The Ambassadors (20 page)

"In the box? Yes," he rather blankly urged.

"Well—to feel sure."

"Sure of what?"

She got up from her chair, at this, with a nearer approach than
she had ever yet shown to dismay at his dimness. She even, fairly
pausing for it, spoke with a shade of pity. "Guess!"

It was a shade, fairly, that brought a flush into his face; so
that for a moment, as they waited together, their difference was
between them. "You mean that just your hour with him told you so
much of his story? Very good; I'm not such a fool, on my side, as
that I don't understand you, or as that I didn't in some degree
understand HIM. That he has done what he liked most isn't, among
any of us, a matter the least in dispute. There's equally little
question at this time of day of what it is he does like most. But
I'm not talking," he reasonably explained, "of any mere wretch he
may still pick up. I'm talking of some person who in his present
situation may have held her own, may really have counted."

"That's exactly what I am!" said Miss Gostrey. But she as
quickly made her point. "I thought you thought—or that they think
at Woollett—that that's what mere wretches necessarily do. Mere
wretches necessarily DON'T!" she declared with spirit. "There must,
behind every appearance to the contrary, still be somebody—somebody
who's not a mere wretch, since we accept the miracle. What else but
such a somebody can such a miracle be?"

He took it in. "Because the fact itself IS the woman?"

"A woman. Some woman or other. It's one of the things that HAVE
to be."

"But you mean then at least a good one."

"A good woman?" She threw up her arms with a laugh. "I should
call her excellent!"

"Then why does he deny her?"

Miss Gostrey thought a moment. "Because she's too good to admit!
Don't you see," she went on, "how she accounts for him?"

Strether clearly, more and more, did see; yet it made him also
see other things. "But isn't what we want that he shall account for
HER?"

"Well, he does. What you have before you is his way. You must
forgive him if it isn't quite outspoken. In Paris such debts are
tacit."

Strether could imagine; but still—! "Even when the woman's
good?"

Again she laughed out. "Yes, and even when the man is! There's
always a caution in such cases," she more seriously explained—"for
what it may seem to show. There's nothing that's taken as showing
so much here as sudden unnatural goodness."

"Ah then you're speaking now," Strether said, "of people who are
NOT nice."

"I delight," she replied, "in your classifications. But do you
want me," she asked, "to give you in the matter, on this ground,
the wisest advice I'm capable of? Don't consider her, don't judge
her at all in herself. Consider her and judge her only in
Chad."

He had the courage at least of his companion's logic. "Because
then I shall like her?" He almost looked, with his quick
imagination as if he already did, though seeing at once also the
full extent of how little it would suit his book. "But is that what
I came out for?"

She had to confess indeed that it wasn't. But there was
something else. "Don't make up your mind. There are all sorts of
things. You haven't seen him all."

This on his side Strether recognised; but his acuteness none the
less showed him the danger. "Yes, but if the more I see the better
he seems?"

Well, she found something. "That may be—but his disavowal of her
isn't, all the same, pure consideration. There's a hitch." She made
it out. "It's the effort to sink her."

Strether winced at the image. "To 'sink'—?"

"Well, I mean there's a struggle, and a part of it is just what
he hides. Take time—that's the only way not to make some mistake
that you'll regret. Then you'll see. He does really want to shake
her off."

Our friend had by this time so got into the vision that he
almost gasped. "After all she has done for him?"

Miss Gostrey gave him a look which broke the next moment into a
wonderful smile. "He's not so good as you think!"

They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their
character of warning, considerable help; but the support he tried
to draw from them found itself on each renewal of contact with Chad
defeated by something else. What could it be, this disconcerting
force, he asked himself, but the sense, constantly renewed, that
Chad WAS—quite in fact insisted on being—as good as he thought? It
seemed somehow as if he couldn't BUT be as good from the moment he
wasn't as bad. There was a succession of days at all events when
contact with him—and in its immediate effect, as if it could
produce no other—elbowed out of Strether's consciousness everything
but itself. Little Bilham once more pervaded the scene, but little
Bilham became even in a higher degree than he had originally been
one of the numerous forms of the inclusive relation; a consequence
promoted, to our friend's sense, by two or three incidents with
which we have yet to make acquaintance. Waymarsh himself, for the
occasion, was drawn into the eddy; it absolutely, though but
temporarily, swallowed him down, and there were days when Strether
seemed to bump against him as a sinking swimmer might brush a
submarine object. The fathomless medium held them—Chad's manner was
the fathomless medium; and our friend felt as if they passed each
other, in their deep immersion, with the round impersonal eye of
silent fish. It was practically produced between them that Waymarsh
was giving him then his chance; and the shade of discomfort that
Strether drew from the allowance resembled not a little the
embarrassment he had known at school, as a boy, when members of his
family had been present at exhibitions. He could perform before
strangers, but relatives were fatal, and it was now as if,
comparatively, Waymarsh were a relative. He seemed to hear him say
"Strike up then!" and to enjoy a foretaste of conscientious
domestic criticism. He HAD struck up, so far as he actually could;
Chad knew by this time in profusion what he wanted; and what vulgar
violence did his fellow pilgrim expect of him when he had really
emptied his mind? It went somehow to and fro that what poor
Waymarsh meant was "I told you so—that you'd lose your immortal
soul!" but it was also fairly explicit that Strether had his own
challenge and that, since they must go to the bottom of things, he
wasted no more virtue in watching Chad than Chad wasted in watching
him. His dip for duty's sake—where was it worse than Waymarsh's
own? For HE needn't have stopped resisting and refusing, needn't
have parleyed, at that rate, with the foe.

The strolls over Paris to see something or call somewhere were
accordingly inevitable and natural, and the late sessions in the
wondrous troisieme, the lovely home, when men dropped in and the
picture composed more suggestively through the haze of tobacco, of
music more or less good and of talk more or less polyglot, were on
a principle not to be distinguished from that of the mornings and
the afternoons. Nothing, Strether had to recognise as he leaned
back and smoked, could well less resemble a scene of violence than
even the liveliest of these occasions. They were occasions of
discussion, none the less, and Strether had never in his life heard
so many opinions on so many subjects. There were opinions at
Woollett, but only on three or four. The differences were there to
match; if they were doubtless deep, though few, they were
quiet—they were, as might be said, almost as shy as if people had
been ashamed of them. People showed little diffidence about such
things, on the other hand, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, and were
so far from being ashamed of them—or indeed of anything else—that
they often seemed to have invented them to avert those agreements
that destroy the taste of talk. No one had ever done that at
Woollett, though Strether could remember times when he himself had
been tempted to it without quite knowing why. He saw why at
present—he had but wanted to promote intercourse.

These, however, were but parenthetic memories, and the turn
taken by his affair on the whole was positively that if his nerves
were on the stretch it was because he missed violence. When he
asked himself if none would then, in connexion with it, ever come
at all, he might almost have passed as wondering how to provoke it.
It would be too absurd if such a vision as THAT should have to be
invoked for relief; it was already marked enough as absurd that he
should actually have begun with flutters and dignities on the score
of a single accepted meal. What sort of a brute had he expected
Chad to be, anyway?—Strether had occasion to make the enquiry but
was careful to make it in private. He could himself, comparatively
recent as it was—it was truly but the fact of a few days
since—focus his primal crudity; but he would on the approach of an
observer, as if handling an illicit possession, have slipped the
reminiscence out of sight. There were echoes of it still in Mrs.
Newsome's letters, and there were moments when these echoes made
him exclaim on her want of tact. He blushed of course, at once,
still more for the explanation than for the ground of it: it came
to him in time to save his manners that she couldn't at the best
become tactful as quickly as he. Her tact had to reckon with the
Atlantic Ocean, the General Post-Office and the extravagant curve
of the globe. Chad had one day offered tea at the Boulevard
Malesherbes to a chosen few, a group again including the unobscured
Miss Barrace; and Strether had on coming out walked away with the
acquaintance whom in his letters to Mrs. Newsome he always spoke of
as the little artist-man. He had had full occasion to mention him
as the other party, so oddly, to the only close personal alliance
observation had as yet detected in Chad's existence. Little
Bilham's way this afternoon was not Strether's, but he had none the
less kindly come with him, and it was somehow a part of his
kindness that as it had sadly begun to rain they suddenly found
themselves seated for conversation at a cafe in which they had
taken refuge. He had passed no more crowded hour in Chad's society
than the one just ended; he had talked with Miss Barrace, who had
reproached him with not having come to see her, and he had above
all hit on a happy thought for causing Waymarsh's tension to relax.
Something might possibly be extracted for the latter from the idea
of his success with that lady, whose quick apprehension of what
might amuse her had given Strether a free hand. What had she meant
if not to ask whether she couldn't help him with his splendid
encumbrance, and mightn't the sacred rage at any rate be kept a
little in abeyance by thus creating for his comrade's mind even in
a world of irrelevance the possibility of a relation? What was it
but a relation to be regarded as so decorative and, in especial, on
the strength of it, to be whirled away, amid flounces and feathers,
in a coupe lined, by what Strether could make out, with dark blue
brocade? He himself had never been whirled away—never at least in a
coupe and behind a footman; he had driven with Miss Gostrey in
cabs, with Mrs. Pocock, a few times, in an open buggy, with Mrs.
Newsome in a four-seated cart and, occasionally up at the
mountains, on a buckboard; but his friend's actual adventure
transcended his personal experience. He now showed his companion
soon enough indeed how inadequate, as a general monitor, this last
queer quantity could once more feel itself.

"What game under the sun is he playing?" He signified the next
moment that his allusion was not to the fat gentleman immersed in
dominoes on whom his eyes had begun by resting, but to their host
of the previous hour, as to whom, there on the velvet bench, with a
final collapse of all consistency, he treated himself to the
comfort of indiscretion. "Where do you see him come out?"

Little Bilham, in meditation, looked at him with a kindness
almost paternal. "Don't you like it over here?"

Strether laughed out—for the tone was indeed droll; he let
himself go. "What has that to do with it? The only thing I've any
business to like is to feel that I'm moving him. That's why I ask
you whether you believe I AM? Is the creature"—and he did his best
to show that he simply wished to ascertain—"honest?"

His companion looked responsible, but looked it through a small
dim smile. "What creature do you mean?"

It was on this that they did have for a little a mute
interchange. "Is it untrue that he's free? How then," Strether
asked wondering "does he arrange his life?"

"Is the creature you mean Chad himself?" little Bilham said.

Strether here, with a rising hope, just thought, "We must take
one of them at a time." But his coherence lapsed. "IS there some
woman? Of whom he's really afraid of course I mean—or who does with
him what she likes."

"It's awfully charming of you," Bilham presently remarked, "not
to have asked me that before."

"Oh I'm not fit for my job!"

The exclamation had escaped our friend, but it made little
Bilham more deliberate. "Chad's a rare case!" he luminously
observed. "He's awfully changed," he added.

"Then you see it too?"

"The way he has improved? Oh yes—I think every one must see it.
But I'm not sure," said little Bilham, "that I didn't like him
about as well in his other state."

"Then this IS really a new state altogether?"

"Well," the young man after a moment returned, "I'm not sure he
was really meant by nature to be quite so good. It's like the new
edition of an old book that one has been fond of—revised and
amended, brought up to date, but not quite the thing one knew and
loved. However that may be at all events," he pursued, "I don't
think, you know, that he's really playing, as you call it, any
game. I believe he really wants to go back and take up a career.
He's capable of one, you know, that will improve and enlarge him
still more. He won't then," little Bilham continued to remark, "be
my pleasant well-rubbed old-fashioned volume at all. But of course
I'm beastly immoral. I'm afraid it would be a funny world
altogether—a world with things the way I like them. I ought, I dare
say, to go home and go into business myself. Only I'd simply rather
die—simply. And I've not the least difficulty in making up my mind
not to, and in knowing exactly why, and in defending my ground
against all comers. All the same," he wound up, "I assure you I
don't say a word against it—for himself, I mean—to Chad. I seem to
see it as much the best thing for him. You see he's not happy."