I
Strether told Waymarsh all about it that very evening, on their dining
together at the hotel; which needn’t have happened, he was all the
while aware, hadn’t he chosen to sacrifice to this occasion a rarer
opportunity. The mention to his companion of the sacrifice was moreover
exactly what introduced his recital—or, as he would have called it with
more confidence in his interlocutor, his confession. His confession was
that he had been captured and that one of the features of the affair
had just failed to be his engaging himself on the spot to dinner. As by
such a freedom Waymarsh would have lost him he had obeyed his scruple;
and he had likewise obeyed another scruple—which bore on the question
of his himself bringing a guest.
Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished soup, at this array
of scruples; Strether hadn’t yet got quite used to being so unprepared
for the consequences of the impression he produced. It was
comparatively easy to explain, however, that he hadn’t felt sure his
guest would please. The person was a young man whose acquaintance he
had made but that afternoon in the course of rather a hindered enquiry
for another person—an enquiry his new friend had just prevented in fact
from being vain. “Oh,” said Strether, “I’ve all sorts of things to tell
you!”—and he put it in a way that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh to
help him to enjoy the telling. He waited for his fish, he drank of his
wine, he wiped his long moustache, he leaned back in his chair, he took
in the two English ladies who had just creaked past them and whom he
would even have articulately greeted if they hadn’t rather chilled the
impulse; so that all he could do was—by way of doing something—to say
“Merci, François!” out quite loud when his fish was brought. Everything
was there that he wanted, everything that could make the moment an
occasion, that would do beautifully—everything but what Waymarsh might
give. The little waxed salle-à-manger was sallow and sociable;
François, dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a brother; the
high-shouldered patronne, with her high-held, much-rubbed hands, seemed
always assenting exuberantly to something unsaid; the Paris evening in
short was, for Strether, in the very taste of the soup, in the
goodness, as he was innocently pleased to think it, of the wine, in the
pleasant coarse texture of the napkin and the crunch of the
thick-crusted bread. These all were things congruous with his
confession, and his confession was that he _had_—it would come out
properly just there if Waymarsh would only take it properly—agreed to
breakfast out, at twelve literally, the next day. He didn’t quite know
where; the delicacy of the case came straight up in the remembrance of
his new friend’s “We’ll see; I’ll take you somewhere!”—for it had
required little more than that, after all, to let him right in. He was
affected after a minute, face to face with his actual comrade, by the
impulse to overcolour. There had already been things in respect to
which he knew himself tempted by this perversity. If Waymarsh thought
them bad he should at least have his reason for his discomfort; so
Strether showed them as worse. Still, he was now, in his way, sincerely
perplexed.
Chad had been absent from the Boulevard Malesherbes—was absent from
Paris altogether; he had learned that from the concierge, but had
nevertheless gone up, and gone up—there were no two ways about it—from
an uncontrollable, a really, if one would, depraved curiosity. The
concierge had mentioned to him that a friend of the tenant of the
troisième was for the time in possession; and this had been Strether’s
pretext for a further enquiry, an experiment carried on, under Chad’s
roof, without his knowledge. “I found his friend in fact there keeping
the place warm, as he called it, for him; Chad himself being, as
appears, in the south. He went a month ago to Cannes and though his
return begins to be looked for it can’t be for some days. I might, you
see, perfectly have waited a week; might have beaten a retreat as soon
as I got this essential knowledge. But I beat no retreat; I did the
opposite; I stayed, I dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I
saw, in fine; and—I don’t know what to call it—I sniffed. It’s a
detail, but it’s as if there were something—something very good—_to_
sniff.”
Waymarsh’s face had shown his friend an attention apparently so remote
that the latter was slightly surprised to find it at this point abreast
with him. “Do you mean a smell? What of?”
“A charming scent. But I don’t know.”
Waymarsh gave an inferential grunt. “Does he live there with a woman?”
“I don’t know.”
Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then resumed. “Has he taken her
off with him?”
“And will he bring her back?”—Strether fell into the enquiry. But he
wound it up as before. “I don’t know.”
The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was with another drop back,
another degustation of the Léoville, another wipe of his moustache and
another good word for François, seemed to produce in his companion a
slight irritation. “Then what the devil _do_ you know?”
“Well,” said Strether almost gaily, “I guess I don’t know anything!”
His gaiety might have been a tribute to the fact that the state he had
been reduced to did for him again what had been done by his talk of the
matter with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre. It was somehow
enlarging; and the air of that amplitude was now doubtless more or
less—and all for Waymarsh to feel—in his further response. “That’s what
I found out from the young man.”
“But I thought you said you found out nothing.”
“Nothing but that—that I don’t know anything.”
“And what good does that do you?”
“It’s just,” said Strether, “what I’ve come to you to help me to
discover. I mean anything about anything over here. I _felt_ that, up
there. It regularly rose before me in its might. The young man
moreover—Chad’s friend—as good as told me so.”
“As good as told you you know nothing about anything?” Waymarsh
appeared to look at some one who might have as good as told _him_. “How
old is he?”
“Well, I guess not thirty.”
“Yet you had to take that from him?”
“Oh I took a good deal more—since, as I tell you, I took an invitation
to déjeuner.”
“And are you _going_ to that unholy meal?”
“If you’ll come with me. He wants you too, you know. I told him about
you. He gave me his card,” Strether pursued, “and his name’s rather
funny. It’s John Little Bilham, and he says his two surnames are, on
account of his being small, inevitably used together.”
“Well,” Waymarsh asked with due detachment from these details, “what’s
he doing up there?”
“His account of himself is that he’s ‘only a little artist-man.’ That
seemed to me perfectly to describe him. But he’s yet in the phase of
study; this, you know, is the great art-school—to pass a certain number
of years in which he came over. And he’s a great friend of Chad’s, and
occupying Chad’s rooms just now because they’re so pleasant. _He’s_
very pleasant and curious too,” Strether added—“though he’s not from
Boston.”
Waymarsh looked already rather sick of him. “Where _is_ he from?”
Strether thought. “I don’t know that, either. But he’s ‘notoriously,’
as he put it himself, not from Boston.”
“Well,” Waymarsh moralised from dry depths, “every one can’t
notoriously _be_ from Boston. Why,” he continued, “is he curious?”
“Perhaps just for _that_—for one thing! But really,” Strether added,
“for everything. When you meet him you’ll see.”
“Oh I don’t want to meet him,” Waymarsh impatiently growled. “Why don’t
he go home?”
Strether hesitated. “Well, because he likes it over here.”
This appeared in particular more than Waymarsh could bear. “He ought
then to be ashamed of himself, and, as you admit that you think so too,
why drag him in?”
Strether’s reply again took time. “Perhaps I do think so myself—though
I don’t quite yet admit it. I’m not a bit sure—it’s again one of the
things I want to find out. I liked him, and _can_ you like people—? But
no matter.” He pulled himself up. “There’s no doubt I want you to come
down on me and squash me.”
Waymarsh helped himself to the next course, which, however proving not
the dish he had just noted as supplied to the English ladies, had the
effect of causing his imagination temporarily to wander. But it
presently broke out at a softer spot. “Have they got a handsome place
up there?”
“Oh a charming place; full of beautiful and valuable things. I never
saw such a place”—and Strether’s thought went back to it. “For a little
artist-man—!” He could in fact scarce express it.
But his companion, who appeared now to have a view, insisted. “Well?”
“Well, life can hold nothing better. Besides, they’re things of which
he’s in charge.”
“So that he does doorkeeper for your precious pair? Can life,” Waymarsh
enquired, “hold nothing better than _that?_” Then as Strether, silent,
seemed even yet to wonder, “Doesn’t he know what _she_ is?” he went on.
“_I_ don’t know. I didn’t ask him. I couldn’t. It was impossible. You
wouldn’t either. Besides I didn’t want to. No more would you.” Strether
in short explained it at a stroke. “You can’t make out over here what
people do know.”
“Then what did you come over for?”
“Well, I suppose exactly to see for myself—without their aid.”
“Then what do you want mine for?”
“Oh,” Strether laughed, “you’re not one of _them!_ I do know what _you_
know.”
As, however, this last assertion caused Waymarsh again to look at him
hard—such being the latter’s doubt of its implications—he felt his
justification lame. Which was still more the case when Waymarsh
presently said: “Look here, Strether. Quit this.”
Our friend smiled with a doubt of his own. “Do you mean my tone?”
“No—damn your tone. I mean your nosing round. Quit the whole job. Let
them stew in their juice. You’re being used for a thing you ain’t fit
for. People don’t take a fine-tooth comb to groom a horse.”
“Am I a fine-tooth comb?” Strether laughed. “It’s something I never
called myself!”
“It’s what you are, all the same. You ain’t so young as you were, but
you’ve kept your teeth.”
He acknowledged his friend’s humour. “Take care I don’t get them into
_you!_ You’d like them, my friends at home, Waymarsh,” he declared;
“you’d really particularly like them. And I know”—it was slightly
irrelevant, but he gave it sudden and singular force—“I know they’d
like you!”
“Oh don’t work them off on _me!_” Waymarsh groaned.
Yet Strether still lingered with his hands in his pockets. “It’s really
quite as indispensable as I say that Chad should be got back.”
“Indispensable to whom? To you?”
“Yes,” Strether presently said.
“Because if you get him you also get Mrs. Newsome?”
Strether faced it. “Yes.”
“And if you don’t get him you don’t get her?”
It might be merciless, but he continued not to flinch. “I think it
might have some effect on our personal understanding. Chad’s of real
importance—or can easily become so if he will—to the business.”
“And the business is of real importance to his mother’s husband?”
“Well, I naturally want what my future wife wants. And the thing will
be much better if we have our own man in it.”
“If you have your own man in it, in other words,” Waymarsh said,
“you’ll marry—you personally—more money. She’s already rich, as I
understand you, but she’ll be richer still if the business can be made
to boom on certain lines that you’ve laid down.”
“_I_ haven’t laid them down,” Strether promptly returned. “Mr.
Newsome—who knew extraordinarily well what he was about—laid them down
ten years ago.”
Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake of his mane, _that_
didn’t matter! “You’re fierce for the boom anyway.”
His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice of the charge. “I
can scarcely be called fierce, I think, when I so freely take my chance
of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced in a sense counter
to Mrs. Newsome’s own feelings.”
Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look. “I see. You’re afraid
yourself of being squared. But you’re a humbug,” he added, “all the
same.”
“Oh!” Strether quickly protested.
“Yes, you ask me for protection—which makes you very interesting; and
then you won’t take it. You say you want to be squashed—”
“Ah but not so easily! Don’t you see,” Strether demanded “where my
interest, as already shown you, lies? It lies in my not being squared.
If I’m squared where’s my marriage? If I miss my errand I miss that;
and if I miss that I miss everything—I’m nowhere.”
Waymarsh—but all relentlessly—took this in. “What do I care where you
are if you’re spoiled?”
Their eyes met on it an instant. “Thank you awfully,” Strether at last
said. “But don’t you think _her_ judgement of that—?”
“Ought to content me? No.”
It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that Strether
again laughed. “You do her injustice. You really _must_ know her.
Good-night.”
He breakfasted with Mr. Bilham on the morrow, and, as inconsequently
befell, with Waymarsh massively of the party. The latter announced, at
the eleventh hour and much to his friend’s surprise, that, damn it, he
would as soon join him as do anything else; on which they proceeded
together, strolling in a state of detachment practically luxurious for
them to the Boulevard Malesherbes, a couple engaged that day with the
sharp spell of Paris as confessedly, it might have been seen, as any
couple among the daily thousands so compromised. They walked, wandered,
wondered and, a little, lost themselves; Strether hadn’t had for years
so rich a consciousness of time—a bag of gold into which he constantly
dipped for a handful. It was present to him that when the little
business with Mr. Bilham should be over he would still have shining
hours to use absolutely as he liked. There was no great pulse of haste
yet in this process of saving Chad; nor was that effect a bit more
marked as he sat, half an hour later, with his legs under Chad’s
mahogany, with Mr. Bilham on one side, with a friend of Mr. Bilham’s on
the other, with Waymarsh stupendously opposite, and with the great hum
of Paris coming up in softness, vagueness—for Strether himself indeed
already positive sweetness—through the sunny windows toward which, the
day before, his curiosity had raised its wings from below. The feeling
strongest with him at that moment had borne fruit almost faster than he
could taste it, and Strether literally felt at the present hour that
there was a precipitation in his fate. He had known nothing and nobody
as he stood in the street; but hadn’t his view now taken a bound in the
direction of every one and of every thing?
“What’s he up to, what’s he up to?”—something like that was at the back
of his head all the while in respect to little Bilham; but meanwhile,
till he should make out, every one and every thing were as good as
represented for him by the combination of his host and the lady on his
left. The lady on his left, the lady thus promptly and ingeniously
invited to “meet” Mr. Strether and Mr. Waymarsh—it was the way she
herself expressed her case—was a very marked person, a person who had
much to do with our friend’s asking himself if the occasion weren’t in
its essence the most baited, the most gilded of traps. Baited it could
properly be called when the repast was of so wise a savour, and gilded
surrounding objects seemed inevitably to need to be when Miss
Barrace—which was the lady’s name—looked at them with convex Parisian
eyes and through a glass with a remarkably long tortoise-shell handle.
Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect and eminently gay, highly
adorned, perfectly familiar, freely contradictious and reminding him of
some last-century portrait of a clever head without powder—why Miss
Barrace should have been in particular the note of a “trap” Strether
couldn’t on the spot have explained; he blinked in the light of a
conviction that he should know later on, and know well—as it came over
him, for that matter, with force, that he should need to. He wondered
what he was to think exactly of either of his new friends; since the
young man, Chad’s intimate and deputy, had, in thus constituting the
scene, practised so much more subtly than he had been prepared for, and
since in especial Miss Barrace, surrounded clearly by every
consideration, hadn’t scrupled to figure as a familiar object. It was
interesting to him to feel that he was in the presence of new measures,
other standards, a different scale of relations, and that evidently
here were a happy pair who didn’t think of things at all as he and
Waymarsh thought. Nothing was less to have been calculated in the
business than that it should now be for him as if he and Waymarsh were
comparatively quite at one.
The latter was magnificent—this at least was an assurance privately
given him by Miss Barrace. “Oh your friend’s a type, the grand old
American—what shall one call it? The Hebrew prophet, Ezekiel, Jeremiah,
who used when I was a little girl in the Rue Montaigne to come to see
my father and who was usually the American Minister to the Tuileries or
some other court. I haven’t seen one these ever so many years; the
sight of it warms my poor old chilled heart; this specimen is
wonderful; in the right quarter, you know, he’ll have a _succès fou_.”
Strether hadn’t failed to ask what the right quarter might be, much as
he required his presence of mind to meet such a change in their scheme.
“Oh the artist-quarter and that kind of thing; _here_ already, for
instance, as you see.” He had been on the point of echoing “‘Here’?—is
_this_ the artist-quarter?” but she had already disposed of the
question with a wave of all her tortoise-shell and an easy “Bring him
to _me!_” He knew on the spot how little he should be able to bring
him, for the very air was by this time, to his sense, thick and hot
with poor Waymarsh’s judgement of it. He was in the trap still more
than his companion and, unlike his companion, not making the best of
it; which was precisely what doubtless gave him his admirable sombre
glow. Little did Miss Barrace know that what was behind it was his
grave estimate of her own laxity. The general assumption with which our
two friends had arrived had been that of finding Mr. Bilham ready to
conduct them to one or other of those resorts of the earnest, the
æsthetic fraternity which were shown among the sights of Paris. In this
character it would have justified them in a proper insistence on
discharging their score. Waymarsh’s only proviso at the last had been
that nobody should pay for him; but he found himself, as the occasion
developed, paid for on a scale as to which Strether privately made out
that he already nursed retribution. Strether was conscious across the
table of what worked in him, conscious when they passed back to the
small salon to which, the previous evening, he himself had made so rich
a reference; conscious most of all as they stepped out to the balcony
in which one would have had to be an ogre not to recognise the perfect
place for easy aftertastes. These things were enhanced for Miss Barrace
by a succession of excellent cigarettes—acknowledged, acclaimed, as a
part of the wonderful supply left behind him by Chad—in an almost equal
absorption of which Strether found himself blindly, almost wildly
pushing forward. He might perish by the sword as well as by famine, and
he knew that his having abetted the lady by an excess that was rare
with him would count for little in the sum—as Waymarsh might so easily
add it up—of her licence. Waymarsh had smoked of old, smoked hugely;
but Waymarsh did nothing now, and that gave him his advantage over
people who took things up lightly just when others had laid them
heavily down. Strether had never smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted
at his friend that this had been only because of a reason. The reason,
it now began to appear even to himself, was that he had never had a
lady to smoke with.
It was this lady’s being there at all, however, that was the strange
free thing; perhaps, since she _was_ there, her smoking was the least
of her freedoms. If Strether had been sure at each juncture of
what—with Bilham in especial—she talked about, he might have traced
others and winced at them and felt Waymarsh wince; but he was in fact
so often at sea that his sense of the range of reference was merely
general and that he on several different occasions guessed and
interpreted only to doubt. He wondered what they meant, but there were
things he scarce thought they could be supposed to mean, and “Oh no—not
_that!_” was at the end of most of his ventures. This was the very
beginning with him of a condition as to which, later on, it will be
seen, he found cause to pull himself up; and he was to remember the
moment duly as the first step in a process. The central fact of the
place was neither more nor less, when analysed—and a pressure
superficial sufficed—than the fundamental impropriety of Chad’s
situation, round about which they thus seemed cynically clustered.
Accordingly, since they took it for granted, they took for granted all
that was in connexion with it taken for granted at Woollett—matters as
to which, verily, he had been reduced with Mrs. Newsome to the last
intensity of silence. That was the consequence of their being too bad
to be talked about, and was the accompaniment, by the same token, of a
deep conception of their badness. It befell therefore that when poor
Strether put it to himself that their badness was ultimately, or
perhaps even insolently, what such a scene as the one before him was,
so to speak, built upon, he could scarce shirk the dilemma of reading a
roundabout echo of them into almost anything that came up. This, he was
well aware, was a dreadful necessity; but such was the stern logic, he
could only gather, of a relation to the irregular life.
It was the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss Barrace that
was the insidious, the delicate marvel. He was eager to concede that
their relation to it was all indirect, for anything else in him would
have shown the grossness of bad manners; but the indirectness was none
the less consonant—_that_ was striking—with a grateful enjoyment of
everything that was Chad’s. They spoke of him repeatedly, invoking his
good name and good nature, and the worst confusion of mind for Strether
was that all their mention of him was of a kind to do him honour. They
commended his munificence and approved his taste, and in doing so sat
down, as it seemed to Strether, in the very soil out of which these
things flowered. Our friend’s final predicament was that he himself was
sitting down, for the time, _with_ them, and there was a supreme moment
at which, compared with his collapse, Waymarsh’s erectness affected him
as really high. One thing was certain—he saw he must make up his mind.
He must approach Chad, must wait for him, deal with him, master him,
but he mustn’t dispossess himself of the faculty of seeing things as
they were. He must bring him to _him_—not go himself, as it were, so
much of the way. He must at any rate be clearer as to what—should he
continue to do that for convenience—he was still condoning. It was on
the detail of this quantity—and what could the fact be but
mystifying?—that Bilham and Miss Barrace threw so little light. So
there they were.