The Ambassadors (58 page)

Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picture—he was
moving in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever
canvas—he drew a long breath: it was so presented to him from the
first that the spell of his luxury wouldn't be broken. He wouldn't
have, that is, to become responsible—this was admirably in the air:
she had sent for him precisely to let him feel it, so that he might
go on with the comfort (comfort already established, hadn't it
been?) of regarding his ordeal, the ordeal of the weeks of Sarah's
stay and of their climax, as safely traversed and left behind him.
Didn't she just wish to assure him that SHE now took it all and so
kept it; that he was absolutely not to worry any more, was only to
rest on his laurels and continue generously to help her? The light
in her beautiful formal room was dim, though it would do, as
everything would always do; the hot night had kept out lamps, but
there was a pair of clusters of candles that glimmered over the
chimney-piece like the tall tapers of an altar. The windows were
all open, their redundant hangings swaying a little, and he heard
once more, from the empty court, the small plash of the fountain.
From beyond this, and as from a great distance—beyond the court,
beyond the corps de logis forming the front—came, as if excited and
exciting, the vague voice of Paris. Strether had all along been
subject to sudden gusts of fancy in connexion with such matters as
these—odd starts of the historic sense, suppositions and
divinations with no warrant but their intensity. Thus and so, on
the eve of the great recorded dates, the days and nights of
revolution, the sounds had come in, the omens, the beginnings
broken out. They were the smell of revolution, the smell of the
public temper—or perhaps simply the smell of blood.

It was at present queer beyond words, "subtle," he would have
risked saying, that such suggestions should keep crossing the
scene; but it was doubtless the effect of the thunder in the air,
which had hung about all day without release. His hostess was
dressed as for thunderous times, and it fell in with the kind of
imagination we have just attributed to him that she should be in
simplest coolest white, of a character so old-fashioned, if he were
not mistaken, that Madame Roland must on the scaffold have worn
something like it. This effect was enhanced by a small black fichu
or scarf, of crape or gauze, disposed quaintly round her bosom and
now completing as by a mystic touch the pathetic, the noble
analogy. Poor Strether in fact scarce knew what analogy was evoked
for him as the charming woman, receiving him and making him, as she
could do such things, at once familiarly and gravely welcome, moved
over her great room with her image almost repeated in its polished
floor, which had been fully bared for summer. The associations of
the place, all felt again; the gleam here and there, in the subdued
light, of glass and gilt and parquet, with the quietness of her own
note as the centre—these things were at first as delicate as if
they had been ghostly, and he was sure in a moment that, whatever
he should find he had come for, it wouldn't be for an impression
that had previously failed him. That conviction held him from the
outset, and, seeming singularly to simplify, certified to him that
the objects about would help him, would really help them both. No,
he might never see them again—this was only too probably the last
time; and he should certainly see nothing in the least degree like
them. He should soon be going to where such things were not, and it
would be a small mercy for memory, for fancy, to have, in that
stress, a loaf on the shelf. He knew in advance he should look back
on the perception actually sharpest with him as on the view of
something old, old, old, the oldest thing he had ever personally
touched; and he also knew, even while he took his companion in as
the feature among features, that memory and fancy couldn't help
being enlisted for her. She might intend what she would, but this
was beyond anything she could intend, with things from far
back—tyrannies of history, facts of type, values, as the painters
said, of expression—all working for her and giving her the supreme
chance, the chance of the happy, the really luxurious few, the
chance, on a great occasion, to be natural and simple. She had
never, with him, been more so; or if it was the perfection of art
it would never—and that came to the same thing—be proved against
her.

What was truly wonderful was her way of differing so from time
to time without detriment to her simplicity. Caprices, he was sure
she felt, were before anything else bad manners, and that judgement
in her was by itself a thing making more for safety of intercourse
than anything that in his various own past intercourses he had had
to reckon on. If therefore her presence was now quite other than
the one she had shown him the night before, there was nothing of
violence in the change—it was all harmony and reason. It gave him a
mild deep person, whereas he had had on the occasion to which their
interview was a direct reference a person committed to movement and
surface and abounding in them; but she was in either character more
remarkable for nothing than for her bridging of intervals, and this
now fell in with what he understood he was to leave to her. The
only thing was that, if he was to leave it ALL to her, why exactly
had she sent for him? He had had, vaguely, in advance, his
explanation, his view of the probability of her wishing to set
something right, to deal in some way with the fraud so lately
practised on his presumed credulity. Would she attempt to carry it
further or would she blot it out? Would she throw over it some more
or less happy colour; or would she do nothing about it at all? He
perceived soon enough at least that, however reasonable she might
be, she wasn't vulgarly confused, and it herewith pressed upon him
that their eminent "lie," Chad's and hers, was simply after all
such an inevitable tribute to good taste as he couldn't have wished
them not to render. Away from them, during his vigil, he had seemed
to wince at the amount of comedy involved; whereas in his present
posture he could only ask himself how he should enjoy any attempt
from her to take the comedy back. He shouldn't enjoy it at all;
but, once more and yet once more, he could trust her. That is he
could trust her to make deception right. As she presented things
the ugliness—goodness knew why—went out of them; none the less too
that she could present them, with an art of her own, by not so much
as touching them. She let the matter, at all events, lie where it
was—where the previous twenty-four hours had placed it; appearing
merely to circle about it respectfully, tenderly, almost piously,
while she took up another question.

She knew she hadn't really thrown dust in his eyes; this, the
previous night, before they separated, had practically passed
between them; and, as she had sent for him to see what the
difference thus made for him might amount to, so he was conscious
at the end of five minutes that he had been tried and tested. She
had settled with Chad after he left them that she would, for her
satisfaction, assure herself of this quantity, and Chad had, as
usual, let her have her way. Chad was always letting people have
their way when he felt that it would somehow turn his wheel for
him; it somehow always did turn his wheel. Strether felt, oddly
enough, before these facts, freshly and consentingly passive; they
again so rubbed it into him that the couple thus fixing his
attention were intimate, that his intervention had absolutely aided
and intensified their intimacy, and that in fine he must accept the
consequence of that. He had absolutely become, himself, with his
perceptions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the
droll mixture, as it must seem to them, of his braveries and his
fears, the general spectacle of his art and his innocence, almost
an added link and certainly a common priceless ground for them to
meet upon. It was as if he had been hearing their very tone when
she brought out a reference that was comparatively straight. "The
last twice that you've been here, you know, I never asked you," she
said with an abrupt transition—they had been pretending before this
to talk simply of the charm of yesterday and of the interest of the
country they had seen. The effort was confessedly vain; not for
such talk had she invited him; and her impatient reminder was of
their having done for it all the needful on his coming to her after
Sarah's flight. What she hadn't asked him then was to state to her
where and how he stood for her; she had been resting on Chad's
report of their midnight hour together in the Boulevard
Malesherbes. The thing therefore she at present desired was ushered
in by this recall of the two occasions on which, disinterested and
merciful, she hadn't worried him. To-night truly she WOULD worry
him, and this was her appeal to him to let her risk it. He wasn't
to mind if she bored him a little: she had behaved, after
all—hadn't she?—so awfully, awfully well.

"Oh, you're all right, you're all right," he almost impatiently
declared; his impatience being moreover not for her pressure, but
for her scruple. More and more distinct to him was the tune to
which she would have had the matter out with Chad: more and more
vivid for him the idea that she had been nervous as to what he
might be able to "stand." Yes, it had been a question if he had
"stood" what the scene on the river had given him, and, though the
young man had doubtless opined in favour of his recuperation, her
own last word must have been that she should feel easier in seeing
for herself. That was it, unmistakeably; she WAS seeing for
herself. What he could stand was thus, in these moments, in the
balance for Strether, who reflected, as he became fully aware of
it, that he must properly brace himself. He wanted fully to appear
to stand all he might; and there was a certain command of the
situation for him in this very wish not to look too much at sea.
She was ready with everything, but so, sufficiently, was he; that
is he was at one point the more prepared of the two, inasmuch as,
for all her cleverness, she couldn't produce on the spot—and it was
surprising—an account of the motive of her note. He had the
advantage that his pronouncing her "all right" gave him for an
enquiry. "May I ask, delighted as I've been to come, if you've
wished to say something special?" He spoke as if she might have
seen he had been waiting for it—not indeed with discomfort, but
with natural interest. Then he saw that she was a little taken
aback, was even surprised herself at the detail she had
neglected—the only one ever yet; having somehow assumed he would
know, would recognise, would leave some things not to be said. She
looked at him, however, an instant as if to convey that if he
wanted them ALL—!

"Selfish and vulgar—that's what I must seem to you. You've done
everything for me, and here I am as if I were asking for more. But
it isn't," she went on, "because I'm afraid—though I AM of course
afraid, as a woman in my position always is. I mean it isn't
because one lives in terror—it isn't because of that one is
selfish, for I'm ready to give you my word to-night that I don't
care; don't care what still may happen and what I may lose. I don't
ask you to raise your little finger for me again, nor do I wish so
much as to mention to you what we've talked of before, either my
danger or my safety, or his mother, or his sister, or the girl he
may marry, or the fortune he may make or miss, or the right or the
wrong, of any kind, he may do. If after the help one has had from
you one can't either take care of one's self or simply hold one's
tongue, one must renounce all claim to be an object of interest.
It's in the name of what I DO care about that I've tried still to
keep hold of you. How can I be indifferent," she asked, "to how I
appear to you?" And as he found himself unable immediately to say:
"Why, if you're going, NEED you, after all? Is it impossible you
should stay on—so that one mayn't lose you?"

"Impossible I should live with you here instead of going
home?"

"Not 'with' us, if you object to that, but near enough to us,
somewhere, for us to see you—well," she beautifully brought out,
"when we feel we MUST. How shall we not sometimes feel it? I've
wanted to see you often when I couldn't," she pursued, "all these
last weeks. How shan't I then miss you now, with the sense of your
being gone forever?" Then as if the straightness of this appeal,
taking him unprepared, had visibly left him wondering: "Where IS
your 'home' moreover now—what has become of it? I've made a change
in your life, I know I have; I've upset everything in your mind as
well; in your sense of—what shall I call it?—all the decencies and
possibilities. It gives me a kind of detestation—" She pulled up
short.

Oh but he wanted to hear. "Detestation of what?"

"Of everything—of life."

"Ah that's too much," he laughed—"or too little!"

"Too little, precisely"—she was eager. "What I hate is
myself—when I think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out
of the lives of others, and that one isn't happy even then. One
does it to cheat one's self and to stop one's mouth—but that's only
at the best for a little. The wretched self is always there, always
making one somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it's
not, that it's never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to TAKE.
The only safe thing is to give. It's what plays you least false."
Interesting, touching, strikingly sincere as she let these things
come from her, she yet puzzled and troubled him—so fine was the
quaver of her quietness. He felt what he had felt before with her,
that there was always more behind what she showed, and more and
more again behind that. "You know so, at least," she added, "where
you are!"

"YOU ought to know it indeed then; for isn't what you've been
giving exactly what has brought us together this way? You've been
making, as I've so fully let you know I've felt," Strether said,
"the most precious present I've ever seen made, and if you can't
sit down peacefully on that performance you ARE, no doubt, born to
torment yourself. But you ought," he wound up, "to be easy."