“I’ve come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither
more nor less, and take you straight home; so you’ll be so good as
immediately and favourably to consider it!”—Strether, face to face
with Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and with
an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone. For Chad’s
receptive attitude was that of a person who had been gracefully quiet while the
messenger at last reaching him has run a mile through the dust. During some
seconds after he had spoken Strether felt as if he had made some such
exertion; he was not even certain that the perspiration wasn’t on his
brow. It was the kind of consciousness for which he had to thank the look that,
while the strain lasted, the young man’s eyes gave him. They
reflected—and the deuce of the thing was that they reflected really with
a sort of shyness of kindness—his momentarily disordered state; which
fact brought on in its turn for our friend the dawn of a fear that Chad might
simply “take it out”—take everything out—in being sorry
for him. Such a fear, any fear, was unpleasant. But everything was unpleasant;
it was odd how everything had suddenly turned so. This however was no reason
for letting the least thing go. Strether had the next minute proceeded as
roundly as if with an advantage to follow up. “Of course I’m a
busybody, if you want to fight the case to the death; but after all mainly in
the sense of having known you and having given you such attention as you kindly
permitted when you were in jackets and knickerbockers. Yes—it was
knickerbockers, I’m busybody enough to remember that; and that you had,
for your age—I speak of the first far-away time—tremendously stout
legs. Well, we want you to break. Your mother’s heart’s
passionately set upon it, but she has above and beyond that excellent arguments
and reasons. I’ve not put them into her head—I needn’t remind
you how little she’s a person who needs that. But they exist—you
must take it from me as a friend both of hers and yours—for myself as
well. I didn’t invent them, I didn’t originally work them out; but
I understand them, I think I can explain them—by which I mean make you
actively do them justice; and that’s why you see me here. You had better
know the worst at once. It’s a question of an immediate rupture and an
immediate return. I’ve been conceited enough to dream I can sugar that
pill. I take at any rate the greatest interest in the question. I took it
already before I left home, and I don’t mind telling you that, altered as
you are, I take it still more now that I’ve seen you. You’re older
and—I don’t know what to call it!—more of a handful; but
you’re by so much the more, I seem to make out, to our purpose.”
“Do I strike you as improved?” Strether was to recall that Chad had
at this point enquired.
He was likewise to recall—and it had to count for some time as his
greatest comfort—that it had been “given” him, as they said
at Woollett, to reply with some presence of mind: “I haven’t the
least idea.” He was really for a while to like thinking he had been
positively hard. On the point of conceding that Chad had improved in
appearance, but that to the question of appearance the remark must be confined,
he checked even that compromise and left his reservation bare. Not only his
moral, but also, as it were, his æsthetic sense had a little to pay for this,
Chad being unmistakeably—and wasn’t it a matter of the confounded
grey hair again?—handsomer than he had ever promised. That however fell
in perfectly with what Strether had said. They had no desire to keep down his
proper expansion, and he wouldn’t be less to their purpose for not
looking, as he had too often done of old, only bold and wild. There was indeed
a signal particular in which he would distinctly be more so. Strether
didn’t, as he talked, absolutely follow himself; he only knew he was
clutching his thread and that he held it from moment to moment a little
tighter; his mere uninterruptedness during the few minutes helped him to do
that. He had frequently for a month, turned over what he should say on this
very occasion, and he seemed at last to have said nothing he had thought
of—everything was so totally different.
But in spite of all he had put the flag at the window. This was what he had
done, and there was a minute during which he affected himself as having shaken
it hard, flapped it with a mighty flutter, straight in front of his
companion’s nose. It gave him really almost the sense of having already
acted his part. The momentary relief—as if from the knowledge that
nothing of that at least could be undone—sprang from a particular
cause, the cause that had flashed into operation, in Miss Gostrey’s box,
with direct apprehension, with amazed recognition, and that had been concerned
since then in every throb of his consciousness. What it came to was that with
an absolutely new quantity to deal with one simply couldn’t know.
The new quantity was represented by the fact that Chad had been made over. That
was all; whatever it was it was everything. Strether had never seen the thing
so done before—it was perhaps a speciality of Paris. If one had been
present at the process one might little by little have mastered the result; but
he was face to face, as matters stood, with the finished business. It had
freely been noted for him that he might be received as a dog among skittles,
but that was on the basis of the old quantity. He had originally thought of
lines and tones as things to be taken, but these possibilities had now quite
melted away. There was no computing at all what the young man before him would
think or feel or say on any subject whatever. This intelligence Strether had
afterwards, to account for his nervousness, reconstituted as he might, just as
he had also reconstituted the promptness with which Chad had corrected his
uncertainty. An extraordinarily short time had been required for the
correction, and there had ceased to be anything negative in his
companion’s face and air as soon as it was made. “Your engagement
to my mother has become then what they call here a fait
accompli?”—it had consisted, the determinant touch, in nothing
more than that.
Well, that was enough, Strether had felt while his answer hung fire. He had
felt at the same time, however, that nothing could less become him than that it
should hang fire too long. “Yes,” he said brightly, “it was
on the happy settlement of the question that I started. You see therefore to
what tune I’m in your family. Moreover,” he added,
“I’ve been supposing you’d suppose it.”
“Oh I’ve been supposing it for a long time, and what you tell me
helps me to understand that you should want to do something. To do something, I
mean,” said Chad, “to commemorate an event so—what do they
call it?—so auspicious. I see you make out, and not unnaturally,”
he continued, “that bringing me home in triumph as a sort of
wedding-present to Mother would commemorate it better than anything else. You
want to make a bonfire in fact,” he laughed, “and you pitch me on.
Thank you, thank you!” he laughed again.
He was altogether easy about it, and this made Strether now see how at bottom,
and in spite of the shade of shyness that really cost him nothing, he had from
the first moment been easy about everything. The shade of shyness was mere good
taste. People with manners formed could apparently have, as one of their best
cards, the shade of shyness too. He had leaned a little forward to speak; his
elbows were on the table; and the inscrutable new face that he had got
somewhere and somehow was brought by the movement nearer to his critic’s.
There was a fascination for that critic in its not being, this ripe
physiognomy, the face that, under observation at least, he had originally
carried away from Woollett. Strether found a certain freedom on his own side in
defining it as that of a man of the world—a formula that indeed seemed to
come now in some degree to his relief; that of a man to whom things had
happened and were variously known. In gleams, in glances, the past did perhaps
peep out of it; but such lights were faint and instantly merged. Chad was brown
and thick and strong, and of old Chad had been rough. Was all the difference
therefore that he was actually smooth? Possibly; for that he was smooth
was as marked as in the taste of a sauce or in the rub of a hand. The effect of
it was general—it had retouched his features, drawn them with a cleaner
line. It had cleared his eyes and settled his colour and polished his fine
square teeth—the main ornament of his face; and at the same time that it
had given him a form and a surface, almost a design, it had toned his voice,
established his accent, encouraged his smile to more play and his other motions
to less. He had formerly, with a great deal of action, expressed very little;
and he now expressed whatever was necessary with almost none at all. It was as
if in short he had really, copious perhaps but shapeless, been put into a firm
mould and turned successfully out. The phenomenon—Strether kept eyeing it
as a phenomenon, an eminent case—was marked enough to be touched by the
finger. He finally put his hand across the table and laid it on Chad’s
arm. “If you’ll promise me—here on the spot and giving me
your word of honour—to break straight off, you’ll make the future
the real right thing for all of us alike. You’ll ease off the strain of
this decent but none the less acute suspense in which I’ve for so many
days been waiting for you, and let me turn in to rest. I shall leave you with
my blessing and go to bed in peace.”
Chad again fell back at this and, his hands pocketed, settled himself a little;
in which posture he looked, though he rather anxiously smiled, only the more
earnest. Then Strether seemed to see that he was really nervous, and he took
that as what he would have called a wholesome sign. The only mark of it
hitherto had been his more than once taking off and putting on his wide-brimmed
crush hat. He had at this moment made the motion again to remove it, then had
only pushed it back, so that it hung informally on his strong young grizzled
crop. It was a touch that gave the note of the familiar—the intimate and
the belated—to their quiet colloquy; and it was indeed by some such
trivial aid that Strether became aware at the same moment of something else.
The observation was at any rate determined in him by some light too fine to
distinguish from so many others, but it was none the less sharply determined.
Chad looked unmistakeably during these instants—well, as Strether put it
to himself, all he was worth. Our friend had a sudden apprehension of what that
would on certain sides be. He saw him in a flash as the young man marked out by
women; and for a concentrated minute the dignity, the comparative austerity, as
he funnily fancied it, of this character affected him almost with awe. There
was an experience on his interlocutor’s part that looked out at him from
under the displaced hat, and that looked out moreover by a force of its own,
the deep fact of its quantity and quality, and not through Chad’s
intending bravado or swagger. That was then the way men marked out by women
were—and also the men by whom the women were doubtless in turn
sufficiently distinguished. It affected Strether for thirty seconds as a
relevant truth, a truth which, however, the next minute, had fallen into its
relation. “Can’t you imagine there being some questions,”
Chad asked, “that a fellow—however much impressed by your charming
way of stating things—would like to put to you first?”
“Oh yes—easily. I’m here to answer everything. I think I can
even tell you things, of the greatest interest to you, that you won’t
know enough to ask me. We’ll take as many days to it as you like. But I
want,” Strether wound up, “to go to bed now.”
“Really?”
Chad had spoken in such surprise that he was amused. “Can’t you
believe it?—with what you put me through?”
The young man seemed to consider. “Oh I haven’t put you through
much—yet.”
“Do you mean there’s so much more to come?” Strether laughed.
“All the more reason then that I should gird myself.” And as if to
mark what he felt he could by this time count on he was already on his feet.
Chad, still seated, stayed him, with a hand against him, as he passed between
their table and the next. “Oh we shall get on!”
The tone was, as who should say, everything Strether could have desired; and
quite as good the expression of face with which the speaker had looked up at
him and kindly held him. All these things lacked was their not showing quite so
much as the fruit of experience. Yes, experience was what Chad did play on him,
if he didn’t play any grossness of defiance. Of course experience was in
a manner defiance; but it wasn’t, at any rate—rather indeed quite
the contrary!—grossness; which was so much gained. He fairly grew older,
Strether thought, while he himself so reasoned. Then with his mature pat of his
visitor’s arm he also got up; and there had been enough of it all by this
time to make the visitor feel that something was settled. Wasn’t
it settled that he had at least the testimony of Chad’s own belief in a
settlement? Strether found himself treating Chad’s profession that they
would get on as a sufficient basis for going to bed. He hadn’t
nevertheless after this gone to bed directly; for when they had again passed
out together into the mild bright night a check had virtually sprung from
nothing more than a small circumstance which might have acted only as
confirming quiescence. There were people, expressive sound, projected light,
still abroad, and after they had taken in for a moment, through everything, the
great clear architectural street, they turned off in tacit union to the quarter
of Strether’s hotel. “Of course,” Chad here abruptly began,
“of course Mother’s making things out with you about me has been
natural—and of course also you’ve had a good deal to go upon.
Still, you must have filled out.”
He had stopped, leaving his friend to wonder a little what point he wished to
make; and this it was that enabled Strether meanwhile to make one. “Oh
we’ve never pretended to go into detail. We weren’t in the least
bound to that. It was ‘filling out’ enough to miss you as we
did.”
But Chad rather oddly insisted, though under the high lamp at their corner,
where they paused, he had at first looked as if touched by Strether’s
allusion to the long sense, at home, of his absence. “What I mean is you
must have imagined.”
“Imagined what?”
“Well—horrors.”
It affected Strether: horrors were so little—superficially at
least—in this robust and reasoning image. But he was none the less there
to be veracious. “Yes, I dare say we have imagined horrors. But
where’s the harm if we haven’t been wrong?”
Chad raised his face to the lamp, and it was one of the moments at which he
had, in his extraordinary way, most his air of designedly showing himself. It
was as if at these instants he just presented himself, his identity so rounded
off, his palpable presence and his massive young manhood, as such a link in the
chain as might practically amount to a kind of demonstration. It was as
if—and how but anomalously?—he couldn’t after all help
thinking sufficiently well of these things to let them go for what they were
worth. What could there be in this for Strether but the hint of some
self-respect, some sense of power, oddly perverted; something latent and beyond
access, ominous and perhaps enviable? The intimation had the next thing, in a
flash, taken on a name—a name on which our friend seized as he asked
himself if he weren’t perhaps really dealing with an irreducible young
Pagan. This description—he quite jumped at it—had a sound that
gratified his mental ear, so that of a sudden he had already adopted it.
Pagan—yes, that was, wasn’t it? what Chad would logically
be. It was what he must be. It was what he was. The idea was a clue and,
instead of darkening the prospect, projected a certain clearness. Strether made
out in this quick ray that a Pagan was perhaps, at the pass they had come to,
the thing most wanted at Woollett. They’d be able to do with one—a
good one; he’d find an opening—yes; and Strether’s
imagination even now prefigured and accompanied the first appearance there of
the rousing personage. He had only the slight discomfort of feeling, as the
young man turned away from the lamp, that his thought had in the momentary
silence possibly been guessed. “Well, I’ve no doubt,” said
Chad, “you’ve come near enough. The details, as you say,
don’t matter. It has been generally the case that I’ve let
myself go. But I’m coming round—I’m not so bad now.”
With which they walked on again to Strether’s hotel.
“Do you mean,” the latter asked as they approached the door,
“that there isn’t any woman with you now?”
“But pray what has that to do with it?”
“Why it’s the whole question.”
“Of my going home?” Chad was clearly surprised. “Oh not much!
Do you think that when I want to go any one will have any power—”
“To keep you”—Strether took him straight up—“from
carrying out your wish? Well, our idea has been that somebody has
hitherto—or a good many persons perhaps—kept you pretty well from
‘wanting.’ That’s what—if you’re in
anybody’s hands—may again happen. You don’t answer my
question”—he kept it up; “but if you aren’t in
anybody’s hands so much the better. There’s nothing then but what
makes for your going.”
Chad turned this over. “I don’t answer your question?” He
spoke quite without resenting it. “Well, such questions have always a
rather exaggerated side. One doesn’t know quite what you mean by being in
women’s ‘hands.’ It’s all so vague. One is when one
isn’t. One isn’t when one is. And then one can’t quite give
people away.” He seemed kindly to explain. “I’ve never
got stuck—so very hard; and, as against anything at any time really
better, I don’t think I’ve ever been afraid.” There was
something in it that held Strether to wonder, and this gave him time to go on.
He broke out as with a more helpful thought. “Don’t you know how I
like Paris itself?”
The upshot was indeed to make our friend marvel. “Oh if
that’s all that’s the matter with you—!” It was
he who almost showed resentment.
Chad’s smile of a truth more than met it. “But isn’t that
enough?”
Strether hesitated, but it came out. “Not enough for your mother!”
Spoken, however, it sounded a trifle odd—the effect of which was that
Chad broke into a laugh. Strether, at this, succumbed as well, though with
extreme brevity. “Permit us to have still our theory. But if you
are so free and so strong you’re inexcusable. I’ll write in
the morning,” he added with decision. “I’ll say I’ve
got you.”
This appeared to open for Chad a new interest. “How often do you
write?”
“Oh perpetually.”
“And at great length?”
Strether had become a little impatient. “I hope it’s not found too
great.”
“Oh I’m sure not. And you hear as often?”
Again Strether paused. “As often as I deserve.”
“Mother writes,” said Chad, “a lovely letter.”
Strether, before the closed porte-cochère, fixed him a moment.
“It’s more, my boy, than you do! But our suppositions
don’t matter,” he added, “if you’re actually not
entangled.”
Chad’s pride seemed none the less a little touched. “I never
was that—let me insist. I always had my own way.” With which
he pursued: “And I have it at present.”
“Then what are you here for? What has kept you,” Strether asked,
“if you have been able to leave?”
It made Chad, after a stare, throw himself back. “Do you think
one’s kept only by women?” His surprise and his verbal emphasis
rang out so clear in the still street that Strether winced till he remembered
the safety of their English speech. “Is that,” the young man
demanded, “what they think at Woollett?” At the good faith in the
question Strether had changed colour, feeling that, as he would have said, he
had put his foot in it. He had appeared stupidly to misrepresent what they
thought at Woollett; but before he had time to rectify Chad again was upon him.
“I must say then you show a low mind!”
It so fell in, unhappily for Strether, with that reflexion of his own prompted
in him by the pleasant air of the Boulevard Malesherbes, that its disconcerting
force was rather unfairly great. It was a dig that, administered by
himself—and administered even to poor Mrs. Newsome—was no more than
salutary; but administered by Chad—and quite logically—it came
nearer drawing blood. They hadn’t a low mind—nor any
approach to one; yet incontestably they had worked, and with a certain
smugness, on a basis that might be turned against them. Chad had at any rate
pulled his visitor up; he had even pulled up his admirable mother; he had
absolutely, by a turn of the wrist and a jerk of the far-flung noose, pulled
up, in a bunch, Woollett browsing in its pride. There was no doubt Woollett
had insisted on his coarseness; and what he at present stood there for
in the sleeping street was, by his manner of striking the other note, to make
of such insistence a preoccupation compromising to the insisters. It was
exactly as if they had imputed to him a vulgarity that he had by a mere gesture
caused to fall from him. The devil of the case was that Strether felt it, by
the same stroke, as falling straight upon himself. He had been wondering a
minute ago if the boy weren’t a Pagan, and he found himself wondering now
if he weren’t by chance a gentleman. It didn’t in the least, on the
spot, spring up helpfully for him that a person couldn’t at the same time
be both. There was nothing at this moment in the air to challenge the
combination; there was everything to give it on the contrary something of a
flourish. It struck Strether into the bargain as doing something to meet the
most difficult of the questions; though perhaps indeed only by substituting
another. Wouldn’t it be precisely by having learned to be a gentleman
that he had mastered the consequent trick of looking so well that one could
scarce speak to him straight? But what in the world was the clue to such a
prime producing cause? There were too many clues then that Strether still
lacked, and these clues to clues were among them. What it accordingly amounted
to for him was that he had to take full in the face a fresh attribution of
ignorance. He had grown used by this time to reminders, especially from his own
lips, of what he didn’t know; but he had borne them because in the first
place they were private and because in the second they practically conveyed a
tribute. He didn’t know what was bad, and—as others didn’t
know how little he knew it—he could put up with his state. But if he
didn’t know, in so important a particular, what was good, Chad at least
was now aware he didn’t; and that, for some reason, affected our friend
as curiously public. It was in fact an exposed condition that the young man
left him in long enough for him to feel its chill—till he saw fit, in a
word, generously again to cover him. This last was in truth what Chad quite
gracefully did. But he did it as with a simple thought that met the whole of
the case. “Oh I’m all right!” It was what Strether had rather
bewilderedly to go to bed on.
