There they were yet again, accordingly, for two days more; when Strether, on
being, at Mrs. Pocock’s hotel, ushered into that lady’s salon,
found himself at first assuming a mistake on the part of the servant who had
introduced him and retired. The occupants hadn’t come in, for the room
looked empty as only a room can look in Paris, of a fine afternoon when the
faint murmur of the huge collective life, carried on out of doors, strays among
scattered objects even as a summer air idles in a lonely garden. Our friend
looked about and hesitated; observed, on the evidence of a table charged with
purchases and other matters, that Sarah had become possessed—by no aid
from him—of the last number of the salmon-coloured Revue; noted
further that Mamie appeared to have received a present of Fromentin’s
“Maîtres d’Autrefois” from Chad, who had written her name on
the cover; and pulled up at the sight of a heavy letter addressed in a hand he
knew. This letter, forwarded by a banker and arriving in Mrs. Pocock’s
absence, had been placed in evidence, and it drew from the fact of its being
unopened a sudden queer power to intensify the reach of its author. It brought
home to him the scale on which Mrs. Newsome—for she had been copious
indeed this time—was writing to her daughter while she kept him in
durance; and it had altogether such an effect upon him as made him for a few
minutes stand still and breathe low. In his own room, at his own hotel, he had
dozens of well-filled envelopes superscribed in that character; and there was
actually something in the renewal of his interrupted vision of the character
that played straight into the so frequent question of whether he weren’t
already disinherited beyond appeal. It was such an assurance as the sharp
downstrokes of her pen hadn’t yet had occasion to give him; but they
somehow at the present crisis stood for a probable absoluteness in any decree
of the writer. He looked at Sarah’s name and address, in short, as if he
had been looking hard into her mother’s face, and then turned from it as
if the face had declined to relax. But since it was in a manner as if Mrs.
Newsome were thereby all the more, instead of the less, in the room, and were
conscious, sharply and sorely conscious, of himself, so he felt both held and
hushed, summoned to stay at least and take his punishment. By staying,
accordingly, he took it—creeping softly and vaguely about and waiting for
Sarah to come in. She would come in if he stayed long enough, and he had
now more than ever the sense of her success in leaving him a prey to anxiety.
It wasn’t to be denied that she had had a happy instinct, from the point
of view of Woollett, in placing him thus at the mercy of her own initiative. It
was very well to try to say he didn’t care—that she might break
ground when she would, might never break it at all if she wouldn’t, and
that he had no confession whatever to wait upon her with: he breathed from day
to day an air that damnably required clearing, and there were moments when he
quite ached to precipitate that process. He couldn’t doubt that, should
she only oblige him by surprising him just as he then was, a clarifying scene
of some sort would result from the concussion.
He humbly circulated in this spirit till he suddenly had a fresh arrest. Both
the windows of the room stood open to the balcony, but it was only now that, in
the glass of the leaf of one of them, folded back, he caught a reflexion
quickly recognised as the colour of a lady’s dress. Somebody had been
then all the while on the balcony, and the person, whoever it might be, was so
placed between the windows as to be hidden from him; while on the other hand
the many sounds of the street had covered his own entrance and movements. If
the person were Sarah he might on the spot therefore be served to his taste. He
might lead her by a move or two up to the remedy for his vain tension; as to
which, should he get nothing else from it, he would at least have the relief of
pulling down the roof on their heads. There was fortunately no one at hand to
observe—in respect to his valour—that even on this completed
reasoning he still hung fire. He had been waiting for Mrs. Pocock and the sound
of the oracle; but he had to gird himself afresh—which he did in the
embrasure of the window, neither advancing nor retreating—before
provoking the revelation. It was apparently for Sarah to come more into view;
he was in that case there at her service. She did however, as meanwhile
happened, come more into view; only she luckily came at the last minute as a
contradiction of Sarah. The occupant of the balcony was after all quite another
person, a person presented, on a second look, by a charming back and a slight
shift of her position, as beautiful brilliant unconscious Mamie—Mamie
alone at home, Mamie passing her time in her own innocent way, Mamie in short
rather shabbily used, but Mamie absorbed interested and interesting. With her
arms on the balustrade and her attention dropped to the street she allowed
Strether to watch her, to consider several things, without her turning round.
But the oddity was that when he had so watched and considered he simply
stepped back into the room without following up his advantage. He revolved
there again for several minutes, quite as with something new to think of and as
if the bearings of the possibility of Sarah had been superseded. For frankly,
yes, it had bearings thus to find the girl in solitary possession. There
was something in it that touched him to a point not to have been reckoned
beforehand, something that softly but quite pressingly spoke to him, and that
spoke the more each time he paused again at the edge of the balcony and saw her
still unaware. Her companions were plainly scattered; Sarah would be off
somewhere with Waymarsh and Chad off somewhere with Jim. Strether didn’t
at all mentally impute to Chad that he was with his “good friend”;
he gave him the benefit of supposing him involved in appearances that, had he
had to describe them—for instance to Maria—he would have
conveniently qualified as more subtle. It came to him indeed the next thing
that there was perhaps almost an excess of refinement in having left Mamie in
such weather up there alone; however she might in fact have extemporised, under
the charm of the Rue de Rivoli, a little makeshift Paris of wonder and fancy.
Our friend in any case now recognised—and it was as if at the recognition
Mrs. Newsome’s fixed intensity had suddenly, with a deep audible gasp,
grown thin and vague—that day after day he had been conscious in respect
to his young lady of something odd and ambiguous, yet something into which he
could at last read a meaning. It had been at the most, this mystery, an
obsession—oh an obsession agreeable; and it had just now fallen into its
place as at the touch of a spring. It had represented the possibility between
them of some communication baffled by accident and delay—the possibility
even of some relation as yet unacknowledged.
There was always their old relation, the fruit of the Woollett years; but
that—and it was what was strangest—had nothing whatever in common
with what was now in the air. As a child, as a “bud,” and then
again as a flower of expansion, Mamie had bloomed for him, freely, in the
almost incessantly open doorways of home; where he remembered her as first very
forward, as then very backward—for he had carried on at one period, in
Mrs. Newsome’s parlours (oh Mrs. Newsome’s phases and his own!) a
course of English Literature re-enforced by exams and teas—and once more,
finally, as very much in advance. But he had kept no great sense of points of
contact; it not being in the nature of things at Woollett that the freshest of
the buds should find herself in the same basket with the most withered of the
winter apples. The child had given sharpness, above all, to his sense of the
flight of time; it was but the day before yesterday that he had tripped up on
her hoop, yet his experience of remarkable women—destined, it would seem,
remarkably to grow—felt itself ready this afternoon, quite braced itself,
to include her. She had in fine more to say to him than he had ever dreamed the
pretty girl of the moment could have; and the proof of the circumstance
was that, visibly, unmistakeably, she had been able to say it to no one else.
It was something she could mention neither to her brother, to her sister-in-law
nor to Chad; though he could just imagine that had she still been at home she
might have brought it out, as a supreme tribute to age, authority and attitude,
for Mrs. Newsome. It was moreover something in which they all took an interest;
the strength of their interest was in truth just the reason of her prudence.
All this then, for five minutes, was vivid to Strether, and it put before him
that, poor child, she had now but her prudence to amuse her. That, for a pretty
girl in Paris, struck him, with a rush, as a sorry state; so that under the
impression he went out to her with a step as hypocritically alert, he was well
aware, as if he had just come into the room. She turned with a start at his
voice; preoccupied with him though she might be, she was just a scrap
disappointed. “Oh I thought you were Mr. Bilham!”
The remark had been at first surprising and our friend’s private thought,
under the influence of it, temporarily blighted; yet we are able to add that he
presently recovered his inward tone and that many a fresh flower of fancy was
to bloom in the same air. Little Bilham—since little Bilham was, somewhat
incongruously, expected—appeared behindhand; a circumstance by which
Strether was to profit. They came back into the room together after a little,
the couple on the balcony, and amid its crimson-and-gold elegance, with the
others still absent, Strether passed forty minutes that he appraised even at
the time as far, in the whole queer connexion, from his idlest. Yes indeed,
since he had the other day so agreed with Maria about the inspiration of the
lurid, here was something for his problem that surely didn’t make it
shrink and that was floated in upon him as part of a sudden flood. He was
doubtless not to know till afterwards, on turning them over in thought, of how
many elements his impression was composed; but he none the less felt, as he sat
with the charming girl, the signal growth of a confidence. For she was
charming, when all was said—and none the less so for the visible habit
and practice of freedom and fluency. She was charming, he was aware, in spite
of the fact that if he hadn’t found her so he would have found her
something he should have been in peril of expressing as “funny.”
Yes, she was funny, wonderful Mamie, and without dreaming it; she was bland,
she was bridal—with never, that he could make out as yet, a bridegroom to
support it; she was handsome and portly and easy and chatty, soft and sweet and
almost disconcertingly reassuring. She was dressed, if we might so far
discriminate, less as a young lady than as an old one—had an old one been
supposable to Strether as so committed to vanity; the complexities of her hair
missed moreover also the looseness of youth; and she had a mature manner of
bending a little, as to encourage and reward, while she held neatly together in
front of her a pair of strikingly polished hands: the combination of all of
which kept up about her the glamour of her “receiving,” placed her
again perpetually between the windows and within sound of the ice-cream plates,
suggested the enumeration of all the names, all the Mr. Brookses and Mr.
Snookses, gregarious specimens of a single type, she was happy to
“meet.” But if all this was where she was funny, and if what was
funnier than the rest was the contrast between her beautiful benevolent
patronage—such a hint of the polysyllabic as might make her something of
a bore toward middle age—and her rather flat little voice, the voice,
naturally, unaffectedly yet, of a girl of fifteen; so Strether, none the less,
at the end of ten minutes, felt in her a quiet dignity that pulled things
bravely together. If quiet dignity, almost more than matronly, with voluminous,
too voluminous clothes, was the effect she proposed to produce, that was an
ideal one could like in her when once one had got into relation. The great
thing now for her visitor was that this was exactly what he had done; it made
so extraordinary a mixture of the brief and crowded hour. It was the mark of a
relation that he had begun so quickly to find himself sure she was, of all
people, as might have been said, on the side and of the party of Mrs.
Newsome’s original ambassador. She was in his interest and not in
Sarah’s, and some sign of that was precisely what he had been feeling in
her, these last days, as imminent. Finally placed, in Paris, in immediate
presence of the situation and of the hero of it—by whom Strether was
incapable of meaning any one but Chad—she had accomplished, and really in
a manner all unexpected to herself, a change of base; deep still things had
come to pass within her, and by the time she had grown sure of them Strether
had become aware of the little drama. When she knew where she was, in short, he
had made it out; and he made it out at present still better; though with never
a direct word passing between them all the while on the subject of his own
predicament. There had been at first, as he sat there with her, a moment during
which he wondered if she meant to break ground in respect to his prime
undertaking. That door stood so strangely ajar that he was half-prepared to be
conscious, at any juncture, of her having, of any one’s having, quite
bounced in. But, friendly, familiar, light of touch and happy of tact, she
exquisitely stayed out; so that it was for all the world as if to show she
could deal with him without being reduced to—well, scarcely anything.
It fully came up for them then, by means of their talking of everything
but Chad, that Mamie, unlike Sarah, unlike Jim, knew perfectly what had
become of him. It fully came up that she had taken to the last fraction of an
inch the measure of the change in him, and that she wanted Strether to know
what a secret she proposed to make of it. They talked most
conveniently—as if they had had no chance yet—about Woollett; and
that had virtually the effect of their keeping the secret more close. The hour
took on for Strether, little by little, a queer sad sweetness of quality, he
had such a revulsion in Mamie’s favour and on behalf of her social value
as might have come from remorse at some early injustice. She made him, as under
the breath of some vague western whiff, homesick and freshly restless; he could
really for the time have fancied himself stranded with her on a far shore,
during an ominous calm, in a quaint community of shipwreck. Their little
interview was like a picnic on a coral strand; they passed each other, with
melancholy smiles and looks sufficiently allusive, such cupfuls of water as
they had saved. Especially sharp in Strether meanwhile was the conviction that
his companion really knew, as we have hinted, where she had come out. It was at
a very particular place—only that she would never tell him; it
would be above all what he should have to puzzle for himself. This was what he
hoped for, because his interest in the girl wouldn’t be complete without
it. No more would the appreciation to which she was entitled—so assured
was he that the more he saw of her process the more he should see of her pride.
She saw, herself, everything; but she knew what she didn’t want, and that
it was that had helped her. What didn’t she want?—there was a
pleasure lost for her old friend in not yet knowing, as there would doubtless
be a thrill in getting a glimpse. Gently and sociably she kept that dark to
him, and it was as if she soothed and beguiled him in other ways to make up for
it. She came out with her impression of Madame de Vionnet—of whom she had
“heard so much”; she came out with her impression of Jeanne, whom
she had been “dying to see”: she brought it out with a blandness by
which her auditor was really stirred that she had been with Sarah early that
very afternoon, and after dreadful delays caused by all sorts of things,
mainly, eternally, by the purchase of clothes—clothes that unfortunately
wouldn’t be themselves eternal—to call in the Rue de Bellechasse.
At the sound of these names Strether almost blushed to feel that he
couldn’t have sounded them first—and yet couldn’t either have
justified his squeamishness. Mamie made them easy as he couldn’t have
begun to do, and yet it could only have cost her more than he should ever have
had to spend. It was as friends of Chad’s, friends special,
distinguished, desirable, enviable, that she spoke of them, and she beautifully
carried it off that much as she had heard of them—though she didn’t
say how or where, which was a touch of her own—she had found them beyond
her supposition. She abounded in praise of them, and after the manner of
Woollett—which made the manner of Woollett a loveable thing again to
Strether. He had never so felt the true inwardness of it as when his blooming
companion pronounced the elder of the ladies of the Rue de Bellechasse too
fascinating for words and declared of the younger that she was perfectly ideal,
a real little monster of charm. “Nothing,” she said of Jeanne,
“ought ever to happen to her—she’s so awfully right as she
is. Another touch will spoil her—so she oughtn’t to be
touched.”
“Ah but things, here in Paris,” Strether observed, “do happen
to little girls.” And then for the joke’s and the occasion’s
sake: “Haven’t you found that yourself?”
“That things happen—? Oh I’m not a little girl. I’m a
big battered blowsy one. I don’t care,” Mamie laughed,
“what happens.”
Strether had a pause while he wondered if it mightn’t happen that he
should give her the pleasure of learning that he found her nicer than he had
really dreamed—a pause that ended when he had said to himself that, so
far as it at all mattered for her, she had in fact perhaps already made this
out. He risked accordingly a different question—though conscious, as soon
as he had spoken, that he seemed to place it in relation to her last speech.
“But that Mademoiselle de Vionnet is to be married—I suppose
you’ve heard of that.”
For all, he then found, he need fear! “Dear, yes; the gentleman was
there: Monsieur de Montbron, whom Madame de Vionnet presented to us.”
“And was he nice?”
Mamie bloomed and bridled with her best reception manner. “Any
man’s nice when he’s in love.”
It made Strether laugh. “But is Monsieur de Montbron in
love—already—with you?”
“Oh that’s not necessary—it’s so much better he should
be so with her: which, thank goodness, I lost no time in discovering for
myself. He’s perfectly gone—and I couldn’t have borne it for
her if he hadn’t been. She’s just too sweet.”
Strether hesitated. “And through being in love too?”
On which with a smile that struck him as wonderful Mamie had a wonderful
answer. “She doesn’t know if she is or not.”
It made him again laugh out. “Oh but you do!”
She was willing to take it that way. “Oh yes, I know everything.”
And as she sat there rubbing her polished hands and making the best of
it—only holding her elbows perhaps a little too much out—the
momentary effect for Strether was that every one else, in all their affair,
seemed stupid.
“Know that poor little Jeanne doesn’t know what’s the matter
with her?”
It was as near as they came to saying that she was probably in love with Chad;
but it was quite near enough for what Strether wanted; which was to be
confirmed in his certitude that, whether in love or not, she appealed to
something large and easy in the girl before him. Mamie would be fat, too fat,
at thirty; but she would always be the person who, at the present sharp hour,
had been disinterestedly tender. “If I see a little more of her, as I
hope I shall, I think she’ll like me enough—for she seemed to like
me to-day—to want me to tell her.”
“And shall you?”
“Perfectly. I shall tell her the matter with her is that she wants only
too much to do right. To do right for her, naturally,” said Mamie,
“is to please.”
“Her mother, do you mean?”
“Her mother first.”
Strether waited. “And then?”
“Well, ‘then’—Mr. Newsome.”
There was something really grand for him in the serenity of this reference.
“And last only Monsieur de Montbron?”
“Last only”—she good-humouredly kept it up.
Strether considered. “So that every one after all then will be
suited?”
She had one of her few hesitations, but it was a question only of a moment; and
it was her nearest approach to being explicit with him about what was between
them. “I think I can speak for myself. I shall be.”
It said indeed so much, told such a story of her being ready to help him, so
committed to him that truth, in short, for such use as he might make of it
toward those ends of his own with which, patiently and trustfully, she had
nothing to do—it so fully achieved all this that he appeared to himself
simply to meet it in its own spirit by the last frankness of admiration.
Admiration was of itself almost accusatory, but nothing less would serve to
show her how nearly he understood. He put out his hand for good-bye with a
“Splendid, splendid, splendid!” And he left her, in her splendour,
still waiting for little Bilham.
