What he saw was exactly the right thing—a boat advancing round the bend
and containing a man who held the paddles and a lady, at the stern, with a pink
parasol. It was suddenly as if these figures, or something like them, had been
wanted in the picture, had been wanted more or less all day, and had now
drifted into sight, with the slow current, on purpose to fill up the measure.
They came slowly, floating down, evidently directed to the landing-place near
their spectator and presenting themselves to him not less clearly as the two
persons for whom his hostess was already preparing a meal. For two very happy
persons he found himself straightway taking them—a young man in
shirt-sleeves, a young woman easy and fair, who had pulled pleasantly up from
some other place and, being acquainted with the neighbourhood, had known what
this particular retreat could offer them. The air quite thickened, at their
approach, with further intimations; the intimation that they were expert,
familiar, frequent—that this wouldn’t at all events be the first
time. They knew how to do it, he vaguely felt—and it made them but the
more idyllic, though at the very moment of the impression, as happened, their
boat seemed to have begun to drift wide, the oarsman letting it go. It had by
this time none the less come much nearer—near enough for Strether to
dream the lady in the stern had for some reason taken account of his being
there to watch them. She had remarked on it sharply, yet her companion
hadn’t turned round; it was in fact almost as if our friend had felt her
bid him keep still. She had taken in something as a result of which their
course had wavered, and it continued to waver while they just stood off. This
little effect was sudden and rapid, so rapid that Strether’s sense of it
was separate only for an instant from a sharp start of his own. He too had
within the minute taken in something, taken in that he knew the lady whose
parasol, shifting as if to hide her face, made so fine a pink point in the
shining scene. It was too prodigious, a chance in a million, but, if he knew
the lady, the gentleman, who still presented his back and kept off, the
gentleman, the coatless hero of the idyll, who had responded to her start, was,
to match the marvel, none other than Chad.
Chad and Madame de Vionnet were then like himself taking a day in the
country—though it was as queer as fiction, as farce, that their country
could happen to be exactly his; and she had been the first at recognition, the
first to feel, across the water, the shock—for it appeared to come to
that—of their wonderful accident. Strether became aware, with this, of
what was taking place—that her recognition had been even stranger for the
pair in the boat, that her immediate impulse had been to control it, and that
she was quickly and intensely debating with Chad the risk of betrayal. He saw
they would show nothing if they could feel sure he hadn’t made them out;
so that he had before him for a few seconds his own hesitation. It was a sharp
fantastic crisis that had popped up as if in a dream, and it had had only to
last the few seconds to make him feel it as quite horrible. They were thus, on
either side, trying the other side, and all for some reason that broke
the stillness like some unprovoked harsh note. It seemed to him again, within
the limit, that he had but one thing to do—to settle their common
question by some sign of surprise and joy. He hereupon gave large play to these
things, agitating his hat and his stick and loudly calling out—a
demonstration that brought him relief as soon as he had seen it answered. The
boat, in mid-stream, still went a little wild—which seemed natural,
however, while Chad turned round, half springing up; and his good friend, after
blankness and wonder, began gaily to wave her parasol. Chad dropped afresh to
his paddles and the boat headed round, amazement and pleasantry filling the air
meanwhile, and relief, as Strether continued to fancy, superseding mere
violence. Our friend went down to the water under this odd impression as of
violence averted—the violence of their having “cut” him, out
there in the eye of nature, on the assumption that he wouldn’t know it.
He awaited them with a face from which he was conscious of not being able quite
to banish this idea that they would have gone on, not seeing and not knowing,
missing their dinner and disappointing their hostess, had he himself taken a
line to match. That at least was what darkened his vision for the moment.
Afterwards, after they had bumped at the landing-place and he had assisted
their getting ashore, everything found itself sponged over by the mere miracle
of the encounter.
They could so much better at last, on either side, treat it as a wild
extravagance of hazard, that the situation was made elastic by the amount of
explanation called into play. Why indeed—apart from oddity—the
situation should have been really stiff was a question naturally not practical
at the moment, and in fact, so far as we are concerned, a question tackled,
later on and in private, only by Strether himself. He was to reflect later on
and in private that it was mainly he who had explained—as he had
had moreover comparatively little difficulty in doing. He was to have at all
events meanwhile the worrying thought of their perhaps secretly suspecting him
of having plotted this coincidence, taking such pains as might be to give it
the semblance of an accident. That possibility—as their
imputation—didn’t of course bear looking into for an instant; yet
the whole incident was so manifestly, arrange it as they would, an awkward one,
that he could scarce keep disclaimers in respect to his own presence from
rising to his lips. Disclaimers of intention would have been as tactless as his
presence was practically gross; and the narrowest escape they either of them
had was his lucky escape, in the event, from making any. Nothing of the sort,
so far as surface and sound were involved, was even in question; surface and
sound all made for their common ridiculous good fortune, for the general
invraisemblance of the occasion, for the charming chance that they had,
the others, in passing, ordered some food to be ready, the charming chance that
he had himself not eaten, the charming chance, even more, that their little
plans, their hours, their train, in short, from là-bas, would all match
for their return together to Paris. The chance that was most charming of all,
the chance that drew from Madame de Vionnet her clearest, gayest
“Comme cela se trouve!” was the announcement made to
Strether after they were seated at table, the word given him by their hostess
in respect to his carriage for the station, on which he might now count. It
settled the matter for his friends as well; the conveyance—it was
all too lucky!—would serve for them; and nothing was more delightful than
his being in a position to make the train so definite. It might have been, for
themselves—to hear Madame de Vionnet—almost unnaturally vague, a
detail left to be fixed; though Strether indeed was afterwards to remember that
Chad had promptly enough intervened to forestall this appearance, laughing at
his companion’s flightiness and making the point that he had after all,
in spite of the bedazzlement of a day out with her, known what he was about.
Strether was to remember afterwards further that this had had for him the
effect of forming Chad’s almost sole intervention; and indeed he was to
remember further still, in subsequent meditation, many things that, as it were,
fitted together. Another of them was for instance that the wonderful
woman’s overflow of surprise and amusement was wholly into French, which
she struck him as speaking with an unprecedented command of idiomatic turns,
but in which she got, as he might have said, somewhat away from him, taking all
at once little brilliant jumps that he could but lamely match. The question of
his own French had never come up for them; it was the one thing she
wouldn’t have permitted—it belonged, for a person who had been
through much, to mere boredom; but the present result was odd, fairly veiling
her identity, shifting her back into a mere voluble class or race to the
intense audibility of which he was by this time inured. When she spoke the
charming slightly strange English he best knew her by he seemed to feel her as
a creature, among all the millions, with a language quite to herself, the real
monopoly of a special shade of speech, beautifully easy for her, yet of a
colour and a cadence that were both inimitable and matters of accident. She
came back to these things after they had shaken down in the inn-parlour and
knew, as it were, what was to become of them; it was inevitable that loud
ejaculation over the prodigy of their convergence should at last wear itself
out. Then it was that his impression took fuller form—the impression,
destined only to deepen, to complete itself, that they had something to put a
face upon, to carry off and make the best of, and that it was she who,
admirably on the whole, was doing this. It was familiar to him of course that
they had something to put a face upon; their friendship, their connexion, took
any amount of explaining—that would have been made familiar by his twenty
minutes with Mrs. Pocock if it hadn’t already been so. Yet his theory, as
we know, had bountifully been that the facts were specifically none of his
business, and were, over and above, so far as one had to do with them,
intrinsically beautiful; and this might have prepared him for anything, as well
as rendered him proof against mystification. When he reached home that night,
however, he knew he had been, at bottom, neither prepared nor proof; and since
we have spoken of what he was, after his return, to recall and interpret, it
may as well immediately be said that his real experience of these few hours put
on, in that belated vision—for he scarce went to bed till
morning—the aspect that is most to our purpose.
He then knew more or less how he had been affected—he but half knew at
the time. There had been plenty to affect him even after, as has been said,
they had shaken down; for his consciousness, though muffled, had its sharpest
moments during this passage, a marked drop into innocent friendly Bohemia. They
then had put their elbows on the table, deploring the premature end of their
two or three dishes; which they had tried to make up with another bottle while
Chad joked a little spasmodically, perhaps even a little irrelevantly, with the
hostess. What it all came to had been that fiction and fable were,
inevitably, in the air, and not as a simple term of comparison, but as a result
of things said; also that they were blinking it, all round, and that they yet
needn’t, so much as that, have blinked it—though indeed if they
hadn’t Strether didn’t quite see what else they could have done.
Strether didn’t quite see that even at an hour or two past
midnight, even when he had, at his hotel, for a long time, without a light and
without undressing, sat back on his bedroom sofa and stared straight before
him. He was, at that point of vantage, in full possession, to make of it all
what he could. He kept making of it that there had been simply a lie in
the charming affair—a lie on which one could now, detached and
deliberate, perfectly put one’s finger. It was with the lie that they had
eaten and drunk and talked and laughed, that they had waited for their
carriole rather impatiently, and had then got into the vehicle and,
sensibly subsiding, driven their three or four miles through the darkening
summer night. The eating and drinking, which had been a resource, had had the
effect of having served its turn; the talk and laughter had done as much; and
it was during their somewhat tedious progress to the station, during the waits
there, the further delays, their submission to fatigue, their silences in the
dim compartment of the much-stopping train, that he prepared himself for
reflexions to come. It had been a performance, Madame de Vionnet’s
manner, and though it had to that degree faltered toward the end, as through
her ceasing to believe in it, as if she had asked herself, or Chad had found a
moment surreptitiously to ask her, what after all was the use, a performance it
had none the less quite handsomely remained, with the final fact about it that
it was on the whole easier to keep up than to abandon.
From the point of view of presence of mind it had been very wonderful indeed,
wonderful for readiness, for beautiful assurance, for the way her decision was
taken on the spot, without time to confer with Chad, without time for anything.
Their only conference could have been the brief instants in the boat before
they confessed to recognising the spectator on the bank, for they hadn’t
been alone together a moment since and must have communicated all in silence.
It was a part of the deep impression for Strether, and not the least of the
deep interest, that they could so communicate—that Chad in
particular could let her know he left it to her. He habitually left things to
others, as Strether was so well aware, and it in fact came over our friend in
these meditations that there had been as yet no such vivid illustration of his
famous knowing how to live. It was as if he had humoured her to the extent of
letting her lie without correction—almost as if, really, he would be
coming round in the morning to set the matter, as between Strether and himself,
right. Of course he couldn’t quite come; it was a case in which a man was
obliged to accept the woman’s version, even when fantastic; if she had,
with more flurry than she cared to show, elected, as the phrase was, to
represent that they had left Paris that morning, and with no design but of
getting back within the day—if she had so sized-up, in the Woollett
phrase, their necessity, she knew best her own measure. There were things, all
the same, it was impossible to blink and which made this measure an odd
one—the too evident fact for instance that she hadn’t started out
for the day dressed and hatted and shod, and even, for that matter, pink
parasol’d, as she had been in the boat. From what did the drop in her
assurance proceed as the tension increased—from what did this slightly
baffled ingenuity spring but from her consciousness of not presenting, as night
closed in, with not so much as a shawl to wrap her round, an appearance that
matched her story? She admitted that she was cold, but only to blame her
imprudence which Chad suffered her to give such account of as she might. Her
shawl and Chad’s overcoat and her other garments, and his, those they had
each worn the day before, were at the place, best known to themselves—a
quiet retreat enough, no doubt—at which they had been spending the
twenty-four hours, to which they had fully meant to return that evening, from
which they had so remarkably swum into Strether’s ken, and the tacit
repudiation of which had been thus the essence of her comedy. Strether saw how
she had perceived in a flash that they couldn’t quite look to going back
there under his nose; though, honestly, as he gouged deeper into the matter, he
was somewhat surprised, as Chad likewise had perhaps been, at the uprising of
this scruple. He seemed even to divine that she had entertained it rather for
Chad than for herself, and that, as the young man had lacked the chance to
enlighten her, she had had to go on with it, he meanwhile mistaking her motive.
He was rather glad, none the less, that they had in point of fact not parted at
the Cheval Blanc, that he hadn’t been reduced to giving them his blessing
for an idyllic retreat down the river. He had had in the actual case to
make-believe more than he liked, but this was nothing, it struck him, to what
the other event would have required. Could he, literally, quite have faced the
other event? Would he have been capable of making the best of it with them?
This was what he was trying to do now; but with the advantage of his being able
to give more time to it a good deal counteracted by his sense of what, over and
above the central fact itself, he had to swallow. It was the quantity of
make-believe involved and so vividly exemplified that most disagreed with his
spiritual stomach. He moved, however, from the consideration of that
quantity—to say nothing of the consciousness of that organ—back to
the other feature of the show, the deep, deep truth of the intimacy revealed.
That was what, in his vain vigil, he oftenest reverted to: intimacy, at such a
point, was like that—and what in the world else would one have
wished it to be like? It was all very well for him to feel the pity of its
being so much like lying; he almost blushed, in the dark, for the way he had
dressed the possibility in vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her
doll. He had made them—and by no fault of their own—momentarily
pull it for him, the possibility, out of this vagueness; and must he not
therefore take it now as they had had simply, with whatever thin attenuations,
to give it to him? The very question, it may be added, made him feel lonely and
cold. There was the element of the awkward all round, but Chad and Madame de
Vionnet had at least the comfort that they could talk it over together. With
whom could he talk of such things?—unless indeed always, at almost
any stage, with Maria? He foresaw that Miss Gostrey would come again into
requisition on the morrow; though it wasn’t to be denied that he was
already a little afraid of her “What on earth—that’s what I
want to know now—had you then supposed?” He recognised at last that
he had really been trying all along to suppose nothing. Verily, verily, his
labour had been lost. He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful
things.
