The Ambassadors (54 page)

“Quite like yourself!” Maria smiled.

“Oh but he’s more wonderful about her than I am!” And then as his friend showed how she could believe it, filling it out, fitting it on to old memories of the wonderful woman: “What I should have liked to manage would have been
her
going.”

“To Switzerland with the party?”

“For Jim—and for symmetry. If it had been workable moreover for a fortnight she’d have gone. She’s ready”—he followed up his renewed vision of her—“for anything.”

Miss Gostrey went with him a minute. “She’s too perfect!”

“She
will
, I think,” he pursued, “go to-night to the station.”

“To see him off?”

“With Chad—marvellously—as part of their general attention. And she does it”—it kept before him—“with a light, light grace, a free, free gaiety, that may well softly bewilder Mr. Pocock.”

It kept her so before him that his companion had after an instant a friendly comment. “As in short it has softly bewildered a saner man. Are you really in love with her?” Maria threw off.

“It’s of no importance I should know,” he replied. “It matters so little—has nothing to do, practically, with either of us.”

“All the same”—Maria continued to smile—“they go, the five, as I understand you, and you and Madame de Vionnet stay.”

“Oh and Chad.” To which Strether added: “And you.”

“Ah ‘me’!”—she gave a small impatient wail again, in which something of the unreconciled seemed suddenly to break out. “
I
don’t stay, it somehow seems to me, much to my advantage. In the presence of all you cause to pass before me I’ve a tremendous sense of privation.”

Strether hesitated. “But your privation, your keeping out of everything, has been—hasn’t it?—by your own choice.”

“Oh yes; it has been necessary—that is it has been better for you. What I mean is only that I seem to have ceased to serve you.”

“How can you tell that?” he asked. “You don’t know how you serve me. When you cease—”

“Well?” she said as he dropped.

“Well, I’ll
let
you know. Be quiet till then.”

She thought a moment. “Then you positively like me to stay?”

“Don’t I treat you as if I did?”

“You’re certainly very kind to me. But that,” said Maria, “is for myself. It’s getting late, as you see, and Paris turning rather hot and dusty. People are scattering, and some of them, in other places, want me. But if you want me here—!”

She had spoken as resigned to his word, but he had of a sudden a still sharper sense than he would have expected of desiring not to lose her. “I want you here.”

She took it as if the words were all she had wished; as if they brought her, gave her something that was the compensation of her case. “Thank you,” she simply answered. And then as he looked at her a little harder, “Thank you very much,” she repeated.

It had broken as with a slight arrest into the current of their talk, and it held him a moment longer. “Why, two months, or whatever the time was, ago, did you so suddenly dash off? The reason you afterwards gave me for having kept away three weeks wasn’t the real one.”

She recalled. “I never supposed you believed it was. Yet,” she continued, “if you didn’t guess it that was just what helped you.”

He looked away from her on this; he indulged, so far as space permitted, in one of his slow absences. “I’ve often thought of it, but never to feel that I could guess it. And you see the consideration with which I’ve treated you in never asking till now.”

“Now then why
do
you ask?”

“To show you how I miss you when you’re not here, and what it does for me.”

“It doesn’t seem to have done,” she laughed, “all it might! However,”
she added, “if you’ve really never guessed the truth I’ll tell it you.”

“I’ve never guessed it,” Strether declared.

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Well then I dashed off, as you say, so as not to have the confusion of being there if Marie de Vionnet should tell you anything to my detriment.”

He looked as if he considerably doubted. “You even then would have had to face it on your return.”

“Oh if I had found reason to believe it something very bad I’d have left you altogether.”

“So then,” he continued, “it was only on guessing she had been on the whole merciful that you ventured back?”

Maria kept it together. “I owe her thanks. Whatever her temptation she didn’t separate us. That’s one of my reasons,” she went on, “for admiring her so.”

“Let it pass then,” said Strether, “for one of mine as well. But what would have been her temptation?”

“What are ever the temptations of women?”

He thought—but hadn’t, naturally, to think too long. “Men?”

“She would have had you, with it, more for herself. But she saw she could have you without it.”

“Oh ‘have’ me!” Strether a trifle ambiguously sighed.
“You,”
he handsomely declared, “would have had me at any rate
with
it.”

“Oh ‘have’ you!”—she echoed it as he had done. “I do have you, however,” she less ironically said, “from the moment you express a wish.”

He stopped before her, full of the disposition. “I’ll express fifty.”

Which indeed begot in her, with a certain inconsequence, a return of her small wail. “Ah there you are!”

There, if it were so, he continued for the rest of the time to be, and it was as if to show her how she could still serve him that, coming back to the departure of the Pococks, he gave her the view, vivid with a hundred more touches than we can reproduce, of what had happened for him that morning. He had had ten minutes with Sarah at her hotel, ten minutes reconquered, by irresistible pressure, from the time over which he had already described her to Miss Gostrey as having, at the end of their interview on his own premises, passed the great sponge of the future. He had caught her by not announcing himself, had found her in her sitting-room with a dressmaker and a
lingère
whose accounts she appeared to have been more or less ingenuously settling and who soon withdrew. Then he had explained to her how he had succeeded, late the night before, in keeping his promise of seeing Chad. “I told her I’d take it all.”

“You’d ‘take’ it?”

“Why if he doesn’t go.”

Maria waited. “And who takes it if he does?” she enquired with a certain grimness of gaiety.

“Well,” said Strether, “I think I take, in any event, everything.”

“By which I suppose you mean,” his companion brought out after a moment, “that you definitely understand you now lose everything.”

He stood before her again. “It does come perhaps to the same thing. But Chad, now that he has seen, doesn’t really want it.”

She could believe that, but she made, as always, for clearness. “Still, what, after all,
has
he seen?”

“What they want of him. And it’s enough.”

“It contrasts so unfavourably with what Madame de Vionnet wants?”

“It contrasts—just so; all round, and tremendously.”

“Therefore, perhaps, most of all with what
you
want?”

“Oh,” said Strether, “what I want is a thing I’ve ceased to measure or even to understand.”

But his friend none the less went on. “Do you want Mrs. Newsome—after such a way of treating you?”

It was a straighter mode of dealing with this lady than they had as yet—such was their high form—permitted themselves; but it seemed not wholly for this that he delayed a moment. “I dare say it has been, after all, the only way she could have imagined.”

“And does that make you want her any more?”

“I’ve tremendously disappointed her,” Strether thought it worth while to mention.

“Of course you have. That’s rudimentary; that was plain to us long ago. But isn’t it almost as plain,” Maria went on, “that you’ve even yet your straight remedy? Really drag him away, as I believe you still can, and you’d cease to have to count with her disappointment.”

“Ah then,” he laughed, “I should have to count with yours!”

But this barely struck her now. “What, in that case, should you call counting? You haven’t come out where you are, I think, to please
me.
”

“Oh,” he insisted, “that too, you know, has been part of it. I can’t separate—it’s all one; and that’s perhaps why, as I say, I don’t understand.” But he was ready to declare again that this didn’t in the least matter; all the more that, as he affirmed, he
hadn’t
really as yet “come out.” “She gives me after all, on its coming to the pinch, a last mercy, another chance. They don’t sail, you see, for five or six weeks more, and they haven’t—she admits that—expected Chad would take part in their tour. It’s still open to him to join them, at the last, at Liverpool.”

Miss Gostrey considered. “How in the world is it ‘open’ unless you open it? How can he join them at Liverpool if he but sinks deeper into his situation here?”

“He has given her—as I explained to you that she let me know yesterday—his word of honour to do as I say.”

Maria stared. “But if you say nothing!”

Well, he as usual walked about on it. “I did say something this morning. I gave her my answer—the word I had promised her after hearing from himself what
he
had promised. What she demanded of me yesterday, you’ll remember, was the engagement then and there to make him take up this vow.”

“Well then,” Miss Gostrey enquired, “was the purpose of your visit to her only to decline?”

“No; it was to ask, odd as that may seem to you, for another delay.”

“Ah that’s weak!”

“Precisely!” She had spoken with impatience, but, so far as that at least, he knew where he was. “If I
am
weak I want to find it out. If I don’t find it out I shall have the comfort, the little glory, of thinking I’m strong.”

“It’s all the comfort, I judge,” she returned, “that you
will
have!”

“At any rate,” he said, “it will have been a month more. Paris may grow, from day to day, hot and dusty, as you say; but there are other things that are hotter and dustier. I’m not afraid to stay on; the summer here must be amusing in a wild—if it isn’t a tame—way of its own; the place at no time more picturesque. I think I shall like it. And then,” he benevolently smiled for her, “there will be always you.”

“Oh,” she objected, “it won’t be as a part of the picturesqueness that I shall stay, for I shall be the plainest thing about you. You may, you see, at any rate,” she pursued, “have nobody else. Madame de Vionnet may very well be going off, mayn’t she?—and Mr. Newsome by the same stroke: unless indeed you’ve had an assurance from them to the contrary. So that if your idea’s to stay for them”—it was her duty to suggest it—“you may be left in the
lurch. Of course if they do stay”—she kept it up—“they would be part of the picturesqueness. Or else indeed you might join them somewhere.”

Strether seemed to face it as if it were a happy thought; but the next moment he spoke more critically. “Do you mean that they’ll probably go off together?”

She just considered. “I think it will be treating you quite without ceremony if they do; though after all,” she added, “it would be difficult to see now quite what degree of ceremony properly meets your case.”

“Of course,” Strether conceded, “my attitude toward them is extraordinary.”

“Just so; so that one may ask one’s self what style of proceeding on their own part can altogether match it. The attitude of their own that won’t pale in its light they’ve doubtless still to work out. The really handsome thing perhaps,” she presently threw off, “
would
be for them to withdraw into more secluded conditions, offering at the same time to share them with you.” He looked at her, on this, as if some generous irritation—all in his interest—had suddenly again flickered in her; and what she next said indeed half-explained it. “Don’t really be afraid to tell me if what now holds you
is
the pleasant prospect of the empty town, with plenty of seats in the shade, cool drinks, deserted museums, drives to the Bois in the evening, and our wonderful woman all to yourself.” And she kept it up still more. “The handsomest thing of
all
, when one makes it out, would, I dare say, be that Mr. Chad should for a while go off by himself. It’s a pity, from that point of view,” she wound up, “that he doesn’t pay his mother a visit. It would at least occupy your interval.” The thought in fact held her a moment. “Why doesn’t he pay his mother a visit? Even a week, at this good moment, would do.”

“My dear lady,” Strether replied—and he had it even to himself
surprisingly ready—“my dear lady, his mother has paid
him
a visit. Mrs. Newsome has been with him, this month, with an intensity that I’m sure he has thoroughly felt; he has lavishly entertained her, and she has let him have her thanks. Do you suggest he shall go back for more of them?”

Well, she succeeded after a little in shaking it off. “I see. It’s what you don’t suggest—what you haven’t suggested. And you know.”

“So would you, my dear,” he kindly said, “if you had so much as seen her.”

“As seen Mrs. Newsome?”

“No, Sarah—which, both for Chad and for myself, has served all the purpose.”

“And served it in a manner,” she responsively mused, “so extraordinary!”

“Well, you see,” he partly explained, “what it comes to is that she’s all cold thought—which Sarah could serve to us cold without its really losing anything. So it is that we know what she thinks of us.”

Maria had followed, but she had an arrest. “What I’ve never made out, if you come to that, is what you think—I mean you personally—of
her
. Don’t you so much, when all’s said, as care a little?”

“That,” he answered with no loss of promptness, “is what even Chad himself asked me last night. He asked me if I don’t mind the loss—well, the loss of an opulent future. Which moreover,” he hastened to add, “was a perfectly natural question.”

“I call your attention, all the same,” said Miss Gostrey, “to the fact that I don’t ask it. What I venture to ask is whether it’s to Mrs. Newsome herself that you’re indifferent.”

“I haven’t been so”—he spoke with all assurance. “I’ve been the very opposite. I’ve been, from the first moment, preoccupied with
the impression everything might be making on her—quite oppressed, haunted, tormented by it. I’ve been interested
only
in her seeing what I’ve seen. And I’ve been as disappointed in her refusal to see it as she has been in what has appeared to her the perversity of my insistence.”