The Ambassadors (41 page)

Strether felt the bravery, at the least, of her presenting herself so promptly to sound that note, and yet asked himself what other note, after all, she
could
strike from the moment she presented herself at all. She could meet Mrs. Pocock only on the ground of the obvious, and what feature of Chad’s situation was more eminent than the fact that he had created for himself a new set of circumstances? Unless she hid herself altogether she could show but as one of these, an illustration of his domiciled and indeed of his confirmed condition. And the consciousness of all this in her charming eyes was so clear and fine that as she thus publicly drew him into her boat she produced in him such a silent agitation as he was not to fail afterwards to denounce as pusillanimous. “Ah don’t be so charming to me!—for it makes us intimate, and after all what
is
between us when I’ve been so tremendously on my guard and have seen you but half a dozen times?” He recognized once more the perverse law that so inveterately governed his poor personal aspects: it would be exactly
like
the way things always turned out for him that he should affect Mrs. Pocock and Waymarsh as launched in a relation in which he had really never been launched
at all. They were at this very moment—they could only be—attributing to him the full licence of it, and all by the operation of her own tone with him; whereas his sole licence had been to cling with intensity to the brink, not to dip so much as a toe into the flood. But the flicker of his fear on this occasion was not, as may be added, to repeat itself; it sprang up, for its moment, only to die down and then go out for ever. To meet his fellow visitor’s invocation and, with Sarah’s brilliant eyes on him, answer,
was
quite sufficiently to step into her boat. During the rest of the time her visit lasted he felt himself proceed to each of the proper offices, successively, for helping to keep the adventurous skiff afloat. It rocked beneath him, but he settled himself in his place. He took up an oar and, since he was to have the credit of pulling, pulled.

“That will make it all the pleasanter if it so happens that we
do
meet,” Madame de Vionnet had further observed in reference to Mrs. Pocock’s mention of her initiated state; and she had immediately added that, after all, her hostess couldn’t be in need with the good offices of Mr. Strether so close at hand. “It’s he, I gather, who has learnt to know his Paris, and to love it, better than any one ever before in so short a time; so that between him and your brother, when it comes to the point, how can you possibly want for good guidance? The great thing, Mr. Strether will show you,” she smiled, “is just to let one’s self go.”

“Oh I’ve not let myself go very far,” Strether answered, feeling quite as if he had been called upon to hint to Mrs. Pocock how Parisians could talk. “I’m only afraid of showing I haven’t let myself go far enough. I’ve taken a good deal of time, but I must quite have had the air of not budging from one spot.” He looked at Sarah in a manner that he thought she might take as engaging, and he made, under Madame de Vionnet’s protection, as it were, his first personal point. “What has really happened has been that, all the while, I’ve done what I came out for.”

Yet it only at first gave Madame de Vionnet a chance immediately to take him up. “You’ve renewed acquaintance with your friend—you’ve learnt to know him again.” She spoke with such cheerful helpfulness that they might, in a common cause, have been calling together and pledged to mutual aid.

Waymarsh, at this, as if he had been in question, straightway turned from the window. “Oh yes, Countess—he has renewed acquaintance with
me
, and he
has
, I guess, learnt something about me, though I don’t know how much he has liked it. It’s for Strether himself to say whether he has felt it justifies his course.”

“Oh but
you
,” said the Countess gaily, “are not in the least what he came out for—is he really, Strether? and I hadn’t you at all in my mind. I was thinking of Mr. Newsome, of whom we think so much and with whom, precisely, Mrs. Pocock has given herself the opportunity to take up threads. What a pleasure for you both!” Madame de Vionnet, with her eyes on Sarah, bravely continued.

Mrs. Pocock met her handsomely, but Strether quickly saw she meant to accept no version of her movements or plans from any other lips. She required no patronage and no support, which were but other names for a false position; she would show in her own way what she chose to show, and this she expressed with a dry glitter that recalled to him a fine Woollett winter morning. “I’ve never wanted for opportunities to see my brother. We’ve many things to think of at home, and great responsibilities and occupations, and our home’s not an impossible place. We’ve plenty of reasons,” Sarah continued a little piercingly, “for everything we do”—and in short she wouldn’t give herself the least little scrap away. But she added as one who was always bland and who could afford a concession; “I’ve come because—well, because we do come.”

“Ah then fortunately!”—Madame de Vionnet breathed it to the air. Five minutes later they were on their feet for her to take leave, standing together in an affability that had succeeded in surviving
a further exchange of remarks; only with the emphasized appearance on Waymarsh’s part of a tendency to revert, in a ruminating manner and as with an instinctive or a precautionary lightening of his tread, to an open window and his point of vantage. The glazed and gilded room, all red damask, ormolu, mirrors, clocks, looked south, and the shutters were bowed upon the summer morning; but the Tuileries garden and what was beyond it, over which the whole place hung, were things visible through gaps; so that the far-spreading presence of Paris came up in coolness, dimness and invitation, in the twinkle of gilt-tipped palings, the crunch of gravel, the click of hoofs, the crack of whips, things that suggested some parade of the circus. “I think it probable,” said Mrs. Pocock, “that I shall have the opportunity of going to my brother’s. I’ve no doubt it’s very pleasant indeed.” She spoke as to Strether, but her face was turned with an intensity of brightness to Madame de Vionnet, and there was a moment during which, while she thus fronted her, our friend expected to hear her add: “I’m much obliged to you, I’m sure, for inviting me there.” He guessed that for five seconds these words were on the point of coming; he heard them as clearly as if they had been spoken; but he presently knew they had just failed—knew it by a glance, quick and fine, from Madame de Vionnet, which told him that she too had felt them in the air, but that the point had luckily not been made in any manner requiring notice. This left her free to reply only to what had been said.

“That the Boulevard Malesherbes may be common ground for us offers me the best prospect I see for the pleasure of meeting you again.”

“Oh I shall come to see you, since you’ve been so good”: and Mrs. Pocock looked her invader well in the eyes. The flush in Sarah’s cheeks had by this time settled to a small definite crimson spot that was not without its own bravery; she held her head a
good deal up, and it came to Strether that of the two, at this moment, she was the one who most carried out the idea of a Countess. He quite took in, however, that she would really return her visitor’s civility: she wouldn’t report again at Woollett without at least so much producible history as that in her pocket.

“I want extremely to be able to show you my little daughter,” Madame de Vionnet went on; “and I should have brought her with me if I hadn’t wished first to ask your leave. I was in hopes I should perhaps find Miss Pocock, of whose being with you I’ve heard from Mr. Newsome and whose acquaintance I should so much like my child to make. If I have the pleasure of seeing her and you do permit it I shall venture to ask her to be kind to Jeanne. Mr. Strether will tell you”—she beautifully kept it up—“that my poor girl is gentle and good and rather lonely. They’ve made friends, he and she, ever so happily, and he doesn’t, I believe, think ill of her. As for Jeanne herself he has had the same success with her that I know he has had here wherever he has turned.” She seemed to ask him for permission to say these things, or seemed rather to take it, softly and happily, with the ease of intimacy, for granted, and he had quite the consciousness now that not to meet her at any point more than halfway would be odiously, basely to abandon her. Yes, he was
with
her, and, opposed even in this covert, this semi-safe fashion to those who were not, he felt, strangely and confusedly, but excitedly, inspiringly, how much and how far. It was as if he had positively waited in suspense for something from her that would let him in deeper, so that he might show her how he could take it. And what did in fact come as she drew out a little her farewell served sufficiently the purpose. “As his success is a matter that I’m sure he’ll never mention for himself, I feel, you see, the less scruple; which it’s very good of me to say, you know, by the way,” she added as she addressed herself to him; “considering how little direct advantage I’ve gained from your triumphs
with
me
. When does one ever see you? I wait at home and I languish. You’ll have rendered me the service, Mrs. Pocock, at least,” she wound up, “of giving me one of my much-too-rare glimpses of this gentleman.”

“I certainly should be sorry to deprive you of anything that seems so much, as you describe it, your natural due. Mr. Strether and I are very old friends,” Sarah allowed, “but the privilege of his society isn’t a thing I shall quarrel about with any one.”

“And yet, dear Sarah,” he freely broke in, “I feel, when I hear you say that, that you don’t quite do justice to the important truth of the extent to which—as you’re also mine—I’m
your
natural due. I should like much better,” he laughed, “to see you fight for me.”

She met him, Mrs. Pocock, on this, with an arrest of speech—with a certain breathlessness, as he immediately fancied, on the score of a freedom for which she wasn’t quite prepared. It had flared up—for all the harm he had intended by it—because, confoundedly, he didn’t want any more to be afraid about her than he wanted to be afraid about Madame de Vionnet. He had never, naturally, called her anything but Sarah at home, and though he had perhaps never quite so markedly invoked her as his “dear,” that was somehow partly because no occasion had hitherto laid so effective a trap for it. But something admonished him now that it was too late—unless indeed it were possibly too early; and that he at any rate shouldn’t have pleased Mrs. Pocock the more by it. “Well, Mr. Strether—!” she murmured with vagueness, yet with sharpness, while her crimson spots burned a trifle brighter and he was aware that this must be for the present the limit of her response. Madame de Vionnet had already, however, come to his aid, and Waymarsh, as if for further participation, moved again back to them. It was true that the aid rendered by Madame de Vionnet was questionable; it was a sign that, for all one might
confess to with her, and for all she might complain of not enjoying, she could still insidiously show how much of the material of conversation had accumulated between them.

“The real truth is, you know, that you sacrifice one without mercy to dear old Maria. She leaves no room in your life for anybody else. Do you know,” she enquired of Mrs. Pocock, “about dear old Maria? The worst is that Miss Gostrey is really a wonderful woman.”

“Oh yes indeed,” Strether answered for her, “Mrs. Pocock knows about Miss Gostrey. Your mother, Sarah, must have told you about her; your mother knows everything,” he sturdily pursued. “And I cordially admit,” he added with his conscious gaiety of courage, “that she’s as wonderful a woman as you like.”

“Ah it isn’t
I
who ‘like,’ dear Mr. Strether, anything to do with the matter!” Sarah Pocock promptly protested; “and I’m by no means sure I have—from my mother or from any one else—a notion of whom you’re talking about.”

“Well, he won’t let you see her, you know,” Madame de Vionnet sympathetically threw in. “He never lets
me
—old friends as we are: I mean as I am with Maria. He reserves her for his best hours; keeps her consummately to himself; only gives us others the crumbs of the feast.”

“Well, Countess,
I’ve
had some of the crumbs,” Waymarsh observed with weight and covering her with his large look; which led her to break in before he could go on.

“
Comment donc
, he shares her with you?” she exclaimed in droll stupefaction. “Take care you don’t have, before you go much further, rather more of all
ces dames
than you may know what to do with!”

But he only continued in his massive way. “I can post you about the lady, Mrs. Pocock, so far as you may care to hear. I’ve seen her quite a number of times, and I was practically present when they
made acquaintance. I’ve kept my eye on her right along, but I don’t know as there’s any real harm in her.”

“ ‘Harm’?” Madame de Vionnet quickly echoed. “Why she’s the dearest and cleverest of all the clever and dear.”

“Well, you run her pretty close, Countess,” Waymarsh returned with spirit; “though there’s no doubt she’s pretty well up in things. She knows her way round Europe. Above all there’s no doubt she does love Strether.”

“Ah but we all do that—we all love Strether: it isn’t a merit!” their fellow visitor laughed, keeping to her idea with a good conscience at which our friend was aware that he marvelled, though he trusted also for it, as he met her exquisitely expressive eyes, to some later light.

The prime effect of her tone, however—and it was a truth which his own eyes gave back to her in sad ironic play—could only be to make him feel that, to say such things to a man in public, a woman must practically think of him as ninety years old. He had turned awkwardly, responsively red, he knew, at her mention of Maria Gostrey; Sarah Pocock’s presence—the particular quality of it—had made this inevitable; and then he had grown still redder in proportion as he hated to have shown anything at all. He felt indeed that he was showing much, as, uncomfortably and almost in pain, he offered up his redness to Waymarsh, who, strangely enough, seemed now to be looking at him with a certain explanatory yearning. Something deep—something built on their old old relation—passed, in this complexity, between them; he got the side-wind of a loyalty that stood behind all actual queer questions. Waymarsh’s dry bare humour—as it gave itself to be taken—gloomed out to demand justice. “Well, if you talk of Miss Barrace I’ve
my
chance too,” it appeared stiffly to nod, and it granted that it was giving him away, but struggled to add that it did so only to save him. The sombre glow stared it at him till it fairly sounded
out—“to save you, poor old man, to save you; to save you in spite of yourself.” Yet it was somehow just this communication that showed him to himself as more than ever lost. Still another result of it was to put before him as never yet that between his comrade and the interest represented by Sarah there was already a basis. Beyond all question now, yes: Waymarsh had been in occult relation with Mrs. Newsome—out, out it all came in the very effort of his face. “Yes, you’re feeling my hand”—he as good as proclaimed it; “but only because this at least I
shall
have got out of the damned Old World: that I shall have picked up the pieces into which it has caused you to crumble.” It was as if in short, after an instant, Strether had not only had it from him, but had recognized that so far as this went the instant had cleared the air. Our friend understood and approved; he had the sense that they wouldn’t otherwise speak of it. This would be all, and it would mark in himself a kind of intelligent generosity. It was with grim Sarah then—Sarah grim for all her grace—that Waymarsh had begun at ten o’clock in the morning to save him. Well—if he
could
, poor dear man, with his big bleak kindness! The upshot of which crowded perception was that Strether, on his own side, still showed no more than he absolutely had to. He showed the least possible by saying to Mrs. Pocock after an interval much briefer than our glance at the picture reflected in him: “Oh it’s as true as they please!—There’s no Miss Gostrey for any one but me—not the least little peep. I keep her to myself.”