Strether called, his second morning in Paris, on the bankers of the Rue
Scribe to whom his letter of credit was addressed, and he made this
visit attended by Waymarsh, in whose company he had crossed from London
two days before. They had hastened to the Rue Scribe on the morrow of
their arrival, but Strether had not then found the letters the hope of
which prompted this errand. He had had as yet none at all; hadn’t
expected them in London, but had counted on several in Paris, and,
disconcerted now, had presently strolled back to the Boulevard with a
sense of injury that he felt himself taking for as good a start as any
other. It would serve, this spur to his spirit, he reflected, as,
pausing at the top of the street, he looked up and down the great
foreign avenue, it would serve to begin business with. His idea was to
begin business immediately, and it did much for him the rest of his day
that the beginning of business awaited him. He did little else till
night but ask himself what he should do if he hadn’t fortunately had so
much to do; but he put himself the question in many different
situations and connexions. What carried him hither and yon was an
admirable theory that nothing he could do wouldn’t be in some manner
related to what he fundamentally had on hand, or _would_ be—should he
happen to have a scruple—wasted for it. He did happen to have a
scruple—a scruple about taking no definite step till he should get
letters; but this reasoning carried it off. A single day to feel his
feet—he had felt them as yet only at Chester and in London—was he could
consider, none too much; and having, as he had often privately
expressed it, Paris to reckon with, he threw these hours of freshness
consciously into the reckoning. They made it continually greater, but
that was what it had best be if it was to be anything at all, and he
gave himself up till far into the evening, at the theatre and on the
return, after the theatre, along the bright congested Boulevard, to
feeling it grow. Waymarsh had accompanied him this time to the play,
and the two men had walked together, as a first stage, from the Gymnase
to the Café Riche, into the crowded “terrace” of which
establishment—the night, or rather the morning, for midnight had
struck, being bland and populous—they had wedged themselves for
refreshment. Waymarsh, as a result of some discussion with his friend,
had made a marked virtue of his having now let himself go; and there
had been elements of impression in their half-hour over their watered
beer-glasses that gave him his occasion for conveying that he held this
compromise with his stiffer self to have become extreme. He conveyed
it—for it was still, after all, his stiffer self who gloomed out of the
glare of the terrace—in solemn silence; and there was indeed a great
deal of critical silence, every way, between the companions, even till
they gained the Place de l’Opéra, as to the character of their
nocturnal progress.
This morning there _were_ letters—letters which had reached London,
apparently all together, the day of Strether’s journey, and had taken
their time to follow him; so that, after a controlled impulse to go
into them in the reception-room of the bank, which, reminding him of
the post-office at Woollett, affected him as the abutment of some
transatlantic bridge, he slipped them into the pocket of his loose grey
overcoat with a sense of the felicity of carrying them off. Waymarsh,
who had had letters yesterday, had had them again to-day, and Waymarsh
suggested in this particular no controlled impulses. The last one he
was at all events likely to be observed to struggle with was clearly
that of bringing to a premature close any visit to the Rue Scribe.
Strether had left him there yesterday; he wanted to see the papers, and
he had spent, by what his friend could make out, a succession of hours
with the papers. He spoke of the establishment, with emphasis, as a
post of superior observation; just as he spoke generally of his actual
damnable doom as a device for hiding from him what was going on. Europe
was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for
dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge,
and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations
of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs. Strether, on
his side, set himself to walk again—he had his relief in his pocket;
and indeed, much as he had desired his budget, the growth of
restlessness might have been marked in him from the moment he had
assured himself of the superscription of most of the missives it
contained. This restlessness became therefore his temporary law; he
knew he should recognise as soon as see it the best place of all for
settling down with his chief correspondent. He had for the next hour an
accidental air of looking for it in the windows of shops; he came down
the Rue de la Paix in the sun and, passing across the Tuileries and the
river, indulged more than once—as if on finding himself determined—in a
sudden pause before the book-stalls of the opposite quay. In the garden
of the Tuileries he had lingered, on two or three spots, to look; it
was as if the wonderful Paris spring had stayed him as he roamed. The
prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes—in a soft breeze and a
sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor, of
bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of
ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace-walls were warm,
in the blue-frocked brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and
scrapers, in the deep references of a straight-pacing priest or the
sharp ones of a white-gaitered red-legged soldier. He watched little
brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick of the great
Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point; the air
had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented
nature as a white-capped master-chef. The palace was gone, Strether
remembered the palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable void of
its site the historic sense in him might have been freely at play—the
play under which in Paris indeed it so often winces like a touched
nerve. He filled out spaces with dim symbols of scenes; he caught the
gleam of white statues at the base of which, with his letters out, he
could tilt back a straw-bottomed chair. But his drift was, for reasons,
to the other side, and it floated him unspent up the Rue de Seine and
as far as the Luxembourg. In the Luxembourg Gardens he pulled up; here
at last he found his nook, and here, on a penny chair from which
terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little trees in green tubs, little
women in white caps and shrill little girls at play all sunnily
“composed” together, he passed an hour in which the cup of his
impressions seemed truly to overflow. But a week had elapsed since he
quitted the ship, and there were more things in his mind than so few
days could account for. More than once, during the time, he had
regarded himself as admonished; but the admonition this morning was
formidably sharp. It took as it hadn’t done yet the form of a
question—the question of what he was doing with such an extraordinary
sense of escape. This sense was sharpest after he had read his letters,
but that was also precisely why the question pressed. Four of the
letters were from Mrs. Newsome and none of them short; she had lost no
time, had followed on his heels while he moved, so expressing herself
that he now could measure the probable frequency with which he should
hear. They would arrive, it would seem, her communications, at the rate
of several a week; he should be able to count, it might even prove, on
more than one by each mail. If he had begun yesterday with a small
grievance he had therefore an opportunity to begin to-day with its
opposite. He read the letters successively and slowly, putting others
back into his pocket but keeping these for a long time afterwards
gathered in his lap. He held them there, lost in thought, as if to
prolong the presence of what they gave him; or as if at the least to
assure them their part in the constitution of some lucidity. His friend
wrote admirably, and her tone was even more in her style than in her
voice—he might almost, for the hour, have had to come this distance to
get its full carrying quality; yet the plentitude of his consciousness
of difference consorted perfectly with the deepened intensity of the
connexion. It was the difference, the difference of being just where he
was and _as_ he was, that formed the escape—this difference was so much
greater than he had dreamed it would be; and what he finally sat there
turning over was the strange logic of his finding himself so free. He
felt it in a manner his duty to think out his state, to approve the
process, and when he came in fact to trace the steps and add up the
items they sufficiently accounted for the sum. He had never
expected—that was the truth of it—again to find himself young, and all
the years and other things it had taken to make him so were exactly his
present arithmetic. He had to make sure of them to put his scruple to
rest.
It all sprang at bottom from the beauty of Mrs. Newsome’s desire that
he should be worried with nothing that was not of the essence of his
task; by insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and break she had
so provided for his freedom that she would, as it were, have only
herself to thank. Strether could not at this point indeed have
completed his thought by the image of what she might have to thank
herself _for_: the image, at best, of his own likeness—poor Lambert
Strether washed up on the sunny strand by the waves of a single day,
poor Lambert Strether thankful for breathing-time and stiffening
himself while he gasped. There he was, and with nothing in his aspect
or his posture to scandalise: it was only true that if he had seen Mrs.
Newsome coming he would instinctively have jumped up to walk away a
little. He would have come round and back to her bravely, but he would
have had first to pull himself together. She abounded in news of the
situation at home, proved to him how perfectly she was arranging for
his absence, told him who would take up this and who take up that
exactly where he had left it, gave him in fact chapter and verse for
the moral that nothing would suffer. It filled for him, this tone of
hers, all the air; yet it struck him at the same time as the hum of
vain things. This latter effect was what he tried to justify—and with
the success that, grave though the appearance, he at last lighted on a
form that was happy. He arrived at it by the inevitable recognition of
his having been a fortnight before one of the weariest of men. If ever
a man had come off tired Lambert Strether was that man; and hadn’t it
been distinctly on the ground of his fatigue that his wonderful friend
at home had so felt for him and so contrived? It seemed to him somehow
at these instants that, could he only maintain with sufficient firmness
his grasp of that truth, it might become in a manner his compass and
his helm. What he wanted most was some idea that would simplify, and
nothing would do this so much as the fact that he was done for and
finished. If it had been in such a light that he had just detected in
his cup the dregs of youth, that was a mere flaw of the surface of his
scheme. He was so distinctly fagged-out that it must serve precisely as
his convenience, and if he could but consistently be good for little
enough he might do everything he wanted.
Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon—the common
unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared to himself
to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the way they
didn’t come; but perhaps—as they would seemingly here be things quite
other—this long ache might at last drop to rest. He could easily see
that from the moment he should accept the notion of his foredoomed
collapse the last thing he would lack would be reasons and memories. Oh
if he _should_ do the sum no slate would hold the figures! The fact
that he had failed, as he considered, in everything, in each relation
and in half a dozen trades, as he liked luxuriously to put it, might
have made, might still make, for an empty present; but it stood solidly
for a crowded past. It had not been, so much achievement missed, a
light yoke nor a short load. It was at present as if the backward
picture had hung there, the long crooked course, grey in the shadow of
his solitude. It had been a dreadful cheerful sociable solitude, a
solitude of life or choice, of community; but though there had been
people enough all round it there had been but three or four persons
_in_ it. Waymarsh was one of these, and the fact struck him just now as
marking the record. Mrs. Newsome was another, and Miss Gostrey had of a
sudden shown signs of becoming a third. Beyond, behind them was the
pale figure of his real youth, which held against its breast the two
presences paler than itself—the young wife he had early lost and the
young son he had stupidly sacrificed. He had again and again made out
for himself that he might have kept his little boy, his little dull boy
who had died at school of rapid diphtheria, if he had not in those
years so insanely given himself to merely missing the mother. It was
the soreness of his remorse that the child had in all likelihood not
really been dull—had been dull, as he had been banished and neglected,
mainly because the father had been unwittingly selfish. This was
doubtless but the secret habit of sorrow, which had slowly given way to
time; yet there remained an ache sharp enough to make the spirit, at
the sight now and again of some fair young man just growing up, wince
with the thought of an opportunity lost. Had ever a man, he had finally
fallen into the way of asking himself, lost so much and even done so
much for so little? There had been particular reasons why all
yesterday, beyond other days, he should have had in one ear this cold
enquiry. His name on the green cover, where he had put it for Mrs.
Newsome, expressed him doubtless just enough to make the world—the
world as distinguished, both for more and for less, from Woollett—ask
who he was. He had incurred the ridicule of having to have his
explanation explained. He was Lambert Strether because he was on the
cover, whereas it should have been, for anything like glory, that he
was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether. He would have done
anything for Mrs. Newsome, have been still more ridiculous—as he might,
for that matter, have occasion to be yet; which came to saying that
this acceptance of fate was all he had to show at fifty-five.
He judged the quantity as small because it _was_ small, and all the
more egregiously since it couldn’t, as he saw the case, so much as
thinkably have been larger. He hadn’t had the gift of making the most
of what he tried, and if he had tried and tried again—no one but
himself knew how often—it appeared to have been that he might
demonstrate what else, in default of that, _could_ be made. Old ghosts
of experiments came back to him, old drudgeries and delusions, and
disgusts, old recoveries with their relapses, old fevers with their
chills, broken moments of good faith, others of still better doubt;
adventures, for the most part, of the sort qualified as lessons. The
special spring that had constantly played for him the day before was
the recognition—frequent enough to surprise him—of the promises to
himself that he had after his other visit never kept. The reminiscence
to-day most quickened for him was that of the vow taken in the course
of the pilgrimage that, newly-married, with the War just over, and
helplessly young in spite of it, he had recklessly made with the
creature who was so much younger still. It had been a bold dash, for
which they had taken money set apart for necessities, but kept sacred
at the moment in a hundred ways, and in none more so than by this
private pledge of his own to treat the occasion as a relation formed
with the higher culture and see that, as they said at Woollett, it
should bear a good harvest. He had believed, sailing home again, that
he had gained something great, and his theory—with an elaborate
innocent plan of reading, digesting, coming back even, every few
years—had then been to preserve, cherish and extend it. As such plans
as these had come to nothing, however, in respect to acquisitions still
more precious, it was doubtless little enough of a marvel that he
should have lost account of that handful of seed. Buried for long years
in dark corners at any rate these few germs had sprouted again under
forty-eight hours of Paris. The process of yesterday had really been
the process of feeling the general stirred life of connexions long
since individually dropped. Strether had become acquainted even on this
ground with short gusts of speculation—sudden flights of fancy in
Louvre galleries, hungry gazes through clear plates behind which
lemon-coloured volumes were as fresh as fruit on the tree.
There were instants at which he could ask whether, since there had been
fundamentally so little question of his keeping anything, the fate
after all decreed for him hadn’t been only to _be_ kept. Kept for
something, in that event, that he didn’t pretend, didn’t possibly dare
as yet to divine; something that made him hover and wonder and laugh
and sigh, made him advance and retreat, feeling half ashamed of his
impulse to plunge and more than half afraid of his impulse to wait. He
remembered for instance how he had gone back in the sixties with
lemon-coloured volumes in general on the brain as well as with a
dozen—selected for his wife too—in his trunk; and nothing had at the
moment shown more confidence than this invocation of the finer taste.
They were still somewhere at home, the dozen—stale and soiled and never
sent to the binder; but what had become of the sharp initiation they
represented? They represented now the mere sallow paint on the door of
the temple of taste that he had dreamed of raising up—a structure he
had practically never carried further. Strether’s present highest
flights were perhaps those in which this particular lapse figured to
him as a symbol, a symbol of his long grind and his want of odd
moments, his want moreover of money, of opportunity, of positive
dignity. That the memory of the vow of his youth should, in order to
throb again, have had to wait for this last, as he felt it, of all his
accidents—that was surely proof enough of how his conscience had been
encumbered. If any further proof were needed it would have been to be
found in the fact that, as he perfectly now saw, he had ceased even to
measure his meagreness, a meagreness that sprawled, in this retrospect,
vague and comprehensive, stretching back like some unmapped Hinterland
from a rough coast-settlement. His conscience had been amusing itself
for the forty-eight hours by forbidding him the purchase of a book; he
held off from that, held off from everything; from the moment he didn’t
yet call on Chad he wouldn’t for the world have taken any other step.
On this evidence, however, of the way they actually affected him he
glared at the lemon-coloured covers in confession of the
subconsciousness that, all the same, in the great desert of the years,
he must have had of them. The green covers at home comprised, by the
law of their purpose, no tribute to letters; it was of a mere rich
kernel of economics, politics, ethics that, glazed and, as Mrs. Newsome
maintained rather against _his_ view, pre-eminently pleasant to touch,
they formed the specious shell. Without therefore any needed
instinctive knowledge of what was coming out, in Paris, on the bright
highway, he struck himself at present as having more than once flushed
with a suspicion: he couldn’t otherwise at present be feeling so many
fears confirmed. There were “movements” he was too late for: weren’t
they, with the fun of them, already spent? There were sequences he had
missed and great gaps in the procession: he might have been watching it
all recede in a golden cloud of dust. If the playhouse wasn’t closed
his seat had at least fallen to somebody else. He had had an uneasy
feeling the night before that if he was at the theatre at all—though he
indeed justified the theatre, in the specific sense, and with a
grotesqueness to which his imagination did all honour, as something he
owed poor Waymarsh—he should have been there with, and as might have
been said, _for_ Chad.
This suggested the question of whether he could properly have taken him
to such a play, and what effect—it was a point that suddenly rose—his
peculiar responsibility might be held in general to have on his choice
of entertainment. It had literally been present to him at the
Gymnase—where one was held moreover comparatively safe—that having his
young friend at his side would have been an odd feature of the work of
redemption; and this quite in spite of the fact that the picture
presented might well, confronted with Chad’s own private stage, have
seemed the pattern of propriety. He clearly hadn’t come out in the name
of propriety but to visit unattended equivocal performances; yet still
less had he done so to undermine his authority by sharing them with the
graceless youth. Was he to renounce all amusement for the sweet sake of
that authority? and _would_ such renouncement give him for Chad a moral
glamour? The little problem bristled the more by reason of poor
Strether’s fairly open sense of the irony of things. Were there then
sides on which his predicament threatened to look rather droll to him?
Should he have to pretend to believe—either to himself or the wretched
boy—that there was anything that could make the latter worse? Wasn’t
some such pretence on the other hand involved in the assumption of
possible processes that would make him better? His greatest uneasiness
seemed to peep at him out of the imminent impression that almost any
acceptance of Paris might give one’s authority away. It hung before him
this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent
object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be
discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and
trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment
seemed all depth the next. It was a place of which, unmistakeably, Chad
was fond; wherefore if he, Strether, should like it too much, what on
earth, with such a bond, would become of either of them? It all
depended of course—which was a gleam of light—on how the “too much” was
measured; though indeed our friend fairly felt, while he prolonged the
meditation I describe, that for himself even already a certain measure
had been reached. It will have been sufficiently seen that he was not a
man to neglect any good chance for reflexion. Was it at all possible
for instance to like Paris enough without liking it too much? He
luckily however hadn’t promised Mrs. Newsome not to like it at all. He
was ready to recognise at this stage that such an engagement _would_
have tied his hands. The Luxembourg Gardens were incontestably just so
adorable at this hour by reason—in addition to their intrinsic charm—of
his not having taken it. The only engagement he had taken, when he
looked the thing in the face, was to do what he reasonably could.
It upset him a little none the less and after a while to find himself
at last remembering on what current of association he had been floated
so far. Old imaginations of the Latin Quarter had played their part for
him, and he had duly recalled its having been with this scene of rather
ominous legend that, like so many young men in fiction as well as in
fact, Chad had begun. He was now quite out of it, with his “home,” as
Strether figured the place, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, now; which
was perhaps why, repairing, not to fail of justice either, to the elder
neighbourhood, our friend had felt he could allow for the element of
the usual, the immemorial, without courting perturbation. He was not at
least in danger of seeing the youth and the particular Person flaunt by
together; and yet he was in the very air of which—just to feel what the
early natural note must have been—he wished most to take counsel. It
became at once vivid to him that he had originally had, for a few days,
an almost envious vision of the boy’s romantic privilege. Melancholy
Mürger, with Francine and Musette and Rodolphe, at home, was, in the
company of the tattered, one—if he not in his single self two or
three—of the unbound, the paper-covered dozen on the shelf; and when
Chad had written, five years ago, after a sojourn then already
prolonged to six months, that he had decided to go in for economy and
the real thing, Strether’s fancy had quite fondly accompanied him in
this migration, which was to convey him, as they somewhat confusedly
learned at Woollett, across the bridges and up the Montagne
Sainte-Geneviève. This was the region—Chad had been quite distinct
about it—in which the best French, and many other things, were to be
learned at least cost, and in which all sorts of clever fellows,
compatriots there for a purpose, formed an awfully pleasant set. The
clever fellows, the friendly countrymen were mainly young painters,
sculptors, architects, medical students; but they were, Chad sagely
opined, a much more profitable lot to be with—even on the footing of
not being quite one of them—than the “terrible toughs” (Strether
remembered the edifying discrimination) of the American bars and banks
roundabout the Opéra. Chad had thrown out, in the communications
following this one—for at that time he did once in a while
communicate—that several members of a band of earnest workers under one
of the great artists had taken him right in, making him dine every
night, almost for nothing, at their place, and even pressing him not to
neglect the hypothesis of there being as much “in him” as in any of
them. There had been literally a moment at which it appeared there
might be something in him; there had been at any rate a moment at which
he had written that he didn’t know but what a month or two more might
see him enrolled in some _atelier_. The season had been one at which
Mrs. Newsome was moved to gratitude for small mercies; it had broken on
them all as a blessing that their absentee _had_ perhaps a
conscience—that he was sated in fine with idleness, was ambitious of
variety. The exhibition was doubtless as yet not brilliant, but
Strether himself, even by that time much enlisted and immersed, had
determined, on the part of the two ladies, a temperate approval and in
fact, as he now recollected, a certain austere enthusiasm.
But the very next thing that happened had been a dark drop of the
curtain. The son and brother had not browsed long on the Montagne
Sainte-Geneviève—his effective little use of the name of which, like
his allusion to the best French, appeared to have been but one of the
notes of his rough cunning. The light refreshment of these vain
appearances had not accordingly carried any of them very far. On the
other hand it had gained Chad time; it had given him a chance,
unchecked, to strike his roots, had paved the way for initiations more
direct and more deep. It was Strether’s belief that he had been
comparatively innocent before this first migration, and even that the
first effects of the migration would not have been, without some
particular bad accident, to have been deplored. There had been three
months—he had sufficiently figured it out—in which Chad had wanted to
try. He _had_ tried, though not very hard—he had had his little hour of
good faith. The weakness of this principle in him was that almost any
accident attestedly bad enough was stronger. Such had at any rate
markedly been the case for the precipitation of a special series of
impressions. They had proved, successively, these impressions—all of
Musette and Francine, but Musette and Francine vulgarised by the larger
evolution of the type—irresistibly sharp: he had “taken up,” by what
was at the time to be shrinkingly gathered, as it was scantly
mentioned, with one ferociously “interested” little person after
another. Strether had read somewhere of a Latin motto, a description of
the hours, observed on a clock by a traveller in Spain; and he had been
led to apply it in thought to Chad’s number one, number two, number
three. _Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat_—they had all morally wounded,
the last had morally killed. The last had been longest in possession—in
possession, that is, of whatever was left of the poor boy’s finer
mortality. And it hadn’t been she, it had been one of her early
predecessors, who had determined the second migration, the expensive
return and relapse, the exchange again, as was fairly to be presumed,
of the vaunted best French for some special variety of the worst.
He pulled himself then at last together for his own progress back; not
with the feeling that he had taken his walk in vain. He prolonged it a
little, in the immediate neighbourhood, after he had quitted his chair;
and the upshot of the whole morning for him was that his campaign had
begun. He had wanted to put himself in relation, and he would be hanged
if he were _not_ in relation. He was that at no moment so much as
while, under the old arches of the Odéon, he lingered before the
charming open-air array of literature classic and casual. He found the
effect of tone and tint, in the long charged tables and shelves,
delicate and appetising; the impression—substituting one kind of
low-priced _consommation_ for another—might have been that of one of
the pleasant cafés that overlapped, under an awning, to the pavement;
but he edged along, grazing the tables, with his hands firmly behind
him. He wasn’t there to dip, to consume—he was there to reconstruct. He
wasn’t there for his own profit—not, that is, the direct; he was there
on some chance of feeling the brush of the wing of the stray spirit of
youth. He felt it in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed,
as his inner sense listened, gave out the faint sound, as from far off,
of the wild waving of wings. They were folded now over the breasts of
buried generations; but a flutter or two lived again in the turned page
of shock-headed slouch-hatted loiterers whose young intensity of type,
in the direction of pale acuteness, deepened his vision, and even his
appreciation, of racial differences, and whose manipulation of the
uncut volume was too often, however, but a listening at closed doors.
He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years before,
a Chad who had, after all, simply—for that was the only way to see
it—been too vulgar for his privilege. Surely it _was_ a privilege to
have been young and happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether
knew of him was that he had had such a dream.
But his own actual business, half an hour later, was with a third floor
on the Boulevard Malesherbes—so much as that was definite; and the fact
of the enjoyment by the third-floor windows of a continuous balcony, to
which he was helped by this knowledge, had perhaps something to do with
his lingering for five minutes on the opposite side of the street.
There were points as to which he had quite made up his mind, and one of
these bore precisely on the wisdom of the abruptness to which events
had finally committed him, a policy that he was pleased to find not at
all shaken as he now looked at his watch and wondered. He _had_
announced himself—six months before; had written out at least that Chad
wasn’t to be surprised should he see him some day turn up. Chad had
thereupon, in a few words of rather carefully colourless answer,
offered him a general welcome; and Strether, ruefully reflecting that
he might have understood the warning as a hint to hospitality, a bid
for an invitation, had fallen back upon silence as the corrective most
to his own taste. He had asked Mrs. Newsome moreover not to announce
him again; he had so distinct an opinion on his attacking his job,
should he attack it at all, in his own way. Not the least of this
lady’s high merits for him was that he could absolutely rest on her
word. She was the only woman he had known, even at Woollett, as to whom
his conviction was positive that to lie was beyond her art. Sarah
Pocock, for instance, her own daughter, though with social ideals, as
they said, in some respects different—Sarah who _was_, in her way,
æsthetic, had never refused to human commerce that mitigation of
rigour; there were occasions when he had distinctly seen her apply it.
Since, accordingly, at all events, he had had it from Mrs. Newsome that
she had, at whatever cost to her more strenuous view, conformed, in the
matter of preparing Chad, wholly to his restrictions, he now looked up
at the fine continuous balcony with a safe sense that if the case had
been bungled the mistake was at least his property. Was there perhaps
just a suspicion of that in his present pause on the edge of the
Boulevard and well in the pleasant light?
Many things came over him here, and one of them was that he should
doubtless presently know whether he had been shallow or sharp. Another
was that the balcony in question didn’t somehow show as a convenience
easy to surrender. Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognise
the truth that wherever one paused in Paris the imagination reacted
before one could stop it. This perpetual reaction put a price, if one
would, on pauses; but it piled up consequences till there was scarce
room to pick one’s steps among them. What call had he, at such a
juncture, for example, to like Chad’s very house? High broad clear—he
was expert enough to make out in a moment that it was admirably
built—it fairly embarrassed our friend by the quality that, as he would
have said, it “sprang” on him. He had struck off the fancy that it
might, as a preliminary, be of service to him to be seen, by a happy
accident, from the third-story windows, which took all the March sun,
but of what service was it to find himself making out after a moment
that the quality “sprung,” the quality produced by measure and balance,
the fine relation of part to part and space to space, was
probably—aided by the presence of ornament as positive as it was
discreet, and by the complexion of the stone, a cold fair grey, warmed
and polished a little by life—neither more nor less than a case of
distinction, such a case as he could only feel unexpectedly as a sort
of delivered challenge? Meanwhile, however, the chance he had allowed
for—the chance of being seen in time from the balcony—had become a
fact. Two or three of the windows stood open to the violet air; and,
before Strether had cut the knot by crossing, a young man had come out
and looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and tossed the match
over, and then, resting on the rail, had given himself up to watching
the life below while he smoked. His arrival contributed, in its order,
to keeping Strether in position; the result of which in turn was that
Strether soon felt himself noticed. The young man began to look at him
as in acknowledgement of his being himself in observation.
This was interesting so far as it went, but the interest was affected
by the young man’s not being Chad. Strether wondered at first if he
were perhaps Chad altered, and then saw that this was asking too much
of alteration. The young man was light bright and alert—with an air too
pleasant to have been arrived at by patching. Strether had conceived
Chad as patched, but not beyond recognition. He was in presence, he
felt, of amendments enough as they stood; it was a sufficient amendment
that the gentleman up there should be Chad’s friend. He was young too
then, the gentleman up there—he was very young; young enough apparently
to be amused at an elderly watcher, to be curious even to see what the
elderly watcher would do on finding himself watched. There was youth in
that, there was youth in the surrender to the balcony, there was youth
for Strether at this moment in everything but his own business; and
Chad’s thus pronounced association with youth had given the next
instant an extraordinary quick lift to the issue. The balcony, the
distinguished front, testified suddenly, for Strether’s fancy, to
something that was up and up; they placed the whole case materially,
and as by an admirable image, on a level that he found himself at the
end of another moment rejoicing to think he might reach. The young man
looked at him still, he looked at the young man; and the issue, by a
rapid process, was that this knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to
him the last of luxuries. To him too the perched privacy was open, and
he saw it now but in one light—that of the only domicile, the only
fireside, in the great ironic city, on which he had the shadow of a
claim. Miss Gostrey had a fireside; she had told him of it, and it was
something that doubtless awaited him; but Miss Gostrey hadn’t yet
arrived—she mightn’t arrive for days; and the sole attenuation of his
excluded state was his vision of the small, the admittedly secondary
hotel in the bye-street from the Rue de la Paix, in which her
solicitude for his purse had placed him, which affected him somehow as
all indoor chill, glass-roofed court and slippery staircase, and which,
by the same token, expressed the presence of Waymarsh even at times
when Waymarsh might have been certain to be round at the bank. It came
to pass before he moved that Waymarsh, and Waymarsh alone, Waymarsh not
only undiluted but positively strengthened, struck him as the present
alternative to the young man in the balcony. When he did move it was
fairly to escape that alternative. Taking his way over the street at
last and passing through the _porte-cochère_ of the house was like
consciously leaving Waymarsh out. However, he would tell him all about
it.