VOLUME I - BOOK THIRD - CHAPTER I

Strether told Waymarsh all about it that very evening, on their

dining together at the hotel; which needn't have happened, he was

all the while aware, hadn't he chosen to sacrifice to this occasion

a rarer opportunity. The mention to his companion of the sacrifice

was moreover exactly what introduced his recital--or, as he would

have called it with more confidence in his interlocutor, his

confession. His confession was that he had been captured and that

one of the features of the affair had just failed to be his

engaging himself on the spot to dinner. As by such a freedom

Waymarsh would have lost him he had obeyed his scruple; and he had

likewise obeyed another scruple--which bore on the question of his

himself bringing a guest.

Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished soup, at this

array of scruples; Strether hadn't yet got quite used to being so

unprepared for the consequences of the impression he produced. It

was comparatively easy to explain, however, that he hadn't felt

sure his guest would please. The person was a young man whose

acquaintance he had made but that afternoon in the course of rather

a hindered enquiry for another person--an enquiry his new friend

had just prevented in fact from being vain. "Oh," said Strether,

"I've all sorts of things to tell you!"--and he put it in a way

that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh to help him to enjoy the

telling. He waited for his fish, he drank of his wine, he wiped his

long moustache, he leaned back in his chair, he took in the two

English ladies who had just creaked past them and whom he would

even have articulately greeted if they hadn't rather chilled the

impulse; so that all he could do was--by way of doing something--to

say "Merci, Francois!" out quite loud when his fish was brought.

Everything was there that he wanted, everything that could make the

moment an occasion, that would do beautifully--everything but what

Waymarsh might give. The little waxed salle-a-manger was sallow and

sociable; Francois, dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a

brother; the high-shouldered patronne, with her high-held,

much-rubbed hands, seemed always assenting exuberantly to something

unsaid; the Paris evening in short was, for Strether, in the very

taste of the soup, in the goodness, as he was innocently pleased to

think it, of the wine, in the pleasant coarse texture of the napkin

and the crunch of the thick-crusted bread. These all were things

congruous with his confession, and his confession was that he HAD--

it would come out properly just there if Waymarsh would only take

it properly--agreed to breakfast out, at twelve literally, the next

day. He didn't quite know where; the delicacy of the case came

straight up in the remembrance of his new friend's "We'll see; I'll

take you somewhere!"--for it had required little more than that,

after all, to let him right in. He was affected after a minute,

face to face with his actual comrade, by the impulse to overcolour.

There had already been things in respect to which he knew himself

tempted by this perversity. If Waymarsh thought them bad he should

at least have his reason for his discomfort; so Strether showed

them as worse. Still, he was now, in his way, sincerely perplexed.

Chad had been absent from the Boulevard Malesherbes--was absent

from Paris altogether; he had learned that from the concierge, but

had nevertheless gone up, and gone up--there were no two ways about

it--from an uncontrollable, a really, if one would, depraved

curiosity. The concierge had mentioned to him that a friend of the

tenant of the troisieme was for the time in possession; and this

had been Strether's pretext for a further enquiry, an experiment

carried on, under Chad's roof, without his knowledge. "I found his

friend in fact there keeping the place warm, as he called it, for

him; Chad himself being, as appears, in the south. He went a month

ago to Cannes and though his return begins to be looked for it

can't be for some days. I might, you see, perfectly have waited a

week; might have beaten a retreat as soon as I got this essential

knowledge. But I beat no retreat; I did the opposite; I stayed, I

dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I saw, in fine; and--

I don't know what to call it--I sniffed. It's a detail, but it's as

if there were something--something very good--TO sniff."

Waymarsh's face had shown his friend an attention apparently so

remote that the latter was slightly surprised to find it at this

point abreast with him. "Do you mean a smell? What of?"

"A charming scent. But I don't know."

Waymarsh gave an inferential grunt. "Does he live there with a

woman?"

"I don't know."

Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then resumed. "Has he taken

her off with him?"

"And will he bring her back?"--Strether fell into the enquiry. But

he wound it up as before. "I don't know."

The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was with another drop

back, another degustation of the Leoville, another wipe of his

moustache and another good word for Francois, seemed to produce in

his companion a slight irritation. "Then what the devil DO you

know?"

"Well," said Strether almost gaily, "I guess I don't know anything!"

His gaiety might have been a tribute to the fact that the state he

had been reduced to did for him again what had been done by his talk

of the matter with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre. It was somehow

enlarging; and the air of that amplitude was now doubtless more or

less--and all for Waymarsh to feel--in his further response. "That's

what I found out from the young man."

"But I thought you said you found out nothing."

"Nothing but that--that I don't know anything."

"And what good does that do you?"

"It's just," said Strether, "what I've come to you to help me to

discover. I mean anything about anything over here. I FELT that, up

there. It regularly rose before me in its might. The young man

moreover--Chad's friend--as good as told me so."

"As good as told you you know nothing about anything?" Waymarsh

appeared to look at some one who might have as good as told HIM.

"How old is he?"

"Well, I guess not thirty."

"Yet you had to take that from him?"

"Oh I took a good deal more--since, as I tell you, I took an

invitation to dejeuner."

"And are you GOING to that unholy meal?"

"If you'll come with me. He wants you too, you know. I told him

about you. He gave me his card," Strether pursued, "and his name's

rather funny. It's John Little Bilham, and he says his two surnames

are, on account of his being small, inevitably used together."

"Well," Waymarsh asked with due detachment from these details,

"what's he doing up there?"

"His account of himself is that he's 'only a little artist-man.'

That seemed to me perfectly to describe him. But he's yet in the

phase of study; this, you know, is the great art-school--to pass a

certain number of years in which he came over. And he's a great

friend of Chad's, and occupying Chad's rooms just now because

they're so pleasant. HE'S very pleasant and curious too," Strether

added--"though he's not from Boston."

Waymarsh looked already rather sick of him. "Where is he from?"

Strether thought. "I don't know that, either. But he's

'notoriously,' as he put it himself, not from Boston."

"Well," Waymarsh moralised from dry depths, "every one can't

notoriously be from Boston. Why," he continued, "is he curious?"

"Perhaps just for THAT--for one thing! But really," Strether added,

"for everything. When you meet him you'll see."

"Oh I don't want to meet him," Waymarsh impatiently growled. "Why

don't he go home?"

Strether hesitated. "Well, because he likes it over here."

This appeared in particular more than Waymarsh could bear. "He

ought then to be ashamed of himself, and, as you admit that you

think so too, why drag him in?"

Strether's reply again took time. "Perhaps I do think so myself--

though I don't quite yet admit it. I'm not a bit sure--it's again

one of the things I want to find out. I liked him, and CAN you like

people--? But no matter." He pulled himself up. "There's no doubt I

want you to come down on me and squash me."

Waymarsh helped himself to the next course, which, however proving

not the dish he had just noted as supplied to the English ladies,

had the effect of causing his imagination temporarily to wander.

But it presently broke out at a softer spot. "Have they got a

handsome place up there?"

"Oh a charming place; full of beautiful and valuable things. I

never saw such a place"--and Strether's thought went back to it.

"For a little artist-man--!" He could in fact scarce express it.

But his companion, who appeared now to have a view, insisted.

"Well?"

"Well, life can hold nothing better. Besides, they're things of

which he's in charge."

"So that he does doorkeeper for your precious pair? Can life,"

Waymarsh enquired, "hold nothing better than THAT?" Then as

Strether, silent, seemed even yet to wonder, "Doesn't he know what

SHE is?" he went on.

"I don't know. I didn't ask him. I couldn't. It was impossible. You

wouldn't either. Besides I didn't want to. No more would you."

Strether in short explained it at a stroke. "You can't make out

over here what people do know."

"Then what did you come over for?"

"Well, I suppose exactly to see for myself--without their aid."

"Then what do you want mine for?"

"Oh," Strether laughed, "you're not one of THEM! I do know what you

know."

As, however, this last assertion caused Waymarsh again to look at

him hard--such being the latter's doubt of its implications--he

felt his justification lame. Which was still more the case when

Waymarsh presently said: "Look here, Strether. Quit this."

Our friend smiled with a doubt of his own. "Do you mean my tone?"

"No--damn your tone. I mean your nosing round. Quit the whole job.

Let them stew in their juice. You're being used for a thing you

ain't fit for. People don't take a fine-tooth comb to groom a

horse."

"Am I a fine-tooth comb?" Strether laughed. "It's something I never

called myself!"

"It's what you are, all the same. You ain't so young as you were,

but you've kept your teeth."

He acknowledged his friend's humour. "Take care I don't get them

into YOU! You'd like them, my friends at home, Waymarsh," he

declared; "you'd really particularly like them. And I know"--it was

slightly irrelevant, but he gave it sudden and singular force--"I

know they'd like you!"

"Oh don't work them off on ME!" Waymarsh groaned.

Yet Strether still lingered with his hands in his pockets. "It's

really quite as indispensable as I say that Chad should be got

back."

"Indispensable to whom? To you?"

"Yes," Strether presently said.

"Because if you get him you also get Mrs. Newsome?"

Strether faced it. "Yes."

"And if you don't get him you don't get her?"

It might be merciless, but he continued not to flinch. "I think it

might have some effect on our personal understanding. Chad's of

real importance--or can easily become so if he will--to the

business."

"And the business is of real importance to his mother's husband?"

"Well, I naturally want what my future wife wants. And the thing

will be much better if we have our own man in it."

"If you have your own man in it, in other words," Waymarsh said,

"you'll marry--you personally--more money. She's already rich, as I

understand you, but she'll be richer still if the business can be

made to boom on certain lines that you've laid down."

"I haven't laid them down," Strether promptly returned. "Mr. Newsome

--who knew extraordinarily well what he was about--laid them down

ten years ago."

Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake of his mane, THAT

didn't matter! "You're fierce for the boom anyway."

His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice of the charge.

"I can scarcely be called fierce, I think, when I so freely take my

chance of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced in a

sense counter to Mrs. Newsome's own feelings."

Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look. "I see. You're

afraid yourself of being squared. But you're a humbug," he added,

all the same."

"Oh!" Strether quickly protested.

"Yes, you ask me for protection--which makes you very interesting;

and then you won't take it. You say you want to be squashed--"

"Ah but not so easily! Don't you see," Strether demanded "where my

interest, as already shown you, lies? It lies in my not being

squared. If I'm squared where's my marriage? If I miss my errand I

miss that; and if I miss that I miss everything--I'm nowhere."

Waymarsh--but all relentlessly--took this in. "What do I care where

you are if you're spoiled?"

Their eyes met on it an instant. "Thank you awfully," Strether at

last said. "But don't you think HER judgement of that--?"

"Ought to content me? No."

It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that

Strether again laughed. "You do her injustice. You really MUST know

her. Good-night."

He breakfasted with Mr. Bilham on the morrow, and, as

inconsequently befell, with Waymarsh massively of the party. The

latter announced, at the eleventh hour and much to his friend's

surprise, that, damn it, he would as soon join him as do anything

else; on which they proceeded together, strolling in a state of

detachment practically luxurious for them to the Boulevard

Malesherbes, a couple engaged that day with the sharp spell of

Paris as confessedly, it might have been seen, as any couple

among the daily thousands so compromised. They walked, wandered,

wondered and, a little, lost themselves; Strether hadn't had for

years so rich a consciousness of time--a bag of gold into which

he constantly dipped for a handful. It was present to him that

when the little business with Mr. Bilham should be over he would

still have shining hours to use absolutely as he liked. There was

no great pulse of haste yet in this process of saving Chad; nor

was that effect a bit more marked as he sat, half an hour later,

with his legs under Chad's mahogany, with Mr. Bilham on one side,

with a friend of Mr. Bilham's on the other, with Waymarsh

stupendously opposite, and with the great hum of Paris coming up

in softness, vagueness-for Strether himself indeed already

positive sweetness--through the sunny windows toward which, the

day before, his curiosity had raised its wings from below. The

feeling strongest with him at that moment had borne fruit almost

faster than he could taste it, and Strether literally felt at the

present hour that there was a precipitation in his fate. He had

known nothing and nobody as he stood in the street; but hadn't

his view now taken a bound in the direction of every one and of

every thing?

"What's he up to, what's he up to?"--something like that was at

the back of his head all the while in respect to little Bilham;

but meanwhile, till he should make out, every one and every thing

were as good as represented for him by the combination of his

host and the lady on his left. The lady on his left, the lady

thus promptly and ingeniously invited to "meet" Mr. Strether and

Mr. Waymarsh--it was the way she herself expressed her case--was

a very marked person, a person who had much to do with our

friend's asking himself if the occasion weren't in its essence

the most baited, the most gilded of traps. Baited it could

properly be called when the repast was of so wise a savour, and

gilded surrounding objects seemed inevitably to need to be when

Miss Barrace--which was the lady's name--looked at them with

convex Parisian eyes and through a glass with a remarkably long

tortoise-shell handle. Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect and

eminently gay, highly adorned, perfectly familiar, freely

contradictions and reminding him of some last-century portrait of

a clever head without powder--why Miss Barrace should have been

in particular the note of a "trap" Strether couldn't on the spot

have explained; he blinked in the light of a conviction that he

should know later on, and know well--as it came over him, for

that matter, with force, that he should need to. He wondered what

he was to think exactly of either of his new friends; since the

young man, Chad's intimate and deputy, had, in thus constituting

the scene, practised so much more subtly than he had been

prepared for, and since in especial Miss Barrace, surrounded

clearly by every consideration, hadn't scrupled to figure as a

familiar object. It was interesting to him to feel that he was in

the presence of new measures, other standards, a different scale

of relations, and that evidently here were a happy pair who

didn't think of things at all as he and Waymarsh thought. Nothing

was less to have been calculated in the business than that it

should now be for him as if he and Waymarsh were comparatively

quite at one.

The latter was magnificent--this at least was an assurance

privately given him by Miss Barrace. "Oh your friend's a type,

the grand old American--what shall one call it? The Hebrew

prophet, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, who used when I was a little girl in

the Rue Montaigne to come to see my father and who was usually

the American Minister to the Tuileries or some other court. I

haven't seen one these ever so many years; the sight of it warms

my poor old chilled heart; this specimen is wonderful; in the

right quarter, you know, he'll have a succes fou." Strether

hadn't failed to ask what the right quarter might be, much as he

required his presence of mind to meet such a change in their

scheme. "Oh the artist-quarter and that kind of thing; HERE

already, for instance, as you see." He had been on the point of

echoing "'Here'?--is THIS the artist-quarter?" but she had

already disposed of the question with a wave of all her tortoise-shell

and an easy "Bring him to ME!" He knew on the spot how little he

should be able to bring him, for the very air was by this time,

to his sense, thick and hot with poor Waymarsh's judgement of it.

He was in the trap still more than his companion and, unlike

his companion, not making the best of it; which was precisely what

doubtless gave him his admirable sombre glow. Little did Miss Barrace

know that what was behind it was his grave estimate of her own laxity.

The general assumption with which our two friends had arrived had been

that of finding Mr. Bilham ready to conduct them to one or other of

those resorts of the earnest, the aesthetic fraternity which were shown

among the sights of Paris. In this character it would have justified

them in a proper insistence on discharging their score. Waymarsh's

only proviso at the last had been that nobody should pay for him;

but he found himself, as the occasion developed, paid for on a

scale as to which Strether privately made out that he already

nursed retribution. Strether was conscious across the table of

what worked in him, conscious when they passed back to the small

salon to which, the previous evening, he himself had made so rich

a reference; conscious most of all as they stepped out to the

balcony in which one would have had to be an ogre not to

recognise the perfect place for easy aftertastes. These things

were enhanced for Miss Barrace by a succession of excellent

cigarettes--acknowledged, acclaimed, as a part of the wonderful

supply left behind him by Chad--in an almost equal absorption of

which Strether found himself blindly, almost wildly pushing

forward. He might perish by the sword as well as by famine, and

he knew that his having abetted the lady by an excess that was

rare with him would count for little in the sum--as Waymarsh

might so easily add it up--of her licence. Waymarsh had smoked of

old, smoked hugely; but Waymarsh did nothing now, and that gave

him his advantage over people who took things up lightly just

when others had laid them heavily down. Strether had never

smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had

been only because of a reason. The reason, it now began to appear

even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke with.

It was this lady's being there at all, however, that was the

strange free thing; perhaps, since she WAS there, her smoking was

the least of her freedoms. If Strether had been sure at each

juncture of what--with Bilham in especial--she talked about, he

might have traced others and winced at them and felt Waymarsh

wince; but he was in fact so often at sea that his sense of the

range of reference was merely general and that he on several

different occasions guessed and interpreted only to doubt. He

wondered what they meant, but there were things he scarce thought

they could be supposed to mean, and "Oh no--not THAT!" was at the

end of most of his ventures. This was the very beginning with him

of a condition as to which, later on, it will be seen, he found

cause to pull himself up; and he was to remember the moment duly

as the first step in a process. The central fact of the place was

neither more nor less, when analysed--and a pressure superficial

sufficed--than the fundamental impropriety of Chad's situation,

round about which they thus seemed cynically clustered.

Accordingly, since they took it for granted, they took for

granted all that was in connexion with it taken for granted at

Woollett--matters as to which, verily, he had been reduced with

Mrs. Newsome to the last intensity of silence. That was the

consequence of their being too bad to be talked about, and was

the accompaniment, by the same token, of a deep conception of

their badness. It befell therefore that when poor Strether put it

to himself that their badness was ultimately, or perhaps even

insolently, what such a scene as the one before him was, so to

speak, built upon, he could scarce shirk the dilemma of reading a

roundabout echo of them into almost anything that came up. This,

he was well aware, was a dreadful necessity; but such was the

stern logic, he could only gather, of a relation to the irregular

life.

It was the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss

Barrace that was the insidious, the delicate marvel. He was eager

to concede that their relation to it was all indirect, for

anything else in him would have shown the grossness of bad

manners; but the indirectness was none the less consonant--THAT

was striking-with a grateful enjoyment of everything that was

Chad's. They spoke of him repeatedly, invoking his good name and

good nature, and the worst confusion of mind for Strether was

that all their mention of him was of a kind to do him honour.

They commended his munificence and approved his taste, and in

doing so sat down, as it seemed to Strether, in the very soil out

of which these things flowered. Our friend's final predicament

was that he himself was sitting down, for the time, WITH them,

and there was a supreme moment at which, compared with his

collapse, Waymarsh's erectness affected him as really high. One

thing was certain--he saw he must make up his mind. He must

approach Chad, must wait for him, deal with him, master him, but

he mustn't dispossess himself of the faculty of seeing things as

they were. He must bring him to HIM--not go himself, as it were,

so much of the way. He must at any rate be clearer as to what--

should he continue to do that for convenience--he was still

condoning. It was on the detail of this quantity--and what could

the fact be but mystifying?-that Bilham and Miss Barrace threw so

little light. So there they were.

Read next: VOLUME I#BOOK THIRD#CHAPTER II

Read previous: VOLUME I#BOOK SECOND#CHAPTER II

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