I
Strether couldn’t have said he had during the previous hours definitely
expected it; yet when, later on, that morning—though no later indeed
than for his coming forth at ten o’clock—he saw the concierge produce,
on his approach, a _petit bleu_ delivered since his letters had been
sent up, he recognised the appearance as the first symptom of a sequel.
He then knew he had been thinking of some early sign from Chad as more
likely, after all, than not; and this would be precisely the early
sign. He took it so for granted that he opened the _petit bleu_ just
where he had stopped, in the pleasant cool draught of the
_porte-cochère_—only curious to see where the young man would, at such
a juncture, break out. His curiosity, however, was more than gratified;
the small missive, whose gummed edge he had detached without attention
to the address, not being from the young man at all, but from the
person whom the case gave him on the spot as still more worth while.
Worth while or not, he went round to the nearest telegraph-office, the
big one on the Boulevard, with a directness that almost confessed to a
fear of the danger of delay. He might have been thinking that if he
didn’t go before he could think he wouldn’t perhaps go at all. He at
any rate kept, in the lower side-pocket of his morning coat, a very
deliberate hand on his blue missive, crumpling it up rather tenderly
than harshly. He wrote a reply, on the Boulevard, also in the form of a
_petit bleu_—which was quickly done, under pressure of the place,
inasmuch as, like Madame de Vionnet’s own communication, it consisted
of the fewest words. She had asked him if he could do her the very
great kindness of coming to see her that evening at half-past nine, and
he answered, as if nothing were easier, that he would present himself
at the hour she named. She had added a line of postscript, to the
effect that she would come to him elsewhere and at his own hour if he
preferred; but he took no notice of this, feeling that if he saw her at
all half the value of it would be in seeing her where he had already
seen her best. He mightn’t see her at all; that was one of the
reflexions he made after writing and before he dropped his closed card
into the box; he mightn’t see any one at all any more at all; he might
make an end as well now as ever, leaving things as they were, since he
was doubtless not to leave them better, and taking his way home so far
as should appear that a home remained to him. This alternative was for
a few minutes so sharp that if he at last did deposit his missive it
was perhaps because the pressure of the place had an effect.
There was none other, however, than the common and constant pressure,
familiar to our friend under the rubric of _Postes et Télégraphes_—the
something in the air of these establishments; the vibration of the vast
strange life of the town, the influence of the types, the performers
concocting their messages; the little prompt Paris women, arranging,
pretexting goodness knew what, driving the dreadful needle-pointed
public pen at the dreadful sand-strewn public table: implements that
symbolised for Strether’s too interpretative innocence something more
acute in manners, more sinister in morals, more fierce in the national
life. After he had put in his paper he had ranged himself, he was
really amused to think, on the side of the fierce, the sinister, the
acute. He was carrying on a correspondence, across the great city,
quite in the key of the _Postes et Télégraphes_ in general; and it was
fairly as if the acceptance of that fact had come from something in his
state that sorted with the occupation of his neighbours. He was mixed
up with the typical tale of Paris, and so were they, poor things—how
could they all together help being? They were no worse than he, in
short, and he no worse than they—if, queerly enough, no better; and at
all events he had settled his hash, so that he went out to begin, from
that moment, his day of waiting. The great settlement was, as he felt,
in his preference for seeing his correspondent in her own best
conditions. _That_ was part of the typical tale, the part most
significant in respect to himself. He liked the place she lived in, the
picture that each time squared itself, large and high and clear, around
her: every occasion of seeing it was a pleasure of a different shade.
Yet what precisely was he doing with shades of pleasure now, and why
hadn’t he properly and logically compelled her to commit herself to
whatever of disadvantage and penalty the situation might throw up? He
might have proposed, as for Sarah Pocock, the cold hospitality of his
own _salon de lecture_, in which the chill of Sarah’s visit seemed
still to abide and shades of pleasure were dim; he might have suggested
a stone bench in the dusty Tuileries or a penny chair at the back part
of the Champs Elysées. These things would have been a trifle stern, and
sternness alone now wouldn’t be sinister. An instinct in him cast about
for some form of discipline in which they might meet—some awkwardness
they would suffer from, some danger, or at least some grave
inconvenience, they would incur. This would give a sense—which the
spirit required, rather ached and sighed in the absence of—that
somebody was paying something somewhere and somehow, that they were at
least not all floating together on the silver stream of impunity. Just
instead of that to go and see her late in the evening, as if, for all
the world—well, as if he were as much in the swim as anybody else: this
had as little as possible in common with the penal form.
Even when he had felt that objection melt away, however, the practical
difference was small; the long stretch of his interval took the colour
it would, and if he lived on thus with the sinister from hour to hour
it proved an easier thing than one might have supposed in advance. He
reverted in thought to his old tradition, the one he had been brought
up on and which even so many years of life had but little worn away;
the notion that the state of the wrongdoer, or at least this person’s
happiness, presented some special difficulty. What struck him now
rather was the ease of it—for nothing in truth appeared easier. It was
an ease he himself fairly tasted of for the rest of the day; giving
himself quite up; not so much as trying to dress it out, in any
particular whatever, as a difficulty; not after all going to see
Maria—which would have been in a manner a result of such dressing; only
idling, lounging, smoking, sitting in the shade, drinking lemonade and
consuming ices. The day had turned to heat and eventual thunder, and he
now and again went back to his hotel to find that Chad hadn’t been
there. He hadn’t yet struck himself, since leaving Woollett, so much as
a loafer, though there had been times when he believed himself touching
bottom. This was a deeper depth than any, and with no foresight,
scarcely with a care, as to what he should bring up. He almost wondered
if he didn’t _look_ demoralised and disreputable; he had the fanciful
vision, as he sat and smoked, of some accidental, some motived, return
of the Pococks, who would be passing along the Boulevard and would
catch this view of him. They would have distinctly, on his appearance,
every ground for scandal. But fate failed to administer even that
sternness; the Pococks never passed and Chad made no sign. Strether
meanwhile continued to hold off from Miss Gostrey, keeping her till
to-morrow; so that by evening his irresponsibility, his impunity, his
luxury, had become—there was no other word for them—immense.
Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picture—he was moving
in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever canvas—he
drew a long breath: it was so presented to him from the first that the
spell of his luxury wouldn’t be broken. He wouldn’t have, that is, to
become responsible—this was admirably in the air: she had sent for him
precisely to let him feel it, so that he might go on with the comfort
(comfort already established, hadn’t it been?) of regarding his ordeal,
the ordeal of the weeks of Sarah’s stay and of their climax, as safely
traversed and left behind him. Didn’t she just wish to assure him that
_she_ now took it all and so kept it; that he was absolutely not to
worry any more, was only to rest on his laurels and continue generously
to help her? The light in her beautiful formal room was dim, though it
would do, as everything would always do; the hot night had kept out
lamps, but there was a pair of clusters of candles that glimmered over
the chimney-piece like the tall tapers of an altar. The windows were
all open, their redundant hangings swaying a little, and he heard once
more, from the empty court, the small plash of the fountain. From
beyond this, and as from a great distance—beyond the court, beyond the
_corps de logis_ forming the front—came, as if excited and exciting,
the vague voice of Paris. Strether had all along been subject to sudden
gusts of fancy in connexion with such matters as these—odd starts of
the historic sense, suppositions and divinations with no warrant but
their intensity. Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates,
the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the omens,
the beginnings broken out. They were the smell of revolution, the smell
of the public temper—or perhaps simply the smell of blood.
It was at present queer beyond words, “subtle,” he would have risked
saying, that such suggestions should keep crossing the scene; but it
was doubtless the effect of the thunder in the air, which had hung
about all day without release. His hostess was dressed as for
thunderous times, and it fell in with the kind of imagination we have
just attributed to him that she should be in simplest coolest white, of
a character so old-fashioned, if he were not mistaken, that Madame
Roland must on the scaffold have worn something like it. This effect
was enhanced by a small black fichu or scarf, of crape or gauze,
disposed quaintly round her bosom and now completing as by a mystic
touch the pathetic, the noble analogy. Poor Strether in fact scarce
knew what analogy was evoked for him as the charming woman, receiving
him and making him, as she could do such things, at once familiarly and
gravely welcome, moved over her great room with her image almost
repeated in its polished floor, which had been fully bared for summer.
The associations of the place, all felt again; the gleam here and
there, in the subdued light, of glass and gilt and parquet, with the
quietness of her own note as the centre—these things were at first as
delicate as if they had been ghostly, and he was sure in a moment that,
whatever he should find he had come for, it wouldn’t be for an
impression that had previously failed him. That conviction held him
from the outset, and, seeming singularly to simplify, certified to him
that the objects about would help him, would really help them both. No,
he might never see them again—this was only too probably the last time;
and he should certainly see nothing in the least degree like them. He
should soon be going to where such things were not, and it would be a
small mercy for memory, for fancy, to have, in that stress, a loaf on
the shelf. He knew in advance he should look back on the perception
actually sharpest with him as on the view of something old, old, old,
the oldest thing he had ever personally touched; and he also knew, even
while he took his companion in as the feature among features, that
memory and fancy couldn’t help being enlisted for her. She might intend
what she would, but this was beyond anything she could intend, with
things from far back—tyrannies of history, facts of type, values, as
the painters said, of expression—all working for her and giving her the
supreme chance, the chance of the happy, the really luxurious few, the
chance, on a great occasion, to be natural and simple. She had never,
with him, been more so; or if it was the perfection of art it would
never—and that came to the same thing—be proved against her.
What was truly wonderful was her way of differing so from time to time
without detriment to her simplicity. Caprices, he was sure she felt,
were before anything else bad manners, and that judgement in her was by
itself a thing making more for safety of intercourse than anything that
in his various own past intercourses he had had to reckon on. If
therefore her presence was now quite other than the one she had shown
him the night before, there was nothing of violence in the change—it
was all harmony and reason. It gave him a mild deep person, whereas he
had had on the occasion to which their interview was a direct reference
a person committed to movement and surface and abounding in them; but
she was in either character more remarkable for nothing than for her
bridging of intervals, and this now fell in with what he understood he
was to leave to her. The only thing was that, if he was to leave it
_all_ to her, why exactly had she sent for him? He had had, vaguely, in
advance, his explanation, his view of the probability of her wishing to
set something right, to deal in some way with the fraud so lately
practised on his presumed credulity. Would she attempt to carry it
further or would she blot it out? Would she throw over it some more or
less happy colour; or would she do nothing about it at all? He
perceived soon enough at least that, however reasonable she might be,
she wasn’t vulgarly confused, and it herewith pressed upon him that
their eminent “lie,” Chad’s and hers, was simply after all such an
inevitable tribute to good taste as he couldn’t have wished them not to
render. Away from them, during his vigil, he had seemed to wince at the
amount of comedy involved; whereas in his present posture he could only
ask himself how he should enjoy any attempt from her to take the comedy
back. He shouldn’t enjoy it at all; but, once more and yet once more,
he could trust her. That is he could trust her to make deception right.
As she presented things the ugliness—goodness knew why—went out of
them; none the less too that she could present them, with an art of her
own, by not so much as touching them. She let the matter, at all
events, lie where it was—where the previous twenty-four hours had
placed it; appearing merely to circle about it respectfully, tenderly,
almost piously, while she took up another question.
She knew she hadn’t really thrown dust in his eyes; this, the previous
night, before they separated, had practically passed between them; and,
as she had sent for him to see what the difference thus made for him
might amount to, so he was conscious at the end of five minutes that he
had been tried and tested. She had settled with Chad after he left them
that she would, for her satisfaction, assure herself of this quantity,
and Chad had, as usual, let her have her way. Chad was always letting
people have their way when he felt that it would somehow turn his wheel
for him; it somehow always did turn his wheel. Strether felt, oddly
enough, before these facts, freshly and consentingly passive; they
again so rubbed it into him that the couple thus fixing his attention
were intimate, that his intervention had absolutely aided and
intensified their intimacy, and that in fine he must accept the
consequence of that. He had absolutely become, himself, with his
perceptions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the
droll mixture, as it must seem to them, of his braveries and his fears,
the general spectacle of his art and his innocence, almost an added
link and certainly a common priceless ground for them to meet upon. It
was as if he had been hearing their very tone when she brought out a
reference that was comparatively straight. “The last twice that you’ve
been here, you know, I never asked you,” she said with an abrupt
transition—they had been pretending before this to talk simply of the
charm of yesterday and of the interest of the country they had seen.
The effort was confessedly vain; not for such talk had she invited him;
and her impatient reminder was of their having done for it all the
needful on his coming to her after Sarah’s flight. What she hadn’t
asked him then was to state to her where and how he stood for her; she
had been resting on Chad’s report of their midnight hour together in
the Boulevard Malesherbes. The thing therefore she at present desired
was ushered in by this recall of the two occasions on which,
disinterested and merciful, she hadn’t worried him. To-night truly she
_would_ worry him, and this was her appeal to him to let her risk it.
He wasn’t to mind if she bored him a little: she had behaved, after
all—hadn’t she?—so awfully, awfully well.