“Oh, you’re all right, you’re all right,” he almost
impatiently declared; his impatience being moreover not for her pressure, but
for her scruple. More and more distinct to him was the tune to which she would
have had the matter out with Chad: more and more vivid for him the idea that
she had been nervous as to what he might be able to “stand.” Yes,
it had been a question if he had “stood” what the scene on the
river had given him, and, though the young man had doubtless opined in favour
of his recuperation, her own last word must have been that she should feel
easier in seeing for herself. That was it, unmistakeably; she was seeing
for herself. What he could stand was thus, in these moments, in the balance for
Strether, who reflected, as he became fully aware of it, that he must properly
brace himself. He wanted fully to appear to stand all he might; and there was a
certain command of the situation for him in this very wish not to look too much
at sea. She was ready with everything, but so, sufficiently, was he; that is he
was at one point the more prepared of the two, inasmuch as, for all her
cleverness, she couldn’t produce on the spot—and it was
surprising—an account of the motive of her note. He had the advantage
that his pronouncing her “all right” gave him for an enquiry.
“May I ask, delighted as I’ve been to come, if you’ve wished
to say something special?” He spoke as if she might have seen he had been
waiting for it—not indeed with discomfort, but with natural interest.
Then he saw that she was a little taken aback, was even surprised herself at
the detail she had neglected—the only one ever yet; having somehow
assumed he would know, would recognise, would leave some things not to be said.
She looked at him, however, an instant as if to convey that if he wanted them
all—!
“Selfish and vulgar—that’s what I must seem to you.
You’ve done everything for me, and here I am as if I were asking for
more. But it isn’t,” she went on, “because I’m
afraid—though I am of course afraid, as a woman in my position
always is. I mean it isn’t because one lives in terror—it
isn’t because of that one is selfish, for I’m ready to give you my
word to-night that I don’t care; don’t care what still may happen
and what I may lose. I don’t ask you to raise your little finger for me
again, nor do I wish so much as to mention to you what we’ve talked of
before, either my danger or my safety, or his mother, or his sister, or the
girl he may marry, or the fortune he may make or miss, or the right or the
wrong, of any kind, he may do. If after the help one has had from you one
can’t either take care of one’s self or simply hold one’s
tongue, one must renounce all claim to be an object of interest. It’s in
the name of what I do care about that I’ve tried still to keep
hold of you. How can I be indifferent,” she asked, “to how I appear
to you?” And as he found himself unable immediately to say: “Why,
if you’re going, need you, after all? Is it impossible you should
stay on—so that one mayn’t lose you?”
“Impossible I should live with you here instead of going home?”
“Not ‘with’ us, if you object to that, but near enough to us,
somewhere, for us to see you—well,” she beautifully brought out,
“when we feel we must. How shall we not sometimes feel it?
I’ve wanted to see you often when I couldn’t,” she pursued,
“all these last weeks. How shan’t I then miss you now, with the
sense of your being gone forever?” Then as if the straightness of this
appeal, taking him unprepared, had visibly left him wondering: “Where
is your ‘home’ moreover now—what has become of it?
I’ve made a change in your life, I know I have; I’ve upset
everything in your mind as well; in your sense of—what shall I call
it?—all the decencies and possibilities. It gives me a kind of
detestation—” She pulled up short.
Oh but he wanted to hear. “Detestation of what?”
“Of everything—of life.”
“Ah that’s too much,” he laughed—“or too
little!”
“Too little, precisely”—she was eager. “What I hate is
myself—when I think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the
lives of others, and that one isn’t happy even then. One does it to cheat
one’s self and to stop one’s mouth—but that’s only at
the best for a little. The wretched self is always there, always making one
somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it’s not, that
it’s never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to take. The only
safe thing is to give. It’s what plays you least false.”
Interesting, touching, strikingly sincere as she let these things come from
her, she yet puzzled and troubled him—so fine was the quaver of her
quietness. He felt what he had felt before with her, that there was always more
behind what she showed, and more and more again behind that. “You know
so, at least,” she added, “where you are!”
“You ought to know it indeed then; for isn’t what
you’ve been giving exactly what has brought us together this way?
You’ve been making, as I’ve so fully let you know I’ve
felt,” Strether said, “the most precious present I’ve ever
seen made, and if you can’t sit down peacefully on that performance you
are, no doubt, born to torment yourself. But you ought,” he wound
up, “to be easy.”
“And not trouble you any more, no doubt—not thrust on you even the
wonder and the beauty of what I’ve done; only let you regard our business
as over, and well over, and see you depart in a peace that matches my own? No
doubt, no doubt, no doubt,” she nervously repeated—“all the
more that I don’t really pretend I believe you couldn’t, for
yourself, not have done what you have. I don’t pretend you feel
yourself victimised, for this evidently is the way you live, and it’s
what—we’re agreed—is the best way. Yes, as you say,”
she continued after a moment, “I ought to be easy and rest on my work.
Well then here am I doing so. I am easy. You’ll have it for your
last impression. When is it you say you go?” she asked with a quick
change.
He took some time to reply—his last impression was more and more so mixed
a one. It produced in him a vague disappointment, a drop that was deeper even
than the fall of his elation the previous night. The good of what he had done,
if he had done so much, wasn’t there to enliven him quite to the point
that would have been ideal for a grand gay finale. Women were thus endlessly
absorbent, and to deal with them was to walk on water. What was at bottom the
matter with her, embroider as she might and disclaim as she might—what
was at bottom the matter with her was simply Chad himself. It was of Chad she
was after all renewedly afraid; the strange strength of her passion was the
very strength of her fear; she clung to him, Lambert Strether, as to a
source of safety she had tested, and, generous graceful truthful as she might
try to be, exquisite as she was, she dreaded the term of his being within
reach. With this sharpest perception yet, it was like a chill in the air to
him, it was almost appalling, that a creature so fine could be, by mysterious
forces, a creature so exploited. For at the end of all things they were
mysterious: she had but made Chad what he was—so why could she think she
had made him infinite? She had made him better, she had made him best, she had
made him anything one would; but it came to our friend with supreme queerness
that he was none the less only Chad. Strether had the sense that he, a
little, had made him too; his high appreciation had as it were, consecrated her
work The work, however admirable, was nevertheless of the strict human order,
and in short it was marvellous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of
comforts, aberrations (however one classed them) within the common experience
should be so transcendently prized. It might have made Strether hot or shy, as
such secrets of others brought home sometimes do make us; but he was held there
by something so hard that it was fairly grim. This was not the discomposure of
last night; that had quite passed—such discomposures were a detail; the
real coercion was to see a man ineffably adored. There it was again—it
took women, it took women; if to deal with them was to walk on water what
wonder that the water rose? And it had never surely risen higher than round
this woman. He presently found himself taking a long look from her, and the
next thing he knew he had uttered all his thought. “You’re afraid
for your life!”
It drew out her long look, and he soon enough saw why. A spasm came into her
face, the tears she had already been unable to hide overflowed at first in
silence, and then, as the sound suddenly comes from a child, quickened to
gasps, to sobs. She sat and covered her face with her hands, giving up all
attempt at a manner. “It’s how you see me, it’s how you see
me”—she caught her breath with it—“and it’s as I
am, and as I must take myself, and of course it’s no
matter.” Her emotion was at first so incoherent that he could only stand
there at a loss, stand with his sense of having upset her, though of having
done it by the truth. He had to listen to her in a silence that he made no
immediate effort to attenuate, feeling her doubly woeful amid all her dim
diffused elegance; consenting to it as he had consented to the rest, and even
conscious of some vague inward irony in the presence of such a fine free range
of bliss and bale. He couldn’t say it was not no matter; for he
was serving her to the end, he now knew, anyway—quite as if what he
thought of her had nothing to do with it. It was actually moreover as if he
didn’t think of her at all, as if he could think of nothing but the
passion, mature, abysmal, pitiful, she represented, and the possibilities she
betrayed. She was older for him to-night, visibly less exempt from the touch of
time; but she was as much as ever the finest and subtlest creature, the
happiest apparition, it had been given him, in all his years, to meet; and yet
he could see her there as vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a maidservant
crying for her young man. The only thing was that she judged herself as the
maidservant wouldn’t; the weakness of which wisdom too, the dishonour of
which judgement, seemed but to sink her lower. Her collapse, however, no doubt,
was briefer and she had in a manner recovered herself before he intervened.
“Of course I’m afraid for my life. But that’s nothing. It
isn’t that.”
He was silent a little longer, as if thinking what it might be.
“There’s something I have in mind that I can still do.”
But she threw off at last, with a sharp sad headshake, drying her eyes, what he
could still do. “I don’t care for that. Of course, as I’ve
said, you’re acting, in your wonderful way, for yourself; and
what’s for yourself is no more my business—though I may reach out
unholy hands so clumsily to touch it—than if it were something in
Timbuctoo. It’s only that you don’t snub me, as you’ve had
fifty chances to do—it’s only your beautiful patience that makes
one forget one’s manners. In spite of your patience, all the same,”
she went on, “you’d do anything rather than be with us here, even
if that were possible. You’d do everything for us but be mixed up with
us—which is a statement you can easily answer to the advantage of your
own manners. You can say ‘What’s the use of talking of things that
at the best are impossible?’ What is of course the use? It’s
only my little madness. You’d talk if you were tormented. And I
don’t mean now about him. Oh for him—!” Positively,
strangely, bitterly, as it seemed to Strether, she gave “him,” for
the moment, away. “You don’t care what I think of you; but I happen
to care what you think of me. And what you might,” she added.
“What you perhaps even did.”
He gained time. “What I did—?”
“Did think before. Before this. Didn’t you
think—?”
But he had already stopped her. “I didn’t think anything. I never
think a step further than I’m obliged to.”
“That’s perfectly false, I believe,” she
returned—“except that you may, no doubt, often pull up when things
become too ugly; or even, I’ll say, to save you a protest, too
beautiful. At any rate, even so far as it’s true, we’ve thrust on
you appearances that you’ve had to take in and that have therefore made
your obligation. Ugly or beautiful—it doesn’t matter what we call
them—you were getting on without them, and that’s where we’re
detestable. We bore you—that’s where we are. And we may
well—for what we’ve cost you. All you can do now is not to
think at all. And I who should have liked to seem to you—well,
sublime!”
He could only after a moment re-echo Miss Barrace. “You’re
wonderful!”
“I’m old and abject and hideous”—she went on as without
hearing him. “Abject above all. Or old above all. It’s when
one’s old that it’s worst. I don’t care what becomes of
it—let what will; there it is. It’s a doom—I know it;
you can’t see it more than I do myself. Things have to happen as they
will.” With which she came back again to what, face to face with him, had
so quite broken down. “Of course you wouldn’t, even if possible,
and no matter what may happen to you, be near us. But think of me, think of
me—!” She exhaled it into air.
He took refuge in repeating something he had already said and that she had made
nothing of. “There’s something I believe I can still do.” And
he put his hand out for good-bye.
She again made nothing of it; she went on with her insistence. “That
won’t help you. There’s nothing to help you.”
“Well, it may help you,” he said.
She shook her head. “There’s not a grain of certainty in my
future—for the only certainty is that I shall be the loser in the
end.”
She hadn’t taken his hand, but she moved with him to the door.
“That’s cheerful,” he laughed, “for your
benefactor!”
“What’s cheerful for me,” she replied, “is that
we might, you and I, have been friends. That’s it—that’s it.
You see how, as I say, I want everything. I’ve wanted you too.”
“Ah but you’ve had me!” he declared, at the door, with
an emphasis that made an end.
