The Ambassadors (8 page)

But he had hung fire. "Cost you what?"

"Well, my past—in one great lump. But no matter," he laughed:
"I'll pay with my last penny."

Her attention had unfortunately now been engaged by their
comrade's return, for Waymarsh met their view as he came out of his
shop. "I hope he hasn't paid," she said, "with HIS last; though I'm
convinced he has been splendid, and has been so for you."

"Ah no—not that!"

"Then for me?"

"Quite as little." Waymarsh was by this time near enough to show
signs his friend could read, though he seemed to look almost
carefully at nothing in particular.

"Then for himself?"

"For nobody. For nothing. For freedom."

"But what has freedom to do with it?"

Strether's answer was indirect. "To be as good as you and me.
But different."

She had had time to take in their companion's face; and with it,
as such things were easy for her, she took in all. "Different—yes.
But better!"

If Waymarsh was sombre he was also indeed almost sublime. He
told them nothing, left his absence unexplained, and though they
were convinced he had made some extraordinary purchase they were
never to learn its nature. He only glowered grandly at the tops of
the old gables. "It's the sacred rage," Strether had had further
time to say; and this sacred rage was to become between them, for
convenient comprehension, the description of one of his periodical
necessities. It was Strether who eventually contended that it did
make him better than they. But by that time Miss Gostrey was
convinced that she didn't want to be better than Strether.

Those occasions on which Strether was, in association with the
exile from Milrose, to see the sacred rage glimmer through would
doubtless have their due periodicity; but our friend had meanwhile
to find names for many other matters. On no evening of his life
perhaps, as he reflected, had he had to supply so many as on the
third of his short stay in London; an evening spent by Miss
Gostrey's side at one of the theatres, to which he had found
himself transported, without his own hand raised, on the mere
expression of a conscientious wonder. She knew her theatre, she
knew her play, as she had triumphantly known, three days running,
everything else, and the moment filled to the brim, for her
companion, that apprehension of the interesting which, whether or
no the interesting happened to filter through his guide, strained
now to its limits his brief opportunity. Waymarsh hadn't come with
them; he had seen plays enough, he signified, before Strether had
joined him—an affirmation that had its full force when his friend
ascertained by questions that he had seen two and a circus.
Questions as to what he had seen had on him indeed an effect only
less favourable than questions as to what he hadn't. He liked the
former to be discriminated; but how could it be done, Strether
asked of their constant counsellor, without discriminating the
latter?

Miss Gostrey had dined with him at his hotel, face to face over
a small table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured
shades; and the rose-coloured shades and the small table and the
soft fragrance of the lady—had anything to his mere sense ever been
so soft?—were so many touches in he scarce knew what positive high
picture. He had been to the theatre, even to the opera, in Boston,
with Mrs. Newsome, more than once acting as her only escort; but
there had been no little confronted dinner, no pink lights, no
whiff of vague sweetness, as a preliminary: one of the results of
which was that at present, mildly rueful, though with a sharpish
accent, he actually asked himself WHY there hadn't. There was much
the same difference in his impression of the noticed state of his
companion, whose dress was "cut down," as he believed the term to
be, in respect to shoulders and bosom, in a manner quite other than
Mrs. Newsome's, and who wore round her throat a broad red velvet
band with an antique jewel—he was rather complacently sure it was
antique—attached to it in front. Mrs. Newsome's dress was never in
any degree "cut down," and she never wore round her throat a broad
red velvet band: if she had, moreover, would it ever have served so
to carry on and complicate, as he now almost felt, his vision?

It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the
effect of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey's trinket depended,
had he not for the hour, at the best, been so given over to
uncontrolled perceptions. What was it but an uncontrolled
perception that his friend's velvet band somehow added, in her
appearance, to the value of every other item—to that of her smile
and of the way she carried her head, to that of her complexion, of
her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her hair? What, certainly, had a man
conscious of a man's work in the world to do with red velvet bands?
He wouldn't for anything have so exposed himself as to tell Miss
Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he HAD none the less not only
caught himself in the act—frivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above
all unexpected—of liking it: he had in addition taken it as a
starting-point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh lateral
flights. The manner in which Mrs. Newsome's throat WAS encircled
suddenly represented for him, in an alien order, almost as many
things as the manner in which Miss Gostrey's was. Mrs. Newsome
wore, at operatic hours, a black silk dress—very handsome, he knew
it was "handsome"—and an ornament that his memory was able further
to identify as a ruche. He had his association indeed with the
ruche, but it was rather imperfectly romantic. He had once said to
the wearer—and it was as "free" a remark as he had ever made to
her—that she looked, with her ruff and other matters, like Queen
Elizabeth; and it had after this in truth been his fancy that, as a
consequence of that tenderness and an acceptance of the idea, the
form of this special tribute to the "frill" had grown slightly more
marked. The connexion, as he sat there and let his imagination
roam, was to strike him as vaguely pathetic; but there it all was,
and pathetic was doubtless in the conditions the best thing it
could possibly be. It had assuredly existed at any rate; for it
seemed now to come over him that no gentleman of his age at
Woollett could ever, to a lady of Mrs. Newsome's, which was not
much less than his, have embarked on such a simile.

All sorts of things in fact now seemed to come over him,
comparatively few of which his chronicler can hope for space to
mention. It came over him for instance that Miss Gostrey looked
perhaps like Mary Stuart: Lambert Strether had a candour of fancy
which could rest for an instant gratified in such an antithesis. It
came over him that never before—no, literally never—had a lady
dined with him at a public place before going to the play. The
publicity of the place was just, in the matter, for Strether, the
rare strange thing; it affected him almost as the achievement of
privacy might have affected a man of a different experience. He had
married, in the far-away years, so young as to have missed the time
natural in Boston for taking girls to the Museum; and it was
absolutely true of hint that—even after the close of the period of
conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life, the grey
middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that, ten
years later, of his boy—he had never taken any one anywhere. It
came over him in especial—though the monition had, as happened,
already sounded, fitfully gleamed, in other forms—that the business
he had come out on hadn't yet been so brought home to him as by the
sight of the people about him. She gave him the impression, his
friend, at first, more straight than he got it for himself—gave it
simply by saying with off-hand illumination: "Oh yes, they're
types!"—but after he had taken it he made to the full his own use
of it; both while he kept silence for the four acts and while he
talked in the intervals. It was an evening, it was a world of
types, and this was a connexion above all in which the figures and
faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the
stage.

He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked
elbow of his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady
who conversed with a gentleman on her other side in stray
dissyllables which had for his ear, in the oddest way in the world,
so much sound that he wondered they hadn't more sense; and he
recognised by the same law, beyond the footlights, what he was
pleased to take for the very flush of English life. He had
distracted drops in which he couldn't have said if it were actors
or auditors who were most true, and the upshot of which, each time,
was the consciousness of new contacts. However he viewed his job it
was "types" he should have to tackle. Those before him and around
him were not as the types of Woollett, where, for that matter, it
had begun to seem to him that there must only have been the male
and the female. These made two exactly, even with the individual
varieties. Here, on the other hand, apart from the personal and the
sexual range—which might be greater or less—a series of strong
stamps had been applied, as it were, from without; stamps that his
observation played with as, before a glass case on a table, it
might have passed from medal to medal and from copper to gold. It
befell that in the drama precisely there was a bad woman in a
yellow frock who made a pleasant weak good-looking young man in
perpetual evening dress do the most dreadful things. Strether felt
himself on the whole not afraid of the yellow frock, but he was
vaguely anxious over a certain kindness into which he found himself
drifting for its victim. He hadn't come out, he reminded himself,
to be too kind, or indeed to be kind at all, to Chadwick Newsome.
Would Chad also be in perpetual evening dress? He somehow rather
hoped it—it seemed so to add to THIS young man's general
amenability; though he wondered too if, to fight him with his own
weapons, he himself (a thought almost startling) would have
likewise to be. This young man furthermore would have been much
more easy to handle—at least for HIM—than appeared probable in
respect to Chad.

It came up for him with Miss Gostrey that there were things of
which she would really perhaps after all have heard, and she
admitted when a little pressed that she was never quite sure of
what she heard as distinguished from things such as, on occasions
like the present, she only extravagantly guessed. "I seem with this
freedom, you see, to have guessed Mr. Chad. He's a young man on
whose head high hopes are placed at Woollett; a young man a wicked
woman has got hold of and whom his family over there have sent you
out to rescue. You've accepted the mission of separating him from
the wicked woman. Are you quite sure she's very bad for him?"

Something in his manner showed it as quite pulling him up. "Of
course we are. Wouldn't YOU be?"

"Oh I don't know. One never does—does one?—beforehand. One can
only judge on the facts. Yours are quite new to me; I'm really not
in the least, as you see, in possession of them: so it will be
awfully interesting to have them from you. If you're satisfied,
that's all that's required. I mean if you're sure you ARE sure:
sure it won't do."

"That he should lead such a life? Rather!"

"Oh but I don't know, you see, about his life; you've not told
me about his life. She may be charming—his life!"

"Charming?"—Strether stared before him. "She's base, venal-out
of the streets."

"I see. And HE—?"

"Chad, wretched boy?"

"Of what type and temper is he?" she went on as Strether had
lapsed.

"Well—the obstinate." It was as if for a moment he had been
going to say more and had then controlled himself.

That was scarce what she wished. "Do you like him?"

This time he was prompt. "No. How CAN I?"

"Do you mean because of your being so saddled with him?"

"I'm thinking of his mother," said Strether after a moment. "He
has darkened her admirable life." He spoke with austerity. "He has
worried her half to death."

"Oh that's of course odious." She had a pause as if for renewed
emphasis of this truth, but it ended on another note. "Is her life
very admirable?"

"Extraordinarily."

There was so much in the tone that Miss Gostrey had to devote
another pause to the appreciation of it. "And has he only HER? I
don't mean the bad woman in Paris," she quickly added—"for I assure
you I shouldn't even at the best be disposed to allow him more than
one. But has he only his mother?"

"He has also a sister, older than himself and married; and
they're both remarkably fine women."

"Very handsome, you mean?"

This promptitude—almost, as he might have thought, this
precipitation, gave him a brief drop; but he came up again. "Mrs.
Newsome, I think, is handsome, though she's not of course, with a
son of twenty-eight and a daughter of thirty, in her very first
youth. She married, however, extremely young."

"And is wonderful," Miss Gostrey asked, "for her age?"

Strether seemed to feel with a certain disquiet the pressure of
it. "I don't say she's wonderful. Or rather," he went on the next
moment, "I do say it. It's exactly what she IS—wonderful. But I
wasn't thinking of her appearance," he explained—"striking as that
doubtless is. I was thinking—well, of many other things." He seemed
to look at these as if to mention some of them; then took, pulling
himself up, another turn. "About Mrs. Pocock people may
differ."

"Is that the daughter's name—'Pocock'?"

"That's the daughter's name," Strether sturdily confessed.

"And people may differ, you mean, about HER beauty?"

"About everything."

"But YOU admire her?"

He gave his friend a glance as to show how he could bear this
"I'm perhaps a little afraid of her."

"Oh," said Miss Gostrey, "I see her from here! You may say then
I see very fast and very far, but I've already shown you I do. The
young man and the two ladies," she went on, "are at any rate all
the family?"