The Ambassadors (17 page)

He had introduced Chad, in the first minutes, under his breath,
and there was never the primness in her of the person unacquainted;
but she had none the less betrayed at first no vision but of the
stage, where she occasionally found a pretext for an appreciative
moment that she invited Waymarsh to share. The latter's faculty of
participation had never had, all round, such an assault to meet;
the pressure on him being the sharper for this chosen attitude in
her, as Strether judged it, of isolating, for their natural
intercourse, Chad and himself. This intercourse was meanwhile
restricted to a frank friendly look from the young man, something
markedly like a smile, but falling far short of a grin, and to the
vivacity of Strether's private speculation as to whether HE carried
himself like a fool. He didn't quite see how he could so feel as
one without somehow showing as one. The worst of that question
moreover was that he knew it as a symptom the sense of which
annoyed him. "If I'm going to be odiously conscious of how I may
strike the fellow," he reflected, "it was so little what I came out
for that I may as well stop before I begin." This sage
consideration too, distinctly, seemed to leave untouched the fact
that he WAS going to be conscious. He was conscious of everything
but of what would have served him.

He was to know afterwards, in the watches of the night, that
nothing would have been more open to him than after a minute or two
to propose to Chad to seek with him the refuge of the lobby. He
hadn't only not proposed it, but had lacked even the presence of
mind to see it as possible. He had stuck there like a schoolboy
wishing not to miss a minute of the show; though for that portion
of the show then presented he hadn't had an instant's real
attention. He couldn't when the curtain fell have given the
slightest account of what had happened. He had therefore, further,
not at that moment acknowledged the amenity added by this
acceptance of his awkwardness to Chad's general patience. Hadn't he
none the less known at the very time—known it stupidly and without
reaction—that the boy was accepting something? He was modestly
benevolent, the boy—that was at least what he had been capable of
the superiority of making out his chance to be; and one had one's
self literally not had the gumption to get in ahead of him. If we
should go into all that occupied our friend in the watches of the
night we should have to mend our pen; but an instance or two may
mark for us the vividness with which he could remember. He
remembered the two absurdities that, if his presence of mind HAD
failed, were the things that had had most to do with it. He had
never in his life seen a young man come into a box at ten o'clock
at night, and would, if challenged on the question in advance, have
scarce been ready to pronounce as to different ways of doing so.
But it was in spite of this definite to him that Chad had had a way
that was wonderful: a fact carrying with it an implication that, as
one might imagine it, he knew, he had learned, how.

Here already then were abounding results; he had on the spot and
without the least trouble of intention taught Strether that even in
so small a thing as that there were different ways. He had done in
the same line still more than this; had by a mere shake or two of
the head made his old friend observe that the change in him was
perhaps more than anything else, for the eye, a matter of the
marked streaks of grey, extraordinary at his age, in his thick
black hair; as well as that this new feature was curiously becoming
to him, did something for him, as characterisation, also even—of
all things in the world—as refinement, that had been a good deal
wanted. Strether felt, however, he would have had to confess, that
it wouldn't have been easy just now, on this and other counts, in
the presence of what had been supplied, to be quite clear as to
what had been missed. A reflexion a candid critic might have made
of old, for instance, was that it would have been happier for the
son to look more like the mother; but this was a reflexion that at
present would never occur. The ground had quite fallen away from
it, yet no resemblance whatever to the mother had supervened. It
would have been hard for a young man's face and air to disconnect
themselves more completely than Chad's at this juncture from any
discerned, from any imaginable aspect of a New England female
parent. That of course was no more than had been on the cards; but
it produced in Strether none the less one of those frequent
phenomena of mental reference with which all judgement in him was
actually beset.

Again and again as the days passed he had had a sense of the
pertinence of communicating quickly with Woollett—communicating
with a quickness with which telegraphy alone would rhyme; the fruit
really of a fine fancy in him for keeping things straight, for the
happy forestalment of error. No one could explain better when
needful, nor put more conscience into an account or a report; which
burden of conscience is perhaps exactly the reason why his heart
always sank when the clouds of explanation gathered. His highest
ingenuity was in keeping the sky of life clear of them. Whether or
no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was
in fact—for any one else—explained. One went through the vain
motions, but it was mostly a waste of life. A personal relation was
a relation only so long as people either perfectly understood or,
better still, didn't care if they didn't. From the moment they
cared if they didn't it was living by the sweat of one's brow; and
the sweat of one's brow was just what one might buy one's self off
from by keeping the ground free of the wild weed of delusion. It
easily grew too fast, and the Atlantic cable now alone could race
with it. That agency would each day have testified for him to
something that was not what Woollett had argued. He was not at this
moment absolutely sure that the effect of the morrow's—or rather of
the night's—appreciation of the crisis wouldn't be to determine
some brief missive. "Have at last seen him, but oh dear!"—some
temporary relief of that sort seemed to hover before him. It
hovered somehow as preparing them all—yet preparing them for what?
If he might do so more luminously and cheaply he would tick out in
four words: "Awfully old—grey hair." To this particular item in
Chad's appearance he constantly, during their mute half-hour,
reverted; as if so very much more than he could have said had been
involved in it. The most he could have said would have been: "If
he's going to make me feel young—!" which indeed, however, carried
with it quite enough. If Strether was to feel young, that is, it
would be because Chad was to feel old; and an aged and hoary sinner
had been no part of the scheme.

The question of Chadwick's true time of life was, doubtless,
what came up quickest after the adjournment of the two, when the
play was over, to a cafe in the Avenue de l'Opera. Miss Gostrey had
in due course been perfect for such a step; she had known exactly
what they wanted—to go straight somewhere and talk; and Strether
had even felt she had known what he wished to say and that he was
arranging immediately to begin. She hadn't pretended this, as she
HAD pretended on the other hand, to have divined Waymarsh's wish to
extend to her an independent protection homeward; but Strether
nevertheless found how, after he had Chad opposite to him at a
small table in the brilliant halls that his companion straightway
selected, sharply and easily discriminated from others, it was
quite, to his mind, as if she heard him speak; as if, sitting up, a
mile away, in the little apartment he knew, she would listen hard
enough to catch. He found too that he liked that idea, and he
wished that, by the same token, Mrs. Newsome might have caught as
well. For what had above all been determined in him as a necessity
of the first order was not to lose another hour, nor a fraction of
one; was to advance, to overwhelm, with a rush. This was how he
would anticipate—by a night-attack, as might be—any forced maturity
that a crammed consciousness of Paris was likely to take upon
itself to assert on behalf of the boy. He knew to the full, on what
he had just extracted from Miss Gostrey, Chad's marks of alertness;
but they were a reason the more for not dawdling. If he was himself
moreover to be treated as young he wouldn't at all events be so
treated before he should have struck out at least once. His arms
might be pinioned afterwards, but it would have been left on record
that he was fifty. The importance of this he had indeed begun to
feel before they left the theatre; it had become a wild unrest,
urging him to seize his chance. He could scarcely wait for it as
they went; he was on the verge of the indecency of bringing up the
question in the street; he fairly caught himself going on—so he
afterwards invidiously named it—as if there would be for him no
second chance should the present be lost. Not till, on the purple
divan before the perfunctory bock, he had brought out the words
themselves, was he sure, for that matter, that the present would be
saved.

"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
aesthetic 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.