He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he knew almost
nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that Waymarsh, even with his memory
refreshed by contact, by her own prompt and lucid allusions and enquiries, by
their having publicly partaken of dinner in her company, and by another stroll,
to which she was not a stranger, out into the town to look at the cathedral by
moonlight—it was a blank that the resident of Milrose, though admitting
acquaintance with the Munsters, professed himself unable to fill. He had no
recollection of Miss Gostrey, and two or three questions that she put to him
about those members of his circle had, to Strether’s observation, the
same effect he himself had already more directly felt—the effect of
appearing to place all knowledge, for the time, on this original woman’s
side. It interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such relation for her
with his friend as there could possibly be a question of, and it particularly
struck him that they were to be marked altogether in Waymarsh’s quarter.
This added to his own sense of having gone far with her—gave him an early
illustration of a much shorter course. There was a certitude he immediately
grasped—a conviction that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on
whatever degree of acquaintances to profit by her.
There had been after the first interchange among the three a talk of some five
minutes in the hall, and then the two men had adjourned to the garden, Miss
Gostrey for the time disappearing. Strether in due course accompanied his
friend to the room he had bespoken and had, before going out, scrupulously
visited; where at the end of another half-hour he had no less discreetly left
him. On leaving him he repaired straight to his own room, but with the prompt
effect of feeling the compass of that chamber resented by his condition. There
he enjoyed at once the first consequence of their reunion. A place was too
small for him after it that had seemed large enough before. He had awaited it
with something he would have been sorry, have been almost ashamed not to
recognise as emotion, yet with a tacit assumption at the same time that emotion
would in the event find itself relieved. The actual oddity was that he was only
more excited; and his excitement—to which indeed he would have found it
difficult instantly to give a name—brought him once more downstairs and
caused him for some minutes vaguely to wander. He went once more to the garden;
he looked into the public room, found Miss Gostrey writing letters and backed
out; he roamed, fidgeted and wasted time; but he was to have his more intimate
session with his friend before the evening closed.
It was late—not till Strether had spent an hour upstairs with
him—that this subject consented to betake himself to doubtful rest.
Dinner and the subsequent stroll by moonlight—a dream, on
Strether’s part, of romantic effects rather prosaically merged in a mere
missing of thicker coats—had measurably intervened, and this midnight
conference was the result of Waymarsh’s having (when they were free, as
he put it, of their fashionable friend) found the smoking-room not quite what
he wanted, and yet bed what he wanted less. His most frequent form of words was
that he knew himself, and they were applied on this occasion to his certainty
of not sleeping. He knew himself well enough to know that he should have a
night of prowling unless he should succeed, as a preliminary, in getting
prodigiously tired. If the effort directed to this end involved till a late
hour the presence of Strether—consisted, that is, in the detention of the
latter for full discourse—there was yet an impression of minor discipline
involved for our friend in the picture Waymarsh made as he sat in trousers and
shirt on the edge of his couch. With his long legs extended and his large back
much bent, he nursed alternately, for an almost incredible time, his elbows and
his beard. He struck his visitor as extremely, as almost wilfully
uncomfortable; yet what had this been for Strether, from that first glimpse of
him disconcerted in the porch of the hotel, but the predominant notes. The
discomfort was in a manner contagious, as well as also in a manner inconsequent
and unfounded; the visitor felt that unless he should get used to it—or
unless Waymarsh himself should—it would constitute a menace for his own
prepared, his own already confirmed, consciousness of the agreeable. On their
first going up together to the room Strether had selected for him Waymarsh had
looked it over in silence and with a sigh that represented for his companion,
if not the habit of disapprobation, at least the despair of felicity; and this
look had recurred to Strether as the key of much he had since observed.
“Europe,” he had begun to gather from these things, had up to now
rather failed of its message to him; he hadn’t got into tune with it and
had at the end of three months almost renounced any such expectation.
He really appeared at present to insist on that by just perching there with the
gas in his eyes. This of itself somehow conveyed the futility of single
rectifications in a multiform failure. He had a large handsome head and a large
sallow seamed face—a striking significant physiognomic total, the upper
range of which, the great political brow, the thick loose hair, the dark
fuliginous eyes, recalled even to a generation whose standard had dreadfully
deviated the impressive image, familiar by engravings and busts, of some great
national worthy of the earlier part of the mid-century. He was of the personal
type—and it was an element in the power and promise that in their early
time Strether had found in him—of the American statesman, the statesman
trained in “Congressional halls,” of an elder day. The legend had
been in later years that as the lower part of his face, which was weak, and
slightly crooked, spoiled the likeness, this was the real reason for the growth
of his beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those not in the secret.
He shook his mane; he fixed, with his admirable eyes, his auditor or his
observer; he wore no glasses and had a way, partly formidable, yet also partly
encouraging, as from a representative to a constituent, of looking very hard at
those who approached him. He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden
you enter. Strether, who hadn’t seen him for so long an interval,
apprehended him now with a freshness of taste, and had perhaps never done him
such ideal justice. The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than they need have
been for the career; but that only meant, after all, that the career was itself
expressive. What it expressed at midnight in the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester
was that the subject of it had, at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight
in time, a general nervous collapse. But this very proof of the full life, as
the full life was understood at Milrose, would have made to Strether’s
imagination an element in which Waymarsh could have floated easily had he only
consented to float. Alas nothing so little resembled floating as the rigour
with which, on the edge of his bed, he hugged his posture of prolonged
impermanence. It suggested to his comrade something that always, when kept up,
worried him—a person established in a railway-coach with a forward
inclination. It represented the angle at which poor Waymarsh was to sit through
the ordeal of Europe.
Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions, the absorption
and embarrassment of each, they had not, at home, during years before this
sudden brief and almost bewildering reign of comparative ease, found so much as
a day for a meeting; a fact that was in some degree an explanation of the
sharpness with which most of his friend’s features stood out to Strether.
Those he had lost sight of since the early time came back to him; others that
it was never possible to forget struck him now as sitting, clustered and
expectant, like a somewhat defiant family-group, on the doorstep of their
residence. The room was narrow for its length, and the occupant of the bed
thrust so far a pair of slippered feet that the visitor had almost to step over
them in his recurrent rebounds from his chair to fidget back and forth. There
were marks the friends made on things to talk about, and on things not to, and
one of the latter in particular fell like the tap of chalk on the blackboard.
Married at thirty, Waymarsh had not lived with his wife for fifteen years, and
it came up vividly between them in the glare of the gas that Strether
wasn’t to ask about her. He knew they were still separate and that she
lived at hotels, travelled in Europe, painted her face and wrote her husband
abusive letters, of not one of which, to a certainty, that sufferer spared
himself the perusal; but he respected without difficulty the cold twilight that
had settled on this side of his companion’s life. It was a province in
which mystery reigned and as to which Waymarsh had never spoken the informing
word. Strether, who wanted to do him the highest justice wherever he
could do it, singularly admired him for the dignity of this reserve, and
even counted it as one of the grounds—grounds all handled and
numbered—for ranking him, in the range of their acquaintance, as a
success. He was a success, Waymarsh, in spite of overwork, or
prostration, of sensible shrinkage, of his wife’s letters and of his not
liking Europe. Strether would have reckoned his own career less futile had he
been able to put into it anything so handsome as so much fine silence. One
might one’s self easily have left Mrs. Waymarsh; and one would assuredly
have paid one’s tribute to the ideal in covering with that attitude the
derision of having been left by her. Her husband had held his tongue and had
made a large income; and these were in especial the achievements as to which
Strether envied him. Our friend had had indeed on his side too a subject for
silence, which he fully appreciated; but it was a matter of a different sort,
and the figure of the income he had arrived at had never been high enough to
look any one in the face.
“I don’t know as I quite see what you require it for. You
don’t appear sick to speak of.” It was of Europe Waymarsh thus
finally spoke.
“Well,” said Strether, who fell as much as possible into step,
“I guess I don’t feel sick now that I’ve started. But
I had pretty well run down before I did start.”
Waymarsh raised his melancholy look. “Ain’t you about up to your
usual average?”
It was not quite pointedly sceptical, but it seemed somehow a plea for the
purest veracity, and it thereby affected our friend as the very voice of
Milrose. He had long since made a mental distinction—though never in
truth daring to betray it—between the voice of Milrose and the voice even
of Woollett. It was the former he felt, that was most in the real tradition.
There had been occasions in his past when the sound of it had reduced him to
temporary confusion, and the present, for some reason, suddenly became such
another. It was nevertheless no light matter that the very effect of his
confusion should be to make him again prevaricate. “That description
hardly does justice to a man to whom it has done such a lot of good to see
you.”
Waymarsh fixed on his washing-stand the silent detached stare with which
Milrose in person, as it were, might have marked the unexpectedness of a
compliment from Woollett, and Strether for his part, felt once more like
Woollett in person. “I mean,” his friend presently continued,
“that your appearance isn’t as bad as I’ve seen it: it
compares favourably with what it was when I last noticed it.” On this
appearance Waymarsh’s eyes yet failed to rest; it was almost as if they
obeyed an instinct of propriety, and the effect was still stronger when, always
considering the basin and jug, he added: “You’ve filled out some
since then.”
“I’m afraid I have,” Strether laughed: “one does fill
out some with all one takes in, and I’ve taken in, I dare say, more than
I’ve natural room for. I was dog-tired when I sailed.” It had the
oddest sound of cheerfulness.
“I was dog-tired,” his companion returned, “when I
arrived, and it’s this wild hunt for rest that takes all the life out of
me. The fact is, Strether—and it’s a comfort to have you here at
last to say it to; though I don’t know, after all, that I’ve really
waited; I’ve told it to people I’ve met in the cars—the fact
is, such a country as this ain’t my kind of country anyway. There
ain’t a country I’ve seen over here that does seem my kind.
Oh I don’t say but what there are plenty of pretty places and remarkable
old things; but the trouble is that I don’t seem to feel anywhere in
tune. That’s one of the reasons why I suppose I’ve gained so
little. I haven’t had the first sign of that lift I was led to
expect.” With this he broke out more earnestly. “Look here—I
want to go back.”
His eyes were all attached to Strether’s now, for he was one of the men
who fully face you when they talk of themselves. This enabled his friend to
look at him hard and immediately to appear to the highest advantage in his eyes
by doing so. “That’s a genial thing to say to a fellow who has come
out on purpose to meet you!”
Nothing could have been finer, on this, than Waymarsh’s sombre glow.
“Have you come out on purpose?”
“Well—very largely.”
“I thought from the way you wrote there was something back of it.”
Strether hesitated. “Back of my desire to be with you?”
“Back of your prostration.”
Strether, with a smile made more dim by a certain consciousness, shook his
head. “There are all the causes of it!”
“And no particular cause that seemed most to drive you?”
Our friend could at last conscientiously answer. “Yes. One. There
is a matter that has had much to do with my coming out.”
Waymarsh waited a little. “Too private to mention?”
“No, not too private—for you. Only rather
complicated.”
“Well,” said Waymarsh, who had waited again, “I may
lose my mind over here, but I don’t know as I’ve done so
yet.”
“Oh you shall have the whole thing. But not tonight.”
Waymarsh seemed to sit stiffer and to hold his elbows tighter. “Why
not—if I can’t sleep?”
“Because, my dear man, I can!”
“Then where’s your prostration?”
“Just in that—that I can put in eight hours.” And Strether
brought it out that if Waymarsh didn’t “gain” it was because
he didn’t go to bed: the result of which was, in its order, that, to do
the latter justice, he permitted his friend to insist on his really getting
settled. Strether, with a kind coercive hand for it, assisted him to this
consummation, and again found his own part in their relation auspiciously
enlarged by the smaller touches of lowering the lamp and seeing to a
sufficiency of blanket. It somehow ministered for him to indulgence to feel
Waymarsh, who looked unnaturally big and black in bed, as much tucked in as a
patient in a hospital and, with his covering up to his chin, as much simplified
by it. He hovered in vague pity, to be brief, while his companion challenged
him out of the bedclothes. “Is she really after you? Is that what’s
behind?”
Strether felt an uneasiness at the direction taken by his companion’s
insight, but he played a little at uncertainty. “Behind my coming
out?”
“Behind your prostration or whatever. It’s generally felt, you
know, that she follows you up pretty close.”
Strether’s candour was never very far off. “Oh it has occurred to
you that I’m literally running away from Mrs. Newsome?”
“Well, I haven’t known but what you are. You’re a very
attractive man, Strether. You’ve seen for yourself,” said Waymarsh
“what that lady downstairs makes of it. Unless indeed,” he rambled
on with an effect between the ironic and the anxious, “it’s you who
are after her. Is Mrs. Newsome over here?” He spoke as with
a droll dread of her.
It made his friend—though rather dimly—smile. “Dear no;
she’s safe, thank goodness—as I think I more and more feel—at
home. She thought of coming, but she gave it up. I’ve come in a manner
instead of her; and come to that extent—for you’re right in your
inference—on her business. So you see there is plenty of
connexion.”
Waymarsh continued to see at least all there was. “Involving accordingly
the particular one I’ve referred to?”
Strether took another turn about the room, giving a twitch to his
companion’s blanket and finally gaining the door. His feeling was that of
a nurse who had earned personal rest by having made everything straight.
“Involving more things than I can think of breaking ground on now. But
don’t be afraid—you shall have them from me: you’ll probably
find yourself having quite as much of them as you can do with. I shall—if
we keep together—very much depend on your impression of some of
them.”
Waymarsh’s acknowledgement of this tribute was characteristically
indirect. “You mean to say you don’t believe we will keep
together?”
“I only glance at the danger,” Strether paternally said,
“because when I hear you wail to go back I seem to see you open up such
possibilities of folly.”
Waymarsh took it—silent a little—like a large snubbed child
“What are you going to do with me?”
It was the very question Strether himself had put to Miss Gostrey, and he
wondered if he had sounded like that. But he at least could be more
definite. “I’m going to take you right down to London.”
“Oh I’ve been down to London!” Waymarsh more softly moaned.
“I’ve no use, Strether, for anything down there.”
“Well,” said Strether, good-humouredly, “I guess you’ve
some use for me.”
“So I’ve got to go?”
“Oh you’ve got to go further yet.”
“Well,” Waymarsh sighed, “do your damnedest! Only you
will tell me before you lead me on all the way—?”
Our friend had again so lost himself, both for amusement and for contrition, in
the wonder of whether he had made, in his own challenge that afternoon, such
another figure, that he for an instant missed the thread. “Tell
you—?”
“Why what you’ve got on hand.”
Strether hesitated. “Why it’s such a matter as that even if I
positively wanted I shouldn’t be able to keep it from you.”
Waymarsh gloomily gazed. “What does that mean then but that your trip is
just for her?”
“For Mrs. Newsome? Oh it certainly is, as I say. Very much.”
“Then why do you also say it’s for me?”
Strether, in impatience, violently played with his latch. “It’s
simple enough. It’s for both of you.”
Waymarsh at last turned over with a groan. “Well, I won’t
marry you!”
“Neither, when it comes to that—!” But the visitor had
already laughed and escaped.
