The Ambassadors (15 page)

Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished soup, at this array of scruples; Strether hadn’t yet got quite used to being so unprepared for the consequences of the impression he produced. It was comparatively easy to explain, however, that he hadn’t felt sure his guest would please. The person was a young man whose
acquaintance he had made but that afternoon in the course of rather a hindered enquiry for another person—an enquiry his new friend had just prevented in fact from being vain. “Oh,” said Strether, “I’ve all sorts of things to tell you!”—and he put it in a way that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh to help him to enjoy the telling. He waited for his fish, he drank of his wine, he wiped his long moustache, he leaned back in his chair, he took in the two English ladies who had just creaked past them and whom he would even have articulately greeted if they hadn’t rather chilled the impulse; so that all he could do was—by way of doing something—to say “Merci, François!” out quite loud when his fish was brought. Everything was there that he wanted, everything that could make the moment an occasion, that would do beautifully—everything but what Waymarsh might give. The little waxed salle-à-manger was sallow and sociable; François, dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a brother; the high-shouldered patronne, with her high-held, much-rubbed hands, seemed always assenting exuberantly to something unsaid; the Paris evening in short was, for Strether, in the very taste of the soup, in the goodness, as he was innocently pleased to think it, of the wine, in the pleasant coarse texture of the napkin and the crunch of the thick-crusted bread. These all were things congruous with his confession, and his confession was that he
had
—it would come out properly just there if Waymarsh would only take it properly—agreed to breakfast out, at twelve literally, the next day. He didn’t quite know where; the delicacy of the case came straight up in the remembrance of his new friend’s “We’ll see; I’ll take you somewhere!”—for it had required little more than that, after all, to let him right in. He was affected after a minute, face to face with his actual comrade, by the impulse to overcolour. There had already been things in respect to which he knew himself tempted by this perversity. If Waymarsh thought them bad he should at least have his
reason for his discomfort; so Strether showed them as worse. Still, he was now, in his way, sincerely perplexed.

Chad had been absent from the Boulevard Malesherbes—was absent from Paris altogether; he had learned that from the concierge, but had nevertheless gone up, and gone up—there were no two ways about it—from an uncontrollable, a really, if one would, depraved curiosity. The concierge had mentioned to him that a friend of the tenant of the troisième was for the time in possession; and this had been Strether’s pretext for a further enquiry, an experiment carried on, under Chad’s roof, without his knowledge. “I found his friend in fact there keeping the place warm, as he called it, for him; Chad himself being, as appears, in the south. He went a month ago to Cannes and though his return begins to be looked for it can’t be for some days. I might, you see, perfectly have waited a week; might have beaten a retreat as soon as I got this essential knowledge. But I beat no retreat; I did the opposite; I stayed, I dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I saw, in fine; and—I don’t know what to call it—I sniffed. It’s a detail, but it’s as if there were something—something very good—
to
sniff.”

Waymarsh’s face had shown his friend an attention apparently so remote that the latter was slightly surprised to find it at this point abreast with him. “Do you mean a smell? What of?”

“A charming scent. But I don’t know.”

Waymarsh gave an inferential grunt. “Does he live there with a woman?”

“I don’t know.”

Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then resumed. “Has he taken her off with him?”

“And will he bring her back?”—Strether fell into the enquiry. But he wound it up as before. “I don’t know.”

The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was with another drop back, another degustation of the Léoville, another wipe of
his moustache and another good word for François, seemed to produce in his companion a slight irritation. “Then what the devil
do
you know?”

“Well,” said Strether almost gaily, “I guess I don’t know anything!” His gaiety might have been a tribute to the fact that the state he had been reduced to did for him again what had been done by his talk of the matter with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre. It was somehow enlarging; and the air of that amplitude was now doubtless more or less—and all for Waymarsh to feel—in his further response. “That’s what I found out from the young man.”

“But I thought you said you found out nothing.”

“Nothing but that—that I don’t know anything.”

“And what good does that do you?”

“It’s just,” said Strether, “what I’ve come to you to help me to discover. I mean anything about anything over here. I
felt
that, up there. It regularly rose before me in its might. The young man moreover—Chad’s friend—as good as told me so.”

“As good as told you you know nothing about anything?” Waymarsh appeared to look at some one who might have as good as told
him
. “How old is he?”

“Well, I guess not thirty.”

“Yet you had to take that from him?”

“Oh I took a good deal more—since, as I tell you, I took an invitation to déjeuner.”

“And are you
going
to that unholy meal?”

“If you’ll come with me. He wants you too, you know. I told him about you. He gave me his card,” Strether pursued, “and his name’s rather funny. It’s John Little Bilham, and he says his two surnames are, on account of his being small, inevitably used together.”

“Well,” Waymarsh asked with due detachment from these details, “what’s he doing up there?”

“His account of himself is that he’s ‘only a little artist-man.’ That seemed to me perfectly to describe him. But he’s yet in the phase of study; this, you know, is the great art-school—to pass a certain number of years in which he came over. And he’s a great friend of Chad’s, and occupying Chad’s rooms just now because they’re so pleasant.
He’s
very pleasant and curious too,” Strether added—“though he’s not from Boston.”

Waymarsh looked already rather sick of him. “Where
is
he from?”

Strether thought. “I don’t know that, either. But he’s ‘notoriously,’ as he put it himself, not from Boston.”

“Well,” Waymarsh moralized from dry depths, “everyone can’t notoriously
be
from Boston. Why,” he continued, “is he curious?”

“Perhaps just for
that
—for one thing! But really,” Strether added, “for everything. When you meet him you’ll see.”

“Oh I don’t want to meet him,” Waymarsh impatiently growled. “Why don’t he go home?”

Strether hesitated. “Well, because he likes it over here.”

This appeared in particular more than Waymarsh could bear. “He ought then to be ashamed of himself, and, as you admit that you think so too, why drag him in?”

Strether’s reply again took time. “Perhaps I do think so myself—though I don’t quite yet admit it. I’m not a bit sure—it’s again one of the things I want to find out. I liked him, and
can
you like people—? But no matter.” He pulled himself up. “There’s no doubt I want you to come down on me and squash me.”

Waymarsh helped himself to the next course, which, however, proving not the dish he had just noted as supplied to the English ladies, had the effect of causing his imagination temporarily to wander. But it presently broke out at a softer spot. “Have they got a handsome place up there?”

“Oh a charming place; full of beautiful and valuable things.
I never saw such a place”—and Strether’s thought went back to it. “For a little artist-man—!” He could in fact scarce express it.

But his companion, who appeared now to have a view, insisted. “Well?”

“Well, life can hold nothing better. Besides, they’re things of which he’s in charge.”

“So that he does doorkeeper for your precious pair? Can life,” Waymarsh enquired, “hold nothing better than that?” Then as Strether, silent, seemed even yet to wonder, “Doesn’t he know what
she
is?” he went on.

“
I
don’t know. I didn’t ask him. I couldn’t. It was impossible. You wouldn’t either. Besides I didn’t want to. No more would you.” Strether in short explained it at a stroke. “You can’t make out over here what people do know.”

“Then what did you come over for?”

“Well, I suppose exactly to see for myself—without their aid.”

“Then what do you want mine for?”

“Oh,” Strether laughed, “you’re not one of
them
! I do know what
you
know.”

As, however, this last assertion caused Waymarsh again to look at him hard—such being the latter’s doubt of its implications—he felt his justification lame. Which was still more the case when Waymarsh presently said: “Look here, Strether. Quit this.”

Our friend smiled with a doubt of his own. “Do you mean my tone?”

“No—damn your tone. I mean your nosing round. Quit the whole job. Let them stew in their juice. You’re being used for a thing you ain’t fit for. People don’t take a fine-tooth comb to groom a horse.”

“Am I a fine-tooth comb?” Strether laughed. “It’s something I never called myself!”

“It’s what you are, all the same. You ain’t so young as you were, but you’ve kept your teeth.”

He acknowledged his friend’s humour. “Take care I don’t get them into
you
! You’d like them, my friends at home, Waymarsh,” he declared; “you’d really particularly like them. And I know”—it was slightly irrelevant, but he gave it sudden and singular force—“I know they’d like you!”

“Oh don’t work them off on
me
!” Waymarsh groaned.

Yet Strether still lingered with his hands in his pockets. “It’s really quite as indispensable as I say that Chad should be got back.”

“Indispensable to whom? To you?”

“Yes,” Strether presently said.

“Because if you get him you also get Mrs. Newsome?”

Strether faced it. “Yes.”

“And if you don’t get him you don’t get her?”

It might be merciless, but he continued not to flinch. “I think it might have some effect on our personal understanding. Chad’s of real importance—or can easily become so if he will—to the business.”

“And the business is of real importance to his mother’s husband?”

“Well, I naturally want what my future wife wants. And the thing will be much better if we have our own man in it.”

“If you have your own man in it, in other words,” Waymarsh said, “you’ll marry—you personally—more money. She’s already rich, as I understand you, but she’ll be richer still if the business can be made to boom on certain lines that you’ve laid down.”

“
I
haven’t laid them down,” Strether promptly returned. “Mr. Newsome—who knew extraordinarily well what he was about—laid them down ten years ago.”

Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake of his mane,
that
didn’t matter! “You’re fierce for the boom anyway.”

His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice of the charge. “I can scarcely be called fierce, I think, when I so freely
take my chance of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced in a sense counter to Mrs. Newsome’s own feelings.”

Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look. “I see. You’re afraid yourself of being squared. But you’re a humbug,” he added, “all the same.”

“Oh!” Strether quickly protested.

“Yes, you ask me for protection—which makes you very interesting; and then you won’t take it. You say you want to be squashed—”

“Ah but not so easily! Don’t you see,” Strether demanded, “where my interest, as already shown you, lies? It lies in my not being squared. If I’m squared where’s my marriage? If I miss my errand I miss that; and if I miss that I miss everything—I’m nowhere.”

Waymarsh—but all relentlessly—took this in. “What do I care where you are if you’re spoiled?”

Their eyes met on it an instant. “Thank you awfully,” Strether at last said. “But don’t you think
her
judgement of that—?”

“Ought to content me? No.”

It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that Strether again laughed. “You do her injustice. You really
must
know her. Good-night.”

He breakfasted with Mr. Bilham on the morrow, and, as inconsequently befell, with Waymarsh massively of the party. The latter announced, at the eleventh hour and much to his friend’s surprise, that, damn it, he would as soon join him as do anything else; on which they proceeded together, strolling in a state of detachment practically luxurious for them to the Boulevard Malesherbes, a couple engaged that day with the sharp spell of Paris as confessedly, it might have been seen, as any couple among the daily thousands so compromised. They walked, wandered, wondered and, a little, lost themselves; Strether hadn’t had for
years so rich a consciousness of time—a bag of gold into which he constantly dipped for a handful. It was present to him that when the little business with Mr. Bilham should be over he would still have shining hours to use absolutely as he liked. There was no great pulse of haste yet in this process of saving Chad; nor was that effect a bit more marked as he sat, half an hour later, with his legs under Chad’s mahogany, with Mr. Bilham on one side, with a friend of Mr. Bilham’s on the other, with Waymarsh stupendously opposite, and with the great hum of Paris coming up in softness, vagueness—for Strether himself indeed already positive sweetness—through the sunny windows toward which, the day before, his curiosity had raised its wings from below. The feeling strongest with him at that moment had borne fruit almost faster than he could taste it, and Strether literally felt at the present hour that there was a precipitation in his fate. He had known nothing and nobody as he stood in the street; but hadn’t his view now taken a bound in the direction of every one and of every thing?

“What’s he up to, what’s he up to?”—something like that was at the back of his head all the while in respect to little Bilham; but meanwhile, till he should make out, every one and every thing were as good as represented for him by the combination of his host and the lady on his left. The lady on his left, the lady thus promptly and ingeniously invited to “meet” Mr. Strether and Mr. Waymarsh—it was the way she herself expressed her case—was a very marked person, a person who had much to do with our friend’s asking himself if the occasion weren’t in its essence the most baited, the most gilded of traps. Baited it could properly be called when the repast was of so wise a savour, and gilded surrounding objects seemed inevitably to need to be when Miss Barrace—which was the lady’s name—looked at them with convex Parisian eyes and through a glass with a remarkably long
tortoise-shell handle. Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect and eminently gay, highly adorned, perfectly familiar, freely contradictious and reminding him of some last-century portrait of a clever head without powder—why Miss Barrace should have been in particular the note of a “trap” Strether couldn’t on the spot have explained; he blinked in the light of a conviction that he should know later on, and know well—as it came over him, for that matter, with force, that he should need to. He wondered what he was to think exactly of either of his new friends; since the young man, Chad’s intimate and deputy, had, in thus constituting the scene, practised so much more subtly than he had been prepared for, and since in especial Miss Barrace, surrounded clearly by every consideration, hadn’t scrupled to figure as a familiar object. It was interesting to him to feel that he was in the presence of new measures, other standards, a different scale of relations, and that evidently here were a happy pair who didn’t think of things at all as he and Waymarsh thought. Nothing was less to have been calculated in the business than that it should now be for him as if he and Waymarsh were comparatively quite at one.