it
must have been that only you meant. Well, you did me no end of good, and
I’m doing my best. I do make it out a situation.”
“So do I!” Strether went on after a moment. But he had the next
minute an inconsequent question. “How comes Chad so mixed up,
anyway?”
“Ah, ah, ah!”—and little Bilham fell back on his cushions.
It reminded our friend of Miss Barrace, and he felt again the brush of his
sense of moving in a maze of mystic closed allusions. Yet he kept hold of his
thread. “Of course I understand really; only the general transformation
makes me occasionally gasp. Chad with such a voice in the settlement of the
future of a little countess—no,” he declared, “it takes more
time! You say moreover,” he resumed, “that we’re inevitably,
people like you and me, out of the running. The curious fact remains that Chad
himself isn’t. The situation doesn’t make for it, but in a
different one he could have her if he would.”
“Yes, but that’s only because he’s rich and because
there’s a possibility of his being richer. They won’t think of
anything but a great name or a great fortune.”
“Well,” said Strether, “he’ll have no great fortune on
these lines. He must stir his stumps.”
“Is that,” little Bilham enquired, “what you were saying to
Madame de Vionnet?”
“No—I don’t say much to her. Of course, however,”
Strether continued, “he can make sacrifices if he likes.”
Little Bilham had a pause. “Oh he’s not keen for sacrifices; or
thinks, that is, possibly, that he has made enough.”
“Well, it is virtuous,” his companion observed with some
decision.
“That’s exactly,” the young man dropped after a moment,
“what I mean.”
It kept Strether himself silent a little. “I’ve made it out for
myself,” he then went on; “I’ve really, within the last
half-hour, got hold of it. I understand it in short at last; which at
first—when you originally spoke to me—I didn’t. Nor when Chad
originally spoke to me either.”
“Oh,” said little Bilham, “I don’t think that at that
time you believed me.”
“Yes—I did; and I believed Chad too. It would have been odious and
unmannerly—as well as quite perverse—if I hadn’t. What
interest have you in deceiving me?”
The young man cast about. “What interest have I?”
“Yes. Chad might have. But you?”
“Ah, ah, ah!” little Bilham exclaimed.
It might, on repetition, as a mystification, have irritated our friend a
little, but he knew, once more, as we have seen, where he was, and his being
proof against everything was only another attestation that he meant to stay
there. “I couldn’t, without my own impression, realise. She’s
a tremendously clever brilliant capable woman, and with an extraordinary charm
on top of it all—the charm we surely all of us this evening know what to
think of. It isn’t every clever brilliant capable woman that has it. In
fact it’s rare with any woman. So there you are,” Strether
proceeded as if not for little Bilham’s benefit alone. “I
understand what a relation with such a woman—what such a high fine
friendship—may be. It can’t be vulgar or coarse, anyway—and
that’s the point.”
“Yes, that’s the point,” said little Bilham. “It
can’t be vulgar or coarse. And, bless us and save us, it
isn’t! It’s, upon my word, the very finest thing I ever saw
in my life, and the most distinguished.”
Strether, from beside him and leaning back with him as he leaned, dropped on
him a momentary look which filled a short interval and of which he took no
notice. He only gazed before him with intent participation. “Of course
what it has done for him,” Strether at all events presently pursued,
“of course what it has done for him—that is as to how it has
so wonderfully worked—isn’t a thing I pretend to understand.
I’ve to take it as I find it. There he is.”
“There he is!” little Bilham echoed. “And it’s really
and truly she. I don’t understand either, even with my longer and closer
opportunity. But I’m like you,” he added; “I can admire and
rejoice even when I’m a little in the dark. You see I’ve watched it
for some three years, and especially for this last. He wasn’t so bad
before it as I seem to have made out that you think—”
“Oh I don’t think anything now!” Strether impatiently broke
in: “that is but what I do think! I mean that originally, for her
to have cared for him—”
“There must have been stuff in him? Oh yes, there was stuff indeed, and
much more of it than ever showed, I dare say, at home. Still, you know,”
the young man in all fairness developed, “there was room for her, and
that’s where she came in. She saw her chance and took it. That’s
what strikes me as having been so fine. But of course,” he wound up,
“he liked her first.”
“Naturally,” said Strether.
“I mean that they first met somehow and somewhere—I believe in some
American house—and she, without in the least then intending it, made her
impression. Then with time and opportunity he made his; and after that
she was as bad as he.”
Strether vaguely took it up. “As ‘bad’?”
“She began, that is, to care—to care very much. Alone, and in her
horrid position, she found it, when once she had started, an interest. It was,
it is, an interest, and it did—it continues to do—a lot for herself
as well. So she still cares. She cares in fact,” said little Bilham
thoughtfully “more.”
Strether’s theory that it was none of his business was somehow not
damaged by the way he took this. “More, you mean, than he?” On
which his companion looked round at him, and now for an instant their eyes met.
“More than he?” he repeated.
Little Bilham, for as long, hung fire. “Will you never tell any
one?”
Strether thought. “Whom should I tell?”
“Why I supposed you reported regularly—”
“To people at home?”—Strether took him up. “Well, I
won’t tell them this.”
The young man at last looked away. “Then she does now care more than
he.”
“Oh!” Strether oddly exclaimed.
But his companion immediately met it. “Haven’t you after all had
your impression of it? That’s how you’ve got hold of him.”
“Ah but I haven’t got hold of him!”
“Oh I say!” But it was all little Bilham said.
“It’s at any rate none of my business. I mean,” Strether
explained, “nothing else than getting hold of him is.” It appeared,
however, to strike him as his business to add: “The fact remains
nevertheless that she has saved him.”
Little Bilham just waited. “I thought that was what you were to
do.”
But Strether had his answer ready. “I’m speaking—in connexion
with her—of his manners and morals, his character and life. I’m
speaking of him as a person to deal with and talk with and live
with—speaking of him as a social animal.”
“And isn’t it as a social animal that you also want him?”
“Certainly; so that it’s as if she had saved him for
us.”
“It strikes you accordingly then,” the young man threw out,
“as for you all to save her?”
“Oh for us ‘all’—!” Strether could but laugh at
that. It brought him back, however, to the point he had really wished to make.
“They’ve accepted their situation—hard as it is.
They’re not free—at least she’s not; but they take
what’s left to them. It’s a friendship, of a beautiful sort; and
that’s what makes them so strong. They’re straight, they feel; and
they keep each other up. It’s doubtless she, however, who, as you
yourself have hinted, feels it most.”
Little Bilham appeared to wonder what he had hinted. “Feels most that
they’re straight?”
“Well, feels that she is, and the strength that comes from it. She
keeps him up—she keeps the whole thing up. When people are able to
it’s fine. She’s wonderful, wonderful, as Miss Barrace says; and he
is, in his way, too; however, as a mere man, he may sometimes rebel and not
feel that he finds his account in it. She has simply given him an immense moral
lift, and what that can explain is prodigious. That’s why I speak of it
as a situation. It is one, if there ever was.” And Strether, with
his head back and his eyes on the ceiling, seemed to lose himself in the vision
of it.
His companion attended deeply. “You state it much better than I
could.” “Oh you see it doesn’t concern you.”
Little Bilham considered. “I thought you said just now that it
doesn’t concern you either.”
“Well, it doesn’t a bit as Madame de Vionnet’s affair. But as
we were again saying just now, what did I come out for but to save him?”
“Yes—to remove him.”
“To save him by removal; to win him over to himself
thinking it best he shall take up business—thinking he must immediately
do therefore what’s necessary to that end.”
“Well,” said little Bilham after a moment, “you have
won him over. He does think it best. He has within a day or two again said to
me as much.”
“And that,” Strether asked, “is why you consider that he
cares less than she?”
“Cares less for her than she for him? Yes, that’s one of the
reasons. But other things too have given me the impression. A man, don’t
you think?” little Bilham presently pursued, “Can’t,
in such conditions, care so much as a woman. It takes different conditions to
make him, and then perhaps he cares more. Chad,” he wound up, “has
his possible future before him.”
“Are you speaking of his business future?”
“No—on the contrary; of the other, the future of what you so justly
call their situation. M. de Vionnet may live for ever.”
“So that they can’t marry?”
The young man waited a moment. “Not being able to marry is all
they’ve with any confidence to look forward to. A woman—a
particular woman—may stand that strain. But can a man?” he
propounded.
Strether’s answer was as prompt as if he had already, for himself, worked
it out. “Not without a very high ideal of conduct. But that’s just
what we’re attributing to Chad. And how, for that matter,” he
mused, “does his going to America diminish the particular strain?
Wouldn’t it seem rather to add to it?”
“Out of sight out of mind!” his companion laughed. Then more
bravely: “Wouldn’t distance lessen the torment?” But before
Strether could reply, “The thing is, you see, Chad ought to marry!”
he wound up.
Strether, for a little, appeared to think of it. “If you talk of torments
you don’t diminish mine!” he then broke out. The next moment he was
on his feet with a question. “He ought to marry whom?”
Little Bilham rose more slowly. “Well, some one he can—some
thoroughly nice girl.”
Strether’s eyes, as they stood together, turned again to Jeanne.
“Do you mean her?”
His friend made a sudden strange face. “After being in love with her
mother? No.”
“But isn’t it exactly your idea that he isn’t in love
with her mother?”
His friend once more had a pause. “Well, he isn’t at any rate in
love with Jeanne.”
“I dare say not.”
“How can he be with any other woman?”
“Oh that I admit. But being in love isn’t, you know,
here”—little Bilham spoke in friendly reminder—“thought
necessary, in strictness, for marriage.”
“And what torment—to call a torment—can there ever possibly
be with a woman like that?” As if from the interest of his own question
Strether had gone on without hearing. “Is it for her to have turned a man
out so wonderfully, too, only for somebody else?” He appeared to make a
point of this, and little Bilham looked at him now. “When it’s for
each other that people give things up they don’t miss them.” Then
he threw off as with an extravagance of which he was conscious: “Let them
face the future together!”
Little Bilham looked at him indeed. “You mean that after all he
shouldn’t go back?”
“I mean that if he gives her up—!”
“Yes?”
“Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself.” But Strether spoke with
a sound that might have passed for a laugh.
