The Ambassadors (12 page)

“It’s she who hasn’t sinned,” Strether replied. “I’ve sinned the most.”

“Ah,” Miss Gostrey cynically laughed, “what a picture of
her
! Have you robbed the widow and the orphan?”

“I’ve sinned enough,” said Strether.

“Enough for whom? Enough for what?”

“Well, to be where I am.”

“Thank you!” They were disturbed at this moment by the passage between their knees and the back of the seats before them of a gentleman who had been absent during a part of the performance and who now returned for the close; but the interruption left Miss Gostrey time, before the subsequent hush, to express as a sharp finality her sense of the moral of all their talk. “I knew you had something up your sleeve!” This finality, however, left them in
its turn, at the end of the play, as disposed to hang back as if they had still much to say; so that they easily agreed to let every one go before them—they found an interest in waiting. They made out from the lobby that the night had turned to rain; yet Miss Gostrey let her friend know that he wasn’t to see her home. He was simply to put her, by herself, into a four-wheeler; she liked so in London, of wet nights after wild pleasures, thinking things over, on the return, in lonely four-wheelers. This was her great time, she intimated, for pulling herself together. The delays caused by the weather, the struggle for vehicles at the door, gave them occasion to subside on a divan at the back of the vestibule and just beyond the reach of the fresh damp gusts from the street. Here Strether’s comrade resumed that free handling of the subject to which his own imagination of it already owed so much. “Does your young friend in Paris like you?”

It had almost, after the interval, startled him. “Oh I hope not! Why
should
he?”

“Why shouldn’t he?” Miss Gostrey asked. “That you’re coming down on him need have nothing to do with it.”

“You see more in it,” he presently returned, “than I.”

“Of course I see
you
in it.”

“Well then you see more in ‘me’!”

“Than you see in yourself? Very likely. That’s always one’s right. What I was thinking of,” she explained, “is the possible particular effect on him of his
milieu
.”

“Oh his
milieu
—!” Strether really felt he could imagine it better now than three hours before.

“Do you mean it can only have been so lowering?”

“Why that’s my very starting-point.”

“Yes, but you start so far back. What do his letters say?”

“Nothing. He practically ignores us—or spares us. He doesn’t write.”

“I see. But there are all the same,” she went on, “two quite distinct things that—given the wonderful place he’s in—may have happened to him. One is that he may have got brutalized. The other is that he may have got refined.”

Strether stared—this
was
a novelty. “Refined?”

“Oh,” she said quietly, “there
are
refinements.”

The way of it made him, after looking at her, break into a laugh. “
You
have them!”

“As one of the signs,” she continued in the same tone, “they constitute perhaps the worst.”

He thought it over and his gravity returned. “Is it a refinement not to answer his mother’s letters?”

She appeared to have a scruple, but she brought it out. “Oh I should say the greatest of all.”

“Well,” said Strether, “
I’m
quite content to let it, as one of the signs, pass for the worst that I know he believes he can do what he likes with me.”

This appeared to strike her. “How do you know it?”

“Oh I’m sure of it. I feel it in my bones.”

“Feel he
can
do it?”

“Feel that he believes he can. It may come to the same thing!” Strether laughed.

She wouldn’t, however, have this. “Nothing for you will ever come to the same thing as anything else.” And she understood what she meant, it seemed, sufficiently to go straight on. “You say that if he does break he’ll come in for things at home?”

“Quite positively. He’ll come in for a particular chance—a chance that any properly constituted young man would jump at. The business has so developed that an opening scarcely apparent three years ago, but which his father’s will took account of as in certain conditions possible and which, under that will, attaches to Chad’s availing himself of it a large contingent advantage—this
opening, the conditions having come about, now simply awaits him. His mother has kept it for him, holding out against strong pressure, till the last possible moment. It requires, naturally, as it carries with it a handsome ‘part,’ a large share in profits, his being on the spot and making a big effort for a big result. That’s what I mean by his chance. If he misses it he comes in, as you say, for nothing. And to see that he doesn’t miss it is, in a word, what I’ve come out for.”

She let it all sink in. “What you’ve come out for then is simply to render him an immense service.”

Well, poor Strether was willing to take it so. “Ah if you like.”

“He stands, as they say, if you succeed with him, to gain—”

“Oh a lot of advantages.” Strether had them clearly at his fingers’ ends.

“By which you mean of course a lot of money”

“Well, not only. I’m acting with a sense for him of other things too. Consideration and comfort and security—the general safety of being anchored by a strong chain. He wants, as I see him, to be protected. Protected I mean from life.”

“Ah voilà!”—her thought fitted with a click. “From life. What you
really
want to get him home for is to marry him.”

“Well, that’s about the size of it.”

“Of course,” she said, “it’s rudimentary. But to any one in particular?”

He smiled at this, looking a little more conscious. “You get everything out.”

For a moment again their eyes met. “You put everything in!”

He acknowledged the tribute by telling her. “To Mamie Pocock.”

She wondered; then gravely, even exquisitely, as if to make the oddity also fit: “His own niece?”

“Oh you must yourself find a name for the relation. His brother-in-law’s sister. Mrs. Jim’s sister-in-law.”

It seemed to have on Miss Gostrey a certain hardening effect. “And who in the world’s Mrs. Jim?”

“Chad’s sister—who was Sarah Newsome. She’s married—didn’t I mention it?—to Jim Pocock.”

“Ah yes,” she tacitly replied; but he had mentioned things—! Then, however, with all the sound it could have, “Who in the world’s Jim Pocock?” she asked.

“Why Sally’s husband. That’s the only way we distinguish people at Woollett,” he good-humouredly explained.

“And is it a great distinction—being Sally’s husband?”

He considered. “I think there can be scarcely a greater—unless it may become one, in the future, to be Chad’s wife.”

“Then how do they distinguish
you
?”

“They
don’t
—except, as I’ve told you, by the green cover.”

Once more their eyes met on it, and she held him an instant. “The green cover won’t—nor will
any
cover—avail you with
me
. You’re of a depth of duplicity!” Still, she could in her own large grasp of the real condone it. “Is Mamie a great
parti
?”

“Oh the greatest we have—our prettiest brightest girl.”

Miss Gostrey seemed to fix the poor child. “I know what they
can
be. And with money?”

“Not perhaps with a great deal of that—but with so much of everything else that we don’t miss it. We
don’t
miss money much, you know,” Strether added, “in general, in America, in pretty girls.”

“No,” she conceded; “but I know also what you do sometimes miss. And do you,” she asked, “yourself admire her?”

It was a question, he indicated, that there might be several ways of taking; but he decided after an instant for the humorous. “Haven’t I sufficiently showed you how I admire
any
pretty girl?”

Her interest in his problem was by this time such that it scarce left her freedom, and she kept close to the facts. “I supposed that
at Woollett you wanted them—what shall I call it?—blameless. I mean your young men for your pretty girls.”

“So did I!” Strether confessed. “But you strike there a curious fact—the fact that Woollett too accommodates itself to the spirit of the age and the increasing mildness of manners. Everything changes, and I hold that our situation precisely marks a date. We
should
prefer them blameless, but we have to make the best of them as we find them. Since the spirit of the age and the increasing mildness send them so much more to Paris—”

“You’ve to take them back as they come. When they
do
come.
Bon
!” Once more she embraced it all, but she had a moment of thought. “Poor Chad!”

“Ah,” said Strether cheerfully, “Mamie will save him!”

She was looking away, still in her vision, and she spoke with impatience and almost as if he hadn’t understood her. “
You’ll
save him. That’s who’ll save him.”

“Oh but with Mamie’s aid. Unless indeed you mean,” he added, “that I shall effect so much more with yours!”

It made her at last again look at him. “You’ll do more—as you’re so much better—than all of us put together.”

“I think I’m only better since I’ve known
you
!” Strether bravely returned.

The depletion of the place, the shrinkage of the crowd and now comparatively quiet withdrawal of its last elements had already brought them nearer the door and put them in relation with a messenger of whom he bespoke Miss Gostrey’s cab. But this left them a few minutes more, which she was clearly in no mood not to use. “You’ve spoken to me of what—by your success—Mr. Chad stands to gain. But you’ve not spoken to me of what you do.”

“Oh I’ve nothing more to gain,” said Strether very simply.

She took it as even quite too simple. “You mean you’ve got it all ‘down’? You’ve been paid in advance?”

“Ah don’t talk about payment!” he groaned.

Something in the tone of it pulled her up, but as their messenger still delayed she had another chance and she put it in another way. “What—by failure—do you stand to lose?”

He still, however, wouldn’t have it. “Nothing!” he exclaimed, and on the messenger’s at this instant reappearing he was able to sink the subject in their responsive advance. When, a few steps up the street, under a lamp, he had put her into her four-wheeler and she had asked him if the man had called for him no second conveyance, he replied before the door was closed. “You won’t take me with you?”

“Not for the world.”

“Then I shall walk.”

“In the rain?”

“I like the rain,” said Strether. “Good-night!”

She kept him a moment, while his hand was on the door, by not answering; after which she answered by repeating her question. “What do you stand to lose?”

Why the question now affected him as other he couldn’t have said; he could only this time meet it otherwise. “Everything.”

“So I thought. Then you shall succeed. And to that end I’m yours—”

“Ah, dear lady!” he kindly breathed.

“Till death!” said Maria Gostrey. “Good-night.”

Strether called, his second morning in Paris, on the bankers of the Rue Scribe to whom his letter of credit was addressed, and he made this visit attended by Waymarsh, in whose company he had crossed from London two days before. They had hastened to the Rue Scribe on the morrow of their arrival, but Strether had not then found the letters the hope of which prompted this errand. He had had as yet none at all; hadn’t expected them in London, but had counted on several in Paris, and, disconcerted now, had presently strolled back to the Boulevard with a sense of injury that he felt himself taking for as good a start as any other. It would serve, this spur to his spirit, he reflected, as, pausing at the top of the street, he looked up and down the great foreign avenue, it would serve to begin business with. His idea was to begin business immediately, and it did much for him the rest of his day that the beginning of business awaited him. He did little else till night but ask himself what he should do if he hadn’t fortunately had so much to do; but he put himself the question in many different
situations and connexions. What carried him hither and yon was an admirable theory that nothing he could do wouldn’t be in some manner related to what he fundamentally had on hand, or
would
be—should he happen to have a scruple—wasted for it. He did happen to have a scruple—a scruple about taking no definite step till he should get letters; but this reasoning carried it off. A single day to feel his feet—he had felt them as yet only at Chester and in London—was, he could consider, none too much; and having, as he had often privately expressed it, Paris to reckon with, he threw these hours of freshness consciously into the reckoning. They made it continually greater, but that was what it had best be if it was to be anything at all, and he gave himself up till far into the evening, at the theatre and on the return, after the theatre, along the bright congested Boulevard, to feeling it grow. Waymarsh had accompanied him this time to the play, and the two men had walked together, as a first stage, from the Gymnase to the Café Riche, into the crowded “terrace” of which establishment—the night, or rather the morning, for midnight had struck, being bland and populous—they had wedged themselves for refreshment. Waymarsh, as a result of some discussion with his friend, had made a marked virtue of his having now let himself go; and there had been elements of impression in their half-hour over their watered beer-glasses that gave him his occasion for conveying that he held this compromise with his stiffer self to have become extreme. He conveyed it—for it was still, after all, his stiffer self who gloomed out of the glare of the terrace—in solemn silence; and there was indeed a great deal of critical silence, every way, between the companions, even till they gained the Place de l’Opéra, as to the character of their nocturnal progress.

This morning there
were
letters—letters which had reached London, apparently all together, the day of Strether’s journey, and had taken their time to follow him; so that, after a controlled
impulse to go into them in the reception-room of the bank, which, reminding him of the post-office at Woollett, affected him as the abutment of some transatlantic bridge, he slipped them into the pocket of his loose grey overcoat with a sense of the felicity of carrying them off. Waymarsh, who had had letters yesterday, had had them again to-day, and Waymarsh suggested in this particular no controlled impulses. The last one he was at all events likely to be observed to struggle with was clearly that of bringing to a premature close any visit to the Rue Scribe. Strether had left him there yesterday; he wanted to see the papers, and he had spent, by what his friend could make out, a succession of hours with the papers. He spoke of the establishment, with emphasis, as a post of superior observation; just as he spoke generally of his actual damnable doom as a device for hiding from him what was going on. Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs. Strether, on his side, set himself to walk again—he had his relief in his pocket; and indeed, much as he had desired his budget, the growth of restlessness might have been marked in him from the moment he had assured himself of the superscription of most of the missives it contained. This restlessness became therefore his temporary law; he knew he should recognize as soon as see it the best place of all for settling down with his chief correspondent. He had for the next hour an accidental air of looking for it in the windows of shops; he came down the Rue de la Paix in the sun and, passing across the Tuileries and the river, indulged more than once—as if on finding himself determined—in a sudden pause before the book stalls of the opposite quay. In the garden of the Tuileries he had lingered, on two or three spots, to look; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring had stayed him as he roamed. The
prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes—in a soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-frocked brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered red-legged soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point; the air had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a white-capped master-chef. The palace was gone, Strether remembered the palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable void of its site the historic sense in him might have been freely at play—the play under which in Paris indeed it so often winces like a touched nerve. He filled out spaces with dim symbols of scenes; he caught the gleam of white statues at the base of which, with his letters out, he could tilt back a straw-bottomed chair. But his drift was, for reasons, to the other side, and it floated him unspent up the Rue de Seine and as far as the Luxembourg.