The Ambassadors (49 page)

“Ah then,” said Strether good-naturedly, “why
did
he bring her?”

“He couldn’t afford not to.”

“Oh you were a trophy—one of the spoils of conquest? But why in that case, since you do ‘compromise’—”

“Don’t I compromise
him
as well? I do compromise him as well,” Miss Barrace smiled. “I compromise him as hard as I can. But for Mr. Waymarsh it isn’t fatal. It’s—so far as his wonderful relation with Mrs. Pocock is concerned—favourable.” And then, as he still seemed slightly at sea: “The man who had succeeded with
me
, don’t you see? For her to get him from me was such an added incentive.”

Strether saw, but as if his path was still strewn with surprises. “It’s ‘from’ you then that she has got him?”

She was amused at his momentary muddle. “You can fancy my fight! She believes in her triumph. I think it has been part of her joy.”

“Oh her joy!” Strether sceptically murmured.

“Well, she thinks she has had her own way. And what’s to-night for her but a kind of apotheosis? Her frock’s really good.”

“Good enough to go to heaven in? For after a real apotheosis,” Strether went on, “there’s nothing
but
heaven. For Sarah there’s only to-morrow.”

“And you mean that she won’t find to-morrow heavenly?”

“Well, I mean that I somehow feel to-night—on her behalf—too good to be true. She has had her cake; that is she’s in the act now of having it, of swallowing the largest and sweetest piece. There won’t be another left for her. Certainly
I
haven’t one. It can only, at the best, be Chad.” He continued to make it out as for their common entertainment. “He may have one, as it were, up his sleeve; yet it’s borne in upon me that if he had—”

“He wouldn’t”—she quite understood—“have taken all
this
trouble? I dare say not, and, if I may be quite free and dreadful, I very much hope he won’t take any more. Of course I won’t pretend now,” she added, “not to know what it’s a question of.”

“Oh everyone must know now,” poor Strether thoughtfully admitted; “and it’s strange enough and funny enough that one should feel everybody here at this very moment to be knowing and watching and waiting.”

“Yes—isn’t it indeed funny?” Miss Barrace quite rose to it. “That’s the way we
are
in Paris.” She was always pleased with a new contribution to that queerness. “It’s wonderful! But, you know,” she declared, “it all depends on you. I don’t want to turn the knife in your vitals, but that’s naturally what you just now meant by our all being on top of you. We know you as the hero of the drama, and we’re gathered to see what you’ll do.”

Strether looked at her a moment with a light perhaps slightly obscured. “I think that must be why the hero has taken refuge in this corner. He’s scared at his heroism—he shrinks from his part.”

“Ah but we nevertheless believe he’ll play it. That’s why,” Miss Barrace kindly went on, “we take such an interest in you. We feel you’ll come up to the scratch.” And then as he seemed perhaps not quite to take fire: “Don’t let him do it.”

“Don’t let Chad go?”

“Yes, keep hold of him. With all this”—and she indicated the general tribute—“he has done enough. We love him here—he’s charming.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Strether, “the way you all can simplify when you will.”

But she gave it to him back. “It’s nothing to the way
you
will when you must.”

He winced at it as at the very voice of prophecy, and it kept him a moment quiet. He detained her, however, on her appearing about to leave him alone in the rather cold clearance their talk had made. “There positively isn’t a sign of a hero to-night; the hero’s dodging and shirking, the hero’s ashamed. Therefore, you know, I think, what you must all
really
be occupied with is the heroine.”

Miss Barrace took a minute. “The heroine?”

“The heroine. I’ve treated her,” said Strether, “not a bit like a hero. Oh,” he sighed, “I don’t do it well!”

She eased him off. “You do it as you can.” And then after another hesitation: “I think she’s satisfied.”

But he remained compunctious. “I haven’t been near her. I haven’t looked at her.”

“Ah then you’ve lost a good deal!”

He showed he knew it. “She’s more wonderful than ever?”

“Than ever. With Mr. Pocock.”

Strether wondered. “Madame de Vionnet—with Jim?”

“Madame de Vionnet—with ‘Jim.’ ” Miss Barrace was historic.

“And what’s she doing with him?”

“Ah you must ask
him
!”

Strether’s face lighted again at the prospect. “It
will
be amusing to do so.” Yet he continued to wonder. “But she must have some idea.”

“Of course she has—she has twenty ideas. She has in the first place,” said Miss Barrace, swinging a little her tortoise-shell, “that of doing her part. Her part is to help you.”

It came out as nothing had come yet; links were missing and connexions unnamed, but it was suddenly as if they were at the heart of their subject. “Yes; how much more she does it,” Strether gravely reflected, “than I help
her
!” It all came over him as with the near presence of the beauty, the grace, the intense, dissimulated spirit with which he had, as he said, been putting off contact. “She has courage.”

“Ah she has courage!” Miss Barrace quite agreed; and it was as if for a moment they saw the quantity in each other’s face.

But indeed the whole thing was present. “How much she must care!”

“Ah there it is. She does care. But it isn’t, is it,” Miss Barrace considerately added, “as if you had ever had any doubt of that?”

Strether seemed suddenly to like to feel that he really never had. “Why of course it’s the whole point.”

“Voilà!” Miss Barrace smiled.

“It’s why one came out,” Strether went on. “And it’s why one has stayed so long. And it’s also”—he abounded—“why one’s going home. It’s why, it’s why—”

“It’s why everything!” she concurred. “It’s why she might be to-night—for all she looks and shows, and for all your friend ‘Jim’ does—about twenty years old. That’s another of her ideas; to be for him, and to be quite easily and charmingly, as young as a little girl.”

Strether assisted at his distance. “ ‘For him’? For Chad—?”

“For Chad, in a manner, naturally, always. But in particular to-night for Mr. Pocock.” And then as her friend still stared: “Yes, it
is
of a bravery! But that’s what she has: her high sense of duty.” It was more than sufficiently before them. “When Mr. Newsome has his hands so embarrassed with his sister—”

“It’s quite the least”—Strether filled it out—“that she should take his sister’s husband? Certainly—quite the least. So she has taken him.”

“She has taken him.” It was all Miss Barrace had meant.

Still it remained enough. “It must be funny.”

“Oh it
is
funny.” That of course essentially went with it.

But it brought them back. “How indeed then she must care!” In answer to which Strether’s entertainer dropped a comprehensive “Ah!” expressive perhaps of some impatience for the time he took to get used to it. She herself had got used to it long before.

When one morning within the week he perceived the whole thing to be really at last upon him Strether’s immediate feeling was all relief. He had known this morning that something was about to happen—known it, in a moment, by Waymarsh’s manner when Waymarsh appeared before him during his brief consumption of coffee and a roll in the small slippery
salle-à-manger
so associated with rich rumination. Strether had taken there of late various lonely and absent-minded meals; he communed there, even at the end of June, with a suspected chill, the air of old shivers mixed with old savours, the air in which so many of his impressions had perversely matured; the place meanwhile renewing its message to him by the very circumstance of his single state. He now sat there, for the most part, to sigh softly, while he vaguely tilted his carafe, over the vision of how much better Waymarsh was occupied. That was really his success by the common measure—to have led this companion so on and on. He remembered how at first there had been scarce a squatting-place he could beguile him into passing;
the actual outcome of which at last was that there was scarce one that could arrest him in his rush. His rush—as Strether vividly and amusedly figured it—continued to be all with Sarah, and contained perhaps moreover the word of the whole enigma, whipping up in its fine full-flavoured froth the very principle, for good or for ill, of his own, of Strether’s destiny. It might after all, to the end, only be that they had united to save him, and indeed, so far as Waymarsh was concerned, that
had
to be the spring of action. Strether was glad at all events, in connexion with the case, that the saving he required was not more scant; so constituted a luxury was it in certain lights just to lurk there out of the full glare. He had moments of quite seriously wondering whether Waymarsh wouldn’t in fact, thanks to old friendship and a conceivable indulgence, make about as good terms for him as he might make for himself. They wouldn’t be the same terms of course; but they might have the advantage that he himself probably should be able to make none at all.

He was never in the morning very late, but Waymarsh had already been out, and, after a peep into the dim refectory, he presented himself with much less than usual of his large looseness. He had made sure, through the expense of glass exposed to the court, that they would be alone; and there was now in fact that about him that pretty well took up the room. He was dressed in the garments of summer; and save that his white waistcoat was redundant and bulging these things favoured, they determined, his expression. He wore a straw hat such as his friend hadn’t yet seen in Paris, and he showed a buttonhole freshly adorned with a magnificent rose. Strether read on the instant his story—how, astir for the previous hour, the sprinkled newness of the day, so pleasant at that season in Paris, he was fairly panting with the pulse of adventure and had been with Mrs. Pocock, unmistakeably, to the Marché aux Fleurs. Strether really knew in this vision of him a joy
that was akin to envy; so reversed as he stood there did their old positions seem; so comparatively doleful now showed, by the sharp turn of the wheel, the posture of the pilgrim from Woollett. He wondered, this pilgrim, if he had originally looked to Waymarsh so brave and well, so remarkably launched, as it was at present the latter’s privilege to appear. He recalled that his friend had remarked to him even at Chester that his aspect belied his plea of prostration; but there certainly couldn’t have been, for an issue, an aspect less concerned than Waymarsh’s with the menace of decay. Strether had at any rate never resembled a Southern planter of the great days—which was the image picturesquely suggested by the happy relation between the fuliginous face and the wide panama of his visitor. This type, it further amused him to guess, had been, on Waymarsh’s part, the object of Sarah’s care; he was convinced that her taste had not been a stranger to the conception and purchase of the hat, any more than her fine fingers had been guiltless of the bestowal of the rose. It came to him in the current of thought, as things so oddly did come, that
he
had never risen with the lark to attend a brilliant woman to the Marché aux Fleurs; this could be fastened on him in connexion neither with Miss Gostrey nor with Madame de Vionnet; the practice of getting up early for adventures could indeed in no manner be fastened on him. It came to him in fact that just here was his usual case: he was for ever missing things through his general genius for missing them, while others were for ever picking them up through a contrary bent. And it was others who looked abstemious and he who looked greedy; it was he somehow who finally paid, and it was others who mainly partook. Yes, he should go to the scaffold yet for he wouldn’t know quite whom. He almost, for that matter, felt on the scaffold now and really quite enjoying it. It worked out as
because
he was anxious there—it worked out as for this reason that Waymarsh was so blooming. It was
his
trip for health, for a change,
that proved the success—which was just what Strether, planning and exerting himself, had desired it should be. That truth already sat full-blown on his companion’s lips; benevolence breathed from them as with the warmth of active exercise, and also a little as with the bustle of haste.

“Mrs. Pocock, whom I left a quarter of an hour ago at her hotel, has asked me to mention to you that she would like to find you at home here in about another hour. She wants to see you; she has something to say—or considers, I believe, that you may have: so that I asked her myself why she shouldn’t come right round. She hasn’t
been
round yet—to see our place; and I took upon myself to say that I was sure you’d be glad to have her. The thing’s therefore, you see, to keep right here till she comes.”

The announcement was sociably, even though, after Waymarsh’s wont, somewhat solemnly made; but Strether quickly felt other things in it than these light features. It was the first approach, from that quarter, to admitted consciousness; it quickened his pulse; it simply meant at last that he should have but himself to thank if he didn’t know where he was. He had finished his breakfast; he pushed it away and was on his feet. There were plenty of elements of surprise, but only one of doubt. “The thing’s for
you
to keep here too?” Waymarsh had been slightly ambiguous.

He wasn’t ambiguous, however, after this enquiry; and Strether’s understanding had probably never before opened so wide and effective a mouth as it was to open during the next five minutes. It was no part of his friend’s wish, as appeared, to help to receive Mrs. Pocock; he quite understood the spirit in which she was to present herself, but his connexion with her visit was limited to his having—well, as he might say—perhaps a little promoted it. He had thought, and had let her know it, that Strether possibly would think she might have been round before. At any rate, as turned out, she had been wanting herself, quite a while, to come.
“I told her,” said Waymarsh, “that it would have been a bright idea if she had only carried it out before.”