VOLUME I - BOOK FIRST - CHAPTER I

Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his

friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to

arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from

him bespeaking a room "only if not noisy," reply paid, was produced

for the enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they

should meet at Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that

extent sound. The same secret principle, however, that had prompted

Strether not absolutely to desire Waymarsh's presence at the dock,

that had led him thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of

it, now operated to make him feel he could still wait without

disappointment. They would dine together at the worst, and, with

all respect to dear old Waymarsh--if not even, for that matter, to

himself--there was little fear that in the sequel they shouldn't

see enough of each other. The principle I have just mentioned as

operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men,

wholly instinctive--the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as

it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into

his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should

he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the

nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe. Mixed with

everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether's part, that

it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite a

sufficient degree.

That note had been meanwhile--since the previous afternoon, thanks

to this happier device--such a consciousness of personal freedom as

he hadn't known for years; such a deep taste of change and of

having above all for the moment nobody and nothing to consider, as

promised already, if headlong hope were not too foolish, to colour

his adventure with cool success. There were people on the ship with

whom he had easily consorted--so far as ease could up to now be

imputed to him--and who for the most part plunged straight into the

current that set from the landing-stage to London; there were

others who had invited him to a tryst at the inn and had even

invoked his aid for a "look round" at the beauties of Liverpool;

but he had stolen away from every one alike, had kept no

appointment and renewed no acquaintance, had been indifferently

aware of the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in

being, unlike himself, "met," and had even independently,

unsociably, alone, without encounter or relapse and by mere quiet

evasion, given his afternoon and evening to the immediate and the

sensible. They formed a qualified draught of Europe, an afternoon

and an evening on the banks of the Mersey, but such as it was he

took his potion at least undiluted. He winced a little, truly, at

the thought that Waymarsh might be already at Chester; he reflected

that, should he have to describe himself there as having "got in"

so early, it would be difficult to make the interval look

particularly eager; but he was like a man who, elatedly finding in

his pocket more money than usual, handles it a while and idly and

pleasantly chinks it before addressing himself to the business of

spending. That he was prepared to be vague to Waymarsh about the

hour of the ship's touching, and that he both wanted extremely to

see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of delay--these things,

it is to be conceived, were early signs in him that his relation to

his actual errand might prove none of the simplest. He was

burdened, poor Strether--it had better be confessed at the outset--

with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in

his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.

After the young woman in the glass cage had held up to him across

her counter the pale-pink leaflet bearing his friend's name, which

she neatly pronounced, he turned away to find himself, in the hall,

facing a lady who met his eyes as with an intention suddenly

determined, and whose features--not freshly young, not markedly

fine, but on happy terms with each other--came back to him as from

a recent vision. For a moment they stood confronted; then the

moment placed her: he had noticed her the day before, noticed her

at his previous inn, where--again in the hall--she had been briefly

engaged with some people of his own ship's company. Nothing had

actually passed between them, and he would as little have been able

to say what had been the sign of her face for him on the first

occasion as to name the ground of his present recognition.

Recognition at any rate appeared to prevail on her own side as

well--which would only have added to the mystery. All she now began

by saying to him nevertheless was that, having chanced to catch his

enquiry, she was moved to ask, by his leave, if it were possibly a

question of Mr. Waymarsh of Milrose Connecticut--Mr. Waymarsh the

American lawyer.

"Oh yes," he replied, "my very well-known friend. He's to meet me

here, coming up from Malvern, and I supposed he'd already have

arrived. But he doesn't come till later, and I'm relieved not to

have kept him. Do you know him?" Strether wound up.

It wasn't till after he had spoken that he became aware of how much

there had been in him of response; when the tone of her own

rejoinder, as well as the play of something more in her face--

something more, that is, than its apparently usual restless light--

seemed to notify him. "I've met him at Milrose--where I used

sometimes, a good while ago, to stay; I had friends there who were

friends of his, and I've been at his house. I won't answer for it

that he would know me," Strether's new acquaintance pursued; "but I

should be delighted to see him. Perhaps," she added, "I shall--for

I'm staying over." She paused while our friend took in these

things, and it was as if a good deal of talk had already passed.

They even vaguely smiled at it, and Strether presently observed

that Mr. Waymarsh would, no doubt, be easily to be seen. This,

however, appeared to affect the lady as if she might have advanced

too far. She appeared to have no reserves about anything. "Oh," she

said, "he won't care!"--and she immediately thereupon remarked that

she believed Strether knew the Munsters; the Munsters being the

people he had seen her with at Liverpool.

But he didn't, it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give

the case much of a lift; so that they were left together as if over

the mere laid table of conversation. Her qualification of the

mentioned connexion had rather removed than placed a dish, and

there seemed nothing else to serve. Their attitude remained, none

the less, that of not forsaking the board; and the effect of this

in turn was to give them the appearance of having accepted each

other with an absence of preliminaries practically complete. They

moved along the hall together, and Strether's companion threw off

that the hotel had the advantage of a garden. He was aware by this

time of his strange inconsequence: he had shirked the intimacies of

the steamer and had muffled the shock of Waymarsh only to find

himself forsaken, in this sudden case, both of avoidance and of

caution. He passed, under this unsought protection and before he

had so much as gone up to his room, into the garden of the hotel,

and at the end of ten minutes had agreed to meet there again, as

soon as he should have made himself tidy, the dispenser of such

good assurances. He wanted to look at the town, and they would

forthwith look together. It was almost as if she had been in

possession and received him as a guest. Her acquaintance with the

place presented her in a manner as a hostess, and Strether had a

rueful glance for the lady in the glass cage. It was as if this

personage had seen herself instantly superseded.

When in a quarter of an hour he came down, what his hostess saw,

what she might have taken in with a vision kindly adjusted, was the

lean, the slightly loose figure of a man of the middle height and

something more perhaps than the middle age--a man of five-and-fifty,

whose most immediate signs were a marked bloodless brownness of face,

a thick dark moustache, of characteristically American cut,

growing strong and falling low, a head of hair still abundant

but irregularly streaked with grey, and a nose of bold free

prominence, the even line, the high finish, as it might have been

called, of which, had a certain effect of mitigation. A perpetual

pair of glasses astride of this fine ridge, and a line, unusually

deep and drawn, the prolonged pen-stroke of time, accompanying the

curve of the moustache from nostril to chin, did something to

complete the facial furniture that an attentive observer would have

seen catalogued, on the spot, in the vision of the other party to

Strether's appointment. She waited for him in the garden, the other

party, drawing on a pair of singularly fresh soft and elastic light

gloves and presenting herself with a superficial readiness which,

as he approached her over the small smooth lawn and in the watery

English sunshine, he might, with his rougher preparation, have

marked as the model for such an occasion. She had, this lady, a

perfect plain propriety, an expensive subdued suitability, that her

companion was not free to analyse, but that struck him, so that his

consciousness of it was instantly acute, as a quality quite new to

him. Before reaching her he stopped on the grass and went through

the form of feeling for something, possibly forgotten, in the light

overcoat he carried on his arm; yet the essence of the act was no

more than the impulse to gain time. Nothing could have been odder

than Strether's sense of himself as at that moment launched in

something of which the sense would be quite disconnected from the

sense of his past and which was literally beginning there and then.

It had begun in fact already upstairs and before the dressing glass

that struck him as blocking further, so strangely, the dimness of

the window of his dull bedroom; begun with a sharper survey of the

elements of Appearance than he had for a long time been moved to

make. He had during those moments felt these elements to be not so

much to his hand as he should have liked, and then had fallen back

on the thought that they were precisely a matter as to which help

was supposed to come from what he was about to do. He was about to

go up to London, so that hat and necktie might wait. What had come

as straight to him as a ball in a well-played game--and caught

moreover not less neatly--was just the air, in the person of his

friend, of having seen and chosen, the air of achieved possession

of those vague qualities and quantities that collectively figured

to him as the advantage snatched from lucky chances. Without pomp

or circumstance, certainly, as her original address to him, equally

with his own response, had been, he would have sketched to himself

his impression of her as: "Well, she's more thoroughly civilized--!"

If "More thoroughly than WHOM?" would not have been for him a

sequel to this remark, that was just by reason of his deep

consciousness of the bearing of his comparison.

The amusement, at all events, of a civilisation intenser was what--

familiar compatriot as she was, with the full tone of the

compatriot and the rattling link not with mystery but only with

dear dyspeptic Waymarsh--she appeared distinctly to promise. His

pause while he felt in his overcoat was positively the pause of

confidence, and it enabled his eyes to make out as much of a case

for her, in proportion, as her own made out for himself. She

affected him as almost insolently young; but an easily carried

five-and-thirty could still do that. She was, however, like himself

marked and wan; only it naturally couldn't have been known to him

how much a spectator looking from one to the other might have

discerned that they had in common. It wouldn't for such a spectator

have been altogether insupposable that, each so finely brown and so

sharply spare, each confessing so to dents of surface and aids to

sight, to a disproportionate nose and a head delicately or grossly

grizzled, they might have been brother and sister. On this ground

indeed there would have been a residuum of difference; such a

sister having surely known in respect to such a brother the

extremity of separation, and such a brother now feeling in respect

to such a sister the extremity of surprise. Surprise, it was true,

was not on the other hand what the eyes of Strether's friend most

showed him while she gave him, stroking her gloves smoother, the

time he appreciated. They had taken hold of him straightway

measuring him up and down as if they knew how; as if he were human

material they had already in some sort handled. Their possessor was

in truth, it may be communicated, the mistress of a hundred cases

or categories, receptacles of the mind, subdivisions for

convenience, in which, from a full experience, she pigeon-holed her

fellow mortals with a hand as free as that of a compositor

scattering type. She was as equipped in this particular as Strether

was the reverse, and it made an opposition between them which he

might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected

it. So far as he did suspect it he was on the contrary, after a

short shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly passive as might

be. He really had a sort of sense of what she knew. He had quite

the sense that she knew things he didn't, and though this was a

concession that in general he found not easy to make to women, he

made it now as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes

were so quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might almost

have been absent without changing his face, which took its

expression mainly, and not least its stamp of sensibility, from

other sources, surface and grain and form. He joined his guide in

an instant, and then felt she had profited still better than he by

his having been for the moments just mentioned, so at the disposal

of her intelligence. She knew even intimate things about him that

he hadn't yet told her and perhaps never would. He wasn't unaware

that he had told her rather remarkably many for the time, but these

were not the real ones. Some of the real ones, however, precisely,

were what she knew.

They were to pass again through the hall of the inn to get into the

street, and it was here she presently checked him with a question.

"Have you looked up my name?"

He could only stop with a laugh. "Have you looked up mine?"

"Oh dear, yes--as soon as you left me. I went to the office and

asked. Hadn't YOU better do the same?"

He wondered. "Find out who you are?--after the uplifted young woman

there has seen us thus scrape acquaintance!"

She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement.

"Isn't it a reason the more? If what you're afraid of is the injury

for me--my being seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask

who I am--l assure you I don't in the least mind. Here, however,"

she continued, "is my card, and as I find there's something else

again I have to say at the office, you can just study it during the

moment I leave you."

She left him after he had taken from her the small pasteboard she

had extracted from her pocket-book, and he had extracted another

from his own, to exchange with it, before she came back. He read

thus the simple designation "Maria Gostrey," to which was attached,

in a corner of the card, with a number, the name of a street,

presumably in Paris, without other appreciable identity than its

foreignness. He put the card into his waistcoat pocket, keeping his

own meanwhile in evidence; and as he leaned against the door-post

he met with the smile of a straying thought what the expanse before

the hotel offered to his view. It was positively droll to him that

he should already have Maria Gostrey, whoever she was--of which he

hadn't really the least idea--in a place of safe keeping. He had

somehow an assurance that he should carefully preserve the little

token he had just tucked in. He gazed with unseeing lingering eyes

as he followed some of the implications of his act, asking himself

if he really felt admonished to qualify it as disloyal. It was

prompt, it was possibly even premature, and there was little doubt

of the expression of face the sight of it would have produced in a

certain person. But if it was "wrong"--why then he had better not

have come out at all. At this, poor man, had he already--and even

before meeting Waymarsh--arrived. He had believed he had a limit,

but the limit had been transcended within thirty-six hours. By how

long a space on the plane of manners or even of morals, moreover,

he felt still more sharply after Maria Gostrey had come back to him

and with a gay decisive "So now--!" led him forth into the world.

This counted, it struck him as he walked beside her with his

overcoat on an arm, his umbrella under another and his personal

pasteboard a little stiffly retained between forefinger and thumb,

this struck him as really, in comparison his introduction to

things. It hadn't been "Europe" at Liverpool no--not even in the

dreadful delightful impressive streets the night before--to the

extent his present companion made it so. She hadn't yet done that

so much as when, after their walk had lasted a few minutes and he

had had time to wonder if a couple of sidelong glances from her

meant that he had best have put on gloves she almost pulled him up

with an amused challenge. "But why--fondly as it's so easy to

imagine your clinging to it--don't you put it away? Or if it's an

inconvenience to you to carry it, one's often glad to have one's

card back. The fortune one spends in them!"

Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared

tribute had affected her as a deviation in one of those directions

he couldn't yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be

still the one he had received from her. He accordingly handed her

the card as if in restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt

the difference and, with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology.

"I like," she observed, "your name."

"Oh," he answered, "you won't have heard of it!" Yet he had his

reasons for not being sure but that she perhaps might.

Ah it was but too visible! She read it over again as one who had

never seen it. "'Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether'"--she sounded it

almost as freely as for any stranger. She repeated however that she

liked it--"particularly the Lewis Lambert. It's the name of a novel

of Balzac's."

"Oh I know that!" said Strether.

"But the novel's an awfully bad one."

"I know that too," Strether smiled. To which he added with an

irrelevance that was only superficial: "I come from Woollett

Massachusetts." It made her for some reason--the irrelevance or

whatever--laugh. Balzac had described many cities, but hadn't

described Woollett Massachusetts. "You say that," she returned,

"as if you wanted one immediately to know the worst."

"Oh I think it's a thing," he said, "that you must already have

made out. I feel it so that I certainly must look it, speak it,

and, as people say there, 'act' it. It sticks out of me, and you

knew surely for yourself as soon as you looked at me."

"The worst, you mean?"

"Well, the fact of where I come from. There at any rate it IS; so

that you won't be able, if anything happens, to say I've not been

straight with you."

"I see"--and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point he

had made. "But what do you think of as happening?"

Though he wasn't shy--which was rather anomalous--Strether gazed

about without meeting her eyes; a motion that was frequent with him

in talk, yet of which his words often seemed not at all the effect.

"Why that you should find me too hopeless." With which they walked

on again together while she answered, as they went, that the most

"hopeless" of her countryfolk were in general precisely those she

liked best. All sorts of other pleasant small things-small things

that were yet large for him--flowered in the air of the occasion,

but the bearing of the occasion itself on matters still remote

concerns us too closely to permit us to multiply our illustrations.

Two or three, however, in truth, we should perhaps regret to lose.

The tortuous wall--girdle, long since snapped, of the little

swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands--wanders in

narrow file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations,

pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with

rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer

contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables,

views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English

town and ordered English country. Too deep almost for words was the

delight of these things to Strether; yet as deeply mixed with it

were certain images of his inward picture. He had trod this walks

in the far-off time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling

it, only enriched it for present feeling and marked his renewal as

a thing substantial enough to share. It was with Waymarsh he should

have shared it. and he was now accordingly taking from him

something that was his due. He looked repeatedly at his watch, and

when he had done so for the fifth time Miss Gostrey took him up.

"You're doing something that you think not right."

It so touched the place that he quite changed colour and his laugh

grew almost awkward. "Am I enjoying it as much as THAT?"

"You're not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought."

"I see"--he appeared thoughtfully to agree. "Great is my privilege."

"Oh it's not your privilege! It has nothing to do with me. It has

to do with yourself. Your failure's general."

"Ah there you are!" he laughed. "It's the failure of Woollett.

THAT'S general."

"The failure to enjoy," Miss Gostrey explained, "is what I mean."

"Precisely. Woollett isn't sure it ought to enjoy. If it were it

would. But it hasn't, poor thing," Strether continued, "any one to

show it how. It's not like me. I have somebody."

They had stopped, in the afternoon sunshine--constantly pausing, in

their stroll, for the sharper sense of what they saw--and Strether

rested on one of the high sides of the old stony groove of the

little rampart. He leaned back on this support with his face to the

tower of the cathedral, now admirably commanded by their station,

the high red-brown mass, square and subordinately spired and

crocketed, retouched and restored, but charming to his long-sealed

eyes and with the first swallows of the year weaving their flight

all round it. Miss Gostrey lingered near him, full of an air, to

which she more and more justified her right, of understanding the

effect of things. She quite concurred. "You've indeed somebody."

And she added: "I wish you WOULD let me show you how!"

"Oh I'm afraid of you!" he cheerfully pleaded.

She kept on him a moment, through her glasses and through his own,

a certain pleasant pointedness. "Ah no, you're not! You're not in

the least, thank goodness! If you had been we shouldn't so soon

have found ourselves here together. I think," she comfortably

concluded, "you trust me."

"I think I do!--but that's exactly what I'm afraid of. I shouldn't

mind if I didn't. It's falling thus in twenty minutes so utterly

into your hands. I dare say," Strether continued, "it's a sort of

thing you're thoroughly familiar with; but nothing more

extraordinary has ever happened to me."

She watched him with all her kindness. "That means simply that

you've recognised me--which IS rather beautiful and rare. You see

what I am." As on this, however, he protested, with a good-humoured

headshake, a resignation of any such claim, she had a moment of

explanation. "If you'll only come on further as you HAVE come

you'll at any rate make out. My own fate has been too many for me,

and I've succumbed to it. I'm a general guide--to 'Europe,' don't

you know? I wait for people--l put them through. I pick them up--

I set them down. I'm a sort of superior 'courier-maid.' I'm a

companion at large. I take people, as I've told you, about. I never

sought it--it has come to me. It has been my fate, and one's fate

one accepts. It's a dreadful thing to have to say, in so wicked a

world, but I verily believe that, such as you see me, there's

nothing I don't know. I know all the shops and the prices--but I

know worse things still. I bear on my back the huge load of our

national consciousness, or, in other words--for it comes to that--

of our nation itself. Of what is our nation composed but of the men

and women individually on my shoulders? I don't do it, you know,

for any particular advantage. I don't do it, for instance--some

people do, you know--for money."

Strether could only listen and wonder and weigh his chance. "And

yet, affected as you are then to so many of your clients, you can

scarcely be said to do it for love." He waited a moment. "How do we

reward you?"

She had her own hesitation, but "You don't!" she finally returned,

setting him again in motion. They went on, but in a few minutes,

though while still thinking over what she had said, he once more

took out his watch; mechanically, unconsciously and as if made

nervous by the mere exhilaration of what struck him as her strange

and cynical wit. He looked at the hour without seeing it, and then,

on something again said by his companion, had another pause.

"You're really in terror of him."

He smiled a smile that he almost felt to be sickly. "Now you can

see why I'm afraid of you."

"Because I've such illuminations? Why they're all for your help!

It's what I told you," she added, "just now. You feel as if this

were wrong."

He fell back once more, settling himself against the parapet as if

to hear more about it. "Then get me out!"

Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the appeal, but, as if it

were a question of immediate action, she visibly considered. "Out

of waiting for him?--of seeing him at all?"

"Oh no--not that," said poor Strether, looking grave. "I've got to

wait for him--and I want very much to see him. But out of the

terror. You did put your finger on it a few minutes ago. It's

general, but it avails itself of particular occasions. That's what

it's doing for me now. I'm always considering something else;

something else, I mean, than the thing of the moment. The obsession

of the other thing is the terror. I'm considering at present for

instance something else than YOU."

She listened with charming earnestness. "Oh you oughtn't to do

that!"

"It's what I admit. Make it then impossible."

She continued to think. "Is it really an 'order' from you?--that I

shall take the job? WILL you give yourself up?"

Poor Strether heaved his sigh. "If I only could! But that's the

deuce of it--that I never can. No--I can't."

She wasn't, however, discouraged. "But you want to at least?"

"Oh unspeakably!"

"Ah then, if you'll try!"--and she took over the job, as she had

called it, on the spot. "Trust me!" she exclaimed, and the action

of this, as they retraced their steps, was presently to make him

pass his hand into her arm in the manner of a benign dependent

paternal old person who wishes to be "nice" to a younger one. If he

drew it out again indeed as they approached the inn this may have

been because, after more talk had passed between them, the relation

of age, or at least of experience--which, for that matter, had

already played to and fro with some freedom--affected him as

incurring a readjustment. It was at all events perhaps lucky that

they arrived in sufficiently separate fashion within range of the

hotel-door. The young lady they had left in the glass cage watched

as if she had come to await them on the threshold. At her side

stood a person equally interested, by his attitude, in their

return, and the effect of the sight of whom was instantly to

determine for Strether another of those responsive arrests that we

have had so repeatedly to note. He left it to Miss Gostrey to name,

with the fine full bravado as it almost struck him, of her

"Mr. Waymarsh!" what was to have been, what--he more than ever felt

as his short stare of suspended welcome took things in--would have

been, but for herself, his doom. It was already upon him even at

that distance--Mr. Waymarsh was for HIS part joyless.

Read next: VOLUME I#BOOK FIRST#CHAPTER II

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