II

He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he

knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that Waymarsh,

even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own prompt and lucid

allusions and enquiries, by their having publicly partaken of dinner in

her company, and by another stroll, to which she was not a stranger,

out into the town to look at the cathedral by moonlight—it was a blank

that the resident of Milrose, though admitting acquaintance with the

Munsters, professed himself unable to fill. He had no recollection of

Miss Gostrey, and two or three questions that she put to him about

those members of his circle had, to Strether’s observation, the same

effect he himself had already more directly felt—the effect of

appearing to place all knowledge, for the time, on this original

woman’s side. It interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such

relation for her with his friend as there could possibly be a question

of, and it particularly struck him that they were to be marked

altogether in Waymarsh’s quarter. This added to his own sense of having

gone far with her—gave him an early illustration of a much shorter

course. There was a certitude he immediately grasped—a conviction that

Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever degree of

acquaintances to profit by her.

There had been after the first interchange among the three a talk of

some five minutes in the hall, and then the two men had adjourned to

the garden, Miss Gostrey for the time disappearing. Strether in due

course accompanied his friend to the room he had bespoken and had,

before going out, scrupulously visited; where at the end of another

half-hour he had no less discreetly left him. On leaving him he

repaired straight to his own room, but with the prompt effect of

feeling the compass of that chamber resented by his condition. There he

enjoyed at once the first consequence of their reunion. A place was too

small for him after it that had seemed large enough before. He had

awaited it with something he would have been sorry, have been almost

ashamed not to recognise as emotion, yet with a tacit assumption at the

same time that emotion would in the event find itself relieved. The

actual oddity was that he was only more excited; and his excitement—to

which indeed he would have found it difficult instantly to give a

name—brought him once more downstairs and caused him for some minutes

vaguely to wander. He went once more to the garden; he looked into the

public room, found Miss Gostrey writing letters and backed out; he

roamed, fidgeted and wasted time; but he was to have his more intimate

session with his friend before the evening closed.

It was late—not till Strether had spent an hour upstairs with him—that

this subject consented to betake himself to doubtful rest. Dinner and

the subsequent stroll by moonlight—a dream, on Strether’s part, of

romantic effects rather prosaically merged in a mere missing of thicker

coats—had measurably intervened, and this midnight conference was the

result of Waymarsh’s having (when they were free, as he put it, of

their fashionable friend) found the smoking-room not quite what he

wanted, and yet bed what he wanted less. His most frequent form of

words was that he knew himself, and they were applied on this occasion

to his certainty of not sleeping. He knew himself well enough to know

that he should have a night of prowling unless he should succeed, as a

preliminary, in getting prodigiously tired. If the effort directed to

this end involved till a late hour the presence of Strether—consisted,

that is, in the detention of the latter for full discourse—there was

yet an impression of minor discipline involved for our friend in the

picture Waymarsh made as he sat in trousers and shirt on the edge of

his couch. With his long legs extended and his large back much bent, he

nursed alternately, for an almost incredible time, his elbows and his

beard. He struck his visitor as extremely, as almost wilfully

uncomfortable; yet what had this been for Strether, from that first

glimpse of him disconcerted in the porch of the hotel, but the

predominant notes. The discomfort was in a manner contagious, as well

as also in a manner inconsequent and unfounded; the visitor felt that

unless he should get used to it—or unless Waymarsh himself should—it

would constitute a menace for his own prepared, his own already

confirmed, consciousness of the agreeable. On their first going up

together to the room Strether had selected for him Waymarsh had looked

it over in silence and with a sigh that represented for his companion,

if not the habit of disapprobation, at least the despair of felicity;

and this look had recurred to Strether as the key of much he had since

observed. “Europe,” he had begun to gather from these things, had up to

now rather failed of its message to him; he hadn’t got into tune with

it and had at the end of three months almost renounced any such

expectation.

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.