I
“I’ve come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither more
nor less, and take you straight home; so you’ll be so good as
immediately and favourably to consider it!”—Strether, face to face with
Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and
with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone. For
Chad’s receptive attitude was that of a person who had been gracefully
quiet while the messenger at last reaching him has run a mile through
the dust. During some seconds after he had spoken Strether felt as if
_he_ had made some such exertion; he was not even certain that the
perspiration wasn’t on his brow. It was the kind of consciousness for
which he had to thank the look that, while the strain lasted, the young
man’s eyes gave him. They reflected—and the deuce of the thing was that
they reflected really with a sort of shyness of kindness—his
momentarily disordered state; which fact brought on in its turn for our
friend the dawn of a fear that Chad might simply “take it out”—take
everything out—in being sorry for him. Such a fear, any fear, was
unpleasant. But everything was unpleasant; it was odd how everything
had suddenly turned so. This however was no reason for letting the
least thing go. Strether had the next minute proceeded as roundly as if
with an advantage to follow up. “Of course I’m a busybody, if you want
to fight the case to the death; but after all mainly in the sense of
having known you and having given you such attention as you kindly
permitted when you were in jackets and knickerbockers. Yes—it was
knickerbockers, I’m busybody enough to remember that; and that you had,
for your age—I speak of the first far-away time—tremendously stout
legs. Well, we want you to break. Your mother’s heart’s passionately
set upon it, but she has above and beyond that excellent arguments and
reasons. I’ve not put them into her head—I needn’t remind you how
little she’s a person who needs that. But they exist—you must take it
from me as a friend both of hers and yours—for myself as well. I didn’t
invent them, I didn’t originally work them out; but I understand them,
I think I can explain them—by which I mean make you actively do them
justice; and that’s why you see me here. You had better know the worst
at once. It’s a question of an immediate rupture and an immediate
return. I’ve been conceited enough to dream I can sugar that pill. I
take at any rate the greatest interest in the question. I took it
already before I left home, and I don’t mind telling you that, altered
as you are, I take it still more now that I’ve seen you. You’re older
and—I don’t know what to call it!—more of a handful; but you’re by so
much the more, I seem to make out, to our purpose.”
“Do I strike you as improved?” Strether was to recall that Chad had at
this point enquired.
He was likewise to recall—and it had to count for some time as his
greatest comfort—that it had been “given” him, as they said at
Woollett, to reply with some presence of mind: “I haven’t the least
idea.” He was really for a while to like thinking he had been
positively hard. On the point of conceding that Chad had improved in
appearance, but that to the question of appearance the remark must be
confined, he checked even that compromise and left his reservation
bare. Not only his moral, but also, as it were, his æsthetic sense had
a little to pay for this, Chad being unmistakeably—and wasn’t it a
matter of the confounded grey hair again?—handsomer than he had ever
promised. That however fell in perfectly with what Strether had said.
They had no desire to keep down his proper expansion, and he wouldn’t
be less to their purpose for not looking, as he had too often done of
old, only bold and wild. There was indeed a signal particular in which
he would distinctly be more so. Strether didn’t, as he talked,
absolutely follow himself; he only knew he was clutching his thread and
that he held it from moment to moment a little tighter; his mere
uninterruptedness during the few minutes helped him to do that. He had
frequently for a month, turned over what he should say on this very
occasion, and he seemed at last to have said nothing he had thought
of—everything was so totally different.
But in spite of all he had put the flag at the window. This was what he
had done, and there was a minute during which he affected himself as
having shaken it hard, flapped it with a mighty flutter, straight in
front of his companion’s nose. It gave him really almost the sense of
having already acted his part. The momentary relief—as if from the
knowledge that nothing of _that_ at least could be undone—sprang from a
particular cause, the cause that had flashed into operation, in Miss
Gostrey’s box, with direct apprehension, with amazed recognition, and
that had been concerned since then in every throb of his consciousness.
What it came to was that with an absolutely _new_ quantity to deal with
one simply couldn’t know. The new quantity was represented by the fact
that Chad had been made over. That was all; whatever it was it was
everything. Strether had never seen the thing so done before—it was
perhaps a speciality of Paris. If one had been present at the process
one might little by little have mastered the result; but he was face to
face, as matters stood, with the finished business. It had freely been
noted for him that he might be received as a dog among skittles, but
that was on the basis of the old quantity. He had originally thought of
lines and tones as things to be taken, but these possibilities had now
quite melted away. There was no computing at all what the young man
before him would think or feel or say on any subject whatever. This
intelligence Strether had afterwards, to account for his nervousness,
reconstituted as he might, just as he had also reconstituted the
promptness with which Chad had corrected his uncertainty. An
extraordinarily short time had been required for the correction, and
there had ceased to be anything negative in his companion’s face and
air as soon as it was made. “Your engagement to my mother has become
then what they call here a _fait accompli?_”—it had consisted, the
determinant touch, in nothing more than that.
Well, that was enough, Strether had felt while his answer hung fire. He
had felt at the same time, however, that nothing could less become him
than that it should hang fire too long. “Yes,” he said brightly, “it
was on the happy settlement of the question that I started. You see
therefore to what tune I’m in your family. Moreover,” he added, “I’ve
been supposing you’d suppose it.”
“Oh I’ve been supposing it for a long time, and what you tell me helps
me to understand that you should want to do something. To do something,
I mean,” said Chad, “to commemorate an event so—what do they call
it?—so auspicious. I see you make out, and not unnaturally,” he
continued, “that bringing me home in triumph as a sort of
wedding-present to Mother would commemorate it better than anything
else. You want to make a bonfire in fact,” he laughed, “and you pitch
me on. Thank you, thank you!” he laughed again.
He was altogether easy about it, and this made Strether now see how at
bottom, and in spite of the shade of shyness that really cost him
nothing, he had from the first moment been easy about everything. The
shade of shyness was mere good taste. People with manners formed could
apparently have, as one of their best cards, the shade of shyness too.
He had leaned a little forward to speak; his elbows were on the table;
and the inscrutable new face that he had got somewhere and somehow was
brought by the movement nearer to his critic’s. There was a fascination
for that critic in its not being, this ripe physiognomy, the face that,
under observation at least, he had originally carried away from
Woollett. Strether found a certain freedom on his own side in defining
it as that of a man of the world—a formula that indeed seemed to come
now in some degree to his relief; that of a man to whom things had
happened and were variously known. In gleams, in glances, the past did
perhaps peep out of it; but such lights were faint and instantly
merged. Chad was brown and thick and strong, and of old Chad had been
rough. Was all the difference therefore that he was actually smooth?
Possibly; for that he _was_ smooth was as marked as in the taste of a
sauce or in the rub of a hand. The effect of it was general—it had
retouched his features, drawn them with a cleaner line. It had cleared
his eyes and settled his colour and polished his fine square teeth—the
main ornament of his face; and at the same time that it had given him a
form and a surface, almost a design, it had toned his voice,
established his accent, encouraged his smile to more play and his other
motions to less. He had formerly, with a great deal of action,
expressed very little; and he now expressed whatever was necessary with
almost none at all. It was as if in short he had really, copious
perhaps but shapeless, been put into a firm mould and turned
successfully out. The phenomenon—Strether kept eyeing it as a
phenomenon, an eminent case—was marked enough to be touched by the
finger. He finally put his hand across the table and laid it on Chad’s
arm. “If you’ll promise me—here on the spot and giving me your word of
honour—to break straight off, you’ll make the future the real right
thing for all of us alike. You’ll ease off the strain of this decent
but none the less acute suspense in which I’ve for so many days been
waiting for you, and let me turn in to rest. I shall leave you with my
blessing and go to bed in peace.”
Chad again fell back at this and, his hands pocketed, settled himself a
little; in which posture he looked, though he rather anxiously smiled,
only the more earnest. Then Strether seemed to see that he was really
nervous, and he took that as what he would have called a wholesome
sign. The only mark of it hitherto had been his more than once taking
off and putting on his wide-brimmed crush hat. He had at this moment
made the motion again to remove it, then had only pushed it back, so
that it hung informally on his strong young grizzled crop. It was a
touch that gave the note of the familiar—the intimate and the
belated—to their quiet colloquy; and it was indeed by some such trivial
aid that Strether became aware at the same moment of something else.
The observation was at any rate determined in him by some light too
fine to distinguish from so many others, but it was none the less
sharply determined. Chad looked unmistakeably during these
instants—well, as Strether put it to himself, all he was worth. Our
friend had a sudden apprehension of what that would on certain sides
be. He saw him in a flash as the young man marked out by women; and for
a concentrated minute the dignity, the comparative austerity, as he
funnily fancied it, of this character affected him almost with awe.
There was an experience on his interlocutor’s part that looked out at
him from under the displaced hat, and that looked out moreover by a
force of its own, the deep fact of its quantity and quality, and not
through Chad’s intending bravado or swagger. That was then the way men
marked out by women _were_—and also the men by whom the women were
doubtless in turn sufficiently distinguished. It affected Strether for
thirty seconds as a relevant truth, a truth which, however, the next
minute, had fallen into its relation. “Can’t you imagine there being
some questions,” Chad asked, “that a fellow—however much impressed by
your charming way of stating things—would like to put to you first?”
“Oh yes—easily. I’m here to answer everything. I think I can even tell
you things, of the greatest interest to you, that you won’t know enough
to ask me. We’ll take as many days to it as you like. But I want,”
Strether wound up, “to go to bed now.”
“Really?”
Chad had spoken in such surprise that he was amused. “Can’t you believe
it?—with what you put me through?”
The young man seemed to consider. “Oh I haven’t put you through
much—yet.”
“Do you mean there’s so much more to come?” Strether laughed. “All the
more reason then that I should gird myself.” And as if to mark what he
felt he could by this time count on he was already on his feet.
Chad, still seated, stayed him, with a hand against him, as he passed
between their table and the next. “Oh we shall get on!”
The tone was, as who should say, everything Strether could have
desired; and quite as good the expression of face with which the
speaker had looked up at him and kindly held him. All these things
lacked was their not showing quite so much as the fruit of experience.
Yes, experience was what Chad did play on him, if he didn’t play any
grossness of defiance. Of course experience was in a manner defiance;
but it wasn’t, at any rate—rather indeed quite the contrary!—grossness;
which was so much gained. He fairly grew older, Strether thought, while
he himself so reasoned. Then with his mature pat of his visitor’s arm
he also got up; and there had been enough of it all by this time to
make the visitor feel that something _was_ settled. Wasn’t it settled
that he had at least the testimony of Chad’s own belief in a
settlement? Strether found himself treating Chad’s profession that they
would get on as a sufficient basis for going to bed. He hadn’t
nevertheless after this gone to bed directly; for when they had again
passed out together into the mild bright night a check had virtually
sprung from nothing more than a small circumstance which might have
acted only as confirming quiescence. There were people, expressive
sound, projected light, still abroad, and after they had taken in for a
moment, through everything, the great clear architectural street, they
turned off in tacit union to the quarter of Strether’s hotel. “Of
course,” Chad here abruptly began, “of course Mother’s making things
out with you about me has been natural—and of course also you’ve had a
good deal to go upon. Still, you must have filled out.”
He had stopped, leaving his friend to wonder a little what point he
wished to make; and this it was that enabled Strether meanwhile to make
one. “Oh we’ve never pretended to go into detail. We weren’t in the
least bound to _that_. It was ‘filling out’ enough to miss you as we
did.”
But Chad rather oddly insisted, though under the high lamp at their
corner, where they paused, he had at first looked as if touched by
Strether’s allusion to the long sense, at home, of his absence. “What I
mean is you must have imagined.”
“Imagined what?”
“Well—horrors.”
It affected Strether: horrors were so little—superficially at least—in
this robust and reasoning image. But he was none the less there to be
veracious. “Yes, I dare say we _have_ imagined horrors. But where’s the
harm if we haven’t been wrong?”
Chad raised his face to the lamp, and it was one of the moments at
which he had, in his extraordinary way, most his air of designedly
showing himself. It was as if at these instants he just presented
himself, his identity so rounded off, his palpable presence and his
massive young manhood, as such a link in the chain as might practically
amount to a kind of demonstration. It was as if—and how but
anomalously?—he couldn’t after all help thinking sufficiently well of
these things to let them go for what they were worth. What could there
be in this for Strether but the hint of some self-respect, some sense
of power, oddly perverted; something latent and beyond access, ominous
and perhaps enviable? The intimation had the next thing, in a flash,
taken on a name—a name on which our friend seized as he asked himself
if he weren’t perhaps really dealing with an irreducible young Pagan.
This description—he quite jumped at it—had a sound that gratified his
mental ear, so that of a sudden he had already adopted it. Pagan—yes,
that was, wasn’t it? what Chad _would_ logically be. It was what he
must be. It was what he was. The idea was a clue and, instead of
darkening the prospect, projected a certain clearness. Strether made
out in this quick ray that a Pagan was perhaps, at the pass they had
come to, the thing most wanted at Woollett. They’d be able to do with
one—a good one; he’d find an opening—yes; and Strether’s imagination
even now prefigured and accompanied the first appearance there of the
rousing personage. He had only the slight discomfort of feeling, as the
young man turned away from the lamp, that his thought had in the
momentary silence possibly been guessed. “Well, I’ve no doubt,” said
Chad, “you’ve come near enough. The details, as you say, don’t matter.
It _has_ been generally the case that I’ve let myself go. But I’m
coming round—I’m not so bad now.” With which they walked on again to
Strether’s hotel.
“Do you mean,” the latter asked as they approached the door, “that
there isn’t any woman with you now?”
“But pray what has that to do with it?”
“Why it’s the whole question.”
“Of my going home?” Chad was clearly surprised. “Oh not much! Do you
think that when I want to go any one will have any power—”
“To keep you”—Strether took him straight up—“from carrying out your
wish? Well, our idea has been that somebody has hitherto—or a good many
persons perhaps—kept you pretty well from ‘wanting.’ That’s what—if
you’re in anybody’s hands—may again happen. You don’t answer my
question”—he kept it up; “but if you aren’t in anybody’s hands so much
the better. There’s nothing then but what makes for your going.”
Chad turned this over. “I don’t answer your question?” He spoke quite
without resenting it. “Well, such questions have always a rather
exaggerated side. One doesn’t know quite what you mean by being in
women’s ‘hands.’ It’s all so vague. One is when one isn’t. One isn’t
when one is. And then one can’t quite give people away.” He seemed
kindly to explain. “I’ve _never_ got stuck—so very hard; and, as
against anything at any time really better, I don’t think I’ve ever
been afraid.” There was something in it that held Strether to wonder,
and this gave him time to go on. He broke out as with a more helpful
thought. “Don’t you know how I like Paris itself?”
The upshot was indeed to make our friend marvel. “Oh if _that’s_ all
that’s the matter with you—!” It was _he_ who almost showed resentment.
Chad’s smile of a truth more than met it. “But isn’t that enough?”
Strether hesitated, but it came out. “Not enough for your mother!”
Spoken, however, it sounded a trifle odd—the effect of which was that
Chad broke into a laugh. Strether, at this, succumbed as well, though
with extreme brevity. “Permit us to have still our theory. But if you
_are_ so free and so strong you’re inexcusable. I’ll write in the
morning,” he added with decision. “I’ll say I’ve got you.”
This appeared to open for Chad a new interest. “How often do you
write?”
“Oh perpetually.”
“And at great length?”
Strether had become a little impatient. “I hope it’s not found too
great.”
“Oh I’m sure not. And you hear as often?”
Again Strether paused. “As often as I deserve.”
“Mother writes,” said Chad, “a lovely letter.”
Strether, before the closed _porte-cochère_, fixed him a moment. “It’s
more, my boy, than _you_ do! But our suppositions don’t matter,” he
added, “if you’re actually not entangled.”
Chad’s pride seemed none the less a little touched. “I never _was_
that—let me insist. I always had my own way.” With which he pursued:
“And I have it at present.”
“Then what are you here for? What has kept you,” Strether asked, “if
you _have_ been able to leave?”
It made Chad, after a stare, throw himself back. “Do you think one’s
kept only by women?” His surprise and his verbal emphasis rang out so
clear in the still street that Strether winced till he remembered the
safety of their English speech. “Is that,” the young man demanded,
“what they think at Woollett?” At the good faith in the question
Strether had changed colour, feeling that, as he would have said, he
had put his foot in it. He had appeared stupidly to misrepresent what
they thought at Woollett; but before he had time to rectify Chad again
was upon him. “I must say then you show a low mind!”
It so fell in, unhappily for Strether, with that reflexion of his own
prompted in him by the pleasant air of the Boulevard Malesherbes, that
its disconcerting force was rather unfairly great. It was a dig that,
administered by himself—and administered even to poor Mrs. Newsome—was
no more than salutary; but administered by Chad—and quite logically—it
came nearer drawing blood. They _hadn’t_ a low mind—nor any approach to
one; yet incontestably they had worked, and with a certain smugness, on
a basis that might be turned against them. Chad had at any rate pulled
his visitor up; he had even pulled up his admirable mother; he had
absolutely, by a turn of the wrist and a jerk of the far-flung noose,
pulled up, in a bunch, Woollett browsing in its pride. There was no
doubt Woollett _had_ insisted on his coarseness; and what he at present
stood there for in the sleeping street was, by his manner of striking
the other note, to make of such insistence a preoccupation compromising
to the insisters. It was exactly as if they had imputed to him a
vulgarity that he had by a mere gesture caused to fall from him. The
devil of the case was that Strether felt it, by the same stroke, as
falling straight upon himself. He had been wondering a minute ago if
the boy weren’t a Pagan, and he found himself wondering now if he
weren’t by chance a gentleman. It didn’t in the least, on the spot,
spring up helpfully for him that a person couldn’t at the same time be
both. There was nothing at this moment in the air to challenge the
combination; there was everything to give it on the contrary something
of a flourish. It struck Strether into the bargain as doing something
to meet the most difficult of the questions; though perhaps indeed only
by substituting another. Wouldn’t it be precisely by having learned to
be a gentleman that he had mastered the consequent trick of looking so
well that one could scarce speak to him straight? But what in the world
was the clue to such a prime producing cause? There were too many clues
then that Strether still lacked, and these clues to clues were among
them. What it accordingly amounted to for him was that he had to take
full in the face a fresh attribution of ignorance. He had grown used by
this time to reminders, especially from his own lips, of what he didn’t
know; but he had borne them because in the first place they were
private and because in the second they practically conveyed a tribute.
He didn’t know what was bad, and—as others didn’t know how little he
knew it—he could put up with his state. But if he didn’t know, in so
important a particular, what was good, Chad at least was now aware he
didn’t; and that, for some reason, affected our friend as curiously
public. It was in fact an exposed condition that the young man left him
in long enough for him to feel its chill—till he saw fit, in a word,
generously again to cover him. This last was in truth what Chad quite
gracefully did. But he did it as with a simple thought that met the
whole of the case. “Oh I’m all right!” It was what Strether had rather
bewilderedly to go to bed on.