Almost the first thing, strangely enough, that, about an hour later,
Strether found himself doing in Sarah’s presence was to remark
articulately on this failure, in their friend, of what had been
superficially his great distinction. It was as if—he alluded of course
to the grand manner—the dear man had sacrificed it to some other
advantage; which would be of course only for himself to measure. It
might be simply that he was physically so much more sound than on his
first coming out; this was all prosaic, comparatively cheerful and
vulgar. And fortunately, if one came to that, his improvement in health
was really itself grander than any manner it could be conceived as
having cost him. “You yourself alone, dear Sarah”—Strether took the
plunge—“have done him, it strikes me, in these three weeks, as much
good as all the rest of his time together.”
It was a plunge because somehow the range of reference was, in the
conditions, “funny,” and made funnier still by Sarah’s attitude, by the
turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so sensibly taken. Her
appearance was really indeed funnier than anything else—the spirit in
which he felt her to be there as soon as she was there, the shade of
obscurity that cleared up for him as soon as he was seated with her in
the small _salon de lecture_ that had, for the most part, in all the
weeks, witnessed the wane of his early vivacity of discussion with
Waymarsh. It was an immense thing, quite a tremendous thing, for her to
have come: this truth opened out to him in spite of his having already
arrived for himself at a fairly vivid view of it. He had done exactly
what he had given Waymarsh his word for—had walked and re-walked the
court while he awaited her advent; acquiring in this exercise an amount
of light that affected him at the time as flooding the scene. She had
decided upon the step in order to give him the benefit of a doubt, in
order to be able to say to her mother that she had, even to abjectness,
smoothed the way for him. The doubt had been as to whether he mightn’t
take her as not having smoothed it—and the admonition had possibly come
from Waymarsh’s more detached spirit. Waymarsh had at any rate,
certainly, thrown his weight into the scale—he had pointed to the
importance of depriving their friend of a grievance. She had done
justice to the plea, and it was to set herself right with a high ideal
that she actually sat there in her state. Her calculation was sharp in
the immobility with which she held her tall parasol-stick upright and
at arm’s length, quite as if she had struck the place to plant her
flag; in the separate precautions she took not to show as nervous; in
the aggressive repose in which she did quite nothing but wait for him.
Doubt ceased to be possible from the moment he had taken in that she
had arrived with no proposal whatever; that her concern was simply to
show what she had come to receive. She had come to receive his
submission, and Waymarsh was to have made it plain to him that she
would expect nothing less. He saw fifty things, her host, at this
convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was that their anxious
friend hadn’t quite had the hand required of him. Waymarsh _had_,
however, uttered the request that she might find him mild, and while
hanging about the court before her arrival he had turned over with zeal
the different ways in which he could be so. The difficulty was that if
he was mild he wasn’t, for her purpose, conscious. If she wished him
conscious—as everything about her cried aloud that she did—she must
accordingly be at costs to make him so. Conscious he _was_, for
himself—but only of too many things; so she must choose the one she
required.
Practically, however, it at last got itself named, and when once that
had happened they were quite at the centre of their situation. One
thing had really done as well as another; when Strether had spoken of
Waymarsh’s leaving him, and that had necessarily brought on a reference
to Mrs. Pocock’s similar intention, the jump was but short to supreme
lucidity. Light became indeed after that so intense that Strether would
doubtless have but half made out, in the prodigious glare, by which of
the two the issue had been in fact precipitated. It was, in their
contracted quarters, as much there between them as if it had been
something suddenly spilled with a crash and a splash on the floor. The
form of his submission was to be an engagement to acquit himself within
the twenty-four hours. “He’ll go in a moment if you give him the
word—he assures me on his honour he’ll do that”: this came in its
order, out of its order, in respect to Chad, after the crash had
occurred. It came repeatedly during the time taken by Strether to feel
that he was even more fixed in his rigour than he had supposed—the time
he was not above adding to a little by telling her that such a way of
putting it on her brother’s part left him sufficiently surprised. She
wasn’t at all funny at last—she was really fine; and he felt easily
where she was strong—strong for herself. It hadn’t yet so come home to
him that she was nobly and appointedly officious. She was acting in
interests grander and clearer than that of her poor little personal,
poor little Parisian equilibrium, and all his consciousness of her
mother’s moral pressure profited by this proof of its sustaining force.
She would be held up; she would be strengthened; he needn’t in the
least be anxious for her. What would once more have been distinct to
him had he tried to make it so was that, as Mrs. Newsome was
essentially all moral pressure, the presence of this element was almost
identical with her own presence. It wasn’t perhaps that he felt he was
dealing with her straight, but it was certainly as if she had been
dealing straight with _him_. She was reaching him somehow by the
lengthened arm of the spirit, and he was having to that extent to take
her into account; but he wasn’t reaching her in turn, not making her
take _him_; he was only reaching Sarah, who appeared to take so little
of him. “Something has clearly passed between you and Chad,” he
presently said, “that I think I ought to know something more about.
Does he put it all,” he smiled, “on me?”
“Did you come out,” she asked, “to put it all on _him?_”
But he replied to this no further than, after an instant, by saying:
“Oh it’s all right. Chad I mean’s all right in having said to you—well
anything he may have said. I’ll _take_ it all—what he does put on me.
Only I must see him before I see you again.”
She hesitated, but she brought it out. “Is it absolutely necessary you
should see me again?”
“Certainly, if I’m to give you any definite word about anything.”
“Is it your idea then,” she returned, “that I shall keep on meeting you
only to be exposed to fresh humiliation?”
He fixed her a longer time. “Are your instructions from Mrs. Newsome
that you shall, even at the worst, absolutely and irretrievably break
with me?”
“My instructions from Mrs. Newsome are, if you please, my affair. You
know perfectly what your own were, and you can judge for yourself of
what it can do for you to have made what you have of them. You can
perfectly see, at any rate, I’ll go so far as to say, that if I wish
not to expose myself I must wish still less to expose _her_.” She had
already said more than she had quite expected; but, though she had also
pulled up, the colour in her face showed him he should from one moment
to the other have it all. He now indeed felt the high importance of his
having it. “What is your conduct,” she broke out as if to explain—“what
is your conduct but an outrage to women like _us?_ I mean your acting
as if there can be a doubt—as between us and such another—of his duty?”
He thought a moment. It was rather much to deal with at once; not only
the question itself, but the sore abysses it revealed. “Of course
they’re totally different kinds of duty.”
“And do you pretend that he has any at all—to such another?”
“Do you mean to Madame de Vionnet?” He uttered the name not to affront
her, but yet again to gain time—time that he needed for taking in
something still other and larger than her demand of a moment before. It
wasn’t at once that he could see all that was in her actual challenge;
but when he did he found himself just checking a low vague sound, a
sound which was perhaps the nearest approach his vocal chords had ever
known to a growl. Everything Mrs. Pocock had failed to give a sign of
recognising in Chad as a particular part of a transformation—everything
that had lent intention to this particular failure—affected him as
gathered into a large loose bundle and thrown, in her words, into his
face. The missile made him to that extent catch his breath; which
however he presently recovered. “Why when a woman’s at once so charming
and so beneficent—”
“You can sacrifice mothers and sisters to her without a blush and can
make them cross the ocean on purpose to feel the more and take from you
the straighter, _how_ you do it?”
Yes, she had taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but he tried
not to flounder in her grasp. “I don’t think there’s anything I’ve done
in any such calculated way as you describe. Everything has come as a
sort of indistinguishable part of everything else. Your coming out
belonged closely to my having come before you, and my having come was a
result of our general state of mind. Our general state of mind had
proceeded, on its side, from our queer ignorance, our queer
misconceptions and confusions—from which, since then, an inexorable
tide of light seems to have floated us into our perhaps still queerer
knowledge. Don’t you _like_ your brother as he is,” he went on, “and
haven’t you given your mother an intelligible account of all that that
comes to?”
It put to her also, doubtless, his own tone, too many things, this at
least would have been the case hadn’t his final challenge directly
helped her. Everything, at the stage they had reached, directly helped
her, because everything betrayed in him such a basis of intention. He
saw—the odd way things came out!—that he would have been held less
monstrous had he only been a little wilder. What exposed him was just
his poor old trick of quiet inwardness, what exposed him was his
_thinking_ such offence. He hadn’t in the least however the desire to
irritate that Sarah imputed to him, and he could only at last
temporise, for the moment, with her indignant view. She was altogether
more inflamed than he had expected, and he would probably understand
this better when he should learn what had occurred for her with Chad.
Till then her view of his particular blackness, her clear surprise at
his not clutching the pole she held out, must pass as extravagant. “I
leave you to flatter yourself,” she returned, “that what you speak of
is what _you’ve_ beautifully done. When a thing has been already
described in such a lovely way—!” But she caught herself up, and her
comment on his description rang out sufficiently loud. “Do you consider
her even an apology for a decent woman?”
Ah there it was at last! She put the matter more crudely than, for his
own mixed purposes, he had yet had to do; but essentially it was all
one matter. It was so much—so much; and she treated it, poor lady, as
so little. He grew conscious, as he was now apt to do, of a strange
smile, and the next moment he found himself talking like Miss Barrace.
“She has struck me from the first as wonderful. I’ve been thinking too
moreover that, after all, she would probably have represented even for
yourself something rather new and rather good.”
He was to have given Mrs. Pocock with this, however, but her best
opportunity for a sound of derision. “Rather new? I hope so with all my
heart!”
“I mean,” he explained, “that she might have affected you by her
exquisite amiability—a real revelation, it has seemed to myself; her
high rarity, her distinction of every sort.”
He had been, with these words, consciously a little “precious”; but he
had had to be—he couldn’t give her the truth of the case without them;
and it seemed to him moreover now that he didn’t care. He had at all
events not served his cause, for she sprang at its exposed side. “A
‘revelation’—to _me_: I’ve come to such a woman for a revelation? You
talk to me about ‘distinction’—_you_, you who’ve had your
privilege?—when the most distinguished woman we shall either of us have
seen in this world sits there insulted, in her loneliness, by your
incredible comparison!”
Strether forbore, with an effort, from straying; but he looked all
about him. “Does your mother herself make the point that she sits
insulted?”
Sarah’s answer came so straight, so “pat,” as might have been said,
that he felt on the instant its origin. “She has confided to my
judgement and my tenderness the expression of her personal sense of
everything, and the assertion of her personal dignity.”
They were the very words of the lady of Woollett—he would have known
them in a thousand; her parting charge to her child. Mrs. Pocock
accordingly spoke to this extent by book, and the fact immensely moved
him. “If she does really feel as you say it’s of course very very
dreadful. I’ve given sufficient proof, one would have thought,” he
added, “of my deep admiration for Mrs. Newsome.”
“And pray what proof would one have thought you’d _call_ sufficient?
That of thinking this person here so far superior to her?”
He wondered again; he waited. “Ah dear Sarah, you must _leave_ me this
person here!”
In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even
perversely, he clung to his rag of reason, he had softly almost wailed
this plea. Yet he knew it to be perhaps the most positive declaration
he had ever made in his life, and his visitor’s reception of it
virtually gave it that importance. “That’s exactly what I’m delighted
to do. God knows _we_ don’t want her! You take good care not to meet,”
she observed in a still higher key, “my question about their life. If
you do consider it a thing one can even _speak_ of, I congratulate you
on your taste!”
The life she alluded to was of course Chad’s and Madame de Vionnet’s,
which she thus bracketed together in a way that made him wince a
little; there being nothing for him but to take home her full
intention. It was none the less his inconsequence that while he had
himself been enjoying for weeks the view of the brilliant woman’s
specific action, he just suffered from any characterisation of it by
other lips. “I think tremendously well of her, at the same time that I
seem to feel her ‘life’ to be really none of my business. It’s my
business, that is, only so far as Chad’s own life is affected by it;
and what has happened, don’t you see? is that Chad’s has been affected
so beautifully. The proof of the pudding’s in the eating”—he tried,
with no great success, to help it out with a touch of pleasantry, while
she let him go on as if to sink and sink. He went on however well
enough, as well as he could do without fresh counsel; he indeed
shouldn’t stand quite firm, he felt, till he should have re-established
his communications with Chad. Still, he could always speak for the
woman he had so definitely promised to “save.” This wasn’t quite for
her the air of salvation; but as that chill fairly deepened what did it
become but a reminder that one might at the worst perish _with_ her?
And it was simple enough—it was rudimentary: not, not to give her away.
“I find in her more merits than you would probably have patience with
my counting over. And do you know,” he enquired, “the effect you
produce on me by alluding to her in such terms? It’s as if you had some
motive in not recognising all she has done for your brother, and so
shut your eyes to each side of the matter, in order, whichever side
comes up, to get rid of the other. I don’t, you must allow me to say,
see how you can with any pretence to candour get rid of the side
nearest you.”
“Near me—_that_ sort of thing?” And Sarah gave a jerk back of her head
that well might have nullified any active proximity.
It kept her friend himself at his distance, and he respected for a
moment the interval. Then with a last persuasive effort he bridged it.
“You don’t, on your honour, appreciate Chad’s fortunate development?”
“Fortunate?” she echoed again. And indeed she was prepared. “I call it
hideous.”
Her departure had been for some minutes marked as imminent, and she was
already at the door that stood open to the court, from the threshold of
which she delivered herself of this judgement. It rang out so loud as
to produce for the time the hush of everything else. Strether quite, as
an effect of it, breathed less bravely; he could acknowledge it, but
simply enough. “Oh if you think _that_—!”
“Then all’s at an end? So much the better. I do think that!” She passed
out as she spoke and took her way straight across the court, beyond
which, separated from them by the deep arch of the _porte-cochère_ the
low victoria that had conveyed her from her own hotel was drawn up. She
made for it with decision, and the manner of her break, the sharp shaft
of her rejoinder, had an intensity by which Strether was at first kept
in arrest. She had let fly at him as from a stretched cord, and it took
him a minute to recover from the sense of being pierced. It was not the
penetration of surprise; it was that, much more, of certainty; his case
being put for him as he had as yet only put it to himself. She was away
at any rate; she had distanced him—with rather a grand spring, an
effect of pride and ease, after all; she had got into her carriage
before he could overtake her, and the vehicle was already in motion. He
stopped halfway; he stood there in the court only seeing her go and
noting that she gave him no other look. The way he had put it to
himself was that all quite _might_ be at an end. Each of her movements,
in this resolute rupture, reaffirmed, re-enforced that idea. Sarah
passed out of sight in the sunny street while, planted there in the
centre of the comparatively grey court, he continued merely to look
before him. It probably _was_ all at an end.