He had taken the train a few days after this from a station—as well as
_to_ a station—selected almost at random; such days, whatever should
happen, were numbered, and he had gone forth under the impulse—artless
enough, no doubt—to give the whole of one of them to that French
ruralism, with its cool special green, into which he had hitherto
looked only through the little oblong window of the picture-frame. It
had been as yet for the most part but a land of fancy for him—the
background of fiction, the medium of art, the nursery of letters;
practically as distant as Greece, but practically also well-nigh as
consecrated. Romance could weave itself, for Strether’s sense, out of
elements mild enough; and even after what he had, as he felt, lately
“been through,” he could thrill a little at the chance of seeing
something somewhere that would remind him of a certain small Lambinet
that had charmed him, long years before, at a Boston dealer’s and that
he had quite absurdly never forgotten. It had been offered, he
remembered, at a price he had been instructed to believe the lowest
ever named for a Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on
having to recognise, all the same, as beyond a dream of possibility. He
had dreamed—had turned and twisted possibilities for an hour: it had
been the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase of a
work of art. The adventure, it will be perceived, was modest; but the
memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of association, was
sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the picture he _would_
have bought—the particular production that had made him for the moment
overstep the modesty of nature. He was quite aware that if he were to
see it again he should perhaps have a drop or a shock, and he never
found himself wishing that the wheel of time would turn it up again,
just as he had seen it in the maroon-coloured, sky-lighted inner shrine
of Tremont Street. It would be a different thing, however, to see the
remembered mixture resolved back into its elements—to assist at the
restoration to nature of the whole far-away hour: the dusty day in
Boston, the background of the Fitchburg Depot, of the maroon-coloured
sanctum, the special-green vision, the ridiculous price, the poplars,
the willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady
woody horizon.
He observed in respect to his train almost no condition save that it
should stop a few times after getting out of the _banlieue_; he threw
himself on the general amiability of the day for the hint of where to
alight. His theory of his excursion was that he could alight
anywhere—not nearer Paris than an hour’s run—on catching a suggestion
of the particular note required. It made its sign, the
suggestion—weather, air, light, colour and his mood all favouring—at
the end of some eighty minutes; the train pulled up just at the right
spot, and he found himself getting out as securely as if to keep an
appointment. It will be felt of him that he could amuse himself, at his
age, with very small things if it be again noted that his appointment
was only with a superseded Boston fashion. He hadn’t gone far without
the quick confidence that it would be quite sufficiently kept. The
oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and
willows, the reeds and river—a river of which he didn’t know, and
didn’t want to know, the name—fell into a composition, full of
felicity, within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish;
the village on the left was white and the church on the right was grey;
it was all there, in short—it was what he wanted: it was Tremont
Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking
about in it. He did this last, for an hour, to his heart’s content,
making for the shady woody horizon and boring so deep into his
impression and his idleness that he might fairly have got through them
again and reached the maroon-coloured wall. It was a wonder, no doubt,
that the taste of idleness for him shouldn’t need more time to sweeten;
but it had in fact taken the few previous days; it had been sweetening
in truth ever since the retreat of the Pococks. He walked and walked as
if to show himself how little he had now to do; he had nothing to do
but turn off to some hillside where he might stretch himself and hear
the poplars rustle, and whence—in the course of an afternoon so spent,
an afternoon richly suffused too with the sense of a book in his
pocket—he should sufficiently command the scene to be able to pick out
just the right little rustic inn for an experiment in respect to
dinner. There was a train back to Paris at 9.20, and he saw himself
partaking, at the close of the day, with the enhancements of a coarse
white cloth and a sanded door, of something fried and felicitous,
washed down with authentic wine; after which he might, as he liked,
either stroll back to his station in the gloaming or propose for the
local _carriole_ and converse with his driver, a driver who naturally
wouldn’t fail of a stiff clean blouse, of a knitted nightcap and of the
genius of response—who, in fine, would sit on the shafts, tell him what
the French people were thinking, and remind him, as indeed the whole
episode would incidentally do, of Maupassant. Strether heard his lips,
for the first time in French air, as this vision assumed consistency,
emit sounds of expressive intention without fear of his company. He had
been afraid of Chad and of Maria and of Madame de Vionnet; he had been
most of all afraid of Waymarsh, in whose presence, so far as they had
mixed together in the light of the town, he had never without somehow
paying for it aired either his vocabulary or his accent. He usually
paid for it by meeting immediately afterwards Waymarsh’s eye.
Such were the liberties with which his fancy played after he had turned
off to the hillside that did really and truly, as well as most amiably,
await him beneath the poplars, the hillside that made him feel, for a
murmurous couple of hours, how happy had been his thought. He had the
sense of success, of a finer harmony in things; nothing but what had
turned out as yet according to his plan. It most of all came home to
him, as he lay on his back on the grass, that Sarah had really gone,
that his tension was really relaxed; the peace diffused in these ideas
might be delusive, but it hung about him none the less for the time. It
fairly, for half an hour, sent him to sleep; he pulled his straw hat
over his eyes—he had bought it the day before with a reminiscence of
Waymarsh’s—and lost himself anew in Lambinet. It was as if he had found
out he was tired—tired not from his walk, but from that inward exercise
which had known, on the whole, for three months, so little
intermission. That was it—when once they were off he had dropped; this
moreover was what he had dropped to, and now he was touching bottom. He
was kept luxuriously quiet, soothed and amused by the consciousness of
what he had found at the end of his descent. It was very much what he
had told Maria Gostrey he should like to stay on for, the
hugely-distributed Paris of summer, alternately dazzling and dusky,
with a weight lifted for him off its columns and cornices and with
shade and air in the flutter of awnings as wide as avenues. It was
present to him without attenuation that, reaching out, the day after
making the remark, for some proof of his freedom, he had gone that very
afternoon to see Madame de Vionnet. He had gone again the next day but
one, and the effect of the two visits, the after-sense of the couple of
hours spent with her, was almost that of fulness and frequency. The
brave intention of frequency, so great with him from the moment of his
finding himself unjustly suspected at Woollett, had remained rather
theoretic, and one of the things he could muse about under his poplars
was the source of the special shyness that had still made him careful.
He had surely got rid of it now, this special shyness; what had become
of it if it hadn’t precisely, within the week, rubbed off?
It struck him now in fact as sufficiently plain that if he had still
been careful he had been so for a reason. He had really feared, in his
behaviour, a lapse from good faith; if there was a danger of one’s
liking such a woman too much one’s best safety was in waiting at least
till one had the right to do so. In the light of the last few days the
danger was fairly vivid; so that it was proportionately fortunate that
the right was likewise established. It seemed to our friend that he had
on each occasion profited to the utmost by the latter: how could he
have done so more, he at all events asked himself, than in having
immediately let her know that, if it was all the same to her, he
preferred not to talk about anything tiresome? He had never in his life
so sacrificed an armful of high interests as in that remark; he had
never so prepared the way for the comparatively frivolous as in
addressing it to Madame de Vionnet’s intelligence. It hadn’t been till
later that he quite recalled how in conjuring away everything but the
pleasant he had conjured away almost all they had hitherto talked
about; it was not till later even that he remembered how, with their
new tone, they hadn’t so much as mentioned the name of Chad himself.
One of the things that most lingered with him on his hillside was this
delightful facility, with such a woman, of arriving at a new tone; he
thought, as he lay on his back, of all the tones she might make
possible if one were to try her, and at any rate of the probability
that one could trust her to fit them to occasions. He had wanted her to
feel that, as he was disinterested now, so she herself should be, and
she had showed she felt it, and he had showed he was grateful, and it
had been for all the world as if he were calling for the first time.
They had had other, but irrelevant, meetings; it was quite as if, had
they sooner known how much they _really_ had in common, there were
quantities of comparatively dull matters they might have skipped. Well,
they were skipping them now, even to graceful gratitude, even to
handsome “Don’t mention it!”—and it was amazing what could still come
up without reference to what had been going on between them. It might
have been, on analysis, nothing more than Shakespeare and the musical
glasses; but it had served all the purpose of his appearing to have
said to her: “Don’t like me, if it’s a question of liking me, for
anything obvious and clumsy that I’ve, as they call it, ‘done’ for you:
like me—well, like me, hang it, for anything else you choose. So, by
the same propriety, don’t be for me simply the person I’ve come to know
through my awkward connexion with Chad—was ever anything, by the way,
_more_ awkward? Be for me, please, with all your admirable tact and
trust, just whatever I may show you it’s a present pleasure to me to
think you.” It had been a large indication to meet; but if she hadn’t
met it what _had_ she done, and how had their time together slipped
along so smoothly, mild but not slow, and melting, liquefying, into his
happy illusion of idleness? He could recognise on the other hand that
he had probably not been without reason, in his prior, his restricted
state, for keeping an eye on his liability to lapse from good faith.
He really continued in the picture—that being for himself his
situation—all the rest of this rambling day; so that the charm was
still, was indeed more than ever upon him when, toward six o’clock he
found himself amicably engaged with a stout white-capped deep-voiced
woman at the door of the _auberge_ of the biggest village, a village
that affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness and crookedness,
set in coppery green, and that had the river flowing behind or before
it—one couldn’t say which; at the bottom, in particular, of the
inn-garden. He had had other adventures before this; had kept along the
height, after shaking off slumber; had admired, had almost coveted,
another small old church, all steep roof and dim slate-colour without
and all whitewash and paper flowers within; had lost his way and had
found it again; had conversed with rustics who struck him perhaps a
little more as men of the world than he had expected; had acquired at a
bound a fearless facility in French; had had, as the afternoon waned, a
watery _bock_, all pale and Parisian, in the café of the furthest
village, which was not the biggest; and had meanwhile not once
overstepped the oblong gilt frame. The frame had drawn itself out for
him, as much as you please; but that was just his luck. He had finally
come down again to the valley, to keep within touch of stations and
trains, turning his face to the quarter from which he had started; and
thus it was that he had at last pulled up before the hostess of the
Cheval Blanc, who met him, with a rough readiness that was like the
clatter of sabots over stones, on their common ground of a _côtelette
de veau à l’oseille_ and a subsequent lift. He had walked many miles
and didn’t know he was tired; but he still knew he was amused, and even
that, though he had been alone all day, he had never yet so struck
himself as engaged with others and in midstream of his drama. It might
have passed for finished his drama, with its catastrophe all but
reached: it had, however, none the less been vivid again for him as he
thus gave it its fuller chance. He had only had to be at last well out
of it to feel it, oddly enough, still going on.
For this had been all day at bottom the spell of the picture—that it
was essentially more than anything else a scene and a stage, that the
very air of the play was in the rustle of the willows and the tone of
the sky. The play and the characters had, without his knowing it till
now, peopled all his space for him, and it seemed somehow quite happy
that they should offer themselves, in the conditions so supplied, with
a kind of inevitability. It was as if the conditions made them not only
inevitable, but so much more nearly natural and right as that they were
at least easier, pleasanter, to put up with. The conditions had nowhere
so asserted their difference from those of Woollett as they appeared to
him to assert it in the little court of the Cheval Blanc while he
arranged with his hostess for a comfortable climax. They were few and
simple, scant and humble, but they were _the thing_, as he would have
called it, even to a greater degree than Madame de Vionnet’s old high
salon where the ghost of the Empire walked. “The” thing was the thing
that implied the greatest number of other things of the sort he had had
to tackle; and it was queer of course, but so it was—the implication
here was complete. Not a single one of his observations but somehow
fell into a place in it; not a breath of the cooler evening that wasn’t
somehow a syllable of the text. The text was simply, when condensed,
that in _these_ places such things were, and that if it was in them one
elected to move about one had to make one’s account with what one
lighted on. Meanwhile at all events it was enough that they did affect
one—so far as the village aspect was concerned—as whiteness,
crookedness and blueness set in coppery green; there being positively,
for that matter, an outer wall of the White Horse that was painted the
most improbable shade. That was part of the amusement—as if to show
that the fun was harmless; just as it was enough, further, that the
picture and the play seemed supremely to melt together in the good
woman’s broad sketch of what she could do for her visitor’s appetite.
He felt in short a confidence, and it was general, and it was all he
wanted to feel. It suffered no shock even on her mentioning that she
had in fact just laid the cloth for two persons who, unlike Monsieur,
had arrived by the river—in a boat of their own; who had asked her,
half an hour before, what she could do for them, and had then paddled
away to look at something a little further up—from which promenade they
would presently return. Monsieur might meanwhile, if he liked, pass
into the garden, such as it was, where she would serve him, should he
wish it—for there were tables and benches in plenty—a “bitter” before
his repast. Here she would also report to him on the possibility of a
conveyance to his station, and here at any rate he would have the
_agrément_ of the river.
It may be mentioned without delay that Monsieur had the _agrément_ of
everything, and in particular, for the next twenty minutes, of a small
and primitive pavilion that, at the garden’s edge, almost overhung the
water, testifying, in its somewhat battered state, to much fond
frequentation. It consisted of little more than a platform, slightly
raised, with a couple of benches and a table, a protecting rail and a
projecting roof; but it raked the full grey-blue stream, which, taking
a turn a short distance above, passed out of sight to reappear much
higher up; and it was clearly in esteemed requisition for Sundays and
other feasts. Strether sat there and, though hungry, felt at peace; the
confidence that had so gathered for him deepened with the lap of the
water, the ripple of the surface, the rustle of the reeds on the
opposite bank, the faint diffused coolness and the slight rock of a
couple of small boats attached to a rough landing-place hard by. The
valley on the further side was all copper-green level and glazed pearly
sky, a sky hatched across with screens of trimmed trees, which looked
flat, like espaliers; and though the rest of the village straggled away
in the near quarter the view had an emptiness that made one of the
boats suggestive. Such a river set one afloat almost before one could
take up the oars—the idle play of which would be moreover the aid to
the full impression. This perception went so far as to bring him to his
feet; but that movement, in turn, made him feel afresh that he was
tired, and while he leaned against a post and continued to look out he
saw something that gave him a sharper arrest.