The Ambassadors (51 page)

"You can sacrifice mothers and sisters to her without a blush
and can make them cross the ocean on purpose to feel the more and
take from you the straighter, HOW you do it?"

Yes, she had taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but
he tried not to flounder in her grasp. "I don't think there's
anything I've done in any such calculated way as you describe.
Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of
everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to my having come
before you, and my having come was a result of our general state of
mind. Our general state of mind had proceeded, on its side, from
our queer ignorance, our queer misconceptions and confusions—from
which, since then, an inexorable tide of light seems to have
floated us into our perhaps still queerer knowledge. Don't you LIKE
your brother as he is," he went on, "and haven't you given your
mother an intelligible account of all that that comes to?"

It put to her also, doubtless, his own tone, too many things,
this at least would have been the case hadn't his final challenge
directly helped her. Everything, at the stage they had reached,
directly helped her, because everything betrayed in him such a
basis of intention. He saw—the odd way things came out!—that he
would have been held less monstrous had he only been a little
wilder. What exposed him was just his poor old trick of quiet
inwardness, what exposed him was his THINKING such offence. He
hadn't in the least however the desire to irritate that Sarah
imputed to him, and he could only at last temporise, for the
moment, with her indignant view. She was altogether more inflamed
than he had expected, and he would probably understand this better
when he should learn what had occurred for her with Chad. Till then
her view of his particular blackness, her clear surprise at his not
clutching the pole she held out, must pass as extravagant. "I leave
you to flatter yourself," she returned, "that what you speak of is
what YOU'VE beautifully done. When a thing has been already
described in such a lovely way—!" But she caught herself up, and
her comment on his description rang out sufficiently loud. "Do you
consider her even an apology for a decent woman?"

Ah there it was at last! She put the matter more crudely than,
for his own mixed purposes, he had yet had to do; but essentially
it was all one matter. It was so much—so much; and she treated it,
poor lady, as so little. He grew conscious, as he was now apt to
do, of a strange smile, and the next moment he found himself
talking like Miss Barrace. "She has struck me from the first as
wonderful. I've been thinking too moreover that, after all, she
would probably have represented even for yourself something rather
new and rather good."

He was to have given Mrs. Pocock with this, however, but her
best opportunity for a sound of derision. "Rather new? I hope so
with all my heart!"

"I mean," he explained, "that she might have affected you by her
exquisite amiability—a real revelation, it has seemed to myself;
her high rarity, her distinction of every sort."

He had been, with these words, consciously a little "precious";
but he had had to be—he couldn't give her the truth of the case
without them; and it seemed to him moreover now that he didn't
care. He had at all events not served his cause, for she sprang at
its exposed side. "A 'revelation'—to ME: I've come to such a woman
for a revelation? You talk to me about 'distinction'—YOU, you
who've had your privilege?—when the most distinguished woman we
shall either of us have seen in this world sits there insulted, in
her loneliness, by your incredible comparison!"

Strether forbore, with an effort, from straying; but he looked
all about him. "Does your mother herself make the point that she
sits insulted?"

Sarah's answer came so straight, so "pat," as might have been
said, that he felt on the instant its origin. "She has confided to
my judgement and my tenderness the expression of her personal sense
of everything, and the assertion of her personal dignity."

They were the very words of the lady of Woollett—he would have
known them in a thousand; her parting charge to her child. Mrs.
Pocock accordingly spoke to this extent by book, and the fact
immensely moved him. "If she does really feel as you say it's of
course very very dreadful. I've given sufficient proof, one would
have thought," he added, "of my deep admiration for Mrs.
Newsome."

"And pray what proof would one have thought you'd CALL
sufficient? That of thinking this person here so far superior to
her?"

He wondered again; he waited. "Ah dear Sarah, you must LEAVE me
this person here!"

In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even
perversely, he clung to his rag of reason, he had softly almost
wailed this plea. Yet he knew it to be perhaps the most positive
declaration he had ever made in his life, and his visitor's
reception of it virtually gave it that importance. "That's exactly
what I'm delighted to do. God knows WE don't want her! You take
good care not to meet," she observed in a still higher key, "my
question about their life. If you do consider it a thing one can
even SPEAK of, I congratulate you on your taste!"

The life she alluded to was of course Chad's and Madame de
Vionnet's, which she thus bracketed together in a way that made him
wince a little; there being nothing for him but to take home her
full intention. It was none the less his inconsequence that while
he had himself been enjoying for weeks the view of the brilliant
woman's specific action, he just suffered from any characterisation
of it by other lips. "I think tremendously well of her, at the same
time that I seem to feel her 'life' to be really none of my
business. It's my business, that is, only so far as Chad's own life
is affected by it; and what has happened, don't you see? is that
Chad's has been affected so beautifully. The proof of the pudding's
in the eating"—he tried, with no great success, to help it out with
a touch of pleasantry, while she let him go on as if to sink and
sink. He went on however well enough, as well as he could do
without fresh counsel; he indeed shouldn't stand quite firm, he
felt, till he should have re-established his communications with
Chad. Still, he could always speak for the woman he had so
definitely promised to "save." This wasn't quite for her the air of
salvation; but as that chill fairly deepened what did it become but
a reminder that one might at the worst perish WITH her? And it was
simple enough—it was rudimentary: not, not to give her away. "I
find in her more merits than you would probably have patience with
my counting over. And do you know," he enquired, "the effect you
produce on me by alluding to her in such terms? It's as if you had
some motive in not recognising all she has done for your brother,
and so shut your eyes to each side of the matter, in order,
whichever side comes up, to get rid of the other. I don't, you must
allow me to say, see how you can with any pretence to candour get
rid of the side nearest you."

"Near me—THAT sort of thing?" And Sarah gave a jerk back of her
head that well might have nullified any active proximity.

It kept her friend himself at his distance, and he respected for
a moment the interval. Then with a last persuasive effort he
bridged it. "You don't, on your honour, appreciate Chad's fortunate
development?"

"Fortunate?" she echoed again. And indeed she was prepared. "I
call it hideous."

Her departure had been for some minutes marked as imminent, and
she was already at the door that stood open to the court, from the
threshold of which she delivered herself of this judgement. It rang
out so loud as to produce for the time the hush of everything else.
Strether quite, as an effect of it, breathed less bravely; he could
acknowledge it, but simply enough. "Oh if you think THAT—!"

"Then all's at an end? So much the better. I do think that!" She
passed out as she spoke and took her way straight across the court,
beyond which, separated from them by the deep arch of the
porte-cochere the low victoria that had conveyed her from her own
hotel was drawn up. She made for it with decision, and the manner
of her break, the sharp shaft of her rejoinder, had an intensity by
which Strether was at first kept in arrest. She had let fly at him
as from a stretched cord, and it took him a minute to recover from
the sense of being pierced. It was not the penetration of surprise;
it was that, much more, of certainty; his case being put for him as
he had as yet only put it to himself. She was away at any rate; she
had distanced him—with rather a grand spring, an effect of pride
and ease, after all; she had got into her carriage before he could
overtake her, and the vehicle was already in motion. He stopped
halfway; he stood there in the court only seeing her go and noting
that she gave him no other look. The way he had put it to himself
was that all quite MIGHT be at an end. Each of her movements, in
this resolute rupture, reaffirmed, re-enforced that idea. Sarah
passed out of sight in the sunny street while, planted there in the
centre of the comparatively grey court, he continued merely to look
before him. It probably WAS all at an end.

[Note: In the 1909 New York Edition the
following two chapters were placed in the reverse of the order
appearing below. Since 1950, most scholars have agreed, because of
the internal evidence of the two chapters, that an editorial error
caused them to be printed in reverse order. This Etext, like other
editions of the past four decades, corrects the apparent
error.—Richard D. Hathaway, preparer of this electronic text]

He went late that evening to the Boulevard Malesherbes, having
his impression that it would be vain to go early, and having also,
more than once in the course of the day, made enquiries of the
concierge. Chad hadn't come in and had left no intimation; he had
affairs, apparently, at this juncture—as it occurred to Strether he
so well might have—that kept him long abroad. Our friend asked once
for him at the hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, but the only
contribution offered there was the fact that every one was out. It
was with the idea that he would have to come home to sleep that
Strether went up to his rooms, from which however he was still
absent, though, from the balcony, a few moments later, his visitor
heard eleven o'clock strike. Chad's servant had by this time
answered for his reappearance; he HAD, the visitor learned, come
quickly in to dress for dinner and vanish again. Strether spent an
hour in waiting for him—an hour full of strange suggestions,
persuasions, recognitions; one of those that he was to recall, at
the end of his adventure, as the particular handful that most had
counted. The mellowest lamplight and the easiest chair had been
placed at his disposal by Baptiste, subtlest of servants; the novel
half-uncut, the novel lemon-coloured and tender, with the ivory
knife athwart it like the dagger in a contadina's hair, had been
pushed within the soft circle—a circle which, for some reason,
affected Strether as softer still after the same Baptiste had
remarked that in the absence of a further need of anything by
Monsieur he would betake himself to bed. The night was hot and
heavy and the single lamp sufficient; the great flare of the
lighted city, rising high, spending itself afar, played up from the
Boulevard and, through the vague vista of the successive rooms,
brought objects into view and added to their dignity. Strether
found himself in possession as he never yet had been; he had been
there alone, had turned over books and prints, had invoked, in
Chad's absence, the spirit of the place, but never at the witching
hour and never with a relish quite so like a pang.

He spent a long time on the balcony; he hung over it as he had
seen little Bilham hang the day of his first approach, as he had
seen Mamie hang over her own the day little Bilham himself might
have seen her from below; he passed back into the rooms, the three
that occupied the front and that communicated by wide doors; and,
while he circulated and rested, tried to recover the impression
that they had made on him three months before, to catch again the
voice in which they had seemed then to speak to him. That voice, he
had to note, failed audibly to sound; which he took as the proof of
all the change in himself. He had heard, of old, only what he COULD
then hear; what he could do now was to think of three months ago as
a point in the far past. All voices had grown thicker and meant
more things; they crowded on him as he moved about—it was the way
they sounded together that wouldn't let him be still. He felt,
strangely, as sad as if he had come for some wrong, and yet as
excited as if he had come for some freedom. But the freedom was
what was most in the place and the hour, it was the freedom that
most brought him round again to the youth of his own that he had
long ago missed. He could have explained little enough to-day
either why he had missed it or why, after years and years, he
should care that he had; the main truth of the actual appeal of
everything was none the less that everything represented the
substance of his loss put it within reach, within touch, made it,
to a degree it had never been, an affair of the senses. That was
what it became for him at this singular time, the youth he had long
ago missed—a queer concrete presence, full of mystery, yet full of
reality, which he could handle, taste, smell, the deep breathing of
which he could positively hear. It was in the outside air as well
as within; it was in the long watch, from the balcony, in the
summer night, of the wide late life of Paris, the unceasing soft
quick rumble, below, of the little lighted carriages that, in the
press, always suggested the gamblers he had seen of old at Monte
Carlo pushing up to the tables. This image was before him when he
at last became aware that Chad was behind.