The Ambassadors (15 page)

When Miss Gostrey arrived, at the end of a week, she made him a
sign; he went immediately to see her, and it wasn't till then that
he could again close his grasp on the idea of a corrective. This
idea however was luckily all before him again from the moment he
crossed the threshold of the little entresol of the Quartier
Marboeuf into which she had gathered, as she said, picking them up
in a thousand flights and funny little passionate pounces, the
makings of a final nest. He recognised in an instant that there
really, there only, he should find the boon with the vision of
which he had first mounted Chad's stairs. He might have been a
little scared at the picture of how much more, in this place, he
should know himself "in" hadn't his friend been on the spot to
measure the amount to his appetite. Her compact and crowded little
chambers, almost dusky, as they at first struck him, with
accumulations, represented a supreme general adjustment to
opportunities and conditions. Wherever he looked he saw an old
ivory or an old brocade, and he scarce knew where to sit for fear
of a misappliance. The life of the occupant struck him of a sudden
as more charged with possession even than Chad's or than Miss
Barrace's; wide as his glimpse had lately become of the empire of
"things," what was before him still enlarged it; the lust of the
eyes and the pride of life had indeed thus their temple. It was the
innermost nook of the shrine—as brown as a pirate's cave. In the
brownness were glints of gold; patches of purple were in the gloom;
objects all that caught, through the muslin, with their high
rarity, the light of the low windows. Nothing was clear about them
but that they were precious, and they brushed his ignorance with
their contempt as a flower, in a liberty taken with him, might have
been whisked under his nose. But after a full look at his hostess
he knew none the less what most concerned him. The circle in which
they stood together was warm with life, and every question between
them would live there as nowhere else. A question came up as soon
as they had spoken, for his answer, with a laugh, was quickly:
"Well, they've got hold of me!" Much of their talk on this first
occasion was his development of that truth. He was extraordinarily
glad to see her, expressing to her frankly what she most showed
him, that one might live for years without a blessing unsuspected,
but that to know it at last for no more than three days was to need
it or miss it for ever. She was the blessing that had now become
his need, and what could prove it better than that without her he
had lost himself?

"What do you mean?" she asked with an absence of alarm that,
correcting him as if he had mistaken the "period" of one of her
pieces, gave him afresh a sense of her easy movement through the
maze he had but begun to tread. "What in the name of all the
Pococks have you managed to do?"

"Why exactly the wrong thing. I've made a frantic friend of
little Bilham."

"Ah that sort of thing was of the essence of your case and to
have been allowed for from the first." And it was only after this
that, quite as a minor matter, she asked who in the world little
Bilham might be. When she learned that he was a friend of Chad's
and living for the time in Chad's rooms in Chad's absence, quite as
if acting in Chad's spirit and serving Chad's cause, she showed,
however, more interest. "Should you mind my seeing him? Only once,
you know," she added.

"Oh the oftener the better: he's amusing—he's original."

"He doesn't shock you?" Miss Gostrey threw out.

"Never in the world! We escape that with a perfection—! I feel
it to be largely, no doubt, because I don't half-understand him;
but our modus vivendi isn't spoiled even by that. You must dine
with me to meet him," Strether went on. "Then you'll see.'

"Are you giving dinners?"

"Yes—there I am. That's what I mean."

All her kindness wondered. "That you're spending too much
money?"

"Dear no—they seem to cost so little. But that I do it to THEM.
I ought to hold off."

She thought again—she laughed. "The money you must be spending
to think it cheap! But I must be out of it—to the naked eye."

He looked for a moment as if she were really failing him. "Then
you won't meet them?" It was almost as if she had developed an
unexpected personal prudence.

She hesitated. "Who are they—first?"

"Why little Bilham to begin with." He kept back for the moment
Miss Barrace. "And Chad—when he comes—you must absolutely see."

"When then does he come?"

"When Bilham has had time to write him, and hear from him about
me. Bilham, however," he pursued, "will report
favourably—favourably for Chad. That will make him not afraid to
come. I want you the more therefore, you see, for my bluff."

"Oh you'll do yourself for your bluff." She was perfectly easy.
"At the rate you've gone I'm quiet."

"Ah but I haven't," said Strether, "made one protest."

She turned it over. "Haven't you been seeing what there's to
protest about?"

He let her, with this, however ruefully, have the whole truth.
"I haven't yet found a single thing."

"Isn't there any one WITH him then?"

"Of the sort I came out about?" Strether took a moment. "How do
I know? And what do I care?"

"Oh oh!"—and her laughter spread. He was struck in fact by the
effect on her of his joke. He saw now how he meant it as a joke.
SHE saw, however, still other things, though in an instant she had
hidden them. "You've got at no facts at all?"

He tried to muster them. "Well, he has a lovely home."

"Ah that, in Paris," she quickly returned, "proves nothing. That
is rather it DISproves nothing. They may very well, you see, the
people your mission is concerned with, have done it FOR him."

"Exactly. And it was on the scene of their doings then that
Waymarsh and I sat guzzling."

"Oh if you forbore to guzzle here on scenes of doings," she
replied, "you might easily die of starvation." With which she
smiled at him. "You've worse before you."

"Ah I've EVERYTHING before me. But on our hypothesis, you know,
they must be wonderful."

"They ARE!" said Miss Gostrey. "You're not therefore, you see,"
she added, "wholly without facts. They've BEEN, in effect,
wonderful."

To have got at something comparatively definite appeared at last
a little to help—a wave by which moreover, the next moment,
recollection was washed. "My young man does admit furthermore that
they're our friend's great interest."

"Is that the expression he uses?"

Strether more exactly recalled. "No—not quite."

"Something more vivid? Less?"

He had bent, with neared glasses, over a group of articles on a
small stand; and at this he came up. "It was a mere allusion, but,
on the lookout as I was, it struck me. 'Awful, you know, as Chad
is'—those were Bilham's words."

"'Awful, you know'—? Oh!"—and Miss Gostrey turned them over. She
seemed, however, satisfied. "Well, what more do you want?"

He glanced once more at a bibelot or two, and everything sent
him back. "But it is all the same as if they wished to let me have
it between the eyes."

She wondered. "Quoi donc?"

"Why what I speak of. The amenity. They can stun you with that
as well as with anything else."

"Oh," she answered, "you'll come round! I must see them each,"
she went on, "for myself. I mean Mr. Bilham and Mr. Newsome—Mr.
Bilham naturally first. Once only—once for each; that will do. But
face to face—for half an hour. What's Mr. Chad," she immediately
pursued, "doing at Cannes? Decent men don't go to Cannes with
the—well, with the kind of ladies you mean."

"Don't they?" Strether asked with an interest in decent men that
amused her.

"No, elsewhere, but not to Cannes. Cannes is different. Cannes
is better. Cannes is best. I mean it's all people you know—when you
do know them. And if HE does, why that's different too. He must
have gone alone. She can't be with him."

"I haven't," Strether confessed in his weakness, "the least
idea." There seemed much in what she said, but he was able after a
little to help her to a nearer impression. The meeting with little
Bilham took place, by easy arrangement, in the great gallery of the
Louvre; and when, standing with his fellow visitor before one of
the splendid Titians—the overwhelming portrait of the young man
with the strangely-shaped glove and the blue-grey eyes—he turned to
see the third member of their party advance from the end of the
waxed and gilded vista, he had a sense of having at last taken
hold. He had agreed with Miss Gostrey—it dated even from
Chester—for a morning at the Louvre, and he had embraced
independently the same idea as thrown out by little Bilham, whom he
had already accompanied to the museum of the Luxembourg. The fusion
of these schemes presented no difficulty, and it was to strike him
again that in little Bilham's company contrarieties in general
dropped.

"Oh he's all right—he's one of US!" Miss Gostrey, after the
first exchange, soon found a chance to murmur to her companion; and
Strether, as they proceeded and paused and while a quick unanimity
between the two appeared to have phrased itself in half a dozen
remarks—Strether knew that he knew almost immediately what she
meant, and took it as still another sign that he had got his job in
hand. This was the more grateful to him that he could think of the
intelligence now serving him as an acquisition positively new. He
wouldn't have known even the day before what she meant—that is if
she meant, what he assumed, that they were intense Americans
together. He had just worked round—and with a sharper turn of the
screw than any yet—to the conception of an American intense as
little Bilham was intense. The young man was his first specimen;
the specimen had profoundly perplexed him; at present however there
was light. It was by little Bilham's amazing serenity that he had
at first been affected, but he had inevitably, in his
circumspection, felt it as the trail of the serpent, the
corruption, as he might conveniently have said, of Europe; whereas
the promptness with which it came up for Miss Gostrey but as a
special little form of the oldest thing they knew justified it at
once to his own vision as well. He wanted to be able to like his
specimen with a clear good conscience, and this fully permitted it.
What had muddled him was precisely the small artist-man's way—it
was so complete—of being more American than anybody. But it now for
the time put Strether vastly at his ease to have this view of a new
way.

The amiable youth then looked out, as it had first struck
Strether, at a world in respect to which he hadn't a prejudice. The
one our friend most instantly missed was the usual one in favour of
an occupation accepted. Little Bilham had an occupation, but it was
only an occupation declined; and it was by his general exemption
from alarm, anxiety or remorse on this score that the impression of
his serenity was made. He had come out to Paris to paint—to fathom,
that is, at large, that mystery; but study had been fatal to him so
far as anything COULD be fatal, and his productive power faltered
in proportion as his knowledge grew. Strether had gathered from him
that at the moment of his finding him in Chad's rooms he hadn't
saved from his shipwreck a scrap of anything but his beautiful
intelligence and his confirmed habit of Paris. He referred to these
things with an equal fond familiarity, and it was sufficiently
clear that, as an outfit, they still served him. They were charming
to Strether through the hour spent at the Louvre, where indeed they
figured for him as an unseparated part of the charged iridescent
air, the glamour of the name, the splendour of the space, the
colour of the masters. Yet they were present too wherever the young
man led, and the day after the visit to the Louvre they hung, in a
different walk, about the steps of our party. He had invited his
companions to cross the river with him, offering to show them his
own poor place; and his own poor place, which was very poor, gave
to his idiosyncrasies, for Strether—the small sublime indifference
and independences that had struck the latter as fresh—an odd and
engaging dignity. He lived at the end of an alley that went out of
an old short cobbled street, a street that went in turn out of a
new long smooth avenue—street and avenue and alley having, however,
in common a sort of social shabbiness; and he introduced them to
the rather cold and blank little studio which he had lent to a
comrade for the term of his elegant absence. The comrade was
another ingenuous compatriot, to whom he had wired that tea was to
await them "regardless," and this reckless repast, and the second
ingenuous compatriot, and the faraway makeshift life, with its
jokes and its gaps, its delicate daubs and its three or four
chairs, its overflow of taste and conviction and its lack of nearly
all else—these things wove round the occasion a spell to which our
hero unreservedly surrendered.

He liked the ingenuous compatriots—for two or three others soon
gathered; he liked the delicate daubs and the free
discriminations—involving references indeed, involving enthusiasms
and execrations that made him, as they said, sit up; he liked above
all the legend of good-humoured poverty, of mutual accommodation
fairly raised to the romantic, that he soon read into the scene.
The ingenuous compatriots showed a candour, he thought, surpassing
even the candour of Woollett; they were red-haired and long-legged,
they were quaint and queer and dear and droll; they made the place
resound with the vernacular, which he had never known so marked as
when figuring for the chosen language, he must suppose, of
contemporary art. They twanged with a vengeance the aesthetic
lyre—they drew from it wonderful airs. This aspect of their life
had an admirable innocence; and he looked on occasion at Maria
Gostrey to see to what extent that element reached her. She gave
him however for the hour, as she had given him the previous day, no
further sign than to show how she dealt with boys; meeting them
with the air of old Parisian practice that she had for every one,
for everything, in turn. Wonderful about the delicate daubs,
masterful about the way to make tea, trustful about the legs of
chairs and familiarly reminiscent of those, in the other time, the
named, the numbered or the caricatured, who had flourished or
failed, disappeared or arrived, she had accepted with the best
grace her second course of little Bilham, and had said to Strether,
the previous afternoon on his leaving them, that, since her
impression was to be renewed, she would reserve judgement till
after the new evidence.