VOLUME I - BOOK FIRST - CHAPTER III

He had told Miss Gostrey he should probably take, for departure

with Waymarsh, some afternoon train, and it thereupon in the

morning appeared that this lady had made her own plan for an

earlier one. She had breakfasted when Strether came into the

coffee-room; but, Waymarsh not having yet emerged, he was in time

to recall her to the terms of their understanding and to pronounce

her discretion overdone. She was surely not to break away at the

very moment she had created a want. He had met her as she rose

from her little table in a window, where, with the morning papers

beside her, she reminded him, as he let her know, of Major

Pendennis breakfasting at his club--a compliment of which she

professed a deep appreciation; and he detained her as pleadingly

as if he had already--and notably under pressure of the visions of

the night--learned to be unable to do without her. She must teach

him at all events, before she went, to order breakfast as

breakfast was ordered in Europe, and she must especially sustain

him in the problem of ordering for Waymarsh. The latter had laid

upon his friend, by desperate sounds through the door of his room,

dreadful divined responsibilities in respect to beefsteak and

oranges--responsibilities which Miss Gostrey took over with an

alertness of action that matched her quick intelligence. She had

before this weaned the expatriated from traditions compared with

which the matutinal beefsteak was but the creature of an hour, and

it was not for her, with some of her memories, to falter in the

path though she freely enough declared, on reflexion, that there

was always in such cases a choice of opposed policies. "There are

times when to give them their head, you know--!"

They had gone to wait together in the garden for the dressing of

the meal, and Strether found her more suggestive than ever "Well,

what?"

"Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations-unless

indeed we call it a simplicity!--that the situation HAS to wind

itself up. They want to go back."

"And you want them to go!" Strether gaily concluded.

"I always want them to go, and I send them as fast as I can.'

"Oh I know--you take them to Liverpool."

"Any port will serve in a storm. I'm--with all my other functions--

an agent for repatriation. I want to re-people our stricken

country. What will become of it else? I want to discourage others."

The ordered English garden, in the freshness of the day, was

delightful to Strether, who liked the sound, under his feet, of

the tight fine gravel, packed with the chronic damp, and who had

the idlest eye for the deep smoothness of turf and the clean

curves of paths. "Other people?"

"Other countries. Other people--yes. I want to encourage our own."

Strether wondered. "Not to come? Why then do you 'meet' them--

since it doesn't appear to be to stop them?"

"Oh that they shouldn't come is as yet too much to ask. What I

attend to is that they come quickly and return still more so. I

meet them to help it to be over as soon as possible, and though I

don't stop them I've my way of putting them through. That's my

little system; and, if you want to know," said Maria Gostrey,

"it's my real secret, my innermost mission and use. I only seem,

you see, to beguile and approve; but I've thought it all out and

I'm working all the while underground. I can't perhaps quite give

you my formula, but I think that practically I succeed. I send you

back spent. So you stay back. Passed through my hands--"

"We don't turn up again?" The further she went the further he

always saw himself able to follow. "I don't want your formula--I

feel quite enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses. Spent!" he

echoed. "If that's how you're arranging so subtly to send me I

thank you for the warning."

For a minute, amid the pleasantness--poetry in tariffed items, but

all the more, for guests already convicted, a challenge to

consumption--they smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship. "Do

you call it subtly? It's a plain poor tale. Besides, you're a

special case."

"Oh special cases--that's weak!" She was weak enough, further

still, to defer her journey and agree to accompany the gentlemen on

their own, might a separate carriage mark her independence; though

it was in spite of this to befall after luncheon that she went off

alone and that, with a tryst taken for a day of her company in

London, they lingered another night. She had, during the morning--

spent in a way that he was to remember later on as the very climax

of his foretaste, as warm with presentiments, with what he would

have called collapses--had all sorts of things out with Strether;

and among them the fact that though there was never a moment of her

life when she wasn't "due" somewhere, there was yet scarce a

perfidy to others of which she wasn't capable for his sake. She

explained moreover that wherever she happened to be she found a

dropped thread to pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some familiar

appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet appeasable

with a temporary biscuit. It became, on her taking the risk of the

deviation imposed on him by her insidious arrangement of his

morning meal, a point of honour for her not to fail with Waymarsh

of the larger success too; and her subsequent boast to Strether was

that she had made their friend fare--and quite without his knowing

what was the matter--as Major Pendennis would have fared at the

Megatherium. She had made him breakfast like a gentleman, and it

was nothing, she forcibly asserted, to what she would yet make him

do. She made him participate in the slow reiterated ramble with

which, for Strether, the new day amply filled itself; and it was by

her art that he somehow had the air, on the ramparts and in the

Rows, of carrying a point of his own.

The three strolled and stared and gossiped, or at least the

two did; the case really yielding for their comrade, if analysed,

but the element of stricken silence. This element indeed affected

Strether as charged with audible rumblings, but he was conscious of

the care of taking it explicitly as a sign of pleasant peace. He

wouldn't appeal too much, for that provoked stiffness; yet he

wouldn't be too freely tacit, for that suggested giving up.

Waymarsh himself adhered to an ambiguous dumbness that might have

represented either the growth of a perception or the despair of

one; and at times and in places--where the low-browed galleries

were darkest, the opposite gables queerest, the solicitations of

every kind densest--the others caught him fixing hard some object

of minor interest, fixing even at moments nothing discernible, as

if he were indulging it with a truce. When he met Strether's eye on

such occasions he looked guilty and furtive, fell the next minute

into some attitude of retractation. Our friend couldn't show him

the right things for fear of provoking some total renouncement, and

was tempted even to show him the wrong in order to make him differ

with triumph. There were moments when he himself felt shy of

professing the full sweetness of the taste of leisure, and there

were others when he found himself feeling as if his passages of

interchange with the lady at his side might fall upon the third

member of their party very much as Mr. Burchell, at Dr. Primrose's

fireside, was influenced by the high flights of the visitors from

London. The smallest things so arrested and amused him that he

repeatedly almost apologised--brought up afresh in explanation his

plea of a previous grind. He was aware at the same time that his

grind had been as nothing to Waymarsh's, and he repeatedly

confessed that, to cover his frivolity, he was doing his best for

his previous virtue. Do what he might, in any case, his previous

virtue was still there, and it seemed fairly to stare at him out of

the windows of shops that were not as the shops of Woollett, fairly

to make him want things that he shouldn't know what to do with. It

was by the oddest, the least admissible of laws demoralising him

now; and the way it boldly took was to make him want more wants.

These first walks in Europe were in fact a kind of finely lurid

intimation of what one might find at the end of that process. Had

he come back after long years, in something already so like the

evening of life, only to be exposed to it? It was at all events

over the shop-windows that he made, with Waymarsh, most free;

though it would have been easier had not the latter most sensibly

yielded to the appeal of the merely useful trades. He pierced with

his sombre detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers,

while Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped

letter-paper and in smart neckties. Strether was in fact

recurrently shameless in the presence of the tailors, though it was

just over the heads of the tailors that his countryman most loftily

looked. This gave Miss Gostrey a grasped opportunity to back up

Waymarsh at his expense. The weary lawyer--it was unmistakeable--

had a conception of dress; but that, in view of some of the

features of the effect produced, was just what made the danger of

insistence on it. Strether wondered if he by this time thought Miss

Gostrey less fashionable or Lambert Strether more so; and it

appeared probable that most of the remarks exchanged between this

latter pair about passers, figures, faces, personal types,

exemplified in their degree the disposition to talk as "society"

talked.

Was what was happening to himself then, was what already HAD

happened, really that a woman of fashion was floating him into

society and that an old friend deserted on the brink was watching

the force of the current? When the woman of fashion permitted

Strether--as she permitted him at the most--the purchase of a pair

of gloves, the terms she made about it, the prohibition of neckties

and other items till she should be able to guide him through the

Burlington Arcade, were such as to fall upon a sensitive ear as a

challenge to just imputations. Miss Gostrey was such a woman of

fashion as could make without a symptom of vulgar blinking an

appointment for the Burlington Arcade. Mere discriminations about a

pair of gloves could thus at any rate represent--always for such

sensitive ears as were in question--possibilities of something that

Strether could make a mark against only as the peril of apparent

wantonness. He had quite the consciousness of his new friend, for

their companion, that he might have had of a Jesuit in petticoats,

a representative of the recruiting interests of the Catholic

Church. The Catholic Church, for Waymarsh-that was to say the

enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and far-reaching quivering

groping tentacles--was exactly society, exactly the multiplication

of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types and tones,

exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism;

exactly in short Europe.

There was light for observation, however, in an incident that

occurred just before they turned back to luncheon. Waymarsh had

been for a quarter of an hour exceptionally mute and distant, and

something, or other--Strether was never to make out exactly what--

proved, as it were, too much for him after his comrades had stood

for three minutes taking in, while they leaned on an old balustrade

that guarded the edge of the Row, a particularly crooked and

huddled street-view. "He thinks us sophisticated, he thinks us

worldly, he thinks us wicked, he thinks us all sorts of queer

things," Strether reflected; for wondrous were the vague quantities

our friend had within a couple of short days acquired the habit of

conveniently and conclusively lumping together. There seemed

moreover a direct connexion between some such inference and a

sudden grim dash taken by Waymarsh to the opposite side. This

movement was startlingly sudden, and his companions at first

supposed him to have espied, to be pursuing, the glimpse of an

acquaintance. They next made out, however, that an open door had

instantly received him, and they then recognised him as engulfed in

the establishment of a jeweller, behind whose glittering front he

was lost to view. The fact had somehow the note of a demonstration,

and it left each of the others to show a face almost of fear. But

Miss Gostrey broke into a laugh. "What's the matter with him?"

"Well," said Strether, "he can't stand it."

"But can't stand what?"

"Anything. Europe."

"Then how will that jeweller help him?"

Strether seemed to make it out, from their position, between the

interstices of arrayed watches, of close-hung dangling gewgaws.

"You'll see."

"Ah that's just what--if he buys anything--I'm afraid of: that I

shall see something rather dreadful."

Strether studied the finer appearances. "He may buy everything."

"Then don't you think we ought to follow him?"

"Not for worlds. Besides we can't. We're paralysed. We exchange a

long scared look, we publicly tremble. The thing is, you see, we

'realise.' He has struck for freedom."

She wondered but she laughed. "Ah what a price to pay! And I was

preparing some for him so cheap."

"No, no," Strether went on, frankly amused now; "don't call it

that: the kind of freedom you deal in is dear." Then as to justify

himself: "Am I not in MY way trying it? It's this."

"Being here, you mean, with me?''

"Yes, and talking to you as I do. I've known you a few hours, and

I've known HIM all my life; so that if the ease I thus take with

you about him isn't magnificent"--and the thought of it held him a

moment--"why it's rather base."

"It's magnificent!" said Miss Gostrey to make an end of it. "And

you should hear," she added, "the ease I take--and I above all

intend to take--with Mr. Waymarsh."

Strether thought. "About ME? Ah that's no equivalent.

The equivalent would be Waymarsh's himself serving me up--

his remorseless analysis of me. And he'll never do that"--

he was sadly clear. "He'll never remorselessly analyse me."

He quite held her with the authority of this. "He'll never

say a word to you about me."

She took it in; she did it justice; yet after an instant her

reason, her restless irony, disposed of it. "Of course he won't.

For what do you take people, that they're able to say words about

anything, able remorselessly to analyse? There are not many like

you and me. It will be only because he's too stupid."

It stirred in her friend a sceptical echo which was at the same

time the protest of the faith of years. "Waymarsh stupid?"

"Compared with you."

Strether had still his eyes on the jeweller's front, and he waited

a moment to answer. "He's a success of a kind that I haven't

approached."

"Do you mean he has made money?"

"He makes it--to my belief. And I," said Strether, "though with a

back quite as bent, have never made anything. I'm a perfectly

equipped failure."

He feared an instant she'd ask him if he meant he was poor; and he

was glad she didn't, for he really didn't know to what the truth on

this unpleasant point mightn't have prompted her. She only,

however, confirmed his assertion. "Thank goodness you're a failure--

it's why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too

hideous. Look about you--look at the successes. Would you BE one,

on your honour? Look, moreover," she continued, "at me."

For a little accordingly their eyes met. "I see," Strether

returned. "You too are out of it."

"The superiority you discern in me," she concurred, "announces my

futility. If you knew," she sighed, "the dreams of my youth! But

our realities are what has brought us together. We're beaten

brothers in arms."

He smiled at her kindly enough, but he shook his head. "It doesn't

alter the fact that you're expensive. You've cost me already--!"

But he had hung fire. "Cost you what?"

"Well, my past--in one great lump. But no matter," he laughed:

"I'll pay with my last penny."

Her attention had unfortunately now been engaged by their comrade's

return, for Waymarsh met their view as he came out of his shop. "I

hope he hasn't paid," she said, "with HIS last; though I'm

convinced he has been splendid, and has been so for you."

"Ah no--not that!"

"Then for me?"

"Quite as little." Waymarsh was by this time near enough to show

signs his friend could read, though he seemed to look almost

carefully at nothing in particular.

"Then for himself?"

"For nobody. For nothing. For freedom."

"But what has freedom to do with it?"

Strether's answer was indirect. "To be as good as you and me. But

different."

She had had time to take in their companion's face; and with it, as

such things were easy for her, she took in all. "Different--yes.

But better!"

If Waymarsh was sombre he was also indeed almost sublime. He told

them nothing, left his absence unexplained, and though they were

convinced he had made some extraordinary purchase they were never

to learn its nature. He only glowered grandly at the tops of the

old gables. "It's the sacred rage," Strether had had further time

to say; and this sacred rage was to become between them, for

convenient comprehension, the description of one of his periodical

necessities. It was Strether who eventually contended that it did

make him better than they. But by that time Miss Gostrey was

convinced that she didn't want to be better than Strether.

Read next: VOLUME I#BOOK SECOND#CHAPTER I

Read previous: VOLUME I#BOOK FIRST#CHAPTER II

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