The Ambassadors (50 page)

Their eyes met on it with some intensity—during the few seconds
of which something happened quite out of proportion to the time. It
happened that Strether, looking thus at his friend, didn't take his
answer for truth—and that something more again occurred in
consequence of THAT. Yes—Waymarsh just DID know about Mrs.
Newsome's cables: to what other end than that had they dined
together at Bignon's? Strether almost felt for the instant that it
was to Mrs. Newsome herself the dinner had been given; and, for
that matter, quite felt how she must have known about it and, as he
might think, protected and consecrated it. He had a quick blurred
view of daily cables, questions, answers, signals: clear enough was
his vision of the expense that, when so wound up, the lady at home
was prepared to incur. Vivid not less was his memory of what,
during his long observation of her, some of her attainments of that
high pitch had cost her. Distinctly she was at the highest now, and
Waymarsh, who imagined himself an independent performer, was
really, forcing his fine old natural voice, an overstrained
accompanist. The whole reference of his errand seemed to mark her
for Strether as by this time consentingly familiar to him, and
nothing yet had so despoiled her of a special shade of
consideration. "You don't know," he asked, "whether Sarah has been
directed from home to try me on the matter of my also going to
Switzerland?"

"I know," said Waymarsh as manfully as possible, "nothing
whatever about her private affairs; though I believe her to be
acting in conformity with things that have my highest respect." It
was as manful as possible, but it was still the false note—as it
had to be to convey so sorry a statement. He knew everything,
Strether more and more felt, that he thus disclaimed, and his
little punishment was just in this doom to a second fib. What
falser position—given the man—could the most vindictive mind
impose? He ended by squeezing through a passage in which three
months before he would certainly have stuck fast. "Mrs Pocock will
probably be ready herself to answer any enquiry you may put to her.
But," he continued, "BUT—!" He faltered on it.

"But what? Don't put her too many?"

Waymarsh looked large, but the harm was done; he couldn't, do
what he would, help looking rosy. "Don't do anything you'll be
sorry for."

It was an attenuation, Strether guessed, of something else that
had been on his lips; it was a sudden drop to directness, and was
thereby the voice of sincerity. He had fallen to the supplicating
note, and that immediately, for our friend, made a difference and
reinstated him. They were in communication as they had been, that
first morning, in Sarah's salon and in her presence and Madame de
Vionnet's; and the same recognition of a great good will was again,
after all, possible. Only the amount of response Waymarsh had then
taken for granted was doubled, decupled now. This came out when he
presently said: "Of course I needn't assure you I hope you'll come
with us." Then it was that his implications and expectations loomed
up for Strether as almost pathetically gross.

The latter patted his shoulder while he thanked him, giving the
go-by to the question of joining the Pococks; he expressed the joy
he felt at seeing him go forth again so brave and free, and he in
fact almost took leave of him on the spot. "I shall see you again
of course before you go; but I'm meanwhile much obliged to you for
arranging so conveniently for what you've told me. I shall walk up
and down in the court there—dear little old court which we've each
bepaced so, this last couple of months, to the tune of our flights
and our drops, our hesitations and our plunges: I shall hang about
there, all impatience and excitement, please let Sarah know, till
she graciously presents herself. Leave me with her without fear,"
he laughed; "I assure you I shan't hurt her. I don't think either
she'll hurt ME: I'm in a situation in which damage was some time
ago discounted. Besides, THAT isn't what worries you—but don't,
don't explain! We're all right as we are: which was the degree of
success our adventure was pledged to for each of us. We weren't, it
seemed, all right as we were before; and we've got over the ground,
all things considered, quickly. I hope you'll have a lovely time in
the Alps."

Waymarsh fairly looked up at him as from the foot of them. "I
don't know as I OUGHT really to go."

It was the conscience of Milrose in the very voice of Milrose,
but, oh it was feeble and flat! Strether suddenly felt quite
ashamed for him; he breathed a greater boldness. "LET yourself, on
the contrary, go—in all agreeable directions. These are precious
hours—at our age they mayn't recur. Don't have it to say to
yourself at Milrose, next winter, that you hadn't courage for
them." And then as his comrade queerly stared: "Live up to Mrs.
Pocock."

"Live up to her?"

"You're a great help to her."

Waymarsh looked at it as at one of the uncomfortable things that
were certainly true and that it was yet ironical to say. "It's more
then than you are."

"That's exactly your own chance and advantage. Besides," said
Strether, "I do in my way contribute. I know what I'm about."

Waymarsh had kept on his great panama, and, as he now stood
nearer the door, his last look beneath the shade of it had turned
again to darkness and warning. "So do I! See here, Strether."

"I know what you're going to say. 'Quit this'?"

"Quit this!" But it lacked its old intensity; nothing of it
remained; it went out of the room with him.

Almost the first thing, strangely enough, that, about an hour
later, Strether found himself doing in Sarah's presence was to
remark articulately on this failure, in their friend, of what had
been superficially his great distinction. It was as if—he alluded
of course to the grand manner—the dear man had sacrificed it to
some other advantage; which would be of course only for himself to
measure. It might be simply that he was physically so much more
sound than on his first coming out; this was all prosaic,
comparatively cheerful and vulgar. And fortunately, if one came to
that, his improvement in health was really itself grander than any
manner it could be conceived as having cost him. "You yourself
alone, dear Sarah"—Strether took the plunge—"have done him, it
strikes me, in these three weeks, as much good as all the rest of
his time together."

It was a plunge because somehow the range of reference was, in
the conditions, "funny," and made funnier still by Sarah's
attitude, by the turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so
sensibly taken. Her appearance was really indeed funnier than
anything else—the spirit in which he felt her to be there as soon
as she was there, the shade of obscurity that cleared up for him as
soon as he was seated with her in the small salon de lecture that
had, for the most part, in all the weeks, witnessed the wane of his
early vivacity of discussion with Waymarsh. It was an immense
thing, quite a tremendous thing, for her to have come: this truth
opened out to him in spite of his having already arrived for
himself at a fairly vivid view of it. He had done exactly what he
had given Waymarsh his word for—had walked and re-walked the court
while he awaited her advent; acquiring in this exercise an amount
of light that affected him at the time as flooding the scene. She
had decided upon the step in order to give him the benefit of a
doubt, in order to be able to say to her mother that she had, even
to abjectness, smoothed the way for him. The doubt had been as to
whether he mightn't take her as not having smoothed it—and the
admonition had possibly come from Waymarsh's more detached spirit.
Waymarsh had at any rate, certainly, thrown his weight into the
scale—he had pointed to the importance of depriving their friend of
a grievance. She had done justice to the plea, and it was to set
herself right with a high ideal that she actually sat there in her
state. Her calculation was sharp in the immobility with which she
held her tall parasol-stick upright and at arm's length, quite as
if she had struck the place to plant her flag; in the separate
precautions she took not to show as nervous; in the aggressive
repose in which she did quite nothing but wait for him. Doubt
ceased to be possible from the moment he had taken in that she had
arrived with no proposal whatever; that her concern was simply to
show what she had come to receive. She had come to receive his
submission, and Waymarsh was to have made it plain to him that she
would expect nothing less. He saw fifty things, her host, at this
convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was that their
anxious friend hadn't quite had the hand required of him. Waymarsh
HAD, however, uttered the request that she might find him mild, and
while hanging about the court before her arrival he had turned over
with zeal the different ways in which he could be so. The
difficulty was that if he was mild he wasn't, for her purpose,
conscious. If she wished him conscious—as everything about her
cried aloud that she did—she must accordingly be at costs to make
him so. Conscious he was, for himself—but only of too many things;
so she must choose the one she required.

Practically, however, it at last got itself named, and when once
that had happened they were quite at the centre of their situation.
One thing had really done as well as another; when Strether had
spoken of Waymarsh's leaving him, and that had necessarily brought
on a reference to Mrs. Pocock's similar intention, the jump was but
short to supreme lucidity. Light became indeed after that so
intense that Strether would doubtless have but half made out, in
the prodigious glare, by which of the two the issue had been in
fact precipitated. It was, in their contracted quarters, as much
there between them as if it had been something suddenly spilled
with a crash and a splash on the floor. The form of his submission
was to be an engagement to acquit himself within the twenty-four
hours. "He'll go in a moment if you give him the word—he assures me
on his honour he'll do that": this came in its order, out of its
order, in respect to Chad, after the crash had occurred. It came
repeatedly during the time taken by Strether to feel that he was
even more fixed in his rigour than he had supposed—the time he was
not above adding to a little by telling her that such a way of
putting it on her brother's part left him sufficiently surprised.
She wasn't at all funny at last—she was really fine; and he felt
easily where she was strong—strong for herself. It hadn't yet so
come home to him that she was nobly and appointedly officious. She
was acting in interests grander and clearer than that of her poor
little personal, poor little Parisian equilibrium, and all his
consciousness of her mother's moral pressure profited by this proof
of its sustaining force. She would be held up; she would be
strengthened; he needn't in the least be anxious for her. What
would once more have been distinct to him had he tried to make it
so was that, as Mrs. Newsome was essentially all moral pressure,
the presence of this element was almost identical with her own
presence. It wasn't perhaps that he felt he was dealing with her
straight, but it was certainly as if she had been dealing straight
with HIM. She was reaching him somehow by the lengthened arm of the
spirit, and he was having to that extent to take her into account;
but he wasn't reaching her in turn, not making her take HIM; he was
only reaching Sarah, who appeared to take so little of him.
"Something has clearly passed between you and Chad," he presently
said, "that I think I ought to know something more about. Does he
put it all," he smiled, "on me?"

"Did you come out," she asked, "to put it all on HIM?"

But he replied to this no further than, after an instant, by
saying: "Oh it's all right. Chad I mean's all right in having said
to you—well anything he may have said. I'll TAKE it all—what he
does put on me. Only I must see him before I see you again."

She hesitated, but she brought it out. "Is it absolutely
necessary you should see me again?"

"Certainly, if I'm to give you any definite word about
anything."

"Is it your idea then," she returned, "that I shall keep on
meeting you only to be exposed to fresh humiliation?"

He fixed her a longer time. "Are your instructions from Mrs.
Newsome that you shall, even at the worst, absolutely and
irretrievably break with me?"

"My instructions from Mrs. Newsome are, if you please, my
affair. You know perfectly what your own were, and you can judge
for yourself of what it can do for you to have made what you have
of them. You can perfectly see, at any rate, I'll go so far as to
say, that if I wish not to expose myself I must wish still less to
expose HER." She had already said more than she had quite expected;
but, though she had also pulled up, the colour in her face showed
him he should from one moment to the other have it all. He now
indeed felt the high importance of his having it. "What is your
conduct," she broke out as if to explain—"what is your conduct but
an outrage to women like US? I mean your acting as if there can be
a doubt—as between us and such another—of his duty?"

He thought a moment. It was rather much to deal with at once;
not only the question itself, but the sore abysses it revealed. "Of
course they're totally different kinds of duty."

"And do you pretend that he has any at all—to such another?"

"Do you mean to Madame de Vionnet?" He uttered the name not to
affront her, but yet again to gain time—time that he needed for
taking in something still other and larger than her demand of a
moment before. It wasn't at once that he could see all that was in
her actual challenge; but when he did he found himself just
checking a low vague sound, a sound which was perhaps the nearest
approach his vocal chords had ever known to a growl. Everything
Mrs. Pocock had failed to give a sign of recognising in Chad as a
particular part of a transformation—everything that had lent
intention to this particular failure—affected him as gathered into
a large loose bundle and thrown, in her words, into his face. The
missile made him to that extent catch his breath; which however he
presently recovered. "Why when a woman's at once so charming and so
beneficent—"