At four o’clock that afternoon he had still not seen him, but he was
then, as to make up for this, engaged in talk about him with Miss
Gostrey. Strether had kept away from home all day, given himself up to
the town and to his thoughts, wandered and mused, been at once restless
and absorbed—and all with the present climax of a rich little welcome
in the Quartier Marbœuf. “Waymarsh has been, ‘unbeknown’ to me, I’m
convinced”—for Miss Gostrey had enquired—“in communication with
Woollett: the consequence of which was, last night, the loudest
possible call for me.”
“Do you mean a letter to bring you home?”
“No—a cable, which I have at this moment in my pocket: a ‘Come back by
the first ship.’”
Strether’s hostess, it might have been made out, just escaped changing
colour. Reflexion arrived but in time and established a provisional
serenity. It was perhaps exactly this that enabled her to say with
duplicity: “And you’re going—?”
“You almost deserve it when you abandon me so.”
She shook her head as if this were not worth taking up. “My absence has
helped you—as I’ve only to look at you to see. It was my calculation,
and I’m justified. You’re not where you were. And the thing,” she
smiled, “was for me not to be there either. You can go of yourself.”
“Oh but I feel to-day,” he comfortably declared, “that I shall want you
yet.”
She took him all in again. “Well, I promise you not again to leave you,
but it will only be to follow you. You’ve got your momentum and can
toddle alone.”
He intelligently accepted it. “Yes—I suppose I can toddle. It’s the
sight of that in fact that has upset Waymarsh. He can bear it—the way I
strike him as going—no longer. That’s only the climax of his original
feeling. He wants me to quit; and he must have written to Woollett that
I’m in peril of perdition.”
“Ah good!” she murmured. “But is it only your supposition?”
“I make it out—it explains.”
“Then he denies?—or you haven’t asked him?”
“I’ve not had time,” Strether said; “I made it out but last night,
putting various things together, and I’ve not been since then face to
face with him.”
She wondered. “Because you’re too disgusted? You can’t trust yourself?”
He settled his glasses on his nose. “Do I look in a great rage?”
“You look divine!”
“There’s nothing,” he went on, “to be angry about. He has done me on
the contrary a service.”
She made it out. “By bringing things to a head?”
“How well you understand!” he almost groaned. “Waymarsh won’t in the
least, at any rate, when I have it out with him, deny or extenuate. He
has acted from the deepest conviction, with the best conscience and
after wakeful nights. He’ll recognise that he’s fully responsible, and
will consider that he has been highly successful; so that any
discussion we may have will bring us quite together again—bridge the
dark stream that has kept us so thoroughly apart. We shall have at
last, in the consequences of his act, something we can definitely talk
about.”
She was silent a little. “How wonderfully you take it! But you’re
always wonderful.”
He had a pause that matched her own; then he had, with an adequate
spirit, a complete admission. “It’s quite true. I’m extremely wonderful
just now. I dare say in fact I’m quite fantastic, and I shouldn’t be at
all surprised if I were mad.”
“Then tell me!” she earnestly pressed. As he, however, for the time
answered nothing, only returning the look with which she watched him,
she presented herself where it was easier to meet her. “What will Mr.
Waymarsh exactly have done?”
“Simply have written a letter. One will have been quite enough. He has
told them I want looking after.”
“And _do_ you?”—she was all interest.
“Immensely. And I shall get it.”
“By which you mean you don’t budge?”
“I don’t budge.”
“You’ve cabled?”
“No—I’ve made Chad do it.”
“That you decline to come?”
“That _he_ declines. We had it out this morning and I brought him
round. He had come in, before I was down, to tell me he was
ready—ready, I mean, to return. And he went off, after ten minutes with
me, to say he wouldn’t.”
Miss Gostrey followed with intensity. “Then you’ve _stopped_ him?”
Strether settled himself afresh in his chair. “I’ve stopped him. That
is for the time. That”—he gave it to her more vividly—“is where I am.”
“I see, I see. But where’s Mr. Newsome? He was ready,” she asked, “to
go?”
“All ready.”
“And sincerely—believing _you’d_ be?”
“Perfectly, I think; so that he was amazed to find the hand I had laid
on him to pull him over suddenly converted into an engine for keeping
him still.”
It was an account of the matter Miss Gostrey could weigh. “Does he
think the conversion sudden?”
“Well,” said Strether, “I’m not altogether sure what he thinks. I’m not
sure of anything that concerns him, except that the more I’ve seen of
him the less I’ve found him what I originally expected. He’s obscure,
and that’s why I’m waiting.”
She wondered. “But for what in particular?”
“For the answer to his cable.”
“And what was his cable?”
“I don’t know,” Strether replied; “it was to be, when he left me,
according to his own taste. I simply said to him: ‘I want to stay, and
the only way for me to do so is for _you_ to.’ That I wanted to stay
seemed to interest him, and he acted on that.”
Miss Gostrey turned it over. “He wants then himself to stay.”
“He half wants it. That is he half wants to go. My original appeal has
to that extent worked in him. Nevertheless,” Strether pursued, “he
won’t go. Not, at least, so long as I’m here.”
“But you can’t,” his companion suggested, “stay here always. I wish you
could.”
“By no means. Still, I want to see him a little further. He’s not in
the least the case I supposed, he’s quite another case. And it’s as
such that he interests me.” It was almost as if for his own
intelligence that, deliberate and lucid, our friend thus expressed the
matter. “I don’t want to give him up.”
Miss Gostrey but desired to help his lucidity. She had however to be
light and tactful. “Up, you mean—a—to his mother?”
“Well, I’m not thinking of his mother now. I’m thinking of the plan of
which I was the mouthpiece, which, as soon as we met, I put before him
as persuasively as I knew how, and which was drawn up, as it were, in
complete ignorance of all that, in this last long period, has been
happening to him. It took no account whatever of the impression I was
here on the spot immediately to begin to receive from him—impressions
of which I feel sure I’m far from having had the last.”
Miss Gostrey had a smile of the most genial criticism. “So your idea
is—more or less—to stay out of curiosity?”
“Call it what you like! I don’t care what it’s called—”
“So long as you do stay? Certainly not then. I call it, all the same,
immense fun,” Maria Gostrey declared; “and to see you work it out will
be one of the sensations of my life. It _is_ clear you can toddle
alone!”
He received this tribute without elation. “I shan’t be alone when the
Pococks have come.”
Her eyebrows went up. “The Pococks are coming?”
“That, I mean, is what will happen—and happen as quickly as possible—in
consequence of Chad’s cable. They’ll simply embark. Sarah will come to
speak for her mother—with an effect different from _my_ muddle.”
Miss Gostrey more gravely wondered. “_She_ then will take him back?”
“Very possibly—and we shall see. She must at any rate have the chance,
and she may be trusted to do all she can.”
“And do you _want_ that?”
“Of course,” said Strether, “I want it. I want to play fair.”
But she had lost for a moment the thread. “If it devolves on the
Pococks why do you stay?”
“Just to see that I _do_ play fair—and a little also, no doubt, that
they do.” Strether was luminous as he had never been. “I came out to
find myself in presence of new facts—facts that have kept striking me
as less and less met by our old reasons. The matter’s perfectly simple.
New reasons—reasons as new as the facts themselves—are wanted; and of
this our friends at Woollett—Chad’s and mine—were at the earliest
moment definitely notified. If any are producible Mrs. Pocock will
produce them; she’ll bring over the whole collection. They’ll be,” he
added with a pensive smile “a part of the ‘fun’ you speak of.”
She was quite in the current now and floating by his side. “It’s
Mamie—so far as I’ve had it from you—who’ll be their great card.” And
then as his contemplative silence wasn’t a denial she significantly
added: “I think I’m sorry for her.”
“I think _I_ am!”—and Strether sprang up, moving about a little as her
eyes followed him. “But it can’t be helped.”
“You mean her coming out can’t be?”
He explained after another turn what he meant. “The only way for her
not to come is for me to go home—as I believe that on the spot I could
prevent it. But the difficulty as to that is that if I do go home—”
“I see, I see”—she had easily understood. “Mr. Newsome will do the
same, and that’s not”—she laughed out now—“to be thought of.”
Strether had no laugh; he had only a quiet comparatively placid look
that might have shown him as proof against ridicule. “Strange, isn’t
it?”
They had, in the matter that so much interested them, come so far as
this without sounding another name—to which however their present
momentary silence was full of a conscious reference. Strether’s
question was a sufficient implication of the weight it had gained with
him during the absence of his hostess; and just for that reason a
single gesture from her could pass for him as a vivid answer. Yet he
was answered still better when she said in a moment: “Will Mr. Newsome
introduce his sister—?”
“To Madame de Vionnet?” Strether spoke the name at last. “I shall be
greatly surprised if he doesn’t.”
She seemed to gaze at the possibility. “You mean you’ve thought of it
and you’re prepared.”
“I’ve thought of it and I’m prepared.”
It was to her visitor now that she applied her consideration. “Bon! You
_are_ magnificent!”
“Well,” he answered after a pause and a little wearily, but still
standing there before her—“well, that’s what, just once in all my dull
days, I think I shall like to have been!”
Two days later he had news from Chad of a communication from Woollett
in response to their determinant telegram, this missive being addressed
to Chad himself and announcing the immediate departure for France of
Sarah and Jim and Mamie. Strether had meanwhile on his own side cabled;
he had but delayed that act till after his visit to Miss Gostrey, an
interview by which, as so often before, he felt his sense of things
cleared up and settled. His message to Mrs. Newsome, in answer to her
own, had consisted of the words: “Judge best to take another month, but
with full appreciation of all re-enforcements.” He had added that he
was writing, but he was of course always writing; it was a practice
that continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, to make him come nearer
than anything else to the consciousness of doing something: so that he
often wondered if he hadn’t really, under his recent stress, acquired
some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of make-believe. Wouldn’t
the pages he still so freely dispatched by the American post have been
worthy of a showy journalist, some master of the great new science of
beating the sense out of words? Wasn’t he writing against time, and
mainly to show he was kind?—since it had become quite his habit not to
like to read himself over. On those lines he could still be liberal,
yet it was at best a sort of whistling in the dark. It was
unmistakeable moreover that the sense of being in the dark now pressed
on him more sharply—creating thereby the need for a louder and livelier
whistle. He whistled long and hard after sending his message; he
whistled again and again in celebration of Chad’s news; there was an
interval of a fortnight in which this exercise helped him. He had no
great notion of what, on the spot, Sarah Pocock would have to say,
though he had indeed confused premonitions; but it shouldn’t be in her
power to say—it shouldn’t be in any one’s anywhere to say—that he was
neglecting her mother. He might have written before more freely, but he
had never written more copiously; and he frankly gave for a reason at
Woollett that he wished to fill the void created there by Sarah’s
departure.
The increase of his darkness, however, and the quickening, as I have
called it, of his tune, resided in the fact that he was hearing almost
nothing. He had for some time been aware that he was hearing less than
before, and he was now clearly following a process by which Mrs.
Newsome’s letters could but logically stop. He hadn’t had a line for
many days, and he needed no proof—though he was, in time, to have
plenty—that she wouldn’t have put pen to paper after receiving the hint
that had determined her telegram. She wouldn’t write till Sarah should
have seen him and reported on him. It was strange, though it might well
be less so than his own behaviour appeared at Woollett. It was at any
rate significant, and what _was_ remarkable was the way his friend’s
nature and manner put on for him, through this very drop of
demonstration, a greater intensity. It struck him really that he had
never so lived with her as during this period of her silence; the
silence was a sacred hush, a finer clearer medium, in which her
idiosyncrasies showed. He walked about with her, sat with her, drove
with her and dined face-to-face with her—a rare treat “in his life,” as
he could perhaps have scarce escaped phrasing it; and if he had never
seen her so soundless he had never, on the other hand, felt her so
highly, so almost austerely, herself: pure and by the vulgar estimate
“cold,” but deep devoted delicate sensitive noble. Her vividness in
these respects became for him, in the special conditions, almost an
obsession; and though the obsession sharpened his pulses, adding really
to the excitement of life, there were hours at which, to be less on the
stretch, he directly sought forgetfulness. He knew it for the queerest
of adventures—a circumstance capable of playing such a part only for
Lambert Strether—that in Paris itself, of all places, he should find
this ghost of the lady of Woollett more importunate than any other
presence.
When he went back to Maria Gostrey it was for the change to something
else. And yet after all the change scarcely operated for he talked to
her of Mrs. Newsome in these days as he had never talked before. He had
hitherto observed in that particular a discretion and a law;
considerations that at present broke down quite as if relations had
altered. They hadn’t _really_ altered, he said to himself, so much as
that came to; for if what had occurred was of course that Mrs. Newsome
had ceased to trust him, there was nothing on the other hand to prove
that he shouldn’t win back her confidence. It was quite his present
theory that he would leave no stone unturned to do so; and in fact if
he now told Maria things about her that he had never told before this
was largely because it kept before him the idea of the honour of such a
woman’s esteem. His relation with Maria as well was, strangely enough,
no longer quite the same; this truth—though not too disconcertingly—had
come up between them on the renewal of their meetings. It was all
contained in what she had then almost immediately said to him; it was
represented by the remark she had needed but ten minutes to make and
that he hadn’t been disposed to gainsay. He could toddle alone, and the
difference that showed was extraordinary. The turn taken by their talk
had promptly confirmed this difference; his larger confidence on the
score of Mrs. Newsome did the rest; and the time seemed already far off
when he had held out his small thirsty cup to the spout of her pail.
Her pail was scarce touched now, and other fountains had flowed for
him; she fell into her place as but one of his tributaries; and there
was a strange sweetness—a melancholy mildness that touched him—in her
acceptance of the altered order.
It marked for himself the flight of time, or at any rate what he was
pleased to think of with irony and pity as the rush of experience; it
having been but the day before yesterday that he sat at her feet and
held on by her garment and was fed by her hand. It was the proportions
that were changed, and the proportions were at all times, he
philosophised, the very conditions of perception, the terms of thought.
It was as if, with her effective little _entresol_ and and her wide
acquaintance, her activities, varieties, promiscuities, the duties and
devotions that took up nine tenths of her time and of which he got,
guardedly, but the side-wind—it was as if she had shrunk to a secondary
element and had consented to the shrinkage with the perfection of tact.
This perfection had never failed her; it had originally been greater
than his prime measure for it; it had kept him quite apart, kept him
out of the shop, as she called her huge general acquaintance, made
their commerce as quiet, as much a thing of the home alone—the opposite
of the shop—as if she had never another customer. She had been
wonderful to him at first, with the memory of her little _entresol_,
the image to which, on most mornings at that time, his eyes directly
opened; but now she mainly figured for him as but part of the bristling
total—though of course always as a person to whom he should never cease
to be indebted. It would never be given to him certainly to inspire a
greater kindness. She had decked him out for others, and he saw at this
point at least nothing she would ever ask for. She only wondered and
questioned and listened, rendering him the homage of a wistful
speculation. She expressed it repeatedly; he was already far beyond
her, and she must prepare herself to lose him. There was but one little
chance for her.
Often as she had said it he met it—for it was a touch he liked—each
time the same way. “My coming to grief?”
“Yes—then I might patch you up.”
“Oh for my real smash, if it takes place, there will be no patching.”
“But you surely don’t mean it will kill you.”
“No—worse. It will make me old.”
“Ah nothing can do that! The wonderful and special thing about you is
that you _are_, at this time of day, youth.” Then she always made,
further, one of those remarks that she had completely ceased to adorn
with hesitations or apologies, and that had, by the same token, in
spite of their extreme straightness, ceased to produce in Strether the
least embarrassment. She made him believe them, and they became thereby
as impersonal as truth itself. “It’s just your particular charm.”
His answer too was always the same. “Of course I’m youth—youth for the
trip to Europe. I began to be young, or at least to get the benefit of
it, the moment I met you at Chester, and that’s what has been taking
place ever since. I never had the benefit at the proper time—which
comes to saying that I never had the thing itself. I’m having the
benefit at this moment; I had it the other day when I said to Chad
‘Wait’; I shall have it still again when Sarah Pocock arrives. It’s a
benefit that would make a poor show for many people; and I don’t know
who else but you and I, frankly, could begin to see in it what I feel.
I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t spend money; I
don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m making up late for what
I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little
way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my
life. They may say what they like—it’s my surrender, it’s my tribute,
to youth. One puts that in where one can—it has to come in somewhere,
if only out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of other
persons. Chad gives me the sense of it, for all his grey hairs, which
merely make it solid in him and safe and serene; and _she_ does the
same, for all her being older than he, for all her marriageable
daughter, her separated husband, her agitated history. Though they’re
young enough, my pair, I don’t say they’re, in the freshest way, their
_own_ absolutely prime adolescence; for that has nothing to do with it.
The point is that they’re mine. Yes, they’re my youth; since somehow at
the right time nothing else ever was. What I meant just now therefore
is that it would all go—go before doing its work—if they were to fail
me.”
On which, just here, Miss Gostrey inveterately questioned. “What do
you, in particular, call its work?”
“Well, to see me through.”
“But through what?”—she liked to get it all out of him.
“Why through this experience.” That was all that would come.
It regularly gave her none the less the last word. “Don’t you remember
how in those first days of our meeting it was _I_ who was to see you
through?”
“Remember? Tenderly, deeply”—he always rose to it. “You’re just doing
your part in letting me maunder to you thus.”
“Ah don’t speak as if my part were small; since whatever else fails
you—”
“_You_ won’t, ever, ever, ever?”—he thus took her up. “Oh I beg your
pardon; you necessarily, you inevitably _will_. Your conditions—that’s
what I mean—won’t allow me anything to do for you.”
“Let alone—I see what you mean—that I’m drearily dreadfully old. I
_am_, but there’s a service—possible for you to render—that I know, all
the same, I shall think of.”
“And what will it be?”
This, in fine, however, she would never tell him. “You shall hear only
if your smash takes place. As that’s really out of the question, I
won’t expose myself”—a point at which, for reasons of his own, Strether
ceased to press.
He came round, for publicity—it was the easiest thing—to the idea that
his smash _was_ out of the question, and this rendered idle the
discussion of what might follow it. He attached an added importance, as
the days elapsed, to the arrival of the Pococks; he had even a shameful
sense of waiting for it insincerely and incorrectly. He accused himself
of making believe to his own mind that Sarah’s presence, her
impression, her judgement would simplify and harmonise, he accused
himself of being so afraid of what they _might_ do that he sought
refuge, to beg the whole question, in a vain fury. He had abundantly
seen at home what they were in the habit of doing, and he had not at
present the smallest ground. His clearest vision was when he made out
that what he most desired was an account more full and free of Mrs.
Newsome’s state of mind than any he felt he could now expect from
herself; that calculation at least went hand in hand with the sharp
consciousness of wishing to prove to himself that he was not afraid to
look his behaviour in the face. If he was by an inexorable logic to pay
for it he was literally impatient to know the cost, and he held himself
ready to pay in instalments. The first instalment would be precisely
this entertainment of Sarah; as a consequence of which moreover, he
should know vastly better how he stood.