Strether rambled alone during these few days, the effect of the incident of the
previous week having been to simplify in a marked fashion his mixed relations
with Waymarsh. Nothing had passed between them in reference to Mrs.
Newsome’s summons but that our friend had mentioned to his own the
departure of the deputation actually at sea—giving him thus an
opportunity to confess to the occult intervention he imputed to him. Waymarsh
however in the event confessed to nothing; and though this falsified in some
degree Strether’s forecast the latter amusedly saw in it the same depth
of good conscience out of which the dear man’s impertinence had
originally sprung. He was patient with the dear man now and delighted to
observe how unmistakeably he had put on flesh; he felt his own holiday so
successfully large and free that he was full of allowances and charities in
respect to those cabined and confined: his instinct toward a spirit so strapped
down as Waymarsh’s was to walk round it on tiptoe for fear of waking it
up to a sense of losses by this time irretrievable. It was all very funny he
knew, and but the difference, as he often said to himself, of tweedledum and
tweedledee—an emancipation so purely comparative that it was like the
advance of the door-mat on the scraper; yet the present crisis was happily to
profit by it and the pilgrim from Milrose to know himself more than ever in the
right.
Strether felt that when he heard of the approach of the Pococks the impulse of
pity quite sprang up in him beside the impulse of triumph. That was exactly why
Waymarsh had looked at him with eyes in which the heat of justice was measured
and shaded. He had looked very hard, as if affectionately sorry for the
friend—the friend of fifty-five—whose frivolity had had thus to be
recorded; becoming, however, but obscurely sententious and leaving his
companion to formulate a charge. It was in this general attitude that he had of
late altogether taken refuge; with the drop of discussion they were solemnly
sadly superficial; Strether recognised in him the mere portentous rumination to
which Miss Barrace had so good-humouredly described herself as assigning a
corner of her salon. It was quite as if he knew his surreptitious step had been
divined, and it was also as if he missed the chance to explain the purity of
his motive; but this privation of relief should be precisely his small penance:
it was not amiss for Strether that he should find himself to that degree
uneasy. If he had been challenged or accused, rebuked for meddling or otherwise
pulled up, he would probably have shown, on his own system, all the height of
his consistency, all the depth of his good faith. Explicit resentment of his
course would have made him take the floor, and the thump of his fist on the
table would have affirmed him as consciously incorruptible. Had what now really
prevailed with Strether been but a dread of that thump—a dread of wincing
a little painfully at what it might invidiously demonstrate? However this might
be, at any rate, one of the marks of the crisis was a visible, a studied lapse,
in Waymarsh, of betrayed concern. As if to make up to his comrade for the
stroke by which he had played providence he now conspicuously ignored his
movements, withdrew himself from the pretension to share them, stiffened up his
sensibility to neglect, and, clasping his large empty hands and swinging his
large restless foot, clearly looked to another quarter for justice.
This made for independence on Strether’s part, and he had in truth at no
moment of his stay been so free to go and come. The early summer brushed the
picture over and blurred everything but the near; it made a vast warm fragrant
medium in which the elements floated together on the best of terms, in which
rewards were immediate and reckonings postponed. Chad was out of town again,
for the first time since his visitor’s first view of him; he had
explained this necessity—without detail, yet also without embarrassment,
the circumstance was one of those which, in the young man’s life,
testified to the variety of his ties. Strether wasn’t otherwise concerned
with it than for its so testifying—a pleasant multitudinous image in
which he took comfort. He took comfort, by the same stroke, in the swing of
Chad’s pendulum back from that other swing, the sharp jerk towards
Woollett, so stayed by his own hand. He had the entertainment of thinking that
if he had for that moment stopped the clock it was to promote the next minute
this still livelier motion. He himself did what he hadn’t done before; he
took two or three times whole days off—irrespective of others, of two or
three taken with Miss Gostrey, two or three taken with little Bilham: he went
to Chartres and cultivated, before the front of the cathedral, a general easy
beatitude; he went to Fontainebleau and imagined himself on the way to Italy;
he went to Rouen with a little handbag and inordinately spent the night.
One afternoon he did something quite different; finding himself in the
neighbourhood of a fine old house across the river, he passed under the great
arch of its doorway and asked at the porter’s lodge for Madame de
Vionnet. He had already hovered more than once about that possibility, been
aware of it, in the course of ostensible strolls, as lurking but round the
corner. Only it had perversely happened, after his morning at Notre Dame, that
his consistency, as he considered and intended it, had come back to him;
whereby he had reflected that the encounter in question had been none of his
making; clinging again intensely to the strength of his position, which was
precisely that there was nothing in it for himself. From the moment he actively
pursued the charming associate of his adventure, from that moment his position
weakened, for he was then acting in an interested way. It was only within a few
days that he had fixed himself a limit: he promised himself his consistency
should end with Sarah’s arrival. It was arguing correctly to feel the
title to a free hand conferred on him by this event. If he wasn’t to be
let alone he should be merely a dupe to act with delicacy. If he wasn’t
to be trusted he could at least take his ease. If he was to be placed under
control he gained leave to try what his position might agreeably give
him. An ideal rigour would perhaps postpone the trial till after the Pococks
had shown their spirit; and it was to an ideal rigour that he had quite
promised himself to conform.
Suddenly, however, on this particular day, he felt a particular fear under
which everything collapsed. He knew abruptly that he was afraid of
himself—and yet not in relation to the effect on his sensibilities of
another hour of Madame de Vionnet. What he dreaded was the effect of a single
hour of Sarah Pocock, as to whom he was visited, in troubled nights, with
fantastic waking dreams. She loomed at him larger than life; she increased in
volume as she drew nearer; she so met his eyes that, his imagination taking,
after the first step, all, and more than all, the strides, he already felt her
come down on him, already burned, under her reprobation, with the blush of
guilt, already consented, by way of penance, to the instant forfeiture of
everything. He saw himself, under her direction, recommitted to Woollett as
juvenile offenders are committed to reformatories. It wasn’t of course
that Woollett was really a place of discipline; but he knew in advance that
Sarah’s salon at the hotel would be. His danger, at any rate, in such
moods of alarm, was some concession, on this ground, that would involve a sharp
rupture with the actual; therefore if he waited to take leave of that actual he
might wholly miss his chance. It was represented with supreme vividness by
Madame de Vionnet, and that is why, in a word, he waited no longer. He had seen
in a flash that he must anticipate Mrs. Pocock. He was accordingly much
disappointed on now learning from the portress that the lady of his quest was
not in Paris. She had gone for some days to the country. There was nothing in
this accident but what was natural; yet it produced for poor Strether a drop of
all confidence. It was suddenly as if he should never see her again, and as if
moreover he had brought it on himself by not having been quite kind to her.
It was the advantage of his having let his fancy lose itself for a little in
the gloom that, as by reaction, the prospect began really to brighten from the
moment the deputation from Woollett alighted on the platform of the station.
They had come straight from Havre, having sailed from New York to that port,
and having also, thanks to a happy voyage, made land with a promptitude that
left Chad Newsome, who had meant to meet them at the dock, belated. He had
received their telegram, with the announcement of their immediate further
advance, just as he was taking the train for Havre, so that nothing had
remained for him but to await them in Paris. He hastily picked up Strether, at
the hotel, for this purpose, and he even, with easy pleasantry, suggested the
attendance of Waymarsh as well—Waymarsh, at the moment his cab rattled
up, being engaged, under Strether’s contemplative range, in a grave
perambulation of the familiar court. Waymarsh had learned from his companion,
who had already had a note, delivered by hand, from Chad, that the Pococks were
due, and had ambiguously, though, as always, impressively, glowered at him over
the circumstance; carrying himself in a manner in which Strether was now expert
enough to recognise his uncertainty, in the premises, as to the best tone. The
only tone he aimed at with confidence was a full tone—which was
necessarily difficult in the absence of a full knowledge. The Pococks were a
quantity as yet unmeasured, and, as he had practically brought them over, so
this witness had to that extent exposed himself. He wanted to feel right about
it, but could only, at the best, for the time, feel vague. “I shall look
to you, you know, immensely,” our friend had said, “to help me with
them,” and he had been quite conscious of the effect of the remark, and
of others of the same sort, on his comrade’s sombre sensibility. He had
insisted on the fact that Waymarsh would quite like Mrs. Pocock—one could
be certain he would: he would be with her about everything, and she would also
be with him, and Miss Barrace’s nose, in short, would find itself
out of joint.
Strether had woven this web of cheerfulness while they waited in the court for
Chad; he had sat smoking cigarettes to keep himself quiet while, caged and
leonine, his fellow traveller paced and turned before him. Chad Newsome was
doubtless to be struck, when he arrived, with the sharpness of their opposition
at this particular hour; he was to remember, as a part of it, how Waymarsh came
with him and with Strether to the street and stood there with a face
half-wistful and half-rueful. They talked of him, the two others, as they
drove, and Strether put Chad in possession of much of his own strained sense of
things. He had already, a few days before, named to him the wire he was
convinced their friend had pulled—a confidence that had made on the young
man’s part quite hugely for curiosity and diversion. The action of the
matter, moreover, Strether could see, was to penetrate; he saw that is, how
Chad judged a system of influence in which Waymarsh had served as a
determinant—an impression just now quickened again; with the whole
bearing of such a fact on the youth’s view of his relatives. As it came
up between them that they might now take their friend for a feature of the
control of these latter now sought to be exerted from Woollett, Strether felt
indeed how it would be stamped all over him, half an hour later for Sarah
Pocock’s eyes, that he was as much on Chad’s “side” as
Waymarsh had probably described him. He was letting himself at present, go;
there was no denying it; it might be desperation, it might be confidence; he
should offer himself to the arriving travellers bristling with all the lucidity
he had cultivated.
He repeated to Chad what he had been saying in the court to Waymarsh; how there
was no doubt whatever that his sister would find the latter a kindred spirit,
no doubt of the alliance, based on an exchange of views, that the pair would
successfully strike up. They would become as thick as thieves—which
moreover was but a development of what Strether remembered to have said in one
of his first discussions with his mate, struck as he had then already been with
the elements of affinity between that personage and Mrs. Newsome herself.
“I told him, one day, when he had questioned me on your mother, that she
was a person who, when he should know her, would rouse in him, I was sure, a
special enthusiasm; and that hangs together with the conviction we now
feel—this certitude that Mrs. Pocock will take him into her boat. For
it’s your mother’s own boat that she’s pulling.”
“Ah,” said Chad, “Mother’s worth fifty of Sally!”
“A thousand; but when you presently meet her, all the same you’ll
be meeting your mother’s representative—just as I shall. I feel
like the outgoing ambassador,” said Strether, “doing honour to his
appointed successor.” A moment after speaking as he had just done he felt
he had inadvertently rather cheapened Mrs. Newsome to her son; an impression
audibly reflected, as at first seen, in Chad’s prompt protest. He had
recently rather failed of apprehension of the young man’s attitude and
temper—remaining principally conscious of how little worry, at the worst,
he wasted, and he studied him at this critical hour with renewed interest. Chad
had done exactly what he had promised him a fortnight previous—had
accepted without another question his plea for delay. He was waiting cheerfully
and handsomely, but also inscrutably and with a slight increase perhaps of the
hardness originally involved in his acquired high polish. He was neither
excited nor depressed; was easy and acute and deliberate—unhurried
unflurried unworried, only at most a little less amused than usual. Strether
felt him more than ever a justification of the extraordinary process of which
his own absurd spirit had been the arena; he knew as their cab rolled along,
knew as he hadn’t even yet known, that nothing else than what Chad had
done and had been would have led to his present showing. They had made him,
these things, what he was, and the business hadn’t been easy; it had
taken time and trouble, it had cost, above all, a price. The result at any rate
was now to be offered to Sally; which Strether, so far as that was concerned,
was glad to be there to witness. Would she in the least make it out or take it
in, the result, or would she in the least care for it if she did? He scratched
his chin as he asked himself by what name, when challenged—as he was sure
he should be—he could call it for her. Oh those were determinations she
must herself arrive at; since she wanted so much to see, let her see then and
welcome. She had come out in the pride of her competence, yet it hummed in
Strether’s inner sense that she practically wouldn’t see.
That this was moreover what Chad shrewdly suspected was clear from a word that
next dropped from him. “They’re children; they play at
life!”—and the exclamation was significant and reassuring. It
implied that he hadn’t then, for his companion’s sensibility,
appeared to give Mrs. Newsome away; and it facilitated our friend’s
presently asking him if it were his idea that Mrs. Pocock and Madame de Vionnet
should become acquainted. Strether was still more sharply struck, hereupon,
with Chad’s lucidity. “Why, isn’t that exactly—to get a
sight of the company I keep—what she has come out for?”
“Yes—I’m afraid it is,” Strether unguardedly replied.
Chad’s quick rejoinder lighted his precipitation. “Why do you say
you’re afraid?”
“Well, because I feel a certain responsibility. It’s my testimony,
I imagine, that will have been at the bottom of Mrs. Pocock’s curiosity.
My letters, as I’ve supposed you to understand from the beginning, have
spoken freely. I’ve certainly said my little say about Madame de
Vionnet.”
All that, for Chad, was beautifully obvious. “Yes, but you’ve only
spoken handsomely.”
“Never more handsomely of any woman. But it’s just that
tone—!”
“That tone,” said Chad, “that has fetched her? I dare say;
but I’ve no quarrel with you about it. And no more has Madame de Vionnet.
Don’t you know by this time how she likes you?”
“Oh!”—and Strether had, with his groan, a real pang of
melancholy. “For all I’ve done for her!”
“Ah you’ve done a great deal.”
Chad’s urbanity fairly shamed him, and he was at this moment absolutely
impatient to see the face Sarah Pocock would present to a sort of thing, as he
synthetically phrased it to himself, with no adequate forecast of which,
despite his admonitions, she would certainly arrive. “I’ve done
this!”
“Well, this is all right. She likes,” Chad comfortably remarked,
“to be liked.”
It gave his companion a moment’s thought. “And she’s sure
Mrs. Pocock will—?”
“No, I say that for you. She likes your liking her; it’s so much,
as it were,” Chad laughed, “to the good. However, she doesn’t
despair of Sarah either, and is prepared, on her own side, to go all
lengths.”
“In the way of appreciation?”
“Yes, and of everything else. In the way of general amiability,
hospitality and welcome. She’s under arms,” Chad laughed again;
“she’s prepared.”
Strether took it in; then as if an echo of Miss Barrace were in the air:
“She’s wonderful.”
“You don’t begin to know how wonderful!”
There was a depth in it, to Strether’s ear, of confirmed
luxury—almost a kind of unconscious insolence of proprietorship; but the
effect of the glimpse was not at this moment to foster speculation: there was
something so conclusive in so much graceful and generous assurance. It was in
fact a fresh evocation; and the evocation had before many minutes another
consequence. “Well, I shall see her oftener now. I shall see her as much
as I like—by your leave; which is what I hitherto haven’t
done.”
“It has been,” said Chad, but without reproach, “only your
own fault. I tried to bring you together, and she, my dear
fellow—I never saw her more charming to any man. But you’ve got
your extraordinary ideas.”
“Well, I did have,” Strether murmured, while he felt both
how they had possessed him and how they had now lost their authority. He
couldn’t have traced the sequence to the end, but it was all because of
Mrs. Pocock. Mrs. Pocock might be because of Mrs. Newsome, but that was still
to be proved. What came over him was the sense of having stupidly failed to
profit where profit would have been precious. It had been open to him to see so
much more of her, and he had but let the good days pass. Fierce in him almost
was the resolve to lose no more of them, and he whimsically reflected, while at
Chad’s side he drew nearer to his destination, that it was after all
Sarah who would have quickened his chance. What her visit of inquisition might
achieve in other directions was as yet all obscure—only not obscure that
it would do supremely much to bring two earnest persons together. He had but to
listen to Chad at this moment to feel it; for Chad was in the act of remarking
to him that they of course both counted on him—he himself and the other
earnest person—for cheer and support. It was brave to Strether to hear
him talk as if the line of wisdom they had struck out was to make things
ravishing to the Pococks. No, if Madame de Vionnet compassed that,
compassed the ravishment of the Pococks, Madame de Vionnet would be prodigious.
It would be a beautiful plan if it succeeded, and it all came to the question
of Sarah’s being really bribeable. The precedent of his own case helped
Strether perhaps but little to consider she might prove so; it being distinct
that her character would rather make for every possible difference. This idea
of his own bribeability set him apart for himself; with the further mark in
fact that his case was absolutely proved. He liked always, where Lambert
Strether was concerned, to know the worst, and what he now seemed to know was
not only that he was bribeable, but that he had been effectually bribed. The
only difficulty was that he couldn’t quite have said with what. It was as
if he had sold himself, but hadn’t somehow got the cash. That, however,
was what, characteristically, would happen to him. It would naturally be
his kind of traffic. While he thought of these things he reminded Chad of the
truth they mustn’t lose sight of—the truth that, with all deference
to her susceptibility to new interests, Sarah would have come out with a high
firm definite purpose. “She hasn’t come out, you know, to be
bamboozled. We may all be ravishing—nothing perhaps can be more easy for
us; but she hasn’t come out to be ravished. She has come out just simply
to take you home.”
“Oh well, with her I’ll go,” said Chad
good-humouredly. “I suppose you’ll allow that.” And
then as for a minute Strether said nothing: “Or is your idea that when
I’ve seen her I shan’t want to go?” As this question,
however, again left his friend silent he presently went on: “My own idea
at any rate is that they shall have while they’re here the best sort of
time.”
It was at this that Strether spoke. “Ah there you are! I think if you
really wanted to go—!”
“Well?” said Chad to bring it out.
“Well, you wouldn’t trouble about our good time. You wouldn’t
care what sort of a time we have.”
Chad could always take in the easiest way in the world any ingenious
suggestion. “I see. But can I help it? I’m too decent.”
“Yes, you’re too decent!” Strether heavily sighed. And he
felt for the moment as if it were the preposterous end of his mission.
It ministered for the time to this temporary effect that Chad made no
rejoinder. But he spoke again as they came in sight of the station. “Do
you mean to introduce her to Miss Gostrey?”
As to this Strether was ready. “No.”
“But haven’t you told me they know about her?”
“I think I’ve told you your mother knows.”
“And won’t she have told Sally?”
“That’s one of the things I want to see.”
“And if you find she has—?”
“Will I then, you mean, bring them together?”
“Yes,” said Chad with his pleasant promptness: “to show her
there’s nothing in it.”
Strether hesitated. “I don’t know that I care very much what she
may think there’s in it.”
“Not if it represents what Mother thinks?”
“Ah what does your mother think?” There was in this some
sound of bewilderment.
But they were just driving up, and help, of a sort, might after all be quite at
hand. “Isn’t that, my dear man, what we’re both just going to
make out?”
