VOLUME I - BOOK FIRST - CHAPTER II

He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he

knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that

Waymarsh, even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own

prompt and lucid allusions and enquiries, by their having publicly

partaken of dinner in her company, and by another stroll, to which

she was not a stranger, out into the town to look at the cathedral

by moonlight--it was a blank that the resident of Milrose, though

admitting acquaintance with the Munsters, professed himself unable

to fill. He had no recollection of Miss Gostrey, and two or three

questions that she put to him about those members of his circle

had, to Strether's observation, the same effect he himself had

already more directly felt--the effect of appearing to place all

knowledge, for the time, on this original woman's side. It

interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such relation for

her with his friend as there could possibly be a question of, and

it particularly struck him that they were to be marked altogether

in Waymarsh's quarter. This added to his own sense of having gone

far with her-gave him an early illustration of a much shorter

course. There was a certitude he immediately grasped--a conviction

that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever degree

of acquaintances to profit by her.

There had been after the first interchange among the three a talk

of some five minutes in the hall, and then the two men had

adjourned to the garden, Miss Gostrey for the time disappearing.

Strether in due course accompanied his friend to the room he had

bespoken and had, before going out, scrupulously visited; where at

the end of another half-hour he had no less discreetly left him.

On leaving him he repaired straight to his own room, but with the

prompt effect of feeling the compass of that chamber resented by

his condition. There he enjoyed at once the first consequence of

their reunion. A place was too small for him after it that had

seemed large enough before. He had awaited it with something he

would have been sorry, have been almost ashamed not to recognise as

emotion, yet with a tacit assumption at the same time that emotion

would in the event find itself relieved. The actual oddity was that

he was only more excited; and his excitement-to which indeed he

would have found it difficult instantly to give a name--brought him

once more downstairs and caused him for some minutes vaguely to

wander. He went once more to the garden; he looked into the public

room, found Miss Gostrey writing letters and backed out; he roamed,

fidgeted and wasted time; but he was to have his more intimate

session with his friend before the evening closed.

It was late--not till Strether had spent an hour upstairs with him--

that this subject consented to betake himself to doubtful rest.

Dinner and the subsequent stroll by moonlight--a dream, on

Strether's part, of romantic effects rather prosaically merged in a

mere missing of thicker coats--had measurably intervened, and this

midnight conference was the result of Waymarsh's having (when they

were free, as he put it, of their fashionable friend) found the

smoking-room not quite what he wanted, and yet bed what he wanted

less. His most frequent form of words was that he knew himself, and

they were applied on this occasion to his certainty of not

sleeping. He knew himself well enough to know that he should have a

night of prowling unless he should succeed, as a preliminary, in

getting prodigiously tired. If the effort directed to this end

involved till a late hour the presence of Strether--consisted,

that is, in the detention of the latter for full discourse--there

was yet an impression of minor discipline involved for our friend

in the picture Waymarsh made as he sat in trousers and shirt on the

edge of his couch. With his long legs extended and his large back

much bent, he nursed alternately, for an almost incredible time,

his elbows and his beard. He struck his visitor as extremely, as

almost wilfully uncomfortable; yet what had this been for Strether,

from that first glimpse of him disconcerted in the porch of the

hotel, but the predominant notes. The discomfort was in a manner

contagious, as well as also in a manner inconsequent and unfounded;

the visitor felt that unless he should get used to it--or unless

Waymarsh himself should--it would constitute a menace for his own

prepared, his own already confirmed, consciousness of the

agreeable. On their first going up together to the room Strether

had selected for him Waymarsh had looked it over in silence and

with a sigh that represented for his companion, if not the habit of

disapprobation, at least the despair of felicity; and this look had

recurred to Strether as the key of much he had since observed.

"Europe," he had begun to gather from these things, had up to now

rather failed of its message to him; he hadn't got into tune with

it and had at the end of three months almost renounced any such

expectation.

He really appeared at present to insist on that by just perching

there with the gas in his eyes. This of itself somehow conveyed the

futility of single rectifications in a multiform failure. He had a

large handsome head and a large sallow seamed face--a striking

significant physiognomic total, the upper range of which, the great

political brow, the thick loose hair, the dark fuliginous eyes,

recalled even to a generation whose standard had dreadfully

deviated the impressive image, familiar by engravings and busts, of

some great national worthy of the earlier part of the mid-century.

He was of the personal type--and it was an element in the power and

promise that in their early time Strether had found in him--of the

American statesman, the statesman trained in "Congressional halls,"

of an elder day. The legend had been in later years that as the

lower part of his face, which was weak, and slightly crooked,

spoiled the likeness, this was the real reason for the growth of

his beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those not in the

secret. He shook his mane; he fixed, with his admirable eyes, his

auditor or his observer; he wore no glasses and had a way, partly

formidable, yet also partly encouraging, as from a representative

to a constituent, of looking very hard at those who approached him.

He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you enter.

Strether, who hadn't seen him for so long an interval, apprehended

him now with a freshness of taste, and had perhaps never done him

such ideal justice. The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than they

need have been for the career; but that only meant, after all, that

the career was itself expressive. What it expressed at midnight in

the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject of it had,

at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight in time, a general

nervous collapse. But this very proof of the full life, as the full

life was understood at Milrose, would have made to Strether's

imagination an element in which Waymarsh could have floated easily

had he only consented to float. Alas nothing so little resembled

floating as the rigour with which, on the edge of his bed, he

hugged his posture of prolonged impermanence. It suggested to his

comrade something that always, when kept up, worried him--a person

established in a railway-coach with a forward inclination. It

represented the angle at which poor Waymarsh was to sit through the

ordeal of Europe.

Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions, the

absorption and embarrassment of each, they had not, at home, during

years before this sudden brief and almost bewildering reign of

comparative ease, found so much as a day for a meeting; a fact that

was in some degree an explanation of the sharpness with which most

of his friend's features stood out to Strether. Those he had lost

sight of since the early time came back to him; others that it was

never possible to forget struck him now as sitting, clustered and

expectant, like a somewhat defiant family-group, on the doorstep of

their residence. The room was narrow for its length, and the

occupant of the bed thrust so far a pair of slippered feet that the

visitor had almost to step over them in his recurrent rebounds from

his chair to fidget back and forth. There were marks the friends

made on things to talk about, and on things not to, and one of the

latter in particular fell like the tap of chalk on the blackboard.

Married at thirty, Waymarsh had not lived with his wife for fifteen

years, and it came up vividly between them in the glare of the gas

that Strether wasn't to ask about her. He knew they were still

separate and that she lived at hotels, travelled in Europe, painted

her face and wrote her husband abusive letters, of not one of

which, to a certainty, that sufferer spared himself the perusal;

but he respected without difficulty the cold twilight that had

settled on this side of his companion's life. It was a province in

which mystery reigned and as to which Waymarsh had never spoken the

informing word. Strether, who wanted to do him the highest justice

wherever he COULD do it, singularly admired him for the dignity of

this reserve, and even counted it as one of the grounds--grounds

all handled and numbered--for ranking him, in the range of their

acquaintance, as a success. He WAS a success, Waymarsh, in spite of

overwork, or prostration, of sensible shrinkage, of his wife's

letters and of his not liking Europe. Strether would have reckoned

his own career less futile had he been able to put into it anything

so handsome as so much fine silence. One might one's self easily

have left Mrs. Waymarsh; and one would assuredly have paid one's

tribute to the ideal in covering with that attitude the derision of

having been left by her. Her husband had held his tongue and had

made a large income; and these were in especial the achievements as

to which Strether envied him. Our friend had had indeed on his side

too a subject for silence, which he fully appreciated; but it was a

matter of a different sort, and the figure of the income he had

arrived at had never been high enough to look any one in the face.

"I don't know as I quite see what you require it for. You don't

appear sick to speak of." It was of Europe Waymarsh thus finally

spoke.

"Well," said Strether, who fell as much as possible into step, "I

guess I don't FEEL sick now that I've started. But I had pretty

well run down before I did start."

Waymarsh raised his melancholy look. "Ain't you about up to your

usual average?"

It was not quite pointedly sceptical, but it seemed somehow a plea

for the purest veracity, and it thereby affected our friend as the

very voice of Milrose. He had long since made a mental distinction--

though never in truth daring to betray it--between the voice of

Milrose and the voice even of Woollett. It was the former he felt,

that was most in the real tradition. There had been occasions in

his past when the sound of it had reduced him to temporary

confusion, and the present, for some reason, suddenly became such

another. It was nevertheless no light matter that the very effect

of his confusion should be to make him again prevaricate. "That

description hardly does justice to a man to whom it has done such a

lot of good to see YOU."

Waymarsh fixed on his washing-stand the silent detached stare with

which Milrose in person, as it were, might have marked the

unexpectedness of a compliment from Woollett, and Strether for his

part, felt once more like Woollett in person. "I mean," his friend

presently continued, "that your appearance isn't as bad as I've

seen it: it compares favourably with what it was when I last

noticed it." On this appearance Waymarsh's eyes yet failed to rest;

it was almost as if they obeyed an instinct of propriety, and the

effect was still stronger when, always considering the basin and

jug, he added: "You've filled out some since then."

"I'm afraid I have," Strether laughed: "one does fill out some with

all one takes in, and I've taken in, I dare say, more than I've

natural room for. I was dog-tired when I sailed." It had the oddest

sound of cheerfulness.

"I was dog-tired," his companion returned, "when I arrived, and it's

this wild hunt for rest that takes all the life out of me. The fact

is, Strether--and it's a comfort to have you here at last to say it to;

though I don't know, after all, that I've really waited; I've told

it to people I've met in the cars--the fact is, such a country as this

ain't my KIND of country anyway. There ain't a country I've seen over

here that DOES seem my kind. Oh I don't say but what there are plenty

of pretty places and remarkable old things; but the trouble is that I

don't seem to feel anywhere in tune. That's one of the reasons why I

suppose I've gained so little. I haven't had the first sign of that

lift I was led to expect." With this he broke out more earnestly.

"Look here--I want to go back."

His eyes were all attached to Strether's now, for he was one of the

men who fully face you when they talk of themselves. This enabled

his friend to look at him hard and immediately to appear to the

highest advantage in his eyes by doing so. "That's a genial thing

to say to a fellow who has come out on purpose to meet you!"

Nothing could have been finer, on this, than Waymarsh's sombre

glow. "HAVE you come out on purpose?"

"Well--very largely."

"I thought from the way you wrote there was something back of it."

Strether hesitated. "Back of my desire to be with you?"

"Back of your prostration."

Strether, with a smile made more dim by a certain consciousness,

shook his head. "There are all the causes of it!"

"And no particular cause that seemed most to drive you?"

Our friend could at last conscientiously answer. "Yes. One. There

IS a matter that has had much to do with my coming out."

Waymarsh waited a little. "Too private to mention?"

"No, not too private--for YOU. Only rather complicated."

"Well," said Waymarsh, who had waited again, "I MAY lose my mind

over here, but I don't know as I've done so yet."

"Oh you shall have the whole thing. But not tonight."

Waymarsh seemed to sit stiffer and to hold his elbows tighter. "Why

not--if I can't sleep?"

"Because, my dear man, I CAN!"

"Then where's your prostration?"

"Just in that--that I can put in eight hours." And Strether brought

it out that if Waymarsh didn't "gain" it was because he didn't go

to bed: the result of which was, in its order, that, to do the

latter justice, he permitted his friend to insist on his really

getting settled. Strether, with a kind coercive hand for it,

assisted him to this consummation, and again found his own part in

their relation auspiciously enlarged by the smaller touches of

lowering the lamp and seeing to a sufficiency of blanket. It

somehow ministered for him to indulgence to feel Waymarsh, who

looked unnaturally big and black in bed, as much tucked in as a

patient in a hospital and, with his covering up to his chin, as

much simplified by it He hovered in vague pity, to be brief, while

his companion challenged him out of the bedclothes. "Is she really

after you? Is that what's behind?"

Strether felt an uneasiness at the direction taken by his

companion's insight, but he played a little at uncertainty. "Behind

my coming out?"

"Behind your prostration or whatever. It's generally felt, you

know, that she follows you up pretty close."

Strether's candour was never very far off. "Oh it has occurred to

you that I'm literally running away from Mrs. Newsome?"

"Well, I haven't KNOWN but what you are. You're a very attractive

man, Strether. You've seen for yourself," said Waymarsh "what that

lady downstairs makes of it. Unless indeed," he rambled on with an

effect between the ironic and the anxious, "it's you who are after

HER. IS Mrs. Newsome OVER here?" He spoke as with a droll dread of

her.

It made his friend--though rather dimly--smile. "Dear no she's

safe, thank goodness--as I think I more and more feel--at home. She

thought of coming, but she gave it up. I've come in a manner

instead of her; and come to that extent--for you're right in your

inference--on her business. So you see there IS plenty of

connexion."

Waymarsh continued to see at least all there was. "Involving

accordingly the particular one I've referred to?"

Strether took another turn about the room, giving a twitch to his

companion's blanket and finally gaining the door. His feeling was

that of a nurse who had earned personal rest by having made

everything straight. "Involving more things than I can think of

breaking ground on now. But don't be afraid--you shall have them

from me: you'll probably find yourself having quite as much of them

as you can do with. I shall--if we keep together--very much depend

on your impression of some of them."

Waymarsh's acknowledgement of this tribute was characteristically

indirect. "You mean to say you don't believe we WILL keep

together?"

"I only glance at the danger," Strether paternally said, "because

when I hear you wail to go back I seem to see you open up such

possibilities of folly."

Waymarsh took it--silent a little--like a large snubbed child "What

are you going to do with me?"

It was the very question Strether himself had put to Miss Gostrey,

and he wondered if he had sounded like that. But HE at least could

be more definite. "I'm going to take you right down to London."

"Oh I've been down to London!" Waymarsh more softly moaned. "I've

no use, Strether, for anything down there."

"Well," said Strether, good-humouredly, "I guess you've some use

for me."

"So I've got to go?"

"Oh you've got to go further yet."

"Well," Waymarsh sighed, "do your damnedest! Only you WILL tell me

before you lead me on all the way--?"

Our friend had again so lost himself, both for amusement and for

contrition, in the wonder of whether he had made, in his own

challenge that afternoon, such another figure, that he for an

instant missed the thread. "Tell you--?"

"Why what you've got on hand."

Strether hesitated. "Why it's such a matter as that even if I

positively wanted I shouldn't be able to keep it from you."

Waymarsh gloomily gazed. "What does that mean then but that your

trip is just FOR her?"

"For Mrs. Newsome? Oh it certainly is, as I say. Very much."

"Then why do you also say it's for me?"

Strether, in impatience, violently played with his latch. "It's

simple enough. It's for both of you."

Waymarsh at last turned over with a groan. "Well, I won't marry

you!"

"Neither, when it comes to that--!" But the visitor had already

laughed and escaped.

Read next: VOLUME I#BOOK FIRST#CHAPTER III

Read previous: VOLUME I#BOOK FIRST#CHAPTER I

Table of content of Ambassadors



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book