Strether occupied beside little Bilham, three evenings after his interview with
Mamie Pocock, the same deep divan they had enjoyed together on the first
occasion of our friend’s meeting Madame de Vionnet and her daughter in
the apartment of the Boulevard Malesherbes, where his position affirmed itself
again as ministering to an easy exchange of impressions. The present evening
had a different stamp; if the company was much more numerous, so, inevitably,
were the ideas set in motion. It was on the other hand, however, now strongly
marked that the talkers moved, in respect to such matters, round an inner, a
protected circle. They knew at any rate what really concerned them to-night,
and Strether had begun by keeping his companion close to it. Only a few of
Chad’s guests had dined—that is fifteen or twenty, a few compared
with the large concourse offered to sight by eleven o’clock; but number
and mass, quantity and quality, light, fragrance, sound, the overflow of
hospitality meeting the high tide of response, had all from the first pressed
upon Strether’s consciousness, and he felt himself somehow part and
parcel of the most festive scene, as the term was, in which he had ever in his
life been engaged. He had perhaps seen, on Fourths of July and on dear old
domestic Commencements, more people assembled, but he had never seen so many in
proportion to the space, or had at all events never known so great a
promiscuity to show so markedly as picked. Numerous as was the company, it had
still been made so by selection, and what was above all rare for Strether was
that, by no fault of his own, he was in the secret of the principle that had
worked. He hadn’t enquired, he had averted his head, but Chad had put him
a pair of questions that themselves smoothed the ground. He hadn’t
answered the questions, he had replied that they were the young man’s own
affair; and he had then seen perfectly that the latter’s direction was
already settled.
Chad had applied for counsel only by way of intimating that he knew what to do;
and he had clearly never known it better than in now presenting to his sister
the whole circle of his society. This was all in the sense and the spirit of
the note struck by him on that lady’s arrival; he had taken at the
station itself a line that led him without a break, and that enabled him to
lead the Pococks—though dazed a little, no doubt, breathless, no doubt,
and bewildered—to the uttermost end of the passage accepted by them
perforce as pleasant. He had made it for them violently pleasant and
mercilessly full; the upshot of which was, to Strether’s vision, that
they had come all the way without discovering it to be really no passage at
all. It was a brave blind alley, where to pass was impossible and where, unless
they stuck fast, they would have—which was always awkward—publicly
to back out. They were touching bottom assuredly tonight; the whole scene
represented the terminus of the cul-de-sac. So could things go when
there was a hand to keep them consistent—a hand that pulled the wire with
a skill at which the elder man more and more marvelled. The elder man felt
responsible, but he also felt successful, since what had taken place was simply
the issue of his own contention, six weeks before, that they properly should
wait to see what their friends would have really to say. He had determined Chad
to wait, he had determined him to see; he was therefore not to quarrel with the
time given up to the business. As much as ever, accordingly, now that a
fortnight had elapsed, the situation created for Sarah, and against which she
had raised no protest, was that of her having accommodated herself to her
adventure as to a pleasure-party surrendered perhaps even somewhat in excess to
bustle and to “pace.” If her brother had been at any point the
least bit open to criticism it might have been on the ground of his spicing the
draught too highly and pouring the cup too full. Frankly treating the whole
occasion of the presence of his relatives as an opportunity for amusement, he
left it, no doubt, but scant margin as an opportunity for anything else. He
suggested, invented, abounded—yet all the while with the loosest easiest
rein. Strether, during his own weeks, had gained a sense of knowing Paris; but
he saw it afresh, and with fresh emotion, in the form of the knowledge offered
to his colleague.
A thousand unuttered thoughts hummed for him in the air of these observations;
not the least frequent of which was that Sarah might well of a truth not quite
know whither she was drifting. She was in no position not to appear to expect
that Chad should treat her handsomely; yet she struck our friend as privately
stiffening a little each time she missed the chance of marking the great
nuance. The great nuance was in brief that of course her brother
must treat her handsomely—she should like to see him not; but that
treating her handsomely, none the less, wasn’t all in all—treating
her handsomely buttered no parsnips; and that in fine there were moments when
she felt the fixed eyes of their admirable absent mother fairly screw into the
flat of her back. Strether, watching, after his habit, and overscoring with
thought, positively had moments of his own in which he found himself sorry for
her—occasions on which she affected him as a person seated in a runaway
vehicle and turning over the question of a possible jump. Would she
jump, could she, would that be a safe place?—this question, at
such instants, sat for him in her lapse into pallor, her tight lips, her
conscious eyes. It came back to the main point at issue: would she be, after
all, to be squared? He believed on the whole she would jump; yet his
alternations on this subject were the more especial stuff of his suspense. One
thing remained well before him—a conviction that was in fact to gain
sharpness from the impressions of this evening: that if she should
gather in her skirts, close her eyes and quit the carriage while in motion, he
would promptly enough become aware. She would alight from her headlong course
more or less directly upon him; it would be appointed to him, unquestionably,
to receive her entire weight. Signs and portents of the experience thus in
reserve for him had as it happened, multiplied even through the dazzle of
Chad’s party. It was partly under the nervous consciousness of such a
prospect that, leaving almost every one in the two other rooms, leaving those
of the guests already known to him as well as a mass of brilliant strangers of
both sexes and of several varieties of speech, he had desired five quiet
minutes with little Bilham, whom he always found soothing and even a little
inspiring, and to whom he had actually moreover something distinct and
important to say.
He had felt of old—for it already seemed long ago—rather humiliated
at discovering he could learn in talk with a personage so much his junior the
lesson of a certain moral ease; but he had now got used to that—whether
or no the mixture of the fact with other humiliations had made it indistinct,
whether or no directly from little Bilham’s example, the example of his
being contentedly just the obscure and acute little Bilham he was. It worked so
for him, Strether seemed to see; and our friend had at private hours a wan
smile over the fact that he himself, after so many more years, was still in
search of something that would work. However, as we have said, it worked just
now for them equally to have found a corner a little apart. What particularly
kept it apart was the circumstance that the music in the salon was admirable,
with two or three such singers as it was a privilege to hear in private. Their
presence gave a distinction to Chad’s entertainment, and the interest of
calculating their effect on Sarah was actually so sharp as to be almost
painful. Unmistakeably, in her single person, the motive of the composition and
dressed in a splendour of crimson which affected Strether as the sound of a
fall through a skylight, she would now be in the forefront of the listening
circle and committed by it up to her eyes. Those eyes during the wonderful
dinner itself he hadn’t once met; having confessedly—perhaps a
little pusillanimously—arranged with Chad that he should be on the same
side of the table. But there was no use in having arrived now with little
Bilham at an unprecedented point of intimacy unless he could pitch everything
into the pot. “You who sat where you could see her, what does she make of
it all? By which I mean on what terms does she take it?”
“Oh she takes it, I judge, as proving that the claim of his family is
more than ever justified.”
“She isn’t then pleased with what he has to show?”
“On the contrary; she’s pleased with it as with his capacity to do
this kind of thing—more than she has been pleased with anything for a
long time. But she wants him to show it there. He has no right to waste
it on the likes of us.”
Strether wondered. “She wants him to move the whole thing over?”
“The whole thing—with an important exception. Everything he has
‘picked up’—and the way he knows how. She sees no difficulty
in that. She’d run the show herself, and she’ll make the handsome
concession that Woollett would be on the whole in some ways the better for it.
Not that it wouldn’t be also in some ways the better for Woollett. The
people there are just as good.”
“Just as good as you and these others? Ah that may be. But such an
occasion as this, whether or no,” Strether said, “isn’t the
people. It’s what has made the people possible.”
“Well then,” his friend replied, “there you are; I give you
my impression for what it’s worth. Mrs. Pocock has seen, and
that’s to-night how she sits there. If you were to have a glimpse of her
face you’d understand me. She has made up her mind—to the sound of
expensive music.”
Strether took it freely in. “Ah then I shall have news of her.”
“I don’t want to frighten you, but I think that likely.
However,” little Bilham continued, “if I’m of the least use
to you to hold on by—!”
“You’re not of the least!”—and Strether laid an
appreciative hand on him to say it. “No one’s of the least.”
With which, to mark how gaily he could take it, he patted his companion’s
knee. “I must meet my fate alone, and I shall—oh
you’ll see! And yet,” he pursued the next moment, “you
can help me too. You once said to me”—he followed this
further—“that you held Chad should marry. I didn’t see then
so well as I know now that you meant he should marry Miss Pocock. Do you still
consider that he should? Because if you do”—he kept it
up—“I want you immediately to change your mind. You can help me
that way.”
“Help you by thinking he should not marry?”
“Not marry at all events Mamie.”
“And who then?”
“Ah,” Strether returned, “that I’m not obliged to say.
But Madame de Vionnet—I suggest—when he can.’
“Oh!” said little Bilham with some sharpness.
“Oh precisely! But he needn’t marry at all—I’m at any
rate not obliged to provide for it. Whereas in your case I rather feel that I
am.”
Little Bilham was amused. “Obliged to provide for my marrying?”
“Yes—after all I’ve done to you!”
The young man weighed it. “Have you done as much as that?”
“Well,” said Strether, thus challenged, “of course I must
remember what you’ve also done to me. We may perhaps call it
square. But all the same,” he went on, “I wish awfully you’d
marry Mamie Pocock yourself.”
Little Bilham laughed out. “Why it was only the other night, in this very
place, that you were proposing to me a different union altogether.”
“Mademoiselle de Vionnet?” Well, Strether easily confessed it.
“That, I admit, was a vain image. This is practical politics. I
want to do something good for both of you—I wish you each so well; and
you can see in a moment the trouble it will save me to polish you off by the
same stroke. She likes you, you know. You console her. And she’s
splendid.”
Little Bilham stared as a delicate appetite stares at an overheaped plate.
“What do I console her for?”
It just made his friend impatient. “Oh come, you know!”
“And what proves for you that she likes me?”
“Why the fact that I found her three days ago stopping at home alone all
the golden afternoon on the mere chance that you’d come to her, and
hanging over her balcony on that of seeing your cab drive up. I don’t
know what you want more.”
Little Bilham after a moment found it. “Only just to know what proves to
you that I like her.”
“Oh if what I’ve just mentioned isn’t enough to make you do
it, you’re a stony-hearted little fiend. Besides”—Strether
encouraged his fancy’s flight—“you showed your inclination in
the way you kept her waiting, kept her on purpose to see if she cared enough
for you.”
His companion paid his ingenuity the deference of a pause. “I
didn’t keep her waiting. I came at the hour. I wouldn’t have kept
her waiting for the world,” the young man honourably declared.
“Better still—then there you are!” And Strether, charmed,
held him the faster. “Even if you didn’t do her justice,
moreover,” he continued, “I should insist on your immediately
coming round to it. I want awfully to have worked it. I want”—and
our friend spoke now with a yearning that was really earnest—“at
least to have done that.”
“To have married me off—without a penny?”
“Well, I shan’t live long; and I give you my word, now and here,
that I’ll leave you every penny of my own. I haven’t many,
unfortunately, but you shall have them all. And Miss Pocock, I think, has a
few. I want,” Strether went on, “to have been at least to that
extent constructive even expiatory. I’ve been sacrificing so to strange
gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my
fidelity—fundamentally unchanged after all—to our own. I feel as if
my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars—of another
faith altogether. There it is—it’s done.” And then he further
explained. “It took hold of me because the idea of getting her quite out
of the way for Chad helps to clear my ground.”
The young man, at this, bounced about, and it brought them face to face in
admitted amusement. “You want me to marry as a convenience to
Chad?”
“No,” Strether debated—“he doesn’t care
whether you marry or not. It’s as a convenience simply to my own plan
for him.”
“‘Simply’!”—and little Bilham’s concurrence
was in itself a lively comment. “Thank you. But I thought,” he
continued, “you had exactly no plan ‘for’ him.”
“Well then call it my plan for myself—which may be well, as you
say, to have none. His situation, don’t you see? is reduced now to the
bare facts one has to recognise. Mamie doesn’t want him, and he
doesn’t want Mamie: so much as that these days have made clear.
It’s a thread we can wind up and tuck in.”
But little Bilham still questioned. “You can—since you seem
so much to want to. But why should I?”
Poor Strether thought it over, but was obliged of course to admit that his
demonstration did superficially fail. “Seriously, there is no
reason. It’s my affair—I must do it alone. I’ve only my
fantastic need of making my dose stiff.”
Little Bilham wondered. “What do you call your dose?”
“Why what I have to swallow. I want my conditions unmitigated.”
He had spoken in the tone of talk for talk’s sake, and yet with an
obscure truth lurking in the loose folds; a circumstance presently not without
its effect on his young friend. Little Bilham’s eyes rested on him a
moment with some intensity; then suddenly, as if everything had cleared up, he
gave a happy laugh. It seemed to say that if pretending, or even trying, or
still even hoping, to be able to care for Mamie would be of use, he was all
there for the job. “I’ll do anything in the world for you!”
“Well,” Strether smiled, “anything in the world is all I
want. I don’t know anything that pleased me in her more,” he went
on, “than the way that, on my finding her up there all alone, coming on
her unawares and feeling greatly for her being so out of it, she knocked down
my tall house of cards with her instant and cheerful allusion to the next young
man. It was somehow so the note I needed—her staying at home to receive
him.”
“It was Chad of course,” said little Bilham, “who asked the
next young man—I like your name for me!—to call.”
“So I supposed—all of which, thank God, is in our innocent and
natural manners. But do you know,” Strether asked, “if Chad
knows—?” And then as this interlocutor seemed at a loss: “Why
where she has come out.”
Little Bilham, at this, met his face with a conscious look—it was as if,
more than anything yet, the allusion had penetrated. “Do you know
yourself?”
Strether lightly shook his head. “There I stop. Oh, odd as it may appear
to you, there are things I don’t know. I only got the sense from
her of something very sharp, and yet very deep down, that she was keeping all
to herself. That is I had begun with the belief that she had kept it to
herself; but face to face with her there I soon made out that there was a
person with whom she would have shared it. I had thought she possibly might
with me—but I saw then that I was only half in her confidence.
When, turning to me to greet me—for she was on the balcony and I had come
in without her knowing it—she showed me she had been expecting you
and was proportionately disappointed, I got hold of the tail of my conviction.
Half an hour later I was in possession of all the rest of it. You know what has
happened.” He looked at his young friend hard—then he felt sure.
“For all you say, you’re up to your eyes. So there you are.”
Little Bilham after an instant pulled half round. “I assure you she
hasn’t told me anything.”
“Of course she hasn’t. For what do you suggest that I suppose her
to take you? But you’ve been with her every day, you’ve seen her
freely, you’ve liked her greatly—I stick to that—and
you’ve made your profit of it. You know what she has been through as well
as you know that she has dined here to-night—which must have put her, by
the way, through a good deal more.”
The young man faced this blast; after which he pulled round the rest of the
way. “I haven’t in the least said she hasn’t been nice to me.
But she’s proud.”
“And quite properly. But not too proud for that.”
“It’s just her pride that has made her. Chad,” little Bilham
loyally went on, “has really been as kind to her as possible. It’s
awkward for a man when a girl’s in love with him.”
“Ah but she isn’t—now.”
Little Bilham sat staring before him; then he sprang up as if his
friend’s penetration, recurrent and insistent, made him really after all
too nervous. “No—she isn’t now. It isn’t in the
least,” he went on, “Chad’s fault. He’s really all
right. I mean he would have been willing. But she came over with ideas. Those
she had got at home. They had been her motive and support in joining her
brother and his wife. She was to save our friend.”
“Ah like me, poor thing?” Strether also got to his feet.
“Exactly—she had a bad moment. It was very soon distinct to her, to
pull her up, to let her down, that, alas, he was, he is, saved.
There’s nothing left for her to do.”
“Not even to love him?”
“She would have loved him better as she originally believed him.”
Strether wondered. “Of course one asks one’s self what notion a
little girl forms, where a young man’s in question, of such a history and
such a state.”
“Well, this little girl saw them, no doubt, as obscure, but she saw them
practically as wrong. The wrong for her was the obscure. Chad turns out
at any rate right and good and disconcerting, while what she was all prepared
for, primed and girded and wound up for, was to deal with him as the general
opposite.”
“Yet wasn’t her whole point”—Strether weighed
it—“that he was to be, that he could be, made better,
redeemed?”
Little Bilham fixed it all a moment, and then with a small headshake that
diffused a tenderness: “She’s too late. Too late for the
miracle.”
“Yes”—his companion saw enough. “Still, if the worst
fault of his condition is that it may be all there for her to profit
by—?”
“Oh she doesn’t want to ‘profit,’ in that flat way. She
doesn’t want to profit by another woman’s work—she wants the
miracle to have been her own miracle. That’s what she’s too
late for.”
Strether quite felt how it all fitted, yet there seemed one loose piece.
“I’m bound to say, you know, that she strikes one, on these lines,
as fastidious—what you call here difficile.”
Little Bilham tossed up his chin. “Of course she’s
difficile—on any lines! What else in the world are our
Mamies—the real, the right ones?”
“I see, I see,” our friend repeated, charmed by the responsive
wisdom he had ended by so richly extracting. “Mamie is one of the real
and the right.”
“The very thing itself.”
“And what it comes to then,” Strether went on, “is that poor
awful Chad is simply too good for her.”
“Ah too good was what he was after all to be; but it was she herself, and
she herself only, who was to have made him so.”
It hung beautifully together, but with still a loose end. “Wouldn’t
he do for her even if he should after all break—”
“With his actual influence?” Oh little Bilham had for this enquiry
the sharpest of all his controls. “How can he ‘do’—on
any terms whatever—when he’s flagrantly spoiled?”
Strether could only meet the question with his passive, his receptive pleasure.
“Well, thank goodness, you’re not! You remain for her
to save, and I come back, on so beautiful and full a demonstration, to my
contention of just now—that of your showing distinct signs of her having
already begun.”
The most he could further say to himself—as his young friend turned
away—was that the charge encountered for the moment no renewed denial.
Little Bilham, taking his course back to the music, only shook his good-natured
ears an instant, in the manner of a terrier who has got wet; while Strether
relapsed into the sense—which had for him in these days most of
comfort—that he was free to believe in anything that from hour to hour
kept him going. He had positively motions and flutters of this conscious
hour-to-hour kind, temporary surrenders to irony, to fancy, frequent
instinctive snatches at the growing rose of observation, constantly stronger
for him, as he felt, in scent and colour, and in which he could bury his nose
even to wantonness. This last resource was offered him, for that matter, in the
very form of his next clear perception—the vision of a prompt meeting, in
the doorway of the room, between little Bilham and brilliant Miss Barrace, who
was entering as Bilham withdrew. She had apparently put him a question, to
which he had replied by turning to indicate his late interlocutor; toward whom,
after an interrogation further aided by a resort to that optical machinery
which seemed, like her other ornaments, curious and archaic, the genial lady,
suggesting more than ever for her fellow guest the old French print, the
historic portrait, directed herself with an intention that Strether instantly
met. He knew in advance the first note she would sound, and took in as she
approached all her need of sounding it. Nothing yet had been so
“wonderful” between them as the present occasion; and it was her
special sense of this quality in occasions that she was there, as she was in
most places, to feed. That sense had already been so well fed by the situation
about them that she had quitted the other room, forsaken the music, dropped out
of the play, abandoned, in a word, the stage itself, that she might stand a
minute behind the scenes with Strether and so perhaps figure as one of the
famous augurs replying, behind the oracle, to the wink of the other. Seated
near him presently where little Bilham had sat, she replied in truth to many
things; beginning as soon as he had said to her—what he hoped he said
without fatuity—“All you ladies are extraordinarily kind to
me.”
She played her long handle, which shifted her observation; she saw in an
instant all the absences that left them free. “How can we be anything
else? But isn’t that exactly your plight? ‘We
ladies’—oh we’re nice, and you must be having enough of us!
As one of us, you know, I don’t pretend I’m crazy about us. But
Miss Gostrey at least to-night has left you alone, hasn’t she?”
With which she again looked about as if Maria might still lurk.
“Oh yes,” said Strether; “she’s only sitting up for me
at home.” And then as this elicited from his companion her gay “Oh,
oh, oh!” he explained that he meant sitting up in suspense and prayer.
“We thought it on the whole better she shouldn’t be present; and
either way of course it’s a terrible worry for her.” He abounded in
the sense of his appeal to the ladies, and they might take their choice of his
doing so from humility or from pride. “Yet she inclines to believe I
shall come out.”
“Oh I incline to believe too you’ll come out!”—Miss
Barrace, with her laugh, was not to be behind. “Only the question’s
about where, isn’t it? However,” she happily continued,
“if it’s anywhere at all it must be very far on, mustn’t it?
To do us justice, I think, you know,” she laughed, “we do, among us
all, want you rather far on. Yes, yes,” she repeated in her quick droll
way; “we want you very, very far on!” After which she wished
to know why he had thought it better Maria shouldn’t be present.
“Oh,” he replied, “it was really her own idea. I should have
wished it. But she dreads responsibility.”
“And isn’t that a new thing for her?”
“To dread it? No doubt—no doubt. But her nerve has given
way.”
Miss Barrace looked at him a moment. “She has too much at stake.”
Then less gravely: “Mine, luckily for me, holds out.”
“Luckily for me too”—Strether came back to that. “My
own isn’t so firm, my appetite for responsibility isn’t so
sharp, as that I haven’t felt the very principle of this occasion to be
‘the more the merrier.’ If we are so merry it’s
because Chad has understood so well.”
“He has understood amazingly,” said Miss Barrace.
“It’s wonderful—Strether anticipated for her.
“It’s wonderful!” she, to meet it, intensified; so that, face
to face over it, they largely and recklessly laughed. But she presently added:
“Oh I see the principle. If one didn’t one would be lost. But when
once one has got hold of it—”
“It’s as simple as twice two! From the moment he had to do
something—”
“A crowd”—she took him straight up—“was the only
thing? Rather, rather: a rumpus of sound,” she laughed, “or
nothing. Mrs. Pocock’s built in, or built out—whichever you call
it; she’s packed so tight she can’t move. She’s in splendid
isolation”—Miss Barrace embroidered the theme.
Strether followed, but scrupulous of justice. “Yet with every one in the
place successively introduced to her.”
“Wonderfully—but just so that it does build her out. She’s
bricked up, she’s buried alive!”
Strether seemed for a moment to look at it; but it brought him to a sigh.
“Oh but she’s not dead! It will take more than this to kill
her.”
His companion had a pause that might have been for pity. “No, I
can’t pretend I think she’s finished—or that it’s for
more than to-night.” She remained pensive as if with the same
compunction. “It’s only up to her chin.” Then again for the
fun of it: “She can breathe.”
“She can breathe!”—he echoed it in the same spirit.
“And do you know,” he went on, “what’s really all this
time happening to me?—through the beauty of music, the gaiety of voices,
the uproar in short of our revel and the felicity of your wit? The sound of
Mrs. Pocock’s respiration drowns for me, I assure you, every other.
It’s literally all I hear.”
She focussed him with her clink of chains. “Well—!” she
breathed ever so kindly.
“Well, what?”
“She is free from her chin up,” she mused; “and that
will be enough for her.”
“It will be enough for me!” Strether ruefully laughed.
“Waymarsh has really,” he then asked, “brought her to see
you?”
“Yes—but that’s the worst of it. I could do you no good. And
yet I tried hard.”
Strether wondered. “And how did you try?”
“Why I didn’t speak of you.”
“I see. That was better.”
“Then what would have been worse? For speaking or silent,” she
lightly wailed, “I somehow ‘compromise.’ And it has never
been any one but you.”
“That shows”—he was magnanimous—“that it’s
something not in you, but in one’s self. It’s my
fault.”
She was silent a little. “No, it’s Mr. Waymarsh’s. It’s
the fault of his having brought her.”
“Ah then,” said Strether good-naturedly, “why did he
bring her?”
“He couldn’t afford not to.”
“Oh you were a trophy—one of the spoils of conquest? But why in
that case, since you do ‘compromise’—”
“Don’t I compromise him as well? I do compromise him as
well,” Miss Barrace smiled. “I compromise him as hard as I can. But
for Mr. Waymarsh it isn’t fatal. It’s—so far as his wonderful
relation with Mrs. Pocock is concerned—favourable.” And then, as he
still seemed slightly at sea: “The man who had succeeded with me,
don’t you see? For her to get him from me was such an added
incentive.”
Strether saw, but as if his path was still strewn with surprises.
“It’s ‘from’ you then that she has got him?”
She was amused at his momentary muddle. “You can fancy my fight! She
believes in her triumph. I think it has been part of her joy.
“Oh her joy!” Strether sceptically murmured.
“Well, she thinks she has had her own way. And what’s to-night for
her but a kind of apotheosis? Her frock’s really good.”
“Good enough to go to heaven in? For after a real apotheosis,”
Strether went on, “there’s nothing but heaven. For Sarah
there’s only to-morrow.”
“And you mean that she won’t find to-morrow heavenly?”
“Well, I mean that I somehow feel to-night—on her behalf—too
good to be true. She has had her cake; that is she’s in the act now of
having it, of swallowing the largest and sweetest piece. There won’t be
another left for her. Certainly I haven’t one. It can only, at the
best, be Chad.” He continued to make it out as for their common
entertainment. “He may have one, as it were, up his sleeve; yet
it’s borne in upon me that if he had—”
“He wouldn’t”—she quite understood—“have
taken all this trouble? I dare say not, and, if I may be quite free and
dreadful, I very much hope he won’t take any more. Of course I
won’t pretend now,” she added, “not to know what it’s a
question of.”
“Oh every one must know now,” poor Strether thoughtfully admitted;
“and it’s strange enough and funny enough that one should feel
everybody here at this very moment to be knowing and watching and
waiting.”
“Yes—isn’t it indeed funny?” Miss Barrace quite rose to
it. “That’s the way we are in Paris.” She was always
pleased with a new contribution to that queerness. “It’s wonderful!
But, you know,” she declared, “it all depends on you. I don’t
want to turn the knife in your vitals, but that’s naturally what you just
now meant by our all being on top of you. We know you as the hero of the drama,
and we’re gathered to see what you’ll do.”
Strether looked at her a moment with a light perhaps slightly obscured.
“I think that must be why the hero has taken refuge in this corner.
He’s scared at his heroism—he shrinks from his part.”
“Ah but we nevertheless believe he’ll play it. That’s
why,” Miss Barrace kindly went on, “we take such an interest in
you. We feel you’ll come up to the scratch.” And then as he seemed
perhaps not quite to take fire: “Don’t let him do it.”
“Don’t let Chad go?”
“Yes, keep hold of him. With all this”—and she indicated the
general tribute—“he has done enough. We love him
here—he’s charming.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Strether, “the way you all can
simplify when you will.”
But she gave it to him back. “It’s nothing to the way you
will when you must.”
He winced at it as at the very voice of prophecy, and it kept him a moment
quiet. He detained her, however, on her appearing about to leave him alone in
the rather cold clearance their talk had made. “There positively
isn’t a sign of a hero to-night; the hero’s dodging and shirking,
the hero’s ashamed. Therefore, you know, I think, what you must all
really be occupied with is the heroine.”
Miss Barrace took a minute. “The heroine?”
“The heroine. I’ve treated her,” said Strether, “not a
bit like a hero. Oh,” he sighed, “I don’t do it well!”
She eased him off. “You do it as you can.” And then after another
hesitation: “I think she’s satisfied.”
But he remained compunctious. “I haven’t been near her. I
haven’t looked at her.”
“Ah then you’ve lost a good deal!”
He showed he knew it. “She’s more wonderful than ever?”
“Than ever. With Mr. Pocock.”
Strether wondered. “Madame de Vionnet—with Jim?”
“Madame de Vionnet—with ‘Jim.’” Miss Barrace was
historic.
“And what’s she doing with him?”
“Ah you must ask him!”
Strether’s face lighted again at the prospect. “It will be
amusing to do so.” Yet he continued to wonder. “But she must have
some idea.”
“Of course she has—she has twenty ideas. She has in the first
place,” said Miss Barrace, swinging a little her tortoise-shell,
“that of doing her part. Her part is to help you.”
It came out as nothing had come yet; links were missing and connexions unnamed,
but it was suddenly as if they were at the heart of their subject. “Yes;
how much more she does it,” Strether gravely reflected, “than I
help her!” It all came over him as with the near presence of the
beauty, the grace, the intense, dissimulated spirit with which he had, as he
said, been putting off contact. “She has courage.”
“Ah she has courage!” Miss Barrace quite agreed; and it was as if
for a moment they saw the quantity in each other’s face.
But indeed the whole thing was present. “How much she must care!”
“Ah there it is. She does care. But it isn’t, is it,” Miss
Barrace considerately added, “as if you had ever had any doubt of
that?”
Strether seemed suddenly to like to feel that he really never had. “Why
of course it’s the whole point.”
“Voilà!” Miss Barrace smiled.
“It’s why one came out,” Strether went on. “And
it’s why one has stayed so long. And it’s also”—he
abounded—“why one’s going home. It’s why, it’s
why—”
“It’s why everything!” she concurred. “It’s why
she might be to-night—for all she looks and shows, and for all your
friend ‘Jim’ does—about twenty years old. That’s
another of her ideas; to be for him, and to be quite easily and charmingly, as
young as a little girl.”
Strether assisted at his distance. “‘For him’? For
Chad—?”
“For Chad, in a manner, naturally, always. But in particular to-night for
Mr. Pocock.” And then as her friend still stared: “Yes, it
is of a bravery! But that’s what she has: her high sense of
duty.” It was more than sufficiently before them. “When Mr. Newsome
has his hands so embarrassed with his sister—”
“It’s quite the least”—Strether filled it
out—“that she should take his sister’s husband?
Certainly—quite the least. So she has taken him.”
“She has taken him.” It was all Miss Barrace had meant.
Still it remained enough. “It must be funny.”
“Oh it is funny.” That of course essentially went with it.
But it brought them back. “How indeed then she must care!” In
answer to which Strether’s entertainer dropped a comprehensive
“Ah!” expressive perhaps of some impatience for the time he took to
get used to it. She herself had got used to it long before.
