The Ambassadors (19 page)

It so fell in, unhappily for Strether, with that reflexion of
his own prompted in him by the pleasant air of the Boulevard
Malesherbes, that its disconcerting force was rather unfairly
great. It was a dig that, administered by himself—and administered
even to poor Mrs. Newsome—was no more than salutary; but
administered by Chad—and quite logically—it came nearer drawing
blood. They HADn't a low mind—nor any approach to one; yet
incontestably they had worked, and with a certain smugness, on a
basis that might be turned against them. Chad had at any rate
pulled his visitor up; he had even pulled up his admirable mother;
he had absolutely, by a turn of the wrist and a jerk of the
far-flung noose, pulled up, in a bunch, Woollett browsing in its
pride. There was no doubt Woollett HAD insisted on his coarseness;
and what he at present stood there for in the sleeping street was,
by his manner of striking the other note, to make of such
insistence a preoccupation compromising to the insisters. It was
exactly as if they had imputed to him a vulgarity that he had by a
mere gesture caused to fall from him. The devil of the case was
that Strether felt it, by the same stroke, as falling straight upon
himself. He had been wondering a minute ago if the boy weren't a
Pagan, and he found himself wondering now if he weren't by chance a
gentleman. It didn't in the least, on the spot, spring up helpfully
for him that a person couldn't at the same time be both. There was
nothing at this moment in the air to challenge the combination;
there was everything to give it on the contrary something of a
flourish. It struck Strether into the bargain as doing something to
meet the most difficult of the questions; though perhaps indeed
only by substituting another. Wouldn't it be precisely by having
learned to be a gentleman that he had mastered the consequent trick
of looking so well that one could scarce speak to him straight? But
what in the world was the clue to such a prime producing cause?
There were too many clues then that Strether still lacked, and
these clues to clues were among them. What it accordingly amounted
to for him was that he had to take full in the face a fresh
attribution of ignorance. He had grown used by this time to
reminders, especially from his own lips, of what he didn't know;
but he had borne them because in the first place they were private
and because in the second they practically conveyed a tribute. He
didn't know what was bad, and—as others didn't know how little he
knew it—he could put up with his state. But if he didn't know, in
so important a particular, what was good, Chad at least was now
aware he didn't; and that, for some reason, affected our friend as
curiously public. It was in fact an exposed condition that the
young man left him in long enough for him to feel its chill—till he
saw fit, in a word, generously again to cover him. This last was in
truth what Chad quite gracefully did. But he did it as with a
simple thought that met the whole of the case. "Oh I'm all right!"
It was what Strether had rather bewilderedly to go to bed on.

It really looked true moreover from the way Chad was to behave
after this. He was full of attentions to his mother's ambassador;
in spite of which, all the while, the latter's other relations
rather remarkably contrived to assert themselves. Strether's
sittings pen in hand with Mrs. Newsome up in his own room were
broken, yet they were richer; and they were more than ever
interspersed with the hours in which he reported himself, in a
different fashion, but with scarce less earnestness and fulness, to
Maria Gostrey. Now that, as he would have expressed it, he had
really something to talk about he found himself, in respect to any
oddity that might reside for him in the double connexion, at once
more aware and more indifferent. He had been fine to Mrs. Newsome
about his useful friend, but it had begun to haunt his imagination
that Chad, taking up again for her benefit a pen too long disused,
might possibly be finer. It wouldn't at all do, he saw, that
anything should come up for him at Chad's hand but what
specifically was to have come; the greatest divergence from which
would be precisely the element of any lubrication of their
intercourse by levity It was accordingly to forestall such an
accident that he frankly put before the young man the several
facts, just as they had occurred, of his funny alliance. He spoke
of these facts, pleasantly and obligingly, as "the whole story,"
and felt that he might qualify the alliance as funny if he remained
sufficiently grave about it. He flattered himself that he even
exaggerated the wild freedom of his original encounter with the
wonderful lady; he was scrupulously definite about the absurd
conditions in which they had made acquaintance—their having picked
each other up almost in the street; and he had (finest inspiration
of all!) a conception of carrying the war into the enemy's country
by showing surprise at the enemy's ignorance.

He had always had a notion that this last was the grand style of
fighting; the greater therefore the reason for it, as he couldn't
remember that he had ever before fought in the grand style. Every
one, according to this, knew Miss Gostrey: how came it Chad didn't
know her? The difficulty, the impossibility, was really to escape
it; Strether put on him, by what he took for granted, the burden of
proof of the contrary. This tone was so far successful as that Chad
quite appeared to recognise her as a person whose fame had reached
him, but against his acquaintance with whom much mischance had
worked. He made the point at the same time that his social
relations, such as they could be called, were perhaps not to the
extent Strether supposed with the rising flood of their
compatriots. He hinted at his having more and more given way to a
different principle of selection; the moral of which seemed to be
that he went about little in the "colony." For the moment certainly
he had quite another interest. It was deep, what he understood, and
Strether, for himself, could only so observe it. He couldn't see as
yet how deep. Might he not all too soon! For there was really too
much of their question that Chad had already committed himself to
liking. He liked, to begin with, his prospective stepfather; which
was distinctly what had not been on the cards. His hating him was
the untowardness for which Strether had been best prepared; he
hadn't expected the boy's actual form to give him more to do than
his imputed. It gave him more through suggesting that he must
somehow make up to himself for not being sure he was sufficiently
disagreeable. That had really been present to him as his only way
to be sure he was sufficiently thorough. The point was that if
Chad's tolerance of his thoroughness were insincere, were but the
best of devices for gaining time, it none the less did treat
everything as tacitly concluded.

That seemed at the end of ten days the upshot of the abundant,
the recurrent talk through which Strether poured into him all it
concerned him to know, put him in full possession of facts and
figures. Never cutting these colloquies short by a minute, Chad
behaved, looked and spoke as if he were rather heavily, perhaps
even a trifle gloomily, but none the less fundamentally and
comfortably free. He made no crude profession of eagerness to
yield, but he asked the most intelligent questions, probed, at
moments, abruptly, even deeper than his friend's layer of
information, justified by these touches the native estimate of his
latent stuff, and had in every way the air of trying to live,
reflectively, into the square bright picture. He walked up and down
in front of this production, sociably took Strether's arm at the
points at which he stopped, surveyed it repeatedly from the right
and from the left, inclined a critical head to either quarter, and,
while he puffed a still more critical cigarette, animadverted to
his companion on this passage and that. Strether sought
relief—there were hours when he required it—in repeating himself;
it was in truth not to be blinked that Chad had a way. The main
question as yet was of what it was a way TO. It made vulgar
questions no more easy; but that was unimportant when all questions
save those of his own asking had dropped. That he was free was
answer enough, and it wasn't quite ridiculous that this freedom
should end by presenting itself as what was difficult to move. His
changed state, his lovely home, his beautiful things, his easy
talk, his very appetite for Strether, insatiable and, when all was
said, flattering—what were such marked matters all but the notes of
his freedom? He had the effect of making a sacrifice of it just in
these handsome forms to his visitor; which was mainly the reason
the visitor was privately, for the time, a little out of
countenance. Strether was at this period again and again thrown
back on a felt need to remodel somehow his plan. He fairly caught
himself shooting rueful glances, shy looks of pursuit, toward the
embodied influence, the definite adversary, who had by a stroke of
her own failed him and on a fond theory of whose palpable presence
he had, under Mrs. Newsome's inspiration, altogether proceeded. He
had once or twice, in secret, literally expressed the irritated
wish that SHE would come out and find her.

He couldn't quite yet force it upon Woollett that such a career,
such a perverted young life, showed after all a certain plausible
side, DID in the case before them flaunt something like an impunity
for the social man; but he could at least treat himself to the
statement that would prepare him for the sharpest echo. This
echo—as distinct over there in the dry thin air as some shrill
"heading" above a column of print—seemed to reach him even as he
wrote. "He says there's no woman," he could hear Mrs. Newsome
report, in capitals almost of newspaper size, to Mrs. Pocock; and
he could focus in Mrs. Pocock the response of the reader of the
journal. He could see in the younger lady's face the earnestness of
her attention and catch the full scepticism of her but slightly
delayed "What is there then?" Just so he could again as little miss
the mother's clear decision: "There's plenty of disposition, no
doubt, to pretend there isn't." Strether had, after posting his
letter, the whole scene out; and it was a scene during which,
coming and going, as befell, he kept his eye not least upon the
daughter. He had his fine sense of the conviction Mrs. Pocock would
take occasion to reaffirm—a conviction bearing, as he had from the
first deeply divined it to bear, on Mr. Strether's essential
inaptitude. She had looked him in his conscious eyes even before he
sailed, and that she didn't believe HE would find the woman had
been written in her book. Hadn't she at the best but a scant faith
in his ability to find women? It wasn't even as if he had found her
mother—so much more, to her discrimination, had her mother
performed the finding. Her mother had, in a case her private
judgement of which remained educative of Mrs. Pocock's critical
sense, found the man. The man owed his unchallenged state, in
general, to the fact that Mrs. Newsome's discoveries were accepted
at Woollett; but he knew in his bones, our friend did, how almost
irresistibly Mrs. Pocock would now be moved to show what she
thought of his own. Give HER a free hand, would be the moral, and
the woman would soon be found.

His impression of Miss Gostrey after her introduction to Chad
was meanwhile an impression of a person almost unnaturally on her
guard. He struck himself as at first unable to extract from her
what he wished; though indeed OF what he wished at this special
juncture he would doubtless have contrived to make but a crude
statement. It sifted and settled nothing to put to her, tout
betement, as she often said, "Do you like him, eh?"—thanks to his
feeling it actually the least of his needs to heap up the evidence
in the young man's favour. He repeatedly knocked at her door to let
her have it afresh that Chad's case—whatever else of minor interest
it might yield—was first and foremost a miracle almost monstrous.
It was the alteration of the entire man, and was so signal an
instance that nothing else, for the intelligent observer,
could—COULD it?—signify. "It's a plot," he declared—"there's more
in it than meets the eye." He gave the rein to his fancy. "It's a
plant!"

His fancy seemed to please her. "Whose then?"

"Well, the party responsible is, I suppose, the fate that waits
for one, the dark doom that rides. What I mean is that with such
elements one can't count. I've but my poor individual, my modest
human means. It isn't playing the game to turn on the uncanny. All
one's energy goes to facing it, to tracking it. One wants, confound
it, don't you see?" he confessed with a queer face—"one wants to
enjoy anything so rare. Call it then life"—he puzzled it out—"call
it poor dear old life simply that springs the surprise. Nothing
alters the fact that the surprise is paralysing, or at any rate
engrossing—all, practically, hang it, that one sees, that one CAN
see."

Her silences were never barren, nor even dull. "Is that what
you've written home?"

He tossed it off. "Oh dear, yes!"

She had another pause while, across her carpets, he had another
walk. "If you don't look out you'll have them straight over."

"Oh but I've said he'll go back."

"And WILL he?" Miss Gostrey asked.

The special tone of it made him, pulling up, look at her long.
"What's that but just the question I've spent treasures of patience
and ingenuity in giving you, by the sight of him—after everything
had led up—every facility to answer? What is it but just the thing
I came here to-day to get out of you? Will he?"

"No—he won't," she said at last. "He's not free."

The air of it held him. "Then you've all the while known—?"

"I've known nothing but what I've seen; and I wonder," she
declared with some impatience, "that you didn't see as much. It was
enough to be with him there—"