“Oh, you’re all right, you’re all right,” he almost impatiently
declared; his impatience being moreover not for her pressure, but for
her scruple. More and more distinct to him was the tune to which she
would have had the matter out with Chad: more and more vivid for him
the idea that she had been nervous as to what he might be able to
“stand.” Yes, it had been a question if he had “stood” what the scene
on the river had given him, and, though the young man had doubtless
opined in favour of his recuperation, her own last word must have been
that she should feel easier in seeing for herself. That was it,
unmistakeably; she _was_ seeing for herself. What he could stand was
thus, in these moments, in the balance for Strether, who reflected, as
he became fully aware of it, that he must properly brace himself. He
wanted fully to appear to stand all he might; and there was a certain
command of the situation for him in this very wish not to look too much
at sea. She was ready with everything, but so, sufficiently, was he;
that is he was at one point the more prepared of the two, inasmuch as,
for all her cleverness, she couldn’t produce on the spot—and it was
surprising—an account of the motive of her note. He had the advantage
that his pronouncing her “all right” gave him for an enquiry. “May I
ask, delighted as I’ve been to come, if you’ve wished to say something
special?” He spoke as if she might have seen he had been waiting for
it—not indeed with discomfort, but with natural interest. Then he saw
that she was a little taken aback, was even surprised herself at the
detail she had neglected—the only one ever yet; having somehow assumed
he would know, would recognise, would leave some things not to be said.
She looked at him, however, an instant as if to convey that if he
wanted them _all_—!
“Selfish and vulgar—that’s what I must seem to you. You’ve done
everything for me, and here I am as if I were asking for more. But it
isn’t,” she went on, “because I’m afraid—though I _am_ of course
afraid, as a woman in my position always is. I mean it isn’t because
one lives in terror—it isn’t because of that one is selfish, for I’m
ready to give you my word to-night that I don’t care; don’t care what
still may happen and what I may lose. I don’t ask you to raise your
little finger for me again, nor do I wish so much as to mention to you
what we’ve talked of before, either my danger or my safety, or his
mother, or his sister, or the girl he may marry, or the fortune he may
make or miss, or the right or the wrong, of any kind, he may do. If
after the help one has had from you one can’t either take care of one’s
self or simply hold one’s tongue, one must renounce all claim to be an
object of interest. It’s in the name of what I _do_ care about that
I’ve tried still to keep hold of you. How can I be indifferent,” she
asked, “to how I appear to you?” And as he found himself unable
immediately to say: “Why, if you’re going, _need_ you, after all? Is it
impossible you should stay on—so that one mayn’t lose you?”
“Impossible I should live with you here instead of going home?”
“Not ‘with’ us, if you object to that, but near enough to us,
somewhere, for us to see you—well,” she beautifully brought out, “when
we feel we _must_. How shall we not sometimes feel it? I’ve wanted to
see you often when I couldn’t,” she pursued, “all these last weeks. How
shan’t I then miss you now, with the sense of your being gone forever?”
Then as if the straightness of this appeal, taking him unprepared, had
visibly left him wondering: “Where _is_ your ‘home’ moreover now—what
has become of it? I’ve made a change in your life, I know I have; I’ve
upset everything in your mind as well; in your sense of—what shall I
call it?—all the decencies and possibilities. It gives me a kind of
detestation—” She pulled up short.
Oh but he wanted to hear. “Detestation of what?”
“Of everything—of life.”
“Ah that’s too much,” he laughed—“or too little!”
“Too little, precisely”—she was eager. “What I hate is myself—when I
think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the lives of
others, and that one isn’t happy even then. One does it to cheat one’s
self and to stop one’s mouth—but that’s only at the best for a little.
The wretched self is always there, always making one somehow a fresh
anxiety. What it comes to is that it’s not, that it’s never, a
happiness, any happiness at all, to _take_. The only safe thing is to
give. It’s what plays you least false.” Interesting, touching,
strikingly sincere as she let these things come from her, she yet
puzzled and troubled him—so fine was the quaver of her quietness. He
felt what he had felt before with her, that there was always more
behind what she showed, and more and more again behind that. “You know
so, at least,” she added, “where you are!”
“_You_ ought to know it indeed then; for isn’t what you’ve been giving
exactly what has brought us together this way? You’ve been making, as
I’ve so fully let you know I’ve felt,” Strether said, “the most
precious present I’ve ever seen made, and if you can’t sit down
peacefully on that performance you _are_, no doubt, born to torment
yourself. But you ought,” he wound up, “to be easy.”
“And not trouble you any more, no doubt—not thrust on you even the
wonder and the beauty of what I’ve done; only let you regard our
business as over, and well over, and see you depart in a peace that
matches my own? No doubt, no doubt, no doubt,” she nervously
repeated—“all the more that I don’t really pretend I believe you
couldn’t, for yourself, _not_ have done what you have. I don’t pretend
you feel yourself victimised, for this evidently is the way you live,
and it’s what—we’re agreed—is the best way. Yes, as you say,” she
continued after a moment, “I ought to be easy and rest on my work. Well
then here am I doing so. I _am_ easy. You’ll have it for your last
impression. When is it you say you go?” she asked with a quick change.
He took some time to reply—his last impression was more and more so
mixed a one. It produced in him a vague disappointment, a drop that was
deeper even than the fall of his elation the previous night. The good
of what he had done, if he had done so much, wasn’t there to enliven
him quite to the point that would have been ideal for a grand gay
finale. Women were thus endlessly absorbent, and to deal with them was
to walk on water. What was at bottom the matter with her, embroider as
she might and disclaim as she might—what was at bottom the matter with
her was simply Chad himself. It was of Chad she was after all renewedly
afraid; the strange strength of her passion was the very strength of
her fear; she clung to _him_, Lambert Strether, as to a source of
safety she had tested, and, generous graceful truthful as she might try
to be, exquisite as she was, she dreaded the term of his being within
reach. With this sharpest perception yet, it was like a chill in the
air to him, it was almost appalling, that a creature so fine could be,
by mysterious forces, a creature so exploited. For at the end of all
things they _were_ mysterious: she had but made Chad what he was—so why
could she think she had made him infinite? She had made him better, she
had made him best, she had made him anything one would; but it came to
our friend with supreme queerness that he was none the less only Chad.
Strether had the sense that _he_, a little, had made him too; his high
appreciation had as it were, consecrated her work The work, however
admirable, was nevertheless of the strict human order, and in short it
was marvellous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of comforts,
aberrations (however one classed them) within the common experience
should be so transcendently prized. It might have made Strether hot or
shy, as such secrets of others brought home sometimes do make us; but
he was held there by something so hard that it was fairly grim. This
was not the discomposure of last night; that had quite passed—such
discomposures were a detail; the real coercion was to see a man
ineffably adored. There it was again—it took women, it took women; if
to deal with them was to walk on water what wonder that the water rose?
And it had never surely risen higher than round this woman. He
presently found himself taking a long look from her, and the next thing
he knew he had uttered all his thought. “You’re afraid for your life!”
It drew out her long look, and he soon enough saw why. A spasm came
into her face, the tears she had already been unable to hide overflowed
at first in silence, and then, as the sound suddenly comes from a
child, quickened to gasps, to sobs. She sat and covered her face with
her hands, giving up all attempt at a manner. “It’s how you see me,
it’s how you see me”—she caught her breath with it—“and it’s as I _am_,
and as I must take myself, and of course it’s no matter.” Her emotion
was at first so incoherent that he could only stand there at a loss,
stand with his sense of having upset her, though of having done it by
the truth. He had to listen to her in a silence that he made no
immediate effort to attenuate, feeling her doubly woeful amid all her
dim diffused elegance; consenting to it as he had consented to the
rest, and even conscious of some vague inward irony in the presence of
such a fine free range of bliss and bale. He couldn’t say it was _not_
no matter; for he was serving her to the end, he now knew, anyway—quite
as if what he thought of her had nothing to do with it. It was actually
moreover as if he didn’t think of her at all, as if he could think of
nothing but the passion, mature, abysmal, pitiful, she represented, and
the possibilities she betrayed. She was older for him to-night, visibly
less exempt from the touch of time; but she was as much as ever the
finest and subtlest creature, the happiest apparition, it had been
given him, in all his years, to meet; and yet he could see her there as
vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a maidservant crying for her young
man. The only thing was that she judged herself as the maidservant
wouldn’t; the weakness of which wisdom too, the dishonour of which
judgement, seemed but to sink her lower. Her collapse, however, no
doubt, was briefer and she had in a manner recovered herself before he
intervened. “Of course I’m afraid for my life. But that’s nothing. It
isn’t that.”
He was silent a little longer, as if thinking what it might be.
“There’s something I have in mind that I can still do.”
But she threw off at last, with a sharp sad headshake, drying her eyes,
what he could still do. “I don’t care for that. Of course, as I’ve
said, you’re acting, in your wonderful way, for yourself; and what’s
for yourself is no more my business—though I may reach out unholy hands
so clumsily to touch it—than if it were something in Timbuctoo. It’s
only that you don’t snub me, as you’ve had fifty chances to do—it’s
only your beautiful patience that makes one forget one’s manners. In
spite of your patience, all the same,” she went on, “you’d do anything
rather than be with us here, even if that were possible. You’d do
everything for us but be mixed up with us—which is a statement you can
easily answer to the advantage of your own manners. You can say ‘What’s
the use of talking of things that at the best are impossible?’ What
_is_ of course the use? It’s only my little madness. You’d talk if you
were tormented. And I don’t mean now about _him_. Oh for him—!”
Positively, strangely, bitterly, as it seemed to Strether, she gave
“him,” for the moment, away. “You don’t care what I think of you; but I
happen to care what you think of me. And what you _might_,” she added.
“What you perhaps even did.”
He gained time. “What I did—?”
“Did think before. Before this. _Didn’t_ you think—?”
But he had already stopped her. “I didn’t think anything. I never think
a step further than I’m obliged to.”
“That’s perfectly false, I believe,” she returned—“except that you may,
no doubt, often pull up when things become _too_ ugly; or even, I’ll
say, to save you a protest, too beautiful. At any rate, even so far as
it’s true, we’ve thrust on you appearances that you’ve had to take in
and that have therefore made your obligation. Ugly or beautiful—it
doesn’t matter what we call them—you were getting on without them, and
that’s where we’re detestable. We bore you—that’s where we are. And we
may well—for what we’ve cost you. All you can do _now_ is not to think
at all. And I who should have liked to seem to you—well, sublime!”
He could only after a moment re-echo Miss Barrace. “You’re wonderful!”
“I’m old and abject and hideous”—she went on as without hearing him.
“Abject above all. Or old above all. It’s when one’s old that it’s
worst. I don’t care what becomes of it—let what _will_; there it is.
It’s a doom—I know it; you can’t see it more than I do myself. Things
have to happen as they will.” With which she came back again to what,
face to face with him, had so quite broken down. “Of course you
wouldn’t, even if possible, and no matter what may happen to you, be
near us. But think of me, think of me—!” She exhaled it into air.
He took refuge in repeating something he had already said and that she
had made nothing of. “There’s something I believe I can still do.” And
he put his hand out for good-bye.
She again made nothing of it; she went on with her insistence. “That
won’t help you. There’s nothing to help you.”
“Well, it may help _you_,” he said.
She shook her head. “There’s not a grain of certainty in my future—for
the only certainty is that I shall be the loser in the end.”
She hadn’t taken his hand, but she moved with him to the door. “That’s
cheerful,” he laughed, “for your benefactor!”
“What’s cheerful for _me_,” she replied, “is that we might, you and I,
have been friends. That’s it—that’s it. You see how, as I say, I want
everything. I’ve wanted you too.”
“Ah but you’ve _had_ me!” he declared, at the door, with an emphasis
that made an end.