The Ambassadors (9 page)

"Quite all. His father has been dead ten years, and there's no
brother, nor any other sister. They'd do," said Strether, "anything
in the world for him."

"And you'd do anything in the world for THEM?"

He shifted again; she had made it perhaps just a shade too
affirmative for his nerves. "Oh I don't know!"

"You'd do at any rate this, and the 'anything' they'd do is
represented by their MAKING you do it."

"Ah they couldn't have come—either of them. They're very busy
people and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life. She's
moreover highly nervous—and not at all strong."

"You mean she's an American invalid?"

He carefully distinguished. "There's nothing she likes less than
to be called one, but she would consent to be one of those things,
I think," he laughed, "if it were the only way to be the
other."

"Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?"

"No," said Strether, "the other way round. She's at any rate
delicate sensitive high-strung. She puts so much of herself into
everything—"

Ah Maria knew these things! "That she has nothing left for
anything else? Of course she hasn't. To whom do you say it?
High-strung? Don't I spend my life, for them, jamming down the
pedal? I see moreover how it has told on you."

Strether took this more lightly. "Oh I jam down the pedal
too!"

"Well," she lucidly returned, "we must from this moment bear on
it together with all our might." And she forged ahead. "Have they
money?"

But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her
enquiry fell short. "Mrs. Newsome," he wished further to explain,
"hasn't moreover your courage on the question of contact. If she
had come it would have been to see the person herself."

"The woman? Ah but that's courage."

"No—it's exaltation, which is a very different thing. Courage,"
he, however, accommodatingly threw out, "is what YOU have."

She shook her head. "You say that only to patch me up—to cover
the nudity of my want of exaltation. I've neither the one nor the
other. I've mere battered indifference. I see that what you mean,"
Miss Gostrey pursued, "is that if your friend HAD come she would
take great views, and the great views, to put it simply, would be
too much for her."

Strether looked amused at her notion of the simple, but he
adopted her formula. "Everything's too much for her."

"Ah then such a service as this of yours—"

"Is more for her than anything else? Yes—far more. But so long
as it isn't too much for ME—!"

"Her condition doesn't matter? Surely not; we leave her
condition out; we take it, that is, for granted. I see it, her
condition, as behind and beneath you; yet at the same time I see it
as bearing you up."

"Oh it does bear me up!" Strether laughed.

"Well then as yours bears ME nothing more's needed." With which
she put again her question. "Has Mrs. Newsome money?"

This time he heeded. "Oh plenty. That's the root of the evil.
There's money, to very large amounts, in the concern. Chad has had
the free use of a great deal. But if he'll pull himself together
and come home, all the same, he'll find his account in it."

She had listened with all her interest. "And I hope to goodness
you'll find yours!"

"He'll take up his definite material reward," said Strether
without acknowledgement of this. "He's at the parting of the ways.
He can come into the business now—he can't come later."

"Is there a business?"

"Lord, yes—a big brave bouncing business. A roaring trade."

"A great shop?"

"Yes—a workshop; a great production, a great industry. The
concern's a manufacture—and a manufacture that, if it's only
properly looked after, may well be on the way to become a monopoly.
It's a little thing they make—make better, it appears, than other
people can, or than other people, at any rate, do. Mr. Newsome,
being a man of ideas, at least in that particular line," Strether
explained, "put them on it with great effect, and gave the place
altogether, in his time, an immense lift."

"It's a place in itself?"

"Well, quite a number of buildings; almost a little industrial
colony. But above all it's a thing. The article produced."

"And what IS the article produced?"

Strether looked about him as in slight reluctance to say; then
the curtain, which he saw about to rise, came to his aid. "I'll
tell you next time." But when the next time came he only said he'd
tell her later on—after they should have left the theatre; for she
had immediately reverted to their topic, and even for himself the
picture of the stage was now overlaid with another image. His
postponements, however, made her wonder—wonder if the article
referred to were anything bad. And she explained that she meant
improper or ridiculous or wrong. But Strether, so far as that went,
could satisfy her. "Unmentionable? Oh no, we constantly talk of it;
we are quite familiar and brazen about it. Only, as a small,
trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use,
it's just wanting in-what shall I say? Well, dignity, or the least
approach to distinction. Right here therefore, with everything
about us so grand—!" In short he shrank.

"It's a false note?"

"Sadly. It's vulgar."

"But surely not vulgarer than this." Then on his wondering as
she herself had done: "Than everything about us." She seemed a
trifle irritated. "What do you take this for?"

"Why for—comparatively—divine!"

"This dreadful London theatre? It's impossible, if you really
want to know."

"Oh then," laughed Strether, "I DON'T really want to know!"

It made between them a pause, which she, however, still
fascinated by the mystery of the production at Woollett, presently
broke. "'Rather ridiculous'? Clothes-pins? Saleratus?
Shoe-polish?"

It brought him round. "No—you don't even 'burn.' I don't think,
you know, you'll guess it."

"How then can I judge how vulgar it is?"

"You'll judge when I do tell you"—and he persuaded her to
patience. But it may even now frankly be mentioned that he in the
sequel never WAS to tell her. He actually never did so, and it
moreover oddly occurred that by the law, within her, of the
incalculable, her desire for the information dropped and her
attitude to the question converted itself into a positive
cultivation of ignorance. In ignorance she could humour her fancy,
and that proved a useful freedom. She could treat the little
nameless object as indeed unnameable—she could make their
abstention enormously definite. There might indeed have been for
Strether the portent of this in what she next said.

"Is it perhaps then because it's so bad—because your industry as
you call it, IS so vulgar—that Mr. Chad won't come back? Does he
feel the taint? Is he staying away not to be mixed up in it?"

"Oh," Strether laughed, "it wouldn't appear—would it?—that he
feels 'taints'! He's glad enough of the money from it, and the
money's his whole basis. There's appreciation in that—I mean as to
the allowance his mother has hitherto made him. She has of course
the resource of cutting this allowance off; but even then he has
unfortunately, and on no small scale, his independent supply—money
left him by his grandfather, her own father."

"Wouldn't the fact you mention then," Miss Gostrey asked, "make
it just more easy for him to be particular? Isn't he conceivable as
fastidious about the source—the apparent and public source—of his
income?"

Strether was able quite good-humouredly to entertain the
proposition. "The source of his grandfather's wealth—and thereby of
his own share in it—was not particularly noble."

"And what source was it?"

Strether cast about. "Well—practices."

"In business? Infamies? He was an old swindler?"

"Oh," he said with more emphasis than spirit, "I shan't describe
HIM nor narrate his exploits."

"Lord, what abysses! And the late Mr. Newsome then?"

"Well, what about him?"

"Was he like the grandfather?"

"No—he was on the other side of the house. And he was
different."

Miss Gostrey kept it up. "Better?"

Her friend for a moment hung fire. "No."

Her comment on his hesitation was scarce the less marked for
being mute. "Thank you. NOW don't you see," she went on, "why the
boy doesn't come home? He's drowning his shame."

"His shame? What shame?"

"What shame? Comment donc? THE shame."

"But where and when," Strether asked, "is 'THE shame'—where is
any shame—to-day? The men I speak of—they did as every one does;
and (besides being ancient history) it was all a matter of
appreciation."

She showed how she understood. "Mrs. Newsome has
appreciated?"

"Ah I can't speak for HER!"

"In the midst of such doings—and, as I understand you, profiting
by them, she at least has remained exquisite?"

"Oh I can't talk of her!" Strether said.

"I thought she was just what you COULD talk of. You DON'T trust
me," Miss Gostrey after a moment declared.

It had its effect. "Well, her money is spent, her life conceived
and carried on with a large beneficence—"

"That's a kind of expiation of wrongs? Gracious," she added
before he could speak, "how intensely you make me see her!"

"If you see her," Strether dropped, "it's all that's
necessary."

She really seemed to have her. "I feel that. She IS, in spite of
everything, handsome."

This at least enlivened him. "What do you mean by
everything?"

"Well, I mean YOU." With which she had one of her swift changes
of ground. "You say the concern needs looking after; but doesn't
Mrs. Newsome look after it?"

"So far as possible. She's wonderfully able, but it's not her
affair, and her life's a good deal overcharged. She has many, many
things."

"And you also?"

"Oh yes—I've many too, if you will."

"I see. But what I mean is," Miss Gostrey amended, "do you also
look after the business?"

"Oh no, I don't touch the business."

"Only everything else?"

"Well, yes—some things."

"As for instance—?"

Strether obligingly thought. "Well, the Review."

"The Review?—you have a Review?"

"Certainly. Woollett has a Review—which Mrs. Newsome, for the
most part, magnificently pays for and which I, not at all
magnificently, edit. My name's on the cover," Strether pursued,
"and I'm really rather disappointed and hurt that you seem never to
have heard of it."

She neglected for a moment this grievance. "And what kind of a
Review is it?"

His serenity was now completely restored. "Well, it's
green."

"Do you mean in political colour as they say here—in
thought?"

"No; I mean the cover's green—of the most lovely shade."

"And with Mrs. Newsome's name on it too?"

He waited a little. "Oh as for that you must judge if she peeps
out. She's behind the whole thing; but she's of a delicacy and a
discretion—!"

Miss Gostrey took it all. "I'm sure. She WOULD be. I don't
underrate her. She must be rather a swell."

"Oh yes, she's rather a swell!"

"A Woollett swell—bon! I like the idea of a Woollett swell. And
you must be rather one too, to be so mixed up with her."

"Ah no," said Strether, "that's not the way it works."

But she had already taken him up. "The way it works—you needn't
tell me!—is of course that you efface yourself."

"With my name on the cover?" he lucidly objected.

"Ah but you don't put it on for yourself."

"I beg your pardon—that's exactly what I do put it on for. It's
exactly the thing that I'm reduced to doing for myself. It seems to
rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions,
the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable
little scrap of an identity."

On this she looked at him as to say many things, but what she at
last simply said was: "She likes to see it there. You're the bigger
swell of the two," she immediately continued, "because you think
you're not one. She thinks she IS one. However," Miss Gostrey
added, "she thinks you're one too. You're at all events the biggest
she can get hold of." She embroidered, she abounded. "I don't say
it to interfere between you, but on the day she gets hold of a
bigger one—!" Strether had thrown back his head as in silent mirth
over something that struck him in her audacity or felicity, and her
flight meanwhile was already higher. "Therefore close with
her—!"

"Close with her?" he asked as she seemed to hang poised.

"Before you lose your chance."

Their eyes met over it. "What do you mean by closing?"

"And what do I mean by your chance? I'll tell you when you tell
me all the things YOU don't. Is it her GREATEST fad?" she briskly
pursued.

"The Review?" He seemed to wonder how he could best describe it.
This resulted however but in a sketch. "It's her tribute to the
ideal."

"I see. You go in for tremendous things."

"We go in for the unpopular side—that is so far as we dare."

"And how far DO you dare?"

"Well, she very far. I much less. I don't begin to have her
faith. She provides," said Strether, "three fourths of that. And
she provides, as I've confided to you, ALL the money."

It evoked somehow a vision of gold that held for a little Miss
Gostrey's eyes, and she looked as if she heard the bright dollars
shovelled in. "I hope then you make a good thing—"

"I NEVER made a good thing!" he at once returned.

She just waited. "Don't you call it a good thing to be
loved?"

"Oh we're not loved. We're not even hated. We're only just
sweetly ignored."

She had another pause. "You don't trust me!" she once more
repeated.

"Don't I when I lift the last veil?—tell you the very secret of
the prison-house?"