One of the features of the restless afternoon passed by him after Mrs.
Pocock’s visit was an hour spent, shortly before dinner, with Maria
Gostrey, whom of late, in spite of so sustained a call on his attention from
other quarters, he had by no means neglected. And that he was still not
neglecting her will appear from the fact that he was with her again at the same
hour on the very morrow—with no less fine a consciousness moreover of
being able to hold her ear. It continued inveterately to occur, for that
matter, that whenever he had taken one of his greater turns he came back to
where she so faithfully awaited him. None of these excursions had on the whole
been livelier than the pair of incidents—the fruit of the short interval
since his previous visit—on which he had now to report to her. He had
seen Chad Newsome late the night before, and he had had that morning, as a
sequel to this conversation, a second interview with Sarah. “But
they’re all off,” he said, “at last.”
It puzzled her a moment. “All?—Mr. Newsome with them?”
“Ah not yet! Sarah and Jim and Mamie. But Waymarsh with them—for
Sarah. It’s too beautiful,” Strether continued; “I find I
don’t get over that—it’s always a fresh joy. But it’s a
fresh joy too,” he added, “that—well, what do you think?
Little Bilham also goes. But he of course goes for Mamie.”
Miss Gostrey wondered. “‘For’ her? Do you mean they’re
already engaged?”
“Well,” said Strether, “say then for me. He’ll
do anything for me; just as I will, for that matter—anything I
can—for him. Or for Mamie either. She’ll do anything for
me.”
Miss Gostrey gave a comprehensive sigh. “The way you reduce people to
subjection!”
“It’s certainly, on one side, wonderful. But it’s quite
equalled, on another, by the way I don’t. I haven’t reduced Sarah,
since yesterday; though I’ve succeeded in seeing her again, as I’ll
presently tell you. The others however are really all right. Mamie, by that
blessed law of ours, absolutely must have a young man.”
“But what must poor Mr. Bilham have? Do you mean they’ll
marry for you?”
“I mean that, by the same blessed law, it won’t matter a grain if
they don’t—I shan’t have in the least to worry.”
She saw as usual what he meant. “And Mr. Jim?—who goes for
him?”
“Oh,” Strether had to admit, “I couldn’t manage
that. He’s thrown, as usual, on the world; the world which, after
all, by his account—for he has prodigious adventures—seems very
good to him. He fortunately—‘over here,’ as he
says—finds the world everywhere; and his most prodigious adventure of
all,” he went on, “has been of course of the last few days.”
Miss Gostrey, already knowing, instantly made the connexion. “He has seen
Marie de Vionnet again?”
“He went, all by himself, the day after Chad’s
party—didn’t I tell you?—to tea with her. By her
invitation—all alone.”
“Quite like yourself!” Maria smiled.
“Oh but he’s more wonderful about her than I am!” And then as
his friend showed how she could believe it, filling it out, fitting it on to
old memories of the wonderful woman: “What I should have liked to manage
would have been her going.”
“To Switzerland with the party?”
“For Jim—and for symmetry. If it had been workable moreover for a
fortnight she’d have gone. She’s ready”—he followed up
his renewed vision of her—“for anything.”
Miss Gostrey went with him a minute. “She’s too perfect!”
“She will, I think,” he pursued, “go to-night to the
station.”
“To see him off?”
“With Chad—marvellously—as part of their general attention.
And she does it”—it kept before him—“with a light,
light grace, a free, free gaiety, that may well softly bewilder Mr.
Pocock.”
It kept her so before him that his companion had after an instant a friendly
comment. “As in short it has softly bewildered a saner man. Are you
really in love with her?” Maria threw off.
“It’s of no importance I should know,” he replied. “It
matters so little—has nothing to do, practically, with either of
us.”
“All the same”—Maria continued to smile—“they go,
the five, as I understand you, and you and Madame de Vionnet stay.”
“Oh and Chad.” To which Strether added: “And you.”
“Ah ‘me’!”—she gave a small impatient wail again,
in which something of the unreconciled seemed suddenly to break out.
“I don’t stay, it somehow seems to me, much to my advantage.
In the presence of all you cause to pass before me I’ve a tremendous
sense of privation.”
Strether hesitated. “But your privation, your keeping out of everything,
has been—hasn’t it?—by your own choice.”
“Oh yes; it has been necessary—that is it has been better for you.
What I mean is only that I seem to have ceased to serve you.”
“How can you tell that?” he asked. “You don’t know how
you serve me. When you cease—”
“Well?” she said as he dropped.
“Well, I’ll let you know. Be quiet till then.”
She thought a moment. “Then you positively like me to stay?”
“Don’t I treat you as if I did?”
“You’re certainly very kind to me. But that,” said Maria,
“is for myself. It’s getting late, as you see, and Paris turning
rather hot and dusty. People are scattering, and some of them, in other places
want me. But if you want me here—!”
She had spoken as resigned to his word, but he had of a sudden a still sharper
sense than he would have expected of desiring not to lose her. “I want
you here.”
She took it as if the words were all she had wished; as if they brought her,
gave her something that was the compensation of her case. “Thank
you,” she simply answered. And then as he looked at her a little harder,
“Thank you very much,” she repeated.
It had broken as with a slight arrest into the current of their talk, and it
held him a moment longer. “Why, two months, or whatever the time was,
ago, did you so suddenly dash off? The reason you afterwards gave me for having
kept away three weeks wasn’t the real one.”
She recalled. “I never supposed you believed it was. Yet,” she
continued, “if you didn’t guess it that was just what helped
you.”
He looked away from her on this; he indulged, so far as space permitted, in one
of his slow absences. “I’ve often thought of it, but never to feel
that I could guess it. And you see the consideration with which I’ve
treated you in never asking till now.”
“Now then why do you ask?”
“To show you how I miss you when you’re not here, and what it does
for me.”
“It doesn’t seem to have done,” she laughed, “all it
might! However,” she added, “if you’ve really never guessed
the truth I’ll tell it you.”
“I’ve never guessed it,” Strether declared.
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Well then I dashed off, as you say, so as not to have the confusion of
being there if Marie de Vionnet should tell you anything to my
detriment.”
He looked as if he considerably doubted. “You even then would have had to
face it on your return.”
“Oh if I had found reason to believe it something very bad I’d have
left you altogether.”
“So then,” he continued, “it was only on guessing she had
been on the whole merciful that you ventured back?”
Maria kept it together. “I owe her thanks. Whatever her temptation she
didn’t separate us. That’s one of my reasons,” she went on
“for admiring her so.”
“Let it pass then,” said Strether, “for one of mine as well.
But what would have been her temptation?”
“What are ever the temptations of women?”
He thought—but hadn’t, naturally, to think too long.
“Men?”
“She would have had you, with it, more for herself. But she saw she could
have you without it.”
“Oh ‘have’ me!” Strether a trifle ambiguously sighed.
“You,” he handsomely declared, “would have had me at
any rate with it.”
“Oh ‘have’ you!”—she echoed it as he had done.
“I do have you, however,” she less ironically said, “from the
moment you express a wish.”
He stopped before her, full of the disposition. “I’ll express
fifty.”
Which indeed begot in her, with a certain inconsequence, a return of her small
wail. “Ah there you are!”
There, if it were so, he continued for the rest of the time to be, and it was
as if to show her how she could still serve him that, coming back to the
departure of the Pococks, he gave her the view, vivid with a hundred more
touches than we can reproduce, of what had happened for him that morning. He
had had ten minutes with Sarah at her hotel, ten minutes reconquered, by
irresistible pressure, from the time over which he had already described her to
Miss Gostrey as having, at the end of their interview on his own premises,
passed the great sponge of the future. He had caught her by not announcing
himself, had found her in her sitting-room with a dressmaker and a
lingère whose accounts she appeared to have been more or less
ingenuously settling and who soon withdrew. Then he had explained to her how he
had succeeded, late the night before, in keeping his promise of seeing Chad.
“I told her I’d take it all.”
“You’d ‘take’ it?”
“Why if he doesn’t go.”
Maria waited. “And who takes it if he does?” she enquired with a
certain grimness of gaiety.
“Well,” said Strether, “I think I take, in any event,
everything.”
“By which I suppose you mean,” his companion brought out after a
moment, “that you definitely understand you now lose everything.”
He stood before her again. “It does come perhaps to the same thing. But
Chad, now that he has seen, doesn’t really want it.”
She could believe that, but she made, as always, for clearness. “Still,
what, after all, has he seen?”
“What they want of him. And it’s enough.”
“It contrasts so unfavourably with what Madame de Vionnet wants?”
“It contrasts—just so; all round, and tremendously.”
“Therefore, perhaps, most of all with what you want?”
“Oh,” said Strether, “what I want is a thing I’ve
ceased to measure or even to understand.”
But his friend none the less went on. “Do you want Mrs.
Newsome—after such a way of treating you?”
It was a straighter mode of dealing with this lady than they had as
yet—such was their high form—permitted themselves; but it seemed
not wholly for this that he delayed a moment. “I dare say it has been,
after all, the only way she could have imagined.”
“And does that make you want her any more?”
“I’ve tremendously disappointed her,” Strether thought it
worth while to mention.
“Of course you have. That’s rudimentary; that was plain to us long
ago. But isn’t it almost as plain,” Maria went on, “that
you’ve even yet your straight remedy? Really drag him away, as I believe
you still can, and you’d cease to have to count with her
disappointment.”
“Ah then,” he laughed, “I should have to count with
yours!”
But this barely struck her now. “What, in that case, should you call
counting? You haven’t come out where you are, I think, to please
me.”
“Oh,” he insisted, “that too, you know, has been part of it.
I can’t separate—it’s all one; and that’s perhaps why,
as I say, I don’t understand.” But he was ready to declare again
that this didn’t in the least matter; all the more that, as he affirmed,
he hadn’t really as yet “come out.” “She gives
me after all, on its coming to the pinch, a last mercy, another chance. They
don’t sail, you see, for five or six weeks more, and they
haven’t—she admits that—expected Chad would take part in
their tour. It’s still open to him to join them, at the last, at
Liverpool.”
Miss Gostrey considered. “How in the world is it ‘open’
unless you open it? How can he join them at Liverpool if he but sinks deeper
into his situation here?”
“He has given her—as I explained to you that she let me know
yesterday—his word of honour to do as I say.”
Maria stared. “But if you say nothing!”
Well, he as usual walked about on it. “I did say something this morning.
I gave her my answer—the word I had promised her after hearing from
himself what he had promised. What she demanded of me yesterday,
you’ll remember, was the engagement then and there to make him take up
this vow.”
“Well then,” Miss Gostrey enquired, “was the purpose of your
visit to her only to decline?”
“No; it was to ask, odd as that may seem to you, for another
delay.”
“Ah that’s weak!”
“Precisely!” She had spoken with impatience, but, so far as that at
least, he knew where he was. “If I am weak I want to find it out.
If I don’t find it out I shall have the comfort, the little glory, of
thinking I’m strong.”
“It’s all the comfort, I judge,” she returned, “that
you will have!”
“At any rate,” he said, “it will have been a month more.
Paris may grow, from day to day, hot and dusty, as you say; but there are other
things that are hotter and dustier. I’m not afraid to stay on; the summer
here must be amusing in a wild—if it isn’t a tame—way of its
own; the place at no time more picturesque. I think I shall like it. And
then,” he benevolently smiled for her, “there will be always
you.”
“Oh,” she objected, “it won’t be as a part of the
picturesqueness that I shall stay, for I shall be the plainest thing about you.
You may, you see, at any rate,” she pursued, “have nobody else.
Madame de Vionnet may very well be going off, mayn’t she?—and Mr.
Newsome by the same stroke: unless indeed you’ve had an assurance from
them to the contrary. So that if your idea’s to stay for
them”—it was her duty to suggest it—“you may be left in
the lurch. Of course if they do stay”—she kept it
up—“they would be part of the picturesqueness. Or else indeed you
might join them somewhere.”
Strether seemed to face it as if it were a happy thought; but the next moment
he spoke more critically. “Do you mean that they’ll probably go off
together?”
She just considered. “I think it will be treating you quite without
ceremony if they do; though after all,” she added, “it would be
difficult to see now quite what degree of ceremony properly meets your
case.”
“Of course,” Strether conceded, “my attitude toward them is
extraordinary.”
“Just so; so that one may ask one’s self what style of proceeding
on their own part can altogether match it. The attitude of their own that
won’t pale in its light they’ve doubtless still to work out. The
really handsome thing perhaps,” she presently threw off,
“would be for them to withdraw into more secluded conditions,
offering at the same time to share them with you.” He looked at her, on
this, as if some generous irritation—all in his interest—had
suddenly again flickered in her; and what she next said indeed half-explained
it. “Don’t really be afraid to tell me if what now holds you
is the pleasant prospect of the empty town, with plenty of seats in the
shade, cool drinks, deserted museums, drives to the Bois in the evening, and
our wonderful woman all to yourself.” And she kept it up still more.
“The handsomest thing of all, when one makes it out, would, I dare
say, be that Mr. Chad should for a while go off by himself. It’s a pity,
from that point of view,” she wound up, “that he doesn’t pay
his mother a visit. It would at least occupy your interval.” The thought
in fact held her a moment. “Why doesn’t he pay his mother a visit?
Even a week, at this good moment, would do.”
“My dear lady,” Strether replied—and he had it even to
himself surprisingly ready—“my dear lady, his mother has paid
him a visit. Mrs. Newsome has been with him, this month, with an
intensity that I’m sure he has thoroughly felt; he has lavishly
entertained her, and she has let him have her thanks. Do you suggest he shall
go back for more of them?”
Well, she succeeded after a little in shaking it off. “I see. It’s
what you don’t suggest—what you haven’t suggested. And you
know.”
“So would you, my dear,” he kindly said, “if you had so much
as seen her.”
“As seen Mrs. Newsome?”
“No, Sarah—which, both for Chad and for myself, has served all the
purpose.”
“And served it in a manner,” she responsively mused, “so
extraordinary!”
“Well, you see,” he partly explained, “what it comes to is
that she’s all cold thought—which Sarah could serve to us cold
without its really losing anything. So it is that we know what she thinks of
us.”
Maria had followed, but she had an arrest. “What I’ve never made
out, if you come to that, is what you think—I mean you
personally—of her. Don’t you so much, when all’s said,
as care a little?”
“That,” he answered with no loss of promptness, “is what even
Chad himself asked me last night. He asked me if I don’t mind the
loss—well, the loss of an opulent future. Which moreover,” he
hastened to add, “was a perfectly natural question.”
“I call your attention, all the same,” said Miss Gostrey, “to
the fact that I don’t ask it. What I venture to ask is whether it’s
to Mrs. Newsome herself that you’re indifferent.”
“I haven’t been so”—he spoke with all assurance.
“I’ve been the very opposite. I’ve been, from the first
moment, preoccupied with the impression everything might be making on
her—quite oppressed, haunted, tormented by it. I’ve been interested
only in her seeing what I’ve seen. And I’ve been as
disappointed in her refusal to see it as she has been in what has appeared to
her the perversity of my insistence.”
“Do you mean that she has shocked you as you’ve shocked her?”
Strether weighed it. “I’m probably not so shockable. But on the
other hand I’ve gone much further to meet her. She, on her side,
hasn’t budged an inch.”
“So that you’re now at last”—Maria pointed the
moral—“in the sad stage of recriminations.”
“No—it’s only to you I speak. I’ve been like a lamb to
Sarah. I’ve only put my back to the wall. It’s to that one
naturally staggers when one has been violently pushed there.”
She watched him a moment. “Thrown over?”
“Well, as I feel I’ve landed somewhere I think I must have been
thrown.”
She turned it over, but as hoping to clarify much rather than to harmonise.
“The thing is that I suppose you’ve been
disappointing—”
“Quite from the very first of my arrival? I dare say. I admit I was
surprising even to myself.”
“And then of course,” Maria went on, “I had much to do with
it.”
“With my being surprising—?”
“That will do,” she laughed, “if you’re too delicate to
call it my being! Naturally,” she added, “you came over more
or less for surprises.”
“Naturally!”—he valued the reminder.
“But they were to have been all for you”—she continued to
piece it out—“and none of them for her.”
Once more he stopped before her as if she had touched the point.
“That’s just her difficulty—that she doesn’t admit
surprises. It’s a fact that, I think, describes and represents her; and
it falls in with what I tell you—that she’s all, as I’ve
called it, fine cold thought. She had, to her own mind, worked the whole thing
out in advance, and worked it out for me as well as for herself. Whenever she
has done that, you see, there’s no room left; no margin, as it were, for
any alteration. She’s filled as full, packed as tight, as she’ll
hold and if you wish to get anything more or different either out or
in—”
“You’ve got to make over altogether the woman herself?”
“What it comes to,” said Strether, “is that you’ve got
morally and intellectually to get rid of her.”
“Which would appear,” Maria returned, “to be practically what
you’ve done.”
But her friend threw back his head. “I haven’t touched her. She
won’t be touched. I see it now as I’ve never done; and she
hangs together with a perfection of her own,” he went on, “that
does suggest a kind of wrong in any change of her composition. It was at
any rate,” he wound up, “the woman herself, as you call her the
whole moral and intellectual being or block, that Sarah brought me over to take
or to leave.”
It turned Miss Gostrey to deeper thought. “Fancy having to take at the
point of the bayonet a whole moral and intellectual being or block!”
“It was in fact,” said Strether, “what, at home, I had
done. But somehow over there I didn’t quite know it.”
“One never does, I suppose,” Miss Gostrey concurred, “realise
in advance, in such a case, the size, as you may say, of the block. Little by
little it looms up. It has been looming for you more and more till at last you
see it all.”
“I see it all,” he absently echoed, while his eyes might have been
fixing some particularly large iceberg in a cool blue northern sea.
“It’s magnificent!” he then rather oddly exclaimed.
But his friend, who was used to this kind of inconsequence in him, kept the
thread. “There’s nothing so magnificent—for making others
feel you—as to have no imagination.”
It brought him straight round. “Ah there you are! It’s what I said
last night to Chad. That he himself, I mean, has none.”
“Then it would appear,” Maria suggested, “that he has, after
all, something in common with his mother.”
“He has in common that he makes one, as you say, ‘feel’ him.
And yet,” he added, as if the question were interesting, “one feels
others too, even when they have plenty.”
Miss Gostrey continued suggestive. “Madame de Vionnet?”
“She has plenty.”
“Certainly—she had quantities of old. But there are different ways
of making one’s self felt.”
“Yes, it comes, no doubt, to that. You now—”
He was benevolently going on, but she wouldn’t have it. “Oh I
don’t make myself felt; so my quantity needn’t be settled.
Yours, you know,” she said, “is monstrous. No one has ever had so
much.”
It struck him for a moment. “That’s what Chad also thinks.”
“There you are then—though it isn’t for him to
complain of it!”
“Oh he doesn’t complain of it,” said Strether.
“That’s all that would be wanting! But apropos of what,”
Maria went on, “did the question come up?”
“Well, of his asking me what it is I gain.”
She had a pause. “Then as I’ve asked you too it settles my
case. Oh you have,” she repeated, “treasures of
imagination.”
But he had been for an instant thinking away from this, and he came up in
another place. “And yet Mrs. Newsome—it’s a thing to
remember—has imagined, did, that is, imagine, and apparently still
does, horrors about what I should have found. I was booked, by her
vision—extraordinarily intense, after all—to find them; and that I
didn’t, that I couldn’t, that, as she evidently felt, I
wouldn’t—this evidently didn’t at all, as they say,
‘suit’ her book. It was more than she could bear. That was her
disappointment.”
“You mean you were to have found Chad himself horrible?”
“I was to have found the woman.”
“Horrible?”
“Found her as she imagined her.” And Strether paused as if for his
own expression of it he could add no touch to that picture.
His companion had meanwhile thought. “She imagined stupidly—so it
comes to the same thing.”
“Stupidly? Oh!” said Strether.
But she insisted. “She imagined meanly.”
He had it, however, better. “It couldn’t but be ignorantly.”
“Well, intensity with ignorance—what do you want worse?”
This question might have held him, but he let it pass. “Sarah isn’t
ignorant—now; she keeps up the theory of the horrible.”
“Ah but she’s intense—and that by itself will do sometimes as
well. If it doesn’t do, in this case, at any rate, to deny that
Marie’s charming, it will do at least to deny that she’s
good.”
“What I claim is that she’s good for Chad.”
“You don’t claim”—she seemed to like it
clear—“that she’s good for you.”
But he continued without heeding. “That’s what I wanted them to
come out for—to see for themselves if she’s bad for him.”
“And now that they’ve done so they won’t admit that
she’s good even for anything?”
“They do think,” Strether presently admitted, “that
she’s on the whole about as bad for me. But they’re consistent of
course, inasmuch as they’ve their clear view of what’s good for
both of us.”
“For you, to begin with”—Maria, all responsive, confined the
question for the moment—“to eliminate from your existence and if
possible even from your memory the dreadful creature that I must
gruesomely shadow forth for them, even more than to eliminate the distincter
evil—thereby a little less portentous—of the person whose
confederate you’ve suffered yourself to become. However, that’s
comparatively simple. You can easily, at the worst, after all, give me
up.”
“I can easily at the worst, after all, give you up.” The irony was
so obvious that it needed no care. “I can easily at the worst, after all,
even forget you.”
“Call that then workable. But Mr. Newsome has much more to forget. How
can he do it?”
“Ah there again we are! That’s just what I was to have made him do;
just where I was to have worked with him and helped.”
She took it in silence and without attenuation—as if perhaps from very
familiarity with the facts; and her thought made a connexion without showing
the links. “Do you remember how we used to talk at Chester and in London
about my seeing you through?” She spoke as of far-off things and as if
they had spent weeks at the places she named.
“It’s just what you are doing.”
“Ah but the worst—since you’ve left such a margin—may
be still to come. You may yet break down.”
“Yes, I may yet break down. But will you take me—?”
He had hesitated, and she waited. “Take you?”
“For as long as I can bear it.”
She also debated “Mr. Newsome and Madame de Vionnet may, as we were
saying, leave town. How long do you think you can bear it without them?”
Strether’s reply to this was at first another question. “Do you
mean in order to get away from me?”
Her answer had an abruptness. “Don’t find me rude if I say I should
think they’d want to!”
He looked at her hard again—seemed even for an instant to have an
intensity of thought under which his colour changed. But he smiled. “You
mean after what they’ve done to me?”
“After what she has.”
At this, however, with a laugh, he was all right again. “Ah but she
hasn’t done it yet!”
