The Ambassadors (42 page)

"But WHY can you be?"—his companion was surprised at his use of
the word.

"Because I'm made so—I think of everything."

"Ah one must never do that," she smiled. "One must think of as
few things as possible."

"Then," he answered, "one must pick them out right. But all I
mean is—for I express myself with violence—that she's in a position
to watch me. There's an element of suspense for me, and she can see
me wriggle. But my wriggling doesn't matter," he pursued. "I can
bear it. Besides, I shall wriggle out."

The picture at any rate stirred in her an appreciation that he
felt to be sincere. "I don't see how a man can be kinder to a woman
than you are to me."

Well, kind was what he wanted to be; yet even while her charming
eyes rested on him with the truth of this he none the less had his
humour of honesty. "When I say suspense I mean, you know," he
laughed, "suspense about my own case too!"

"Oh yes—about your own case too!" It diminished his magnanimity,
but she only looked at him the more tenderly.

"Not, however," he went on, "that I want to talk to you about
that. It's my own little affair, and I mentioned it simply as part
of Mrs. Pocock's advantage." No, no; though there was a queer
present temptation in it, and his suspense was so real that to
fidget was a relief, he wouldn't talk to her about Mrs. Newsome,
wouldn't work off on her the anxiety produced in him by Sarah's
calculated omissions of reference. The effect she produced of
representing her mother had been produced—and that was just the
immense, the uncanny part of it—without her having so much as
mentioned that lady. She had brought no message, had alluded to no
question, had only answered his enquiries with hopeless limited
propriety. She had invented a way of meeting them—as if he had been
a polite perfunctory poor relation, of distant degree—that made
them almost ridiculous in him. He couldn't moreover on his own side
ask much without appearing to publish how he had lately lacked
news; a circumstance of which it was Sarah's profound policy not to
betray a suspicion. These things, all the same, he wouldn't breathe
to Madame de Vionnet—much as they might make him walk up and down.
And what he didn't say—as well as what SHE didn't, for she had also
her high decencies—enhanced the effect of his being there with her
at the end of ten minutes more intimately on the basis of saving
her than he had yet had occasion to be. It ended in fact by being
quite beautiful between them, the number of things they had a
manifest consciousness of not saying. He would have liked to turn
her, critically, to the subject of Mrs. Pocock, but he so stuck to
the line he felt to be the point of honour and of delicacy that he
scarce even asked her what her personal impression had been. He
knew it, for that matter, without putting her to trouble: that she
wondered how, with such elements, Sarah could still have no charm,
was one of the principal things she held her tongue about. Strether
would have been interested in her estimate of the
elements—indubitably there, some of them, and to be appraised
according to taste—but he denied himself even the luxury of this
diversion. The way Madame de Vionnet affected him to-day was in
itself a kind of demonstration of the happy employment of gifts.
How could a woman think Sarah had charm who struck one as having
arrived at it herself by such different roads? On the other hand of
course Sarah wasn't obliged to have it. He felt as if somehow
Madame de Vionnet WAS. The great question meanwhile was what Chad
thought of his sister; which was naturally ushered in by that of
Sarah's apprehension of Chad. THAT they could talk of, and with a
freedom purchased by their discretion in other senses. The
difficulty however was that they were reduced as yet to conjecture.
He had given them in the day or two as little of a lead as Sarah,
and Madame de Vionnet mentioned that she hadn't seen him since his
sister's arrival.

"And does that strike you as such an age?"

She met it in all honesty. "Oh I won't pretend I don't miss him.
Sometimes I see him every day. Our friendship's like that. Make
what you will of it!" she whimsically smiled; a little flicker of
the kind, occasional in her, that had more than once moved him to
wonder what he might best make of HER. "But he's perfectly right,"
she hastened to add, "and I wouldn't have him fail in any way at
present for the world. I'd sooner not see him for three months. I
begged him to be beautiful to them, and he fully feels it for
himself."

Strether turned away under his quick perception; she was so odd
a mixture of lucidity and mystery. She fell in at moments with the
theory about her he most cherished, and she seemed at others to
blow it into air. She spoke now as if her art were all an
innocence, and then again as if her innocence were all an art. "Oh
he's giving himself up, and he'll do so to the end. How can he but
want, now that it's within reach, his full impression?—which is
much more important, you know, than either yours or mine. But he's
just soaking," Strether said as he came back; "he's going in
conscientiously for a saturation. I'm bound to say he IS very
good."

"Ah," she quietly replied, "to whom do you say it?" And then
more quietly still: "He's capable of anything."

Strether more than reaffirmed—"Oh he's excellent. I more and
more like," he insisted, "to see him with them;" though the oddity
of this tone between them grew sharper for him even while they
spoke. It placed the young man so before them as the result of her
interest and the product of her genius, acknowledged so her part in
the phenomenon and made the phenomenon so rare, that more than ever
yet he might have been on the very point of asking her for some
more detailed account of the whole business than he had yet
received from her. The occasion almost forced upon him some
question as to how she had managed and as to the appearance such
miracles presented from her own singularly close place of survey.
The moment in fact however passed, giving way to more present
history, and he continued simply to mark his appreciation of the
happy truth. "It's a tremendous comfort to feel how one can trust
him." And then again while for a little she said nothing—as if
after all to HER trust there might be a special limit: "I mean for
making a good show to them."

"Yes," she thoughtfully returned—"but if they shut their eyes to
it!"

Strether for an instant had his own thought. "Well perhaps that
won't matter!"

"You mean because he probably—do what they will—won't like
them?"

"Oh 'do what they will'—! They won't do much; especially if
Sarah hasn't more—well, more than one has yet made out—to
give."

Madame de Vionnet weighed it. "Ah she has all her grace!" It was
a statement over which, for a little, they could look at each other
sufficiently straight, and though it produced no protest from
Strether the effect was somehow as if he had treated it as a joke.
"She may be persuasive and caressing with him; she may be eloquent
beyond words. She may get hold of him," she wound up—"well, as
neither you nor I have."

"Yes, she MAY"—and now Strether smiled. "But he has spent all
his time each day with Jim. He's still showing Jim round."

She visibly wondered. "Then how about Jim?"

Strether took a turn before he answered. "Hasn't he given you
Jim? Hasn't he before this 'done' him for you?" He was a little at
a loss. "Doesn't he tell you things?"

She hesitated. "No"—and their eyes once more gave and took. "Not
as you do. You somehow make me see them—or at least feel them. And
I haven't asked too much," she added; "I've of late wanted so not
to worry him."

"Ah for that, so have I," he said with encouraging assent; so
that—as if she had answered everything—they were briefly sociable
on it. It threw him back on his other thought, with which he took
another turn; stopping again, however, presently with something of
a glow. "You see Jim's really immense. I think it will be Jim
who'll do it."

She wondered. "Get hold of him?"

"No—just the other thing. Counteract Sarah's spell." And he
showed now, our friend, how far he had worked it out. "Jim's
intensely cynical."

"Oh dear Jim!" Madame de Vionnet vaguely smiled.

"Yes, literally—dear Jim! He's awful. What HE wants, heaven
forgive him, is to help us."

"You mean"—she was eager—"help ME?"

"Well, Chad and me in the first place. But he throws you in too,
though without as yet seeing you much. Only, so far as he does see
you—if you don't mind—he sees you as awful."

"'Awful'?"—she wanted it all.

"A regular bad one—though of course of a tremendously superior
kind. Dreadful, delightful, irresistible."

"Ah dear Jim! I should like to know him. I MUST."

"Yes, naturally. But will it do? You may, you know," Strether
suggested, "disappoint him."

She was droll and humble about it. "I can but try. But my
wickedness then," she went on, "is my recommendation for him?"

"Your wickedness and the charms with which, in such a degree as
yours, he associates it. He understands, you see, that Chad and I
have above all wanted to have a good time, and his view is simple
and sharp. Nothing will persuade him—in the light, that is, of my
behaviour—that I really didn't, quite as much as Chad, come over to
have one before it was too late. He wouldn't have expected it of
me; but men of my age, at Woollett—and especially the least likely
ones—have been noted as liable to strange outbreaks, belated
uncanny clutches at the unusual, the ideal. It's an effect that a
lifetime of Woollett has quite been observed as having; and I thus
give it to you, in Jim's view, for what it's worth. Now his wife
and his mother-in-law," Strether continued to explain, "have, as in
honour bound, no patience with such phenomena, late or early—which
puts Jim, as against his relatives, on the other side. Besides," he
added, "I don't think he really wants Chad back. If Chad doesn't
come—"

"He'll have"—Madame de Vionnet quite apprehended—"more of the
free hand?"

"Well, Chad's the bigger man."

"So he'll work now, en dessous, to keep him quiet?"

"No—he won't 'work' at all, and he won't do anything en dessous.
He's very decent and won't be a traitor in the camp. But he'll be
amused with his own little view of our duplicity, he'll sniff up
what he supposes to be Paris from morning till night, and he'll be,
as to the rest, for Chad—well, just what he is."

She thought it over. "A warning?"

He met it almost with glee. "You ARE as wonderful as everybody
says!" And then to explain all he meant: "I drove him about for his
first hour, and do you know what—all beautifully unconscious—he
most put before me? Why that something like THAT is at bottom, as
an improvement to his present state, as in fact the real redemption
of it, what they think it may not be too late to make of our
friend." With which, as, taking it in, she seemed, in her recurrent
alarm, bravely to gaze at the possibility, he completed his
statement. "But it IS too late. Thanks to you!"

It drew from her again one of her indefinite reflexions. "Oh
'me'—after all!"

He stood before her so exhilarated by his demonstration that he
could fairly be jocular. "Everything's comparative. You're better
than THAT."

"You"—she could but answer him—"are better than anything." But
she had another thought. "WILL Mrs. Pocock come to me?"

"Oh yes—she'll do that. As soon, that is, as my friend
Waymarsh—HER friend now—leaves her leisure."

She showed an interest. "Is he so much her friend as that?"

"Why, didn't you see it all at the hotel?"

"Oh"—she was amused—"'all' is a good deal to say. I don't know—I
forget. I lost myself in HER."

"You were splendid," Strether returned—"but 'all' isn't a good
deal to say: it's only a little. Yet it's charming so far as it
goes. She wants a man to herself."

"And hasn't she got you?"

"Do you think she looked at me—or even at you—as if she had?"
Strether easily dismissed that irony. "Every one, you see, must
strike her as having somebody. You've got Chad—and Chad has got
you."

"I see"—she made of it what she could. "And you've got
Maria."

Well, he on his side accepted that. "I've got Maria. And Maria
has got me. So it goes."

"But Mr. Jim—whom has he got?"

"Oh he has got—or it's as IF he had—the whole place."

"But for Mr. Waymarsh"—she recalled—"isn't Miss Barrace before
any one else?"

He shook his head. "Miss Barrace is a raffinee, and her
amusement won't lose by Mrs. Pocock. It will gain rather—especially
if Sarah triumphs and she comes in for a view of it."

"How well you know us!" Madame de Vionnet, at this, frankly
sighed.

"No—it seems to me it's we that I know. I know Sarah—it's
perhaps on that ground only that my feet are firm. Waymarsh will
take her round while Chad takes Jim—and I shall be, I assure you
delighted for both of them. Sarah will have had what she
requires—she will have paid her tribute to the ideal; and he will
have done about the same. In Paris it's in the air—so what can one
do less? If there's a point that, beyond any other, Sarah wants to
make, it's that she didn't come out to be narrow. We shall feel at
least that."

"Oh," she sighed, "the quantity we seem likely to 'feel'! But
what becomes, in these conditions, of the girl?"

"Of Mamie—if we're all provided? Ah for that," said Strether,
"you can trust Chad."

"To be, you mean, all right to her?"

"To pay her every attention as soon as he has polished off Jim.
He wants what Jim can give him—and what Jim really won't—though he
has had it all, and more than all, from me. He wants in short his
own personal impression, and he'll get it—strong. But as soon as he
has got it Mamie won't suffer."