The Ambassadors (12 page)

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; 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 Murger, with Francine and Musette and Rodolphe, at home,
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-Genevieve. 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 Opera. 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-Genevieve—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
Odeon, 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 cafes 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, aesthetic, 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?