IV

What he saw was exactly the right thing—a boat advancing round the bend

and containing a man who held the paddles and a lady, at the stern,

with a pink parasol. It was suddenly as if these figures, or something

like them, had been wanted in the picture, had been wanted more or less

all day, and had now drifted into sight, with the slow current, on

purpose to fill up the measure. They came slowly, floating down,

evidently directed to the landing-place near their spectator and

presenting themselves to him not less clearly as the two persons for

whom his hostess was already preparing a meal. For two very happy

persons he found himself straightway taking them—a young man in

shirt-sleeves, a young woman easy and fair, who had pulled pleasantly

up from some other place and, being acquainted with the neighbourhood,

had known what this particular retreat could offer them. The air quite

thickened, at their approach, with further intimations; the intimation

that they were expert, familiar, frequent—that this wouldn’t at all

events be the first time. They knew how to do it, he vaguely felt—and

it made them but the more idyllic, though at the very moment of the

impression, as happened, their boat seemed to have begun to drift wide,

the oarsman letting it go. It had by this time none the less come much

nearer—near enough for Strether to dream the lady in the stern had for

some reason taken account of his being there to watch them. She had

remarked on it sharply, yet her companion hadn’t turned round; it was

in fact almost as if our friend had felt her bid him keep still. She

had taken in something as a result of which their course had wavered,

and it continued to waver while they just stood off. This little effect

was sudden and rapid, so rapid that Strether’s sense of it was separate

only for an instant from a sharp start of his own. He too had within

the minute taken in something, taken in that he knew the lady whose

parasol, shifting as if to hide her face, made so fine a pink point in

the shining scene. It was too prodigious, a chance in a million, but,

if he knew the lady, the gentleman, who still presented his back and

kept off, the gentleman, the coatless hero of the idyll, who had

responded to her start, was, to match the marvel, none other than Chad.

Chad and Madame de Vionnet were then like himself taking a day in the

country—though it was as queer as fiction, as farce, that their country

could happen to be exactly his; and she had been the first at

recognition, the first to feel, across the water, the shock—for it

appeared to come to that—of their wonderful accident. Strether became

aware, with this, of what was taking place—that her recognition had

been even stranger for the pair in the boat, that her immediate impulse

had been to control it, and that she was quickly and intensely debating

with Chad the risk of betrayal. He saw they would show nothing if they

could feel sure he hadn’t made them out; so that he had before him for

a few seconds his own hesitation. It was a sharp fantastic crisis that

had popped up as if in a dream, and it had had only to last the few

seconds to make him feel it as quite horrible. They were thus, on

either side, _trying_ the other side, and all for some reason that

broke the stillness like some unprovoked harsh note. It seemed to him

again, within the limit, that he had but one thing to do—to settle

their common question by some sign of surprise and joy. He hereupon

gave large play to these things, agitating his hat and his stick and

loudly calling out—a demonstration that brought him relief as soon as

he had seen it answered. The boat, in mid-stream, still went a little

wild—which seemed natural, however, while Chad turned round, half

springing up; and his good friend, after blankness and wonder, began

gaily to wave her parasol. Chad dropped afresh to his paddles and the

boat headed round, amazement and pleasantry filling the air meanwhile,

and relief, as Strether continued to fancy, superseding mere violence.

Our friend went down to the water under this odd impression as of

violence averted—the violence of their having “cut” him, out there in

the eye of nature, on the assumption that he wouldn’t know it. He

awaited them with a face from which he was conscious of not being able

quite to banish this idea that they would have gone on, not seeing and

not knowing, missing their dinner and disappointing their hostess, had

he himself taken a line to match. That at least was what darkened his

vision for the moment. Afterwards, after they had bumped at the

landing-place and he had assisted their getting ashore, everything

found itself sponged over by the mere miracle of the encounter.

They could so much better at last, on either side, treat it as a wild

extravagance of hazard, that the situation was made elastic by the

amount of explanation called into play. Why indeed—apart from

oddity—the situation should have been really stiff was a question

naturally not practical at the moment, and in fact, so far as we are

concerned, a question tackled, later on and in private, only by

Strether himself. He was to reflect later on and in private that it was

mainly _he_ who had explained—as he had had moreover comparatively

little difficulty in doing. He was to have at all events meanwhile the

worrying thought of their perhaps secretly suspecting him of having

plotted this coincidence, taking such pains as might be to give it the

semblance of an accident. That possibility—as their imputation—didn’t

of course bear looking into for an instant; yet the whole incident was

so manifestly, arrange it as they would, an awkward one, that he could

scarce keep disclaimers in respect to his own presence from rising to

his lips. Disclaimers of intention would have been as tactless as his

presence was practically gross; and the narrowest escape they either of

them had was his lucky escape, in the event, from making any. Nothing

of the sort, so far as surface and sound were involved, was even in

question; surface and sound all made for their common ridiculous good

fortune, for the general _invraisemblance_ of the occasion, for the

charming chance that they had, the others, in passing, ordered some

food to be ready, the charming chance that he had himself not eaten,

the charming chance, even more, that their little plans, their hours,

their train, in short, from _là-bas_, would all match for their return

together to Paris. The chance that was most charming of all, the chance

that drew from Madame de Vionnet her clearest, gayest “_Comme cela se

trouve!_” was the announcement made to Strether after they were seated

at table, the word given him by their hostess in respect to his

carriage for the station, on which he might now count. It settled the

matter for his friends as well; the conveyance—it _was_ all too

lucky!—would serve for them; and nothing was more delightful than his

being in a position to make the train so definite. It might have been,

for themselves—to hear Madame de Vionnet—almost unnaturally vague, a

detail left to be fixed; though Strether indeed was afterwards to

remember that Chad had promptly enough intervened to forestall this

appearance, laughing at his companion’s flightiness and making the

point that he had after all, in spite of the bedazzlement of a day out

with her, known what he was about.

Strether was to remember afterwards further that this had had for him

the effect of forming Chad’s almost sole intervention; and indeed he

was to remember further still, in subsequent meditation, many things

that, as it were, fitted together. Another of them was for instance

that the wonderful woman’s overflow of surprise and amusement was

wholly into French, which she struck him as speaking with an

unprecedented command of idiomatic turns, but in which she got, as he

might have said, somewhat away from him, taking all at once little

brilliant jumps that he could but lamely match. The question of his own

French had never come up for them; it was the one thing she wouldn’t

have permitted—it belonged, for a person who had been through much, to

mere boredom; but the present result was odd, fairly veiling her

identity, shifting her back into a mere voluble class or race to the

intense audibility of which he was by this time inured. When she spoke

the charming slightly strange English he best knew her by he seemed to

feel her as a creature, among all the millions, with a language quite

to herself, the real monopoly of a special shade of speech, beautifully

easy for her, yet of a colour and a cadence that were both inimitable

and matters of accident. She came back to these things after they had

shaken down in the inn-parlour and knew, as it were, what was to become

of them; it was inevitable that loud ejaculation over the prodigy of

their convergence should at last wear itself out. Then it was that his

impression took fuller form—the impression, destined only to deepen, to

complete itself, that they had something to put a face upon, to carry

off and make the best of, and that it was she who, admirably on the

whole, was doing this. It was familiar to him of course that they had

something to put a face upon; their friendship, their connexion, took

any amount of explaining—that would have been made familiar by his

twenty minutes with Mrs. Pocock if it hadn’t already been so. Yet his

theory, as we know, had bountifully been that the facts were

specifically none of his business, and were, over and above, so far as

one had to do with them, intrinsically beautiful; and this might have

prepared him for anything, as well as rendered him proof against

mystification. When he reached home that night, however, he knew he had

been, at bottom, neither prepared nor proof; and since we have spoken

of what he was, after his return, to recall and interpret, it may as

well immediately be said that his real experience of these few hours

put on, in that belated vision—for he scarce went to bed till

morning—the aspect that is most to our purpose.

He then knew more or less how he had been affected—he but half knew at

the time. There had been plenty to affect him even after, as has been

said, they had shaken down; for his consciousness, though muffled, had

its sharpest moments during this passage, a marked drop into innocent

friendly Bohemia. They then had put their elbows on the table,

deploring the premature end of their two or three dishes; which they

had tried to make up with another bottle while Chad joked a little

spasmodically, perhaps even a little irrelevantly, with the hostess.

What it all came to had been that fiction and fable _were_, inevitably,

in the air, and not as a simple term of comparison, but as a result of

things said; also that they were blinking it, all round, and that they

yet needn’t, so much as that, have blinked it—though indeed if they

hadn’t Strether didn’t quite see what else they could have done.

Strether didn’t quite see _that_ even at an hour or two past midnight,

even when he had, at his hotel, for a long time, without a light and

without undressing, sat back on his bedroom sofa and stared straight

before him. He was, at that point of vantage, in full possession, to

make of it all what he could. He kept making of it that there had been

simply a _lie_ in the charming affair—a lie on which one could now,

detached and deliberate, perfectly put one’s finger. It was with the

lie that they had eaten and drunk and talked and laughed, that they had

waited for their _carriole_ rather impatiently, and had then got into

the vehicle and, sensibly subsiding, driven their three or four miles

through the darkening summer night. The eating and drinking, which had

been a resource, had had the effect of having served its turn; the talk

and laughter had done as much; and it was during their somewhat tedious

progress to the station, during the waits there, the further delays,

their submission to fatigue, their silences in the dim compartment of

the much-stopping train, that he prepared himself for reflexions to

come. It had been a performance, Madame de Vionnet’s manner, and though

it had to that degree faltered toward the end, as through her ceasing

to believe in it, as if she had asked herself, or Chad had found a

moment surreptitiously to ask her, what after all was the use, a

performance it had none the less quite handsomely remained, with the

final fact about it that it was on the whole easier to keep up than to

abandon.

From the point of view of presence of mind it had been very wonderful

indeed, wonderful for readiness, for beautiful assurance, for the way

her decision was taken on the spot, without time to confer with Chad,

without time for anything. Their only conference could have been the

brief instants in the boat before they confessed to recognising the

spectator on the bank, for they hadn’t been alone together a moment

since and must have communicated all in silence. It was a part of the

deep impression for Strether, and not the least of the deep interest,

that they _could_ so communicate—that Chad in particular could let her

know he left it to her. He habitually left things to others, as

Strether was so well aware, and it in fact came over our friend in

these meditations that there had been as yet no such vivid illustration

of his famous knowing how to live. It was as if he had humoured her to

the extent of letting her lie without correction—almost as if, really,

he would be coming round in the morning to set the matter, as between

Strether and himself, right. Of course he couldn’t quite come; it was a

case in which a man was obliged to accept the woman’s version, even

when fantastic; if she had, with more flurry than she cared to show,

elected, as the phrase was, to represent that they had left Paris that

morning, and with no design but of getting back within the day—if she

had so sized-up, in the Woollett phrase, their necessity, she knew best

her own measure. There were things, all the same, it was impossible to

blink and which made this measure an odd one—the too evident fact for

instance that she hadn’t started out for the day dressed and hatted and

shod, and even, for that matter, pink parasol’d, as she had been in the

boat. From what did the drop in her assurance proceed as the tension

increased—from what did this slightly baffled ingenuity spring but from

her consciousness of not presenting, as night closed in, with not so

much as a shawl to wrap her round, an appearance that matched her

story? She admitted that she was cold, but only to blame her imprudence

which Chad suffered her to give such account of as she might. Her shawl

and Chad’s overcoat and her other garments, and his, those they had

each worn the day before, were at the place, best known to themselves—a

quiet retreat enough, no doubt—at which they had been spending the

twenty-four hours, to which they had fully meant to return that

evening, from which they had so remarkably swum into Strether’s ken,

and the tacit repudiation of which had been thus the essence of her

comedy. Strether saw how she had perceived in a flash that they

couldn’t quite look to going back there under his nose; though,

honestly, as he gouged deeper into the matter, he was somewhat

surprised, as Chad likewise had perhaps been, at the uprising of this

scruple. He seemed even to divine that she had entertained it rather

for Chad than for herself, and that, as the young man had lacked the

chance to enlighten her, she had had to go on with it, he meanwhile

mistaking her motive.

He was rather glad, none the less, that they had in point of fact not

parted at the Cheval Blanc, that he hadn’t been reduced to giving them

his blessing for an idyllic retreat down the river. He had had in the

actual case to make-believe more than he liked, but this was nothing,

it struck him, to what the other event would have required. Could he,

literally, quite have faced the other event? Would he have been capable

of making the best of it with them? This was what he was trying to do

now; but with the advantage of his being able to give more time to it a

good deal counteracted by his sense of what, over and above the central

fact itself, he had to swallow. It was the quantity of make-believe

involved and so vividly exemplified that most disagreed with his

spiritual stomach. He moved, however, from the consideration of that

quantity—to say nothing of the consciousness of that organ—back to the

other feature of the show, the deep, deep truth of the intimacy

revealed. That was what, in his vain vigil, he oftenest reverted to:

intimacy, at such a point, was _like_ that—and what in the world else

would one have wished it to be like? It was all very well for him to

feel the pity of its being so much like lying; he almost blushed, in

the dark, for the way he had dressed the possibility in vagueness, as a

little girl might have dressed her doll. He had made them—and by no

fault of their own—momentarily pull it for him, the possibility, out of

this vagueness; and must he not therefore take it now as they had had

simply, with whatever thin attenuations, to give it to him? The very

question, it may be added, made him feel lonely and cold. There was the

element of the awkward all round, but Chad and Madame de Vionnet had at

least the comfort that they could talk it over together. With whom

could _he_ talk of such things?—unless indeed always, at almost any

stage, with Maria? He foresaw that Miss Gostrey would come again into

requisition on the morrow; though it wasn’t to be denied that he was

already a little afraid of her “What on earth—that’s what I want to

know now—had you then supposed?” He recognised at last that he had

really been trying all along to suppose nothing. Verily, verily, his

labour had been lost. He found himself supposing innumerable and

wonderful things.