The Ambassadors (10 page)

Again she met his eyes, but to the result that after an instant
her own turned away with impatience. "You don't sell? Oh I'm glad
of THAT!" After which however, and before he could protest, she was
off again. "She's just a MORAL swell."

He accepted gaily enough the definition. "Yes—I really think
that describes her."

But it had for his friend the oddest connexion. "How does she do
her hair?"

He laughed out. "Beautifully!"

"Ah that doesn't tell me. However, it doesn't matter—I know.
It's tremendously neat—a real reproach; quite remarkably thick and
without, as yet, a single strand of white. There!"

He blushed for her realism, but gaped at her truth. "You're the
very deuce."

"What else SHOULD I be? It was as the very deuce I pounced on
you. But don't let it trouble you, for everything but the very
deuce—at our age—is a bore and a delusion, and even he himself,
after all, but half a joy." With which, on a single sweep of her
wing, she resumed. "You assist her to expiate—which is rather hard
when you've yourself not sinned."

"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 brutalised. 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 voila!"—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-humoredly 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 Cafe 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'Opera, as to the character of their
nocturnal progress.