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—!”
They had gone to wait together in the garden for the dressing of the
meal, and Strether found her more suggestive than ever “Well, what?”
“Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations—unless
indeed we call it a simplicity!—that the situation _has_ to wind itself
up. They want to go back.”
“And you want them to go!” Strether gaily concluded.
“I always want them to go, and I send them as fast as I can.’
“Oh I know—you take them to Liverpool.”
“Any port will serve in a storm. I’m—with all my other functions—an
agent for repatriation. I want to re-people our stricken country. What
will become of it else? I want to discourage others.”
The ordered English garden, in the freshness of the day, was delightful
to Strether, who liked the sound, under his feet, of the tight fine
gravel, packed with the chronic damp, and who had the idlest eye for
the deep smoothness of turf and the clean curves of paths. “Other
people?”
“Other countries. Other people—yes. I want to encourage our own.”
Strether wondered. “Not to come? Why then do you ‘meet’ them—since it
doesn’t appear to be to stop them?”
“Oh that they shouldn’t come is as yet too much to ask. What I attend
to is that they come quickly and return still more so. I meet them to
help it to be over as soon as possible, and though I don’t stop them
I’ve my way of putting them through. That’s my little system; and, if
you want to know,” said Maria Gostrey, “it’s my real secret, my
innermost mission and use. I only seem, you see, to beguile and
approve; but I’ve thought it all out and I’m working all the while
underground. I can’t perhaps quite give you my formula, but I think
that practically I succeed. I send you back spent. So you stay back.
Passed through my hands—”
“We don’t turn up again?” The further she went the further he always
saw himself able to follow. “I don’t want your formula—I feel quite
enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses. Spent!” he echoed. “If
that’s how you’re arranging so subtly to send me I thank you for the
warning.”
For a minute, amid the pleasantness—poetry in tariffed items, but all
the more, for guests already convicted, a challenge to consumption—they
smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship. “Do you call it subtly?
It’s a plain poor tale. Besides, you’re a special case.”
“Oh special cases—that’s weak!” She was weak enough, further still, to
defer her journey and agree to accompany the gentlemen on their own,
might a separate carriage mark her independence; though it was in spite
of this to befall after luncheon that she went off alone and that, with
a tryst taken for a day of her company in London, they lingered another
night. She had, during the morning—spent in a way that he was to
remember later on as the very climax of his foretaste, as warm with
presentiments, with what he would have called collapses—had all sorts
of things out with Strether; and among them the fact that though there
was never a moment of her life when she wasn’t “due” somewhere, there
was yet scarce a perfidy to others of which she wasn’t capable for his
sake. She explained moreover that wherever she happened to be she found
a dropped thread to pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some familiar
appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet appeasable with
a temporary biscuit. It became, on her taking the risk of the deviation
imposed on him by her insidious arrangement of his morning meal, a
point of honour for her not to fail with Waymarsh of the larger success
too; and her subsequent boast to Strether was that she had made their
friend fare—and quite without his knowing what was the matter—as Major
Pendennis would have fared at the Megatherium. She had made him
breakfast like a gentleman, and it was nothing, she forcibly asserted,
to what she would yet make him do. She made him participate in the slow
reiterated ramble with which, for Strether, the new day amply filled
itself; and it was by her art that he somehow had the air, on the
ramparts and in the Rows, of carrying a point of his own.
The three strolled and stared and gossiped, or at least the two did;
the case really yielding for their comrade, if analysed, but the
element of stricken silence. This element indeed affected Strether as
charged with audible rumblings, but he was conscious of the care of
taking it explicitly as a sign of pleasant peace. He wouldn’t appeal
too much, for that provoked stiffness; yet he wouldn’t be too freely
tacit, for that suggested giving up. Waymarsh himself adhered to an
ambiguous dumbness that might have represented either the growth of a
perception or the despair of one; and at times and in places—where the
low-browed galleries were darkest, the opposite gables queerest, the
solicitations of every kind densest—the others caught him fixing hard
some object of minor interest, fixing even at moments nothing
discernible, as if he were indulging it with a truce. When he met
Strether’s eye on such occasions he looked guilty and furtive, fell the
next minute into some attitude of retractation. Our friend couldn’t
show him the right things for fear of provoking some total
renouncement, and was tempted even to show him the wrong in order to
make him differ with triumph. There were moments when he himself felt
shy of professing the full sweetness of the taste of leisure, and there
were others when he found himself feeling as if his passages of
interchange with the lady at his side might fall upon the third member
of their party very much as Mr. Burchell, at Dr. Primrose’s fireside,
was influenced by the high flights of the visitors from London. The
smallest things so arrested and amused him that he repeatedly almost
apologised—brought up afresh in explanation his plea of a previous
grind. He was aware at the same time that his grind had been as nothing
to Waymarsh’s, and he repeatedly confessed that, to cover his
frivolity, he was doing his best for his previous virtue. Do what he
might, in any case, his previous virtue was still there, and it seemed
fairly to stare at him out of the windows of shops that were not as the
shops of Woollett, fairly to make him want things that he shouldn’t
know what to do with. It was by the oddest, the least admissible of
laws demoralising him now; and the way it boldly took was to make him
want more wants. These first walks in Europe were in fact a kind of
finely lurid intimation of what one might find at the end of that
process. Had he come back after long years, in something already so
like the evening of life, only to be exposed to it? It was at all
events over the shop-windows that he made, with Waymarsh, most free;
though it would have been easier had not the latter most sensibly
yielded to the appeal of the merely useful trades. He pierced with his
sombre detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers, while
Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped letter-paper
and in smart neckties. Strether was in fact recurrently shameless in
the presence of the tailors, though it was just over the heads of the
tailors that his countryman most loftily looked. This gave Miss Gostrey
a grasped opportunity to back up Waymarsh at his expense. The weary
lawyer—it was unmistakeable—had a conception of dress; but that, in
view of some of the features of the effect produced, was just what made
the danger of insistence on it. Strether wondered if he by this time
thought Miss Gostrey less fashionable or Lambert Strether more so; and
it appeared probable that most of the remarks exchanged between this
latter pair about passers, figures, faces, personal types, exemplified
in their degree the disposition to talk as “society” talked.
Was what was happening to himself then, was what already _had_
happened, really that a woman of fashion was floating him into society
and that an old friend deserted on the brink was watching the force of
the current? When the woman of fashion permitted Strether—as she
permitted him at the most—the purchase of a pair of gloves, the terms
she made about it, the prohibition of neckties and other items till she
should be able to guide him through the Burlington Arcade, were such as
to fall upon a sensitive ear as a challenge to just imputations. Miss
Gostrey was such a woman of fashion as could make without a symptom of
vulgar blinking an appointment for the Burlington Arcade. Mere
discriminations about a pair of gloves could thus at any rate
represent—always for such sensitive ears as were in
question—possibilities of something that Strether could make a mark
against only as the peril of apparent wantonness. He had quite the
consciousness of his new friend, for their companion, that he might
have had of a Jesuit in petticoats, a representative of the recruiting
interests of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, for
Waymarsh—that was to say the enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and
far-reaching quivering groping tentacles—was exactly society, exactly
the multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types
and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism;
exactly in short Europe.
There was light for observation, however, in an incident that occurred
just before they turned back to luncheon. Waymarsh had been for a
quarter of an hour exceptionally mute and distant, and something, or
other—Strether was never to make out exactly what—proved, as it were,
too much for him after his comrades had stood for three minutes taking
in, while they leaned on an old balustrade that guarded the edge of the
Row, a particularly crooked and huddled street-view. “He thinks us
sophisticated, he thinks us worldly, he thinks us wicked, he thinks us
all sorts of queer things,” Strether reflected; for wondrous were the
vague quantities our friend had within a couple of short days acquired
the habit of conveniently and conclusively lumping together. There
seemed moreover a direct connexion between some such inference and a
sudden grim dash taken by Waymarsh to the opposite side. This movement
was startlingly sudden, and his companions at first supposed him to
have espied, to be pursuing, the glimpse of an acquaintance. They next
made out, however, that an open door had instantly received him, and
they then recognised him as engulfed in the establishment of a
jeweller, behind whose glittering front he was lost to view. The fact
had somehow the note of a demonstration, and it left each of the others
to show a face almost of fear. But Miss Gostrey broke into a laugh.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Well,” said Strether, “he can’t stand it.”
“But can’t stand what?”
“Anything. Europe.”
“Then how will that jeweller help him?”
Strether seemed to make it out, from their position, between the
interstices of arrayed watches, of close-hung dangling gewgaws. “You’ll
see.”
“Ah that’s just what—if he buys anything—I’m afraid of: that I shall
see something rather dreadful.”
Strether studied the finer appearances. “He may buy everything.”
“Then don’t you think we ought to follow him?”
“Not for worlds. Besides we can’t. We’re paralysed. We exchange a long
scared look, we publicly tremble. The thing is, you see, we ‘realise.’
He has struck for freedom.”
She wondered but she laughed. “Ah what a price to pay! And I was
preparing some for him so cheap.”
“No, no,” Strether went on, frankly amused now; “don’t call it that:
the kind of freedom you deal in is dear.” Then as to justify himself:
“Am I not in _my_ way trying it? It’s this.”
“Being here, you mean, with me?”
“Yes, and talking to you as I do. I’ve known you a few hours, and I’ve
known _him_ all my life; so that if the ease I thus take with you about
him isn’t magnificent”—and the thought of it held him a moment—“why
it’s rather base.”
“It’s magnificent!” said Miss Gostrey to make an end of it. “And you
should hear,” she added, “the ease _I_ take—and I above all intend to
take—with Mr. Waymarsh.”
Strether thought. “About _me?_ Ah that’s no equivalent. The equivalent
would be Waymarsh’s himself serving me up—his remorseless analysis of
me. And he’ll never do that”—he was sadly clear. “He’ll never
remorselessly analyse me.” He quite held her with the authority of
this. “He’ll never say a word to you about me.”
She took it in; she did it justice; yet after an instant her reason,
her restless irony, disposed of it. “Of course he won’t. For what do
you take people, that they’re able to say words about anything, able
remorselessly to analyse? There are not many like you and me. It will
be only because he’s too stupid.”
It stirred in her friend a sceptical echo which was at the same time
the protest of the faith of years. “Waymarsh stupid?”
“Compared with you.”
Strether had still his eyes on the jeweller’s front, and he waited a
moment to answer. “He’s a success of a kind that I haven’t approached.”
“Do you mean he has made money?”
“He makes it—to my belief. And I,” said Strether, “though with a back
quite as bent, have never made anything. I’m a perfectly equipped
failure.”
He feared an instant she’d ask him if he meant he was poor; and he was
glad she didn’t, for he really didn’t know to what the truth on this
unpleasant point mightn’t have prompted her. She only, however,
confirmed his assertion. “Thank goodness you’re a failure—it’s why I so
distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about
you—look at the successes. Would you _be_ one, on your honour? Look,
moreover,” she continued, “at me.”
For a little accordingly their eyes met. “I see,” Strether returned.
“You too are out of it.”
“The superiority you discern in me,” she concurred, “announces my
futility. If you knew,” she sighed, “the dreams of my youth! But our
realities are what has brought us together. We’re beaten brothers in
arms.”
He smiled at her kindly enough, but he shook his head. “It doesn’t
alter the fact that you’re expensive. You’ve cost me already—!”
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.