The Ambassadors (35 page)

"Oh but I feel to-day," he comfortably declared, "that I shall
want you yet."

She took him all in again. "Well, I promise you not again to
leave you, but it will only be to follow you. You've got your
momentum and can toddle alone."

He intelligently accepted it. "Yes—I suppose I can toddle. It's
the sight of that in fact that has upset Waymarsh. He can bear
it—the way I strike him as going—no longer. That's only the climax
of his original feeling. He wants me to quit; and he must have
written to Woollett that I'm in peril of perdition."

"Ah good!" she murmured. "But is it only your supposition?"

"I make it out—it explains."

"Then he denies?—or you haven't asked him?"

"I've not had time," Strether said; "I made it out but last
night, putting various things together, and I've not been since
then face to face with him."

She wondered. "Because you're too disgusted? You can't trust
yourself?"

He settled his glasses on his nose. "Do I look in a great
rage?"

"You look divine!"

"There's nothing," he went on, "to be angry about. He has done
me on the contrary a service."

She made it out. "By bringing things to a head?"

"How well you understand!" he almost groaned. "Waymarsh won't in
the least, at any rate, when I have it out with him, deny or
extenuate. He has acted from the deepest conviction, with the best
conscience and after wakeful nights. He'll recognise that he's
fully responsible, and will consider that he has been highly
successful; so that any discussion we may have will bring us quite
together again—bridge the dark stream that has kept us so
thoroughly apart. We shall have at last, in the consequences of his
act, something we can definitely talk about."

She was silent a little. "How wonderfully you take it! But
you're always wonderful."

He had a pause that matched her own; then he had, with an
adequate spirit, a complete admission. "It's quite true. I'm
extremely wonderful just now. I dare say in fact I'm quite
fantastic, and I shouldn't be at all surprised if I were mad."

"Then tell me!" she earnestly pressed. As he, however, for the
time answered nothing, only returning the look with which she
watched him, she presented herself where it was easier to meet her.
"What will Mr. Waymarsh exactly have done?"

"Simply have written a letter. One will have been quite enough.
He has told them I want looking after."

"And DO you?"—she was all interest.

"Immensely. And I shall get it."

"By which you mean you don't budge?"

"I don't budge."

"You've cabled?"

"No—I've made Chad do it."

"That you decline to come?"

"That HE declines. We had it out this morning and I brought him
round. He had come in, before I was down, to tell me he was
ready—ready, I mean, to return. And he went off, after ten minutes
with me, to say he wouldn't."

Miss Gostrey followed with intensity. "Then you've STOPPED
him?"

Strether settled himself afresh in his chair. "I've stopped him.
That is for the time. That"—he gave it to her more vividly—"is
where I am."

"I see, I see. But where's Mr. Newsome? He was ready," she
asked, "to go?"

"All ready."

"And sincerely—believing YOU'D be?"

"Perfectly, I think; so that he was amazed to find the hand I
had laid on him to pull him over suddenly converted into an engine
for keeping him still."

It was an account of the matter Miss Gostrey could weigh. "Does
he think the conversion sudden?"

"Well," said Strether, "I'm not altogether sure what he thinks.
I'm not sure of anything that concerns him, except that the more
I've seen of him the less I've found him what I originally
expected. He's obscure, and that's why I'm waiting."

She wondered. "But for what in particular?"

"For the answer to his cable."

"And what was his cable?"

"I don't know," Strether replied; "it was to be, when he left
me, according to his own taste. I simply said to him: 'I want to
stay, and the only way for me to do so is for you to.' That I
wanted to stay seemed to interest him, and he acted on that."

Miss Gostrey turned it over. "He wants then himself to
stay."

"He half wants it. That is he half wants to go. My original
appeal has to that extent worked in him. Nevertheless," Strether
pursued, "he won't go. Not, at least, so long as I'm here."

"But you can't," his companion suggested, "stay here always. I
wish you could."

"By no means. Still, I want to see him a little further. He's
not in the least the case I supposed, he's quite another case. And
it's as such that he interests me." It was almost as if for his own
intelligence that, deliberate and lucid, our friend thus expressed
the matter. "I don't want to give him up."

Miss Gostrey but desired to help his lucidity. She had however
to be light and tactful. "Up, you mean—a—to his mother?"

"Well, I'm not thinking of his mother now. I'm thinking of the
plan of which I was the mouthpiece, which, as soon as we met, I put
before him as persuasively as I knew how, and which was drawn up,
as it were, in complete ignorance of all that, in this last long
period, has been happening to him. It took no account whatever of
the impression I was here on the spot immediately to begin to
receive from him—impressions of which I feel sure I'm far from
having had the last."

Miss Gostrey had a smile of the most genial criticism. "So your
idea is—more or less—to stay out of curiosity?"

"Call it what you like! I don't care what it's called—"

"So long as you do stay? Certainly not then. I call it, all the
same, immense fun," Maria Gostrey declared; "and to see you work it
out will be one of the sensations of my life. It IS clear you can
toddle alone!"

He received this tribute without elation. "I shan't be alone
when the Pococks have come."

Her eyebrows went up. "The Pococks are coming?"

"That, I mean, is what will happen—and happen as quickly as
possible—in consequence of Chad's cable. They'll simply embark.
Sarah will come to speak for her mother—with an effect different
from MY muddle."

Miss Gostrey more gravely wondered. "SHE then will take him
back?"

"Very possibly—and we shall see. She must at any rate have the
chance, and she may be trusted to do all she can."

"And do you WANT that?"

"Of course," said Strether, "I want it. I want to play
fair."

But she had lost for a moment the thread. "If it devolves on the
Pococks why do you stay?"

"Just to see that I DO play fair—and a little also, no doubt,
that they do." Strether was luminous as he had never been. "I came
out to find myself in presence of new facts—facts that have kept
striking me as less and less met by our old reasons. The matter's
perfectly simple. New reasons—reasons as new as the facts
themselves—are wanted; and of this our friends at Woollett—Chad's
and mine—were at the earliest moment definitely notified. If any
are producible Mrs. Pocock will produce them; she'll bring over the
whole collection. They'll be," he added with a pensive smile "a
part of the 'fun' you speak of."

She was quite in the current now and floating by his side. "It's
Mamie—so far as I've had it from you—who'll be their great card."
And then as his contemplative silence wasn't a denial she
significantly added: "I think I'm sorry for her."

"I think I am!"—and Strether sprang up, moving about a little as
her eyes followed him. "But it can't be helped."

"You mean her coming out can't be?"

He explained after another turn what he meant. "The only way for
her not to come is for me to go home—as I believe that on the spot
I could prevent it. But the difficulty as to that is that if I do
go home—"

"I see, I see"—she had easily understood. "Mr. Newsome will do
the same, and that's not"—she laughed out now—"to be thought
of."

Strether had no laugh; he had only a quiet comparatively placid
look that might have shown him as proof against ridicule. "Strange,
isn't it?"

They had, in the matter that so much interested them, come so
far as this without sounding another name—to which however their
present momentary silence was full of a conscious reference.
Strether's question was a sufficient implication of the weight it
had gained with him during the absence of his hostess; and just for
that reason a single gesture from her could pass for him as a vivid
answer. Yet he was answered still better when she said in a moment:
"Will Mr. Newsome introduce his sister—?"

"To Madame de Vionnet?" Strether spoke the name at last. "I
shall be greatly surprised if he doesn't."

She seemed to gaze at the possibility. "You mean you've thought
of it and you're prepared."

"I've thought of it and I'm prepared."

It was to her visitor now that she applied her consideration.
"Bon! You ARE magnificent!"

"Well," he answered after a pause and a little wearily, but
still standing there before her—"well, that's what, just once in
all my dull days, I think I shall like to have been!"

Two days later he had news from Chad of a communication from
Woollett in response to their determinant telegram, this missive
being addressed to Chad himself and announcing the immediate
departure for France of Sarah and Jim and Mamie. Strether had
meanwhile on his own side cabled; he had but delayed that act till
after his visit to Miss Gostrey, an interview by which, as so often
before, he felt his sense of things cleared up and settled. His
message to Mrs. Newsome, in answer to her own, had consisted of the
words: "Judge best to take another month, but with full
appreciation of all re-enforcements." He had added that he was
writing, but he was of course always writing; it was a practice
that continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, to make him come
nearer than anything else to the consciousness of doing something:
so that he often wondered if he hadn't really, under his recent
stress, acquired some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of
make-believe. Wouldn't the pages he still so freely dispatched by
the American post have been worthy of a showy journalist, some
master of the great new science of beating the sense out of words?
Wasn't he writing against time, and mainly to show he was
kind?—since it had become quite his habit not to like to read
himself over. On those lines he could still be liberal, yet it was
at best a sort of whistling in the dark. It was unmistakeable
moreover that the sense of being in the dark now pressed on him
more sharply—creating thereby the need for a louder and livelier
whistle. He whistled long and hard after sending his message; he
whistled again and again in celebration of Chad's news; there was
an interval of a fortnight in which this exercise helped him. He
had no great notion of what, on the spot, Sarah Pocock would have
to say, though he had indeed confused premonitions; but it
shouldn't be in her power to say—it shouldn't be in any one's
anywhere to say—that he was neglecting her mother. He might have
written before more freely, but he had never written more
copiously; and he frankly gave for a reason at Woollett that he
wished to fill the void created there by Sarah's departure.

The increase of his darkness, however, and the quickening, as I
have called it, of his tune, resided in the fact that he was
hearing almost nothing. He had for some time been aware that he was
hearing less than before, and he was now clearly following a
process by which Mrs. Newsome's letters could but logically stop.
He hadn't had a line for many days, and he needed no proof—though
he was, in time, to have plenty—that she wouldn't have put pen to
paper after receiving the hint that had determined her telegram.
She wouldn't write till Sarah should have seen him and reported on
him. It was strange, though it might well be less so than his own
behaviour appeared at Woollett. It was at any rate significant, and
what WAS remarkable was the way his friend's nature and manner put
on for him, through this very drop of demonstration, a greater
intensity. It struck him really that he had never so lived with her
as during this period of her silence; the silence was a sacred
hush, a finer clearer medium, in which her idiosyncrasies showed.
He walked about with her, sat with her, drove with her and dined
face-to-face with her—a rare treat "in his life," as he could
perhaps have scarce escaped phrasing it; and if he had never seen
her so soundless he had never, on the other hand, felt her so
highly, so almost austerely, herself: pure and by the vulgar
estimate "cold," but deep devoted delicate sensitive noble. Her
vividness in these respects became for him, in the special
conditions, almost an obsession; and though the obsession sharpened
his pulses, adding really to the excitement of life, there were
hours at which, to be less on the stretch, he directly sought
forgetfulness. He knew it for the queerest of adventures—a
circumstance capable of playing such a part only for Lambert
Strether—that in Paris itself, of all places, he should find this
ghost of the lady of Woollett more importunate than any other
presence.

When he went back to Maria Gostrey it was for the change to
something else. And yet after all the change scarcely operated for
he talked to her of Mrs. Newsome in these days as he had never
talked before. He had hitherto observed in that particular a
discretion and a law; considerations that at present broke down
quite as if relations had altered. They hadn't REALLY altered, he
said to himself, so much as that came to; for if what had occurred
was of course that Mrs. Newsome had ceased to trust him, there was
nothing on the other hand to prove that he shouldn't win back her
confidence. It was quite his present theory that he would leave no
stone unturned to do so; and in fact if he now told Maria things
about her that he had never told before this was largely because it
kept before him the idea of the honour of such a woman's esteem.
His relation with Maria as well was, strangely enough, no longer
quite the same; this truth—though not too disconcertingly—had come
up between them on the renewal of their meetings. It was all
contained in what she had then almost immediately said to him; it
was represented by the remark she had needed but ten minutes to
make and that he hadn't been disposed to gainsay. He could toddle
alone, and the difference that showed was extraordinary. The turn
taken by their talk had promptly confirmed this difference; his
larger confidence on the score of Mrs. Newsome did the rest; and
the time seemed already far off when he had held out his small
thirsty cup to the spout of her pail. Her pail was scarce touched
now, and other fountains had flowed for him; she fell into her
place as but one of his tributaries; and there was a strange
sweetness—a melancholy mildness that touched him—in her acceptance
of the altered order.