The Ambassadors (54 page)

"Let it pass then," said Strether, "for one of mine as well. But
what would have been her temptation?"

"What are ever the temptations of women?"

He thought—but hadn't, naturally, to think too long. "Men?"

"She would have had you, with it, more for herself. But she saw
she could have you without it."

"Oh 'have' me!" Strether a trifle ambiguously sighed. "YOU," he
handsomely declared, "would have had me at any rate WITH it."

"Oh 'have' you!"—she echoed it as he had done. "I do have you,
however," she less ironically said, "from the moment you express a
wish."

He stopped before her, full of the disposition. "I'll express
fifty."

Which indeed begot in her, with a certain inconsequence, a
return of her small wail. "Ah there you are!"

There, if it were so, he continued for the rest of the time to
be, and it was as if to show her how she could still serve him
that, coming back to the departure of the Pococks, he gave her the
view, vivid with a hundred more touches than we can reproduce, of
what had happened for him that morning. He had had ten minutes with
Sarah at her hotel, ten minutes reconquered, by irresistible
pressure, from the time over which he had already described her to
Miss Gostrey as having, at the end of their interview on his own
premises, passed the great sponge of the future. He had caught her
by not announcing himself, had found her in her sitting-room with a
dressmaker and a lingere whose accounts she appeared to have been
more or less ingenuously settling and who soon withdrew. Then he
had explained to her how he had succeeded, late the night before,
in keeping his promise of seeing Chad. "I told her I'd take it
all."

"You'd 'take' it?"

"Why if he doesn't go."

Maria waited. "And who takes it if he does?" she enquired with a
certain grimness of gaiety.

"Well," said Strether, "I think I take, in any event,
everything."

"By which I suppose you mean," his companion brought out after a
moment, "that you definitely understand you now lose
everything."

He stood before her again. "It does come perhaps to the same
thing. But Chad, now that he has seen, doesn't really want it."

She could believe that, but she made, as always, for clearness.
"Still, what, after all, HAS he seen?"

"What they want of him. And it's enough."

"It contrasts so unfavourably with what Madame de Vionnet
wants?"

"It contrasts—just so; all round, and tremendously."

"Therefore, perhaps, most of all with what YOU want?"

"Oh," said Strether, "what I want is a thing I've ceased to
measure or even to understand."

But his friend none the less went on. "Do you want Mrs.
Newsome—after such a way of treating you?"

It was a straighter mode of dealing with this lady than they had
as yet—such was their high form—permitted themselves; but it seemed
not wholly for this that he delayed a moment. "I dare say it has
been, after all, the only way she could have imagined."

"And does that make you want her any more?"

"I've tremendously disappointed her," Strether thought it worth
while to mention.

"Of course you have. That's rudimentary; that was plain to us
long ago. But isn't it almost as plain," Maria went on, "that
you've even yet your straight remedy? Really drag him away, as I
believe you still can, and you'd cease to have to count with her
disappointment."

"Ah then," he laughed, "I should have to count with yours!"

But this barely struck her now. "What, in that case, should you
call counting? You haven't come out where you are, I think, to
please ME."

"Oh," he insisted, "that too, you know, has been part of it. I
can't separate—it's all one; and that's perhaps why, as I say, I
don't understand." But he was ready to declare again that this
didn't in the least matter; all the more that, as he affirmed, he
HADn't really as yet "come out." "She gives me after all, on its
coming to the pinch, a last mercy, another chance. They don't sail,
you see, for five or six weeks more, and they haven't—she admits
that—expected Chad would take part in their tour. It's still open
to him to join them, at the last, at Liverpool."

Miss Gostrey considered. "How in the world is it 'open' unless
you open it? How can he join them at Liverpool if he but sinks
deeper into his situation here?"

"He has given her—as I explained to you that she let me know
yesterday—his word of honour to do as I say."

Maria stared. "But if you say nothing!"

Well, he as usual walked about on it. "I did say something this
morning. I gave her my answer—the word I had promised her after
hearing from himself what HE had promised. What she demanded of me
yesterday, you'll remember, was the engagement then and there to
make him take up this vow."

"Well then," Miss Gostrey enquired, "was the purpose of your
visit to her only to decline?"

"No; it was to ask, odd as that may seem to you, for another
delay."

"Ah that's weak!"

"Precisely!" She had spoken with impatience, but, so far as that
at least, he knew where he was. "If I AM weak I want to find it
out. If I don't find it out I shall have the comfort, the little
glory, of thinking I'm strong."

"It's all the comfort, I judge," she returned, "that you WILL
have!"

"At any rate," he said, "it will have been a month more. Paris
may grow, from day to day, hot and dusty, as you say; but there are
other things that are hotter and dustier. I'm not afraid to stay
on; the summer here must be amusing in a wild—if it isn't a
tame—way of its own; the place at no time more picturesque. I think
I shall like it. And then," he benevolently smiled for her, "there
will be always you."

"Oh," she objected, "it won't be as a part of the
picturesqueness that I shall stay, for I shall be the plainest
thing about you. You may, you see, at any rate," she pursued, "have
nobody else. Madame de Vionnet may very well be going off, mayn't
she?—and Mr. Newsome by the same stroke: unless indeed you've had
an assurance from them to the contrary. So that if your idea's to
stay for them"—it was her duty to suggest it—"you may be left in
the lurch. Of course if they do stay"—she kept it up—"they would be
part of the picturesqueness. Or else indeed you might join them
somewhere."

Strether seemed to face it as if it were a happy thought; but
the next moment he spoke more critically. "Do you mean that they'll
probably go off together?"

She just considered. "I think it will be treating you quite
without ceremony if they do; though after all," she added, "it
would be difficult to see now quite what degree of ceremony
properly meets your case."

"Of course," Strether conceded, "my attitude toward them is
extraordinary."

"Just so; so that one may ask one's self what style of
proceeding on their own part can altogether match it. The attitude
of their own that won't pale in its light they've doubtless still
to work out. The really handsome thing perhaps," she presently
threw off, "WOULD be for them to withdraw into more secluded
conditions, offering at the same time to share them with you." He
looked at her, on this, as if some generous irritation—all in his
interest—had suddenly again flickered in her; and what she next
said indeed half-explained it. "Don't really be afraid to tell me
if what now holds you IS the pleasant prospect of the empty town,
with plenty of seats in the shade, cool drinks, deserted museums,
drives to the Bois in the evening, and our wonderful woman all to
yourself." And she kept it up still more. "The handsomest thing of
ALL, when one makes it out, would, I dare say, be that Mr. Chad
should for a while go off by himself. It's a pity, from that point
of view," she wound up, "that he doesn't pay his mother a visit. It
would at least occupy your interval." The thought in fact held her
a moment. "Why doesn't he pay his mother a visit? Even a week, at
this good moment, would do."

"My dear lady," Strether replied—and he had it even to himself
surprisingly ready—"my dear lady, his mother has paid HIM a visit.
Mrs. Newsome has been with him, this month, with an intensity that
I'm sure he has thoroughly felt; he has lavishly entertained her,
and she has let him have her thanks. Do you suggest he shall go
back for more of them?"

Well, she succeeded after a little in shaking it off. "I see.
It's what you don't suggest—what you haven't suggested. And you
know."

"So would you, my dear," he kindly said, "if you had so much as
seen her."

"As seen Mrs. Newsome?"

"No, Sarah—which, both for Chad and for myself, has served all
the purpose."

"And served it in a manner," she responsively mused, "so
extraordinary!"

"Well, you see," he partly explained, "what it comes to is that
she's all cold thought—which Sarah could serve to us cold without
its really losing anything. So it is that we know what she thinks
of us."

Maria had followed, but she had an arrest. "What I've never made
out, if you come to that, is what you think—I mean you
personally—of HER. Don't you so much, when all's said, as care a
little?"

"That," he answered with no loss of promptness, "is what even
Chad himself asked me last night. He asked me if I don't mind the
loss—well, the loss of an opulent future. Which moreover," he
hastened to add, "was a perfectly natural question."

"I call your attention, all the same," said Miss Gostrey, "to
the fact that I don't ask it. What I venture to ask is whether it's
to Mrs. Newsome herself that you're indifferent."

"I haven't been so"—he spoke with all assurance. "I've been the
very opposite. I've been, from the first moment, preoccupied with
the impression everything might be making on her—quite oppressed,
haunted, tormented by it. I've been interested ONLY in her seeing
what I've seen. And I've been as disappointed in her refusal to see
it as she has been in what has appeared to her the perversity of my
insistence."

"Do you mean that she has shocked you as you've shocked
her?"

Strether weighed it. "I'm probably not so shockable. But on the
other hand I've gone much further to meet her. She, on her side,
hasn't budged an inch."

"So that you're now at last"—Maria pointed the moral—"in the sad
stage of recriminations."

"No—it's only to you I speak. I've been like a lamb to Sarah.
I've only put my back to the wall. It's to THAT one naturally
staggers when one has been violently pushed there."

She watched him a moment. "Thrown over?"

"Well, as I feel I've landed somewhere I think I must have been
thrown."

She turned it over, but as hoping to clarify much rather than to
harmonise. "The thing is that I suppose you've been
disappointing—"

"Quite from the very first of my arrival? I dare say. I admit I
was surprising even to myself."

"And then of course," Maria went on, "I had much to do with
it."

"With my being surprising—?"

"That will do," she laughed, "if you're too delicate to call it
MY being! Naturally," she added, "you came over more or less for
surprises."

"Naturally!"—he valued the reminder.

"But they were to have been all for you"—she continued to piece
it out—"and none of them for HER."

Once more he stopped before her as if she had touched the point.
"That's just her difficulty—that she doesn't admit surprises. It's
a fact that, I think, describes and represents her; and it falls in
with what I tell you—that she's all, as I've called it, fine cold
thought. She had, to her own mind, worked the whole thing out in
advance, and worked it out for me as well as for herself. Whenever
she has done that, you see, there's no room left; no margin, as it
were, for any alteration. She's filled as full, packed as tight, as
she'll hold and if you wish to get anything more or different
either out or in—"

"You've got to make over altogether the woman herself?"

"What it comes to," said Strether, "is that you've got morally
and intellectually to get rid of her."

"Which would appear," Maria returned, "to be practically what
you've done."

But her friend threw back his head. "I haven't touched her. She
won't BE touched. I see it now as I've never done; and she hangs
together with a perfection of her own," he went on, "that does
suggest a kind of wrong in ANY change of her composition. It was at
any rate," he wound up, "the woman herself, as you call her the
whole moral and intellectual being or block, that Sarah brought me
over to take or to leave."

It turned Miss Gostrey to deeper thought. "Fancy having to take
at the point of the bayonet a whole moral and intellectual being or
block!"

"It was in fact," said Strether, "what, at home, I HAD done. But
somehow over there I didn't quite know it."

"One never does, I suppose," Miss Gostrey concurred, "realise in
advance, in such a case, the size, as you may say, of the block.
Little by little it looms up. It has been looming for you more and
more till at last you see it all."

"I see it all," he absently echoed, while his eyes might have
been fixing some particularly large iceberg in a cool blue northern
sea. "It's magnificent!" he then rather oddly exclaimed.

But his friend, who was used to this kind of inconsequence in
him, kept the thread. "There's nothing so magnificent—for making
others feel you—as to have no imagination."

It brought him straight round. "Ah there you are! It's what I
said last night to Chad. That he himself, I mean, has none."

"Then it would appear," Maria suggested, "that he has, after
all, something in common with his mother."

"He has in common that he makes one, as you say, 'feel' him. And
yet," he added, as if the question were interesting, "one feels
others too, even when they have plenty."