The Ambassadors (38 page)

"And if you find she HAS—?"

"Will I then, you mean, bring them together?"

"Yes," said Chad with his pleasant promptness: "to show her
there's nothing in it."

Strether hesitated. "I don't know that I care very much what she
may think there's in it."

"Not if it represents what Mother thinks?"

"Ah what DOES your mother think?" There was in this some sound
of bewilderment.

But they were just driving up, and help, of a sort, might after
all be quite at hand. "Isn't that, my dear man, what we're both
just going to make out?"

Strether quitted the station half an hour later in different
company. Chad had taken charge, for the journey to the hotel, of
Sarah, Mamie, the maid and the luggage, all spaciously installed
and conveyed; and it was only after the four had rolled away that
his companion got into a cab with Jim. A strange new feeling had
come over Strether, in consequence of which his spirits had risen;
it was as if what had occurred on the alighting of his critics had
been something other than his fear, though his fear had vet not
been of an instant scene of violence. His impression had been
nothing but what was inevitable—he said that to himself; yet relief
and reassurance had softly dropped upon him. Nothing could be so
odd as to be indebted for these things to the look of faces and the
sound of voices that had been with him to satiety, as he might have
said, for years; but he now knew, all the same, how uneasy he had
felt; that was brought home to him by his present sense of a
respite. It had come moreover in the flash of an eye, it had come
in the smile with which Sarah, whom, at the window of her
compartment, they had effusively greeted from the platform, rustled
down to them a moment later, fresh and handsome from her cool June
progress through the charming land. It was only a sign, but enough:
she was going to be gracious and unallusive, she was going to play
the larger game—which was still more apparent, after she had
emerged from Chad's arms, in her direct greeting to the valued
friend of her family.

Strether WAS then as much as ever the valued friend of her
family, it was something he could at all events go on with; and the
manner of his response to it expressed even for himself how little
he had enjoyed the prospect of ceasing to figure in that likeness.
He had always seen Sarah gracious—had in fact rarely seen her shy
or dry, her marked thin-lipped smile, intense without brightness
and as prompt to act as the scrape of a safety-match; the
protrusion of her rather remarkably long chin, which in her case
represented invitation and urbanity, and not, as in most others,
pugnacity and defiance; the penetration of her voice to a distance,
the general encouragement and approval of her manner, were all
elements with which intercourse had made him familiar, but which he
noted today almost as if she had been a new acquaintance. This
first glimpse of her had given a brief but vivid accent to her
resemblance to her mother; he could have taken her for Mrs. Newsome
while she met his eyes as the train rolled into the station. It was
an impression that quickly dropped; Mrs. Newsome was much
handsomer, and while Sarah inclined to the massive her mother had,
at an age, still the girdle of a maid; also the latter's chin was
rather short, than long, and her smile, by good fortune, much more,
oh ever so much more, mercifully vague. Strether had seen Mrs.
Newsome reserved; he had literally heard her silent, though he had
never known her unpleasant. It was the case with Mrs. Pocock that
he had known HER unpleasant, even though he had never known her not
affable. She had forms of affability that were in a high degree
assertive; nothing for instance had ever been more striking than
that she was affable to Jim.

What had told in any case at the window of the train was her
high clear forehead, that forehead which her friends, for some
reason, always thought of as a "brow"; the long reach of her
eyes—it came out at this juncture in such a manner as to remind
him, oddly enough, also of that of Waymarsh's; and the unusual
gloss of her dark hair, dressed and hatted, after her mother's
refined example, with such an avoidance of extremes that it was
always spoken of at Woollett as "their own." Though this analogy
dropped as soon as she was on the platform it had lasted long
enough to make him feel all the advantage, as it were, of his
relief. The woman at home, the woman to whom he was attached, was
before him just long enough to give him again the measure of the
wretchedness, in fact really of the shame, of their having to
recognise the formation, between them, of a "split." He had taken
this measure in solitude and meditation: but the catastrophe, as
Sarah steamed up, looked for its seconds unprecedentedly
dreadful—or proved, more exactly, altogether unthinkable; so that
his finding something free and familiar to respond to brought with
it an instant renewal of his loyalty. He had suddenly sounded the
whole depth, had gasped at what he might have lost.

Well, he could now, for the quarter of an hour of their
detention hover about the travellers as soothingly as if their
direct message to him was that he had lost nothing. He wasn't going
to have Sarah write to her mother that night that he was in any way
altered or strange. There had been times enough for a month when it
had seemed to him that he was strange, that he was altered, in
every way; but that was a matter for himself; he knew at least
whose business it was not; it was not at all events such a
circumstance as Sarah's own unaided lights would help her to. Even
if she had come out to flash those lights more than yet appeared
she wouldn't make much headway against mere pleasantness. He
counted on being able to be merely pleasant to the end, and if only
from incapacity moreover to formulate anything different. He
couldn't even formulate to himself his being changed and queer; it
had taken place, the process, somewhere deep down; Maria Gostrey
had caught glimpses of it; but how was he to fish it up, even if he
desired, for Mrs. Pocock? This was then the spirit in which he
hovered, and with the easier throb in it much indebted furthermore
to the impression of high and established adequacy as a pretty girl
promptly produced in him by Mamie. He had wondered vaguely—turning
over many things in the fidget of his thoughts—if Mamie WERE as
pretty as Woollett published her; as to which issue seeing her now
again was to be so swept away by Woollett's opinion that this
consequence really let loose for the imagination an avalanche of
others. There were positively five minutes in which the last word
seemed of necessity to abide with a Woollett represented by a
Mamie. This was the sort of truth the place itself would feel; it
would send her forth in confidence; it would point to her with
triumph; it would take its stand on her with assurance; it would be
conscious of no requirements she didn't meet, of no question she
couldn't answer.

Well, it was right, Strether slipped smoothly enough into the
cheerfulness of saying: granted that a community MIGHT be best
represented by a young lady of twenty-two, Mamie perfectly played
the part, played it as if she were used to it, and looked and spoke
and dressed the character. He wondered if she mightn't, in the high
light of Paris, a cool full studio-light, becoming yet treacherous,
show as too conscious of these matters; but the next moment he felt
satisfied that her consciousness was after all empty for its size,
rather too simple than too mixed, and that the kind way with her
would be not to take many things out of it, but to put as many as
possible in. She was robust and conveniently tall; just a trifle
too bloodlessly fair perhaps, but with a pleasant public familiar
radiance that affirmed her vitality. She might have been
"receiving" for Woollett, wherever she found herself, and there was
something in her manner, her tone, her motion, her pretty blue
eyes, her pretty perfect teeth and her very small, too small, nose,
that immediately placed her, to the fancy, between the windows of a
hot bright room in which voices were high—up at that end to which
people were brought to be "presented." They were there to
congratulate, these images, and Strether's renewed vision, on this
hint, completed the idea. What Mamie was like was the happy bride,
the bride after the church and just before going away. She wasn't
the mere maiden, and yet was only as much married as that quantity
came to. She was in the brilliant acclaimed festal stage. Well,
might it last her long!

Strether rejoiced in these things for Chad, who was all genial
attention to the needs of his friends, besides having arranged that
his servant should reinforce him; the ladies were certainly
pleasant to see, and Mamie would be at any time and anywhere
pleasant to exhibit. She would look extraordinarily like his young
wife—the wife of a honeymoon, should he go about with her; but that
was his own affair—or perhaps it was hers; it was at any rate
something she couldn't help. Strether remembered how he had seen
him come up with Jeanne de Vionnet in Gloriani's garden, and the
fancy he had had about that—the fancy obscured now, thickly
overlaid with others; the recollection was during these minutes his
only note of trouble. He had often, in spite of himself, wondered
if Chad but too probably were not with Jeanne the object of a still
and shaded flame. It was on the cards that the child MIGHT be
tremulously in love, and this conviction now flickered up not a bit
the less for his disliking to think of it, for its being, in a
complicated situation, a complication the more, and for something
indescribable in Mamie, something at all events straightway lent
her by his own mind, something that gave her value, gave her
intensity and purpose, as the symbol of an opposition. Little
Jeanne wasn't really at all in question—how COULD she be?—yet from
the moment Miss Pocock had shaken her skirts on the platform,
touched up the immense bows of her hat and settled properly over
her shoulder the strap of her morocco-and-gilt travelling-satchel,
from that moment little Jeanne was opposed.

It was in the cab with Jim that impressions really crowded on
Strether, giving him the strangest sense of length of absence from
people among whom he had lived for years. Having them thus come out
to him was as if he had returned to find them: and the droll
promptitude of Jim's mental reaction threw his own initiation far
back into the past. Whoever might or mightn't be suited by what was
going on among them, Jim, for one, would certainly be: his instant
recognition—frank and whimsical—of what the affair was for HIM gave
Strether a glow of pleasure. "I say, you know, this IS about my
shape, and if it hadn't been for YOU—!" so he broke out as the
charming streets met his healthy appetite; and he wound up, after
an expressive nudge, with a clap of his companion's knee and an "Oh
you, you—you ARE doing it!" that was charged with rich meaning.
Strether felt in it the intention of homage, but, with a curiosity
otherwise occupied, postponed taking it up. What he was asking
himself for the time was how Sarah Pocock, in the opportunity
already given her, had judged her brother—from whom he himself, as
they finally, at the station, separated for their different
conveyances, had had a look into which he could read more than one
message. However Sarah was judging her brother, Chad's conclusion
about his sister, and about her husband and her husband's sister,
was at the least on the way not to fail of confidence. Strether
felt the confidence, and that, as the look between them was an
exchange, what he himself gave back was relatively vague. This
comparison of notes however could wait; everything struck him as
depending on the effect produced by Chad. Neither Sarah nor Mamie
had in any way, at the station—where they had had after all ample
time—broken out about it; which, to make up for this, was what our
friend had expected of Jim as soon as they should find themselves
together.

It was queer to him that he had that noiseless brush with Chad;
an ironic intelligence with this youth on the subject of his
relatives, an intelligence carried on under their nose and, as
might be said, at their expense—such a matter marked again for him
strongly the number of stages he had come; albeit that if the
number seemed great the time taken for the final one was but the
turn of a hand. He had before this had many moments of wondering if
he himself weren't perhaps changed even as Chad was changed. Only
what in Chad was conspicuous improvement—well, he had no name ready
for the working, in his own organism, of his own more timid dose.
He should have to see first what this action would amount to. And
for his occult passage with the young man, after all, the
directness of it had no greater oddity than the fact that the young
man's way with the three travellers should have been so happy a
manifestation. Strether liked him for it, on the spot, as he hadn't
yet liked him; it affected him while it lasted as he might have
been affected by some light pleasant perfect work of art: to that
degree that he wondered if they were really worthy of it, took it
in and did it justice; to that degree that it would have been
scarce a miracle if, there in the luggage-room, while they waited
for their things, Sarah had pulled his sleeve and drawn him aside.
"You're right; we haven't quite known what you mean, Mother and I,
but now we see. Chad's magnificent; what can one want more? If THIS
is the kind of thing—!" On which they might, as it were, have
embraced and begun to work together.

Ah how much, as it was, for all her bridling brightness—which
was merely general and noticed nothing—WOULD they work together?
Strether knew he was unreasonable; he set it down to his being
nervous: people couldn't notice everything and speak of everything
in a quarter of an hour. Possibly, no doubt, also, he made too much
of Chad's display. Yet, none the less, when, at the end of five
minutes, in the cab, Jim Pocock had said nothing either—hadn't
said, that is, what Strether wanted, though he had said much
else—it all suddenly bounced back to their being either stupid or
wilful. It was more probably on the whole the former; so that that
would be the drawback of the bridling brightness. Yes, they would
bridle and be bright; they would make the best of what was before
them, but their observation would fail; it would be beyond them;
they simply wouldn't understand. Of what use would it be then that
they had come?—if they weren't to be intelligent up to THAT point:
unless indeed he himself were utterly deluded and extravagant? Was
he, on this question of Chad's improvement, fantastic and away from
the truth? Did he live in a false world, a world that had grown
simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation—in the
face now of Jim's silence in particular—but the alarm of the vain
thing menaced by the touch of the real? Was this contribution of
the real possibly the mission of the Pococks?—had they come to make
the work of observation, as HE had practised observation, crack and
crumble, and to reduce Chad to the plain terms in which honest
minds could deal with him? Had they come in short to be sane where
Strether was destined to feel that he himself had only been
silly?