The Ambassadors (46 page)

It fully came up for them then, by means of their talking of
everything BUT Chad, that Mamie, unlike Sarah, unlike Jim, knew
perfectly what had become of him. It fully came up that she had
taken to the last fraction of an inch the measure of the change in
him, and that she wanted Strether to know what a secret she
proposed to make of it. They talked most conveniently—as if they
had had no chance yet—about Woollett; and that had virtually the
effect of their keeping the secret more close. The hour took on for
Strether, little by little, a queer sad sweetness of quality, he
had such a revulsion in Mamie's favour and on behalf of her social
value as might have come from remorse at some early injustice. She
made him, as under the breath of some vague western whiff, homesick
and freshly restless; he could really for the time have fancied
himself stranded with her on a far shore, during an ominous calm,
in a quaint community of shipwreck. Their little interview was like
a picnic on a coral strand; they passed each other, with melancholy
smiles and looks sufficiently allusive, such cupfuls of water as
they had saved. Especially sharp in Strether meanwhile was the
conviction that his companion really knew, as we have hinted, where
she had come out. It was at a very particular place—only THAT she
would never tell him; it would be above all what he should have to
puzzle for himself. This was what he hoped for, because his
interest in the girl wouldn't be complete without it. No more would
the appreciation to which she was entitled—so assured was he that
the more he saw of her process the more he should see of her pride.
She saw, herself, everything; but she knew what she didn't want,
and that it was that had helped her. What didn't she want?—there
was a pleasure lost for her old friend in not yet knowing, as there
would doubtless be a thrill in getting a glimpse. Gently and
sociably she kept that dark to him, and it was as if she soothed
and beguiled him in other ways to make up for it. She came out with
her impression of Madame de Vionnet—of whom she had "heard so
much"; she came out with her impression of Jeanne, whom she had
been "dying to see": she brought it out with a blandness by which
her auditor was really stirred that she had been with Sarah early
that very afternoon, and after dreadful delays caused by all sorts
of things, mainly, eternally, by the purchase of clothes—clothes
that unfortunately wouldn't be themselves eternal—to call in the
Rue de Bellechasse.

At the sound of these names Strether almost blushed to feel that
he couldn't have sounded them first—and yet couldn't either have
justified his squeamishness. Mamie made them easy as he couldn't
have begun to do, and yet it could only have cost her more than he
should ever have had to spend. It was as friends of Chad's, friends
special, distinguished, desirable, enviable, that she spoke of
them, and she beautifully carried it off that much as she had heard
of them—though she didn't say how or where, which was a touch of
her own—she had found them beyond her supposition. She abounded in
praise of them, and after the manner of Woollett—which made the
manner of Woollett a loveable thing again to Strether. He had never
so felt the true inwardness of it as when his blooming companion
pronounced the elder of the ladies of the Rue de Bellechasse too
fascinating for words and declared of the younger that she was
perfectly ideal, a real little monster of charm. "Nothing," she
said of Jeanne, "ought ever to happen to her—she's so awfully right
as she is. Another touch will spoil her—so she oughtn't to BE
touched."

"Ah but things, here in Paris," Strether observed, "do happen to
little girls." And then for the joke's and the occasion's sake:
"Haven't you found that yourself?"

"That things happen—? Oh I'm not a little girl. I'm a big
battered blowsy one. I don't care," Mamie laughed, "WHAT
happens."

Strether had a pause while he wondered if it mightn't happen
that he should give her the pleasure of learning that he found her
nicer than he had really dreamed—a pause that ended when he had
said to himself that, so far as it at all mattered for her, she had
in fact perhaps already made this out. He risked accordingly a
different question—though conscious, as soon as he had spoken, that
he seemed to place it in relation to her last speech. "But that
Mademoiselle de Vionnet is to be married—I suppose you've heard of
THAT." For all, he then found, he need fear! "Dear, yes; the
gentleman was there: Monsieur de Montbron, whom Madame de Vionnet
presented to us."

"And was he nice?"

Mamie bloomed and bridled with her best reception manner. "Any
man's nice when he's in love."

It made Strether laugh. "But is Monsieur de Montbron in
love—already—with YOU?"

"Oh that's not necessary—it's so much better he should be so
with HER: which, thank goodness, I lost no time in discovering for
myself. He's perfectly gone—and I couldn't have borne it for her if
he hadn't been. She's just too sweet."

Strether hesitated. "And through being in love too?"

On which with a smile that struck him as wonderful Mamie had a
wonderful answer. "She doesn't know if she is or not."

It made him again laugh out. "Oh but YOU do!"

She was willing to take it that way. "Oh yes, I know
everything." And as she sat there rubbing her polished hands and
making the best of it—only holding her elbows perhaps a little too
much out—the momentary effect for Strether was that every one else,
in all their affair, seemed stupid.

"Know that poor little Jeanne doesn't know what's the matter
with her?"

It was as near as they came to saying that she was probably in
love with Chad; but it was quite near enough for what Strether
wanted; which was to be confirmed in his certitude that, whether in
love or not, she appealed to something large and easy in the girl
before him. Mamie would be fat, too fat, at thirty; but she would
always be the person who, at the present sharp hour, had been
disinterestedly tender. "If I see a little more of her, as I hope I
shall, I think she'll like me enough—for she seemed to like me
to-day—to want me to tell her."

"And SHALL you?"

"Perfectly. I shall tell her the matter with her is that she
wants only too much to do right. To do right for her, naturally,"
said Mamie, "is to please."

"Her mother, do you mean?"

"Her mother first."

Strether waited. "And then?"

"Well, 'then'—Mr. Newsome."

There was something really grand for him in the serenity of this
reference. "And last only Monsieur de Montbron?"

"Last only"—she good-humouredly kept it up.

Strether considered. "So that every one after all then will be
suited?"

She had one of her few hesitations, but it was a question only
of a moment; and it was her nearest approach to being explicit with
him about what was between them. "I think I can speak for myself. I
shall be."

It said indeed so much, told such a story of her being ready to
help him, so committed to him that truth, in short, for such use as
he might make of it toward those ends of his own with which,
patiently and trustfully, she had nothing to do—it so fully
achieved all this that he appeared to himself simply to meet it in
its own spirit by the last frankness of admiration. Admiration was
of itself almost accusatory, but nothing less would serve to show
her how nearly he understood. He put out his hand for good-bye with
a "Splendid, splendid, splendid!" And he left her, in her
splendour, still waiting for little Bilham.

Strether occupied beside little Bilham, three evenings after his
interview with Mamie Pocock, the same deep divan they had enjoyed
together on the first occasion of our friend's meeting Madame de
Vionnet and her daughter in the apartment of the Boulevard
Malesherbes, where his position affirmed itself again as
ministering to an easy exchange of impressions. The present evening
had a different stamp; if the company was much more numerous, so,
inevitably, were the ideas set in motion. It was on the other hand,
however, now strongly marked that the talkers moved, in respect to
such matters, round an inner, a protected circle. They knew at any
rate what really concerned them to-night, and Strether had begun by
keeping his companion close to it. Only a few of Chad's guests had
dined—that is fifteen or twenty, a few compared with the large
concourse offered to sight by eleven o'clock; but number and mass,
quantity and quality, light, fragrance, sound, the overflow of
hospitality meeting the high tide of response, had all from the
first pressed upon Strether's consciousness, and he felt himself
somehow part and parcel of the most festive scene, as the term was,
in which he had ever in his life been engaged. He had perhaps seen,
on Fourths of July and on dear old domestic Commencements, more
people assembled, but he had never seen so many in proportion to
the space, or had at all events never known so great a promiscuity
to show so markedly as picked. Numerous as was the company, it had
still been made so by selection, and what was above all rare for
Strether was that, by no fault of his own, he was in the secret of
the principle that had worked. He hadn't enquired, he had averted
his head, but Chad had put him a pair of questions that themselves
smoothed the ground. He hadn't answered the questions, he had
replied that they were the young man's own affair; and he had then
seen perfectly that the latter's direction was already settled.

Chad had applied for counsel only by way of intimating that he
knew what to do; and he had clearly never known it better than in
now presenting to his sister the whole circle of his society. This
was all in the sense and the spirit of the note struck by him on
that lady's arrival; he had taken at the station itself a line that
led him without a break, and that enabled him to lead the
Pococks—though dazed a little, no doubt, breathless, no doubt, and
bewildered—to the uttermost end of the passage accepted by them
perforce as pleasant. He had made it for them violently pleasant
and mercilessly full; the upshot of which was, to Strether's
vision, that they had come all the way without discovering it to be
really no passage at all. It was a brave blind alley, where to pass
was impossible and where, unless they stuck fast, they would
have—which was always awkward—publicly to back out. They were
touching bottom assuredly tonight; the whole scene represented the
terminus of the cul-de-sac. So could things go when there was a
hand to keep them consistent—a hand that pulled the wire with a
skill at which the elder man more and more marvelled. The elder man
felt responsible, but he also felt successful, since what had taken
place was simply the issue of his own contention, six weeks before,
that they properly should wait to see what their friends would have
really to say. He had determined Chad to wait, he had determined
him to see; he was therefore not to quarrel with the time given up
to the business. As much as ever, accordingly, now that a fortnight
had elapsed, the situation created for Sarah, and against which she
had raised no protest, was that of her having accommodated herself
to her adventure as to a pleasure-party surrendered perhaps even
somewhat in excess to bustle and to "pace." If her brother had been
at any point the least bit open to criticism it might have been on
the ground of his spicing the draught too highly and pouring the
cup too full. Frankly treating the whole occasion of the presence
of his relatives as an opportunity for amusement, he left it, no
doubt, but scant margin as an opportunity for anything else. He
suggested, invented, abounded—yet all the while with the loosest
easiest rein. Strether, during his own weeks, had gained a sense of
knowing Paris; but he saw it afresh, and with fresh emotion, in the
form of the knowledge offered to his colleague.

A thousand unuttered thoughts hummed for him in the air of these
observations; not the least frequent of which was that Sarah might
well of a truth not quite know whither she was drifting. She was in
no position not to appear to expect that Chad should treat her
handsomely; yet she struck our friend as privately stiffening a
little each time she missed the chance of marking the great nuance.
The great nuance was in brief that of course her brother must treat
her handsomely—she should like to see him not; but that treating
her handsomely, none the less, wasn't all in all—treating her
handsomely buttered no parsnips; and that in fine there were
moments when she felt the fixed eyes of their admirable absent
mother fairly screw into the flat of her back. Strether, watching,
after his habit, and overscoring with thought, positively had
moments of his own in which he found himself sorry for
her—occasions on which she affected him as a person seated in a
runaway vehicle and turning over the question of a possible jump.
WOULD she jump, could she, would THAT be a safe placed—this
question, at such instants, sat for him in her lapse into pallor,
her tight lips, her conscious eyes. It came back to the main point
at issue: would she be, after all, to be squared? He believed on
the whole she would jump; yet his alternations on this subject were
the more especial stuff of his suspense. One thing remained well
before him—a conviction that was in fact to gain sharpness from the
impressions of this evening: that if she SHOULD gather in her
skirts, close her eyes and quit the carriage while in motion, he
would promptly enough become aware. She would alight from her
headlong course more or less directly upon him; it would be
appointed to him, unquestionably, to receive her entire weight.
Signs and portents of the experience thus in reserve for him had as
it happened, multiplied even through the dazzle of Chad's party. It
was partly under the nervous consciousness of such a prospect that,
leaving almost every one in the two other rooms, leaving those of
the guests already known to him as well as a mass of brilliant
strangers of both sexes and of several varieties of speech, he had
desired five quiet minutes with little Bilham, whom he always found
soothing and even a little inspiring, and to whom he had actually
moreover something distinct and important to say.