VOLUME II - BOOK SEVEN - CHAPTER III

At four o'clock that afternoon he had still not seen him, but he

was then, as to make up for this, engaged in talk about him with

Miss Gostrey. Strether had kept away from home all day, given

himself up to the town and to his thoughts, wandered and mused,

been at once restless and absorbed--and all with the present climax

of a rich little welcome in the Quartier Marboeuf. "Waymarsh has

been, 'unbeknown' to me, I'm convinced"--for Miss Gostrey had

enquired--"in communication with Woollett: the consequence of which

was, last night, the loudest possible call for me."

"Do you mean a letter to bring you home?"

"No--a cable, which I have at this moment in my pocket: a 'Come

back by the first ship.'"

Strether's hostess, it might have been made out, just escaped

changing colour. Reflexion arrived but in time and established a

provisional serenity. It was perhaps exactly this that enabled her

to say with duplicity: "And you're going--?"

"You almost deserve it when you abandon me so."

She shook her head as if this were not worth taking up. "My absence

has helped you--as I've only to look at you to see. It was my

calculation, and I'm justified. You're not where you were. And the

thing," she smiled, "was for me not to be there either. You can go

of yourself."

"Oh but I feel to-day," he comfortably declared, "that I shall want

you yet."

She took him all in again. "Well, I promise you not again to leave

you, but it will only be to follow you. You've got your momentum

and can toddle alone."

He intelligently accepted it. "Yes--I suppose I can toddle. It's

the sight of that in fact that has upset Waymarsh. He can bear it--

the way I strike him as going--no longer. That's only the climax

of his original feeling. He wants me to quit; and he must have

written to Woollett that I'm in peril of perdition."

"Ah good!" she murmured. "But is it only your supposition?"

"I make it out--it explains."

"Then he denies?--or you haven't asked him?"

"I've not had time," Strether said; "I made it out but last night,

putting various things together, and I've not been since then face

to face with him."

She wondered. "Because you're too disgusted? You can't trust

yourself?"

He settled his glasses on his nose. "Do I look in a great rage?"

"You look divine!"

"There's nothing," he went on, "to be angry about. He has done me

on the contrary a service."

She made it out. "By bringing things to a head?"

"How well you understand!" he almost groaned. "Waymarsh won't in

the least, at any rate, when I have it out with him, deny or

extenuate. He has acted from the deepest conviction, with the best

conscience and after wakeful nights. He'll recognise that he's

fully responsible, and will consider that he has been highly

successful; so that any discussion we may have will bring us quite

together again--bridge the dark stream that has kept us so

thoroughly apart. We shall have at last, in the consequences of his

act, something we can definitely talk about."

She was silent a little. "How wonderfully you take it! But you're

always wonderful."

He had a pause that matched her own; then he had, with an adequate

spirit, a complete admission. "It's quite true. I'm extremely

wonderful just now. I dare say in fact I'm quite fantastic, and I

shouldn't be at all surprised if I were mad."

"Then tell me!" she earnestly pressed. As he, however, for the time

answered nothing, only returning the look with which she watched

him, she presented herself where it was easier to meet her. "What

will Mr. Waymarsh exactly have done?"

"Simply have written a letter. One will have been quite enough. He

has told them I want looking after."

"And DO you?"--she was all interest.

"Immensely. And I shall get it."

"By which you mean you don't budge?"

"I don't budge."

"You've cabled?"

"No--I've made Chad do it."

"That you decline to come?"

"That HE declines. We had it out this morning and I brought him

round. He had come in, before I was down, to tell me he was ready--

ready, I mean, to return. And he went off, after ten minutes with

me, to say he wouldn't."

Miss Gostrey followed with intensity. "Then you've STOPPED him?"

Strether settled himself afresh in his chair. "I've stopped him.

That is for the time. That"--he gave it to her more vividly--"is

where I am."

"I see, I see. But where's Mr. Newsome? He was ready," she asked,

"to go?"

"All ready."

"And sincerely--believing YOU'D be?"

"Perfectly, I think; so that he was amazed to find the hand I had

laid on him to pull him over suddenly converted into an engine for

keeping him still."

It was an account of the matter Miss Gostrey could weigh. "Does he

think the conversion sudden?"

"Well," said Strether, "I'm not altogether sure what he thinks. I'm

not sure of anything that concerns him, except that the more I've

seen of him the less I've found him what I originally expected.

He's obscure, and that's why I'm waiting."

She wondered. "But for what in particular?"

"For the answer to his cable."

"And what was his cable?"

"I don't know," Strether replied; "it was to be, when he left me,

according to his own taste. I simply said to him: 'I want to stay,

and the only way for me to do so is for you to.' That I wanted to

stay seemed to interest him, and he acted on that."

Miss Gostrey turned it over. "He wants then himself to stay."

"He half wants it. That is he half wants to go. My original appeal

has to that extent worked in him. Nevertheless," Strether pursued,

"he won't go. Not, at least, so long as I'm here."

"But you can't," his companion suggested, "stay here always. I wish

you could."

"By no means. Still, I want to see him a little further. He's not

in the least the case I supposed, he's quite another case. And it's

as such that he interests me." It was almost as if for his own

intelligence that, deliberate and lucid, our friend thus expressed

the matter. "I don't want to give him up."

Miss Gostrey but desired to help his lucidity. She had however to

be light and tactful. "Up, you mean--a--to his mother?"

"Well, I'm not thinking of his mother now. I'm thinking of the plan

of which I was the mouthpiece, which, as soon as we met, I put

before him as persuasively as I knew how, and which was drawn up,

as it were, in complete ignorance of all that, in this last long

period, has been happening to him. It took no account whatever of

the impression I was here on the spot immediately to begin to

receive from him--impressions of which I feel sure I'm far from

having had the last."

Miss Gostrey had a smile of the most genial criticism. "So your

idea is--more or less--to stay out of curiosity?"

"Call it what you like! I don't care what it's called--"

"So long as you do stay? Certainly not then. I call it, all the

same, immense fun," Maria Gostrey declared; "and to see you work it

out will be one of the sensations of my life. It IS clear you can

toddle alone!"

He received this tribute without elation. "I shan't be alone when

the Pococks have come."

Her eyebrows went up. "The Pococks are coming?"

"That, I mean, is what will happen--and happen as quickly as

possible--in consequence of Chad's cable. They'll simply embark.

Sarah will come to speak for her mother--with an effect different

from MY muddle."

Miss Gostrey more gravely wondered. "SHE then will take him back?"

"Very possibly--and we shall see. She must at any rate have the

chance, and she may be trusted to do all she can."

"And do you WANT that?"

"Of course," said Strether, "I want it. I want to play fair "

But she had lost for a moment the thread. "If it devolves on the

Pococks why do you stay?"

"Just to see that I DO play fair--and a little also, no doubt, that

they do." Strether was luminous as he had never been. "I came out

to find myself in presence of new facts--facts that have kept

striking me as less and less met by our old reasons. The matter's

perfectly simple. New reasons--reasons as new as the facts

themselves--are wanted; and of this our friends at Woollett--Chad's

and mine--were at the earliest moment definitely notified. If any

are producible Mrs. Pocock will produce them; she'll bring over the

whole collection. They'll be," he added with a pensive smile "a

part of the 'fun' you speak of."

She was quite in the current now and floating by his side. "It's

Mamie--so far as I've had it from you--who'll be their great card."

And then as his contemplative silence wasn't a denial she

significantly added: "I think I'm sorry for her."

"I think I am!"--and Strether sprang up, moving about a little as

her eyes followed him. "But it can't be helped."

"You mean her coming out can't be?"

He explained after another turn what he meant. "The only way for

her not to come is for me to go home--as I believe that on the spot

I could prevent it. But the difficulty as to that is that if I do

go home--"

"I see, I see"--she had easily understood. "Mr. Newsome will do the

same, and that's not"--she laughed out now--"to be thought of."

Strether had no laugh; he had only a quiet comparatively placid

look that might have shown him as proof against ridicule. "Strange,

isn't it?"

They had, in the matter that so much interested them, come so far

as this without sounding another name--to which however their

present momentary silence was full of a conscious reference.

Strether's question was a sufficient implication of the weight it

had gained with him during the absence of his hostess; and just for

that reason a single gesture from her could pass for him as a vivid

answer. Yet he was answered still better when she said in a moment:

"Will Mr. Newsome introduce his sister--?"

"To Madame de Vionnet?" Strether spoke the name at last. "I shall

be greatly surprised if he doesn't."

She seemed to gaze at the possibility. "You mean you've thought of

it and you're prepared."

"I've thought of it and I'm prepared."

It was to her visitor now that she applied her consideration. "Bon!

You ARE magnificent!"

"Well," he answered after a pause and a little wearily, but still

standing there before her--"well, that's what, just once in all my

dull days, I think I shall like to have been!"

Two days later he had news from Chad of a communication from

Woollett in response to their determinant telegram, this missive

being addressed to Chad himself and announcing the immediate

departure for France of Sarah and Jim and Mamie. Strether had

meanwhile on his own side cabled; he had but delayed that act till

after his visit to Miss Gostrey, an interview by which, as so often

before, he felt his sense of things cleared up and settled. His

message to Mrs. Newsome, in answer to her own, had consisted of the

words: "Judge best to take another month, but with full

appreciation of all re-enforcements." He had added that he was

writing, but he was of course always writing; it was a practice

that continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, to make him come

nearer than anything else to the consciousness of doing something:

so that he often wondered if he hadn't really, under his recent

stress, acquired some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of

make-believe. Wouldn't the pages he still so freely dispatched by

the American post have been worthy of a showy journalist, some

master of the great new science of beating the sense out of words?

Wasn't he writing against time, and mainly to show he was kind?--

since it had become quite his habit not to like to read himself

over. On those lines he could still be liberal, yet it was at best

a sort of whistling in the dark. It was unmistakeable moreover that

the sense of being in the dark now pressed on him more sharply--

creating thereby the need for a louder and livelier whistle. He

whistled long and hard after sending his message; he whistled again

and again in celebration of Chad's news; there was an interval of a

fortnight in which this exercise helped him. He had no great notion

of what, on the spot, Sarah Pocock would have to say, though he had

indeed confused premonitions; but it shouldn't be in her power to

say--it shouldn't be in any one's anywhere to say--that he was

neglecting her mother. He might have written before more freely,

but he had never written more copiously; and he frankly gave for a

reason at Woollett that he wished to fill the void created there by

Sarah's departure.

The increase of his darkness, however, and the quickening, as I

have called it, of his tune, resided in the fact that he was

hearing almost nothing. He had for some time been aware that he was

hearing less than before, and he was now clearly following a

process by which Mrs. Newsome's letters could but logically stop.

He hadn't had a line for many days, and he needed no proof--though

he was, in time, to have plenty--that she wouldn't have put pen to

paper after receiving the hint that had determined her telegram.

She wouldn't write till Sarah should have seen him and reported on

him. It was strange, though it might well be less so than his own

behaviour appeared at Woollett. It was at any rate significant, and

what WAS remarkable was the way his friend's nature and manner put

on for him, through this very drop of demonstration, a greater

intensity. It struck him really that he had never so lived with her

as during this period of her silence; the silence was a sacred

hush, a finer clearer medium, in which her idiosyncrasies showed.

He walked about with her, sat with her, drove with her and dined

face-to-face with her--a rare treat "in his life," as he could

perhaps have scarce escaped phrasing it; and if he had never seen

her so soundless he had never, on the other hand, felt her so

highly, so almost austerely, herself: pure and by the vulgar

estimate "cold," but deep devoted delicate sensitive noble. Her

vividness in these respects became for him, in the special

conditions, almost an obsession; and though the obsession sharpened

his pulses, adding really to the excitement of life, there were

hours at which, to be less on the stretch, he directly sought

forgetfulness. He knew it for the queerest of adventures--a

circumstance capable of playing such a part only for Lambert

Strether--that in Paris itself, of all places, he should find this

ghost of the lady of Woollett more importunate than any other

presence.

When he went back to Maria Gostrey it was for the change to

something else. And yet after all the change scarcely operated for

he talked to her of Mrs. Newsome in these days as he had never

talked before. He had hitherto observed in that particular a

discretion and a law; considerations that at present broke down

quite as if relations had altered. They hadn't REALLY altered, he

said to himself, so much as that came to; for if what had occurred

was of course that Mrs. Newsome had ceased to trust him, there was

nothing on the other hand to prove that he shouldn't win back her

confidence. It was quite his present theory that he would leave no

stone unturned to do so; and in fact if he now told Maria things

about her that he had never told before this was largely because it

kept before him the idea of the honour of such a woman's esteem.

His relation with Maria as well was, strangely enough, no longer

quite the same; this truth--though not too disconcertingly--had

come up between them on the renewal of their meetings. It was all

contained in what she had then almost immediately said to him; it

was represented by the remark she had needed but ten minutes to

make and that he hadn't been disposed to gainsay. He could toddle

alone, and the difference that showed was extraordinary. The turn

taken by their talk had promptly confirmed this difference; his

larger confidence on the score of Mrs. Newsome did the rest; and

the time seemed already far off when he had held out his small

thirsty cup to the spout of her pail. Her pail was scarce touched

now, and other fountains had flowed for him; she fell into her

place as but one of his tributaries; and there was a strange

sweetness--a melancholy mildness that touched him--in her

acceptance of the altered order.

It marked for himself the flight of time, or at any rate what he

was pleased to think of with irony and pity as the rush of experience;

it having been but the day before yesterday that he sat at her feet

and held on by her garment and was fed by her hand. It was the

proportions that were changed, and the proportions were at all

times, he philosophised, the very conditions of perception, the

terms of thought. It was as if, with her effective little entresol and

and her wide acquaintance, her activities, varieties, promiscuities,

the duties and devotions that took up nine tenths of her time and

of which he got, guardedly, but the side-wind--it was as if she had

shrunk to a secondary element and had consented to the shrinkage

with the perfection of tact. This perfection had never failed

her; it had originally been greater than his prime measure for it;

it had kept him quite apart, kept him out of the shop, as she

called her huge general acquaintance, made their commerce as

quiet, as much a thing of the home alone--the opposite of the

shop--as if she had never another customer. She had been wonderful

to him at first, with the memory of her little entresol, the image

to which, on most mornings at that time, his eyes directly opened;

but now she mainly figured for him as but part of the bristling

total--though of course always as a person to whom he should never

cease to be indebted. It would never be given to him certainly

to inspire a greater kindness. She had decked him out for others,

and he saw at this point at least nothing she would ever ask for.

She only wondered and questioned and listened, rendering him the

homage of a wistful speculation. She expressed it repeatedly;

he was already far beyond her, and she must prepare herself to

lose him. There was but one little chance for her.

Often as she had said it he met it--for it was a touch he liked--

each time the same way. "My coming to grief?"

"Yes--then I might patch you up."

"Oh for my real smash, if it takes place, there will be no

patching."

"But you surely don't mean it will kill you."

"No--worse. It will make me old."

"Ah nothing can do that! The wonderful and special thing about you

is that you ARE, at this time of day, youth." Then she always made,

further, one of those remarks that she had completely ceased to

adorn with hesitations or apologies, and that had, by the same

token, in spite of their extreme straightness, ceased to produce in

Strether the least embarrassment. She made him believe them, and

they became thereby as impersonal as truth itself. "It's just your

particular charm."

His answer too was always the same. "Of course I'm youth--youth

for the trip to Europe. I began to be young, or at least to get the

benefit of it, the moment I met you at Chester, and that's what has

been taking place ever since. I never had the benefit at the proper

time--which comes to saying that I never had the thing itself. I'm

having the benefit at this moment; I had it the other day when I

said to Chad 'Wait'; I shall have it still again when Sarah Pocock

arrives. It's a benefit that would make a poor show for many

people; and I don't know who else but you and I, frankly, could

begin to see in it what I feel. I don't get drunk; I don't pursue

the ladies; I don't spend money; I don't even write sonnets. But

nevertheless I'm making up late for what I didn't have early. I

cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more

than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say

what they like--it's my surrender, it's my tribute, to youth. One

puts that in where one can--it has to come in somewhere, if only

out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of other persons.

Chad gives me the sense of it, for all his grey hairs, which merely

make it solid in him and safe and serene; and SHE does the same,

for all her being older than he, for all her marriageable daughter,

her separated husband, her agitated history. Though they're young

enough, my pair, I don't say they're, in the freshest way, their

own absolutely prime adolescence; for that has nothing to do with

it. The point is that they're mine. Yes, they're my youth; since

somehow at the right time nothing else ever was. What I meant just

now therefore is that it would all go--go before doing its work--

if they were to fail me."

On which, just here, Miss Gostrey inveterately questioned. "What do

you, in particular, call its work?"

"Well, to see me through."

"But through what?"--she liked to get it all out of him.

"Why through this experience." That was all that would come.

It regularly gave her none the less the last word. "Don't you

remember how in those first days of our meeting it was I who was to

see you through?"

"Remember? Tenderly, deeply"--he always rose to it. "You're just

doing your part in letting me maunder to you thus."

"Ah don't speak as if my part were small; since whatever else fails

you--"

"YOU won't, ever, ever, ever?"--he thus took her up. "Oh I beg your

pardon; you necessarily, you inevitably WILL. Your conditions--that's

what I mean--won't allow me anything to do for you."

"Let alone--I see what you mean--that I'm drearily dreadfully old.

I AM, but there's a service--possible for you to render--that I know,

all the same, I shall think of."

"And what will it be?"

This, in fine, however, she would never tell him. "You shall hear

only if your smash takes place. As that's really out of the

question, I won't expose myself''--a point at which, for reasons of

his own, Strether ceased to press.

He came round, for publicity--it was the easiest thing--to the idea

that his smash WAS out of the question, and this rendered idle the

discussion of what might follow it. He attached an added

importance, as the days elapsed, to the arrival of the Pococks; he

had even a shameful sense of waiting for it insincerely and

incorrectly. He accused himself of making believe to his own mind

that Sarah's presence, her impression, her judgement would simplify

and harmonise, he accused himself of being so afraid of what they

MIGHT do that he sought refuge, to beg the whole question, in a

vain fury. He had abundantly seen at home what they were in the

habit of doing, and he had not at present the smallest ground. His

clearest vision was when he made out that what he most desired was

an account more full and free of Mrs. Newsome's state of mind than

any he felt he could now expect from herself; that calculation at

least went hand in hand with the sharp consciousness of wishing to

prove to himself that he was not afraid to look his behaviour in

the face. If he was by an inexorable logic to pay for it he was

literally impatient to know the cost, and he held himself ready to

pay in instalments. The first instalment would be precisely this

entertainment of Sarah; as a consequence of which moreover. he

should know vastly better how he stood.

Read next: VOLUME II#BOOK EIGHTH#CHAPTER I

Read previous: VOLUME II#BOOK SEVEN#CHAPTER II

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