The Ambassadors (29 page)

"No, not a bit"—Miss Barrace was prompt. "She makes nothing of
him. She's bored. She won't help you with him."

"Oh," Strether laughed, "she can't do everything.

"Of course not—wonderful as she is. Besides, he makes nothing of
HER. She won't take him from me—though she wouldn't, no doubt,
having other affairs in hand, even if she could. I've never," said
Miss Barrace, "seen her fail with any one before. And to-night,
when she's so magnificent, it would seem to her strange—if she
minded. So at any rate I have him all. Je suis tranquille!"

Strether understood, so far as that went; but he was feeling for
his clue. "She strikes you to-night as particularly
magnificent?"

"Surely. Almost as I've never seen her. Doesn't she you? Why
it's FOR you."

He persisted in his candour. "'For' me—?"

"Oh, oh, oh!" cried Miss Barrace, who persisted in the opposite
of that quality.

"Well," he acutely admitted, "she IS different. She's gay."

"She's gay!" Miss Barrace laughed. "And she has beautiful
shoulders—though there's nothing different in that."

"No," said Strether, "one was sure of her shoulders. It isn't
her shoulders."

His companion, with renewed mirth and the finest sense, between
the puffs of her cigarette, of the drollery of things, appeared to
find their conversation highly delightful. "Yes, it isn't her
shoulders ."

"What then is it?" Strether earnestly enquired.

"Why, it's SHE—simply. It's her mood. It's her charm."

"Of course it's her charm, but we're speaking of the
difference." "Well," Miss Barrace explained, "she's just brilliant,
as we used to say. That's all. She's various. She's fifty
women."

"Ah but only one"—Strether kept it clear—"at a time."

"Perhaps. But in fifty times—!"

"Oh we shan't come to that," our friend declared; and the next
moment he had moved in another direction. "Will you answer me a
plain question? Will she ever divorce?"

Miss Barrace looked at him through all her tortoise-shell. "Why
should she?"

It wasn't what he had asked for, he signified; but he met it
well enough. "To marry Chad."

"Why should she marry Chad?"

"Because I'm convinced she's very fond of him. She has done
wonders for him."

"Well then, how could she do more? Marrying a man, or woman
either," Miss Barrace sagely went on, "is never the wonder for any
Jack and Jill can bring THAT off. The wonder is their doing such
things without marrying."

Strether considered a moment this proposition. "You mean it's so
beautiful for our friends simply to go on so?"

But whatever he said made her laugh. "Beautiful."

He nevertheless insisted. "And THAT because it's
disinterested?"

She was now, however, suddenly tired of the question. "Yes
then—call it that. Besides, she'll never divorce. Don't, moreover,"
she added, "believe everything you hear about her husband."

"He's not then," Strether asked, "a wretch?"

"Oh yes. But charming."

"Do you know him?"

"I've met him. He's bien aimable."

"To every one but his wife?"

"Oh for all I know, to her too—to any, to every woman. I hope
you at any rate," she pursued with a quick change, "appreciate the
care I take of Mr. Waymarsh."

"Oh immensely." But Strether was not yet in line. "At all
events," he roundly brought out, "the attachment's an innocent
one."

"Mine and his? Ah," she laughed, "don't rob it of ALL
interest!"

"I mean our friend's here—to the lady we've been speaking of."
That was what he had settled to as an indirect but none the less
closely involved consequence of his impression of Jeanne. That was
where he meant to stay. "It's innocent," he repeated—"I see the
whole thing."

Mystified by his abrupt declaration, she had glanced over at
Gloriani as at the unnamed subject of his allusion, but the next
moment she had understood; though indeed not before Strether had
noticed her momentary mistake and wondered what might possibly be
behind that too. He already knew that the sculptor admired Madame
de Vionnet; but did this admiration also represent an attachment of
which the innocence was discussable? He was moving verily in a
strange air and on ground not of the firmest. He looked hard for an
instant at Miss Barrace, but she had already gone on. "All right
with Mr. Newsome? Why of course she is!"—and she got gaily back to
the question of her own good friend. "I dare say you're surprised
that I'm not worn out with all I see—it being so much!—of Sitting
Bull. But I'm not, you know—I don't mind him; I bear up, and we get
on beautifully. I'm very strange; I'm like that; and often I can't
explain. There are people who are supposed interesting or
remarkable or whatever, and who bore me to death; and then there
are others as to whom nobody can understand what anybody sees in
them—in whom I see no end of things." Then after she had smoked a
moment, "He's touching, you know," she said.

"'Know'?" Strether echoed—"don't I, indeed? We must move you
almost to tears."

"Oh but I don't mean YOU!" she laughed.

"You ought to then, for the worst sign of all—as I must have it
for you—is that you can't help me. That's when a woman pities."

"Ah but I do help you!" she cheerfully insisted.

Again he looked at her hard, and then after a pause: "No you
don't!"

Her tortoise-shell, on its long chain, rattled down. "I help you
with Sitting Bull. That's a good deal."

"Oh that, yes." But Strether hesitated. "Do you mean he talks of
me?"

"So that I have to defend you? No, never.'

"I see," Strether mused. "It's too deep."

"That's his only fault," she returned—"that everything, with
him, is too deep. He has depths of silence—which he breaks only at
the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it's
always something he has seen or felt for himself—never a bit banal
THAT would be what one might have feared and what would kill me But
never." She smoked again as she thus, with amused complacency,
appreciated her acquisition. "And never about you. We keep clear of
you. We're wonderful. But I'll tell you what he does do," she
continued: "he tries to make me presents."

"Presents?" poor Strether echoed, conscious with a pang that HE
hadn't yet tried that in any quarter.

"Why you see," she explained, "he's as fine as ever in the
victoria; so that when I leave him, as I often do almost for
hours—he likes it so—at the doors of shops, the sight of him there
helps me, when I come out, to know my carriage away off in the
rank. But sometimes, for a change, he goes with me into the shops,
and then I've all I can do to prevent his buying me things."

"He wants to 'treat' you?" Strether almost gasped at all he
himself hadn't thought of. He had a sense of admiration. "Oh he's
much more in the real tradition than I. Yes," he mused, "it's the
sacred rage."

"The sacred rage, exactly!"—and Miss Barrace, who hadn't before
heard this term applied, recognised its bearing with a clap of her
gemmed hands. "Now I do know why he's not banal. But I do prevent
him all the same—and if you saw what he sometimes selects—from
buying. I save him hundreds and hundreds. I only take flowers."

"Flowers?" Strether echoed again with a rueful reflexion. How
many nosegays had her present converser sent?

"Innocent flowers," she pursued, "as much as he likes. And he
sends me splendours; he knows all the best places—he has found them
for himself; he's wonderful."

"He hasn't told them to me," her friend smiled, "he has a life
of his own." But Strether had swung back to the consciousness that
for himself after all it never would have done. Waymarsh hadn't
Mrs. Waymarsh in the least to consider, whereas Lambert Strether
had constantly, in the inmost honour of his thoughts, to consider
Mrs. Newsome. He liked moreover to feel how much his friend was in
the real tradition. Yet he had his conclusion. "WHAT a rage it is!"
He had worked it out. "It's an opposition."

She followed, but at a distance. "That's what I feel. Yet to
what?"

"Well, he thinks, you know, that I'VE a life of my own. And I
haven't!"

"You haven't?" She showed doubt, and her laugh confirmed it.
"Oh, oh, oh!"

"No—not for myself. I seem to have a life only for other
people."

"Ah for them and WITH them! Just now for instance with—"

"Well, with whom?" he asked before she had had time to say.

His tone had the effect of making her hesitate and even, as he
guessed, speak with a difference. "Say with Miss Gostrey. What do
you do for HER?" It really made him wonder. "Nothing at all!"

Madame de Vionnet, having meanwhile come in, was at present
close to them, and Miss Barrace hereupon, instead of risking a
rejoinder, became again with a look that measured her from top to
toe all mere long-handled appreciative tortoise-shell. She had
struck our friend, from the first of her appearing, as dressed for
a great occasion, and she met still more than on either of the
others the conception reawakened in him at their garden-party, the
idea of the femme du monde in her habit as she lived. Her bare
shoulders and arms were white and beautiful; the materials of her
dress, a mixture, as he supposed, of silk and crape, were of a
silvery grey so artfully composed as to give an impression of warm
splendour; and round her neck she wore a collar of large old
emeralds, the green note of which was more dimly repeated, at other
points of her apparel, in embroidery, in enamel, in satin, in
substances and textures vaguely rich. Her head, extremely fair and
exquisitely festal, was like a happy fancy, a notion of the
antique, on an old precious medal, some silver coin of the
Renaissance; while her slim lightness and brightness, her gaiety,
her expression, her decision, contributed to an effect that might
have been felt by a poet as half mythological and half
conventional. He could have compared her to a goddess still partly
engaged in a morning cloud, or to a sea-nymph waist-high in the
summer surge. Above all she suggested to him the reflexion that the
femme du monde—in these finest developments of the type—was, like
Cleopatra in the play, indeed various and multifold. She had
aspects, characters, days, nights—or had them at least, showed them
by a mysterious law of her own, when in addition to everything she
happened also to be a woman of genius. She was an obscure person, a
muffled person one day, and a showy person, an uncovered person the
next. He thought of Madame de Vionnet to-night as showy and
uncovered, though he felt the formula rough, because, thanks to one
of the short-cuts of genius she had taken all his categories by
surprise. Twice during dinner he had met Chad's eyes in a longish
look; but these communications had in truth only stirred up again
old ambiguities—so little was it clear from them whether they were
an appeal or an admonition. "You see how I'm fixed," was what they
appeared to convey; yet how he was fixed was exactly what Strether
didn't see. However, perhaps he should see now.

"Are you capable of the very great kindness of going to relieve
Newsome, for a few minutes, of the rather crushing responsibility
of Madame Gloriani, while I say a word, if he'll allow me, to Mr.
Strether, of whom I've a question to ask? Our host ought to talk a
bit to those other ladies, and I'll come back in a minute to your
rescue." She made this proposal to Miss Barrace as if her
consciousness of a special duty had just flickered-up, but that
lady's recognition of Strether's little start at it—as at a
betrayal on the speaker's part of a domesticated state—was as mute
as his own comment; and after an instant, when their fellow guest
had good-naturedly left them, he had been given something else to
think of. "Why has Maria so suddenly gone? Do you know?" That was
the question Madame de Vionnet had brought with her.

"I'm afraid I've no reason to give you but the simple reason
I've had from her in a note—the sudden obligation to join in the
south a sick friend who has got worse."

"Ah then she has been writing you?"

"Not since she went—I had only a brief explanatory word before
she started. I went to see her," Strether explained—"it was the day
after I called on you—but she was already on her way, and her
concierge told me that in case of my coming I was to be informed
she had written to me. I found her note when I got home."

Madame de Vionnet listened with interest and with her eyes on
Strether's face; then her delicately decorated head had a small
melancholy motion. "She didn't write to ME. I went to see her," she
added, "almost immediately after I had seen you, and as I assured
her I would do when I met her at Gloriani's. She hadn't then told
me she was to be absent, and I felt at her door as if I understood.
She's absent—with all respect to her sick friend, though I know
indeed she has plenty—so that I may not see her. She doesn't want
to meet me again. Well," she continued with a beautiful conscious
mildness, "I liked and admired her beyond every one in the old
time, and she knew it—perhaps that's precisely what has made her
go—and I dare say I haven't lost her for ever." Strether still said
nothing; he had a horror, as he now thought of himself, of being in
question between women—was in fact already quite enough on his way
to that, and there was moreover, as it came to him, perceptibly,
something behind these allusions and professions that, should he
take it in, would square but ill with his present resolve to
simplify. It was as if, for him, all the same, her softness and
sadness were sincere. He felt that not less when she soon went on:
"I'm extremely glad of her happiness." But it also left him
mute—sharp and fine though the imputation it conveyed. What it
conveyed was that HE was Maria Gostrey's happiness, and for the
least little instant he had the impulse to challenge the thought.
He could have done so however only by saying "What then do you
suppose to be between us?" and he was wonderfully glad a moment
later not to have spoken. He would rather seem stupid any day than
fatuous, and he drew back as well, with a smothered inward shudder,
from the consideration of what women—of highly-developed type in
particular—might think of each other. Whatever he had come out for
he hadn't come to go into that; so that he absolutely took up
nothing his interlocutress had now let drop. Yet, though he had
kept away from her for days, had laid wholly on herself the burden
of their meeting again, she hadn't a gleam of irritation to show
him. "Well, about Jeanne now?" she smiled—it had the gaiety with
which she had originally come in. He felt it on the instant to
represent her motive and real errand. But he had been schooling her
of a truth to say much in proportion to his little. "Do you make
out that she has a sentiment? I mean for Mr. Newsome."