The Ambassadors (61 page)

It was an offer he could temporarily entertain; but he decided.
"She knows perfectly how I see her."

"Not favourably enough, she mentioned to me, to wish ever to see
her again. She told me you had taken a final leave of her. She says
you've done with her."

"So I have."

Maria had a pause; then she spoke as if for conscience. "She
wouldn't have done with YOU. She feels she has lost you—yet that
she might have been better for you."

"Oh she has been quite good enough!" Strether laughed.

"She thinks you and she might at any rate have been
friends."

"We might certainly. That's just"—he continued to laugh—"why I'm
going."

It was as if Maria could feel with this then at last that she
had done her best for each. But she had still an idea. "Shall I
tell her that?"

"No. Tell her nothing."

"Very well then." To which in the next breath Miss Gostrey
added: "Poor dear thing!"

Her friend wondered; then with raised eyebrows: "Me?"

"Oh no. Marie de Vionnet."

He accepted the correction, but he wondered still. "Are you so
sorry for her as that?"

It made her think a moment—made her even speak with a smile. But
she didn't really retract. "I'm sorry for us all!"

He was to delay no longer to re-establish communication with
Chad, and we have just seen that he had spoken to Miss Gostrey of
this intention on hearing from her of the young man's absence. It
was not moreover only the assurance so given that prompted him; it
was the need of causing his conduct to square with another
profession still—the motive he had described to her as his sharpest
for now getting away. If he was to get away because of some of the
relations involved in staying, the cold attitude toward them might
look pedantic in the light of lingering on. He must do both things;
he must see Chad, but he must go. The more he thought of the former
of these duties the more he felt himself make a subject of
insistence of the latter. They were alike intensely present to him
as he sat in front of a quiet little cafe into which he had dropped
on quitting Maria's entresol. The rain that had spoiled his evening
with her was over; for it was still to him as if his evening HAD
been spoiled—though it mightn't have been wholly the rain. It was
late when he left the cafe, yet not too late; he couldn't in any
case go straight to bed, and he would walk round by the Boulevard
Malesherbes—rather far round—on his way home. Present enough always
was the small circumstance that had originally pressed for him the
spring of so big a difference—the accident of little Bilham's
appearance on the balcony of the mystic troisieme at the moment of
his first visit, and the effect of it on his sense of what was then
before him. He recalled his watch, his wait, and the recognition
that had proceeded from the young stranger, that had played frankly
into the air and had presently brought him up—things smoothing the
way for his first straight step. He had since had occasion, a few
times, to pass the house without going in; but he had never passed
it without again feeling how it had then spoken to him. He stopped
short to-night on coming to sight of it: it was as if his last day
were oddly copying his first. The windows of Chad's apartment were
open to the balcony—a pair of them lighted; and a figure that had
come out and taken up little Bilham's attitude, a figure whose
cigarette-spark he could see leaned on the rail and looked down at
him. It denoted however no reappearance of his younger friend; it
quickly defined itself in the tempered darkness as Chad's more
solid shape; so that Chad's was the attention that after he had
stepped forward into the street and signalled, he easily engaged;
Chad's was the voice that, sounding into the night with promptness
and seemingly with joy, greeted him and called him up.

That the young man had been visible there just in this position
expressed somehow for Strether that, as Maria Gostrey had reported,
he had been absent and silent; and our friend drew breath on each
landing—the lift, at that hour, having ceased to work—before the
implications of the fact. He had been for a week intensely away,
away to a distance and alone; but he was more back than ever, and
the attitude in which Strether had surprised him was something more
than a return—it was clearly a conscious surrender. He had arrived
but an hour before, from London, from Lucerne, from Homburg, from
no matter where—though the visitor's fancy, on the staircase, liked
to fill it out; and after a bath, a talk with Baptiste and a supper
of light cold clever French things, which one could see the remains
of there in the circle of the lamp, pretty and ultra-Parisian, he
had come into the air again for a smoke, was occupied at the moment
of Strether's approach in what might have been called taking up his
life afresh. His life, his life!—Strether paused anew, on the last
flight, at this final rather breathless sense of what Chad's life
was doing with Chad's mother's emissary. It was dragging him, at
strange hours, up the staircases of the rich; it was keeping him
out of bed at the end of long hot days; it was transforming beyond
recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently uniform thing that had
anciently passed with him for a life of his own. Why should it
concern him that Chad was to be fortified in the pleasant practice
of smoking on balconies, of supping on salads, of feeling his
special conditions agreeably reaffirm themselves, of finding
reassurance in comparisons and contrasts? There was no answer to
such a question but that he was still practically committed—he had
perhaps never yet so much known it. It made him feel old, and he
would buy his railway-ticket—feeling, no doubt, older—the next day;
but he had meanwhile come up four flights, counting the entresol,
at midnight and without a lift, for Chad's life. The young man,
hearing him by this time, and with Baptiste sent to rest, was
already at the door; so that Strether had before him in full
visibility the cause in which he was labouring and even, with the
troisieme fairly gained, panting a little.

Chad offered him, as always, a welcome in which the cordial and
the formal—so far as the formal was the respectful—handsomely met;
and after he had expressed a hope that he would let him put him up
for the night Strether was in full possession of the key, as it
might have been called, to what had lately happened. If he had just
thought of himself as old Chad was at sight of him thinking of him
as older: he wanted to put him up for the night just because he was
ancient and weary. It could never be said the tenant of these
quarters wasn't nice to him; a tenant who, if he might indeed now
keep him, was probably prepared to work it all still more
thoroughly. Our friend had in fact the impression that with the
minimum of encouragement Chad would propose to keep him
indefinitely; an impression in the lap of which one of his own
possibilities seemed to sit. Madame de Vionnet had wished him to
stay—so why didn't that happily fit? He could enshrine himself for
the rest of his days in his young host's chambre d'ami and draw out
these days at his young host's expense: there could scarce be
greater logical expression of the countenance he had been moved to
give. There was literally a minute—it was strange enough—during
which he grasped the idea that as he WAS acting, as he could only
act, he was inconsistent. The sign that the inward forces he had
obeyed really hung together would be that—in default always of
another career—he should promote the good cause by mounting guard
on it. These things, during his first minutes, came and went; but
they were after all practically disposed of as soon as he had
mentioned his errand. He had come to say good-bye—yet that was only
a part; so that from the moment Chad accepted his farewell the
question of a more ideal affirmation gave way to something else. He
proceeded with the rest of his business. "You'll be a brute, you
know—you'll be guilty of the last infamy—if you ever forsake
her."

That, uttered there at the solemn hour, uttered in the place
that was full of her influence, was the rest of his business; and
when once he had heard himself say it he felt that his message had
never before been spoken. It placed his present call immediately on
solid ground, and the effect of it was to enable him quite to play
with what we have called the key. Chad showed no shade of
embarrassment, but had none the less been troubled for him after
their meeting in the country; had had fears and doubts on the
subject of his comfort. He was disturbed, as it were, only FOR him,
and had positively gone away to ease him off, to let him down—if it
wasn't indeed rather to screw him up—the more gently. Seeing him
now fairly jaded he had come, with characteristic good humour, all
the way to meet him, and what Strether thereupon supremely made out
was that he would abound for him to the end in conscientious
assurances. This was what was between them while the visitor
remained; so far from having to go over old ground he found his
entertainer keen to agree to everything. It couldn't be put too
strongly for him that he'd be a brute. "Oh rather!—if I should do
anything of THAT sort. I hope you believe I really feel it."

"I want it," said Strether, "to be my last word of all to you. I
can't say more, you know; and I don't see how I can do more, in
every way, than I've done."

Chad took this, almost artlessly, as a direct allusion. "You've
seen her?"

"Oh yes—to say good-bye. And if I had doubted the truth of what
I tell you—"

"She'd have cleared up your doubt?" Chad
understood—"rather"—again! It even kept him briefly silent. But he
made that up. "She must have been wonderful."

"She WAS," Strether candidly admitted—all of which practically
told as a reference to the conditions created by the accident of
the previous week.

They appeared for a little to be looking back at it; and that
came out still more in what Chad next said. "I don't know what
you've really thought, all along; I never did know—for anything,
with you, seemed to be possible. But of course—of course—" Without
confusion, quite with nothing but indulgence, he broke down, he
pulled up. "After all, you understand. I spoke to you originally
only as I HAD to speak. There's only one way—isn't there?—about
such things. However," he smiled with a final philosophy, "I see
it's all right."

Strether met his eyes with a sense of multiplying thoughts. What
was it that made him at present, late at night and after journeys,
so renewedly, so substantially young? Strether saw in a moment what
it was—it was that he was younger again than Madame de Vionnet. He
himself said immediately none of the things that he was thinking;
he said something quite different. "You HAVE really been to a
distance?"

"I've been to England." Chad spoke cheerfully and promptly, but
gave no further account of it than to say: "One must sometimes get
off."

Strether wanted no more facts—he only wanted to justify, as it
were, his question. "Of course you do as you're free to do. But I
hope, this time, that you didn't go for ME."

"For very shame at bothering you really too much? My dear man,"
Chad laughed, "what WOULDn't I do for you?"

Strether's easy answer for this was that it was a disposition he
had exactly come to profit by. "Even at the risk of being in your
way I've waited on, you know, for a definite reason."

Chad took it in. "Oh yes—for us to make if possible a still
better impression." And he stood there happily exhaling his full
general consciousness. "I'm delighted to gather that you feel we've
made it."

There was a pleasant irony in the words, which his guest,
preoccupied and keeping to the point, didn't take up. "If I had my
sense of wanting the rest of the time—the time of their being still
on this side," he continued to explain—"I know now why I wanted
it."

He was as grave, as distinct, as a demonstrator before a
blackboard, and Chad continued to face him like an intelligent
pupil. "You wanted to have been put through the whole thing."

Strether again, for a moment, said nothing; he turned his eyes
away, and they lost themselves, through the open window, in the
dusky outer air. "I shall learn from the Bank here where they're
now having their letters, and my last word, which I shall write in
the morning and which they're expecting as my ultimatum, will so
immediately reach them." The light of his plural pronoun was
sufficiently reflected in his companion's face as he again met it;
and he completed his demonstration. He pursued indeed as if for
himself. "Of course I've first to justify what I shall do."

"You're justifying it beautifully!" Chad declared.

"It's not a question of advising you not to go," Strether said,
"but of absolutely preventing you, if possible, from so much as
thinking of it. Let me accordingly appeal to you by all you hold
sacred."

Chad showed a surprise. "What makes you think me capable—?"

"You'd not only be, as I say, a brute; you'd be," his companion
went on in the same way, "a criminal of the deepest dye."

Chad gave a sharper look, as if to gauge a possible suspicion.
"I don't know what should make you think I'm tired of her."

Strether didn't quite know either, and such impressions, for the
imaginative mind, were always too fine, too floating, to produce on
the spot their warrant. There was none the less for him, in the
very manner of his host's allusion to satiety as a thinkable
motive, a slight breath of the ominous. "I feel how much more she
can do for you. She hasn't done it all yet. Stay with her at least
till she has."

"And leave her THEN?"

Chad had kept smiling, but its effect in Strether was a shade of
dryness. "Don't leave her BEFORE. When you've got all that can be
got—I don't say," he added a trifle grimly. "That will be the
proper time. But as, for you, from such a woman, there will always
be something to be got, my remark's not a wrong to her." Chad let
him go on, showing every decent deference, showing perhaps also a
candid curiosity for this sharper accent. "I remember you, you
know, as you were."