At four o’clock that afternoon he had still not seen him, but he was
then, as to make up for this, engaged in talk about him with Miss Gostrey.
Strether had kept away from home all day, given himself up to the town and to
his thoughts, wandered and mused, been at once restless and absorbed—and
all with the present climax of a rich little welcome in the Quartier Marbœuf.
“Waymarsh has been, ‘unbeknown’ to me, I’m
convinced”—for Miss Gostrey had enquired—“in
communication with Woollett: the consequence of which was, last night, the
loudest possible call for me.”
“Do you mean a letter to bring you home?”
“No—a cable, which I have at this moment in my pocket: a
‘Come back by the first ship.’”
Strether’s hostess, it might have been made out, just escaped changing
colour. Reflexion arrived but in time and established a provisional serenity.
It was perhaps exactly this that enabled her to say with duplicity: “And
you’re going—?”
“You almost deserve it when you abandon me so.”
She shook her head as if this were not worth taking up. “My absence has
helped you—as I’ve only to look at you to see. It was my
calculation, and I’m justified. You’re not where you were. And the
thing,” she smiled, “was for me not to be there either. You can go
of yourself.”
“Oh but I feel to-day,” he comfortably declared, “that I
shall want you yet.”
She took him all in again. “Well, I promise you not again to leave you,
but it will only be to follow you. You’ve got your momentum and can
toddle alone.”
He intelligently accepted it. “Yes—I suppose I can toddle.
It’s the sight of that in fact that has upset Waymarsh. He can bear
it—the way I strike him as going—no longer. That’s only the
climax of his original feeling. He wants me to quit; and he must have written
to Woollett that I’m in peril of perdition.”
“Ah good!” she murmured. “But is it only your
supposition?”
“I make it out—it explains.”
“Then he denies?—or you haven’t asked him?”
“I’ve not had time,” Strether said; “I made it out but
last night, putting various things together, and I’ve not been since then
face to face with him.”
She wondered. “Because you’re too disgusted? You can’t trust
yourself?”
He settled his glasses on his nose. “Do I look in a great rage?”
“You look divine!”
“There’s nothing,” he went on, “to be angry about. He
has done me on the contrary a service.”
She made it out. “By bringing things to a head?”
“How well you understand!” he almost groaned. “Waymarsh
won’t in the least, at any rate, when I have it out with him, deny or
extenuate. He has acted from the deepest conviction, with the best conscience
and after wakeful nights. He’ll recognise that he’s fully
responsible, and will consider that he has been highly successful; so that any
discussion we may have will bring us quite together again—bridge the dark
stream that has kept us so thoroughly apart. We shall have at last, in the
consequences of his act, something we can definitely talk about.”
She was silent a little. “How wonderfully you take it! But you’re
always wonderful.”
He had a pause that matched her own; then he had, with an adequate spirit, a
complete admission. “It’s quite true. I’m extremely wonderful
just now. I dare say in fact I’m quite fantastic, and I shouldn’t
be at all surprised if I were mad.”
“Then tell me!” she earnestly pressed. As he, however, for the time
answered nothing, only returning the look with which she watched him, she
presented herself where it was easier to meet her. “What will Mr.
Waymarsh exactly have done?”
“Simply have written a letter. One will have been quite enough. He has
told them I want looking after.”
“And do you?”—she was all interest.
“Immensely. And I shall get it.”
“By which you mean you don’t budge?”
“I don’t budge.”
“You’ve cabled?”
“No—I’ve made Chad do it.”
“That you decline to come?”
“That he declines. We had it out this morning and I brought him
round. He had come in, before I was down, to tell me he was ready—ready,
I mean, to return. And he went off, after ten minutes with me, to say he
wouldn’t.”
Miss Gostrey followed with intensity. “Then you’ve stopped
him?”
Strether settled himself afresh in his chair. “I’ve stopped him.
That is for the time. That”—he gave it to her more
vividly—“is where I am.”
“I see, I see. But where’s Mr. Newsome? He was ready,” she
asked, “to go?”
“All ready.”
“And sincerely—believing you’d be?”
“Perfectly, I think; so that he was amazed to find the hand I had laid on
him to pull him over suddenly converted into an engine for keeping him
still.”
It was an account of the matter Miss Gostrey could weigh. “Does he think
the conversion sudden?”
“Well,” said Strether, “I’m not altogether sure what he
thinks. I’m not sure of anything that concerns him, except that the more
I’ve seen of him the less I’ve found him what I originally
expected. He’s obscure, and that’s why I’m waiting.”
She wondered. “But for what in particular?”
“For the answer to his cable.”
“And what was his cable?”
“I don’t know,” Strether replied; “it was to be, when
he left me, according to his own taste. I simply said to him: ‘I want to
stay, and the only way for me to do so is for you to.’ That I
wanted to stay seemed to interest him, and he acted on that.”
Miss Gostrey turned it over. “He wants then himself to stay.”
“He half wants it. That is he half wants to go. My original appeal has to
that extent worked in him. Nevertheless,” Strether pursued, “he
won’t go. Not, at least, so long as I’m here.”
“But you can’t,” his companion suggested, “stay here
always. I wish you could.”
“By no means. Still, I want to see him a little further. He’s not
in the least the case I supposed, he’s quite another case. And it’s
as such that he interests me.” It was almost as if for his own
intelligence that, deliberate and lucid, our friend thus expressed the matter.
“I don’t want to give him up.”
Miss Gostrey but desired to help his lucidity. She had however to be light and
tactful. “Up, you mean—a—to his mother?”
“Well, I’m not thinking of his mother now. I’m thinking of
the plan of which I was the mouthpiece, which, as soon as we met, I put before
him as persuasively as I knew how, and which was drawn up, as it were, in
complete ignorance of all that, in this last long period, has been happening to
him. It took no account whatever of the impression I was here on the spot
immediately to begin to receive from him—impressions of which I feel sure
I’m far from having had the last.”
Miss Gostrey had a smile of the most genial criticism. “So your idea
is—more or less—to stay out of curiosity?”
“Call it what you like! I don’t care what it’s
called—”
“So long as you do stay? Certainly not then. I call it, all the same,
immense fun,” Maria Gostrey declared; “and to see you work it out
will be one of the sensations of my life. It is clear you can toddle
alone!”
He received this tribute without elation. “I shan’t be alone when
the Pococks have come.”
Her eyebrows went up. “The Pococks are coming?”
“That, I mean, is what will happen—and happen as quickly as
possible—in consequence of Chad’s cable. They’ll simply
embark. Sarah will come to speak for her mother—with an effect different
from my muddle.”
Miss Gostrey more gravely wondered. “She then will take him
back?”
“Very possibly—and we shall see. She must at any rate have the
chance, and she may be trusted to do all she can.”
“And do you want that?”
“Of course,” said Strether, “I want it. I want to play
fair.”
But she had lost for a moment the thread. “If it devolves on the Pococks
why do you stay?”
“Just to see that I do play fair—and a little also, no
doubt, that they do.” Strether was luminous as he had never been.
“I came out to find myself in presence of new facts—facts that have
kept striking me as less and less met by our old reasons. The matter’s
perfectly simple. New reasons—reasons as new as the facts
themselves—are wanted; and of this our friends at
Woollett—Chad’s and mine—were at the earliest moment
definitely notified. If any are producible Mrs. Pocock will produce them;
she’ll bring over the whole collection. They’ll be,” he added
with a pensive smile “a part of the ‘fun’ you speak
of.”
She was quite in the current now and floating by his side. “It’s
Mamie—so far as I’ve had it from you—who’ll be their
great card.” And then as his contemplative silence wasn’t a denial
she significantly added: “I think I’m sorry for her.”
“I think I am!”—and Strether sprang up, moving about a
little as her eyes followed him. “But it can’t be helped.”
“You mean her coming out can’t be?”
He explained after another turn what he meant. “The only way for her not
to come is for me to go home—as I believe that on the spot I could
prevent it. But the difficulty as to that is that if I do go home—”
“I see, I see”—she had easily understood. “Mr. Newsome
will do the same, and that’s not”—she laughed out
now—“to be thought of.”
Strether had no laugh; he had only a quiet comparatively placid look that might
have shown him as proof against ridicule. “Strange, isn’t
it?”
They had, in the matter that so much interested them, come so far as this
without sounding another name—to which however their present momentary
silence was full of a conscious reference. Strether’s question was a
sufficient implication of the weight it had gained with him during the absence
of his hostess; and just for that reason a single gesture from her could pass
for him as a vivid answer. Yet he was answered still better when she said in a
moment: “Will Mr. Newsome introduce his sister—?”
“To Madame de Vionnet?” Strether spoke the name at last. “I
shall be greatly surprised if he doesn’t.”
She seemed to gaze at the possibility. “You mean you’ve thought of
it and you’re prepared.”
“I’ve thought of it and I’m prepared.”
It was to her visitor now that she applied her consideration. “Bon! You
are magnificent!”
“Well,” he answered after a pause and a little wearily, but still
standing there before her—“well, that’s what, just once in
all my dull days, I think I shall like to have been!”
Two days later he had news from Chad of a communication from Woollett in
response to their determinant telegram, this missive being addressed to Chad
himself and announcing the immediate departure for France of Sarah and Jim and
Mamie. Strether had meanwhile on his own side cabled; he had but delayed that
act till after his visit to Miss Gostrey, an interview by which, as so often
before, he felt his sense of things cleared up and settled. His message to Mrs.
Newsome, in answer to her own, had consisted of the words: “Judge best to
take another month, but with full appreciation of all re-enforcements.”
He had added that he was writing, but he was of course always writing; it was a
practice that continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, to make him come nearer
than anything else to the consciousness of doing something: so that he often
wondered if he hadn’t really, under his recent stress, acquired some
hollow trick, one of the specious arts of make-believe. Wouldn’t the
pages he still so freely dispatched by the American post have been worthy of a
showy journalist, some master of the great new science of beating the sense out
of words? Wasn’t he writing against time, and mainly to show he was
kind?—since it had become quite his habit not to like to read himself
over. On those lines he could still be liberal, yet it was at best a sort of
whistling in the dark. It was unmistakeable moreover that the sense of being in
the dark now pressed on him more sharply—creating thereby the need for a
louder and livelier whistle. He whistled long and hard after sending his
message; he whistled again and again in celebration of Chad’s news; there
was an interval of a fortnight in which this exercise helped him. He had no
great notion of what, on the spot, Sarah Pocock would have to say, though he
had indeed confused premonitions; but it shouldn’t be in her power to
say—it shouldn’t be in any one’s anywhere to say—that
he was neglecting her mother. He might have written before more freely, but he
had never written more copiously; and he frankly gave for a reason at Woollett
that he wished to fill the void created there by Sarah’s departure.
The increase of his darkness, however, and the quickening, as I have called it,
of his tune, resided in the fact that he was hearing almost nothing. He had for
some time been aware that he was hearing less than before, and he was now
clearly following a process by which Mrs. Newsome’s letters could but
logically stop. He hadn’t had a line for many days, and he needed no
proof—though he was, in time, to have plenty—that she
wouldn’t have put pen to paper after receiving the hint that had
determined her telegram. She wouldn’t write till Sarah should have seen
him and reported on him. It was strange, though it might well be less so than
his own behaviour appeared at Woollett. It was at any rate significant, and
what was remarkable was the way his friend’s nature and manner put
on for him, through this very drop of demonstration, a greater intensity. It
struck him really that he had never so lived with her as during this period of
her silence; the silence was a sacred hush, a finer clearer medium, in which
her idiosyncrasies showed. He walked about with her, sat with her, drove with
her and dined face-to-face with her—a rare treat “in his
life,” as he could perhaps have scarce escaped phrasing it; and if he had
never seen her so soundless he had never, on the other hand, felt her so
highly, so almost austerely, herself: pure and by the vulgar estimate
“cold,” but deep devoted delicate sensitive noble. Her vividness in
these respects became for him, in the special conditions, almost an obsession;
and though the obsession sharpened his pulses, adding really to the excitement
of life, there were hours at which, to be less on the stretch, he directly
sought forgetfulness. He knew it for the queerest of adventures—a
circumstance capable of playing such a part only for Lambert
Strether—that in Paris itself, of all places, he should find this ghost
of the lady of Woollett more importunate than any other presence.
When he went back to Maria Gostrey it was for the change to something else. And
yet after all the change scarcely operated for he talked to her of Mrs. Newsome
in these days as he had never talked before. He had hitherto observed in that
particular a discretion and a law; considerations that at present broke down
quite as if relations had altered. They hadn’t really altered, he
said to himself, so much as that came to; for if what had occurred was of
course that Mrs. Newsome had ceased to trust him, there was nothing on the
other hand to prove that he shouldn’t win back her confidence. It was
quite his present theory that he would leave no stone unturned to do so; and in
fact if he now told Maria things about her that he had never told before this
was largely because it kept before him the idea of the honour of such a
woman’s esteem. His relation with Maria as well was, strangely enough, no
longer quite the same; this truth—though not too
disconcertingly—had come up between them on the renewal of their
meetings. It was all contained in what she had then almost immediately said to
him; it was represented by the remark she had needed but ten minutes to make
and that he hadn’t been disposed to gainsay. He could toddle alone, and
the difference that showed was extraordinary. The turn taken by their talk had
promptly confirmed this difference; his larger confidence on the score of Mrs.
Newsome did the rest; and the time seemed already far off when he had held out
his small thirsty cup to the spout of her pail. Her pail was scarce touched
now, and other fountains had flowed for him; she fell into her place as but one
of his tributaries; and there was a strange sweetness—a melancholy
mildness that touched him—in her acceptance of the altered order.
It marked for himself the flight of time, or at any rate what he was pleased to
think of with irony and pity as the rush of experience; it having been but the
day before yesterday that he sat at her feet and held on by her garment and was
fed by her hand. It was the proportions that were changed, and the proportions
were at all times, he philosophised, the very conditions of perception, the
terms of thought. It was as if, with her effective little entresol and
and her wide acquaintance, her activities, varieties, promiscuities, the duties
and devotions that took up nine tenths of her time and of which he got,
guardedly, but the side-wind—it was as if she had shrunk to a secondary
element and had consented to the shrinkage with the perfection of tact. This
perfection had never failed her; it had originally been greater than his prime
measure for it; it had kept him quite apart, kept him out of the shop, as she
called her huge general acquaintance, made their commerce as quiet, as much a
thing of the home alone—the opposite of the shop—as if she had
never another customer. She had been wonderful to him at first, with the memory
of her little entresol, the image to which, on most mornings at that
time, his eyes directly opened; but now she mainly figured for him as but part
of the bristling total—though of course always as a person to whom he
should never cease to be indebted. It would never be given to him certainly to
inspire a greater kindness. She had decked him out for others, and he saw at
this point at least nothing she would ever ask for. She only wondered and
questioned and listened, rendering him the homage of a wistful speculation. She
expressed it repeatedly; he was already far beyond her, and she must prepare
herself to lose him. There was but one little chance for her.
Often as she had said it he met it—for it was a touch he liked—each
time the same way. “My coming to grief?”
“Yes—then I might patch you up.”
“Oh for my real smash, if it takes place, there will be no
patching.”
“But you surely don’t mean it will kill you.”
“No—worse. It will make me old.”
“Ah nothing can do that! The wonderful and special thing about you is
that you are, at this time of day, youth.” Then she always made,
further, one of those remarks that she had completely ceased to adorn with
hesitations or apologies, and that had, by the same token, in spite of their
extreme straightness, ceased to produce in Strether the least embarrassment.
She made him believe them, and they became thereby as impersonal as truth
itself. “It’s just your particular charm.”
His answer too was always the same. “Of course I’m
youth—youth for the trip to Europe. I began to be young, or at least to
get the benefit of it, the moment I met you at Chester, and that’s what
has been taking place ever since. I never had the benefit at the proper
time—which comes to saying that I never had the thing itself. I’m
having the benefit at this moment; I had it the other day when I said to Chad
‘Wait’; I shall have it still again when Sarah Pocock arrives.
It’s a benefit that would make a poor show for many people; and I
don’t know who else but you and I, frankly, could begin to see in it what
I feel. I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t
spend money; I don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m
making up late for what I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little
benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened
to me in all my life. They may say what they like—it’s my
surrender, it’s my tribute, to youth. One puts that in where one
can—it has to come in somewhere, if only out of the lives, the
conditions, the feelings of other persons. Chad gives me the sense of it, for
all his grey hairs, which merely make it solid in him and safe and serene; and
she does the same, for all her being older than he, for all her
marriageable daughter, her separated husband, her agitated history. Though
they’re young enough, my pair, I don’t say they’re, in the
freshest way, their own absolutely prime adolescence; for that has
nothing to do with it. The point is that they’re mine. Yes, they’re
my youth; since somehow at the right time nothing else ever was. What I meant
just now therefore is that it would all go—go before doing its
work—if they were to fail me.”
On which, just here, Miss Gostrey inveterately questioned. “What do you,
in particular, call its work?”
“Well, to see me through.”
“But through what?”—she liked to get it all out of him.
“Why through this experience.” That was all that would come.
It regularly gave her none the less the last word. “Don’t you
remember how in those first days of our meeting it was I who was to see
you through?”
“Remember? Tenderly, deeply”—he always rose to it.
“You’re just doing your part in letting me maunder to you
thus.”
“Ah don’t speak as if my part were small; since whatever else fails
you—”
“You won’t, ever, ever, ever?”—he thus took her
up. “Oh I beg your pardon; you necessarily, you inevitably will.
Your conditions—that’s what I mean—won’t allow me
anything to do for you.”
“Let alone—I see what you mean—that I’m drearily
dreadfully old. I am, but there’s a service—possible for you
to render—that I know, all the same, I shall think of.”
“And what will it be?”
This, in fine, however, she would never tell him. “You shall hear only if
your smash takes place. As that’s really out of the question, I
won’t expose myself”—a point at which, for reasons of his
own, Strether ceased to press.
He came round, for publicity—it was the easiest thing—to the idea
that his smash was out of the question, and this rendered idle the
discussion of what might follow it. He attached an added importance, as the
days elapsed, to the arrival of the Pococks; he had even a shameful sense of
waiting for it insincerely and incorrectly. He accused himself of making
believe to his own mind that Sarah’s presence, her impression, her
judgement would simplify and harmonise, he accused himself of being so afraid
of what they might do that he sought refuge, to beg the whole question,
in a vain fury. He had abundantly seen at home what they were in the habit of
doing, and he had not at present the smallest ground. His clearest vision was
when he made out that what he most desired was an account more full and free of
Mrs. Newsome’s state of mind than any he felt he could now expect from
herself; that calculation at least went hand in hand with the sharp
consciousness of wishing to prove to himself that he was not afraid to look his
behaviour in the face. If he was by an inexorable logic to pay for it he was
literally impatient to know the cost, and he held himself ready to pay in
instalments. The first instalment would be precisely this entertainment of
Sarah; as a consequence of which moreover, he should know vastly better how he
stood.
