The Ambassadors (14 page)

"Then what did you come over for?"

"Well, I suppose exactly to see for myself—without their
aid."

"Then what do you want mine for?"

"Oh," Strether laughed, "you're not one of THEM! I do know what
you know."

As, however, this last assertion caused Waymarsh again to look
at him hard—such being the latter's doubt of its implications—he
felt his justification lame. Which was still more the case when
Waymarsh presently said: "Look here, Strether. Quit this."

Our friend smiled with a doubt of his own. "Do you mean my
tone?"

"No—damn your tone. I mean your nosing round. Quit the whole
job. Let them stew in their juice. You're being used for a thing
you ain't fit for. People don't take a fine-tooth comb to groom a
horse."

"Am I a fine-tooth comb?" Strether laughed. "It's something I
never called myself!"

"It's what you are, all the same. You ain't so young as you
were, but you've kept your teeth."

He acknowledged his friend's humour. "Take care I don't get them
into YOU! You'd like them, my friends at home, Waymarsh," he
declared; "you'd really particularly like them. And I know"—it was
slightly irrelevant, but he gave it sudden and singular force—"I
know they'd like you!"

"Oh don't work them off on ME!" Waymarsh groaned.

Yet Strether still lingered with his hands in his pockets. "It's
really quite as indispensable as I say that Chad should be got
back."

"Indispensable to whom? To you?"

"Yes," Strether presently said.

"Because if you get him you also get Mrs. Newsome?"

Strether faced it. "Yes."

"And if you don't get him you don't get her?"

It might be merciless, but he continued not to flinch. "I think
it might have some effect on our personal understanding. Chad's of
real importance—or can easily become so if he will—to the
business."

"And the business is of real importance to his mother's
husband?"

"Well, I naturally want what my future wife wants. And the thing
will be much better if we have our own man in it."

"If you have your own man in it, in other words," Waymarsh said,
"you'll marry—you personally—more money. She's already rich, as I
understand you, but she'll be richer still if the business can be
made to boom on certain lines that you've laid down."

"I haven't laid them down," Strether promptly returned. "Mr.
Newsome—who knew extraordinarily well what he was about—laid them
down ten years ago."

Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake of his mane,
THAT didn't matter! "You're fierce for the boom anyway."

His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice of the
charge. "I can scarcely be called fierce, I think, when I so freely
take my chance of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced
in a sense counter to Mrs. Newsome's own feelings."

Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look. "I see. You're
afraid yourself of being squared. But you're a humbug," he added,
"all the same."

"Oh!" Strether quickly protested.

"Yes, you ask me for protection—which makes you very
interesting; and then you won't take it. You say you want to be
squashed—"

"Ah but not so easily! Don't you see," Strether demanded "where
my interest, as already shown you, lies? It lies in my not being
squared. If I'm squared where's my marriage? If I miss my errand I
miss that; and if I miss that I miss everything—I'm nowhere."

Waymarsh—but all relentlessly—took this in. "What do I care
where you are if you're spoiled?"

Their eyes met on it an instant. "Thank you awfully," Strether
at last said. "But don't you think HER judgement of that—?"

"Ought to content me? No."

It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that
Strether again laughed. "You do her injustice. You really MUST know
her. Good-night."

He breakfasted with Mr. Bilham on the morrow, and, as
inconsequently befell, with Waymarsh massively of the party. The
latter announced, at the eleventh hour and much to his friend's
surprise, that, damn it, he would as soon join him as do anything
else; on which they proceeded together, strolling in a state of
detachment practically luxurious for them to the Boulevard
Malesherbes, a couple engaged that day with the sharp spell of
Paris as confessedly, it might have been seen, as any couple among
the daily thousands so compromised. They walked, wandered, wondered
and, a little, lost themselves; Strether hadn't had for years so
rich a consciousness of time—a bag of gold into which he constantly
dipped for a handful. It was present to him that when the little
business with Mr. Bilham should be over he would still have shining
hours to use absolutely as he liked. There was no great pulse of
haste yet in this process of saving Chad; nor was that effect a bit
more marked as he sat, half an hour later, with his legs under
Chad's mahogany, with Mr. Bilham on one side, with a friend of Mr.
Bilham's on the other, with Waymarsh stupendously opposite, and
with the great hum of Paris coming up in softness, vagueness-for
Strether himself indeed already positive sweetness—through the
sunny windows toward which, the day before, his curiosity had
raised its wings from below. The feeling strongest with him at that
moment had borne fruit almost faster than he could taste it, and
Strether literally felt at the present hour that there was a
precipitation in his fate. He had known nothing and nobody as he
stood in the street; but hadn't his view now taken a bound in the
direction of every one and of every thing?

"What's he up to, what's he up to?"—something like that was at
the back of his head all the while in respect to little Bilham; but
meanwhile, till he should make out, every one and every thing were
as good as represented for him by the combination of his host and
the lady on his left. The lady on his left, the lady thus promptly
and ingeniously invited to "meet" Mr. Strether and Mr. Waymarsh—it
was the way she herself expressed her case—was a very marked
person, a person who had much to do with our friend's asking
himself if the occasion weren't in its essence the most baited, the
most gilded of traps. Baited it could properly be called when the
repast was of so wise a savour, and gilded surrounding objects
seemed inevitably to need to be when Miss Barrace—which was the
lady's name—looked at them with convex Parisian eyes and through a
glass with a remarkably long tortoise-shell handle. Why Miss
Barrace, mature meagre erect and eminently gay, highly adorned,
perfectly familiar, freely contradictions and reminding him of some
last-century portrait of a clever head without powder—why Miss
Barrace should have been in particular the note of a "trap"
Strether couldn't on the spot have explained; he blinked in the
light of a conviction that he should know later on, and know
well—as it came over him, for that matter, with force, that he
should need to. He wondered what he was to think exactly of either
of his new friends; since the young man, Chad's intimate and
deputy, had, in thus constituting the scene, practised so much more
subtly than he had been prepared for, and since in especial Miss
Barrace, surrounded clearly by every consideration, hadn't scrupled
to figure as a familiar object. It was interesting to him to feel
that he was in the presence of new measures, other standards, a
different scale of relations, and that evidently here were a happy
pair who didn't think of things at all as he and Waymarsh thought.
Nothing was less to have been calculated in the business than that
it should now be for him as if he and Waymarsh were comparatively
quite at one.

The latter was magnificent—this at least was an assurance
privately given him by Miss Barrace. "Oh your friend's a type, the
grand old American—what shall one call it? The Hebrew prophet,
Ezekiel, Jeremiah, who used when I was a little girl in the Rue
Montaigne to come to see my father and who was usually the American
Minister to the Tuileries or some other court. I haven't seen one
these ever so many years; the sight of it warms my poor old chilled
heart; this specimen is wonderful; in the right quarter, you know,
he'll have a succes fou." Strether hadn't failed to ask what the
right quarter might be, much as he required his presence of mind to
meet such a change in their scheme. "Oh the artist-quarter and that
kind of thing; HERE already, for instance, as you see." He had been
on the point of echoing "'Here'?—is THIS the artist-quarter?" but
she had already disposed of the question with a wave of all her
tortoise-shell and an easy "Bring him to ME!" He knew on the spot
how little he should be able to bring him, for the very air was by
this time, to his sense, thick and hot with poor Waymarsh's
judgement of it. He was in the trap still more than his companion
and, unlike his companion, not making the best of it; which was
precisely what doubtless gave him his admirable sombre glow. Little
did Miss Barrace know that what was behind it was his grave
estimate of her own laxity. The general assumption with which our
two friends had arrived had been that of finding Mr. Bilham ready
to conduct them to one or other of those resorts of the earnest,
the aesthetic fraternity which were shown among the sights of
Paris. In this character it would have justified them in a proper
insistence on discharging their score. Waymarsh's only proviso at
the last had been that nobody should pay for him; but he found
himself, as the occasion developed, paid for on a scale as to which
Strether privately made out that he already nursed retribution.
Strether was conscious across the table of what worked in him,
conscious when they passed back to the small salon to which, the
previous evening, he himself had made so rich a reference;
conscious most of all as they stepped out to the balcony in which
one would have had to be an ogre not to recognise the perfect place
for easy aftertastes. These things were enhanced for Miss Barrace
by a succession of excellent cigarettes—acknowledged, acclaimed, as
a part of the wonderful supply left behind him by Chad—in an almost
equal absorption of which Strether found himself blindly, almost
wildly pushing forward. He might perish by the sword as well as by
famine, and he knew that his having abetted the lady by an excess
that was rare with him would count for little in the sum—as
Waymarsh might so easily add it up—of her licence. Waymarsh had
smoked of old, smoked hugely; but Waymarsh did nothing now, and
that gave him his advantage over people who took things up lightly
just when others had laid them heavily down. Strether had never
smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had
been only because of a reason. The reason, it now began to appear
even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke
with.

It was this lady's being there at all, however, that was the
strange free thing; perhaps, since she WAS there, her smoking was
the least of her freedoms. If Strether had been sure at each
juncture of what—with Bilham in especial—she talked about, he might
have traced others and winced at them and felt Waymarsh wince; but
he was in fact so often at sea that his sense of the range of
reference was merely general and that he on several different
occasions guessed and interpreted only to doubt. He wondered what
they meant, but there were things he scarce thought they could be
supposed to mean, and "Oh no—not THAT!" was at the end of most of
his ventures. This was the very beginning with him of a condition
as to which, later on, it will be seen, he found cause to pull
himself up; and he was to remember the moment duly as the first
step in a process. The central fact of the place was neither more
nor less, when analysed—and a pressure superficial sufficed—than
the fundamental impropriety of Chad's situation, round about which
they thus seemed cynically clustered. Accordingly, since they took
it for granted, they took for granted all that was in connexion
with it taken for granted at Woollett—matters as to which, verily,
he had been reduced with Mrs. Newsome to the last intensity of
silence. That was the consequence of their being too bad to be
talked about, and was the accompaniment, by the same token, of a
deep conception of their badness. It befell therefore that when
poor Strether put it to himself that their badness was ultimately,
or perhaps even insolently, what such a scene as the one before him
was, so to speak, built upon, he could scarce shirk the dilemma of
reading a roundabout echo of them into almost anything that came
up. This, he was well aware, was a dreadful necessity; but such was
the stern logic, he could only gather, of a relation to the
irregular life.

It was the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss
Barrace that was the insidious, the delicate marvel. He was eager
to concede that their relation to it was all indirect, for anything
else in him would have shown the grossness of bad manners; but the
indirectness was none the less consonant—THAT was striking-with a
grateful enjoyment of everything that was Chad's. They spoke of him
repeatedly, invoking his good name and good nature, and the worst
confusion of mind for Strether was that all their mention of him
was of a kind to do him honour. They commended his munificence and
approved his taste, and in doing so sat down, as it seemed to
Strether, in the very soil out of which these things flowered. Our
friend's final predicament was that he himself was sitting down,
for the time, WITH them, and there was a supreme moment at which,
compared with his collapse, Waymarsh's erectness affected him as
really high. One thing was certain—he saw he must make up his mind.
He must approach Chad, must wait for him, deal with him, master
him, but he mustn't dispossess himself of the faculty of seeing
things as they were. He must bring him to HIM—not go himself, as it
were, so much of the way. He must at any rate be clearer as to
what—should he continue to do that for convenience—he was still
condoning. It was on the detail of this quantity—and what could the
fact be but mystifying?-that Bilham and Miss Barrace threw so
little light. So there they were.