The Ambassadors (16 page)

The new evidence was to come, as it proved, in a day or two. He
soon had from Maria a message to the effect that an excellent box
at the Francais had been lent her for the following night; it
seeming on such occasions not the least of her merits that she was
subject to such approaches. The sense of how she was always paying
for something in advance was equalled on Strether's part only by
the sense of how she was always being paid; all of which made for
his consciousness, in the larger air, of a lively bustling traffic,
the exchange of such values as were not for him to handle. She
hated, he knew, at the French play, anything but a box—just as she
hated at the English anything but a stall; and a box was what he
was already in this phase girding himself to press upon her. But
she had for that matter her community with little Bilham: she too
always, on the great issues, showed as having known in time. It
made her constantly beforehand with him and gave him mainly the
chance to ask himself how on the day of their settlement their
account would stand. He endeavoured even now to keep it a little
straight by arranging that if he accepted her invitation she should
dine with him first; but the upshot of this scruple was that at
eight o'clock on the morrow he awaited her with Waymarsh under the
pillared portico. She hadn't dined with him, and it was
characteristic of their relation that she had made him embrace her
refusal without in the least understanding it. She ever caused her
rearrangements to affect him as her tenderest touches. It was on
that principle for instance that, giving him the opportunity to be
amiable again to little Bilham, she had suggested his offering the
young man a seat in their box. Strether had dispatched for this
purpose a small blue missive to the Boulevard Malesherbes, but up
to the moment of their passing into the theatre he had received no
response to his message. He held, however, even after they had been
for some time conveniently seated, that their friend, who knew his
way about, would come in at his own right moment. His temporary
absence moreover seemed, as never yet, to make the right moment for
Miss Gostrey. Strether had been waiting till tonight to get back
from her in some mirrored form her impressions and conclusions. She
had elected, as they said, to see little Bilham once; but now she
had seen him twice and had nevertheless not said more than a
word.

Waymarsh meanwhile sat opposite him with their hostess between;
and Miss Gostrey spoke of herself as an instructor of youth
introducing her little charges to a work that was one of the
glories of literature. The glory was happily unobjectionable, and
the little charges were candid; for herself she had travelled that
road and she merely waited on their innocence. But she referred in
due time to their absent friend, whom it was clear they should have
to give up. "He either won't have got your note," she said, "or you
won't have got his: he has had some kind of hindrance, and, of
course, for that matter, you know, a man never writes about coming
to a box." She spoke as if, with her look, it might have been
Waymarsh who had written to the youth, and the latter's face showed
a mixture of austerity and anguish. She went on however as if to
meet this. "He's far and away, you know, the best of them."

"The best of whom, ma'am?"

"Why of all the long procession—the boys, the girls, or the old
men and old women as they sometimes really are; the hope, as one
may say, of our country. They've all passed, year after year; but
there has been no one in particular I've ever wanted to stop. I
feel—don't YOU?—that I want to stop little Bilham; he's so exactly
right as he is." She continued to talk to Waymarsh. "He's too
delightful. If he'll only not spoil it! But they always WILL; they
always do; they always have."

"I don't think Waymarsh knows," Strether said after a moment,
"quite what it's open to Bilham to spoil."

"It can't be a good American," Waymarsh lucidly enough replied;
"for it didn't strike me the young man had developed much in THAT
shape."

"Ah," Miss Gostrey sighed, "the name of the good American is as
easily given as taken away! What IS it, to begin with, to BE one,
and what's the extraordinary hurry? Surely nothing that's so
pressing was ever so little defined. It's such an order, really,
that before we cook you the dish we must at least have your
receipt. Besides the poor chicks have time! What I've seen so often
spoiled," she pursued, "is the happy attitude itself, the state of
faith and—what shall I call it?—the sense of beauty. You're right
about him"—she now took in Strether; "little Bilham has them to a
charm, we must keep little Bilham along." Then she was all again
for Waymarsh. "The others have all wanted so dreadfully to do
something, and they've gone and done it in too many cases indeed.
It leaves them never the same afterwards; the charm's always
somehow broken. Now HE, I think, you know, really won't. He won't
do the least dreadful little thing. We shall continue to enjoy him
just as he is. No—he's quite beautiful. He sees everything. He
isn't a bit ashamed. He has every scrap of the courage of it that
one could ask. Only think what he MIGHT do. One wants really—for
fear of some accident—to keep him in view. At this very moment
perhaps what mayn't he be up to? I've had my disappointments—the
poor things are never really safe; or only at least when you have
them under your eye. One can never completely trust them. One's
uneasy, and I think that's why I most miss him now."

She had wound up with a laugh of enjoyment over her embroidery
of her idea—an enjoyment that her face communicated to Strether,
who almost wished none the less at this moment that she would let
poor Waymarsh alone. HE knew more or less what she meant; but the
fact wasn't a reason for her not pretending to Waymarsh that he
didn't. It was craven of him perhaps, but he would, for the high
amenity of the occasion, have liked Waymarsh not to be so sure of
his wit. Her recognition of it gave him away and, before she had
done with him or with that article, would give him worse. What was
he, all the same, to do? He looked across the box at his friend;
their eyes met; something queer and stiff, something that bore on
the situation but that it was better not to touch, passed in
silence between them. Well, the effect of it for Strether was an
abrupt reaction, a final impatience of his own tendency to
temporise. Where was that taking him anyway? It was one of the
quiet instants that sometimes settle more matters than the
outbreaks dear to the historic muse. The only qualification of the
quietness was the synthetic "Oh hang it!" into which Strether's
share of the silence soundlessly flowered. It represented, this
mute ejaculation, a final impulse to burn his ships. These ships,
to the historic muse, may seem of course mere cockles, but when he
presently spoke to Miss Gostrey it was with the sense at least of
applying the torch. "Is it then a conspiracy?"

"Between the two young men? Well, I don't pretend to be a seer
or a prophetess," she presently replied; "but if I'm simply a woman
of sense he's working for you to-night. I don't quite know how—but
it's in my bones." And she looked at him at last as if, little
material as she yet gave him, he'd really understand. "For an
opinion THAT'S my opinion. He makes you out too well not to."

"Not to work for me to-night?" Strether wondered. "Then I hope
he isn't doing anything very bad."

"They've got you," she portentously answered.

"Do you mean he IS—?"

"They've got you," she merely repeated. Though she disclaimed
the prophetic vision she was at this instant the nearest approach
he had ever met to the priestess of the oracle. The light was in
her eyes. "You must face it now."

He faced it on the spot. "They HAD arranged—?"

"Every move in the game. And they've been arranging ever since.
He has had every day his little telegram from Cannes."

It made Strether open his eyes. "Do you KNOW that?"

"I do better. I see it. This was, before I met him, what I
wondered whether I WAS to see. But as soon as I met him I ceased to
wonder, and our second meeting made me sure. I took him all in. He
was acting—he is still—on his daily instructions."

"So that Chad has done the whole thing?"

"Oh no—not the whole. WE'VE done some of it. You and I and
'Europe.'"

"Europe—yes," Strether mused.

"Dear old Paris," she seemed to explain. But there was more,
and, with one of her turns, she risked it. "And dear old Waymarsh.
You," she declared, "have been a good bit of it."

He sat massive. "A good bit of what, ma'am?"

"Why of the wonderful consciousness of our friend here. You've
helped too in your way to float him to where he is."

"And where the devil IS he?"

She passed it on with a laugh. "Where the devil, Strether, are
you?"

He spoke as if he had just been thinking it out. "Well, quite
already in Chad's hands, it would seem." And he had had with this
another thought. "Will that be—just all through Bilham—the way he's
going to work it? It would be, for him, you know, an idea. And Chad
with an idea—!"

"Well?" she asked while the image held him.

"Well, is Chad—what shall I say?—monstrous?"

"Oh as much as you like! But the idea you speak of," she said,
"won't have been his best. He'll have a better. It won't be all
through little Bilham that he'll work it."

This already sounded almost like a hope destroyed. "Through whom
else then?"

"That's what we shall see!" But quite as she spoke she turned,
and Strether turned; for the door of the box had opened, with the
click of the ouvreuse, from the lobby, and a gentleman, a stranger
to them, had come in with a quick step. The door closed behind him,
and, though their faces showed him his mistake, his air, which was
striking, was all good confidence. The curtain had just again
arisen, and, in the hush of the general attention, Strether's
challenge was tacit, as was also the greeting, with a quickly
deprecating hand and smile, of the unannounced visitor. He
discreetly signed that he would wait, would stand, and these things
and his face, one look from which she had caught, had suddenly
worked for Miss Gostrey. She fitted to them all an answer for
Strether's last question. The solid stranger was simply the
answer—as she now, turning to her friend, indicated. She brought it
straight out for him—it presented the intruder. "Why, through this
gentleman!" The gentleman indeed, at the same time, though sounding
for Strether a very short name, did practically as much to explain.
Strether gasped the name back—then only had he seen Miss Gostrey
had said more than she knew. They were in presence of Chad
himself.

Our friend was to go over it afterwards again and again—he was
going over it much of the time that they were together, and they
were together constantly for three or four days: the note had been
so strongly struck during that first half-hour that everything
happening since was comparatively a minor development. The fact was
that his perception of the young man's identity—so absolutely
checked for a minute—had been quite one of the sensations that
count in life; he certainly had never known one that had acted, as
he might have said, with more of a crowded rush. And the rush
though both vague and multitudinous, had lasted a long time,
protected, as it were, yet at the same time aggravated, by the
circumstance of its coinciding with a stretch of decorous silence.
They couldn't talk without disturbing the spectators in the part of
the balcony just below them; and it, for that matter, came to
Strether—being a thing of the sort that did come to him—that these
were the accidents of a high civilisation; the imposed tribute to
propriety, the frequent exposure to conditions, usually brilliant,
in which relief has to await its time. Relief was never quite near
at hand for kings, queens, comedians and other such people, and
though you might be yourself not exactly one of those, you could
yet, in leading the life of high pressure, guess a little how they
sometimes felt. It was truly the life of high pressure that
Strether had seemed to feel himself lead while he sat there, close
to Chad, during the long tension of the act. He was in presence of
a fact that occupied his whole mind, that occupied for the
half-hour his senses themselves all together; but he couldn't
without inconvenience show anything—which moreover might count
really as luck. What he might have shown, had he shown at all, was
exactly the kind of emotion—the emotion of bewilderment—that he had
proposed to himself from the first, whatever should occur, to show
least. The phenomenon that had suddenly sat down there with him was
a phenomenon of change so complete that his imagination, which had
worked so beforehand, felt itself, in the connexion, without margin
or allowance. It had faced every contingency but that Chad should
not BE Chad, and this was what it now had to face with a mere
strained smile and an uncomfortable flush.

He asked himself if, by any chance, before he should have in
some way to commit himself, he might feel his mind settled to the
new vision, might habituate it, so to speak, to the remarkable
truth. But oh it was too remarkable, the truth; for what could be
more remarkable than this sharp rupture of an identity? You could
deal with a man as himself—you couldn't deal with him as somebody
else. It was a small source of peace moreover to be reduced to
wondering how little he might know in such an event what a sum he
was setting you. He couldn't absolutely not know, for you couldn't
absolutely not let him. It was a CASE then simply, a strong case,
as people nowadays called such things,' a case of transformation
unsurpassed, and the hope was but in the general law that strong
cases were liable to control from without. Perhaps he, Strether
himself, was the only person after all aware of it. Even Miss
Gostrey, with all her science, wouldn't be, would she?—and he had
never seen any one less aware of anything than Waymarsh as he
glowered at Chad. The social sightlessness of his old friend's
survey marked for him afresh, and almost in an humiliating way, the
inevitable limits of direct aid from this source. He was not
certain, however, of not drawing a shade of compensation from the
privilege, as yet untasted, of knowing more about something in
particular than Miss Gostrey did. His situation too was a case, for
that matter, and he was now so interested, quite so privately agog,
about it, that he had already an eye to the fun it would be to open
up to her afterwards. He derived during his half-hour no assistance
from her, and just this fact of her not meeting his eyes played a
little, it must be confessed, into his predicament.