Strether called, his second morning in Paris, on the bankers of the Rue Scribe
to whom his letter of credit was addressed, and he made this visit attended by
Waymarsh, in whose company he had crossed from London two days before. They had
hastened to the Rue Scribe on the morrow of their arrival, but Strether had not
then found the letters the hope of which prompted this errand. He had had as
yet none at all; hadn’t expected them in London, but had counted on
several in Paris, and, disconcerted now, had presently strolled back to the
Boulevard with a sense of injury that he felt himself taking for as good a
start as any other. It would serve, this spur to his spirit, he reflected, as,
pausing at the top of the street, he looked up and down the great foreign
avenue, it would serve to begin business with. His idea was to begin business
immediately, and it did much for him the rest of his day that the beginning of
business awaited him. He did little else till night but ask himself what he
should do if he hadn’t fortunately had so much to do; but he put himself
the question in many different situations and connexions. What carried him
hither and yon was an admirable theory that nothing he could do wouldn’t
be in some manner related to what he fundamentally had on hand, or would
be—should he happen to have a scruple—wasted for it. He did happen
to have a scruple—a scruple about taking no definite step till he should
get letters; but this reasoning carried it off. A single day to feel his
feet—he had felt them as yet only at Chester and in London—was he
could consider, none too much; and having, as he had often privately expressed
it, Paris to reckon with, he threw these hours of freshness consciously into
the reckoning. They made it continually greater, but that was what it had best
be if it was to be anything at all, and he gave himself up till far into the
evening, at the theatre and on the return, after the theatre, along the bright
congested Boulevard, to feeling it grow. Waymarsh had accompanied him this time
to the play, and the two men had walked together, as a first stage, from the
Gymnase to the Café Riche, into the crowded “terrace” of which
establishment—the night, or rather the morning, for midnight had struck,
being bland and populous—they had wedged themselves for refreshment.
Waymarsh, as a result of some discussion with his friend, had made a marked
virtue of his having now let himself go; and there had been elements of
impression in their half-hour over their watered beer-glasses that gave him his
occasion for conveying that he held this compromise with his stiffer self to
have become extreme. He conveyed it—for it was still, after all, his
stiffer self who gloomed out of the glare of the terrace—in solemn
silence; and there was indeed a great deal of critical silence, every way,
between the companions, even till they gained the Place de l’Opéra, as to
the character of their nocturnal progress.
This morning there were letters—letters which had reached London,
apparently all together, the day of Strether’s journey, and had taken
their time to follow him; so that, after a controlled impulse to go into them
in the reception-room of the bank, which, reminding him of the post-office at
Woollett, affected him as the abutment of some transatlantic bridge, he slipped
them into the pocket of his loose grey overcoat with a sense of the felicity of
carrying them off. Waymarsh, who had had letters yesterday, had had them again
to-day, and Waymarsh suggested in this particular no controlled impulses. The
last one he was at all events likely to be observed to struggle with was
clearly that of bringing to a premature close any visit to the Rue Scribe.
Strether had left him there yesterday; he wanted to see the papers, and he had
spent, by what his friend could make out, a succession of hours with the
papers. He spoke of the establishment, with emphasis, as a post of superior
observation; just as he spoke generally of his actual damnable doom as a device
for hiding from him what was going on. Europe was best described, to his mind,
as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that
indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these
occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs.
Strether, on his side, set himself to walk again—he had his relief in his
pocket; and indeed, much as he had desired his budget, the growth of
restlessness might have been marked in him from the moment he had assured
himself of the superscription of most of the missives it contained. This
restlessness became therefore his temporary law; he knew he should recognise as
soon as see it the best place of all for settling down with his chief
correspondent. He had for the next hour an accidental air of looking for it in
the windows of shops; he came down the Rue de la Paix in the sun and, passing
across the Tuileries and the river, indulged more than once—as if on
finding himself determined—in a sudden pause before the book-stalls of
the opposite quay. In the garden of the Tuileries he had lingered, on two or
three spots, to look; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring had stayed him as
he roamed. The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes—in a soft
breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor, of
bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of ancient
thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace-walls were warm, in the
blue-frocked brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the
deep references of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a
white-gaitered red-legged soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures
whose movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their smooth
diagonal from point to point; the air had a taste as of something mixed with
art, something that presented nature as a white-capped master-chef. The palace
was gone, Strether remembered the palace; and when he gazed into the
irremediable void of its site the historic sense in him might have been freely
at play—the play under which in Paris indeed it so often winces like a
touched nerve. He filled out spaces with dim symbols of scenes; he caught the
gleam of white statues at the base of which, with his letters out, he could
tilt back a straw-bottomed chair. But his drift was, for reasons, to the other
side, and it floated him unspent up the Rue de Seine and as far as the
Luxembourg. In the Luxembourg Gardens he pulled up; here at last he found his
nook, and here, on a penny chair from which terraces, alleys, vistas,
fountains, little trees in green tubs, little women in white caps and shrill
little girls at play all sunnily “composed” together, he passed an
hour in which the cup of his impressions seemed truly to overflow. But a week
had elapsed since he quitted the ship, and there were more things in his mind
than so few days could account for. More than once, during the time, he had
regarded himself as admonished; but the admonition this morning was formidably
sharp. It took as it hadn’t done yet the form of a question—the
question of what he was doing with such an extraordinary sense of escape. This
sense was sharpest after he had read his letters, but that was also precisely
why the question pressed. Four of the letters were from Mrs. Newsome and none
of them short; she had lost no time, had followed on his heels while he moved,
so expressing herself that he now could measure the probable frequency with
which he should hear. They would arrive, it would seem, her communications, at
the rate of several a week; he should be able to count, it might even prove, on
more than one by each mail. If he had begun yesterday with a small grievance he
had therefore an opportunity to begin to-day with its opposite. He read the
letters successively and slowly, putting others back into his pocket but
keeping these for a long time afterwards gathered in his lap. He held them
there, lost in thought, as if to prolong the presence of what they gave him; or
as if at the least to assure them their part in the constitution of some
lucidity. His friend wrote admirably, and her tone was even more in her style
than in her voice—he might almost, for the hour, have had to come this
distance to get its full carrying quality; yet the plentitude of his
consciousness of difference consorted perfectly with the deepened intensity of
the connexion. It was the difference, the difference of being just where he was
and as he was, that formed the escape—this difference was so much
greater than he had dreamed it would be; and what he finally sat there turning
over was the strange logic of his finding himself so free. He felt it in a
manner his duty to think out his state, to approve the process, and when he
came in fact to trace the steps and add up the items they sufficiently
accounted for the sum. He had never expected—that was the truth of
it—again to find himself young, and all the years and other things it had
taken to make him so were exactly his present arithmetic. He had to make sure
of them to put his scruple to rest.
It all sprang at bottom from the beauty of Mrs. Newsome’s desire that he
should be worried with nothing that was not of the essence of his task; by
insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and break she had so provided for
his freedom that she would, as it were, have only herself to thank. Strether
could not at this point indeed have completed his thought by the image of what
she might have to thank herself for: the image, at best, of his own
likeness—poor Lambert Strether washed up on the sunny strand by the waves
of a single day, poor Lambert Strether thankful for breathing-time and
stiffening himself while he gasped. There he was, and with nothing in his
aspect or his posture to scandalise: it was only true that if he had seen Mrs.
Newsome coming he would instinctively have jumped up to walk away a little. He
would have come round and back to her bravely, but he would have had first to
pull himself together. She abounded in news of the situation at home, proved to
him how perfectly she was arranging for his absence, told him who would take up
this and who take up that exactly where he had left it, gave him in fact
chapter and verse for the moral that nothing would suffer. It filled for him,
this tone of hers, all the air; yet it struck him at the same time as the hum
of vain things. This latter effect was what he tried to justify—and with
the success that, grave though the appearance, he at last lighted on a form
that was happy. He arrived at it by the inevitable recognition of his having
been a fortnight before one of the weariest of men. If ever a man had come off
tired Lambert Strether was that man; and hadn’t it been distinctly on the
ground of his fatigue that his wonderful friend at home had so felt for him and
so contrived? It seemed to him somehow at these instants that, could he only
maintain with sufficient firmness his grasp of that truth, it might become in a
manner his compass and his helm. What he wanted most was some idea that would
simplify, and nothing would do this so much as the fact that he was done for
and finished. If it had been in such a light that he had just detected in his
cup the dregs of youth, that was a mere flaw of the surface of his scheme. He
was so distinctly fagged-out that it must serve precisely as his convenience,
and if he could but consistently be good for little enough he might do
everything he wanted.
Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon—the common
unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared to himself to have
given his best years to an active appreciation of the way they didn’t
come; but perhaps—as they would seemingly here be things quite
other—this long ache might at last drop to rest. He could easily see that
from the moment he should accept the notion of his foredoomed collapse the last
thing he would lack would be reasons and memories. Oh if he should do
the sum no slate would hold the figures! The fact that he had failed, as he
considered, in everything, in each relation and in half a dozen trades, as he
liked luxuriously to put it, might have made, might still make, for an empty
present; but it stood solidly for a crowded past. It had not been, so much
achievement missed, a light yoke nor a short load. It was at present as if the
backward picture had hung there, the long crooked course, grey in the shadow of
his solitude. It had been a dreadful cheerful sociable solitude, a solitude of
life or choice, of community; but though there had been people enough all round
it there had been but three or four persons in it. Waymarsh was one of
these, and the fact struck him just now as marking the record. Mrs. Newsome was
another, and Miss Gostrey had of a sudden shown signs of becoming a third.
Beyond, behind them was the pale figure of his real youth, which held against
its breast the two presences paler than itself—the young wife he had
early lost and the young son he had stupidly sacrificed. He had again and again
made out for himself that he might have kept his little boy, his little dull
boy who had died at school of rapid diphtheria, if he had not in those years so
insanely given himself to merely missing the mother. It was the soreness of his
remorse that the child had in all likelihood not really been dull—had
been dull, as he had been banished and neglected, mainly because the father had
been unwittingly selfish. This was doubtless but the secret habit of sorrow,
which had slowly given way to time; yet there remained an ache sharp enough to
make the spirit, at the sight now and again of some fair young man just growing
up, wince with the thought of an opportunity lost. Had ever a man, he had
finally fallen into the way of asking himself, lost so much and even done so
much for so little? There had been particular reasons why all yesterday, beyond
other days, he should have had in one ear this cold enquiry. His name on the
green cover, where he had put it for Mrs. Newsome, expressed him doubtless just
enough to make the world—the world as distinguished, both for more and
for less, from Woollett—ask who he was. He had incurred the ridicule of
having to have his explanation explained. He was Lambert Strether because he
was on the cover, whereas it should have been, for anything like glory, that he
was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether. He would have done anything
for Mrs. Newsome, have been still more ridiculous—as he might, for that
matter, have occasion to be yet; which came to saying that this acceptance of
fate was all he had to show at fifty-five.
He judged the quantity as small because it was small, and all the more
egregiously since it couldn’t, as he saw the case, so much as thinkably
have been larger. He hadn’t had the gift of making the most of what he
tried, and if he had tried and tried again—no one but himself knew how
often—it appeared to have been that he might demonstrate what else, in
default of that, could be made. Old ghosts of experiments came back to
him, old drudgeries and delusions, and disgusts, old recoveries with their
relapses, old fevers with their chills, broken moments of good faith, others of
still better doubt; adventures, for the most part, of the sort qualified as
lessons. The special spring that had constantly played for him the day before
was the recognition—frequent enough to surprise him—of the promises
to himself that he had after his other visit never kept. The reminiscence
to-day most quickened for him was that of the vow taken in the course of the
pilgrimage that, newly-married, with the War just over, and helplessly young in
spite of it, he had recklessly made with the creature who was so much younger
still. It had been a bold dash, for which they had taken money set apart for
necessities, but kept sacred at the moment in a hundred ways, and in none more
so than by this private pledge of his own to treat the occasion as a relation
formed with the higher culture and see that, as they said at Woollett, it
should bear a good harvest. He had believed, sailing home again, that he had
gained something great, and his theory—with an elaborate innocent plan of
reading, digesting, coming back even, every few years—had then been to
preserve, cherish and extend it. As such plans as these had come to nothing,
however, in respect to acquisitions still more precious, it was doubtless
little enough of a marvel that he should have lost account of that handful of
seed. Buried for long years in dark corners at any rate these few germs had
sprouted again under forty-eight hours of Paris. The process of yesterday had
really been the process of feeling the general stirred life of connexions long
since individually dropped. Strether had become acquainted even on this ground
with short gusts of speculation—sudden flights of fancy in Louvre
galleries, hungry gazes through clear plates behind which lemon-coloured
volumes were as fresh as fruit on the tree.
There were instants at which he could ask whether, since there had been
fundamentally so little question of his keeping anything, the fate after all
decreed for him hadn’t been only to be kept. Kept for something,
in that event, that he didn’t pretend, didn’t possibly dare as yet
to divine; something that made him hover and wonder and laugh and sigh, made
him advance and retreat, feeling half ashamed of his impulse to plunge and more
than half afraid of his impulse to wait. He remembered for instance how he had
gone back in the sixties with lemon-coloured volumes in general on the brain as
well as with a dozen—selected for his wife too—in his trunk; and
nothing had at the moment shown more confidence than this invocation of the
finer taste. They were still somewhere at home, the dozen—stale and
soiled and never sent to the binder; but what had become of the sharp
initiation they represented? They represented now the mere sallow paint on the
door of the temple of taste that he had dreamed of raising up—a structure
he had practically never carried further. Strether’s present highest
flights were perhaps those in which this particular lapse figured to him as a
symbol, a symbol of his long grind and his want of odd moments, his want
moreover of money, of opportunity, of positive dignity. That the memory of the
vow of his youth should, in order to throb again, have had to wait for this
last, as he felt it, of all his accidents—that was surely proof enough of
how his conscience had been encumbered. If any further proof were needed it
would have been to be found in the fact that, as he perfectly now saw, he had
ceased even to measure his meagreness, a meagreness that sprawled, in this
retrospect, vague and comprehensive, stretching back like some unmapped
Hinterland from a rough coast-settlement. His conscience had been amusing
itself for the forty-eight hours by forbidding him the purchase of a book; he
held off from that, held off from everything; from the moment he didn’t
yet call on Chad he wouldn’t for the world have taken any other step. On
this evidence, however, of the way they actually affected him he glared at the
lemon-coloured covers in confession of the subconsciousness that, all the same,
in the great desert of the years, he must have had of them. The green covers at
home comprised, by the law of their purpose, no tribute to letters; it was of a
mere rich kernel of economics, politics, ethics that, glazed and, as Mrs.
Newsome maintained rather against his view, pre-eminently pleasant to
touch, they formed the specious shell. Without therefore any needed instinctive
knowledge of what was coming out, in Paris, on the bright highway, he struck
himself at present as having more than once flushed with a suspicion: he
couldn’t otherwise at present be feeling so many fears confirmed. There
were “movements” he was too late for: weren’t they, with the
fun of them, already spent? There were sequences he had missed and great gaps
in the procession: he might have been watching it all recede in a golden cloud
of dust. If the playhouse wasn’t closed his seat had at least fallen to
somebody else. He had had an uneasy feeling the night before that if he was at
the theatre at all—though he indeed justified the theatre, in the
specific sense, and with a grotesqueness to which his imagination did all
honour, as something he owed poor Waymarsh—he should have been there
with, and as might have been said, for Chad.
This suggested the question of whether he could properly have taken him to such
a play, and what effect—it was a point that suddenly rose—his
peculiar responsibility might be held in general to have on his choice of
entertainment. It had literally been present to him at the Gymnase—where
one was held moreover comparatively safe—that having his young friend at
his side would have been an odd feature of the work of redemption; and this
quite in spite of the fact that the picture presented might well, confronted
with Chad’s own private stage, have seemed the pattern of propriety. He
clearly hadn’t come out in the name of propriety but to visit unattended
equivocal performances; yet still less had he done so to undermine his
authority by sharing them with the graceless youth. Was he to renounce all
amusement for the sweet sake of that authority? and would such
renouncement give him for Chad a moral glamour? The little problem bristled the
more by reason of poor Strether’s fairly open sense of the irony of
things. Were there then sides on which his predicament threatened to look
rather droll to him? Should he have to pretend to believe—either to
himself or the wretched boy—that there was anything that could make the
latter worse? Wasn’t some such pretence on the other hand involved in the
assumption of possible processes that would make him better? His greatest
uneasiness seemed to peep at him out of the imminent impression that almost any
acceptance of Paris might give one’s authority away. It hung before him
this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a
jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor
differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together,
and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next. It was a
place of which, unmistakeably, Chad was fond; wherefore if he, Strether, should
like it too much, what on earth, with such a bond, would become of either of
them? It all depended of course—which was a gleam of light—on how
the “too much” was measured; though indeed our friend fairly felt,
while he prolonged the meditation I describe, that for himself even already a
certain measure had been reached. It will have been sufficiently seen that he
was not a man to neglect any good chance for reflexion. Was it at all possible
for instance to like Paris enough without liking it too much? He luckily
however hadn’t promised Mrs. Newsome not to like it at all. He was ready
to recognise at this stage that such an engagement would have tied his
hands. The Luxembourg Gardens were incontestably just so adorable at this hour
by reason—in addition to their intrinsic charm—of his not having
taken it. The only engagement he had taken, when he looked the thing in the
face, was to do what he reasonably could.
It upset him a little none the less and after a while to find himself at last
remembering on what current of association he had been floated so far. Old
imaginations of the Latin Quarter had played their part for him, and he had
duly recalled its having been with this scene of rather ominous legend that,
like so many young men in fiction as well as in fact, Chad had begun. He was
now quite out of it, with his “home,” as Strether figured the
place, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, now; which was perhaps why, repairing, not
to fail of justice either, to the elder neighbourhood, our friend had felt he
could allow for the element of the usual, the immemorial, without courting
perturbation. He was not at least in danger of seeing the youth and the
particular Person flaunt by together; and yet he was in the very air of
which—just to feel what the early natural note must have been—he
wished most to take counsel. It became at once vivid to him that he had
originally had, for a few days, an almost envious vision of the boy’s
romantic privilege. Melancholy Mürger, with Francine and Musette and Rodolphe,
at home, was, in the company of the tattered, one—if he not in his single
self two or three—of the unbound, the paper-covered dozen on the shelf;
and when Chad had written, five years ago, after a sojourn then already
prolonged to six months, that he had decided to go in for economy and the real
thing, Strether’s fancy had quite fondly accompanied him in this
migration, which was to convey him, as they somewhat confusedly learned at
Woollett, across the bridges and up the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. This was the
region—Chad had been quite distinct about it—in which the best
French, and many other things, were to be learned at least cost, and in which
all sorts of clever fellows, compatriots there for a purpose, formed an awfully
pleasant set. The clever fellows, the friendly countrymen were mainly young
painters, sculptors, architects, medical students; but they were, Chad sagely
opined, a much more profitable lot to be with—even on the footing of not
being quite one of them—than the “terrible toughs” (Strether
remembered the edifying discrimination) of the American bars and banks
roundabout the Opéra. Chad had thrown out, in the communications following this
one—for at that time he did once in a while communicate—that
several members of a band of earnest workers under one of the great artists had
taken him right in, making him dine every night, almost for nothing, at their
place, and even pressing him not to neglect the hypothesis of there being as
much “in him” as in any of them. There had been literally a moment
at which it appeared there might be something in him; there had been at any
rate a moment at which he had written that he didn’t know but what a
month or two more might see him enrolled in some atelier. The season had
been one at which Mrs. Newsome was moved to gratitude for small mercies; it had
broken on them all as a blessing that their absentee had perhaps a
conscience—that he was sated in fine with idleness, was ambitious of
variety. The exhibition was doubtless as yet not brilliant, but Strether
himself, even by that time much enlisted and immersed, had determined, on the
part of the two ladies, a temperate approval and in fact, as he now
recollected, a certain austere enthusiasm.
But the very next thing that happened had been a dark drop of the curtain. The
son and brother had not browsed long on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève—his
effective little use of the name of which, like his allusion to the best
French, appeared to have been but one of the notes of his rough cunning. The
light refreshment of these vain appearances had not accordingly carried any of
them very far. On the other hand it had gained Chad time; it had given him a
chance, unchecked, to strike his roots, had paved the way for initiations more
direct and more deep. It was Strether’s belief that he had been
comparatively innocent before this first migration, and even that the first
effects of the migration would not have been, without some particular bad
accident, to have been deplored. There had been three months—he had
sufficiently figured it out—in which Chad had wanted to try. He
had tried, though not very hard—he had had his little hour of good
faith. The weakness of this principle in him was that almost any accident
attestedly bad enough was stronger. Such had at any rate markedly been the case
for the precipitation of a special series of impressions. They had proved,
successively, these impressions—all of Musette and Francine, but Musette
and Francine vulgarised by the larger evolution of the type—irresistibly
sharp: he had “taken up,” by what was at the time to be shrinkingly
gathered, as it was scantly mentioned, with one ferociously
“interested” little person after another. Strether had read
somewhere of a Latin motto, a description of the hours, observed on a clock by
a traveller in Spain; and he had been led to apply it in thought to
Chad’s number one, number two, number three. Omnes vulnerant, ultima
necat—they had all morally wounded, the last had morally killed. The
last had been longest in possession—in possession, that is, of whatever
was left of the poor boy’s finer mortality. And it hadn’t been she,
it had been one of her early predecessors, who had determined the second
migration, the expensive return and relapse, the exchange again, as was fairly
to be presumed, of the vaunted best French for some special variety of the
worst.
He pulled himself then at last together for his own progress back; not with the
feeling that he had taken his walk in vain. He prolonged it a little, in the
immediate neighbourhood, after he had quitted his chair; and the upshot of the
whole morning for him was that his campaign had begun. He had wanted to put
himself in relation, and he would be hanged if he were not in relation.
He was that at no moment so much as while, under the old arches of the Odéon,
he lingered before the charming open-air array of literature classic and
casual. He found the effect of tone and tint, in the long charged tables and
shelves, delicate and appetising; the impression—substituting one kind of
low-priced consommation for another—might have been that of one of
the pleasant cafés that overlapped, under an awning, to the pavement; but he
edged along, grazing the tables, with his hands firmly behind him. He
wasn’t there to dip, to consume—he was there to reconstruct. He
wasn’t there for his own profit—not, that is, the direct; he was
there on some chance of feeling the brush of the wing of the stray spirit of
youth. He felt it in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed, as his
inner sense listened, gave out the faint sound, as from far off, of the wild
waving of wings. They were folded now over the breasts of buried generations;
but a flutter or two lived again in the turned page of shock-headed
slouch-hatted loiterers whose young intensity of type, in the direction of pale
acuteness, deepened his vision, and even his appreciation, of racial
differences, and whose manipulation of the uncut volume was too often, however,
but a listening at closed doors. He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of
three or four years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply—for that
was the only way to see it—been too vulgar for his privilege. Surely it
was a privilege to have been young and happy just there. Well, the best
thing Strether knew of him was that he had had such a dream.
But his own actual business, half an hour later, was with a third floor on the
Boulevard Malesherbes—so much as that was definite; and the fact of the
enjoyment by the third-floor windows of a continuous balcony, to which he was
helped by this knowledge, had perhaps something to do with his lingering for
five minutes on the opposite side of the street. There were points as to which
he had quite made up his mind, and one of these bore precisely on the wisdom of
the abruptness to which events had finally committed him, a policy that he was
pleased to find not at all shaken as he now looked at his watch and wondered.
He had announced himself—six months before; had written out at
least that Chad wasn’t to be surprised should he see him some day turn
up. Chad had thereupon, in a few words of rather carefully colourless answer,
offered him a general welcome; and Strether, ruefully reflecting that he might
have understood the warning as a hint to hospitality, a bid for an invitation,
had fallen back upon silence as the corrective most to his own taste. He had
asked Mrs. Newsome moreover not to announce him again; he had so distinct an
opinion on his attacking his job, should he attack it at all, in his own way.
Not the least of this lady’s high merits for him was that he could
absolutely rest on her word. She was the only woman he had known, even at
Woollett, as to whom his conviction was positive that to lie was beyond her
art. Sarah Pocock, for instance, her own daughter, though with social ideals,
as they said, in some respects different—Sarah who was, in her
way, æsthetic, had never refused to human commerce that mitigation of rigour;
there were occasions when he had distinctly seen her apply it. Since,
accordingly, at all events, he had had it from Mrs. Newsome that she had, at
whatever cost to her more strenuous view, conformed, in the matter of preparing
Chad, wholly to his restrictions, he now looked up at the fine continuous
balcony with a safe sense that if the case had been bungled the mistake was at
least his property. Was there perhaps just a suspicion of that in his present
pause on the edge of the Boulevard and well in the pleasant light?
Many things came over him here, and one of them was that he should doubtless
presently know whether he had been shallow or sharp. Another was that the
balcony in question didn’t somehow show as a convenience easy to
surrender. Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognise the truth that
wherever one paused in Paris the imagination reacted before one could stop it.
This perpetual reaction put a price, if one would, on pauses; but it piled up
consequences till there was scarce room to pick one’s steps among them.
What call had he, at such a juncture, for example, to like Chad’s very
house? High broad clear—he was expert enough to make out in a moment that
it was admirably built—it fairly embarrassed our friend by the quality
that, as he would have said, it “sprang” on him. He had struck off
the fancy that it might, as a preliminary, be of service to him to be seen, by
a happy accident, from the third-story windows, which took all the March sun,
but of what service was it to find himself making out after a moment that the
quality “sprung,” the quality produced by measure and balance, the
fine relation of part to part and space to space, was probably—aided by
the presence of ornament as positive as it was discreet, and by the complexion
of the stone, a cold fair grey, warmed and polished a little by
life—neither more nor less than a case of distinction, such a case as he
could only feel unexpectedly as a sort of delivered challenge? Meanwhile,
however, the chance he had allowed for—the chance of being seen in time
from the balcony—had become a fact. Two or three of the windows stood
open to the violet air; and, before Strether had cut the knot by crossing, a
young man had come out and looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and tossed
the match over, and then, resting on the rail, had given himself up to watching
the life below while he smoked. His arrival contributed, in its order, to
keeping Strether in position; the result of which in turn was that Strether
soon felt himself noticed. The young man began to look at him as in
acknowledgement of his being himself in observation.
This was interesting so far as it went, but the interest was affected by the
young man’s not being Chad. Strether wondered at first if he were perhaps
Chad altered, and then saw that this was asking too much of alteration. The
young man was light bright and alert—with an air too pleasant to have
been arrived at by patching. Strether had conceived Chad as patched, but not
beyond recognition. He was in presence, he felt, of amendments enough as they
stood; it was a sufficient amendment that the gentleman up there should be
Chad’s friend. He was young too then, the gentleman up there—he was
very young; young enough apparently to be amused at an elderly watcher, to be
curious even to see what the elderly watcher would do on finding himself
watched. There was youth in that, there was youth in the surrender to the
balcony, there was youth for Strether at this moment in everything but his own
business; and Chad’s thus pronounced association with youth had given the
next instant an extraordinary quick lift to the issue. The balcony, the
distinguished front, testified suddenly, for Strether’s fancy, to
something that was up and up; they placed the whole case materially, and as by
an admirable image, on a level that he found himself at the end of another
moment rejoicing to think he might reach. The young man looked at him still, he
looked at the young man; and the issue, by a rapid process, was that this
knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to him the last of luxuries. To him too
the perched privacy was open, and he saw it now but in one light—that of
the only domicile, the only fireside, in the great ironic city, on which he had
the shadow of a claim. Miss Gostrey had a fireside; she had told him of it, and
it was something that doubtless awaited him; but Miss Gostrey hadn’t yet
arrived—she mightn’t arrive for days; and the sole attenuation of
his excluded state was his vision of the small, the admittedly secondary hotel
in the bye-street from the Rue de la Paix, in which her solicitude for his
purse had placed him, which affected him somehow as all indoor chill,
glass-roofed court and slippery staircase, and which, by the same token,
expressed the presence of Waymarsh even at times when Waymarsh might have been
certain to be round at the bank. It came to pass before he moved that Waymarsh,
and Waymarsh alone, Waymarsh not only undiluted but positively strengthened,
struck him as the present alternative to the young man in the balcony. When he
did move it was fairly to escape that alternative. Taking his way over the
street at last and passing through the porte-cochère of the house was
like consciously leaving Waymarsh out. However, he would tell him all about it.
