The Ambassadors (36 page)

It marked for himself the flight of time, or at any rate what he
was pleased to think of with irony and pity as the rush of
experience; it having been but the day before yesterday that he sat
at her feet and held on by her garment and was fed by her hand. It
was the proportions that were changed, and the proportions were at
all times, he philosophised, the very conditions of perception, the
terms of thought. It was as if, with her effective little entresol
and and her wide acquaintance, her activities, varieties,
promiscuities, the duties and devotions that took up nine tenths of
her time and of which he got, guardedly, but the side-wind—it was
as if she had shrunk to a secondary element and had consented to
the shrinkage with the perfection of tact. This perfection had
never failed her; it had originally been greater than his prime
measure for it; it had kept him quite apart, kept him out of the
shop, as she called her huge general acquaintance, made their
commerce as quiet, as much a thing of the home alone—the opposite
of the shop—as if she had never another customer. She had been
wonderful to him at first, with the memory of her little entresol,
the image to which, on most mornings at that time, his eyes
directly opened; but now she mainly figured for him as but part of
the bristling total—though of course always as a person to whom he
should never cease to be indebted. It would never be given to him
certainly to inspire a greater kindness. She had decked him out for
others, and he saw at this point at least nothing she would ever
ask for. She only wondered and questioned and listened, rendering
him the homage of a wistful speculation. She expressed it
repeatedly; he was already far beyond her, and she must prepare
herself to lose him. There was but one little chance for her.

Often as she had said it he met it—for it was a touch he
liked—each time the same way. "My coming to grief?"

"Yes—then I might patch you up."

"Oh for my real smash, if it takes place, there will be no
patching."

"But you surely don't mean it will kill you."

"No—worse. It will make me old."

"Ah nothing can do that! The wonderful and special thing about
you is that you ARE, at this time of day, youth." Then she always
made, further, one of those remarks that she had completely ceased
to adorn with hesitations or apologies, and that had, by the same
token, in spite of their extreme straightness, ceased to produce in
Strether the least embarrassment. She made him believe them, and
they became thereby as impersonal as truth itself. "It's just your
particular charm."

His answer too was always the same. "Of course I'm youth—youth
for the trip to Europe. I began to be young, or at least to get the
benefit of it, the moment I met you at Chester, and that's what has
been taking place ever since. I never had the benefit at the proper
time—which comes to saying that I never had the thing itself. I'm
having the benefit at this moment; I had it the other day when I
said to Chad 'Wait'; I shall have it still again when Sarah Pocock
arrives. It's a benefit that would make a poor show for many
people; and I don't know who else but you and I, frankly, could
begin to see in it what I feel. I don't get drunk; I don't pursue
the ladies; I don't spend money; I don't even write sonnets. But
nevertheless I'm making up late for what I didn't have early. I
cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more
than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say
what they like—it's my surrender, it's my tribute, to youth. One
puts that in where one can—it has to come in somewhere, if only out
of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of other persons. Chad
gives me the sense of it, for all his grey hairs, which merely make
it solid in him and safe and serene; and SHE does the same, for all
her being older than he, for all her marriageable daughter, her
separated husband, her agitated history. Though they're young
enough, my pair, I don't say they're, in the freshest way, their
own absolutely prime adolescence; for that has nothing to do with
it. The point is that they're mine. Yes, they're my youth; since
somehow at the right time nothing else ever was. What I meant just
now therefore is that it would all go—go before doing its work—if
they were to fail me."

On which, just here, Miss Gostrey inveterately questioned. "What
do you, in particular, call its work?"

"Well, to see me through."

"But through what?"—she liked to get it all out of him.

"Why through this experience." That was all that would come.

It regularly gave her none the less the last word. "Don't you
remember how in those first days of our meeting it was I who was to
see you through?"

"Remember? Tenderly, deeply"—he always rose to it. "You're just
doing your part in letting me maunder to you thus."

"Ah don't speak as if my part were small; since whatever else
fails you—"

"YOU won't, ever, ever, ever?"—he thus took her up. "Oh I beg
your pardon; you necessarily, you inevitably WILL. Your
conditions—that's what I mean—won't allow me anything to do for
you."

"Let alone—I see what you mean—that I'm drearily dreadfully old.
I AM, but there's a service—possible for you to render—that I know,
all the same, I shall think of."

"And what will it be?"

This, in fine, however, she would never tell him. "You shall
hear only if your smash takes place. As that's really out of the
question, I won't expose myself"—a point at which, for reasons of
his own, Strether ceased to press.

He came round, for publicity—it was the easiest thing—to the
idea that his smash WAS out of the question, and this rendered idle
the discussion of what might follow it. He attached an added
importance, as the days elapsed, to the arrival of the Pococks; he
had even a shameful sense of waiting for it insincerely and
incorrectly. He accused himself of making believe to his own mind
that Sarah's presence, her impression, her judgement would simplify
and harmonise, he accused himself of being so afraid of what they
MIGHT do that he sought refuge, to beg the whole question, in a
vain fury. He had abundantly seen at home what they were in the
habit of doing, and he had not at present the smallest ground. His
clearest vision was when he made out that what he most desired was
an account more full and free of Mrs. Newsome's state of mind than
any he felt he could now expect from herself; that calculation at
least went hand in hand with the sharp consciousness of wishing to
prove to himself that he was not afraid to look his behaviour in
the face. If he was by an inexorable logic to pay for it he was
literally impatient to know the cost, and he held himself ready to
pay in instalments. The first instalment would be precisely this
entertainment of Sarah; as a consequence of which moreover, he
should know vastly better how he stood.

Strether rambled alone during these few days, the effect of the
incident of the previous week having been to simplify in a marked
fashion his mixed relations with Waymarsh. Nothing had passed
between them in reference to Mrs. Newsome's summons but that our
friend had mentioned to his own the departure of the deputation
actually at sea—giving him thus an opportunity to confess to the
occult intervention he imputed to him. Waymarsh however in the
event confessed to nothing; and though this falsified in some
degree Strether's forecast the latter amusedly saw in it the same
depth of good conscience out of which the dear man's impertinence
had originally sprung. He was patient with the dear man now and
delighted to observe how unmistakeably he had put on flesh; he felt
his own holiday so successfully large and free that he was full of
allowances and charities in respect to those cabined and confined'
his instinct toward a spirit so strapped down as Waymarsh's was to
walk round it on tiptoe for fear of waking it up to a sense of
losses by this time irretrievable. It was all very funny he knew,
and but the difference, as he often said to himself, of tweedledum
and tweedledee—an emancipation so purely comparative that it was
like the advance of the door-mat on the scraper; yet the present
crisis was happily to profit by it and the pilgrim from Milrose to
know himself more than ever in the right.

Strether felt that when he heard of the approach of the Pococks
the impulse of pity quite sprang up in him beside the impulse of
triumph. That was exactly why Waymarsh had looked at him with eyes
in which the heat of justice was measured and shaded. He had looked
very hard, as if affectionately sorry for the friend—the friend of
fifty-five—whose frivolity had had thus to be recorded; becoming,
however, but obscurely sententious and leaving his companion to
formulate a charge. It was in this general attitude that he had of
late altogether taken refuge; with the drop of discussion they were
solemnly sadly superficial; Strether recognised in him the mere
portentous rumination to which Miss Barrace had so good-humouredly
described herself as assigning a corner of her salon. It was quite
as if he knew his surreptitious step had been divined, and it was
also as if he missed the chance to explain the purity of his
motive; but this privation of relief should be precisely his small
penance: it was not amiss for Strether that he should find himself
to that degree uneasy. If he had been challenged or accused,
rebuked for meddling or otherwise pulled up, he would probably have
shown, on his own system, all the height of his consistency, all
the depth of his good faith. Explicit resentment of his course
would have made him take the floor, and the thump of his fist on
the table would have affirmed him as consciously incorruptible. Had
what now really prevailed with Strether been but a dread of that
thump—a dread of wincing a little painfully at what it might
invidiously demonstrate? However this might be, at any rate, one of
the marks of the crisis was a visible, a studied lapse, in
Waymarsh, of betrayed concern. As if to make up to his comrade for
the stroke by which he had played providence he now conspicuously
ignored his movements, withdrew himself from the pretension to
share them, stiffened up his sensibility to neglect, and, clasping
his large empty hands and swinging his large restless foot, clearly
looked to another quarter for justice.

This made for independence on Strether's part, and he had in
truth at no moment of his stay been so free to go and come. The
early summer brushed the picture over and blurred everything but
the near; it made a vast warm fragrant medium in which the elements
floated together on the best of terms, in which rewards were
immediate and reckonings postponed. Chad was out of town again, for
the first time since his visitor's first view of him; he had
explained this necessity—without detail, yet also without
embarrassment, the circumstance was one of those which, in the
young man's life, testified to the variety of his ties. Strether
wasn't otherwise concerned with it than for its so testifying—a
pleasant multitudinous image in which he took comfort. He took
comfort, by the same stroke, in the swing of Chad's pendulum back
from that other swing, the sharp jerk towards Woollett, so stayed
by his own hand. He had the entertainment of thinking that if he
had for that moment stopped the clock it was to promote the next
minute this still livelier motion. He himself did what he hadn't
done before; he took two or three times whole days off—irrespective
of others, of two or three taken with Miss Gostrey, two or three
taken with little Bilham: he went to Chartres and cultivated,
before the front of the cathedral, a general easy beatitude; he
went to Fontainebleau and imagined himself on the way to Italy; he
went to Rouen with a little handbag and inordinately spent the
night.

One afternoon he did something quite different; finding himself
in the neighbourhood of a fine old house across the river, he
passed under the great arch of its doorway and asked at the
porter's lodge for Madame de Vionnet. He had already hovered more
than once about that possibility, been aware of it, in the course
of ostensible strolls, as lurking but round the corner. Only it had
perversely happened, after his morning at Notre Dame, that his
consistency, as he considered and intended it, had come back to
him; whereby he had reflected that the encounter in question had
been none of his making; clinging again intensely to the strength
of his position, which was precisely that there was nothing in it
for himself. From the moment he actively pursued the charming
associate of his adventure, from that moment his position weakened,
for he was then acting in an interested way. It was only within a
few days that he had fixed himself a limit: he promised himself his
consistency should end with Sarah's arrival. It was arguing
correctly to feel the title to a free hand conferred on him by this
event. If he wasn't to be let alone he should be merely a dupe to
act with delicacy. If he wasn't to be trusted he could at least
take his ease. If he was to be placed under control he gained leave
to try what his position MIGHT agreeably give him. An ideal rigour
would perhaps postpone the trial till after the Pococks had shown
their spirit; and it was to an ideal rigour that he had quite
promised himself to conform.

Suddenly, however, on this particular day, he felt a particular
fear under which everything collapsed. He knew abruptly that he was
afraid of himself—and yet not in relation to the effect on his
sensibilities of another hour of Madame de Vionnet. What he dreaded
was the effect of a single hour of Sarah Pocock, as to whom he was
visited, in troubled nights, with fantastic waking dreams. She
loomed at him larger than life; she increased in volume as she drew
nearer; she so met his eyes that, his imagination taking, after the
first step, all, and more than all, the strides, he already felt
her come down on him, already burned, under her reprobation, with
the blush of guilt, already consented, by way of penance, to the
instant forfeiture of everything. He saw himself, under her
direction, recommitted to Woollett as juvenile offenders are
committed to reformatories. It wasn't of course that Woollett was
really a place of discipline; but he knew in advance that Sarah's
salon at the hotel would be. His danger, at any rate, in such moods
of alarm, was some concession, on this ground, that would involve a
sharp rupture with the actual; therefore if he waited to take leave
of that actual he might wholly miss his chance. It was represented
with supreme vividness by Madame de Vionnet, and that is why, in a
word, he waited no longer. He had seen in a flash that he must
anticipate Mrs. Pocock. He was accordingly much disappointed on now
learning from the portress that the lady of his quest was not in
Paris. She had gone for some days to the country. There was nothing
in this accident but what was natural; yet it produced for poor
Strether a drop of all confidence. It was suddenly as if he should
never see her again, and as if moreover he had brought it on
himself by not having been quite kind to her.