Strether quitted the station half an hour later in different company.
Chad had taken charge, for the journey to the hotel, of Sarah, Mamie,
the maid and the luggage, all spaciously installed and conveyed; and it
was only after the four had rolled away that his companion got into a
cab with Jim. A strange new feeling had come over Strether, in
consequence of which his spirits had risen; it was as if what had
occurred on the alighting of his critics had been something other than
his fear, though his fear had yet not been of an instant scene of
violence. His impression had been nothing but what was inevitable—he
said that to himself; yet relief and reassurance had softly dropped
upon him. Nothing could be so odd as to be indebted for these things to
the look of faces and the sound of voices that had been with him to
satiety, as he might have said, for years; but he now knew, all the
same, how uneasy he had felt; that was brought home to him by his
present sense of a respite. It had come moreover in the flash of an
eye, it had come in the smile with which Sarah, whom, at the window of
her compartment, they had effusively greeted from the platform, rustled
down to them a moment later, fresh and handsome from her cool June
progress through the charming land. It was only a sign, but enough: she
was going to be gracious and unallusive, she was going to play the
larger game—which was still more apparent, after she had emerged from
Chad’s arms, in her direct greeting to the valued friend of her family.
Strether _was_ then as much as ever the valued friend of her family, it
was something he could at all events go on with; and the manner of his
response to it expressed even for himself how little he had enjoyed the
prospect of ceasing to figure in that likeness. He had always seen
Sarah gracious—had in fact rarely seen her shy or dry, her marked
thin-lipped smile, intense without brightness and as prompt to act as
the scrape of a safety-match; the protrusion of her rather remarkably
long chin, which in her case represented invitation and urbanity, and
not, as in most others, pugnacity and defiance; the penetration of her
voice to a distance, the general encouragement and approval of her
manner, were all elements with which intercourse had made him familiar,
but which he noted today almost as if she had been a new acquaintance.
This first glimpse of her had given a brief but vivid accent to her
resemblance to her mother; he could have taken her for Mrs. Newsome
while she met his eyes as the train rolled into the station. It was an
impression that quickly dropped; Mrs. Newsome was much handsomer, and
while Sarah inclined to the massive her mother had, at an age, still
the girdle of a maid; also the latter’s chin was rather short, than
long, and her smile, by good fortune, much more, oh ever so much more,
mercifully vague. Strether had seen Mrs. Newsome reserved; he had
literally heard her silent, though he had never known her unpleasant.
It was the case with Mrs. Pocock that he had known _her_ unpleasant,
even though he had never known her not affable. She had forms of
affability that were in a high degree assertive; nothing for instance
had ever been more striking than that she was affable to Jim.
What had told in any case at the window of the train was her high clear
forehead, that forehead which her friends, for some reason, always
thought of as a “brow”; the long reach of her eyes—it came out at this
juncture in such a manner as to remind him, oddly enough, also of that
of Waymarsh’s; and the unusual gloss of her dark hair, dressed and
hatted, after her mother’s refined example, with such an avoidance of
extremes that it was always spoken of at Woollett as “their own.”
Though this analogy dropped as soon as she was on the platform it had
lasted long enough to make him feel all the advantage, as it were, of
his relief. The woman at home, the woman to whom he was attached, was
before him just long enough to give him again the measure of the
wretchedness, in fact really of the shame, of their having to recognise
the formation, between them, of a “split.” He had taken this measure in
solitude and meditation: but the catastrophe, as Sarah steamed up,
looked for its seconds unprecedentedly dreadful—or proved, more
exactly, altogether unthinkable; so that his finding something free and
familiar to respond to brought with it an instant renewal of his
loyalty. He had suddenly sounded the whole depth, had gasped at what he
might have lost.
Well, he could now, for the quarter of an hour of their detention hover
about the travellers as soothingly as if their direct message to him
was that he had lost nothing. He wasn’t going to have Sarah write to
her mother that night that he was in any way altered or strange. There
had been times enough for a month when it had seemed to him that he was
strange, that he was altered, in every way; but that was a matter for
himself; he knew at least whose business it was _not_; it was not at
all events such a circumstance as Sarah’s own unaided lights would help
her to. Even if she had come out to flash those lights more than yet
appeared she wouldn’t make much headway against mere pleasantness. He
counted on being able to be merely pleasant to the end, and if only
from incapacity moreover to formulate anything different. He couldn’t
even formulate to himself his being changed and queer; it had taken
place, the process, somewhere deep down; Maria Gostrey had caught
glimpses of it; but how was he to fish it up, even if he desired, for
Mrs. Pocock? This was then the spirit in which he hovered, and with the
easier throb in it much indebted furthermore to the impression of high
and established adequacy as a pretty girl promptly produced in him by
Mamie. He had wondered vaguely—turning over many things in the fidget
of his thoughts—if Mamie _were_ as pretty as Woollett published her; as
to which issue seeing her now again was to be so swept away by
Woollett’s opinion that this consequence really let loose for the
imagination an avalanche of others. There were positively five minutes
in which the last word seemed of necessity to abide with a Woollett
represented by a Mamie. This was the sort of truth the place itself
would feel; it would send her forth in confidence; it would point to
her with triumph; it would take its stand on her with assurance; it
would be conscious of no requirements she didn’t meet, of no question
she couldn’t answer.
Well, it was right, Strether slipped smoothly enough into the
cheerfulness of saying: granted that a community _might_ be best
represented by a young lady of twenty-two, Mamie perfectly played the
part, played it as if she were used to it, and looked and spoke and
dressed the character. He wondered if she mightn’t, in the high light
of Paris, a cool full studio-light, becoming yet treacherous, show as
too conscious of these matters; but the next moment he felt satisfied
that her consciousness was after all empty for its size, rather too
simple than too mixed, and that the kind way with her would be not to
take many things out of it, but to put as many as possible in. She was
robust and conveniently tall; just a trifle too bloodlessly fair
perhaps, but with a pleasant public familiar radiance that affirmed her
vitality. She might have been “receiving” for Woollett, wherever she
found herself, and there was something in her manner, her tone, her
motion, her pretty blue eyes, her pretty perfect teeth and her very
small, too small, nose, that immediately placed her, to the fancy,
between the windows of a hot bright room in which voices were high—up
at that end to which people were brought to be “presented.” They were
there to congratulate, these images, and Strether’s renewed vision, on
this hint, completed the idea. What Mamie was like was the happy bride,
the bride after the church and just before going away. She wasn’t the
mere maiden, and yet was only as much married as that quantity came to.
She was in the brilliant acclaimed festal stage. Well, might it last
her long!
Strether rejoiced in these things for Chad, who was all genial
attention to the needs of his friends, besides having arranged that his
servant should reinforce him; the ladies were certainly pleasant to
see, and Mamie would be at any time and anywhere pleasant to exhibit.
She would look extraordinarily like his young wife—the wife of a
honeymoon, should he go about with her; but that was his own affair—or
perhaps it was hers; it was at any rate something she couldn’t help.
Strether remembered how he had seen him come up with Jeanne de Vionnet
in Gloriani’s garden, and the fancy he had had about that—the fancy
obscured now, thickly overlaid with others; the recollection was during
these minutes his only note of trouble. He had often, in spite of
himself, wondered if Chad but too probably were not with Jeanne the
object of a still and shaded flame. It was on the cards that the child
_might_ be tremulously in love, and this conviction now flickered up
not a bit the less for his disliking to think of it, for its being, in
a complicated situation, a complication the more, and for something
indescribable in Mamie, something at all events straightway lent her by
his own mind, something that gave her value, gave her intensity and
purpose, as the symbol of an opposition. Little Jeanne wasn’t really at
all in question—how _could_ she be?—yet from the moment Miss Pocock had
shaken her skirts on the platform, touched up the immense bows of her
hat and settled properly over her shoulder the strap of her
morocco-and-gilt travelling-satchel, from that moment little Jeanne was
opposed.
It was in the cab with Jim that impressions really crowded on Strether,
giving him the strangest sense of length of absence from people among
whom he had lived for years. Having them thus come out to him was as if
he had returned to find them: and the droll promptitude of Jim’s mental
reaction threw his own initiation far back into the past. Whoever might
or mightn’t be suited by what was going on among them, Jim, for one,
would certainly be: his instant recognition—frank and whimsical—of what
the affair was for _him_ gave Strether a glow of pleasure. “I say, you
know, this _is_ about my shape, and if it hadn’t been for _you_—!” so
he broke out as the charming streets met his healthy appetite; and he
wound up, after an expressive nudge, with a clap of his companion’s
knee and an “Oh you, you—you _are_ doing it!” that was charged with
rich meaning. Strether felt in it the intention of homage, but, with a
curiosity otherwise occupied, postponed taking it up. What he was
asking himself for the time was how Sarah Pocock, in the opportunity
already given her, had judged her brother—from whom he himself, as they
finally, at the station, separated for their different conveyances, had
had a look into which he could read more than one message. However
Sarah was judging her brother, Chad’s conclusion about his sister, and
about her husband and her husband’s sister, was at the least on the way
not to fail of confidence. Strether felt the confidence, and that, as
the look between them was an exchange, what he himself gave back was
relatively vague. This comparison of notes however could wait;
everything struck him as depending on the effect produced by Chad.
Neither Sarah nor Mamie had in any way, at the station—where they had
had after all ample time—broken out about it; which, to make up for
this, was what our friend had expected of Jim as soon as they should
find themselves together.
It was queer to him that he had that noiseless brush with Chad; an
ironic intelligence with this youth on the subject of his relatives, an
intelligence carried on under their nose and, as might be said, at
their expense—such a matter marked again for him strongly the number of
stages he had come; albeit that if the number seemed great the time
taken for the final one was but the turn of a hand. He had before this
had many moments of wondering if he himself weren’t perhaps changed
even as Chad was changed. Only what in Chad was conspicuous
improvement—well, he had no name ready for the working, in his own
organism, of his own more timid dose. He should have to see first what
this action would amount to. And for his occult passage with the young
man, after all, the directness of it had no greater oddity than the
fact that the young man’s way with the three travellers should have
been so happy a manifestation. Strether liked him for it, on the spot,
as he hadn’t yet liked him; it affected him while it lasted as he might
have been affected by some light pleasant perfect work of art: to that
degree that he wondered if they were really worthy of it, took it in
and did it justice; to that degree that it would have been scarce a
miracle if, there in the luggage-room, while they waited for their
things, Sarah had pulled his sleeve and drawn him aside. “You’re right;
we haven’t quite known what you mean, Mother and I, but now we see.
Chad’s magnificent; what can one want more? If _this_ is the kind of
thing—!” On which they might, as it were, have embraced and begun to
work together.
Ah how much, as it was, for all her bridling brightness—which was
merely general and noticed nothing—_would_ they work together? Strether
knew he was unreasonable; he set it down to his being nervous: people
couldn’t notice everything and speak of everything in a quarter of an
hour. Possibly, no doubt, also, he made too much of Chad’s display.
Yet, none the less, when, at the end of five minutes, in the cab, Jim
Pocock had said nothing either—hadn’t said, that is, what Strether
wanted, though he had said much else—it all suddenly bounced back to
their being either stupid or wilful. It was more probably on the whole
the former; so that that would be the drawback of the bridling
brightness. Yes, they would bridle and be bright; they would make the
best of what was before them, but their observation would fail; it
would be beyond them; they simply wouldn’t understand. Of what use
would it be then that they had come?—if they weren’t to be intelligent
up to _that_ point: unless indeed he himself were utterly deluded and
extravagant? Was he, on this question of Chad’s improvement, fantastic
and away from the truth? Did he live in a false world, a world that had
grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation—in the
face now of Jim’s silence in particular—but the alarm of the vain thing
menaced by the touch of the real? Was this contribution of the real
possibly the mission of the Pococks?—had they come to make the work of
observation, as _he_ had practised observation, crack and crumble, and
to reduce Chad to the plain terms in which honest minds could deal with
him? Had they come in short to be sane where Strether was destined to
feel that he himself had only been silly?
He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long when
once he had reflected that he would have been silly, in this case, with
Maria Gostrey and little Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet and little
Jeanne, with Lambert Strether, in fine, and above all with Chad Newsome
himself. Wouldn’t it be found to have made more for reality to be silly
with these persons than sane with Sarah and Jim? Jim in fact, he
presently made up his mind, was individually out of it; Jim didn’t
care; Jim hadn’t come out either for Chad or for him; Jim in short left
the moral side to Sally and indeed simply availed himself now, for the
sense of recreation, of the fact that he left almost everything to
Sally. He was nothing compared to Sally, and not so much by reason of
Sally’s temper and will as by that of her more developed type and
greater acquaintance with the world. He quite frankly and serenely
confessed, as he sat there with Strether, that he felt his type hang
far in the rear of his wife’s and still further, if possible, in the
rear of his sister’s. Their types, he well knew, were recognised and
acclaimed; whereas the most a leading Woollett business-man could hope
to achieve socially, and for that matter industrially, was a certain
freedom to play into this general glamour.
The impression he made on our friend was another of the things that
marked our friend’s road. It was a strange impression, especially as so
soon produced; Strether had received it, he judged, all in the twenty
minutes; it struck him at least as but in a minor degree the work of
the long Woollett years. Pocock was normally and consentingly though
not quite wittingly out of the question. It was despite his being
normal; it was despite his being cheerful; it was despite his being a
leading Woollett business-man; and the determination of his fate left
him thus perfectly usual—as everything else about it was clearly, to
his sense, not less so. He seemed to say that there was a whole side of
life on which the perfectly usual _was_ for leading Woollett
business-men to be out of the question. He made no more of it than
that, and Strether, so far as Jim was concerned, desired to make no
more. Only Strether’s imagination, as always, worked, and he asked
himself if this side of life were not somehow connected, for those who
figured on it with the fact of marriage. Would _his_ relation to it,
had he married ten years before, have become now the same as Pocock’s?
Might it even become the same should he marry in a few months? Should
he ever know himself as much out of the question for Mrs. Newsome as
Jim knew himself—in a dim way—for Mrs. Jim?
To turn his eyes in that direction was to be personally reassured; he
was different from Pocock; he had affirmed himself differently and was
held after all in higher esteem. What none the less came home to him,
however, at this hour, was that the society over there, that of which
Sarah and Mamie—and, in a more eminent way, Mrs. Newsome herself—were
specimens, was essentially a society of women, and that poor Jim wasn’t
in it. He himself Lambert Strether, _was_ as yet in some degree—which
was an odd situation for a man; but it kept coming back to him in a
whimsical way that he should perhaps find his marriage had cost him his
place. This occasion indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a
time of sensible exclusion for Jim, who was in a state of manifest
response to the charm of his adventure. Small and fat and constantly
facetious, straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he would have been
practically indistinguishable hadn’t his constant preference for
light-grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very little
stories, done what it could for his identity. There were signs in him,
though none of them plaintive, of always paying for others; and the
principal one perhaps was just this failure of type. It was with this
that he paid, rather than with fatigue or waste; and also doubtless a
little with the effort of humour—never irrelevant to the conditions, to
the relations, with which he was acquainted.
He gurgled his joy as they rolled through the happy streets; he
declared that his trip was a regular windfall, and that he wasn’t
there, he was eager to remark, to hang back from anything: he didn’t
know quite what Sally had come for, but _he_ had come for a good time.
Strether indulged him even while wondering if what Sally wanted her
brother to go back for was to become like her husband. He trusted that
a good time was to be, out and out, the programme for all of them; and
he assented liberally to Jim’s proposal that, disencumbered and
irresponsible—his things were in the omnibus with those of the
others—they should take a further turn round before going to the hotel.
It wasn’t for _him_ to tackle Chad—it was Sally’s job; and as it would
be like her, he felt, to open fire on the spot, it wouldn’t be amiss of
them to hold off and give her time. Strether, on his side, only asked
to give her time; so he jogged with his companion along boulevards and
avenues, trying to extract from meagre material some forecast of his
catastrophe. He was quick enough to see that Jim Pocock declined
judgement, had hovered quite round the outer edge of discussion and
anxiety, leaving all analysis of their question to the ladies alone and
now only feeling his way toward some small droll cynicism. It broke out
afresh, the cynicism—it had already shown a flicker—in a but slightly
deferred: “Well, hanged if I would if _I_ were he!”
“You mean you wouldn’t in Chad’s place—?”
“Give up this to go back and boss the advertising!” Poor Jim, with his
arms folded and his little legs out in the open fiacre, drank in the
sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of their vista
to the other. “Why I want to come right out and live here myself. And I
want to live while I _am_ here too. I feel with _you_—oh you’ve been
grand, old man, and I’ve twigged—that it ain’t right to worry Chad. _I_
don’t mean to persecute him; I couldn’t in conscience. It’s thanks to
you at any rate that I’m here, and I’m sure I’m much obliged. You’re a
lovely pair.”
There were things in this speech that Strether let pass for the time.
“Don’t you then think it important the advertising should be thoroughly
taken in hand? Chad _will_ be, so far as capacity is concerned,” he
went on, “the man to do it.”
“Where did he get his capacity,” Jim asked, “over here?”
“He didn’t get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that over here
he hasn’t inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for business, an
extraordinary head. He comes by that,” Strether explained, “honestly
enough. He’s in that respect his father’s son, and also—for she’s
wonderful in her way too—his mother’s. He has other tastes and other
tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife are quite right about his
having that. He’s very remarkable.”
“Well, I guess he is!” Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. “But if you’ve
believed so in his making us hum, why have you so prolonged the
discussion? Don’t you know we’ve been quite anxious about you?”
These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether saw he
must none the less make a choice and take a line. “Because, you see,
I’ve greatly liked it. I’ve liked my Paris, I dare say I’ve liked it
too much.”
“Oh you old wretch!” Jim gaily exclaimed.
“But nothing’s concluded,” Strether went on. “The case is more complex
than it looks from Woollett.”
“Oh well, it looks bad enough from Woollett!” Jim declared.
“Even after all I’ve written?”
Jim bethought himself. “Isn’t it what you’ve written that has made Mrs.
Newsome pack us off? That at least and Chad’s not turning up?”
Strether made a reflexion of his own. “I see. That she should do
something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore of
course come out to act.”
“Oh yes,” Jim concurred—“to act. But Sally comes out to act, you know,”
he lucidly added, “every time she leaves the house. She never comes out
but she _does_ act. She’s acting moreover now for her mother, and that
fixes the scale.” Then he wound up, opening all his senses to it, with
a renewed embrace of pleasant Paris. “We haven’t all the same at
Woollett got anything like this.”
Strether continued to consider. “I’m bound to say for you all that you
strike me as having arrived in a very mild and reasonable frame of
mind. You don’t show your claws. I felt just now in Mrs. Pocock no
symptom of that. She isn’t fierce,” he went on. “I’m such a nervous
idiot that I thought she might be.”
“Oh don’t you know her well enough,” Pocock asked, “to have noticed
that she never gives herself away, any more than her mother ever does?
They ain’t fierce, either of ‘em; they let you come quite close. They
wear their fur the smooth side out—the warm side in. Do you know what
they are?” Jim pursued as he looked about him, giving the question, as
Strether felt, but half his care—“do you know what they are? They’re
about as intense as they can live.”
“Yes”—and Strether’s concurrence had a positive precipitation; “they’re
about as intense as they can live.”
“They don’t lash about and shake the cage,” said Jim, who seemed
pleased with his analogy; “and it’s at feeding-time that they’re
quietest. But they always get there.”
“They do indeed—they always get there!” Strether replied with a laugh
that justified his confession of nervousness. He disliked to be talking
sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he could have talked
insincerely. But there was something he wanted to know, a need created
in him by her recent intermission, by his having given from the first
so much, as now more than ever appeared to him, and got so little. It
was as if a queer truth in his companion’s metaphor had rolled over him
with a rush. She _had_ been quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and
Sarah had fed with her, out of the big bowl of all his recent free
communication, his vividness and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even
his eloquence, while the current of her response had steadily run thin.
Jim meanwhile however, it was true, slipped characteristically into
shallowness from the moment he ceased to speak out of the experience of
a husband.
“But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before her. If
he doesn’t work that for all it’s worth—!” He sighed with contingent
pity at his brother-in-law’s possible want of resource. “He has worked
it on _you_, pretty well, eh?” and he asked the next moment if there
were anything new at the Varieties, which he pronounced in the American
manner. They talked about the Varieties—Strether confessing to a
knowledge which produced again on Pocock’s part a play of innuendo as
vague as a nursery-rhyme, yet as aggressive as an elbow in his side;
and they finished their drive under the protection of easy themes.
Strether waited to the end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim
had seen Chad as different; and he could scarce have explained the
discouragement he drew from the absence of this testimony. It was what
he had taken his own stand on, so far as he had taken a stand; and if
they were all only going to see nothing he had only wasted his time. He
gave his friend till the very last moment, till they had come into
sight of the hotel; and when poor Pocock only continued cheerful and
envious and funny he fairly grew to dislike him, to feel him
extravagantly common. If they were _all_ going to see nothing!—Strether
knew, as this came back to him, that he was also letting Pocock
represent for him what Mrs. Newsome wouldn’t see. He went on disliking,
in the light of Jim’s commonness, to talk to him about that lady; yet
just before the cab pulled up he knew the extent of his desire for the
real word from Woollett.
“Has Mrs. Newsome at all given way—?”
“‘Given way’?”—Jim echoed it with the practical derision of his sense
of a long past.
“Under the strain, I mean, of hope deferred, of disappointment repeated
and thereby intensified.”
“Oh is she prostrate, you mean?”—he had his categories in hand. “Why
yes, she’s prostrate—just as Sally is. But they’re never so lively, you
know, as when they’re prostrate.”
“Ah Sarah’s prostrate?” Strether vaguely murmured.
“It’s when they’re prostrate that they most sit up.”
“And Mrs. Newsome’s sitting up?”
“All night, my boy—for _you!_” And Jim fetched him, with a vulgar
little guffaw, a thrust that gave relief to the picture. But he had got
what he wanted. He felt on the spot that this _was_ the real word from
Woollett. “So don’t you go home!” Jim added while he alighted and while
his friend, letting him profusely pay the cabman, sat on in a momentary
muse. Strether wondered if that were the real word too.