I
Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his
friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive
till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from him
bespeaking a room “only if not noisy,” reply paid, was produced for the
enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they should meet at
Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent sound. The
same secret principle, however, that had prompted Strether not
absolutely to desire Waymarsh’s presence at the dock, that had led him
thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now operated to
make him feel he could still wait without disappointment. They would
dine together at the worst, and, with all respect to dear old
Waymarsh—if not even, for that matter, to himself—there was little fear
that in the sequel they shouldn’t see enough of each other. The
principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most
newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive—the fruit of a
sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking,
after so much separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would
be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to
present itself to the nearing steamer as the first “note,” of Europe.
Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether’s
part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in
quite a sufficient degree.
That note had been meanwhile—since the previous afternoon, thanks to
this happier device—such a consciousness of personal freedom as he
hadn’t known for years; such a deep taste of change and of having above
all for the moment nobody and nothing to consider, as promised already,
if headlong hope were not too foolish, to colour his adventure with
cool success. There were people on the ship with whom he had easily
consorted—so far as ease could up to now be imputed to him—and who for
the most part plunged straight into the current that set from the
landing-stage to London; there were others who had invited him to a
tryst at the inn and had even invoked his aid for a “look round” at the
beauties of Liverpool; but he had stolen away from every one alike, had
kept no appointment and renewed no acquaintance, had been indifferently
aware of the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in
being, unlike himself, “met,” and had even independently, unsociably,
alone, without encounter or relapse and by mere quiet evasion, given
his afternoon and evening to the immediate and the sensible. They
formed a qualified draught of Europe, an afternoon and an evening on
the banks of the Mersey, but such as it was he took his potion at least
undiluted. He winced a little, truly, at the thought that Waymarsh
might be already at Chester; he reflected that, should he have to
describe himself there as having “got in” so early, it would be
difficult to make the interval look particularly eager; but he was like
a man who, elatedly finding in his pocket more money than usual,
handles it a while and idly and pleasantly chinks it before addressing
himself to the business of spending. That he was prepared to be vague
to Waymarsh about the hour of the ship’s touching, and that he both
wanted extremely to see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of
delay—these things, it is to be conceived, were early signs in him that
his relation to his actual errand might prove none of the simplest. He
was burdened, poor Strether—it had better be confessed at the
outset—with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment
in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.
After the young woman in the glass cage had held up to him across her
counter the pale-pink leaflet bearing his friend’s name, which she
neatly pronounced, he turned away to find himself, in the hall, facing
a lady who met his eyes as with an intention suddenly determined, and
whose features—not freshly young, not markedly fine, but on happy terms
with each other—came back to him as from a recent vision. For a moment
they stood confronted; then the moment placed her: he had noticed her
the day before, noticed her at his previous inn, where—again in the
hall—she had been briefly engaged with some people of his own ship’s
company. Nothing had actually passed between them, and he would as
little have been able to say what had been the sign of her face for him
on the first occasion as to name the ground of his present recognition.
Recognition at any rate appeared to prevail on her own side as
well—which would only have added to the mystery. All she now began by
saying to him nevertheless was that, having chanced to catch his
enquiry, she was moved to ask, by his leave, if it were possibly a
question of Mr. Waymarsh of Milrose Connecticut—Mr. Waymarsh the
American lawyer.
“Oh yes,” he replied, “my very well-known friend. He’s to meet me here,
coming up from Malvern, and I supposed he’d already have arrived. But
he doesn’t come till later, and I’m relieved not to have kept him. Do
you know him?” Strether wound up.
It wasn’t till after he had spoken that he became aware of how much
there had been in him of response; when the tone of her own rejoinder,
as well as the play of something more in her face—something more, that
is, than its apparently usual restless light—seemed to notify him.
“I’ve met him at Milrose—where I used sometimes, a good while ago, to
stay; I had friends there who were friends of his, and I’ve been at his
house. I won’t answer for it that he would know me,” Strether’s new
acquaintance pursued; “but I should be delighted to see him. Perhaps,”
she added, “I shall—for I’m staying over.” She paused while our friend
took in these things, and it was as if a good deal of talk had already
passed. They even vaguely smiled at it, and Strether presently observed
that Mr. Waymarsh would, no doubt, be easily to be seen. This, however,
appeared to affect the lady as if she might have advanced too far. She
appeared to have no reserves about anything. “Oh,” she said, “he won’t
care!”—and she immediately thereupon remarked that she believed
Strether knew the Munsters; the Munsters being the people he had seen
her with at Liverpool.
But he didn’t, it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give the
case much of a lift; so that they were left together as if over the
mere laid table of conversation. Her qualification of the mentioned
connexion had rather removed than placed a dish, and there seemed
nothing else to serve. Their attitude remained, none the less, that of
not forsaking the board; and the effect of this in turn was to give
them the appearance of having accepted each other with an absence of
preliminaries practically complete. They moved along the hall together,
and Strether’s companion threw off that the hotel had the advantage of
a garden. He was aware by this time of his strange inconsequence: he
had shirked the intimacies of the steamer and had muffled the shock of
Waymarsh only to find himself forsaken, in this sudden case, both of
avoidance and of caution. He passed, under this unsought protection and
before he had so much as gone up to his room, into the garden of the
hotel, and at the end of ten minutes had agreed to meet there again, as
soon as he should have made himself tidy, the dispenser of such good
assurances. He wanted to look at the town, and they would forthwith
look together. It was almost as if she had been in possession and
received him as a guest. Her acquaintance with the place presented her
in a manner as a hostess, and Strether had a rueful glance for the lady
in the glass cage. It was as if this personage had seen herself
instantly superseded.
When in a quarter of an hour he came down, what his hostess saw, what
she might have taken in with a vision kindly adjusted, was the lean,
the slightly loose figure of a man of the middle height and something
more perhaps than the middle age—a man of five-and-fifty, whose most
immediate signs were a marked bloodless brownness of face, a thick dark
moustache, of characteristically American cut, growing strong and
falling low, a head of hair still abundant but irregularly streaked
with grey, and a nose of bold free prominence, the even line, the high
finish, as it might have been called, of which, had a certain effect of
mitigation. A perpetual pair of glasses astride of this fine ridge, and
a line, unusually deep and drawn, the prolonged pen-stroke of time,
accompanying the curve of the moustache from nostril to chin, did
something to complete the facial furniture that an attentive observer
would have seen catalogued, on the spot, in the vision of the other
party to Strether’s appointment. She waited for him in the garden, the
other party, drawing on a pair of singularly fresh soft and elastic
light gloves and presenting herself with a superficial readiness which,
as he approached her over the small smooth lawn and in the watery
English sunshine, he might, with his rougher preparation, have marked
as the model for such an occasion. She had, this lady, a perfect plain
propriety, an expensive subdued suitability, that her companion was not
free to analyse, but that struck him, so that his consciousness of it
was instantly acute, as a quality quite new to him. Before reaching her
he stopped on the grass and went through the form of feeling for
something, possibly forgotten, in the light overcoat he carried on his
arm; yet the essence of the act was no more than the impulse to gain
time. Nothing could have been odder than Strether’s sense of himself as
at that moment launched in something of which the sense would be quite
disconnected from the sense of his past and which was literally
beginning there and then. It had begun in fact already upstairs and
before the dressing glass that struck him as blocking further, so
strangely, the dimness of the window of his dull bedroom; begun with a
sharper survey of the elements of Appearance than he had for a long
time been moved to make. He had during those moments felt these
elements to be not so much to his hand as he should have liked, and
then had fallen back on the thought that they were precisely a matter
as to which help was supposed to come from what he was about to do. He
was about to go up to London, so that hat and necktie might wait. What
had come as straight to him as a ball in a well-played game—and caught
moreover not less neatly—was just the air, in the person of his friend,
of having seen and chosen, the air of achieved possession of those
vague qualities and quantities that collectively figured to him as the
advantage snatched from lucky chances. Without pomp or circumstance,
certainly, as her original address to him, equally with his own
response, had been, he would have sketched to himself his impression of
her as: “Well, she’s more thoroughly civilized—!” If “More thoroughly
than _whom?_” would not have been for him a sequel to this remark, that
was just by reason of his deep consciousness of the bearing of his
comparison.
The amusement, at all events, of a civilisation intenser was
what—familiar compatriot as she was, with the full tone of the
compatriot and the rattling link not with mystery but only with dear
dyspeptic Waymarsh—she appeared distinctly to promise. His pause while
he felt in his overcoat was positively the pause of confidence, and it
enabled his eyes to make out as much of a case for her, in proportion,
as her own made out for himself. She affected him as almost insolently
young; but an easily carried five-and-thirty could still do that. She
was, however, like himself marked and wan; only it naturally couldn’t
have been known to him how much a spectator looking from one to the
other might have discerned that they had in common. It wouldn’t for
such a spectator have been altogether insupposable that, each so finely
brown and so sharply spare, each confessing so to dents of surface and
aids to sight, to a disproportionate nose and a head delicately or
grossly grizzled, they might have been brother and sister. On this
ground indeed there would have been a residuum of difference; such a
sister having surely known in respect to such a brother the extremity
of separation, and such a brother now feeling in respect to such a
sister the extremity of surprise. Surprise, it was true, was not on the
other hand what the eyes of Strether’s friend most showed him while she
gave him, stroking her gloves smoother, the time he appreciated. They
had taken hold of him straightway measuring him up and down as if they
knew how; as if he were human material they had already in some sort
handled. Their possessor was in truth, it may be communicated, the
mistress of a hundred cases or categories, receptacles of the mind,
subdivisions for convenience, in which, from a full experience, she
pigeon-holed her fellow mortals with a hand as free as that of a
compositor scattering type. She was as equipped in this particular as
Strether was the reverse, and it made an opposition between them which
he might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected
it. So far as he did suspect it he was on the contrary, after a short
shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly passive as might be. He
really had a sort of sense of what she knew. He had quite the sense
that she knew things he didn’t, and though this was a concession that
in general he found not easy to make to women, he made it now as
good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes were so quiet behind
his eternal nippers that they might almost have been absent without
changing his face, which took its expression mainly, and not least its
stamp of sensibility, from other sources, surface and grain and form.
He joined his guide in an instant, and then felt she had profited still
better than he by his having been for the moments just mentioned, so at
the disposal of her intelligence. She knew even intimate things about
him that he hadn’t yet told her and perhaps never would. He wasn’t
unaware that he had told her rather remarkably many for the time, but
these were not the real ones. Some of the real ones, however,
precisely, were what she knew.
They were to pass again through the hall of the inn to get into the
street, and it was here she presently checked him with a question.
“Have you looked up my name?”
He could only stop with a laugh. “Have you looked up mine?”
“Oh dear, yes—as soon as you left me. I went to the office and asked.
Hadn’t _you_ better do the same?”
He wondered. “Find out who you are?—after the uplifted young woman
there has seen us thus scrape acquaintance!”
She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement.
“Isn’t it a reason the more? If what you’re afraid of is the injury for
me—my being seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask who I am—I
assure you I don’t in the least mind. Here, however,” she continued,
“is my card, and as I find there’s something else again I have to say
at the office, you can just study it during the moment I leave you.”
She left him after he had taken from her the small pasteboard she had
extracted from her pocket-book, and he had extracted another from his
own, to exchange with it, before she came back. He read thus the simple
designation “Maria Gostrey,” to which was attached, in a corner of the
card, with a number, the name of a street, presumably in Paris, without
other appreciable identity than its foreignness. He put the card into
his waistcoat pocket, keeping his own meanwhile in evidence; and as he
leaned against the door-post he met with the smile of a straying
thought what the expanse before the hotel offered to his view. It was
positively droll to him that he should already have Maria Gostrey,
whoever she was—of which he hadn’t really the least idea—in a place of
safe keeping. He had somehow an assurance that he should carefully
preserve the little token he had just tucked in. He gazed with unseeing
lingering eyes as he followed some of the implications of his act,
asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify it as disloyal.
It was prompt, it was possibly even premature, and there was little
doubt of the expression of face the sight of it would have produced in
a certain person. But if it was “wrong”—why then he had better not have
come out at all. At this, poor man, had he already—and even before
meeting Waymarsh—arrived. He had believed he had a limit, but the limit
had been transcended within thirty-six hours. By how long a space on
the plane of manners or even of morals, moreover, he felt still more
sharply after Maria Gostrey had come back to him and with a gay
decisive “So now—!” led him forth into the world. This counted, it
struck him as he walked beside her with his overcoat on an arm, his
umbrella under another and his personal pasteboard a little stiffly
retained between forefinger and thumb, this struck him as really, in
comparison his introduction to things. It hadn’t been “Europe” at
Liverpool no—not even in the dreadful delightful impressive streets the
night before—to the extent his present companion made it so. She hadn’t
yet done that so much as when, after their walk had lasted a few
minutes and he had had time to wonder if a couple of sidelong glances
from her meant that he had best have put on gloves she almost pulled
him up with an amused challenge. “But why—fondly as it’s so easy to
imagine your clinging to it—don’t you put it away? Or if it’s an
inconvenience to you to carry it, one’s often glad to have one’s card
back. The fortune one spends in them!”
Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared tribute
had affected her as a deviation in one of those directions he couldn’t
yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be still the one he
had received from her. He accordingly handed her the card as if in
restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt the difference and,
with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology. “I like,” she observed,
“your name.”
“Oh,” he answered, “you won’t have heard of it!” Yet he had his reasons
for not being sure but that she perhaps might.
Ah it was but too visible! She read it over again as one who had never
seen it. “‘Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether’”—she sounded it almost as freely
as for any stranger. She repeated however that she liked
it—“particularly the Lewis Lambert. It’s the name of a novel of
Balzac’s.”
“Oh I know that!” said Strether.
“But the novel’s an awfully bad one.”
“I know that too,” Strether smiled. To which he added with an
irrelevance that was only superficial: “I come from Woollett
Massachusetts.” It made her for some reason—the irrelevance or
whatever—laugh. Balzac had described many cities, but hadn’t described
Woollett Massachusetts. “You say that,” she returned, “as if you wanted
one immediately to know the worst.”
“Oh I think it’s a thing,” he said, “that you must already have made
out. I feel it so that I certainly must look it, speak it, and, as
people say there, ‘act’ it. It sticks out of me, and you knew surely
for yourself as soon as you looked at me.”
“The worst, you mean?”
“Well, the fact of where I come from. There at any rate it _is_; so
that you won’t be able, if anything happens, to say I’ve not been
straight with you.”
“I see”—and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point he had
made. “But what do you think of as happening?”
Though he wasn’t shy—which was rather anomalous—Strether gazed about
without meeting her eyes; a motion that was frequent with him in talk,
yet of which his words often seemed not at all the effect. “Why that
you should find me too hopeless.” With which they walked on again
together while she answered, as they went, that the most “hopeless” of
her countryfolk were in general precisely those she liked best. All
sorts of other pleasant small things—small things that were yet large
for him—flowered in the air of the occasion, but the bearing of the
occasion itself on matters still remote concerns us too closely to
permit us to multiply our illustrations. Two or three, however, in
truth, we should perhaps regret to lose. The tortuous wall—girdle, long
since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by
careful civic hands—wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed by
peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a
bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer
twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows
of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled
English town and ordered English country. Too deep almost for words was
the delight of these things to Strether; yet as deeply mixed with it
were certain images of his inward picture. He had trod this walks in
the far-off time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling it,
only enriched it for present feeling and marked his renewal as a thing
substantial enough to share. It was with Waymarsh he should have shared
it, and he was now accordingly taking from him something that was his
due. He looked repeatedly at his watch, and when he had done so for the
fifth time Miss Gostrey took him up.
“You’re doing something that you think not right.”
It so touched the place that he quite changed colour and his laugh grew
almost awkward. “Am I enjoying it as much as _that?_”
“You’re not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought.”
“I see”—he appeared thoughtfully to agree. “Great is my privilege.”
“Oh it’s not your privilege! It has nothing to do with _me_. It has to
do with yourself. Your failure’s general.”
“Ah there you are!” he laughed. “It’s the failure of Woollett. _That’s_
general.”
“The failure to enjoy,” Miss Gostrey explained, “is what I mean.”
“Precisely. Woollett isn’t sure it ought to enjoy. If it were it would.
But it hasn’t, poor thing,” Strether continued, “any one to show it
how. It’s not like me. I have somebody.”
They had stopped, in the afternoon sunshine—constantly pausing, in
their stroll, for the sharper sense of what they saw—and Strether
rested on one of the high sides of the old stony groove of the little
rampart. He leaned back on this support with his face to the tower of
the cathedral, now admirably commanded by their station, the high
red-brown mass, square and subordinately spired and crocketed,
retouched and restored, but charming to his long-sealed eyes and with
the first swallows of the year weaving their flight all round it. Miss
Gostrey lingered near him, full of an air, to which she more and more
justified her right, of understanding the effect of things. She quite
concurred. “You’ve indeed somebody.” And she added: “I wish you _would_
let me show you how!”
“Oh I’m afraid of you!” he cheerfully pleaded.
She kept on him a moment, through her glasses and through his own, a
certain pleasant pointedness. “Ah no, you’re not! You’re not in the
least, thank goodness! If you had been we shouldn’t so soon have found
ourselves here together. I think,” she comfortably concluded, “you
trust me.”
“I think I do!—but that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I shouldn’t mind
if I didn’t. It’s falling thus in twenty minutes so utterly into your
hands. I dare say,” Strether continued, “it’s a sort of thing you’re
thoroughly familiar with; but nothing more extraordinary has ever
happened to me.”
She watched him with all her kindness. “That means simply that you’ve
recognised me—which _is_ rather beautiful and rare. You see what I am.”
As on this, however, he protested, with a good-humoured headshake, a
resignation of any such claim, she had a moment of explanation. “If
you’ll only come on further as you _have_ come you’ll at any rate make
out. My own fate has been too many for me, and I’ve succumbed to it.
I’m a general guide—to ‘Europe,’ don’t you know? I wait for people—I
put them through. I pick them up—I set them down. I’m a sort of
superior ‘courier-maid.’ I’m a companion at large. I take people, as
I’ve told you, about. I never sought it—it has come to me. It has been
my fate, and one’s fate one accepts. It’s a dreadful thing to have to
say, in so wicked a world, but I verily believe that, such as you see
me, there’s nothing I don’t know. I know all the shops and the
prices—but I know worse things still. I bear on my back the huge load
of our national consciousness, or, in other words—for it comes to
that—of our nation itself. Of what is our nation composed but of the
men and women individually on my shoulders? I don’t do it, you know,
for any particular advantage. I don’t do it, for instance—some people
do, you know—for money.”
Strether could only listen and wonder and weigh his chance. “And yet,
affected as you are then to so many of your clients, you can scarcely
be said to do it for love.” He waited a moment. “How do we reward you?”
She had her own hesitation, but “You don’t!” she finally returned,
setting him again in motion. They went on, but in a few minutes, though
while still thinking over what she had said, he once more took out his
watch; mechanically, unconsciously and as if made nervous by the mere
exhilaration of what struck him as her strange and cynical wit. He
looked at the hour without seeing it, and then, on something again said
by his companion, had another pause. “You’re really in terror of him.”
He smiled a smile that he almost felt to be sickly. “Now you can see
why I’m afraid of you.”
“Because I’ve such illuminations? Why they’re all for your help! It’s
what I told you,” she added, “just now. You feel as if this were
wrong.”
He fell back once more, settling himself against the parapet as if to
hear more about it. “Then get me out!”
Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the appeal, but, as if it
were a question of immediate action, she visibly considered. “Out of
waiting for him?—of seeing him at all?”
“Oh no—not that,” said poor Strether, looking grave. “I’ve got to wait
for him—and I want very much to see him. But out of the terror. You did
put your finger on it a few minutes ago. It’s general, but it avails
itself of particular occasions. That’s what it’s doing for me now. I’m
always considering something else; something else, I mean, than the
thing of the moment. The obsession of the other thing is the terror.
I’m considering at present for instance something else than _you_.”
She listened with charming earnestness. “Oh you oughtn’t to do that!”
“It’s what I admit. Make it then impossible.”
She continued to think. “Is it really an ‘order’ from you?—that I shall
take the job? _Will_ you give yourself up?”
Poor Strether heaved his sigh. “If I only could! But that’s the deuce
of it—that I never can. No—I can’t.”
She wasn’t, however, discouraged. “But you want to at least?”
“Oh unspeakably!”
“Ah then, if you’ll try!”—and she took over the job, as she had called
it, on the spot. “Trust me!” she exclaimed, and the action of this, as
they retraced their steps, was presently to make him pass his hand into
her arm in the manner of a benign dependent paternal old person who
wishes to be “nice” to a younger one. If he drew it out again indeed as
they approached the inn this may have been because, after more talk had
passed between them, the relation of age, or at least of
experience—which, for that matter, had already played to and fro with
some freedom—affected him as incurring a readjustment. It was at all
events perhaps lucky that they arrived in sufficiently separate fashion
within range of the hotel-door. The young lady they had left in the
glass cage watched as if she had come to await them on the threshold.
At her side stood a person equally interested, by his attitude, in
their return, and the effect of the sight of whom was instantly to
determine for Strether another of those responsive arrests that we have
had so repeatedly to note. He left it to Miss Gostrey to name, with the
fine full bravado as it almost struck him, of her “Mr. Waymarsh!” what
was to have been, what—he more than ever felt as his short stare of
suspended welcome took things in—would have been, but for herself, his
doom. It was already upon him even at that distance—Mr. Waymarsh was
for _his_ part joyless.