[Note: In the 1909 New York Edition the following two chapters were
placed in the reverse of the order appearing below. Since 1950, most
scholars have agreed, because of the internal evidence of the two
chapters, that an editorial error caused them to be printed in reverse
order. This Etext, like other editions of the past four decades,
corrects the apparent error.—Richard D. Hathaway, preparer of this
electronic text]
I
He went late that evening to the Boulevard Malesherbes, having his
impression that it would be vain to go early, and having also, more
than once in the course of the day, made enquiries of the concierge.
Chad hadn’t come in and had left no intimation; he had affairs,
apparently, at this juncture—as it occurred to Strether he so well
might have—that kept him long abroad. Our friend asked once for him at
the hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, but the only contribution offered there
was the fact that every one was out. It was with the idea that he would
have to come home to sleep that Strether went up to his rooms, from
which however he was still absent, though, from the balcony, a few
moments later, his visitor heard eleven o’clock strike. Chad’s servant
had by this time answered for his reappearance; he _had_, the visitor
learned, come quickly in to dress for dinner and vanish again. Strether
spent an hour in waiting for him—an hour full of strange suggestions,
persuasions, recognitions; one of those that he was to recall, at the
end of his adventure, as the particular handful that most had counted.
The mellowest lamplight and the easiest chair had been placed at his
disposal by Baptiste, subtlest of servants; the novel half-uncut, the
novel lemon-coloured and tender, with the ivory knife athwart it like
the dagger in a contadina’s hair, had been pushed within the soft
circle—a circle which, for some reason, affected Strether as softer
still after the same Baptiste had remarked that in the absence of a
further need of anything by Monsieur he would betake himself to bed.
The night was hot and heavy and the single lamp sufficient; the great
flare of the lighted city, rising high, spending itself afar, played up
from the Boulevard and, through the vague vista of the successive
rooms, brought objects into view and added to their dignity. Strether
found himself in possession as he never yet had been; he had been there
alone, had turned over books and prints, had invoked, in Chad’s
absence, the spirit of the place, but never at the witching hour and
never with a relish quite so like a pang.
He spent a long time on the balcony; he hung over it as he had seen
little Bilham hang the day of his first approach, as he had seen Mamie
hang over her own the day little Bilham himself might have seen her
from below; he passed back into the rooms, the three that occupied the
front and that communicated by wide doors; and, while he circulated and
rested, tried to recover the impression that they had made on him three
months before, to catch again the voice in which they had seemed then
to speak to him. That voice, he had to note, failed audibly to sound;
which he took as the proof of all the change in himself. He had heard,
of old, only what he _could_ then hear; what he could do now was to
think of three months ago as a point in the far past. All voices had
grown thicker and meant more things; they crowded on him as he moved
about—it was the way they sounded together that wouldn’t let him be
still. He felt, strangely, as sad as if he had come for some wrong, and
yet as excited as if he had come for some freedom. But the freedom was
what was most in the place and the hour, it was the freedom that most
brought him round again to the youth of his own that he had long ago
missed. He could have explained little enough to-day either why he had
missed it or why, after years and years, he should care that he had;
the main truth of the actual appeal of everything was none the less
that everything represented the substance of his loss put it within
reach, within touch, made it, to a degree it had never been, an affair
of the senses. That was what it became for him at this singular time,
the youth he had long ago missed—a queer concrete presence, full of
mystery, yet full of reality, which he could handle, taste, smell, the
deep breathing of which he could positively hear. It was in the outside
air as well as within; it was in the long watch, from the balcony, in
the summer night, of the wide late life of Paris, the unceasing soft
quick rumble, below, of the little lighted carriages that, in the
press, always suggested the gamblers he had seen of old at Monte Carlo
pushing up to the tables. This image was before him when he at last
became aware that Chad was behind.
“She tells me you put it all on _me_”—he had arrived after this
promptly enough at that information; which expressed the case however
quite as the young man appeared willing for the moment to leave it.
Other things, with this advantage of their virtually having the night
before them, came up for them, and had, as well, the odd effect of
making the occasion, instead of hurried and feverish, one of the
largest, loosest and easiest to which Strether’s whole adventure was to
have treated him. He had been pursuing Chad from an early hour and had
overtaken him only now; but now the delay was repaired by their being
so exceptionally confronted. They had foregathered enough of course in
all the various times; they had again and again, since that first night
at the theatre, been face to face over their question; but they had
never been so alone together as they were actually alone—their talk
hadn’t yet been so supremely for themselves. And if many things
moreover passed before them, none passed more distinctly for Strether
than that striking truth about Chad of which he had been so often moved
to take note: the truth that everything came happily back with him to
his knowing how to live. It had been seated in his pleased smile—a
smile that pleased exactly in the right degree—as his visitor turned
round, on the balcony, to greet his advent; his visitor in fact felt on
the spot that there was nothing their meeting would so much do as bear
witness to that facility. He surrendered himself accordingly to so
approved a gift; for what was the meaning of the facility but that
others _did_ surrender themselves? He didn’t want, luckily, to prevent
Chad from living; but he was quite aware that even if he had he would
himself have thoroughly gone to pieces. It was in truth essentially by
bringing down his personal life to a function all subsidiary to the
young man’s own that he held together. And the great point, above all,
the sign of how completely Chad possessed the knowledge in question,
was that one thus became, not only with a proper cheerfulness, but with
wild native impulses, the feeder of his stream. Their talk had
accordingly not lasted three minutes without Strether’s feeling basis
enough for the excitement in which he had waited. This overflow fairly
deepened, wastefully abounded, as he observed the smallness of anything
corresponding to it on the part of his friend. That was exactly this
friend’s happy case; he “put out” his excitement, or whatever other
emotion the matter involved, as he put out his washing; than which no
arrangement could make more for domestic order. It was quite for
Strether himself in short to feel a personal analogy with the laundress
bringing home the triumphs of the mangle.
When he had reported on Sarah’s visit, which he did very fully, Chad
answered his question with perfect candour. “I positively referred her
to you—told her she must absolutely see you. This was last night, and
it all took place in ten minutes. It was our first free talk—really the
first time she had tackled me. She knew I also knew what her line had
been with yourself; knew moreover how little you had been doing to make
anything difficult for her. So I spoke for you frankly—assured her you
were all at her service. I assured her _I_ was too,” the young man
continued; “and I pointed out how she could perfectly, at any time,
have got at me. Her difficulty has been simply her not finding the
moment she fancied.”
“Her difficulty,” Strether returned, “has been simply that she finds
she’s afraid of you. She’s not afraid of _me_, Sarah, one little scrap;
and it was just because she has seen how I can fidget when I give my
mind to it that she has felt her best chance, rightly enough to be in
making me as uneasy as possible. I think she’s at bottom as pleased to
_have_ you put it on me as you yourself can possibly be to put it.”
“But what in the world, my dear man,” Chad enquired in objection to
this luminosity, “have I done to make Sally afraid?”
“You’ve been ‘wonderful, wonderful,’ as we say—we poor people who watch
the play from the pit; and that’s what has, admirably, made her. Made
her all the more effectually that she could see you didn’t set about it
on purpose—I mean set about affecting her as with fear.”
Chad cast a pleasant backward glance over his possibilities of motive.
“I’ve only wanted to be kind and friendly, to be decent and
attentive—and I still only want to be.”
Strether smiled at his comfortable clearness. “Well, there can
certainly be no way for it better than by my taking the onus. It
reduces your personal friction and your personal offence to almost
nothing.”
Ah but Chad, with his completer conception of the friendly, wouldn’t
quite have this! They had remained on the balcony, where, after their
day of great and premature heat, the midnight air was delicious; and
they leaned back in turn against the balustrade, all in harmony with
the chairs and the flower-pots, the cigarettes and the starlight. “The
onus isn’t _really_ yours—after our agreeing so to wait together and
judge together. That was all my answer to Sally,” Chad pursued—“that we
have been, that we are, just judging together.”
“I’m not afraid of the burden,” Strether explained; “I haven’t come in
the least that you should take it off me. I’ve come very much, it seems
to me, to double up my fore legs in the manner of the camel when he
gets down on his knees to make his back convenient. But I’ve supposed
you all this while to have been doing a lot of special and private
judging—about which I haven’t troubled you; and I’ve only wished to
have your conclusion first from you. I don’t ask more than that; I’m
quite ready to take it as it has come.”
Chad turned up his face to the sky with a slow puff of his smoke.
“Well, I’ve seen.”
Strether waited a little. “I’ve left you wholly alone; haven’t, I think
I may say, since the first hour or two—when I merely preached
patience—so much as breathed on you.”
“Oh you’ve been awfully good!”
“We’ve both been good then—we’ve played the game. We’ve given them the
most liberal conditions.”
“Ah,” said Chad, “splendid conditions! It was open to them, open to
them”—he seemed to make it out, as he smoked, with his eyes still on
the stars. He might in quiet sport have been reading their horoscope.
Strether wondered meanwhile what had been open to them, and he finally
let him have it. “It was open to them simply to let me alone; to have
made up their minds, on really seeing me for themselves, that I could
go on well enough as I was.”
Strether assented to this proposition with full lucidity, his
companion’s plural pronoun, which stood all for Mrs. Newsome and her
daughter, having no ambiguity for him. There was nothing, apparently,
to stand for Mamie and Jim; and this added to our friend’s sense of
Chad’s knowing what he thought. “But they’ve made up their minds to the
opposite—that you _can’t_ go on as you are.”
“No,” Chad continued in the same way; “they won’t have it for a
minute.”
Strether on his side also reflectively smoked. It was as if their high
place really represented some moral elevation from which they could
look down on their recent past. “There never was the smallest chance,
do you know, that they _would_ have it for a moment.”
“Of course not—no real chance. But if they were willing to think there
was—!”
“They weren’t willing.” Strether had worked it all out. “It wasn’t for
you they came out, but for me. It wasn’t to see for themselves what
you’re doing, but what I’m doing. The first branch of their curiosity
was inevitably destined, under my culpable delay, to give way to the
second; and it’s on the second that, if I may use the expression and
you don’t mind my marking the invidious fact, they’ve been of late
exclusively perched. When Sarah sailed it was me, in other words, they
were after.”
Chad took it in both with intelligence and with indulgence. “It _is_
rather a business then—what I’ve let you in for!”
Strether had again a brief pause; which ended in a reply that seemed to
dispose once for all of this element of compunction. Chad was to treat
it, at any rate, so far as they were again together, as having done so.
“I was ‘in’ when you found me.”
“Ah but it was you,” the young man laughed, “who found _me_.”
“I only found you out. It was you who found me in. It was all in the
day’s work for them, at all events, that they should come. And they’ve
greatly enjoyed it,” Strether declared.
“Well, I’ve tried to make them,” said Chad.
His companion did himself presently the same justice. “So have I. I
tried even this very morning—while Mrs. Pocock was with me. She enjoys
for instance, almost as much as anything else, not being, as I’ve said,
afraid of me; and I think I gave her help in that.”
Chad took a deeper interest. “Was she very very nasty?”
Strether debated. “Well, she was the most important thing—she was
definite. She was—at last—crystalline. And I felt no remorse. I saw
that they must have come.”
“Oh I wanted to see them for myself; so that if it were only for
_that_—!” Chad’s own remorse was as small.
This appeared almost all Strether wanted. “Isn’t your having seen them
for yourself then _the_ thing, beyond all others, that has come of
their visit?”
Chad looked as if he thought it nice of his old friend to put it so.
“Don’t you count it as anything that you’re dished—if you _are_ dished?
Are you, my dear man, dished?”
It sounded as if he were asking if he had caught cold or hurt his foot,
and Strether for a minute but smoked and smoked. “I want to see her
again. I must see her.”
“Of course you must.” Then Chad hesitated. “Do you mean—a—Mother
herself?”
“Oh your mother—that will depend.”
It was as if Mrs. Newsome had somehow been placed by the words very far
off. Chad however endeavoured in spite of this to reach the place.
“What do you mean it will depend on?”
Strether, for all answer, gave him a longish look. “I was speaking of
Sarah. I must positively—though she quite cast me off—see _her_ again.
I can’t part with her that way.”
“Then she was awfully unpleasant?”
Again Strether exhaled. “She was what she had to be. I mean that from
the moment they’re not delighted they can only be—well what I admit she
was. We gave them,” he went on, “their chance to be delighted, and
they’ve walked up to it, and looked all round it, and not taken it.”
“You can bring a horse to water—!” Chad suggested.
“Precisely. And the tune to which this morning Sarah wasn’t
delighted—the tune to which, to adopt your metaphor, she refused to
drink—leaves us on that side nothing more to hope.”
Chad had a pause, and then as if consolingly: “It was never of course
really the least on the cards that they would be ‘delighted.’”
“Well, I don’t know, after all,” Strether mused. “I’ve had to come as
far round. However”—he shook it off—“it’s doubtless _my_ performance
that’s absurd.”
“There are certainly moments,” said Chad, “when you seem to me too good
to be true. Yet if you are true,” he added, “that seems to be all that
need concern me.”
“I’m true, but I’m incredible. I’m fantastic and ridiculous—I don’t
explain myself even _to_ myself. How can they then,” Strether asked,
“understand me? So I don’t quarrel with them.”
“I see. They quarrel,” said Chad rather comfortably, “with _us_.”
Strether noted once more the comfort, but his young friend had already
gone on. “I should feel greatly ashamed, all the same, if I didn’t put
it before you again that you ought to think, after all, tremendously
well. I mean before giving up beyond recall—” With which insistence, as
from a certain delicacy, dropped.
Ah but Strether wanted it. “Say it all, say it all.”
“Well, at your age, and with what—when all’s said and done—Mother might
do for you and be for you.”
Chad had said it all, from his natural scruple, only to that extent; so
that Strether after an instant himself took a hand. “My absence of an
assured future. The little I have to show toward the power to take care
of myself. The way, the wonderful way, she would certainly take care of
me. Her fortune, her kindness, and the constant miracle of her having
been disposed to go even so far. Of course, of course”—he summed it up.
“There are those sharp facts.”
Chad had meanwhile thought of another still. “And don’t you really
care—?”
His friend slowly turned round to him. “Will you go?”
“I’ll go if you’ll say you now consider I should. You know,” he went
on, “I was ready six weeks ago.”
“Ah,” said Strether, “that was when you didn’t know _I_ wasn’t! You’re
ready at present because you do know it.”
“That may be,” Chad returned; “but all the same I’m sincere. You talk
about taking the whole thing on your shoulders, but in what light do
you regard me that you think me capable of letting you pay?” Strether
patted his arm, as they stood together against the parapet,
reassuringly—seeming to wish to contend that he _had_ the wherewithal;
but it was again round this question of purchase and price that the
young man’s sense of fairness continued to hover. “What it literally
comes to for you, if you’ll pardon my putting it so, is that you give
up money. Possibly a good deal of money.”
“Oh,” Strether laughed, “if it were only just enough you’d still be
justified in putting it so! But I’ve on my side to remind you too that
_you_ give up money; and more than ‘possibly’—quite certainly, as I
should suppose—a good deal.”
“True enough; but I’ve got a certain quantity,” Chad returned after a
moment. “Whereas you, my dear man, you—”
“I can’t be at all said”—Strether took him up—“to have a ‘quantity’
certain or uncertain? Very true. Still, I shan’t starve.”
“Oh you mustn’t _starve!_” Chad pacifically emphasised; and so, in the
pleasant conditions, they continued to talk; though there was, for that
matter, a pause in which the younger companion might have been taken as
weighing again the delicacy of his then and there promising the elder
some provision against the possibility just mentioned. This, however,
he presumably thought best not to do, for at the end of another minute
they had moved in quite a different direction. Strether had broken in
by returning to the subject of Chad’s passage with Sarah and enquiring
if they had arrived, in the event, at anything in the nature of a
“scene.” To this Chad replied that they had on the contrary kept
tremendously polite; adding moreover that Sally was after all not the
woman to have made the mistake of not being. “Her hands are a good deal
tied, you see. I got so, from the first,” he sagaciously observed, “the
start of her.”
“You mean she has taken so much from you?”
“Well, I couldn’t of course in common decency give less: only she
hadn’t expected, I think, that I’d give her nearly so much. And she
began to take it before she knew it.”
“And she began to like it,” said Strether, “as soon as she began to
take it!”
“Yes, she has liked it—also more than she expected.” After which Chad
observed: “But she doesn’t like _me_. In fact she hates me.”
Strether’s interest grew. “Then why does she want you at home?”
“Because when you hate you want to triumph, and if she should get me
neatly stuck there she _would_ triumph.”
Strether followed afresh, but looking as he went. “Certainly—in a
manner. But it would scarce be a triumph worth having if, once
entangled, feeling her dislike and possibly conscious in time of a
certain quantity of your own, you should on the spot make yourself
unpleasant to her.”
“Ah,” said Chad, “she can bear _me_—could bear me at least at home.
It’s my being there that would be her triumph. She hates me in Paris.”
“She hates in other words—”
“Yes, _that’s_ it!”—Chad had quickly understood this understanding;
which formed on the part of each as near an approach as they had yet
made to naming Madame de Vionnet. The limitations of their distinctness
didn’t, however, prevent its fairly lingering in the air that it was
this lady Mrs. Pocock hated. It added one more touch moreover to their
established recognition of the rare intimacy of Chad’s association with
her. He had never yet more twitched away the last light veil from this
phenomenon than in presenting himself as confounded and submerged in
the feeling she had created at Woollett. “And I’ll tell you who hates
me too,” he immediately went on.
Strether knew as immediately whom he meant, but with as prompt a
protest. “Ah no! Mamie doesn’t hate—well,” he caught himself in
time—“anybody at all. Mamie’s beautiful.”
Chad shook his head. “That’s just why I mind it. She certainly doesn’t
like me.”
“How much do you mind it? What would you do for her?”
“Well, I’d like her if she’d like me. Really, really,” Chad declared.
It gave his companion a moment’s pause. “You asked me just now if I
don’t, as you said, ‘care’ about a certain person. You rather tempt me
therefore to put the question in my turn. Don’t _you_ care about a
certain other person?”
Chad looked at him hard in the lamplight of the window. “The difference
is that I don’t want to.”
Strether wondered. “‘Don’t want’ to?”
“I try not to—that is I _have_ tried. I’ve done my best. You can’t be
surprised,” the young man easily went on, “when you yourself set me on
it. I was indeed,” he added, “already on it a little; but you set me
harder. It was six weeks ago that I thought I had come out.”
Strether took it well in. “But you haven’t come out!”
“I don’t know—it’s what I _want_ to know,” said Chad. “And if I could
have sufficiently wanted—by myself—to go back, I think I might have
found out.”
“Possibly”—Strether considered. “But all you were able to achieve was
to want to want to! And even then,” he pursued, “only till our friends
there came. Do you want to want to still?” As with a sound
half-dolorous, half-droll and all vague and equivocal, Chad buried his
face for a little in his hands, rubbing it in a whimsical way that
amounted to an evasion, he brought it out more sharply: “_Do_ you?”
Chad kept for a time his attitude, but at last he looked up, and then
abruptly, “Jim _is_ a damned dose!” he declared.
“Oh I don’t ask you to abuse or describe or in any way pronounce on
your relatives; I simply put it to you once more whether you’re _now_
ready. You say you’ve ‘seen.’ Is what you’ve seen that you can’t
resist?”
Chad gave him a strange smile—the nearest approach he had ever shown to
a troubled one. “Can’t you make me _not_ resist?”
“What it comes to,” Strether went on very gravely now and as if he
hadn’t heard him, “what it comes to is that more has been done for you,
I think, than I’ve ever seen done—attempted perhaps, but never so
successfully done—by one human being for another.”
“Oh an immense deal certainly”—Chad did it full justice. “And you
yourself are adding to it.”
It was without heeding this either that his visitor continued. “And our
friends there won’t have it.”
“No, they simply won’t.”
“They demand you on the basis, as it were, of repudiation and
ingratitude; and what has been the matter with me,” Strether went on,
“is that I haven’t seen my way to working with you for repudiation.”
Chad appreciated this. “Then as you haven’t seen yours you naturally
haven’t seen mine. There it is.” After which he proceeded, with a
certain abruptness, to a sharp interrogation. “_Now_ do you say she
doesn’t hate me?”
Strether hesitated. “‘She’—?”
“Yes—Mother. We called it Sarah, but it comes to the same thing.”
“Ah,” Strether objected, “not to the same thing as her hating _you_.”
On which—though as if for an instant it had hung fire—Chad remarkably
replied: “Well, if they hate my good friend, _that_ comes to the same
thing.” It had a note of inevitable truth that made Strether take it as
enough, feel he wanted nothing more. The young man spoke in it for his
“good friend” more than he had ever yet directly spoken, confessed to
such deep identities between them as he might play with the idea of
working free from, but which at a given moment could still draw him
down like a whirlpool. And meanwhile he had gone on. “Their hating you
too moreover—that also comes to a good deal.”
“Ah,” said Strether, “your mother doesn’t.”
Chad, however, loyally stuck to it—loyally, that is, to Strether. “She
will if you don’t look out.”
“Well, I do look out. I am, after all, looking out. That’s just why,”
our friend explained, “I want to see her again.”
It drew from Chad again the same question. “To see Mother?”
“To see—for the present—Sarah.”
“Ah then there you are! And what I don’t for the life of me make out,”
Chad pursued with resigned perplexity, “is what you _gain_ by it.”
Oh it would have taken his companion too long to say! “That’s because
you have, I verily believe, no imagination. You’ve other qualities. But
no imagination, don’t you see? at all.”
“I dare say. I do see.” It was an idea in which Chad showed interest.
“But haven’t you yourself rather too much?”
“Oh _rather_—!” So that after an instant, under this reproach and as if
it were at last a fact really to escape from, Strether made his move
for departure.