The Ambassadors (39 page)

He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long
when once he had reflected that he would have been silly, in this
case, with Maria Gostrey and little Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet
and little Jeanne, with Lambert Strether, in fine, and above all
with Chad Newsome himself. Wouldn't it be found to have made more
for reality to be silly with these persons than sane with Sarah and
Jim? Jim in fact, he presently made up his mind, was individually
out of it; Jim didn't care; Jim hadn't come out either for Chad or
for him; Jim in short left the moral side to Sally and indeed
simply availed himself now, for the sense of recreation, of the
fact that he left almost everything to Sally. He was nothing
compared to Sally, and not so much by reason of Sally's temper and
will as by that of her more developed type and greater acquaintance
with the world. He quite frankly and serenely confessed, as he sat
there with Strether, that he felt his type hang far in the rear of
his wife's and still further, if possible, in the rear of his
sister's. Their types, he well knew, were recognised and acclaimed;
whereas the most a leading Woollett business-man could hope to
achieve socially, and for that matter industrially, was a certain
freedom to play into this general glamour.

The impression he made on our friend was another of the things
that marked our friend's road. It was a strange impression,
especially as so soon produced; Strether had received it, he
judged, all in the twenty minutes; it struck him at least as but in
a minor degree the work of the long Woollett years. Pocock was
normally and consentingly though not quite wittingly out of the
question. It was despite his being normal; it was despite his being
cheerful; it was despite his being a leading Woollett business-man;
and the determination of his fate left him thus perfectly usual—as
everything else about it was clearly, to his sense, not less so. He
seemed to say that there was a whole side of life on which the
perfectly usual WAS for leading Woollett business-men to be out of
the question. He made no more of it than that, and Strether, so far
as Jim was concerned, desired to make no more. Only Strether's
imagination, as always, worked, and he asked himself if this side
of life were not somehow connected, for those who figured on it
with the fact of marriage. Would HIS relation to it, had he married
ten years before, have become now the same as Pocock's? Might it
even become the same should he marry in a few months? Should he
ever know himself as much out of the question for Mrs. Newsome as
Jim knew himself—in a dim way—for Mrs. Jim?

To turn his eyes in that direction was to be personally
reassured; he was different from Pocock; he had affirmed himself
differently and was held after all in higher esteem. What none the
less came home to him, however, at this hour, was that the society
over there, that of which Sarah and Mamie—and, in a more eminent
way, Mrs. Newsome herself—were specimens, was essentially a society
of women, and that poor Jim wasn't in it. He himself Lambert
Strether, WAS as yet in some degree—which was an odd situation for
a man; but it kept coming back to him in a whimsical way that he
should perhaps find his marriage had cost him his place. This
occasion indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a time of
sensible exclusion for Jim, who was in a state of manifest response
to the charm of his adventure. Small and fat and constantly
facetious, straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he would have
been practically indistinguishable hadn't his constant preference
for light-grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and
very little stories, done what it could for his identity. There
were signs in him, though none of them plaintive, of always paying
for others; and the principal one perhaps was just this failure of
type. It was with this that he paid, rather than with fatigue or
waste; and also doubtless a little with the effort of humour—never
irrelevant to the conditions, to the relations, with which he was
acquainted.

He gurgled his joy as they rolled through the happy streets; he
declared that his trip was a regular windfall, and that he wasn't
there, he was eager to remark, to hang back from anything: he
didn't know quite what Sally had come for, but HE had come for a
good time. Strether indulged him even while wondering if what Sally
wanted her brother to go back for was to become like her husband.
He trusted that a good time was to be, out and out, the programme
for all of them; and he assented liberally to Jim's proposal that,
disencumbered and irresponsible—his things were in the omnibus with
those of the others—they should take a further turn round before
going to the hotel. It wasn't for HIM to tackle Chad—it was Sally's
job; and as it would be like her, he felt, to open fire on the
spot, it wouldn't be amiss of them to hold off and give her time.
Strether, on his side, only asked to give her time; so he jogged
with his companion along boulevards and avenues, trying to extract
from meagre material some forecast of his catastrophe. He was quick
enough to see that Jim Pocock declined judgement, had hovered quite
round the outer edge of discussion and anxiety, leaving all
analysis of their question to the ladies alone and now only feeling
his way toward some small droll cynicism. It broke out afresh, the
cynicism—it had already shown a flicker—in a but slightly deferred:
"Well, hanged if I would if I were he!"

"You mean you wouldn't in Chad's place—?"

"Give up this to go back and boss the advertising!" Poor Jim,
with his arms folded and his little legs out in the open fiacre,
drank in the sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one
side of their vista to the other. "Why I want to come right out and
live here myself. And I want to live while I AM here too. I feel
with YOU—oh you've been grand, old man, and I've twigged—that it
ain't right to worry Chad. I don't mean to persecute him; I
couldn't in conscience. It's thanks to you at any rate that I'm
here, and I'm sure I'm much obliged. You're a lovely pair."

There were things in this speech that Strether let pass for the
time. "Don't you then think it important the advertising should be
thoroughly taken in hand? Chad WILL be, so far as capacity is
concerned," he went on, "the man to do it."

"Where did he get his capacity," Jim asked, "over here?"

"He didn't get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that
over here he hasn't inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for
business, an extraordinary head. He comes by that," Strether
explained, "honestly enough. He's in that respect his father's son,
and also—for she's wonderful in her way too—his mother's. He has
other tastes and other tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife
are quite right about his having that. He's very remarkable."

"Well, I guess he is!" Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. "But if
you've believed so in his making us hum, why have you so prolonged
the discussion? Don't you know we've been quite anxious about
you?"

These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether
saw he must none the less make a choice and take a line. "Because,
you see, I've greatly liked it. I've liked my Paris, I dare say
I've liked it too much."

"Oh you old wretch!" Jim gaily exclaimed.

"But nothing's concluded," Strether went on. "The case is more
complex than it looks from Woollett."

"Oh well, it looks bad enough from Woollett!" Jim declared.

"Even after all I've written?"

Jim bethought himself. "Isn't it what you've written that has
made Mrs. Newsome pack us off? That at least and Chad's not turning
up?"

Strether made a reflexion of his own. "I see. That she should do
something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore of
course come out to act."

"Oh yes," Jim concurred—"to act. But Sally comes out to act, you
know," he lucidly added, "every time she leaves the house. She
never comes out but she DOES act. She's acting moreover now for her
mother, and that fixes the scale." Then he wound up, opening all
his senses to it, with a renewed embrace of pleasant Paris. "We
haven't all the same at Woollett got anything like this."

Strether continued to consider. "I'm bound to say for you all
that you strike me as having arrived in a very mild and reasonable
frame of mind. You don't show your claws. I felt just now in Mrs.
Pocock no symptom of that. She isn't fierce," he went on. "I'm such
a nervous idiot that I thought she might be."

"Oh don't you know her well enough," Pocock asked, "to have
noticed that she never gives herself away, any more than her mother
ever does? They ain't fierce, either of 'em; they let you come
quite close. They wear their fur the smooth side out—the warm side
in. Do you know what they are?" Jim pursued as he looked about him,
giving the question, as Strether felt, but half his care—"do you
know what they are? They're about as intense as they can live."

"Yes"—and Strether's concurrence had a positive precipitation;
"they're about as intense as they can live."

"They don't lash about and shake the cage," said Jim, who seemed
pleased with his analogy; "and it's at feeding-time that they're
quietest. But they always get there."

"They do indeed—they always get there!" Strether replied with a
laugh that justified his confession of nervousness. He disliked to
be talking sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he could have
talked insincerely. But there was something he wanted to know, a
need created in him by her recent intermission, by his having given
from the first so much, as now more than ever appeared to him, and
got so little. It was as if a queer truth in his companion's
metaphor had rolled over him with a rush. She HAD been quiet at
feeding-time; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her, out of the
big bowl of all his recent free communication, his vividness and
pleasantness, his ingenuity and even his eloquence, while the
current of her response had steadily run thin. Jim meanwhile
however, it was true, slipped characteristically into shallowness
from the moment he ceased to speak out of the experience of a
husband.

"But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before
her. If he doesn't work that for all it's worth—!" He sighed with
contingent pity at his brother-in-law's possible want of resource.
"He has worked it on YOU, pretty well, eh?" and he asked the next
moment if there were anything new at the Varieties, which he
pronounced in the American manner. They talked about the
Varieties—Strether confessing to a knowledge which produced again
on Pocock's part a play of innuendo as vague as a nursery-rhyme,
yet as aggressive as an elbow in his side; and they finished their
drive under the protection of easy themes. Strether waited to the
end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim had seen Chad as
different; and he could scarce have explained the discouragement he
drew from the absence of this testimony. It was what he had taken
his own stand on, so far as he had taken a stand; and if they were
all only going to see nothing he had only wasted his time. He gave
his friend till the very last moment, till they had come into sight
of the hotel; and when poor Pocock only continued cheerful and
envious and funny he fairly grew to dislike him, to feel him
extravagantly common. If they were ALL going to see
nothing!—Strether knew, as this came back to him, that he was also
letting Pocock represent for him what Mrs. Newsome wouldn't see. He
went on disliking, in the light of Jim's commonness, to talk to him
about that lady; yet just before the cab pulled up he knew the
extent of his desire for the real word from Woollett.

"Has Mrs. Newsome at all given way—?"

"'Given way'?"—Jim echoed it with the practical derision of his
sense of a long past.

"Under the strain, I mean, of hope deferred, of disappointment
repeated and thereby intensified."

"Oh is she prostrate, you mean?"—he had his categories in hand.
"Why yes, she's prostrate—just as Sally is. But they're never so
lively, you know, as when they're prostrate."

"Ah Sarah's prostrate?" Strether vaguely murmured.

"It's when they're prostrate that they most sit up."

"And Mrs. Newsome's sitting up?"

"All night, my boy—for YOU!" And Jim fetched him, with a vulgar
little guffaw, a thrust that gave relief to the picture. But he had
got what he wanted. He felt on the spot that this WAS the real word
from Woollett. "So don't you go home!" Jim added while he alighted
and while his friend, letting him profusely pay the cabman, sat on
in a momentary muse. Strether wondered if that were the real word
too.

As the door of Mrs. Pocock's salon was pushed open for him, the
next day, well before noon, he was reached by a voice with a
charming sound that made him just falter before crossing the
threshold. Madame de Vionnet was already on the field, and this
gave the drama a quicker pace than he felt it as yet—though his
suspense had increased—in the power of any act of his own to do. He
had spent the previous evening with all his old friends together
yet he would still have described himself as quite in the dark in
respect to a forecast of their influence on his situation. It was
strange now, none the less, that in the light of this unexpected
note of her presence he felt Madame de Vionnet a part of that
situation as she hadn't even yet been. She was alone, he found
himself assuming, with Sarah, and there was a bearing in
that—somehow beyond his control—on his personal fate. Yet she was
only saying something quite easy and independent—the thing she had
come, as a good friend of Chad's, on purpose to say. "There isn't
anything at all—? I should be so delighted."

It was clear enough, when they were there before him, how she
had been received. He saw this, as Sarah got up to greet him, from
something fairly hectic in Sarah's face. He saw furthermore that
they weren't, as had first come to him, alone together; he was at
no loss as to the identity of the broad high back presented to him
in the embrasure of the window furthest from the door. Waymarsh,
whom he had to-day not yet seen, whom he only knew to have left the
hotel before him, and who had taken part, the night previous, on
Mrs. Pocock's kind invitation, conveyed by Chad, in the
entertainment, informal but cordial, promptly offered by that
lady—Waymarsh had anticipated him even as Madame de Vionnet had
done, and, with his hands in his pockets and his attitude
unaffected by Strether's entrance, was looking out, in marked
detachment, at the Rue de Rivoli. The latter felt it in the air—it
was immense how Waymarsh could mark things—-that he had remained
deeply dissociated from the overture to their hostess that we have
recorded on Madame de Vionnet's side. He had, conspicuously, tact,
besides a stiff general view; and this was why he had left Mrs.
Pocock to struggle alone. He would outstay the visitor; he would
unmistakeably wait; to what had he been doomed for months past but
waiting? Therefore she was to feel that she had him in reserve.
What support she drew from this was still to be seen, for, although
Sarah was vividly bright, she had given herself up for the moment
to an ambiguous flushed formalism. She had had to reckon more
quickly than she expected; but it concerned her first of all to
signify that she was not to be taken unawares. Strether arrived
precisely in time for her showing it. "Oh you're too good; but I
don't think I feel quite helpless. I have my brother—and these
American friends. And then you know I've been to Paris. I KNOW
Paris," said Sally Pocock in a tone that breathed a certain chill
on Strether's heart.