VOLUME II - BOOK ELEVENTH - CHAPTER IV

What he saw was exactly the right thing--a boat advancing round the

bend and containing a man who held the paddles and a lady, at the

stern, with a pink parasol. It was suddenly as if these figures,

or something like them, had been wanted in the picture, had been

wanted more or less all day, and had now drifted into sight, with

the slow current, on purpose to fill up the measure. They came

slowly, floating down, evidently directed to the landing-place near

their spectator and presenting themselves to him not less clearly

as the two persons for whom his hostess was already preparing a

meal. For two very happy persons he found himself straightway

taking them--a young man in shirt-sleeves, a young woman easy and

fair, who had pulled pleasantly up from some other place and, being

acquainted with the neighbourhood, had known what this particular

retreat could offer them. The air quite thickened, at their

approach, with further intimations; the intimation that they were

expert, familiar, frequent--that this wouldn't at all events be

the first time. They knew how to do it, he vaguely felt--and it

made them but the more idyllic, though at the very moment

of the impression, as happened, their boat seemed to have begun to

drift wide, the oarsman letting it go. It had by this time none

the less come much nearer--near enough for Strether to dream the

lady in the stern had for some reason taken account of his being

there to watch them. She had remarked on it sharply, yet her

companion hadn't turned round; it was in fact almost as if our

friend had felt her bid him keep still. She had taken in something

as a result of which their course had wavered, and it continued to

waver while they just stood off. This little effect was sudden and

rapid, so rapid that Strether's sense of it was separate only for

an instant from a sharp start of his own. He too had within the

minute taken in something, taken in that he knew the lady whose

parasol, shifting as if to hide her face, made so fine a pink point

in the shining scene. It was too prodigious, a chance in a million,

but, if he knew the lady, the gentleman, who still presented his back

and kept off, the gentleman, the coatless hero of the idyll,

who had responded to her start, was, to match the marvel, none other

than Chad.

Chad and Madame de Vionnet were then like himself taking a day in

the country--though it was as queer as fiction, as farce, that

their country could happen to be exactly his; and she had been the

first at recognition, the first to feel, across the water, the shock--

for it appeared to come to that--of their wonderful accident.

Strether became aware, with this, of what was taking place--

that her recognition had been even stranger for the pair in the boat,

that her immediate impulse had been to control it, and that she was

quickly and intensely debating with Chad the risk of betrayal.

He saw they would show nothing if they could feel sure he hadn't

made them out; so that he had before him for a few seconds his

own hesitation. It was a sharp fantastic crisis that had popped up

as if in a dream, and it had had only to last the few seconds to

make him feel it as quite horrible. They were thus, on either side,

TRYING the other side, and all for some reason that broke the stillness

like some unprovoked harsh note. It seemed to him again, within the

limit, that he had but one thing to do--to settle their common question

by some sign of surprise and joy. He hereupon gave large play to

these things, agitating his hat and his stick and loudly calling out--

a demonstration that brought him relief as soon as he had seen it

answered. The boat, in mid-stream, still went a little wild--

which seemed natural, however, while Chad turned round, half

springing up; and his good friend, after blankness and wonder,

began gaily to wave her parasol. Chad dropped afresh to his paddles

and the boat headed round, amazement and pleasantry filling the air

meanwhile, and relief, as Strether continued to fancy, superseding

mere violence. Our friend went down to the water under this odd

impression as of violence averted--the violence of their having

"cut" him, out there in the eye of nature, on the assumption that

he wouldn't know it. He awaited them with a face from which he

was conscious of not being able quite to banish this idea that they

would have gone on, not seeing and not knowing, missing their dinner

and disappointing their hostess, had he himself taken a line to match.

That at least was what darkened his vision for the moment. Afterwards,

after they had bumped at the landing-place and he had assisted their

getting ashore, everything found itself sponged over by the mere

miracle of the encounter.

They could so much better at last, on either side, treat it as a

wild extravagance of hazard, that the situation was made elastic by

the amount of explanation called into play. Why indeed--apart from

oddity--the situation should have been really stiff was a question

naturally not practical at the moment, and in fact, so far as we

are concerned, a question tackled, later on and in private, only by

Strether himself. He was to reflect later on and in private that

it was mainly HE who had explained--as he had had moreover

comparatively little difficulty in doing. He was to have at all

events meanwhile the worrying thought of their perhaps secretly

suspecting him of having plotted this coincidence, taking such

pains as might be to give it the semblance of an accident. That

possibility--as their imputation--didn't of course bear looking

into for an instant; yet the whole incident was so manifestly,

arrange it as they would, an awkward one, that he could scarce keep

disclaimers in respect to his own presence from rising to his lips.

Disclaimers of intention would have been as tactless as his

presence was practically gross; and the narrowest escape they

either of them had was his lucky escape, in the event, from making

any. Nothing of the sort, so far as surface and sound were

involved, was even in question; surface and sound all made for

their common ridiculous good fortune, for the general

invraisemblance of the occasion, for the charming chance that they

had, the others, in passing, ordered some food to be ready, the

charming chance that he had himself not eaten, the charming chance,

even more, that their little plans, their hours, their train, in

short, from la-bas, would all match for their return together to

Paris. The chance that was most charming of all, the chance that

drew from Madame de Vionnet her clearest, gayest "Comme cela se

trouve!" was the announcement made to Strether after they were

seated at table, the word given him by their hostess in respect to

his carriage for the station, on which he might now count. It

settled the matter for his friends as well; the conveyance--

it WAS all too lucky!--would serve for them; and nothing was more

delightful than his being in a position to make the train so definite.

It might have been, for themselves--to hear Madame de Vionnet--

almost unnaturally vague, a detail left to be fixed; though Strether

indeed was afterwards to remember that Chad had promptly enough

intervened to forestall this appearance, laughing at his companion's

flightiness and making the point that he had after all, in spite of

the bedazzlement of a day out with her, known what he was about.

Strether was to remember afterwards further that this had had for

him the effect of forming Chad's almost sole intervention; and

indeed he was to remember further still, in subsequent meditation,

many things that, as it were, fitted together. Another of them was

for instance that the wonderful woman's overflow of surprise and

amusement was wholly into French, which she struck him as speaking

with an unprecedented command of idiomatic turns, but in which she

got, as he might have said, somewhat away from him, taking all at

once little brilliant jumps that he could but lamely match. The

question of his own French had never come up for them; it was the

one thing she wouldn't have permitted--it belonged, for a person

who had been through much, to mere boredom; but the present result

was odd, fairly veiling her identity, shifting her back into a mere

voluble class or race to the intense audibility of which he was by

this time inured. When she spoke the charming slightly strange

English he best knew her by he seemed to feel her as a creature,

among all the millions, with a language quite to herself, the real

monopoly of a special shade of speech, beautifully easy for her,

yet of a colour and a cadence that were both inimitable and matters

of accident. She came back to these things after they had shaken

down in the inn-parlour and knew, as it were, what was to become of

them; it was inevitable that loud ejaculation over the prodigy of

their convergence should at last wear itself out. Then it was that

his impression took fuller form--the impression, destined only to

deepen, to complete itself, that they had something to put a face

upon, to carry off and make the best of, and that it was she who,

admirably on the whole, was doing this. It was familiar to him of

course that they had something to put a face upon; their

friendship, their connexion, took any amount of explaining--that

would have been made familiar by his twenty minutes with Mrs. Pocock

if it hadn't already been so. Yet his theory, as we know, had

bountifully been that the facts were specifically none of his

business, and were, over and above, so far as one had to do with

them, intrinsically beautiful; and this might have prepared him for

anything, as well as rendered him proof against mystification.

When he reached home that night, however, he knew he had been, at

bottom, neither prepared nor proof; and since we have spoken of

what he was, after his return, to recall and interpret, it may as

well immediately be said that his real experience of these few

hours put on, in that belated vision--for he scarce went to bed

till morning--the aspect that is most to our purpose.

He then knew more or less how he had been affected--he but half

knew at the time. There had been plenty to affect him even after,

as has been said, they had shaken down; for his consciousness,

though muffled, had its sharpest moments during this passage, a

marked drop into innocent friendly Bohemia. They then had put

their elbows on the table, deploring the premature end of their two

or three dishes; which they had tried to make up with another

bottle while Chad joked a little spasmodically, perhaps even a

little irrelevantly, with the hostess. What it all came to had

been that fiction and fable WERE, inevitably, in the air, and not

as a simple term of comparison, but as a result of things said;

also that they were blinking it, all round, and that they yet needn't,

so much as that, have blinked it--though indeed if they hadn't

Strether didn't quite see what else they could have done.

Strether didn't quite see THAT even at an hour or two past midnight,

even when he had, at his hotel, for a long time, without a light

and without undressing, sat back on his bedroom sofa and stared

straight before him. He was, at that point of vantage, in full

possession, to make of it all what he could. He kept making of it

that there had been simply a LIE in the charming affair--a lie

on which one could now, detached and deliberate, perfectly put

one's finger. It was with the lie that they had eaten and drunk

and talked and laughed, that they had waited for their carriole

rather impatiently, and had then got into the vehicle and, sensibly

subsiding, driven their three or four miles through the darkening

summer night. The eating and drinking, which had been a resource,

had had the effect of having served its turn; the talk and laughter

had done as much; and it was during their somewhat tedious progress

to the station, during the waits there, the further delays, their

submission to fatigue, their silences in the dim compartment of the

much-stopping train, that he prepared himself for reflexions to come.

It had been a performance, Madame de Vionnet's manner, and though

it had to that degree faltered toward the end, as through her ceasing

to believe in it, as if she had asked herself, or Chad had found

a moment surreptitiously to ask her, what after all was the use,

a performance it had none the less quite handsomely remained,

with the final fact about it that it was on the whole easier to

keep up than to abandon.

From the point of view of presence of mind it had been very

wonderful indeed, wonderful for readiness, for beautiful assurance,

for the way her decision was taken on the spot, without time to

confer with Chad, without time for anything. Their only conference

could have been the brief instants in the boat before they confessed

to recognising the spectator on the bank, for they hadn't been alone

together a moment since and must have communicated all in silence.

It was a part of the deep impression for Strether, and not the least

of the deep interest, that they COULD so communicate--that Chad

in particular could let her know he left it to her. He habitually

left things to others, as Strether was so well aware, and it in fact

came over our friend in these meditations that there had been as yet

no such vivid illustration of his famous knowing how to live.

It was as if he had humoured her to the extent of letting her lie

without correction--almost as if, really, he would be coming round

in the morning to set the matter, as between Strether and himself,

right. Of course he couldn't quite come; it was a case in which

a man was obliged to accept the woman's version, even when fantastic;

if she had, with more flurry than she cared to show, elected,

as the phrase was, to represent that they had left Paris that morning,

and with no design but of getting back within the day--if she had

so sized-up, in the Woollett phrase, their necessity, she knew best

her own measure. There were things, all the same, it was impossible

to blink and which made this measure an odd one--the too evident fact

for instance that she hadn't started out for the day dressed and hatted

and shod, and even, for that matter, pink parasol'd, as she had been

in the boat. From what did the drop in her assurance proceed as the

tension increased--from what did this slightly baffled ingenuity spring

but from her consciousness of not presenting, as night closed in,

with not so much as a shawl to wrap her round, an appearance that

matched her story? She admitted that she was cold, but only to

blame her imprudence which Chad suffered her to give such account

of as she might. Her shawl and Chad's overcoat and her other

garments, and his, those they had each worn the day before, were at

the place, best known to themselves--a quiet retreat enough, no

doubt--at which they had been spending the twenty-four hours, to

which they had fully meant to return that evening, from which they

had so remarkably swum into Strether's ken, and the tacit

repudiation of which had been thus the essence of her comedy.

Strether saw how she had perceived in a flash that they couldn't

quite look to going back there under his nose; though, honestly,

as he gouged deeper into the matter, he was somewhat surprised, as

Chad likewise had perhaps been, at the uprising of this scruple.

He seemed even to divine that she had entertained it rather for

Chad than for herself, and that, as the young man had lacked the

chance to enlighten her, she had had to go on with it, he meanwhile

mistaking her motive.

He was rather glad, none the less, that they had in point of fact

not parted at the Cheval Blanc, that he hadn't been reduced to

giving them his blessing for an idyllic retreat down the river.

He had had in the actual case to make-believe more than he liked,

but this was nothing, it struck him, to what the other event

would have required. Could he, literally, quite have faced the

other event? Would he have been capable of making the best of it

with them? This was what he was trying to do now; but with the

advantage of his being able to give more time to it a good deal

counteracted by his sense of what, over and above the central fact

itself, he had to swallow. It was the quantity of make-believe

involved and so vividly exemplified that most disagreed with his

spiritual stomach. He moved, however, from the consideration of

that quantity--to say nothing of the consciousness of that organ--

back to the other feature of the show, the deep, deep truth of

the intimacy revealed. That was what, in his vain vigil, he oftenest

reverted to: intimacy, at such a point, was LIKE that--and what in

the world else would one have wished it to be like? It was all

very well for him to feel the pity of its being so much like lying;

he almost blushed, in the dark, for the way he had dressed the

possibility in vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll.

He had made them--and by no fault of their own--momentarily pull it for

him, the possibility, out of this vagueness; and must he not therefore

take it now as they had had simply, with whatever thin attenuations,

to give it to him? The very question, it may be added, made him feel

lonely and cold. There was the element of the awkward all round, but

Chad and Madame de Vionnet had at least the comfort that they could talk

it over together. With whom could HE talk of such things?--unless

indeed always, at almost any stage, with Maria? He foresaw that

Miss Gostrey would come again into requisition on the morrow;

though it wasn't to be denied that he was already a little afraid

of her "What on earth--that's what I want to know now--had you

then supposed?" He recognised at last that he had really been trying

all along to suppose nothing. Verily, verily, his labour had been lost.

He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things.

Read next: VOLUME II#BOOK TWELFTH#CHAPTER I

Read previous: VOLUME II#BOOK ELEVENTH#CHAPTER III

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