The Ambassadors (57 page)

He then knew more or less how he had been affected—he but half
knew at the time. There had been plenty to affect him even after,
as has been said, they had shaken down; for his consciousness,
though muffled, had its sharpest moments during this passage, a
marked drop into innocent friendly Bohemia. They then had put their
elbows on the table, deploring the premature end of their two or
three dishes; which they had tried to make up with another bottle
while Chad joked a little spasmodically, perhaps even a little
irrelevantly, with the hostess. What it all came to had been that
fiction and fable WERE, inevitably, in the air, and not as a simple
term of comparison, but as a result of things said; also that they
were blinking it, all round, and that they yet needn't, so much as
that, have blinked it—though indeed if they hadn't Strether didn't
quite see what else they could have done. Strether didn't quite see
THAT even at an hour or two past midnight, even when he had, at his
hotel, for a long time, without a light and without undressing, sat
back on his bedroom sofa and stared straight before him. He was, at
that point of vantage, in full possession, to make of it all what
he could. He kept making of it that there had been simply a LIE in
the charming affair—a lie on which one could now, detached and
deliberate, perfectly put one's finger. It was with the lie that
they had eaten and drunk and talked and laughed, that they had
waited for their carriole rather impatiently, and had then got into
the vehicle and, sensibly subsiding, driven their three or four
miles through the darkening summer night. The eating and drinking,
which had been a resource, had had the effect of having served its
turn; the talk and laughter had done as much; and it was during
their somewhat tedious progress to the station, during the waits
there, the further delays, their submission to fatigue, their
silences in the dim compartment of the much-stopping train, that he
prepared himself for reflexions to come. It had been a performance,
Madame de Vionnet's manner, and though it had to that degree
faltered toward the end, as through her ceasing to believe in it,
as if she had asked herself, or Chad had found a moment
surreptitiously to ask her, what after all was the use, a
performance it had none the less quite handsomely remained, with
the final fact about it that it was on the whole easier to keep up
than to abandon.

From the point of view of presence of mind it had been very
wonderful indeed, wonderful for readiness, for beautiful assurance,
for the way her decision was taken on the spot, without time to
confer with Chad, without time for anything. Their only conference
could have been the brief instants in the boat before they
confessed to recognising the spectator on the bank, for they hadn't
been alone together a moment since and must have communicated all
in silence. It was a part of the deep impression for Strether, and
not the least of the deep interest, that they COULD so
communicate—that Chad in particular could let her know he left it
to her. He habitually left things to others, as Strether was so
well aware, and it in fact came over our friend in these
meditations that there had been as yet no such vivid illustration
of his famous knowing how to live. It was as if he had humoured her
to the extent of letting her lie without correction—almost as if,
really, he would be coming round in the morning to set the matter,
as between Strether and himself, right. Of course he couldn't quite
come; it was a case in which a man was obliged to accept the
woman's version, even when fantastic; if she had, with more flurry
than she cared to show, elected, as the phrase was, to represent
that they had left Paris that morning, and with no design but of
getting back within the day—if she had so sized-up, in the Woollett
phrase, their necessity, she knew best her own measure. There were
things, all the same, it was impossible to blink and which made
this measure an odd one—the too evident fact for instance that she
hadn't started out for the day dressed and hatted and shod, and
even, for that matter, pink parasol'd, as she had been in the boat.
From what did the drop in her assurance proceed as the tension
increased—from what did this slightly baffled ingenuity spring but
from her consciousness of not presenting, as night closed in, with
not so much as a shawl to wrap her round, an appearance that
matched her story? She admitted that she was cold, but only to
blame her imprudence which Chad suffered her to give such account
of as she might. Her shawl and Chad's overcoat and her other
garments, and his, those they had each worn the day before, were at
the place, best known to themselves—a quiet retreat enough, no
doubt—at which they had been spending the twenty-four hours, to
which they had fully meant to return that evening, from which they
had so remarkably swum into Strether's ken, and the tacit
repudiation of which had been thus the essence of her comedy.
Strether saw how she had perceived in a flash that they couldn't
quite look to going back there under his nose; though, honestly, as
he gouged deeper into the matter, he was somewhat surprised, as
Chad likewise had perhaps been, at the uprising of this scruple. He
seemed even to divine that she had entertained it rather for Chad
than for herself, and that, as the young man had lacked the chance
to enlighten her, she had had to go on with it, he meanwhile
mistaking her motive.

He was rather glad, none the less, that they had in point of
fact not parted at the Cheval Blanc, that he hadn't been reduced to
giving them his blessing for an idyllic retreat down the river. He
had had in the actual case to make-believe more than he liked, but
this was nothing, it struck him, to what the other event would have
required. Could he, literally, quite have faced the other event?
Would he have been capable of making the best of it with them? This
was what he was trying to do now; but with the advantage of his
being able to give more time to it a good deal counteracted by his
sense of what, over and above the central fact itself, he had to
swallow. It was the quantity of make-believe involved and so
vividly exemplified that most disagreed with his spiritual stomach.
He moved, however, from the consideration of that quantity—to say
nothing of the consciousness of that organ—back to the other
feature of the show, the deep, deep truth of the intimacy revealed.
That was what, in his vain vigil, he oftenest reverted to:
intimacy, at such a point, was LIKE that—and what in the world else
would one have wished it to be like? It was all very well for him
to feel the pity of its being so much like lying; he almost
blushed, in the dark, for the way he had dressed the possibility in
vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll. He had
made them—and by no fault of their own—momentarily pull it for him,
the possibility, out of this vagueness; and must he not therefore
take it now as they had had simply, with whatever thin
attenuations, to give it to him? The very question, it may be
added, made him feel lonely and cold. There was the element of the
awkward all round, but Chad and Madame de Vionnet had at least the
comfort that they could talk it over together. With whom could HE
talk of such things?—unless indeed always, at almost any stage,
with Maria? He foresaw that Miss Gostrey would come again into
requisition on the morrow; though it wasn't to be denied that he
was already a little afraid of her "What on earth—that's what I
want to know now—had you then supposed?" He recognised at last that
he had really been trying all along to suppose nothing. Verily,
verily, his labour had been lost. He found himself supposing
innumerable and wonderful things.

Strether couldn't have said he had during the previous hours
definitely expected it; yet when, later on, that morning—though no
later indeed than for his coming forth at ten o'clock—he saw the
concierge produce, on his approach, a petit bleu delivered since
his letters had been sent up, he recognised the appearance as the
first symptom of a sequel. He then knew he had been thinking of
some early sign from Chad as more likely, after all, than not; and
this would be precisely the early sign. He took it so for granted
that he opened the petit bleu just where he had stopped, in the
pleasant cool draught of the porte-cochere—only curious to see
where the young man would, at such a juncture, break out. His
curiosity, however, was more than gratified; the small missive,
whose gummed edge he had detached without attention to the address,
not being from the young man at all, but from the person whom the
case gave him on the spot as still more worth while. Worth while or
not, he went round to the nearest telegraph-office, the big one on
the Boulevard, with a directness that almost confessed to a fear of
the danger of delay. He might have been thinking that if he didn't
go before he could think he wouldn't perhaps go at all. He at any
rate kept, in the lower side-pocket of his morning coat, a very
deliberate hand on his blue missive, crumpling it up rather
tenderly than harshly. He wrote a reply, on the Boulevard, also in
the form of a petit bleu—which was quickly done, under pressure of
the place, inasmuch as, like Madame de Vionnet's own communication,
it consisted of the fewest words. She had asked him if he could do
her the very great kindness of coming to see her that evening at
half-past nine, and he answered, as if nothing were easier, that he
would present himself at the hour she named. She had added a line
of postscript, to the effect that she would come to him elsewhere
and at his own hour if he preferred; but he took no notice of this,
feeling that if he saw her at all half the value of it would be in
seeing her where he had already seen her best. He mightn't see her
at all; that was one of the reflexions he made after writing and
before he dropped his closed card into the box; he mightn't see any
one at all any more at all; he might make an end as well now as
ever, leaving things as they were, since he was doubtless not to
leave them better, and taking his way home so far as should appear
that a home remained to him. This alternative was for a few minutes
so sharp that if he at last did deposit his missive it was perhaps
because the pressure of the place had an effect.

There was none other, however, than the common and constant
pressure, familiar to our friend under the rubric of Postes et
Telegraphes—the something in the air of these establishments; the
vibration of the vast strange life of the town, the influence of
the types, the performers concocting their messages; the little
prompt Paris women, arranging, pretexting goodness knew what,
driving the dreadful needle-pointed public pen at the dreadful
sand-strewn public table: implements that symbolised for Strether's
too interpretative innocence something more acute in manners, more
sinister in morals, more fierce in the national life. After he had
put in his paper he had ranged himself, he was really amused to
think, on the side of the fierce, the sinister, the acute. He was
carrying on a correspondence, across the great city, quite in the
key of the Postes et Telegraphes in general; and it was fairly as
if the acceptance of that fact had come from something in his state
that sorted with the occupation of his neighbours. He was mixed up
with the typical tale of Paris, and so were they, poor things—how
could they all together help being? They were no worse than he, in
short, and he no worse than they—if, queerly enough, no better; and
at all events he had settled his hash, so that he went out to
begin, from that moment, his day of waiting. The great settlement
was, as he felt, in his preference for seeing his correspondent in
her own best conditions. THAT was part of the typical tale, the
part most significant in respect to himself. He liked the place she
lived in, the picture that each time squared itself, large and high
and clear, around her: every occasion of seeing it was a pleasure
of a different shade. Yet what precisely was he doing with shades
of pleasure now, and why hadn't he properly and logically compelled
her to commit herself to whatever of disadvantage and penalty the
situation might throw up? He might have proposed, as for Sarah
Pocock, the cold hospitality of his own salon de lecture, in which
the chill of Sarah's visit seemed still to abide and shades of
pleasure were dim; he might have suggested a stone bench in the
dusty Tuileries or a penny chair at the back part of the Champs
Elysees. These things would have been a trifle stern, and sternness
alone now wouldn't be sinister. An instinct in him cast about for
some form of discipline in which they might meet—some awkwardness
they would suffer from, some danger, or at least some grave
inconvenience, they would incur. This would give a sense—which the
spirit required, rather ached and sighed in the absence of—that
somebody was paying something somewhere and somehow, that they were
at least not all floating together on the silver stream of
impunity. Just instead of that to go and see her late in the
evening, as if, for all the world—well, as if he were as much in
the swim as anybody else: this had as little as possible in common
with the penal form.

Even when he had felt that objection melt away, however, the
practical difference was small; the long stretch of his interval
took the colour it would, and if he lived on thus with the sinister
from hour to hour it proved an easier thing than one might have
supposed in advance. He reverted in thought to his old tradition,
the one he had been brought up on and which even so many years of
life had but little worn away; the notion that the state of the
wrongdoer, or at least this person's happiness, presented some
special difficulty. What struck him now rather was the ease of
it—for nothing in truth appeared easier. It was an ease he himself
fairly tasted of for the rest of the day; giving himself quite up;
not so much as trying to dress it out, in any particular whatever,
as a difficulty; not after all going to see Maria—which would have
been in a manner a result of such dressing; only idling, lounging,
smoking, sitting in the shade, drinking lemonade and consuming
ices. The day had turned to heat and eventual thunder, and he now
and again went back to his hotel to find that Chad hadn't been
there. He hadn't yet struck himself, since leaving Woollett, so
much as a loafer, though there had been times when he believed
himself touching bottom. This was a deeper depth than any, and with
no foresight, scarcely with a care, as to what he should bring up.
He almost wondered if he didn't LOOK demoralised and disreputable;
he had the fanciful vision, as he sat and smoked, of some
accidental, some motived, return of the Pococks, who would be
passing along the Boulevard and would catch this view of him. They
would have distinctly, on his appearance, every ground for scandal.
But fate failed to administer even that sternness; the Pococks
never passed and Chad made no sign. Strether meanwhile continued to
hold off from Miss Gostrey, keeping her till to-morrow; so that by
evening his irresponsibility, his impunity, his luxury, had
become—there was no other word for them—immense.