VOLUME II - BOOK TENTH - CHAPTER III

Almost the first thing, strangely enough, that, about an hour

later, Strether found himself doing in Sarah's presence was to

remark articulately on this failure, in their friend, of what had

been superficially his great distinction. It was as if--he alluded

of course to the grand manner--the dear man had sacrificed it to

some other advantage; which would be of course only for himself to

measure. It might be simply that he was physically so much more

sound than on his first coming out; this was all prosaic,

comparatively cheerful and vulgar. And fortunately, if one came to

that, his improvement in health was really itself grander than any

manner it could be conceived as having cost him. "You yourself

alone, dear Sarah"--Strether took the plunge--"have done him, it

strikes me, in these three weeks, as much good as all the rest of

his time together."

It was a plunge because somehow the range of reference was, in the

conditions, "funny," and made funnier still by Sarah's attitude, by

the turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so sensibly taken.

Her appearance was really indeed funnier than anything else--the

spirit in which he felt her to be there as soon as she was there,

the shade of obscurity that cleared up for him as soon as he was

seated with her in the small salon de lecture that had, for the

most part, in all the weeks, witnessed the wane of his early

vivacity of discussion with Waymarsh. It was an immense thing,

quite a tremendous thing, for her to have come: this truth opened

out to him in spite of his having already arrived for himself at a

fairly vivid view of it. He had done exactly what he had given

Waymarsh his word for--had walked and re-walked the court while he

awaited her advent; acquiring in this exercise an amount of light

that affected him at the time as flooding the scene. She had

decided upon the step in order to give him the benefit of a doubt,

in order to be able to say to her mother that she had, even to

abjectness, smoothed the way for him. The doubt had been as to

whether he mightn't take her as not having smoothed it--and the

admonition had possibly come from Waymarsh's more detached spirit.

Waymarsh had at any rate, certainly, thrown his weight into the

scale--he had pointed to the importance of depriving their friend

of a grievance. She had done justice to the plea, and it was to

set herself right with a high ideal that she actually sat there in

her state. Her calculation was sharp in the immobility with which

she held her tall parasol-stick upright and at arm's length, quite

as if she had struck the place to plant her flag; in the separate

precautions she took not to show as nervous; in the aggressive

repose in which she did quite nothing but wait for him. Doubt

ceased to be possible from the moment he had taken in that she had

arrived with no proposal whatever; that her concern was simply to

show what she had come to receive. She had come to receive his

submission, and Waymarsh was to have made it plain to him that she

would expect nothing less. He saw fifty things, her host, at this

convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was that their

anxious friend hadn't quite had the hand required of him.

Waymarsh HAD, however, uttered the request that she might find him

mild, and while hanging about the court before her arrival he had

turned over with zeal the different ways in which he could be so.

The difficulty was that if he was mild he wasn't, for her purpose,

conscious. If she wished him conscious--as everything about her

cried aloud that she did--she must accordingly be at costs to make

him so. Conscious he was, for himself--but only of too many

things; so she must choose the one she required.

Practically, however, it at last got itself named, and when once

that had happened they were quite at the centre of their situation.

One thing had really done as well as another; when Strether had

spoken of Waymarsh's leaving him, and that had necessarily brought

on a reference to Mrs. Pocock's similar intention, the jump was but

short to supreme lucidity. Light became indeed after that so

intense that Strether would doubtless have but half made out, in

the prodigious glare, by which of the two the issue had been in

fact precipitated. It was, in their contracted quarters, as much

there between them as if it had been something suddenly spilled

with a crash and a splash on the floor. The form of his submission

was to be an engagement to acquit himself within the twenty-four

hours. "He'll go in a moment if you give him the word--he assures

me on his honour he'll do that": this came in its order, out of

its order, in respect to Chad, after the crash had occurred. It

came repeatedly during the time taken by Strether to feel that he

was even more fixed in his rigour than he had supposed--the time he

was not above adding to a little by telling her that such a way of

putting it on her brother's part left him sufficiently surprised.

She wasn't at all funny at last--she was really fine; and he felt

easily where she was strong--strong for herself. It hadn't yet so

come home to him that she was nobly and appointedly officious.

She was acting in interests grander and clearer than that of her

poor little personal, poor little Parisian equilibrium, and all his

consciousness of her mother's moral pressure profited by this proof

of its sustaining force. She would be held up; she would be

strengthened; he needn't in the least be anxious for her.

What would once more have been distinct to him had he tried to

make it so was that, as Mrs. Newsome was essentially all moral pressure,

the presence of this element was almost identical with her own presence.

It wasn't perhaps that he felt he was dealing with her straight,

but it was certainly as if she had been dealing straight with HIM.

She was reaching him somehow by the lengthened arm of the spirit,

and he was having to that extent to take her into account;

but he wasn't reaching her in turn, not making her take HIM;

he was only reaching Sarah, who appeared to take so little of him.

"Something has clearly passed between you and Chad," he presently said,

"that I think I ought to know something more about. Does he put it all,"

he smiled, "on me?"

"Did you come out," she asked, "to put it all on HIM?"

But he replied to this no further than, after an instant, by

saying: "Oh it's all right. Chad I mean's all right in having

said to you--well anything he may have said. I'll TAKE it all--

what he does put on me. Only I must see him before I see you

again."

She hesitated, but she brought it out. "Is it absolutely necessary

you should see me again?"

"Certainly, if I'm to give you any definite word about anything."

"Is it your idea then," she returned, "that I shall keep on meeting

you only to be exposed to fresh humiliation?"

He fixed her a longer time. "Are your instructions from

Mrs. Newsome that you shall, even at the worst, absolutely and

irretrievably break with me?"

"My instructions from Mrs. Newsome are, if you please, my affair.

You know perfectly what your own were, and you can judge for

yourself of what it can do for you to have made what you have of

them. You can perfectly see, at any rate, I'll go so far as to

say, that if I wish not to expose myself I must wish still less to

expose HER." She had already said more than she had quite

expected; but, though she had also pulled up, the colour in her

face showed him he should from one moment to the other have it all.

He now indeed felt the high importance of his having it. "What is

your conduct," she broke out as if to explain--"what is your

conduct but an outrage to women like US? I mean your acting as if

there can be a doubt--as between us and such another--of his duty?"

He thought a moment. It was rather much to deal with at once; not

only the question itself, but the sore abysses it revealed.

"Of course they're totally different kinds of duty."

"And do you pretend that he has any at all--to such another?"

"Do you mean to Madame de Vionnet?" He uttered the name not to

affront her, but yet again to gain time--time that he needed for

taking in something still other and larger than her demand of a

moment before. It wasn't at once that he could see all that was

in her actual challenge; but when he did he found himself just

checking a low vague sound, a sound which was perhaps the nearest

approach his vocal chords had ever known to a growl. Everything

Mrs. Pocock had failed to give a sign of recognising in Chad as a

particular part of a transformation--everything that had lent

intention to this particular failure--affected him as gathered into

a large loose bundle and thrown, in her words, into his face. The

missile made him to that extent catch his breath; which however he

presently recovered. "Why when a woman's at once so charming and

so beneficent--"

"You can sacrifice mothers and sisters to her without a blush and

can make them cross the ocean on purpose to feel the more and take

from you the straighter, HOW you do it?"

Yes, she had taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but he

tried not to flounder in her grasp. "I don't think there's

anything I've done in any such calculated way as you describe.

Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of

everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to my having

come before you, and my having come was a result of our general

state of mind. Our general state of mind had proceeded, on its

side, from our queer ignorance, our queer misconceptions and

confusions--from which, since then, an inexorable tide of light

seems to have floated us into our perhaps still queerer knowledge.

Don't you LIKE your brother as he is," he went on, "and haven't

you given your mother an intelligible account of all that that

comes to?"

It put to her also, doubtless, his own tone, too many things, this

at least would have been the case hadn't his final challenge

directly helped her. Everything, at the stage they had reached,

directly helped her, because everything betrayed in him such a

basis of intention. He saw--the odd way things came out!--that he

would have been held less monstrous had he only been a little

wilder. What exposed him was just his poor old trick of quiet

inwardness, what exposed him was his THINKING such offence. He hadn't

in the least however the desire to irritate that Sarah imputed to him,

and he could only at last temporise, for the moment, with her

indignant view. She was altogether more inflamed than he had

expected, and he would probably understand this better when he

should learn what had occurred for her with Chad. Till then her

view of his particular blackness, her clear surprise at his not

clutching the pole she held out, must pass as extravagant. "I

leave you to flatter yourself," she returned, "that what you speak

of is what YOU'VE beautifully done. When a thing has been already

described in such a lovely way--!" But she caught herself up, and

her comment on his description rang out sufficiently loud. "Do you

consider her even an apology for a decent woman?"

Ah there it was at last! She put the matter more crudely than, for

his own mixed purposes, he had yet had to do; but essentially it

was all one matter. It was so much--so much; and she treated it,

poor lady, as so little. He grew conscious, as he was now apt to

do, of a strange smile, and the next moment he found himself

talking like Miss Barrace. "She has struck me from the first as

wonderful. I've been thinking too moreover that, after all, she

would probably have represented even for yourself something rather

new and rather good."

He was to have given Mrs. Pocock with this, however, but her best

opportunity for a sound of derision. "Rather new? I hope so with

all my heart!"

"I mean," he explained, "that she might have affected you by her

exquisite amiability--a real revelation, it has seemed to myself;

her high rarity, her distinction of every sort."

He had been, with these words, consciously a little "precious"; but

he had had to be--he couldn't give her the truth of the case

without them; and it seemed to him moreover now that he didn't

care. He had at all events not served his cause, for she sprang at

its exposed side. "A 'revelation'--to ME: I've come to such a

woman for a revelation? You talk to me about 'distinction'--

YOU, you who've had your privilege?--when the most distinguished woman

we shall either of us have seen in this world sits there insulted,

in her loneliness, by your incredible comparison!"

Strether forbore, with an effort, from straying; but he looked all

about him. "Does your mother herself make the point that she

sits insulted?"

Sarah's answer came so straight, so "pat," as might have been said,

that he felt on the instant its origin. "She has confided to my

judgement and my tenderness the expression of her personal sense of

everything, and the assertion of her personal dignity."

They were the very words of the lady of Woollett--he would have

known them in a thousand; her parting charge to her child. Mrs.

Pocock accordingly spoke to this extent by book, and the fact

immensely moved him. "If she does really feel as you say it's of

course very very dreadful. I've given sufficient proof, one would

have thought," he added, "of my deep admiration for Mrs. Newsome."

"And pray what proof would one have thought you'd CALL sufficient?

That of thinking this person here so far superior to her?"

He wondered again; he waited. "Ah dear Sarah, you must LEAVE me

this person here!"

In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even

perversely, he clung to his rag of reason, he had softly almost

wailed this plea. Yet he knew it to be perhaps the most positive

declaration he had ever made in his life, and his visitor's

reception of it virtually gave it that importance. "That's exactly

what I'm delighted to do. God knows WE don't want her! You take

good care not to meet," she observed in a still higher key,

"my question about their life. If you do consider it a thing

one can even SPEAK of, I congratulate you on your taste!"

The life she alluded to was of course Chad's and Madame de Vionnet's,

which she thus bracketed together in a way that made him wince

a little; there being nothing for him but to take home her

full intention. It was none the less his inconsequence that while

he had himself been enjoying for weeks the view of the brilliant

woman's specific action, he just suffered from any characterisation

of it by other lips. "I think tremendously well of her, at the

same time that I seem to feel her 'life' to be really none of my

business. It's my business, that is, only so far as Chad's own

life is affected by it; and what has happened, don't you see? is

that Chad's has been affected so beautifully. The proof of the

pudding's in the eating"--he tried, with no great success, to help

it out with a touch of pleasantry, while she let him go on as if to

sink and sink. He went on however well enough, as well as he could

do without fresh counsel; he indeed shouldn't stand quite firm, he

felt, till he should have re-established his communications with

Chad. Still, he could always speak for the woman he had so

definitely promised to "save." This wasn't quite for her the air

of salvation; but as that chill fairly deepened what did it become

but a reminder that one might at the worst perish WITH her? And it

was simple enough--it was rudimentary: not, not to give her away.

"I find in her more merits than you would probably have patience

with my counting over. And do you know," he enquired, "the effect

you produce on me by alluding to her in such terms? It's as if you

had some motive in not recognising all she has done for your

brother, and so shut your eyes to each side of the matter, in

order, whichever side comes up, to get rid of the other. I don't,

you must allow me to say, see how you can with any pretence to

candour get rid of the side nearest you."

"Near me--THAT sort of thing?" And Sarah gave a jerk back of her

head that well might have nullified any active proximity.

It kept her friend himself at his distance, and he respected for a

moment the interval. Then with a last persuasive effort he bridged

it. "You don't, on your honour, appreciate Chad's fortunate

development?"

"Fortunate?" she echoed again. And indeed she was prepared.

"I call it hideous."

Her departure had been for some minutes marked as imminent, and she

was already at the door that stood open to the court, from the

threshold of which she delivered herself of this judgement. It

rang out so loud as to produce for the time the hush of everything

else. Strether quite, as an effect of it, breathed less bravely;

he could acknowledge it, but simply enough. "Oh if you think THAT--!"

"Then all's at an end? So much the better. I do think that!" She

passed out as she spoke and took her way straight across the court,

beyond which, separated from them by the deep arch of the

porte-cochere the low victoria that had conveyed her from her own hotel

was drawn up. She made for it with decision, and the manner of her

break, the sharp shaft of her rejoinder, had an intensity by which

Strether was at first kept in arrest. She had let fly at him as

from a stretched cord, and it took him a minute to recover from the

sense of being pierced. It was not the penetration of surprise;

it was that, much more, of certainty; his case being put for him as

he had as yet only put it to himself. She was away at any rate;

she had distanced him--with rather a grand spring, an effect of pride

and ease, after all; she had got into her carriage before he could

overtake her, and the vehicle was already in motion. He stopped

halfway; he stood there in the court only seeing her go and noting

that she gave him no other look. The way he had put it to himself

was that all quite MIGHT be at an end. Each of her movements,

in this resolute rupture, reaffirmed, re-enforced that idea.

Sarah passed out of sight in the sunny street while, planted there

in the centre of the comparatively grey court, he continued merely

to look before him. It probably WAS all at an end.

Read next: VOLUME II#BOOK ELEVENTH#CHAPTER I

Read previous: VOLUME II#BOOK TENTH#CHAPTER II

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