I
The Sunday of the next week was a wonderful day, and Chad Newsome had
let his friend know in advance that he had provided for it. There had
already been a question of his taking him to see the great Gloriani,
who was at home on Sunday afternoons and at whose house, for the most
part, fewer bores were to be met than elsewhere; but the project,
through some accident, had not had instant effect, and now revived in
happier conditions. Chad had made the point that the celebrated
sculptor had a queer old garden, for which the weather—spring at last
frank and fair—was propitious; and two or three of his other allusions
had confirmed for Strether the expectation of something special. He had
by this time, for all introductions and adventures, let himself
recklessly go, cherishing the sense that whatever the young man showed
him he was showing at least himself. He could have wished indeed, so
far as this went, that Chad were less of a mere cicerone; for he was
not without the impression—now that the vision of his game, his plan,
his deep diplomacy, did recurrently assert itself—of his taking refuge
from the realities of their intercourse in profusely dispensing, as our
friend mentally phrased it, _panem et circenses_. Our friend continued
to feel rather smothered in flowers, though he made in his other
moments the almost angry inference that this was only because of his
odious ascetic suspicion of any form of beauty. He periodically assured
himself—for his reactions were sharp—that he shouldn’t reach the truth
of anything till he had at least got rid of that.
He had known beforehand that Madame de Vionnet and her daughter would
probably be on view, an intimation to that effect having constituted
the only reference again made by Chad to his good friends from the
south. The effect of Strether’s talk about them with Miss Gostrey had
been quite to consecrate his reluctance to pry; something in the very
air of Chad’s silence—judged in the light of that talk—offered it to
him as a reserve he could markedly match. It shrouded them about with
he scarce knew what, a consideration, a distinction; he was in presence
at any rate—so far as it placed him there—of ladies; and the one thing
that was definite for him was that they themselves should be, to the
extent of his responsibility, in presence of a gentleman. Was it
because they were very beautiful, very clever, or even very good—was it
for one of these reasons that Chad was, so to speak, nursing his
effect? Did he wish to spring them, in the Woollett phrase, with a
fuller force—to confound his critic, slight though as yet the
criticism, with some form of merit exquisitely incalculable? The most
the critic had at all events asked was whether the persons in question
were French; and that enquiry had been but a proper comment on the
sound of their name. “Yes. That is no!” had been Chad’s reply; but he
had immediately added that their English was the most charming in the
world, so that if Strether were wanting an excuse for not getting on
with them he wouldn’t in the least find one. Never in fact had
Strether—in the mood into which the place had quickly launched
him—felt, for himself, less the need of an excuse. Those he might have
found would have been, at the worst, all for the others, the people
before him, in whose liberty to be as they were he was aware that he
positively rejoiced. His fellow guests were multiplying, and these
things, their liberty, their intensity, their variety, their conditions
at large, were in fusion in the admirable medium of the scene.
The place itself was a great impression—a small pavilion, clear-faced
and sequestered, an effect of polished parquet, of fine white panel and
spare sallow gilt, of decoration delicate and rare, in the heart of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain and on the edge of a cluster of gardens attached
to old noble houses. Far back from streets and unsuspected by crowds,
reached by a long passage and a quiet court, it was as striking to the
unprepared mind, he immediately saw, as a treasure dug up; giving him
too, more than anything yet, the note of the range of the immeasurable
town and sweeping away, as by a last brave brush, his usual landmarks
and terms. It was in the garden, a spacious cherished remnant, out of
which a dozen persons had already passed, that Chad’s host presently
met them while the tall bird-haunted trees, all of a twitter with the
spring and the weather, and the high party-walls, on the other side of
which grave _hôtels_ stood off for privacy, spoke of survival,
transmission, association, a strong indifferent persistent order. The
day was so soft that the little party had practically adjourned to the
open air but the open air was in such conditions all a chamber of
state. Strether had presently the sense of a great convent, a convent
of missions, famous for he scarce knew what, a nursery of young
priests, of scattered shade, of straight alleys and chapel-bells, that
spread its mass in one quarter; he had the sense of names in the air,
of ghosts at the windows, of signs and tokens, a whole range of
expression, all about him, too thick for prompt discrimination.
This assault of images became for a moment, in the address of the
distinguished sculptor, almost formidable: Gloriani showed him, in such
perfect confidence, on Chad’s introduction of him, a fine worn handsome
face, a face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue. With his
genius in his eyes, his manners on his lips, his long career behind him
and his honours and rewards all round, the great artist, in the course
of a single sustained look and a few words of delight at receiving him,
affected our friend as a dazzling prodigy of type. Strether had seen in
museums—in the Luxembourg as well as, more reverently, later on, in the
New York of the billionaires—the work of his hand; knowing too that
after an earlier time in his native Rome he had migrated, in
mid-career, to Paris, where, with a personal lustre almost violent, he
shone in a constellation: all of which was more than enough to crown
him, for his guest, with the light, with the romance, of glory.
Strether, in contact with that element as he had never yet so
intimately been, had the consciousness of opening to it, for the happy
instant, all the windows of his mind, of letting this rather grey
interior drink in for once the sun of a clime not marked in his old
geography. He was to remember again repeatedly the medal-like Italian
face, in which every line was an artist’s own, in which time told only
as tone and consecration; and he was to recall in especial, as the
penetrating radiance, as the communication of the illustrious spirit
itself, the manner in which, while they stood briefly, in welcome and
response, face to face, he was held by the sculptor’s eyes. He wasn’t
soon to forget them, was to think of them, all unconscious,
unintending, preoccupied though they were, as the source of the deepest
intellectual sounding to which he had ever been exposed. He was in fact
quite to cherish his vision of it, to play with it in idle hours; only
speaking of it to no one and quite aware he couldn’t have spoken
without appearing to talk nonsense. Was what it had told him or what it
had asked him the greater of the mysteries? Was it the most special
flare, unequalled, supreme, of the æsthetic torch, lighting that
wondrous world for ever, or was it above all the long straight shaft
sunk by a personal acuteness that life had seasoned to steel? Nothing
on earth could have been stranger and no one doubtless more surprised
than the artist himself, but it was for all the world to Strether just
then as if in the matter of his accepted duty he had positively been on
trial. The deep human expertness in Gloriani’s charming smile—oh the
terrible life behind it!—was flashed upon him as a test of his stuff.
Chad meanwhile, after having easily named his companion, had still more
easily turned away and was already greeting other persons present. He
was as easy, clever Chad, with the great artist as with his obscure
compatriot, and as easy with every one else as with either: this fell
into its place for Strether and made almost a new light, giving him, as
a concatenation, something more he could enjoy. He liked Gloriani, but
should never see him again; of that he was sufficiently sure. Chad
accordingly, who was wonderful with both of them, was a kind of link
for hopeless fancy, an implication of possibilities—oh if everything
had been different! Strether noted at all events that he was thus on
terms with illustrious spirits, and also that—yes, distinctly—he hadn’t
in the least swaggered about it. Our friend hadn’t come there only for
this figure of Abel Newsome’s son, but that presence threatened to
affect the observant mind as positively central. Gloriani indeed,
remembering something and excusing himself, pursued Chad to speak to
him, and Strether was left musing on many things. One of them was the
question of whether, since he had been tested, he had passed. Did the
artist drop him from having made out that he wouldn’t do? He really
felt just to-day that he might do better than usual. Hadn’t he done
well enough, so far as that went, in being exactly so dazzled? and in
not having too, as he almost believed, wholly hidden from his host that
he felt the latter’s plummet? Suddenly, across the garden, he saw
little Bilham approach, and it was a part of the fit that was on him
that as their eyes met he guessed also _his_ knowledge. If he had said
to him on the instant what was uppermost he would have said: “_Have_ I
passed?—for of course I know one has to pass here.” Little Bilham would
have reassured him, have told him that he exaggerated, and have adduced
happily enough the argument of little Bilham’s own very presence;
which, in truth, he could see, was as easy a one as Gloriani’s own or
as Chad’s. He himself would perhaps then after a while cease to be
frightened, would get the point of view for some of the faces—types
tremendously alien, alien to Woollett—that he had already begun to take
in. Who were they all, the dispersed groups and couples, the ladies
even more unlike those of Woollett than the gentlemen?—this was the
enquiry that, when his young friend had greeted him, he did find
himself making.
“Oh they’re every one—all sorts and sizes; of course I mean within
limits, though limits down perhaps rather more than limits up. There
are always artists—he’s beautiful and inimitable to the _cher
confrère_; and then _gros bonnets_ of many kinds—ambassadors, cabinet
ministers, bankers, generals, what do I know? even Jews. Above all
always some awfully nice women—and not too many; sometimes an actress,
an artist, a great performer—but only when they’re not monsters; and in
particular the right _femmes du monde_. You can fancy his history on
that side—I believe it’s fabulous: they _never_ give him up. Yet he
keeps them down: no one knows how he manages; it’s too beautiful and
bland. Never too many—and a mighty good thing too; just a perfect
choice. But there are not in any way many bores; it has always been so;
he has some secret. It’s extraordinary. And you don’t find it out. He’s
the same to every one. He doesn’t ask questions.’
“Ah doesn’t he?” Strether laughed.
Bilham met it with all his candour. “How then should _I_ be here?
“Oh for what you tell me. You’re part of the perfect choice.”
Well, the young man took in the scene. “It seems rather good to-day.”
Strether followed the direction of his eyes. “Are they all, this time,
_femmes du monde?_”
Little Bilham showed his competence. “Pretty well.”
This was a category our friend had a feeling for; a light, romantic and
mysterious, on the feminine element, in which he enjoyed for a little
watching it. “Are there any Poles?”
His companion considered. “I think I make out a ‘Portuguee.’ But I’ve
seen Turks.”
Strether wondered, desiring justice. “They seem—all the women—very
harmonious.”
“Oh in closer quarters they come out!” And then, while Strether was
aware of fearing closer quarters, though giving himself again to the
harmonies, “Well,” little Bilham went on, “it _is_ at the worst rather
good, you know. If you like it, you feel it, this way, that shows
you’re not in the least out. But you always know things,” he handsomely
added, “immediately.”
Strether liked it and felt it only too much; so “I say, don’t lay traps
for me!” he rather helplessly murmured.
“Well,” his companion returned, “he’s wonderfully kind to _us_.”
“To us Americans you mean?”
“Oh no—he doesn’t know anything about _that_. That’s half the battle
here—that you can never hear politics. We don’t talk them. I mean to
poor young wretches of all sorts. And yet it’s always as charming as
this; it’s as if, by something in the air, our squalor didn’t show. It
puts us all back—into the last century.”
“I’m afraid,” Strether said, amused, “that it puts me rather forward:
oh ever so far!”
“Into the next? But isn’t that only,” little Bilham asked, “because
you’re really of the century before?”
“The century before the last? Thank you!” Strether laughed. “If I ask
you about some of the ladies it can’t be then that I may hope, as such
a specimen of the rococo, to please them.”
“On the contrary they adore—we all adore here—the rococo, and where is
there a better setting for it than the whole thing, the pavilion and
the garden, together? There are lots of people with collections,”
little Bilham smiled as he glanced round. “You’ll be secured!”
It made Strether for a moment give himself again to contemplation.
There were faces he scarce knew what to make of. Were they charming or
were they only strange? He mightn’t talk politics, yet he suspected a
Pole or two. The upshot was the question at the back of his head from
the moment his friend had joined him. “Have Madame de Vionnet and her
daughter arrived?”
“I haven’t seen them yet, but Miss Gostrey has come. She’s in the
pavilion looking at objects. One can see _she’s_ a collector,” little
Bilham added without offence.
“Oh yes, she’s a collector, and I knew she was to come. Is Madame de
Vionnet a collector?” Strether went on.
“Rather, I believe; almost celebrated.” The young man met, on it, a
little, his friend’s eyes. “I happen to know—from Chad, whom I saw last
night—that they’ve come back; but only yesterday. He wasn’t sure—up to
the last. This, accordingly,” little Bilham went on, “will be—if they
_are_ here—their first appearance after their return.”
Strether, very quickly, turned these things over. “Chad told you last
night? To me, on our way here, he said nothing about it.”
“But did you ask him?”
Strether did him the justice. “I dare say not.”
“Well,” said little Bilham, “you’re not a person to whom it’s easy to
tell things you don’t want to know. Though it _is_ easy, I admit—it’s
quite beautiful,” he benevolently added, “when you do want to.”
Strether looked at him with an indulgence that matched his
intelligence. “Is that the deep reasoning on which—about these
ladies—you’ve been yourself so silent?”
Little Bilham considered the depth of his reasoning. “I haven’t been
silent. I spoke of them to you the other day, the day we sat together
after Chad’s tea-party.”
Strether came round to it. “They then are the virtuous attachment?”
“I can only tell you that it’s what they pass for. But isn’t that
enough? What more than a vain appearance does the wisest of us know? I
commend you,” the young man declared with a pleasant emphasis, “the
vain appearance.”
Strether looked more widely round, and what he saw, from face to face,
deepened the effect of his young friend’s words. “Is it so good?”
“Magnificent.”
Strether had a pause. “The husband’s dead?”
“Dear no. Alive.”
“Oh!” said Strether. After which, as his companion laughed: “How then
can it be so good?”
“You’ll see for yourself. One does see.”
“Chad’s in love with the daughter?”
“That’s what I mean.”
Strether wondered. “Then where’s the difficulty?”
“Why, aren’t you and I—with our grander bolder ideas?”
“Oh mine—!” Strether said rather strangely. But then as if to
attenuate: “You mean they won’t hear of Woollett?”
Little Bilham smiled. “Isn’t that just what you must see about?”
It had brought them, as she caught the last words, into relation with
Miss Barrace, whom Strether had already observed—as he had never before
seen a lady at a party—moving about alone. Coming within sound of them
she had already spoken, and she took again, through her long-handled
glass, all her amused and amusing possession. “How much, poor Mr.
Strether, you seem to have to see about! But you can’t say,” she gaily
declared, “that I don’t do what I can to help you. Mr. Waymarsh is
placed. I’ve left him in the house with Miss Gostrey.”
“The way,” little Bilham exclaimed, “Mr. Strether gets the ladies to
work for him! He’s just preparing to draw in another; to pounce—don’t
you see him?—on Madame de Vionnet.”
“Madame de Vionnet? Oh, oh, oh!” Miss Barrace cried in a wonderful
crescendo. There was more in it, our friend made out, than met the ear.
Was it after all a joke that he should be serious about anything? He
envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being. She seemed,
with little cries and protests and quick recognitions, movements like
the darts of some fine high-feathered free-pecking bird, to stand
before life as before some full shop-window. You could fairly hear, as
she selected and pointed, the tap of her tortoise-shell against the
glass. “It’s certain that we do need seeing about; only I’m glad it’s
not I who have to do it. One does, no doubt, begin that way; then
suddenly one finds that one has given it up. It’s too much, it’s too
difficult. You’re wonderful, you people,” she continued to Strether,
“for not feeling those things—by which I mean impossibilities. You
never feel them. You face them with a fortitude that makes it a lesson
to watch you.”
“Ah but”—little Bilham put it with discouragement—“what do we achieve
after all? We see about you and report—when we even go so far as
reporting. But nothing’s done.”
“Oh you, Mr. Bilham,” she replied as with an impatient rap on the
glass, “you’re not worth sixpence! You come over to convert the
savages—for I know you verily did, I remember you—and the savages
simply convert _you_.”
“Not even!” the young man woefully confessed: “they haven’t gone
through that form. They’ve simply—the cannibals!—eaten me; converted me
if you like, but converted me into food. I’m but the bleached bones of
a Christian.”
“Well then there we are! Only”—and Miss Barrace appealed again to
Strether—“don’t let it discourage you. You’ll break down soon enough,
but you’ll meanwhile have had your moments. _Il faut en avoir_. I
always like to see you while you last. And I’ll tell you who _will_
last.”
“Waymarsh?”—he had already taken her up.
She laughed out as at the alarm of it. “He’ll resist even Miss Gostrey:
so grand is it not to understand. He’s wonderful.”
“He is indeed,” Strether conceded. “He wouldn’t tell me of this
affair—only said he had an engagement; but with such a gloom, you must
let me insist, as if it had been an engagement to be hanged. Then
silently and secretly he turns up here with you. Do you call _that_
‘lasting’?”
“Oh I hope it’s lasting!” Miss Barrace said. “But he only, at the best,
bears with me. He doesn’t understand—not one little scrap. He’s
delightful. He’s wonderful,” she repeated.
“Michelangelesque!”—little Bilham completed her meaning. “He _is_ a
success. Moses, on the ceiling, brought down to the floor;
overwhelming, colossal, but somehow portable.”
“Certainly, if you mean by portable,” she returned, “looking so well in
one’s carriage. He’s too funny beside me in his corner; he looks like
somebody, somebody foreign and famous, _en exil_; so that people
wonder—it’s very amusing—whom I’m taking about. I show him Paris, show
him everything, and he never turns a hair. He’s like the Indian chief
one reads about, who, when he comes up to Washington to see the Great
Father, stands wrapt in his blanket and gives no sign. _I_ might be the
Great Father—from the way he takes everything.” She was delighted at
this hit of her identity with that personage—it fitted so her
character; she declared it was the title she meant henceforth to adopt.
“And the way he sits, too, in the corner of my room, only looking at my
visitors very hard and as if he wanted to start something! They wonder
what he does want to start. But he’s wonderful,” Miss Barrace once more
insisted. “He has never started anything yet.”
It presented him none the less, in truth, to her actual friends, who
looked at each other in intelligence, with frank amusement on Bilham’s
part and a shade of sadness on Strether’s. Strether’s sadness
sprang—for the image had its grandeur—from his thinking how little he
himself was wrapt in his blanket, how little, in marble halls, all too
oblivious of the Great Father, he resembled a really majestic
aboriginal. But he had also another reflexion. “You’ve all of you here
so much visual sense that you’ve somehow all ‘run’ to it. There are
moments when it strikes one that you haven’t any other.”
“Any moral,” little Bilham explained, watching serenely, across the
garden, the several _femmes du monde_. “But Miss Barrace has a moral
distinction,” he kindly continued; speaking as if for Strether’s
benefit not less than for her own.
“_Have_ you?” Strether, scarce knowing what he was about, asked of her
almost eagerly.
“Oh not a distinction”—she was mightily amused at his tone—“Mr.
Bilham’s too good. But I think I may say a sufficiency. Yes, a
sufficiency. Have you supposed strange things of me?”—and she fixed him
again, through all her tortoise-shell, with the droll interest of it.
“You _are_ all indeed wonderful. I should awfully disappoint you. I do
take my stand on my sufficiency. But I know, I confess,” she went on,
“strange people. I don’t know how it happens; I don’t do it on purpose;
it seems to be my doom—as if I were always one of their habits: it’s
wonderful! I dare say moreover,” she pursued with an interested
gravity, “that I do, that we all do here, run too much to mere eye. But
how can it be helped? We’re all looking at each other—and in the light
of Paris one sees what things resemble. That’s what the light of Paris
seems always to show. It’s the fault of the light of Paris—dear old
light!”
“Dear old Paris!” little Bilham echoed.
“Everything, every one shows,” Miss Barrace went on.
“But for what they really are?” Strether asked.
“Oh I like your Boston ‘reallys’! But sometimes—yes.”
“Dear old Paris then!” Strether resignedly sighed while for a moment
they looked at each other. Then he broke out: “Does Madame de Vionnet
do that? I mean really show for what she is?”
Her answer was prompt. “She’s charming. She’s perfect.”
“Then why did you a minute ago say ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ at her name?”
She easily remembered. “Why just because—! She’s wonderful.”
“Ah she too?”—Strether had almost a groan.
But Miss Barrace had meanwhile perceived relief. “Why not put your
question straight to the person who can answer it best?”
“No,” said little Bilham; “don’t put any question; wait, rather—it will
be much more fun—to judge for yourself. He has come to take you to
her.”