Almost the first thing, strangely enough, that, about an hour later, Strether
found himself doing in Sarah’s presence was to remark articulately on
this failure, in their friend, of what had been superficially his great
distinction. It was as if—he alluded of course to the grand
manner—the dear man had sacrificed it to some other advantage; which
would be of course only for himself to measure. It might be simply that he was
physically so much more sound than on his first coming out; this was all
prosaic, comparatively cheerful and vulgar. And fortunately, if one came to
that, his improvement in health was really itself grander than any manner it
could be conceived as having cost him. “You yourself alone, dear
Sarah”—Strether took the plunge—“have done him, it
strikes me, in these three weeks, as much good as all the rest of his time
together.”
It was a plunge because somehow the range of reference was, in the conditions,
“funny,” and made funnier still by Sarah’s attitude, by the
turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so sensibly taken. Her appearance
was really indeed funnier than anything else—the spirit in which he felt
her to be there as soon as she was there, the shade of obscurity that cleared
up for him as soon as he was seated with her in the small salon de
lecture that had, for the most part, in all the weeks, witnessed the wane
of his early vivacity of discussion with Waymarsh. It was an immense thing,
quite a tremendous thing, for her to have come: this truth opened out to him in
spite of his having already arrived for himself at a fairly vivid view of it.
He had done exactly what he had given Waymarsh his word for—had walked
and re-walked the court while he awaited her advent; acquiring in this exercise
an amount of light that affected him at the time as flooding the scene. She had
decided upon the step in order to give him the benefit of a doubt, in order to
be able to say to her mother that she had, even to abjectness, smoothed the way
for him. The doubt had been as to whether he mightn’t take her as not
having smoothed it—and the admonition had possibly come from
Waymarsh’s more detached spirit. Waymarsh had at any rate, certainly,
thrown his weight into the scale—he had pointed to the importance of
depriving their friend of a grievance. She had done justice to the plea, and it
was to set herself right with a high ideal that she actually sat there in her
state. Her calculation was sharp in the immobility with which she held her tall
parasol-stick upright and at arm’s length, quite as if she had struck the
place to plant her flag; in the separate precautions she took not to show as
nervous; in the aggressive repose in which she did quite nothing but wait for
him. Doubt ceased to be possible from the moment he had taken in that she had
arrived with no proposal whatever; that her concern was simply to show what she
had come to receive. She had come to receive his submission, and Waymarsh was
to have made it plain to him that she would expect nothing less. He saw fifty
things, her host, at this convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was
that their anxious friend hadn’t quite had the hand required of him.
Waymarsh had, however, uttered the request that she might find him mild,
and while hanging about the court before her arrival he had turned over with
zeal the different ways in which he could be so. The difficulty was that if he
was mild he wasn’t, for her purpose, conscious. If she wished him
conscious—as everything about her cried aloud that she did—she must
accordingly be at costs to make him so. Conscious he was, for
himself—but only of too many things; so she must choose the one she
required.
Practically, however, it at last got itself named, and when once that had
happened they were quite at the centre of their situation. One thing had really
done as well as another; when Strether had spoken of Waymarsh’s leaving
him, and that had necessarily brought on a reference to Mrs. Pocock’s
similar intention, the jump was but short to supreme lucidity. Light became
indeed after that so intense that Strether would doubtless have but half made
out, in the prodigious glare, by which of the two the issue had been in fact
precipitated. It was, in their contracted quarters, as much there between them
as if it had been something suddenly spilled with a crash and a splash on the
floor. The form of his submission was to be an engagement to acquit himself
within the twenty-four hours. “He’ll go in a moment if you give him
the word—he assures me on his honour he’ll do that”: this
came in its order, out of its order, in respect to Chad, after the crash had
occurred. It came repeatedly during the time taken by Strether to feel that he
was even more fixed in his rigour than he had supposed—the time he was
not above adding to a little by telling her that such a way of putting it on
her brother’s part left him sufficiently surprised. She wasn’t at
all funny at last—she was really fine; and he felt easily where she was
strong—strong for herself. It hadn’t yet so come home to him that
she was nobly and appointedly officious. She was acting in interests grander
and clearer than that of her poor little personal, poor little Parisian
equilibrium, and all his consciousness of her mother’s moral pressure
profited by this proof of its sustaining force. She would be held up; she would
be strengthened; he needn’t in the least be anxious for her. What would
once more have been distinct to him had he tried to make it so was that, as
Mrs. Newsome was essentially all moral pressure, the presence of this element
was almost identical with her own presence. It wasn’t perhaps that he
felt he was dealing with her straight, but it was certainly as if she had been
dealing straight with him. She was reaching him somehow by the
lengthened arm of the spirit, and he was having to that extent to take her into
account; but he wasn’t reaching her in turn, not making her take
him; he was only reaching Sarah, who appeared to take so little of him.
“Something has clearly passed between you and Chad,” he presently
said, “that I think I ought to know something more about. Does he put it
all,” he smiled, “on me?”
“Did you come out,” she asked, “to put it all on
him?”
But he replied to this no further than, after an instant, by saying: “Oh
it’s all right. Chad I mean’s all right in having said to
you—well anything he may have said. I’ll take it
all—what he does put on me. Only I must see him before I see you
again.”
She hesitated, but she brought it out. “Is it absolutely necessary you
should see me again?”
“Certainly, if I’m to give you any definite word about
anything.”
“Is it your idea then,” she returned, “that I shall keep on
meeting you only to be exposed to fresh humiliation?”
He fixed her a longer time. “Are your instructions from Mrs. Newsome that
you shall, even at the worst, absolutely and irretrievably break with
me?”
“My instructions from Mrs. Newsome are, if you please, my affair. You
know perfectly what your own were, and you can judge for yourself of what it
can do for you to have made what you have of them. You can perfectly see, at
any rate, I’ll go so far as to say, that if I wish not to expose myself I
must wish still less to expose her.” She had already said more
than she had quite expected; but, though she had also pulled up, the colour in
her face showed him he should from one moment to the other have it all. He now
indeed felt the high importance of his having it. “What is your
conduct,” she broke out as if to explain—“what is your
conduct but an outrage to women like us? I mean your acting as if there
can be a doubt—as between us and such another—of his duty?”
He thought a moment. It was rather much to deal with at once; not only the
question itself, but the sore abysses it revealed. “Of course
they’re totally different kinds of duty.”
“And do you pretend that he has any at all—to such another?”
“Do you mean to Madame de Vionnet?” He uttered the name not to
affront her, but yet again to gain time—time that he needed for taking in
something still other and larger than her demand of a moment before. It
wasn’t at once that he could see all that was in her actual challenge;
but when he did he found himself just checking a low vague sound, a sound which
was perhaps the nearest approach his vocal chords had ever known to a growl.
Everything Mrs. Pocock had failed to give a sign of recognising in Chad as a
particular part of a transformation—everything that had lent intention to
this particular failure—affected him as gathered into a large loose
bundle and thrown, in her words, into his face. The missile made him to that
extent catch his breath; which however he presently recovered. “Why when
a woman’s at once so charming and so beneficent—”
“You can sacrifice mothers and sisters to her without a blush and can
make them cross the ocean on purpose to feel the more and take from you the
straighter, how you do it?”
Yes, she had taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but he tried not to
flounder in her grasp. “I don’t think there’s anything
I’ve done in any such calculated way as you describe. Everything has come
as a sort of indistinguishable part of everything else. Your coming out
belonged closely to my having come before you, and my having come was a result
of our general state of mind. Our general state of mind had proceeded, on its
side, from our queer ignorance, our queer misconceptions and
confusions—from which, since then, an inexorable tide of light seems to
have floated us into our perhaps still queerer knowledge. Don’t you
like your brother as he is,” he went on, “and haven’t
you given your mother an intelligible account of all that that comes to?”
It put to her also, doubtless, his own tone, too many things, this at least
would have been the case hadn’t his final challenge directly helped her.
Everything, at the stage they had reached, directly helped her, because
everything betrayed in him such a basis of intention. He saw—the odd way
things came out!—that he would have been held less monstrous had he only
been a little wilder. What exposed him was just his poor old trick of quiet
inwardness, what exposed him was his thinking such offence. He
hadn’t in the least however the desire to irritate that Sarah imputed to
him, and he could only at last temporise, for the moment, with her indignant
view. She was altogether more inflamed than he had expected, and he would
probably understand this better when he should learn what had occurred for her
with Chad. Till then her view of his particular blackness, her clear surprise
at his not clutching the pole she held out, must pass as extravagant. “I
leave you to flatter yourself,” she returned, “that what you speak
of is what you’ve beautifully done. When a thing has been already
described in such a lovely way—!” But she caught herself up, and
her comment on his description rang out sufficiently loud. “Do you
consider her even an apology for a decent woman?”
Ah there it was at last! She put the matter more crudely than, for his own
mixed purposes, he had yet had to do; but essentially it was all one matter. It
was so much—so much; and she treated it, poor lady, as so little. He grew
conscious, as he was now apt to do, of a strange smile, and the next moment he
found himself talking like Miss Barrace. “She has struck me from the
first as wonderful. I’ve been thinking too moreover that, after all, she
would probably have represented even for yourself something rather new and
rather good.”
He was to have given Mrs. Pocock with this, however, but her best opportunity
for a sound of derision. “Rather new? I hope so with all my heart!”
“I mean,” he explained, “that she might have affected you by
her exquisite amiability—a real revelation, it has seemed to myself; her
high rarity, her distinction of every sort.”
He had been, with these words, consciously a little “precious”; but
he had had to be—he couldn’t give her the truth of the case without
them; and it seemed to him moreover now that he didn’t care. He had at
all events not served his cause, for she sprang at its exposed side. “A
‘revelation’—to me: I’ve come to such a woman
for a revelation? You talk to me about
‘distinction’—you, you who’ve had your
privilege?—when the most distinguished woman we shall either of us have
seen in this world sits there insulted, in her loneliness, by your incredible
comparison!”
Strether forbore, with an effort, from straying; but he looked all about him.
“Does your mother herself make the point that she sits insulted?”
Sarah’s answer came so straight, so “pat,” as might have been
said, that he felt on the instant its origin. “She has confided to my
judgement and my tenderness the expression of her personal sense of everything,
and the assertion of her personal dignity.”
They were the very words of the lady of Woollett—he would have known them
in a thousand; her parting charge to her child. Mrs. Pocock accordingly spoke
to this extent by book, and the fact immensely moved him. “If she does
really feel as you say it’s of course very very dreadful. I’ve
given sufficient proof, one would have thought,” he added, “of my
deep admiration for Mrs. Newsome.”
“And pray what proof would one have thought you’d call
sufficient? That of thinking this person here so far superior to her?”
He wondered again; he waited. “Ah dear Sarah, you must leave me
this person here!”
In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even perversely, he
clung to his rag of reason, he had softly almost wailed this plea. Yet he knew
it to be perhaps the most positive declaration he had ever made in his life,
and his visitor’s reception of it virtually gave it that importance.
“That’s exactly what I’m delighted to do. God knows we
don’t want her! You take good care not to meet,” she observed in a
still higher key, “my question about their life. If you do consider it a
thing one can even speak of, I congratulate you on your taste!”
The life she alluded to was of course Chad’s and Madame de
Vionnet’s, which she thus bracketed together in a way that made him wince
a little; there being nothing for him but to take home her full intention. It
was none the less his inconsequence that while he had himself been enjoying for
weeks the view of the brilliant woman’s specific action, he just suffered
from any characterisation of it by other lips. “I think tremendously well
of her, at the same time that I seem to feel her ‘life’ to be
really none of my business. It’s my business, that is, only so far as
Chad’s own life is affected by it; and what has happened, don’t you
see? is that Chad’s has been affected so beautifully. The proof of the
pudding’s in the eating”—he tried, with no great success, to
help it out with a touch of pleasantry, while she let him go on as if to sink
and sink. He went on however well enough, as well as he could do without fresh
counsel; he indeed shouldn’t stand quite firm, he felt, till he should
have re-established his communications with Chad. Still, he could always speak
for the woman he had so definitely promised to “save.” This
wasn’t quite for her the air of salvation; but as that chill fairly
deepened what did it become but a reminder that one might at the worst perish
with her? And it was simple enough—it was rudimentary: not, not to
give her away. “I find in her more merits than you would probably have
patience with my counting over. And do you know,” he enquired, “the
effect you produce on me by alluding to her in such terms? It’s as if you
had some motive in not recognising all she has done for your brother, and so
shut your eyes to each side of the matter, in order, whichever side comes up,
to get rid of the other. I don’t, you must allow me to say, see how you
can with any pretence to candour get rid of the side nearest you.”
“Near me—that sort of thing?” And Sarah gave a jerk
back of her head that well might have nullified any active proximity.
It kept her friend himself at his distance, and he respected for a moment the
interval. Then with a last persuasive effort he bridged it. “You
don’t, on your honour, appreciate Chad’s fortunate
development?”
“Fortunate?” she echoed again. And indeed she was prepared.
“I call it hideous.”
Her departure had been for some minutes marked as imminent, and she was already
at the door that stood open to the court, from the threshold of which she
delivered herself of this judgement. It rang out so loud as to produce for the
time the hush of everything else. Strether quite, as an effect of it, breathed
less bravely; he could acknowledge it, but simply enough. “Oh if you
think that—!”
“Then all’s at an end? So much the better. I do think that!”
She passed out as she spoke and took her way straight across the court, beyond
which, separated from them by the deep arch of the porte-cochère the low
victoria that had conveyed her from her own hotel was drawn up. She made for it
with decision, and the manner of her break, the sharp shaft of her rejoinder,
had an intensity by which Strether was at first kept in arrest. She had let fly
at him as from a stretched cord, and it took him a minute to recover from the
sense of being pierced. It was not the penetration of surprise; it was that,
much more, of certainty; his case being put for him as he had as yet only put
it to himself. She was away at any rate; she had distanced him—with
rather a grand spring, an effect of pride and ease, after all; she had got into
her carriage before he could overtake her, and the vehicle was already in
motion. He stopped halfway; he stood there in the court only seeing her go and
noting that she gave him no other look. The way he had put it to himself was
that all quite might be at an end. Each of her movements, in this
resolute rupture, reaffirmed, re-enforced that idea. Sarah passed out of sight
in the sunny street while, planted there in the centre of the comparatively
grey court, he continued merely to look before him. It probably was all
at an end.
