The Ambassadors (7 page)

Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared tribute had affected her as a deviation in one of those directions he couldn’t yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be still the one he had received from her. He accordingly handed her the card as if in restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt the difference and, with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology. “I like,” she observed, “your name.”

“Oh,” he answered, “you won’t have heard of it!” Yet he had his reasons for not being sure but that she perhaps might.

Ah it was but too visible! She read it over again as one who had never seen it. “ ‘Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether’ ”—she sounded it almost as freely as for any stranger. She repeated however that she liked it—“particularly the Lewis Lambert. It’s the name of a novel of Balzac’s.”

“Oh I know that!” said Strether.

“But the novel’s an awfully bad one.”

“I know that too,” Strether smiled. To which he added with an irrelevance that was only superficial: “I come from Woollett Massachusetts.” It made her for some reason—the irrelevance or whatever—laugh. Balzac had described many cities, but hadn’t described Woollett Massachusetts. “You say that,” she returned, “as if you wanted one immediately to know the worst.”

“Oh I think it’s a thing,” he said, “that you must already have made out. I feel it so that I certainly must look it, speak it, and, as people say there, ‘act’ it. It sticks out of me, and you knew surely for yourself as soon as you looked at me.”

“The worst, you mean?”

“Well, the fact of where I come from. There at any rate it
is
; so that you won’t be able, if anything happens, to say I’ve not been straight with you.”

“I see”—and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point he had made. “But what do you think of as happening?”

Though he wasn’t shy—which was rather anomalous—Strether gazed about without meeting her eyes; a motion that was frequent with him in talk, yet of which his words often seemed not at all the effect. “Why that you should find me too hopeless.” With which they walked on again together while she answered, as they went, that the most “hopeless” of her countryfolk were in general precisely those she liked best. All sorts of other pleasant small things—small things that were yet large for him—flowered in the air of the occasion; but the bearing of the occasion itself on matters still remote concerns us too closely to permit us to multiply our illustrations. Two or three, however, in truth, we should perhaps regret to lose. The tortuous wall—girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands—wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English town and ordered English country. Too deep almost for words was the delight of these things to Strether; yet as deeply mixed with it were certain images of his inward picture. He had trod this walk in the far-off time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling it, only enriched it for present feeling and marked his renewal as a thing substantial enough to share. It was with Waymarsh he should have shared it, and he was now accordingly taking from him something that was his due. He looked repeatedly at his watch, and when he had done so for the fifth time Miss Gostrey took him up.

“You’re doing something that you think not right.”

It so touched the place that he quite changed colour and his laugh grew almost awkward. “Am I enjoying it as much as
that
?”

“You’re not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought.”

“I see”—he appeared thoughtfully to agree. “Great is my privilege.”

“Oh it’s not your privilege! It has nothing to do with
me
. It has to do with yourself. Your failure’s general.”

“Ah there you are!” he laughed. “It’s the failure of Woollett.
That’s
general.”

“The failure to enjoy,” Miss Gostrey explained, “is what I mean.”

“Precisely. Woollett isn’t sure it ought to enjoy. If it were it would. But it hasn’t, poor thing,” Strether continued, “any one to show it how. It’s not like me. I have somebody.”

They had stopped, in the afternoon sunshine—constantly pausing, in their stroll, for the sharper sense of what they saw—and Strether rested on one of the high sides of the old stony groove of the little rampart. He leaned back on this support with his face to the tower of the cathedral, now admirably commanded by their station, the high red-brown mass, square and subordinately spired and crocketed, retouched and restored, but charming to his long-sealed eyes and with the first swallows of the year weaving their flight all round it. Miss Gostrey lingered near him, full of an air, to which she more and more justified her right, of understanding the effect of things. She quite concurred. “You’ve indeed somebody.” And she added: “I wish you
would
let me show you how!”

“Oh I’m afraid of you!” he cheerfully pleaded.

She kept on him a moment, through her glasses and through his own, a certain pleasant pointedness. “Ah no, you’re not! You’re not in the least, thank goodness! If you had been we shouldn’t so soon have found ourselves here together. I think,” she comfortably concluded, “you trust me.”

“I think I do!—but that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I shouldn’t mind if I didn’t. It’s falling thus in twenty minutes so utterly into your hands. I dare say,” Strether continued, “it’s a sort of thing you’re thoroughly familiar with; but nothing more extraordinary has ever happened to me.”

She watched him with all her kindness. “That means simply that you’ve recognized me—which
is
rather beautiful and rare. You see what I am.” As on this, however, he protested, with a good-humoured headshake, a resignation of any such claim, she had a moment of explanation. “If you’ll only come on further as you
have
come you’ll at any rate make out. My own fate has been too many for me, and I’ve succumbed to it. I’m a general guide—to ‘Europe,’ don’t you know? I wait for people—I put them through. I pick them up—I set them down. I’m a sort of superior ‘courier-maid.’ I’m a companion at large. I take people, as I’ve told you, about. I never sought it—it has come to me. It has been my fate, and one’s fate one accepts. It’s a dreadful thing to have to say, in so wicked a world, but I verily believe that, such as you see me, there’s nothing I don’t know. I know all the shops and the prices—but I know worse things still. I bear on my back the huge load of our national consciousness, or, in other words—for it comes to that—of our nation itself. Of what is our nation composed but of the men and women individually on my shoulders? I don’t do it, you know, for any particular advantage. I don’t do it, for instance—some people do, you know—for money.”

Strether could only listen and wonder and weigh his chance. “And yet, affected as you are then to so many of your clients, you can scarcely be said to do it for love.” He waited a moment. “How do we reward you?”

She had her own hesitation, but “You don’t!” she finally returned, setting him again in motion. They went on, but in a few minutes, though while still thinking over what she had said, he once more took out his watch; mechanically, unconsciously and as
if made nervous by the mere exhilaration of what struck him as her strange and cynical wit. He looked at the hour without seeing it, and then, on something again said by his companion, had another pause. “You’re really in terror of him.”

He smiled a smile that he almost felt to be sickly. “Now you can see why I’m afraid of you.”

“Because I’ve such illuminations? Why they’re all for your help! It’s what I told you,” she added, “just now. You feel as if this were wrong.”

He fell back once more, settling himself against the parapet as if to hear more about it. “Then get me out!”

Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the appeal, but, as if it were a question of immediate action, she visibly considered. “Out of waiting for him?—of seeing him at all?”

“Oh no—not that,” said poor Strether, looking grave. “I’ve got to wait for him—and I want very much to see him. But out of the terror. You did put your finger on it a few minutes ago. It’s general, but it avails itself of particular occasions. That’s what it’s doing for me now. I’m always considering something else; something else, I mean, than the thing of the moment. The obsession of the other thing is the terror. I’m considering at present for instance something else than
you
.”

She listened with charming earnestness. “Oh you oughtn’t to do that!”

“It’s what I admit. Make it then impossible.”

She continued to think. “Is it really an ‘order’ from you?—that I shall take the job?
Will
you give yourself up?”

Poor Strether heaved his sigh. “If I only could! But that’s the deuce of it—that I never can. No—I can’t.”

She wasn’t, however, discouraged. “But you want to at least?”

“Oh unspeakably!”

“Ah then, if you’ll try!”—and she took over the job, as she had
called it, on the spot. “Trust me!” she exclaimed; and the action of this, as they retraced their steps, was presently to make him pass his hand into her arm in the manner of a benign dependent paternal old person who wishes to be “nice” to a younger one. If he drew it out again indeed as they approached the inn this may have been because, after more talk had passed between them, the relation of age, or at least of experience—which, for that matter, had already played to and fro with some freedom—affected him as incurring a readjustment. It was at all events perhaps lucky that they arrived in sufficiently separate fashion within range of the hotel-door. The young lady they had left in the glass cage watched as if she had come to await them on the threshold. At her side stood a person equally interested, by his attitude, in their return, and the effect of the sight of whom was instantly to determine for Strether another of those responsive arrests that we have had so repeatedly to note. He left it to Miss Gostrey to name, with the fine full bravado, as it almost struck him, of her “Mr. Waymarsh!” what was to have been, what—he more than ever felt as his short stare of suspended welcome took things in—would have been, but for herself, his doom. It was already upon him even at that distance—Mr. Waymarsh was for
his
part joyless.

He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that Waymarsh, even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own prompt and lucid allusions and enquiries, by their having publicly partaken of dinner in her company, and by another stroll, to which she was not a stranger, out into the town to look at the cathedral by moonlight—it was a blank that the resident of Milrose, though admitting acquaintance with the Munsters, professed himself unable to fill. He had no recollection of Miss Gostrey, and two or three questions that she put to him about those members of his circle had, to Strether’s observation, the same effect he himself had already more directly felt—the effect of appearing to place all knowledge, for the time, on this original woman’s side. It interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such relation for her with his friend as there could possibly be a question of, and it particularly struck him that they were to be marked altogether in Waymarsh’s quarter. This added to his own sense of having gone
far with her—gave him an early illustration of a much shorter course. There was a certitude he immediately grasped—a conviction that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever degree of acquaintance, to profit by her.

There had been after the first interchange among the three a talk of some five minutes in the hall, and then the two men had adjourned to the garden, Miss Gostrey for the time disappearing. Strether in due course accompanied his friend to the room he had bespoken and had, before going out, scrupulously visited; where at the end of another half-hour he had no less discreetly left him. On leaving him he repaired straight to his own room, but with the prompt effect of feeling the compass of that chamber resented by his condition. There he enjoyed at once the first consequence of their reunion. A place was too small for him after it that had seemed large enough before. He had awaited it with something he would have been sorry, have been almost ashamed not to recognize as emotion, yet with a tacit assumption at the same time that emotion would in the event find itself relieved. The actual oddity was that he was only more excited; and his excitement—to which indeed he would have found it difficult instantly to give a name—brought him once more downstairs and caused him for some minutes vaguely to wander. He went once more to the garden; he looked into the public room, found Miss Gostrey writing letters and backed out; he roamed, fidgeted and wasted time; but he was to have his more intimate session with his friend before the evening closed.

It was late—not till Strether had spent an hour upstairs with him—that this subject consented to betake himself to doubtful rest. Dinner and the subsequent stroll by moonlight—a dream, on Strether’s part, of romantic effects rather prosaically merged in a mere missing of thicker coats—had measurably intervened, and this midnight conference was the result of Waymarsh’s having
(when they were free, as he put it, of their fashionable friend) found the smoking-room not quite what he wanted, and yet bed what he wanted less. His most frequent form of words was that he knew himself, and they were applied on this occasion to his certainty of not sleeping. He knew himself well enough to know that he should have a night of prowling unless he should succeed, as a preliminary, in getting prodigiously tired. If the effort directed to this end involved till a late hour, the presence of Strether—consisted, that is, in the detention of the latter for full discourse—there was yet an impression of minor discipline involved for our friend in the picture Waymarsh made as he sat in trousers and shirt on the edge of his couch. With his long legs extended and his large back much bent, he nursed alternately, for an almost incredible time, his elbows and his beard. He struck his visitor as extremely, as almost wilfully uncomfortable; yet what had this been for Strether, from that first glimpse of him disconcerted in the porch of the hotel, but the predominant note? The discomfort was in a manner contagious, as well as also in a manner inconsequent and unfounded; the visitor felt that unless he should get used to it—or unless Waymarsh himself should—it would constitute a menace for his own prepared, his own already confirmed, consciousness of the agreeable. On their first going up together to the room Strether had selected for him Waymarsh had looked it over in silence and with a sigh that represented for his companion, if not the habit of disapprobation, at least the despair of felicity; and this look had recurred to Strether as the key of much he had since observed. “Europe,” he had begun to gather from these things, had up to now rather failed of its message to him; he hadn’t got into tune with it and had at the end of three months almost renounced any such expectation.