The Ambassadors (6 page)

He really appeared at present to insist on that by just perching
there with the gas in his eyes. This of itself somehow conveyed the
futility of single rectifications in a multiform failure. He had a
large handsome head and a large sallow seamed face—a striking
significant physiognomic total, the upper range of which, the great
political brow, the thick loose hair, the dark fuliginous eyes,
recalled even to a generation whose standard had dreadfully
deviated the impressive image, familiar by engravings and busts, of
some great national worthy of the earlier part of the mid-century.
He was of the personal type—and it was an element in the power and
promise that in their early time Strether had found in him—of the
American statesman, the statesman trained in "Congressional halls,"
of an elder day. The legend had been in later years that as the
lower part of his face, which was weak, and slightly crooked,
spoiled the likeness, this was the real reason for the growth of
his beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those not in the
secret. He shook his mane; he fixed, with his admirable eyes, his
auditor or his observer; he wore no glasses and had a way, partly
formidable, yet also partly encouraging, as from a representative
to a constituent, of looking very hard at those who approached him.
He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you enter.
Strether, who hadn't seen him for so long an interval, apprehended
him now with a freshness of taste, and had perhaps never done him
such ideal justice. The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than they
need have been for the career; but that only meant, after all, that
the career was itself expressive. What it expressed at midnight in
the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject of it had,
at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight in time, a general
nervous collapse. But this very proof of the full life, as the full
life was understood at Milrose, would have made to Strether's
imagination an element in which Waymarsh could have floated easily
had he only consented to float. Alas nothing so little resembled
floating as the rigour with which, on the edge of his bed, he
hugged his posture of prolonged impermanence. It suggested to his
comrade something that always, when kept up, worried him—a person
established in a railway-coach with a forward inclination. It
represented the angle at which poor Waymarsh was to sit through the
ordeal of Europe.

Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions,
the absorption and embarrassment of each, they had not, at home,
during years before this sudden brief and almost bewildering reign
of comparative ease, found so much as a day for a meeting; a fact
that was in some degree an explanation of the sharpness with which
most of his friend's features stood out to Strether. Those he had
lost sight of since the early time came back to him; others that it
was never possible to forget struck him now as sitting, clustered
and expectant, like a somewhat defiant family-group, on the
doorstep of their residence. The room was narrow for its length,
and the occupant of the bed thrust so far a pair of slippered feet
that the visitor had almost to step over them in his recurrent
rebounds from his chair to fidget back and forth. There were marks
the friends made on things to talk about, and on things not to, and
one of the latter in particular fell like the tap of chalk on the
blackboard. Married at thirty, Waymarsh had not lived with his wife
for fifteen years, and it came up vividly between them in the glare
of the gas that Strether wasn't to ask about her. He knew they were
still separate and that she lived at hotels, travelled in Europe,
painted her face and wrote her husband abusive letters, of not one
of which, to a certainty, that sufferer spared himself the perusal;
but he respected without difficulty the cold twilight that had
settled on this side of his companion's life. It was a province in
which mystery reigned and as to which Waymarsh had never spoken the
informing word. Strether, who wanted to do him the highest justice
wherever he COULD do it, singularly admired him for the dignity of
this reserve, and even counted it as one of the grounds—grounds all
handled and numbered—for ranking him, in the range of their
acquaintance, as a success. He WAS a success, Waymarsh, in spite of
overwork, or prostration, of sensible shrinkage, of his wife's
letters and of his not liking Europe. Strether would have reckoned
his own career less futile had he been able to put into it anything
so handsome as so much fine silence. One might one's self easily
have left Mrs. Waymarsh; and one would assuredly have paid one's
tribute to the ideal in covering with that attitude the derision of
having been left by her. Her husband had held his tongue and had
made a large income; and these were in especial the achievements as
to which Strether envied him. Our friend had had indeed on his side
too a subject for silence, which he fully appreciated; but it was a
matter of a different sort, and the figure of the income he had
arrived at had never been high enough to look any one in the
face.

"I don't know as I quite see what you require it for. You don't
appear sick to speak of." It was of Europe Waymarsh thus finally
spoke.

"Well," said Strether, who fell as much as possible into step,
"I guess I don't FEEL sick now that I've started. But I had pretty
well run down before I did start."

Waymarsh raised his melancholy look. "Ain't you about up to your
usual average?"

It was not quite pointedly sceptical, but it seemed somehow a
plea for the purest veracity, and it thereby affected our friend as
the very voice of Milrose. He had long since made a mental
distinction—though never in truth daring to betray it—between the
voice of Milrose and the voice even of Woollett. It was the former
he felt, that was most in the real tradition. There had been
occasions in his past when the sound of it had reduced him to
temporary confusion, and the present, for some reason, suddenly
became such another. It was nevertheless no light matter that the
very effect of his confusion should be to make him again
prevaricate. "That description hardly does justice to a man to whom
it has done such a lot of good to see YOU."

Waymarsh fixed on his washing-stand the silent detached stare
with which Milrose in person, as it were, might have marked the
unexpectedness of a compliment from Woollett, and Strether for his
part, felt once more like Woollett in person. "I mean," his friend
presently continued, "that your appearance isn't as bad as I've
seen it: it compares favourably with what it was when I last
noticed it." On this appearance Waymarsh's eyes yet failed to rest;
it was almost as if they obeyed an instinct of propriety, and the
effect was still stronger when, always considering the basin and
jug, he added: "You've filled out some since then."

"I'm afraid I have," Strether laughed: "one does fill out some
with all one takes in, and I've taken in, I dare say, more than
I've natural room for. I was dog-tired when I sailed." It had the
oddest sound of cheerfulness.

"I was dog-tired," his companion returned, "when I arrived, and
it's this wild hunt for rest that takes all the life out of me. The
fact is, Strether—and it's a comfort to have you here at last to
say it to; though I don't know, after all, that I've really waited;
I've told it to people I've met in the cars—the fact is, such a
country as this ain't my KIND of country anyway. There ain't a
country I've seen over here that DOES seem my kind. Oh I don't say
but what there are plenty of pretty places and remarkable old
things; but the trouble is that I don't seem to feel anywhere in
tune. That's one of the reasons why I suppose I've gained so
little. I haven't had the first sign of that lift I was led to
expect." With this he broke out more earnestly. "Look here—I want
to go back."

His eyes were all attached to Strether's now, for he was one of
the men who fully face you when they talk of themselves. This
enabled his friend to look at him hard and immediately to appear to
the highest advantage in his eyes by doing so. "That's a genial
thing to say to a fellow who has come out on purpose to meet
you!"

Nothing could have been finer, on this, than Waymarsh's sombre
glow. "HAVE you come out on purpose?"

"Well—very largely."

"I thought from the way you wrote there was something back of
it."

Strether hesitated. "Back of my desire to be with you?"

"Back of your prostration."

Strether, with a smile made more dim by a certain consciousness,
shook his head. "There are all the causes of it!"

"And no particular cause that seemed most to drive you?"

Our friend could at last conscientiously answer. "Yes. One.
There IS a matter that has had much to do with my coming out."

Waymarsh waited a little. "Too private to mention?"

"No, not too private—for YOU. Only rather complicated."

"Well," said Waymarsh, who had waited again, "I MAY lose my mind
over here, but I don't know as I've done so yet."

"Oh you shall have the whole thing. But not tonight."

Waymarsh seemed to sit stiffer and to hold his elbows tighter.
"Why not—if I can't sleep?"

"Because, my dear man, I CAN!"

"Then where's your prostration?"

"Just in that—that I can put in eight hours." And Strether
brought it out that if Waymarsh didn't "gain" it was because he
didn't go to bed: the result of which was, in its order, that, to
do the latter justice, he permitted his friend to insist on his
really getting settled. Strether, with a kind coercive hand for it,
assisted him to this consummation, and again found his own part in
their relation auspiciously enlarged by the smaller touches of
lowering the lamp and seeing to a sufficiency of blanket. It
somehow ministered for him to indulgence to feel Waymarsh, who
looked unnaturally big and black in bed, as much tucked in as a
patient in a hospital and, with his covering up to his chin, as
much simplified by it He hovered in vague pity, to be brief, while
his companion challenged him out of the bedclothes. "Is she really
after you? Is that what's behind?"

Strether felt an uneasiness at the direction taken by his
companion's insight, but he played a little at uncertainty. "Behind
my coming out?"

"Behind your prostration or whatever. It's generally felt, you
know, that she follows you up pretty close."

Strether's candour was never very far off. "Oh it has occurred
to you that I'm literally running away from Mrs. Newsome?"

"Well, I haven't KNOWN but what you are. You're a very
attractive man, Strether. You've seen for yourself," said Waymarsh
"what that lady downstairs makes of it. Unless indeed," he rambled
on with an effect between the ironic and the anxious, "it's you who
are after HER. IS Mrs. Newsome OVER here?" He spoke as with a droll
dread of her.

It made his friend—though rather dimly—smile. "Dear no she's
safe, thank goodness—as I think I more and more feel—at home. She
thought of coming, but she gave it up. I've come in a manner
instead of her; and come to that extent—for you're right in your
inference—on her business. So you see there IS plenty of
connexion."

Waymarsh continued to see at least all there was. "Involving
accordingly the particular one I've referred to?"

Strether took another turn about the room, giving a twitch to
his companion's blanket and finally gaining the door. His feeling
was that of a nurse who had earned personal rest by having made
everything straight. "Involving more things than I can think of
breaking ground on now. But don't be afraid—you shall have them
from me: you'll probably find yourself having quite as much of them
as you can do with. I shall—if we keep together—very much depend on
your impression of some of them."

Waymarsh's acknowledgement of this tribute was
characteristically indirect. "You mean to say you don't believe we
WILL keep together?"

"I only glance at the danger," Strether paternally said,
"because when I hear you wail to go back I seem to see you open up
such possibilities of folly."

Waymarsh took it—silent a little—like a large snubbed child
"What are you going to do with me?"

It was the very question Strether himself had put to Miss
Gostrey, and he wondered if he had sounded like that. But HE at
least could be more definite. "I'm going to take you right down to
London."

"Oh I've been down to London!" Waymarsh more softly moaned.
"I've no use, Strether, for anything down there."

"Well," said Strether, good-humouredly, "I guess you've some use
for me."

"So I've got to go?"

"Oh you've got to go further yet."

"Well," Waymarsh sighed, "do your damnedest! Only you WILL tell
me before you lead me on all the way—?"

Our friend had again so lost himself, both for amusement and for
contrition, in the wonder of whether he had made, in his own
challenge that afternoon, such another figure, that he for an
instant missed the thread. "Tell you—?"

"Why what you've got on hand."

Strether hesitated. "Why it's such a matter as that even if I
positively wanted I shouldn't be able to keep it from you."

Waymarsh gloomily gazed. "What does that mean then but that your
trip is just FOR her?"

"For Mrs. Newsome? Oh it certainly is, as I say. Very much."

"Then why do you also say it's for me?"

Strether, in impatience, violently played with his latch. "It's
simple enough. It's for both of you."

Waymarsh at last turned over with a groan. "Well, I won't marry
you!"

"Neither, when it comes to that—!" But the visitor had already
laughed and escaped.

He had told Miss Gostrey he should probably take, for departure
with Waymarsh, some afternoon train, and it thereupon in the
morning appeared that this lady had made her own plan for an
earlier one. She had breakfasted when Strether came into the
coffee-room; but, Waymarsh not having yet emerged, he was in time
to recall her to the terms of their understanding and to pronounce
her discretion overdone. She was surely not to break away at the
very moment she had created a want. He had met her as she rose from
her little table in a window, where, with the morning papers beside
her, she reminded him, as he let her know, of Major Pendennis
breakfasting at his club—a compliment of which she professed a deep
appreciation; and he detained her as pleadingly as if he had
already—and notably under pressure of the visions of the
night—learned to be unable to do without her. She must teach him at
all events, before she went, to order breakfast as breakfast was
ordered in Europe, and she must especially sustain him in the
problem of ordering for Waymarsh. The latter had laid upon his
friend, by desperate sounds through the door of his room, dreadful
divined responsibilities in respect to beefsteak and
oranges—responsibilities which Miss Gostrey took over with an
alertness of action that matched her quick intelligence. She had
before this weaned the expatriated from traditions compared with
which the matutinal beefsteak was but the creature of an hour, and
it was not for her, with some of her memories, to falter in the
path though she freely enough declared, on reflexion, that there
was always in such cases a choice of opposed policies. "There are
times when to give them their head, you know—!"