Strether quitted the station half an hour later in different company. Chad had
taken charge, for the journey to the hotel, of Sarah, Mamie, the maid and the
luggage, all spaciously installed and conveyed; and it was only after the four
had rolled away that his companion got into a cab with Jim. A strange new
feeling had come over Strether, in consequence of which his spirits had risen;
it was as if what had occurred on the alighting of his critics had been
something other than his fear, though his fear had yet not been of an instant
scene of violence. His impression had been nothing but what was
inevitable—he said that to himself; yet relief and reassurance had softly
dropped upon him. Nothing could be so odd as to be indebted for these things to
the look of faces and the sound of voices that had been with him to satiety, as
he might have said, for years; but he now knew, all the same, how uneasy he had
felt; that was brought home to him by his present sense of a respite. It had
come moreover in the flash of an eye, it had come in the smile with which
Sarah, whom, at the window of her compartment, they had effusively greeted from
the platform, rustled down to them a moment later, fresh and handsome from her
cool June progress through the charming land. It was only a sign, but enough:
she was going to be gracious and unallusive, she was going to play the larger
game—which was still more apparent, after she had emerged from
Chad’s arms, in her direct greeting to the valued friend of her family.
Strether was then as much as ever the valued friend of her family, it
was something he could at all events go on with; and the manner of his response
to it expressed even for himself how little he had enjoyed the prospect of
ceasing to figure in that likeness. He had always seen Sarah gracious—had
in fact rarely seen her shy or dry, her marked thin-lipped smile, intense
without brightness and as prompt to act as the scrape of a safety-match; the
protrusion of her rather remarkably long chin, which in her case represented
invitation and urbanity, and not, as in most others, pugnacity and defiance;
the penetration of her voice to a distance, the general encouragement and
approval of her manner, were all elements with which intercourse had made him
familiar, but which he noted today almost as if she had been a new
acquaintance. This first glimpse of her had given a brief but vivid accent to
her resemblance to her mother; he could have taken her for Mrs. Newsome while
she met his eyes as the train rolled into the station. It was an impression
that quickly dropped; Mrs. Newsome was much handsomer, and while Sarah inclined
to the massive her mother had, at an age, still the girdle of a maid; also the
latter’s chin was rather short, than long, and her smile, by good
fortune, much more, oh ever so much more, mercifully vague. Strether had seen
Mrs. Newsome reserved; he had literally heard her silent, though he had never
known her unpleasant. It was the case with Mrs. Pocock that he had known
her unpleasant, even though he had never known her not affable. She had
forms of affability that were in a high degree assertive; nothing for instance
had ever been more striking than that she was affable to Jim.
What had told in any case at the window of the train was her high clear
forehead, that forehead which her friends, for some reason, always thought of
as a “brow”; the long reach of her eyes—it came out at this
juncture in such a manner as to remind him, oddly enough, also of that of
Waymarsh’s; and the unusual gloss of her dark hair, dressed and hatted,
after her mother’s refined example, with such an avoidance of extremes
that it was always spoken of at Woollett as “their own.” Though
this analogy dropped as soon as she was on the platform it had lasted long
enough to make him feel all the advantage, as it were, of his relief. The woman
at home, the woman to whom he was attached, was before him just long enough to
give him again the measure of the wretchedness, in fact really of the shame, of
their having to recognise the formation, between them, of a
“split.” He had taken this measure in solitude and meditation: but
the catastrophe, as Sarah steamed up, looked for its seconds unprecedentedly
dreadful—or proved, more exactly, altogether unthinkable; so that his
finding something free and familiar to respond to brought with it an instant
renewal of his loyalty. He had suddenly sounded the whole depth, had gasped at
what he might have lost.
Well, he could now, for the quarter of an hour of their detention hover about
the travellers as soothingly as if their direct message to him was that he had
lost nothing. He wasn’t going to have Sarah write to her mother that
night that he was in any way altered or strange. There had been times enough
for a month when it had seemed to him that he was strange, that he was altered,
in every way; but that was a matter for himself; he knew at least whose
business it was not; it was not at all events such a circumstance as
Sarah’s own unaided lights would help her to. Even if she had come out to
flash those lights more than yet appeared she wouldn’t make much headway
against mere pleasantness. He counted on being able to be merely pleasant to
the end, and if only from incapacity moreover to formulate anything different.
He couldn’t even formulate to himself his being changed and queer; it had
taken place, the process, somewhere deep down; Maria Gostrey had caught
glimpses of it; but how was he to fish it up, even if he desired, for Mrs.
Pocock? This was then the spirit in which he hovered, and with the easier throb
in it much indebted furthermore to the impression of high and established
adequacy as a pretty girl promptly produced in him by Mamie. He had wondered
vaguely—turning over many things in the fidget of his thoughts—if
Mamie were as pretty as Woollett published her; as to which issue seeing
her now again was to be so swept away by Woollett’s opinion that this
consequence really let loose for the imagination an avalanche of others. There
were positively five minutes in which the last word seemed of necessity to
abide with a Woollett represented by a Mamie. This was the sort of truth the
place itself would feel; it would send her forth in confidence; it would point
to her with triumph; it would take its stand on her with assurance; it would be
conscious of no requirements she didn’t meet, of no question she
couldn’t answer.
Well, it was right, Strether slipped smoothly enough into the cheerfulness of
saying: granted that a community might be best represented by a young
lady of twenty-two, Mamie perfectly played the part, played it as if she were
used to it, and looked and spoke and dressed the character. He wondered if she
mightn’t, in the high light of Paris, a cool full studio-light, becoming
yet treacherous, show as too conscious of these matters; but the next moment he
felt satisfied that her consciousness was after all empty for its size, rather
too simple than too mixed, and that the kind way with her would be not to take
many things out of it, but to put as many as possible in. She was robust and
conveniently tall; just a trifle too bloodlessly fair perhaps, but with a
pleasant public familiar radiance that affirmed her vitality. She might have
been “receiving” for Woollett, wherever she found herself, and
there was something in her manner, her tone, her motion, her pretty blue eyes,
her pretty perfect teeth and her very small, too small, nose, that immediately
placed her, to the fancy, between the windows of a hot bright room in which
voices were high—up at that end to which people were brought to be
“presented.” They were there to congratulate, these images, and
Strether’s renewed vision, on this hint, completed the idea. What Mamie
was like was the happy bride, the bride after the church and just before going
away. She wasn’t the mere maiden, and yet was only as much married as
that quantity came to. She was in the brilliant acclaimed festal stage. Well,
might it last her long!
Strether rejoiced in these things for Chad, who was all genial attention to the
needs of his friends, besides having arranged that his servant should reinforce
him; the ladies were certainly pleasant to see, and Mamie would be at any time
and anywhere pleasant to exhibit. She would look extraordinarily like his young
wife—the wife of a honeymoon, should he go about with her; but that was
his own affair—or perhaps it was hers; it was at any rate something she
couldn’t help. Strether remembered how he had seen him come up with
Jeanne de Vionnet in Gloriani’s garden, and the fancy he had had about
that—the fancy obscured now, thickly overlaid with others; the
recollection was during these minutes his only note of trouble. He had often,
in spite of himself, wondered if Chad but too probably were not with Jeanne the
object of a still and shaded flame. It was on the cards that the child
might be tremulously in love, and this conviction now flickered up not a
bit the less for his disliking to think of it, for its being, in a complicated
situation, a complication the more, and for something indescribable in Mamie,
something at all events straightway lent her by his own mind, something that
gave her value, gave her intensity and purpose, as the symbol of an opposition.
Little Jeanne wasn’t really at all in question—how could she
be?—yet from the moment Miss Pocock had shaken her skirts on the
platform, touched up the immense bows of her hat and settled properly over her
shoulder the strap of her morocco-and-gilt travelling-satchel, from that moment
little Jeanne was opposed.
It was in the cab with Jim that impressions really crowded on Strether, giving
him the strangest sense of length of absence from people among whom he had
lived for years. Having them thus come out to him was as if he had returned to
find them: and the droll promptitude of Jim’s mental reaction threw his
own initiation far back into the past. Whoever might or mightn’t be
suited by what was going on among them, Jim, for one, would certainly be: his
instant recognition—frank and whimsical—of what the affair was for
him gave Strether a glow of pleasure. “I say, you know, this
is about my shape, and if it hadn’t been for
you—!” so he broke out as the charming streets met his
healthy appetite; and he wound up, after an expressive nudge, with a clap of
his companion’s knee and an “Oh you, you—you are doing
it!” that was charged with rich meaning. Strether felt in it the
intention of homage, but, with a curiosity otherwise occupied, postponed taking
it up. What he was asking himself for the time was how Sarah Pocock, in the
opportunity already given her, had judged her brother—from whom he
himself, as they finally, at the station, separated for their different
conveyances, had had a look into which he could read more than one message.
However Sarah was judging her brother, Chad’s conclusion about his
sister, and about her husband and her husband’s sister, was at the least
on the way not to fail of confidence. Strether felt the confidence, and that,
as the look between them was an exchange, what he himself gave back was
relatively vague. This comparison of notes however could wait; everything
struck him as depending on the effect produced by Chad. Neither Sarah nor Mamie
had in any way, at the station—where they had had after all ample
time—broken out about it; which, to make up for this, was what our friend
had expected of Jim as soon as they should find themselves together.
It was queer to him that he had that noiseless brush with Chad; an ironic
intelligence with this youth on the subject of his relatives, an intelligence
carried on under their nose and, as might be said, at their expense—such
a matter marked again for him strongly the number of stages he had come; albeit
that if the number seemed great the time taken for the final one was but the
turn of a hand. He had before this had many moments of wondering if he himself
weren’t perhaps changed even as Chad was changed. Only what in Chad was
conspicuous improvement—well, he had no name ready for the working, in
his own organism, of his own more timid dose. He should have to see first what
this action would amount to. And for his occult passage with the young man,
after all, the directness of it had no greater oddity than the fact that the
young man’s way with the three travellers should have been so happy a
manifestation. Strether liked him for it, on the spot, as he hadn’t yet
liked him; it affected him while it lasted as he might have been affected by
some light pleasant perfect work of art: to that degree that he wondered if
they were really worthy of it, took it in and did it justice; to that degree
that it would have been scarce a miracle if, there in the luggage-room, while
they waited for their things, Sarah had pulled his sleeve and drawn him aside.
“You’re right; we haven’t quite known what you mean, Mother
and I, but now we see. Chad’s magnificent; what can one want more? If
this is the kind of thing—!” On which they might, as it
were, have embraced and begun to work together.
Ah how much, as it was, for all her bridling brightness—which was merely
general and noticed nothing—would they work together? Strether
knew he was unreasonable; he set it down to his being nervous: people
couldn’t notice everything and speak of everything in a quarter of an
hour. Possibly, no doubt, also, he made too much of Chad’s display. Yet,
none the less, when, at the end of five minutes, in the cab, Jim Pocock had
said nothing either—hadn’t said, that is, what Strether wanted,
though he had said much else—it all suddenly bounced back to their being
either stupid or wilful. It was more probably on the whole the former; so that
that would be the drawback of the bridling brightness. Yes, they would bridle
and be bright; they would make the best of what was before them, but their
observation would fail; it would be beyond them; they simply wouldn’t
understand. Of what use would it be then that they had come?—if they
weren’t to be intelligent up to that point: unless indeed he
himself were utterly deluded and extravagant? Was he, on this question of
Chad’s improvement, fantastic and away from the truth? Did he live in a
false world, a world that had grown simply to suit him, and was his present
slight irritation—in the face now of Jim’s silence in
particular—but the alarm of the vain thing menaced by the touch of the
real? Was this contribution of the real possibly the mission of the
Pococks?—had they come to make the work of observation, as he had
practised observation, crack and crumble, and to reduce Chad to the plain terms
in which honest minds could deal with him? Had they come in short to be sane
where Strether was destined to feel that he himself had only been silly?
He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long when once he
had reflected that he would have been silly, in this case, with Maria Gostrey
and little Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet and little Jeanne, with Lambert
Strether, in fine, and above all with Chad Newsome himself. Wouldn’t it
be found to have made more for reality to be silly with these persons than sane
with Sarah and Jim? Jim in fact, he presently made up his mind, was
individually out of it; Jim didn’t care; Jim hadn’t come out either
for Chad or for him; Jim in short left the moral side to Sally and indeed
simply availed himself now, for the sense of recreation, of the fact that he
left almost everything to Sally. He was nothing compared to Sally, and not so
much by reason of Sally’s temper and will as by that of her more
developed type and greater acquaintance with the world. He quite frankly and
serenely confessed, as he sat there with Strether, that he felt his type hang
far in the rear of his wife’s and still further, if possible, in the rear
of his sister’s. Their types, he well knew, were recognised and
acclaimed; whereas the most a leading Woollett business-man could hope to
achieve socially, and for that matter industrially, was a certain freedom to
play into this general glamour.
The impression he made on our friend was another of the things that marked our
friend’s road. It was a strange impression, especially as so soon
produced; Strether had received it, he judged, all in the twenty minutes; it
struck him at least as but in a minor degree the work of the long Woollett
years. Pocock was normally and consentingly though not quite wittingly out of
the question. It was despite his being normal; it was despite his being
cheerful; it was despite his being a leading Woollett business-man; and the
determination of his fate left him thus perfectly usual—as everything
else about it was clearly, to his sense, not less so. He seemed to say that
there was a whole side of life on which the perfectly usual was for
leading Woollett business-men to be out of the question. He made no more of it
than that, and Strether, so far as Jim was concerned, desired to make no more.
Only Strether’s imagination, as always, worked, and he asked himself if
this side of life were not somehow connected, for those who figured on it with
the fact of marriage. Would his relation to it, had he married ten years
before, have become now the same as Pocock’s? Might it even become the
same should he marry in a few months? Should he ever know himself as much out
of the question for Mrs. Newsome as Jim knew himself—in a dim
way—for Mrs. Jim?
To turn his eyes in that direction was to be personally reassured; he was
different from Pocock; he had affirmed himself differently and was held after
all in higher esteem. What none the less came home to him, however, at this
hour, was that the society over there, that of which Sarah and Mamie—and,
in a more eminent way, Mrs. Newsome herself—were specimens, was
essentially a society of women, and that poor Jim wasn’t in it. He
himself Lambert Strether, was as yet in some degree—which was an
odd situation for a man; but it kept coming back to him in a whimsical way that
he should perhaps find his marriage had cost him his place. This occasion
indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a time of sensible exclusion
for Jim, who was in a state of manifest response to the charm of his adventure.
Small and fat and constantly facetious, straw-coloured and destitute of marks,
he would have been practically indistinguishable hadn’t his constant
preference for light-grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very
little stories, done what it could for his identity. There were signs in him,
though none of them plaintive, of always paying for others; and the principal
one perhaps was just this failure of type. It was with this that he paid,
rather than with fatigue or waste; and also doubtless a little with the effort
of humour—never irrelevant to the conditions, to the relations, with
which he was acquainted.
He gurgled his joy as they rolled through the happy streets; he declared that
his trip was a regular windfall, and that he wasn’t there, he was eager
to remark, to hang back from anything: he didn’t know quite what Sally
had come for, but he had come for a good time. Strether indulged him
even while wondering if what Sally wanted her brother to go back for was to
become like her husband. He trusted that a good time was to be, out and out,
the programme for all of them; and he assented liberally to Jim’s
proposal that, disencumbered and irresponsible—his things were in the
omnibus with those of the others—they should take a further turn round
before going to the hotel. It wasn’t for him to tackle
Chad—it was Sally’s job; and as it would be like her, he felt, to
open fire on the spot, it wouldn’t be amiss of them to hold off and give
her time. Strether, on his side, only asked to give her time; so he jogged with
his companion along boulevards and avenues, trying to extract from meagre
material some forecast of his catastrophe. He was quick enough to see that Jim
Pocock declined judgement, had hovered quite round the outer edge of discussion
and anxiety, leaving all analysis of their question to the ladies alone and now
only feeling his way toward some small droll cynicism. It broke out afresh, the
cynicism—it had already shown a flicker—in a but slightly deferred:
“Well, hanged if I would if I were he!”
“You mean you wouldn’t in Chad’s place—?”
“Give up this to go back and boss the advertising!” Poor Jim, with
his arms folded and his little legs out in the open fiacre, drank in the
sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of their vista to the
other. “Why I want to come right out and live here myself. And I want to
live while I am here too. I feel with you—oh you’ve
been grand, old man, and I’ve twigged—that it ain’t right to
worry Chad. I don’t mean to persecute him; I couldn’t in
conscience. It’s thanks to you at any rate that I’m here, and
I’m sure I’m much obliged. You’re a lovely pair.”
There were things in this speech that Strether let pass for the time.
“Don’t you then think it important the advertising should be
thoroughly taken in hand? Chad will be, so far as capacity is
concerned,” he went on, “the man to do it.”
“Where did he get his capacity,” Jim asked, “over
here?”
“He didn’t get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that over
here he hasn’t inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for business, an
extraordinary head. He comes by that,” Strether explained,
“honestly enough. He’s in that respect his father’s son, and
also—for she’s wonderful in her way too—his mother’s.
He has other tastes and other tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife are
quite right about his having that. He’s very remarkable.”
“Well, I guess he is!” Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. “But if
you’ve believed so in his making us hum, why have you so prolonged the
discussion? Don’t you know we’ve been quite anxious about
you?”
These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether saw he must
none the less make a choice and take a line. “Because, you see,
I’ve greatly liked it. I’ve liked my Paris, I dare say I’ve
liked it too much.”
“Oh you old wretch!” Jim gaily exclaimed.
“But nothing’s concluded,” Strether went on. “The case
is more complex than it looks from Woollett.”
“Oh well, it looks bad enough from Woollett!” Jim declared.
“Even after all I’ve written?”
Jim bethought himself. “Isn’t it what you’ve written that has
made Mrs. Newsome pack us off? That at least and Chad’s not turning
up?”
Strether made a reflexion of his own. “I see. That she should do
something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore of course come
out to act.”
“Oh yes,” Jim concurred—“to act. But Sally comes out to
act, you know,” he lucidly added, “every time she leaves the house.
She never comes out but she does act. She’s acting moreover now
for her mother, and that fixes the scale.” Then he wound up, opening all
his senses to it, with a renewed embrace of pleasant Paris. “We
haven’t all the same at Woollett got anything like this.”
Strether continued to consider. “I’m bound to say for you all that
you strike me as having arrived in a very mild and reasonable frame of mind.
You don’t show your claws. I felt just now in Mrs. Pocock no symptom of
that. She isn’t fierce,” he went on. “I’m such a
nervous idiot that I thought she might be.”
“Oh don’t you know her well enough,” Pocock asked, “to
have noticed that she never gives herself away, any more than her mother ever
does? They ain’t fierce, either of ‘em; they let you come quite
close. They wear their fur the smooth side out—the warm side in. Do you
know what they are?” Jim pursued as he looked about him, giving the
question, as Strether felt, but half his care—“do you know what
they are? They’re about as intense as they can live.”
“Yes”—and Strether’s concurrence had a positive
precipitation; “they’re about as intense as they can live.”
“They don’t lash about and shake the cage,” said Jim, who
seemed pleased with his analogy; “and it’s at feeding-time that
they’re quietest. But they always get there.”
“They do indeed—they always get there!” Strether replied with
a laugh that justified his confession of nervousness. He disliked to be talking
sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he could have talked insincerely. But
there was something he wanted to know, a need created in him by her recent
intermission, by his having given from the first so much, as now more than ever
appeared to him, and got so little. It was as if a queer truth in his
companion’s metaphor had rolled over him with a rush. She had been
quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her, out of the big
bowl of all his recent free communication, his vividness and pleasantness, his
ingenuity and even his eloquence, while the current of her response had
steadily run thin. Jim meanwhile however, it was true, slipped
characteristically into shallowness from the moment he ceased to speak out of
the experience of a husband.
“But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before her. If
he doesn’t work that for all it’s worth—!” He sighed
with contingent pity at his brother-in-law’s possible want of resource.
“He has worked it on you, pretty well, eh?” and he asked the
next moment if there were anything new at the Varieties, which he pronounced in
the American manner. They talked about the Varieties—Strether confessing
to a knowledge which produced again on Pocock’s part a play of innuendo
as vague as a nursery-rhyme, yet as aggressive as an elbow in his side; and
they finished their drive under the protection of easy themes. Strether waited
to the end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim had seen Chad as
different; and he could scarce have explained the discouragement he drew from
the absence of this testimony. It was what he had taken his own stand on, so
far as he had taken a stand; and if they were all only going to see nothing he
had only wasted his time. He gave his friend till the very last moment, till
they had come into sight of the hotel; and when poor Pocock only continued
cheerful and envious and funny he fairly grew to dislike him, to feel him
extravagantly common. If they were all going to see
nothing!—Strether knew, as this came back to him, that he was also
letting Pocock represent for him what Mrs. Newsome wouldn’t see. He went
on disliking, in the light of Jim’s commonness, to talk to him about that
lady; yet just before the cab pulled up he knew the extent of his desire for
the real word from Woollett.
“Has Mrs. Newsome at all given way—?”
“‘Given way’?”—Jim echoed it with the practical
derision of his sense of a long past.
“Under the strain, I mean, of hope deferred, of disappointment repeated
and thereby intensified.”
“Oh is she prostrate, you mean?”—he had his categories in
hand. “Why yes, she’s prostrate—just as Sally is. But
they’re never so lively, you know, as when they’re
prostrate.”
“Ah Sarah’s prostrate?” Strether vaguely murmured.
“It’s when they’re prostrate that they most sit up.”
“And Mrs. Newsome’s sitting up?”
“All night, my boy—for you!” And Jim fetched him, with
a vulgar little guffaw, a thrust that gave relief to the picture. But he had
got what he wanted. He felt on the spot that this was the real word from
Woollett. “So don’t you go home!” Jim added while he alighted
and while his friend, letting him profusely pay the cabman, sat on in a
momentary muse. Strether wondered if that were the real word too.
