The Ambassadors (47 page)

He had felt of old—for it already seemed long ago—rather
humiliated at discovering he could learn in talk with a personage
so much his junior the lesson of a certain moral ease; but he had
now got used to that—whether or no the mixture of the fact with
other humiliations had made it indistinct, whether or no directly
from little Bilham's example, the example of his being contentedly
just the obscure and acute little Bilham he was. It worked so for
him, Strether seemed to see; and our friend had at private hours a
wan smile over the fact that he himself, after so many more years,
was still in search of something that would work. However, as we
have said, it worked just now for them equally to have found a
corner a little apart. What particularly kept it apart was the
circumstance that the music in the salon was admirable, with two or
three such singers as it was a privilege to hear in private. Their
presence gave a distinction to Chad's entertainment, and the
interest of calculating their effect on Sarah was actually so sharp
as to be almost painful. Unmistakeably, in her single person, the
motive of the composition and dressed in a splendour of crimson
which affected Strether as the sound of a fall through a skylight,
she would now be in the forefront of the listening circle and
committed by it up to her eyes. Those eyes during the wonderful
dinner itself he hadn't once met; having confessedly—perhaps a
little pusillanimously—arranged with Chad that he should be on the
same side of the table. But there was no use in having arrived now
with little Bilham at an unprecedented point of intimacy unless he
could pitch everything into the pot. "You who sat where you could
see her, what does she make of it all? By which I mean on what
terms does she take it?"

"Oh she takes it, I judge, as proving that the claim of his
family is more than ever justified."

"She isn't then pleased with what he has to show?"

"On the contrary; she's pleased with it as with his capacity to
do this kind of thing—more than she has been pleased with anything
for a long time. But she wants him to show it THERE. He has no
right to waste it on the likes of us."

Strether wondered. "She wants him to move the whole thing
over?"

"The whole thing—with an important exception. Everything he has
'picked up'—and the way he knows how. She sees no difficulty in
that. She'd run the show herself, and she'll make the handsome
concession that Woollett would be on the whole in some ways the
better for it. Not that it wouldn't be also in some ways the better
for Woollett. The people there are just as good."

"Just as good as you and these others? Ah that may be. But such
an occasion as this, whether or no," Strether said, "isn't the
people. It's what has made the people possible."

"Well then," his friend replied, "there you are; I give you my
impression for what it's worth. Mrs. Pocock has SEEN, and that's
to-night how she sits there. If you were to have a glimpse of her
face you'd understand me. She has made up her mind—to the sound of
expensive music."

Strether took it freely in. "Ah then I shall have news of
her."

"I don't want to frighten you, but I think that likely.
However," little Bilham continued, "if I'm of the least use to you
to hold on by—!"

"You're not of the least!"—and Strether laid an appreciative
hand on him to say it. "No one's of the least." With which, to mark
how gaily he could take it, he patted his companion's knee. "I must
meet my fate alone, and I SHALL—oh you'll see! And yet," he pursued
the next moment, "you CAN help me too. You once said to me"—he
followed this further—"that you held Chad should marry. I didn't
see then so well as I know now that you meant he should marry Miss
Pocock. Do you still consider that he should? Because if you do"—he
kept it up—"I want you immediately to change your mind. You can
help me that way."

"Help you by thinking he should NOT marry?"

"Not marry at all events Mamie."

"And who then?"

"Ah," Strether returned, "that I'm not obliged to say. But
Madame de Vionnet—I suggest—when he can.'

"Oh!" said little Bilham with some sharpness.

"Oh precisely! But he needn't marry at all—I'm at any rate not
obliged to provide for it. Whereas in your case I rather feel that
I AM."

Little Bilham was amused. "Obliged to provide for my
marrying?"

"Yes—after all I've done to you!"

The young man weighed it. "Have you done as much as that?"

"Well," said Strether, thus challenged, "of course I must
remember what you've also done to ME. We may perhaps call it
square. But all the same," he went on, "I wish awfully you'd marry
Mamie Pocock yourself."

Little Bilham laughed out. "Why it was only the other night, in
this very place, that you were proposing to me a different union
altogether."

"Mademoiselle de Vionnet?" Well, Strether easily confessed it.
"That, I admit, was a vain image. THIS is practical politics. I
want to do something good for both of you—I wish you each so well;
and you can see in a moment the trouble it will save me to polish
you off by the same stroke. She likes you, you know. You console
her. And she's splendid."

Little Bilham stared as a delicate appetite stares at an
overheaped plate. "What do I console her for?"

It just made his friend impatient. "Oh come, you knows"

"And what proves for you that she likes me?"

"Why the fact that I found her three days ago stopping at home
alone all the golden afternoon on the mere chance that you'd come
to her, and hanging over her balcony on that of seeing your cab
drive up. I don't know what you want more."

Little Bilham after a moment found it. "Only just to know what
proves to you that I like HER."

"Oh if what I've just mentioned isn't enough to make you do it,
you're a stony-hearted little fiend. Besides"—Strether encouraged
his fancy's flight—"you showed your inclination in the way you kept
her waiting, kept her on purpose to see if she cared enough for
you."

His companion paid his ingenuity the deference of a pause. "I
didn't keep her waiting. I came at the hour. I wouldn't have kept
her waiting for the world," the young man honourably declared.

"Better still—then there you are!" And Strether, charmed, held
him the faster. "Even if you didn't do her justice, moreover," he
continued, "I should insist on your immediately coming round to it.
I want awfully to have worked it. I want"—and our friend spoke now
with a yearning that was really earnest—"at least to have done
THAT."

"To have married me off—without a penny?"

"Well, I shan't live long; and I give you my word, now and here,
that I'll leave you every penny of my own. I haven't many,
unfortunately, but you shall have them all. And Miss Pocock, I
think, has a few. I want," Strether went on, "to have been at least
to that extent constructive even expiatory. I've been sacrificing
so to strange gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my
fidelity—fundamentally unchanged after all—to our own. I feel as if
my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars—of
another faith altogether. There it is—it's done." And then he
further explained. "It took hold of me because the idea of getting
her quite out of the way for Chad helps to clear my ground."

The young man, at this, bounced about, and it brought them face
to face in admitted amusement. "You want me to marry as a
convenience to Chad?"

"No," Strether debated—"HE doesn't care whether you marry or
not. It's as a convenience simply to my own plan FOR him."

"'Simply'!"—and little Bilham's concurrence was in itself a
lively comment. "Thank you. But I thought," he continued, "you had
exactly NO plan 'for' him."

"Well then call it my plan for myself—which may be well, as you
say, to have none. His situation, don't you see? is reduced now to
the bare facts one has to recognise. Mamie doesn't want him, and he
doesn't want Mamie: so much as that these days have made clear.
It's a thread we can wind up and tuck in."

But little Bilham still questioned. "YOU can—since you seem so
much to want to. But why should I?"

Poor Strether thought it over, but was obliged of course to
admit that his demonstration did superficially fail. "Seriously,
there is no reason. It's my affair—I must do it alone. I've only my
fantastic need of making my dose stiff."

Little Bilham wondered. "What do you call your dose?"

"Why what I have to swallow. I want my conditions
unmitigated."

He had spoken in the tone of talk for talk's sake, and yet with
an obscure truth lurking in the loose folds; a circumstance
presently not without its effect on his young friend. Little
Bilham's eyes rested on him a moment with some intensity; then
suddenly, as if everything had cleared up, he gave a happy laugh.
It seemed to say that if pretending, or even trying, or still even
hoping, to be able to care for Mamie would be of use, he was all
there for the job. "I'll do anything in the world for you!"

"Well," Strether smiled, "anything in the world is all I want. I
don't know anything that pleased me in her more," he went on, "than
the way that, on my finding her up there all alone, coming on her
unawares and feeling greatly for her being so out of it, she
knocked down my tall house of cards with her instant and cheerful
allusion to the next young man. It was somehow so the note I
needed—her staying at home to receive him."

"It was Chad of course," said little Bilham, "who asked the next
young man—I like your name for me!—to call."

"So I supposed—all of which, thank God, is in our innocent and
natural manners. But do you know," Strether asked, "if Chad
knows—?" And then as this interlocutor seemed at a loss: "Why where
she has come out."

Little Bilham, at this, met his face with a conscious look—it
was as if, more than anything yet, the allusion had penetrated. "Do
you know yourself?"

Strether lightly shook his head. "There I stop. Oh, odd as it
may appear to you, there ARE things I don't know. I only got the
sense from her of something very sharp, and yet very deep down,
that she was keeping all to herself. That is I had begun with the
belief that she HAD kept it to herself; but face to face with her
there I soon made out that there was a person with whom she would
have shared it. I had thought she possibly might with ME—but I saw
then that I was only half in her confidence. When, turning to me to
greet me—for she was on the balcony and I had come in without her
knowing it—she showed me she had been expecting YOU and was
proportionately disappointed, I got hold of the tail of my
conviction. Half an hour later I was in possession of all the rest
of it. You know what has happened." He looked at his young friend
hard—then he felt sure. "For all you say, you're up to your eyes.
So there you are."

Little Bilham after an instant pulled half round. "I assure you
she hasn't told me anything."

"Of course she hasn't. For what do you suggest that I suppose
her to take you? But you've been with her every day, you've seen
her freely, you've liked her greatly—I stick to that—and you've
made your profit of it. You know what she has been through as well
as you know that she has dined here to-night—which must have put
her, by the way, through a good deal more."

The young man faced this blast; after which he pulled round the
rest of the way. "I haven't in the least said she hasn't been nice
to me. But she's proud."

"And quite properly. But not too proud for that."

"It's just her pride that has made her. Chad," little Bilham
loyally went on, "has really been as kind to her as possible. It's
awkward for a man when a girl's in love with him."

"Ah but she isn't—now."

Little Bilham sat staring before him; then he sprang up as if
his friend's penetration, recurrent and insistent, made him really
after all too nervous. "No—she isn't now. It isn't in the least,"
he went on, "Chad's fault. He's really all right. I mean he would
have been willing. But she came over with ideas. Those she had got
at home. They had been her motive and support in joining her
brother and his wife. She was to SAVE our friend."

"Ah like me, poor thing?" Strether also got to his feet.

"Exactly—she had a bad moment. It was very soon distinct to her,
to pull her up, to let her down, that, alas, he was, he IS, saved.
There's nothing left for her to do."

"Not even to love him?"

"She would have loved him better as she originally believed
him."

Strether wondered "Of course one asks one's self what notion a
little girl forms, where a young man's in question, of such a
history and such a state."

"Well, this little girl saw them, no doubt, as obscure, but she
saw them practically as wrong. The wrong for her WAS the obscure.
Chad turns out at any rate right and good and disconcerting, while
what she was all prepared for, primed and girded and wound up for,
was to deal with him as the general opposite."

"Yet wasn't her whole point"—Strether weighed it—"that he was to
be, that he COULD be, made better, redeemed?"

Little Bilham fixed it all a moment, and then with a small
headshake that diffused a tenderness: "She's too late. Too late for
the miracle."

"Yes"—his companion saw enough. "Still, if the worst fault of
his condition is that it may be all there for her to profit
by—?"

"Oh she doesn't want to 'profit,' in that flat way. She doesn't
want to profit by another woman's work—she wants the miracle to
have been her own miracle. THAT'S what she's too late for."

Strether quite felt how it all fitted, yet there seemed one
loose piece. "I'm bound to say, you know, that she strikes one, on
these lines, as fastidious—what you call here difficile."

Little Bilham tossed up his chin. "Of course she's difficile—on
any lines! What else in the world ARE our Mamies—the real, the
right ones?"