I
Strether rambled alone during these few days, the effect of the
incident of the previous week having been to simplify in a marked
fashion his mixed relations with Waymarsh. Nothing had passed between
them in reference to Mrs. Newsome’s summons but that our friend had
mentioned to his own the departure of the deputation actually at
sea—giving him thus an opportunity to confess to the occult
intervention he imputed to him. Waymarsh however in the event confessed
to nothing; and though this falsified in some degree Strether’s
forecast the latter amusedly saw in it the same depth of good
conscience out of which the dear man’s impertinence had originally
sprung. He was patient with the dear man now and delighted to observe
how unmistakeably he had put on flesh; he felt his own holiday so
successfully large and free that he was full of allowances and
charities in respect to those cabined and confined: his instinct toward
a spirit so strapped down as Waymarsh’s was to walk round it on tiptoe
for fear of waking it up to a sense of losses by this time
irretrievable. It was all very funny he knew, and but the difference,
as he often said to himself, of tweedledum and tweedledee—an
emancipation so purely comparative that it was like the advance of the
door-mat on the scraper; yet the present crisis was happily to profit
by it and the pilgrim from Milrose to know himself more than ever in
the right.
Strether felt that when he heard of the approach of the Pococks the
impulse of pity quite sprang up in him beside the impulse of triumph.
That was exactly why Waymarsh had looked at him with eyes in which the
heat of justice was measured and shaded. He had looked very hard, as if
affectionately sorry for the friend—the friend of fifty-five—whose
frivolity had had thus to be recorded; becoming, however, but obscurely
sententious and leaving his companion to formulate a charge. It was in
this general attitude that he had of late altogether taken refuge; with
the drop of discussion they were solemnly sadly superficial; Strether
recognised in him the mere portentous rumination to which Miss Barrace
had so good-humouredly described herself as assigning a corner of her
salon. It was quite as if he knew his surreptitious step had been
divined, and it was also as if he missed the chance to explain the
purity of his motive; but this privation of relief should be precisely
his small penance: it was not amiss for Strether that he should find
himself to that degree uneasy. If he had been challenged or accused,
rebuked for meddling or otherwise pulled up, he would probably have
shown, on his own system, all the height of his consistency, all the
depth of his good faith. Explicit resentment of his course would have
made him take the floor, and the thump of his fist on the table would
have affirmed him as consciously incorruptible. Had what now really
prevailed with Strether been but a dread of that thump—a dread of
wincing a little painfully at what it might invidiously demonstrate?
However this might be, at any rate, one of the marks of the crisis was
a visible, a studied lapse, in Waymarsh, of betrayed concern. As if to
make up to his comrade for the stroke by which he had played providence
he now conspicuously ignored his movements, withdrew himself from the
pretension to share them, stiffened up his sensibility to neglect, and,
clasping his large empty hands and swinging his large restless foot,
clearly looked to another quarter for justice.
This made for independence on Strether’s part, and he had in truth at
no moment of his stay been so free to go and come. The early summer
brushed the picture over and blurred everything but the near; it made a
vast warm fragrant medium in which the elements floated together on the
best of terms, in which rewards were immediate and reckonings
postponed. Chad was out of town again, for the first time since his
visitor’s first view of him; he had explained this necessity—without
detail, yet also without embarrassment, the circumstance was one of
those which, in the young man’s life, testified to the variety of his
ties. Strether wasn’t otherwise concerned with it than for its so
testifying—a pleasant multitudinous image in which he took comfort. He
took comfort, by the same stroke, in the swing of Chad’s pendulum back
from that other swing, the sharp jerk towards Woollett, so stayed by
his own hand. He had the entertainment of thinking that if he had for
that moment stopped the clock it was to promote the next minute this
still livelier motion. He himself did what he hadn’t done before; he
took two or three times whole days off—irrespective of others, of two
or three taken with Miss Gostrey, two or three taken with little
Bilham: he went to Chartres and cultivated, before the front of the
cathedral, a general easy beatitude; he went to Fontainebleau and
imagined himself on the way to Italy; he went to Rouen with a little
handbag and inordinately spent the night.
One afternoon he did something quite different; finding himself in the
neighbourhood of a fine old house across the river, he passed under the
great arch of its doorway and asked at the porter’s lodge for Madame de
Vionnet. He had already hovered more than once about that possibility,
been aware of it, in the course of ostensible strolls, as lurking but
round the corner. Only it had perversely happened, after his morning at
Notre Dame, that his consistency, as he considered and intended it, had
come back to him; whereby he had reflected that the encounter in
question had been none of his making; clinging again intensely to the
strength of his position, which was precisely that there was nothing in
it for himself. From the moment he actively pursued the charming
associate of his adventure, from that moment his position weakened, for
he was then acting in an interested way. It was only within a few days
that he had fixed himself a limit: he promised himself his consistency
should end with Sarah’s arrival. It was arguing correctly to feel the
title to a free hand conferred on him by this event. If he wasn’t to be
let alone he should be merely a dupe to act with delicacy. If he wasn’t
to be trusted he could at least take his ease. If he was to be placed
under control he gained leave to try what his position _might_
agreeably give him. An ideal rigour would perhaps postpone the trial
till after the Pococks had shown their spirit; and it was to an ideal
rigour that he had quite promised himself to conform.
Suddenly, however, on this particular day, he felt a particular fear
under which everything collapsed. He knew abruptly that he was afraid
of himself—and yet not in relation to the effect on his sensibilities
of another hour of Madame de Vionnet. What he dreaded was the effect of
a single hour of Sarah Pocock, as to whom he was visited, in troubled
nights, with fantastic waking dreams. She loomed at him larger than
life; she increased in volume as she drew nearer; she so met his eyes
that, his imagination taking, after the first step, all, and more than
all, the strides, he already felt her come down on him, already burned,
under her reprobation, with the blush of guilt, already consented, by
way of penance, to the instant forfeiture of everything. He saw
himself, under her direction, recommitted to Woollett as juvenile
offenders are committed to reformatories. It wasn’t of course that
Woollett was really a place of discipline; but he knew in advance that
Sarah’s salon at the hotel would be. His danger, at any rate, in such
moods of alarm, was some concession, on this ground, that would involve
a sharp rupture with the actual; therefore if he waited to take leave
of that actual he might wholly miss his chance. It was represented with
supreme vividness by Madame de Vionnet, and that is why, in a word, he
waited no longer. He had seen in a flash that he must anticipate Mrs.
Pocock. He was accordingly much disappointed on now learning from the
portress that the lady of his quest was not in Paris. She had gone for
some days to the country. There was nothing in this accident but what
was natural; yet it produced for poor Strether a drop of all
confidence. It was suddenly as if he should never see her again, and as
if moreover he had brought it on himself by not having been quite kind
to her.
It was the advantage of his having let his fancy lose itself for a
little in the gloom that, as by reaction, the prospect began really to
brighten from the moment the deputation from Woollett alighted on the
platform of the station. They had come straight from Havre, having
sailed from New York to that port, and having also, thanks to a happy
voyage, made land with a promptitude that left Chad Newsome, who had
meant to meet them at the dock, belated. He had received their
telegram, with the announcement of their immediate further advance,
just as he was taking the train for Havre, so that nothing had remained
for him but to await them in Paris. He hastily picked up Strether, at
the hotel, for this purpose, and he even, with easy pleasantry,
suggested the attendance of Waymarsh as well—Waymarsh, at the moment
his cab rattled up, being engaged, under Strether’s contemplative
range, in a grave perambulation of the familiar court. Waymarsh had
learned from his companion, who had already had a note, delivered by
hand, from Chad, that the Pococks were due, and had ambiguously,
though, as always, impressively, glowered at him over the circumstance;
carrying himself in a manner in which Strether was now expert enough to
recognise his uncertainty, in the premises, as to the best tone. The
only tone he aimed at with confidence was a full tone—which was
necessarily difficult in the absence of a full knowledge. The Pococks
were a quantity as yet unmeasured, and, as he had practically brought
them over, so this witness had to that extent exposed himself. He
wanted to feel right about it, but could only, at the best, for the
time, feel vague. “I shall look to you, you know, immensely,” our
friend had said, “to help me with them,” and he had been quite
conscious of the effect of the remark, and of others of the same sort,
on his comrade’s sombre sensibility. He had insisted on the fact that
Waymarsh would quite like Mrs. Pocock—one could be certain he would: he
would be with her about everything, and she would also be with _him_,
and Miss Barrace’s nose, in short, would find itself out of joint.
Strether had woven this web of cheerfulness while they waited in the
court for Chad; he had sat smoking cigarettes to keep himself quiet
while, caged and leonine, his fellow traveller paced and turned before
him. Chad Newsome was doubtless to be struck, when he arrived, with the
sharpness of their opposition at this particular hour; he was to
remember, as a part of it, how Waymarsh came with him and with Strether
to the street and stood there with a face half-wistful and half-rueful.
They talked of him, the two others, as they drove, and Strether put
Chad in possession of much of his own strained sense of things. He had
already, a few days before, named to him the wire he was convinced
their friend had pulled—a confidence that had made on the young man’s
part quite hugely for curiosity and diversion. The action of the
matter, moreover, Strether could see, was to penetrate; he saw that is,
how Chad judged a system of influence in which Waymarsh had served as a
determinant—an impression just now quickened again; with the whole
bearing of such a fact on the youth’s view of his relatives. As it came
up between them that they might now take their friend for a feature of
the control of these latter now sought to be exerted from Woollett,
Strether felt indeed how it would be stamped all over him, half an hour
later for Sarah Pocock’s eyes, that he was as much on Chad’s “side” as
Waymarsh had probably described him. He was letting himself at present,
go; there was no denying it; it might be desperation, it might be
confidence; he should offer himself to the arriving travellers
bristling with all the lucidity he had cultivated.
He repeated to Chad what he had been saying in the court to Waymarsh;
how there was no doubt whatever that his sister would find the latter a
kindred spirit, no doubt of the alliance, based on an exchange of
views, that the pair would successfully strike up. They would become as
thick as thieves—which moreover was but a development of what Strether
remembered to have said in one of his first discussions with his mate,
struck as he had then already been with the elements of affinity
between that personage and Mrs. Newsome herself. “I told him, one day,
when he had questioned me on your mother, that she was a person who,
when he should know her, would rouse in him, I was sure, a special
enthusiasm; and that hangs together with the conviction we now
feel—this certitude that Mrs. Pocock will take him into her boat. For
it’s your mother’s own boat that she’s pulling.”
“Ah,” said Chad, “Mother’s worth fifty of Sally!”
“A thousand; but when you presently meet her, all the same you’ll be
meeting your mother’s representative—just as I shall. I feel like the
outgoing ambassador,” said Strether, “doing honour to his appointed
successor.” A moment after speaking as he had just done he felt he had
inadvertently rather cheapened Mrs. Newsome to her son; an impression
audibly reflected, as at first seen, in Chad’s prompt protest. He had
recently rather failed of apprehension of the young man’s attitude and
temper—remaining principally conscious of how little worry, at the
worst, he wasted, and he studied him at this critical hour with renewed
interest. Chad had done exactly what he had promised him a fortnight
previous—had accepted without another question his plea for delay. He
was waiting cheerfully and handsomely, but also inscrutably and with a
slight increase perhaps of the hardness originally involved in his
acquired high polish. He was neither excited nor depressed; was easy
and acute and deliberate—unhurried unflurried unworried, only at most a
little less amused than usual. Strether felt him more than ever a
justification of the extraordinary process of which his own absurd
spirit had been the arena; he knew as their cab rolled along, knew as
he hadn’t even yet known, that nothing else than what Chad had done and
had been would have led to his present showing. They had made him,
these things, what he was, and the business hadn’t been easy; it had
taken time and trouble, it had cost, above all, a price. The result at
any rate was now to be offered to Sally; which Strether, so far as that
was concerned, was glad to be there to witness. Would she in the least
make it out or take it in, the result, or would she in the least care
for it if she did? He scratched his chin as he asked himself by what
name, when challenged—as he was sure he should be—he could call it for
her. Oh those were determinations she must herself arrive at; since she
wanted so much to see, let her see then and welcome. She had come out
in the pride of her competence, yet it hummed in Strether’s inner sense
that she practically wouldn’t see.
That this was moreover what Chad shrewdly suspected was clear from a
word that next dropped from him. “They’re children; they play at
life!”—and the exclamation was significant and reassuring. It implied
that he hadn’t then, for his companion’s sensibility, appeared to give
Mrs. Newsome away; and it facilitated our friend’s presently asking him
if it were his idea that Mrs. Pocock and Madame de Vionnet should
become acquainted. Strether was still more sharply struck, hereupon,
with Chad’s lucidity. “Why, isn’t that exactly—to get a sight of the
company I keep—what she has come out for?”
“Yes—I’m afraid it is,” Strether unguardedly replied.
Chad’s quick rejoinder lighted his precipitation. “Why do you say
you’re afraid?”
“Well, because I feel a certain responsibility. It’s my testimony, I
imagine, that will have been at the bottom of Mrs. Pocock’s curiosity.
My letters, as I’ve supposed you to understand from the beginning, have
spoken freely. I’ve certainly said my little say about Madame de
Vionnet.”
All that, for Chad, was beautifully obvious. “Yes, but you’ve only
spoken handsomely.”
“Never more handsomely of any woman. But it’s just that tone—!”
“That tone,” said Chad, “that has fetched her? I dare say; but I’ve no
quarrel with you about it. And no more has Madame de Vionnet. Don’t you
know by this time how she likes you?”
“Oh!”—and Strether had, with his groan, a real pang of melancholy. “For
all I’ve done for her!”
“Ah you’ve done a great deal.”
Chad’s urbanity fairly shamed him, and he was at this moment absolutely
impatient to see the face Sarah Pocock would present to a sort of
thing, as he synthetically phrased it to himself, with no adequate
forecast of which, despite his admonitions, she would certainly arrive.
“I’ve done _this!_”
“Well, this is all right. She likes,” Chad comfortably remarked, “to be
liked.”
It gave his companion a moment’s thought. “And she’s sure Mrs. Pocock
_will_—?”
“No, I say that for you. She likes your liking her; it’s so much, as it
were,” Chad laughed, “to the good. However, she doesn’t despair of
Sarah either, and is prepared, on her own side, to go all lengths.”
“In the way of appreciation?”
“Yes, and of everything else. In the way of general amiability,
hospitality and welcome. She’s under arms,” Chad laughed again; “she’s
prepared.”
Strether took it in; then as if an echo of Miss Barrace were in the
air: “She’s wonderful.”
“You don’t begin to know _how_ wonderful!”
There was a depth in it, to Strether’s ear, of confirmed luxury—almost
a kind of unconscious insolence of proprietorship; but the effect of
the glimpse was not at this moment to foster speculation: there was
something so conclusive in so much graceful and generous assurance. It
was in fact a fresh evocation; and the evocation had before many
minutes another consequence. “Well, I shall see her oftener now. I
shall see her as much as I like—by your leave; which is what I hitherto
haven’t done.”
“It has been,” said Chad, but without reproach, “only your own fault. I
tried to bring you together, and _she_, my dear fellow—I never saw her
more charming to any man. But you’ve got your extraordinary ideas.”
“Well, I _did_ have,” Strether murmured, while he felt both how they
had possessed him and how they had now lost their authority. He
couldn’t have traced the sequence to the end, but it was all because of
Mrs. Pocock. Mrs. Pocock might be because of Mrs. Newsome, but that was
still to be proved. What came over him was the sense of having stupidly
failed to profit where profit would have been precious. It had been
open to him to see so much more of her, and he had but let the good
days pass. Fierce in him almost was the resolve to lose no more of
them, and he whimsically reflected, while at Chad’s side he drew nearer
to his destination, that it was after all Sarah who would have
quickened his chance. What her visit of inquisition might achieve in
other directions was as yet all obscure—only not obscure that it would
do supremely much to bring two earnest persons together. He had but to
listen to Chad at this moment to feel it; for Chad was in the act of
remarking to him that they of course both counted on him—he himself and
the other earnest person—for cheer and support. It was brave to
Strether to hear him talk as if the line of wisdom they had struck out
was to make things ravishing to the Pococks. No, if Madame de Vionnet
compassed _that_, compassed the ravishment of the Pococks, Madame de
Vionnet would be prodigious. It would be a beautiful plan if it
succeeded, and it all came to the question of Sarah’s being really
bribeable. The precedent of his own case helped Strether perhaps but
little to consider she might prove so; it being distinct that her
character would rather make for every possible difference. This idea of
his own bribeability set him apart for himself; with the further mark
in fact that his case was absolutely proved. He liked always, where
Lambert Strether was concerned, to know the worst, and what he now
seemed to know was not only that he was bribeable, but that he had been
effectually bribed. The only difficulty was that he couldn’t quite have
said with what. It was as if he had sold himself, but hadn’t somehow
got the cash. That, however, was what, characteristically, _would_
happen to him. It would naturally be his kind of traffic. While he
thought of these things he reminded Chad of the truth they mustn’t lose
sight of—the truth that, with all deference to her susceptibility to
new interests, Sarah would have come out with a high firm definite
purpose. “She hasn’t come out, you know, to be bamboozled. We may all
be ravishing—nothing perhaps can be more easy for us; but she hasn’t
come out to be ravished. She has come out just simply to take you
home.”
“Oh well, with _her_ I’ll go,” said Chad good-humouredly. “I suppose
you’ll allow _that_.” And then as for a minute Strether said nothing:
“Or is your idea that when I’ve seen her I shan’t want to go?” As this
question, however, again left his friend silent he presently went on:
“My own idea at any rate is that they shall have while they’re here the
best sort of time.”
It was at this that Strether spoke. “Ah there you are! I think if you
really wanted to go—!”
“Well?” said Chad to bring it out.
“Well, you wouldn’t trouble about our good time. You wouldn’t care what
sort of a time we have.”
Chad could always take in the easiest way in the world any ingenious
suggestion. “I see. But can I help it? I’m too decent.”
“Yes, you’re too decent!” Strether heavily sighed. And he felt for the
moment as if it were the preposterous end of his mission.
It ministered for the time to this temporary effect that Chad made no
rejoinder. But he spoke again as they came in sight of the station. “Do
you mean to introduce her to Miss Gostrey?”
As to this Strether was ready. “No.”
“But haven’t you told me they know about her?”
“I think I’ve told you your mother knows.”
“And won’t she have told Sally?”
“That’s one of the things I want to see.”
“And if you find she _has_—?”
“Will I then, you mean, bring them together?”
“Yes,” said Chad with his pleasant promptness: “to show her there’s
nothing in it.”
Strether hesitated. “I don’t know that I care very much what she may
think there’s in it.”
“Not if it represents what Mother thinks?”
“Ah what _does_ your mother think?” There was in this some sound of
bewilderment.
But they were just driving up, and help, of a sort, might after all be
quite at hand. “Isn’t that, my dear man, what we’re both just going to
make out?”