The Ambassadors (55 page)

Miss Gostrey continued suggestive. "Madame de Vionnet?"

"SHE has plenty."

"Certainly—she had quantities of old. But there are different
ways of making one's self felt."

"Yes, it comes, no doubt, to that. You now—"

He was benevolently going on, but she wouldn't have it. "Oh I
DON'T make myself felt; so my quantity needn't be settled. Yours,
you know," she said, "is monstrous. No one has ever had so
much."

It struck him for a moment. "That's what Chad also thinks."

"There YOU are then—though it isn't for him to complain of
it!"

"Oh he doesn't complain of it," said Strether.

"That's all that would be wanting! But apropos of what," Maria
went on, "did the question come up?"

"Well, of his asking me what it is I gain."

She had a pause. "Then as I've asked you too it settles my case.
Oh you HAVE," she repeated, "treasures of imagination."

But he had been for an instant thinking away from this, and he
came up in another place. "And yet Mrs. Newsome—it's a thing to
remember—HAS imagined, did, that is, imagine, and apparently still
does, horrors about what I should have found. I was booked, by her
vision—extraordinarily intense, after all—to find them; and that I
didn't, that I couldn't, that, as she evidently felt, I
wouldn't—this evidently didn't at all, as they say, 'suit' her
book. It was more than she could bear. That was her
disappointment."

"You mean you were to have found Chad himself horrible?"

"I was to have found the woman."

"Horrible?"

"Found her as she imagined her." And Strether paused as if for
his own expression of it he could add no touch to that picture.

His companion had meanwhile thought. "She imagined stupidly—so
it comes to the same thing."

"Stupidly? Oh!" said Strether.

But she insisted. "She imagined meanly."

He had it, however, better. "It couldn't but be ignorantly."

"Well, intensity with ignorance—what do you want worse?"

This question might have held him, but he let it pass. "Sarah
isn't ignorant—now; she keeps up the theory of the horrible."

"Ah but she's intense—and that by itself will do sometimes as
well. If it doesn't do, in this case, at any rate, to deny that
Marie's charming, it will do at least to deny that she's good."

"What I claim is that she's good for Chad."

"You don't claim"—she seemed to like it clear—"that she's good
for YOU."

But he continued without heeding. "That's what I wanted them to
come out for—to see for themselves if she's bad for him."

"And now that they've done so they won't admit that she's good
even for anything?"

"They do think," Strether presently admitted, "that she's on the
whole about as bad for me. But they're consistent of course,
inasmuch as they've their clear view of what's good for both of
us."

"For you, to begin with"—Maria, all responsive, confined the
question for the moment—"to eliminate from your existence and if
possible even from your memory the dreadful creature that I must
gruesomely shadow forth for them, even more than to eliminate the
distincter evil—thereby a little less portentous—of the person
whose confederate you've suffered yourself to become. However,
that's comparatively simple. You can easily, at the worst, after
all, give me up."

"I can easily at the worst, after all, give you up." The irony
was so obvious that it needed no care. "I can easily at the worst,
after all, even forget you."

"Call that then workable. But Mr. Newsome has much more to
forget. How can HE do it?"

"Ah there again we are! That's just what I was to have made him
do; just where I was to have worked with him and helped."

She took it in silence and without attenuation—as if perhaps
from very familiarity with the facts; and her thought made a
connexion without showing the links. "Do you remember how we used
to talk at Chester and in London about my seeing you through?" She
spoke as of far-off things and as if they had spent weeks at the
places she named.

"It's just what you ARE doing."

"Ah but the worst—since you've left such a margin—may be still
to come. You may yet break down."

"Yes, I may yet break down. But will you take me—?"

He had hesitated, and she waited. "Take you?"

"For as long as I can bear it."

She also debated "Mr. Newsome and Madame de Vionnet may, as we
were saying, leave town. How long do you think you can bear it
without them?"

Strether's reply to this was at first another question. "Do you
mean in order to get away from me?"

Her answer had an abruptness. "Don't find me rude if I say I
should think they'd want to!"

He looked at her hard again—seemed even for an instant to have
an intensity of thought under which his colour changed. But he
smiled. "You mean after what they've done to me?"

"After what SHE has."

At this, however, with a laugh, he was all right again. "Ah but
she hasn't done it yet!"

He had taken the train a few days after this from a station—as
well as to a station—selected almost at random; such days, whatever
should happen, were numbered, and he had gone forth under the
impulse—artless enough, no doubt—to give the whole of one of them
to that French ruralism, with its cool special green, into which he
had hitherto looked only through the little oblong window of the
picture-frame. It had been as yet for the most part but a land of
fancy for him—the background of fiction, the medium of art, the
nursery of letters; practically as distant as Greece, but
practically also well-nigh as consecrated. Romance could weave
itself, for Strether's sense, out of elements mild enough; and even
after what he had, as he felt, lately "been through," he could
thrill a little at the chance of seeing something somewhere that
would remind him of a certain small Lambinet that had charmed him,
long years before, at a Boston dealer's and that he had quite
absurdly never forgotten. It had been offered, he remembered, at a
price he had been instructed to believe the lowest ever named for a
Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on having to
recognise, all the same, as beyond a dream of possibility. He had
dreamed—had turned and twisted possibilities for an hour: it had
been the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase
of a work of art. The adventure, it will be perceived, was modest;
but the memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of
association, was sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the
picture he WOULD have bought—the particular production that had
made him for the moment overstep the modesty of nature. He was
quite aware that if he were to see it again he should perhaps have
a drop or a shock, and he never found himself wishing that the
wheel of time would turn it up again, just as he had seen it in the
maroon-coloured, sky-lighted inner shrine of Tremont Street. It
would be a different thing, however, to see the remembered mixture
resolved back into its elements—to assist at the restoration to
nature of the whole far-away hour: the dusty day in Boston, the
background of the Fitchburg Depot, of the maroon-coloured sanctum,
the special-green vision, the ridiculous price, the poplars, the
willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady
woody horizon.

He observed in respect to his train almost no condition save
that it should stop a few times after getting out of the banlieue;
he threw himself on the general amiability of the day for the hint
of where to alight. His theory of his excursion was that he could
alight anywhere—not nearer Paris than an hour's run—on catching a
suggestion of the particular note required. It made its sign, the
suggestion—weather, air, light, colour and his mood all
favouring—at the end of some eighty minutes; the train pulled up
just at the right spot, and he found himself getting out as
securely as if to keep an appointment. It will be felt of him that
he could amuse himself, at his age, with very small things if it be
again noted that his appointment was only with a superseded Boston
fashion. He hadn't gone far without the quick confidence that it
would be quite sufficiently kept. The oblong gilt frame disposed
its enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and river—a
river of which he didn't know, and didn't want to know, the
name—fell into a composition, full of felicity, within them; the
sky was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left
was white and the church on the right was grey; it was all there,
in short—it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was
France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking about in
it. He did this last, for an hour, to his heart's content, making
for the shady woody horizon and boring so deep into his impression
and his idleness that he might fairly have got through them again
and reached the maroon-coloured wall. It was a wonder, no doubt,
that the taste of idleness for him shouldn't need more time to
sweeten; but it had in fact taken the few previous days; it had
been sweetening in truth ever since the retreat of the Pococks. He
walked and walked as if to show himself how little he had now to
do; he had nothing to do but turn off to some hillside where he
might stretch himself and hear the poplars rustle, and whence—in
the course of an afternoon so spent, an afternoon richly suffused
too with the sense of a book in his pocket—he should sufficiently
command the scene to be able to pick out just the right little
rustic inn for an experiment in respect to dinner. There was a
train back to Paris at 9.20, and he saw himself partaking, at the
close of the day, with the enhancements of a coarse white cloth and
a sanded door, of something fried and felicitous, washed down with
authentic wine; after which he might, as he liked, either stroll
back to his station in the gloaming or propose for the local
carriole and converse with his driver, a driver who naturally
wouldn't fail of a stiff clean blouse, of a knitted nightcap and of
the genius of response—who, in fine, would sit on the shafts, tell
him what the French people were thinking, and remind him, as indeed
the whole episode would incidentally do, of Maupassant. Strether
heard his lips, for the first time in French air, as this vision
assumed consistency, emit sounds of expressive intention without
fear of his company. He had been afraid of Chad and of Maria and of
Madame de Vionnet; he had been most of all afraid of Waymarsh, in
whose presence, so far as they had mixed together in the light of
the town, he had never without somehow paying for it aired either
his vocabulary or his accent. He usually paid for it by meeting
immediately afterwards Waymarsh's eye.

Such were the liberties with which his fancy played after he had
turned off to the hillside that did really and truly, as well as
most amiably, await him beneath the poplars, the hillside that made
him feel, for a murmurous couple of hours, how happy had been his
thought. He had the sense of success, of a finer harmony in things;
nothing but what had turned out as yet according to his plan. It
most of all came home to him, as he lay on his back on the grass,
that Sarah had really gone, that his tension was really relaxed;
the peace diffused in these ideas might be delusive, but it hung
about him none the less for the time. It fairly, for half an hour,
sent him to sleep; he pulled his straw hat over his eyes—he had
bought it the day before with a reminiscence of Waymarsh's—and lost
himself anew in Lambinet. It was as if he had found out he was
tired—tired not from his walk, but from that inward exercise which
had known, on the whole, for three months, so little intermission.
That was it—when once they were off he had dropped; this moreover
was what he had dropped to, and now he was touching bottom. He was
kept luxuriously quiet, soothed and amused by the consciousness of
what he had found at the end of his descent. It was very much what
he had told Maria Gostrey he should like to stay on for, the
hugely-distributed Paris of summer, alternately dazzling and dusky,
with a weight lifted for him off its columns and cornices and with
shade and air in the flutter of awnings as wide as avenues. It was
present to him without attenuation that, reaching out, the day
after making the remark, for some proof of his freedom, he had gone
that very afternoon to see Madame de Vionnet. He had gone again the
next day but one, and the effect of the two visits, the after-sense
of the couple of hours spent with her, was almost that of fulness
and frequency. The brave intention of frequency, so great with him
from the moment of his finding himself unjustly suspected at
Woollett, had remained rather theoretic, and one of the things he
could muse about under his poplars was the source of the special
shyness that had still made him careful. He had surely got rid of
it now, this special shyness; what had become of it if it hadn't
precisely, within the week, rubbed off?

It struck him now in fact as sufficiently plain that if he had
still been careful he had been so for a reason. He had really
feared, in his behaviour, a lapse from good faith; if there was a
danger of one's liking such a woman too much one's best safety was
in waiting at least till one had the right to do so. In the light
of the last few days the danger was fairly vivid; so that it was
proportionately fortunate that the right was likewise established.
It seemed to our friend that he had on each occasion profited to
the utmost by the latter: how could he have done so more, he at all
events asked himself, than in having immediately let her know that,
if it was all the same to her, he preferred not to talk about
anything tiresome? He had never in his life so sacrificed an armful
of high interests as in that remark; he had never so prepared the
way for the comparatively frivolous as in addressing it to Madame
de Vionnet's intelligence. It hadn't been till later that he quite
recalled how in conjuring away everything but the pleasant he had
conjured away almost all they had hitherto talked about; it was not
till later even that he remembered how, with their new tone, they
hadn't so much as mentioned the name of Chad himself. One of the
things that most lingered with him on his hillside was this
delightful facility, with such a woman, of arriving at a new tone;
he thought, as he lay on his back, of all the tones she might make
possible if one were to try her, and at any rate of the probability
that one could trust her to fit them to occasions. He had wanted
her to feel that, as he was disinterested now, so she herself
should be, and she had showed she felt it, and he had showed he was
grateful, and it had been for all the world as if he were calling
for the first time. They had had other, but irrelevant, meetings;
it was quite as if, had they sooner known how much they REALLY had
in common, there were quantities of comparatively dull matters they
might have skipped. Well, they were skipping them now, even to
graceful gratitude, even to handsome "Don't mention it!"—and it was
amazing what could still come up without reference to what had been
going on between them. It might have been, on analysis, nothing
more than Shakespeare and the musical glasses; but it had served
all the purpose of his appearing to have said to her: "Don't like
me, if it's a question of liking me, for anything obvious and
clumsy that I've, as they call it, 'done' for you: like me—well,
like me, hang it, for anything else you choose. So, by the same
propriety, don't be for me simply the person I've come to know
through my awkward connexion with Chad—was ever anything, by the
way, MORE awkward? Be for me, please, with all your admirable tact
and trust, just whatever I may show you it's a present pleasure to
me to think you." It had been a large indication to meet; but if
she hadn't met it what HAD she done, and how had their time
together slipped along so smoothly, mild but not slow, and melting,
liquefying, into his happy illusion of idleness? He could recognise
on the other hand that he had probably not been without reason, in
his prior, his restricted state, for keeping an eye on his
liability to lapse from good faith.