The Ambassadors (24 page)

The evidence as yet in truth was meagre; which, for that matter,
was perhaps a little why his expectation had had a drop. There was
somehow not quite a wealth in her; and a wealth was all that, in
his simplicity, he had definitely prefigured. Still, it was too
much to be sure already that there was but a poverty. They moved
away from the house, and, with eyes on a bench at some distance, he
proposed that they should sit down. "I've heard a great deal about
you," she said as they went; but he had an answer to it that made
her stop short. "Well, about YOU, Madame de Vionnet, I've heard,
I'm bound to say, almost nothing"—those struck him as the only
words he himself could utter with any lucidity; conscious as he
was, and as with more reason, of the determination to be in respect
to the rest of his business perfectly plain and go perfectly
straight. It hadn't at any rate been in the least his idea to spy
on Chad's proper freedom. It was possibly, however, at this very
instant and under the impression of Madame de Vionnet's pause, that
going straight began to announce itself as a matter for care. She
had only after all to smile at him ever so gently in order to make
him ask himself if he weren't already going crooked. It might be
going crooked to find it of a sudden just only clear that she
intended very definitely to be what he would have called nice to
him. This was what passed between them while, for another instant,
they stood still; he couldn't at least remember afterwards what
else it might have been. The thing indeed really unmistakeable was
its rolling over him as a wave that he had been, in conditions
incalculable and unimaginable, a subject of discussion. He had
been, on some ground that concerned her, answered for; which gave
her an advantage he should never be able to match.

"Hasn't Miss Gostrey," she asked, "said a good word for me?"

What had struck him first was the way he was bracketed with that
lady; and he wondered what account Chad would have given of their
acquaintance. Something not as yet traceable, at all events, had
obviously happened. "I didn't even know of her knowing you."

"Well, now she'll tell you all. I'm so glad you're in relation
with her."

This was one of the things—the "all" Miss Gostrey would now tell
him—that, with every deference to present preoccupation, was
uppermost for Strether after they had taken their seat. One of the
others was, at the end of five minutes, that she—oh incontestably,
yes—DIFFERED less; differed, that is, scarcely at all—well,
superficially speaking, from Mrs. Newsome or even from Mrs. Pocock.
She was ever so much younger than the one and not so young as the
other; but what WAS there in her, if anything, that would have made
it impossible he should meet her at Woollett? And wherein was her
talk during their moments on the bench together not the same as
would have been found adequate for a Woollett garden-party?—unless
perhaps truly in not being quite so bright. She observed to him
that Mr. Newsome had, to her knowledge, taken extraordinary
pleasure in his visit; but there was no good lady at Woollett who
wouldn't have been at least up to that. Was there in Chad, by
chance, after all, deep down, a principle of aboriginal loyalty
that had made him, for sentimental ends, attach himself to
elements, happily encountered, that would remind him most of the
old air and the old soil? Why accordingly be in a flutter—Strether
could even put it that way—about this unfamiliar phenomenon of the
femme du monde? On these terms Mrs. Newsome herself was as much of
one. Little Bilham verily had testified that they came out, the
ladies of the type, in close quarters; but it was just in these
quarters—now comparatively close—that he felt Madame de Vionnet's
common humanity. She did come out, and certainly to his relief, but
she came out as the usual thing. There might be motives behind, but
so could there often be even at Woollett. The only thing was that
if she showed him she wished to like him—as the motives behind
might conceivably prompt—it would possibly have been more thrilling
for him that she should have shown as more vividly alien. Ah she
was neither Turk nor Pole!—which would be indeed flat once more for
Mrs. Newsome and Mrs. Pocock. A lady and two gentlemen had
meanwhile, however, approached their bench, and this accident
stayed for the time further developments.

They presently addressed his companion, the brilliant strangers;
she rose to speak to them, and Strether noted how the escorted
lady, though mature and by no means beautiful, had more of the bold
high look, the range of expensive reference, that he had, as might
have been said, made his plans for. Madame de Vionnet greeted her
as "Duchesse" and was greeted in turn, while talk started in
French, as "Ma toute-belle"; little facts that had their due, their
vivid interest for Strether. Madame de Vionnet didn't, none the
less, introduce him—a note he was conscious of as false to the
Woollett scale and the Woollett humanity; though it didn't prevent
the Duchess, who struck him as confident and free, very much what
he had obscurely supposed duchesses, from looking at him as
straight and as hard—for it WAS hard—as if she would have liked,
all the same, to know him. "Oh yes, my dear, it's all right, it's
ME; and who are YOU, with your interesting wrinkles and your most
effective (is it the handsomest, is it the ugliest?) of
noses?"—some such loose handful of bright flowers she seemed,
fragrantly enough, to fling at him. Strether almost wondered—at
such a pace was he going—if some divination of the influence of
either party were what determined Madame de Vionnet's abstention.
One of the gentlemen, in any case, succeeded in placing himself in
close relation with our friend's companion; a gentleman rather
stout and importantly short, in a hat with a wonderful wide curl to
its brim and a frock coat buttoned with an effect of superlative
decision. His French had quickly turned to equal English, and it
occurred to Strether that he might well be one of the ambassadors.
His design was evidently to assert a claim to Madame de Vionnet's
undivided countenance, and he made it good in the course of a
minute—led her away with a trick of three words; a trick played
with a social art of which Strether, looking after them as the
four, whose backs were now all turned, moved off, felt himself no
master.

He sank again upon his bench and, while his eyes followed the
party, reflected, as he had done before, on Chad's strange
communities. He sat there alone for five minutes, with plenty to
think of; above all with his sense of having suddenly been dropped
by a charming woman overlaid now by other impressions and in fact
quite cleared and indifferent. He hadn't yet had so quiet a
surrender; he didn't in the least care if nobody spoke to him more.
He might have been, by his attitude, in for something of a march so
broad that the want of ceremony with which he had just been used
could fall into its place as but a minor incident of the
procession. Besides, there would be incidents enough, as he felt
when this term of contemplation was closed by the reappearance of
little Bilham, who stood before him a moment with a suggestive
"Well?" in which he saw himself reflected as disorganised, as
possibly floored. He replied with a "Well!" intended to show that
he wasn't floored in the least. No indeed; he gave it out, as the
young man sat down beside him, that if, at the worst, he had been
overturned at all, he had been overturned into the upper air, the
sublimer element with which he had an affinity and in which he
might be trusted a while to float. It wasn't a descent to earth to
say after an instant and in sustained response to the reference:
"You're quite sure her husband's living?"

"Oh dear, yes."

"Ah then—!"

"Ah then what?"

Strether had after all to think. "Well, I'm sorry for them." But
it didn't for the moment matter more than that. He assured his
young friend he was quite content. They wouldn't stir; were all
right as they were. He didn't want to be introduced; had been
introduced already about as far as he could go. He had seen
moreover an immensity; liked Gloriani, who, as Miss Barrace kept
saying, was wonderful; had made out, he was sure, the half-dozen
other 'men who were distinguished, the artists, the critics and oh
the great dramatist—HIM it was easy to spot; but wanted—no, thanks,
really—to talk with none of them; having nothing at all to say and
finding it would do beautifully as it was; do beautifully because
what it was—well, was just simply too late. And when after this
little Bilham, submissive and responsive, but with an eye to the
consolation nearest, easily threw off some "Better late than
never!" all he got in return for it was a sharp "Better early than
late!" This note indeed the next thing overflowed for Strether into
a quiet stream of demonstration that as soon as he had let himself
go he felt as the real relief. It had consciously gathered to a
head, but the reservoir had filled sooner than he knew, and his
companion's touch was to make the waters spread. There were some
things that had to come in time if they were to come at all. If
they didn't come in time they were lost for ever. It was the
general sense of them that had overwhelmed him with its long slow
rush.

"It's not too late for YOU, on any side, and you don't strike me
as in danger of missing the train; besides which people can be in
general pretty well trusted, of course—with the clock of their
freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here—to keep an eye on
the fleeting hour. All the same don't forget that you're
young—blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to
it. Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much
matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If
you haven't had that what HAVE you had? This place and these
impressions—mild as you may find them to wind a man up so; all my
impressions of Chad and of people I've seen at HIS place—well, have
had their abundant message for me, have just dropped THAT into my
mind. I see it now. I haven't done so enough before—and now I'm
old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh I DO see, at least; and
more than you'd believe or I can express. It's too late. And it's
as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my
having had the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its faint
receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one
loses; make no mistake about that. The affair—I mean the affair of
life—couldn't, no doubt, have been different for me; for it's at
the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental
excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a
helpless jelly, one's consciousness is poured—so that one 'takes'
the form as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held
by it: one lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of
freedom; therefore don't be, like me, without the memory of that
illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too
intelligent to have it; I don't quite know which. Of course at
present I'm a case of reaction against the mistake; and the voice
of reaction should, no doubt, always be taken with an allowance.
But that doesn't affect the point that the right time is now yours.
The right time is ANY time that one is still so lucky as to have.
You've plenty; that's the great thing; you're, as I say, damn you,
so happily and hatefully young. Don't at any rate miss things out
of stupidity. Of course I don't take you for a fool, or I shouldn't
be addressing you thus awfully. Do what you like so long as you
don't make MY mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!" ... Slowly and
sociably, with full pauses and straight dashes, Strether had so
delivered himself; holding little Bilham from step to step deeply
and gravely attentive. The end of all was that the young man had
turned quite solemn, and that this was a contradiction of the
innocent gaiety the speaker had wished to promote. He watched for a
moment the consequence of his words, and then, laying a hand on his
listener's knee and as if to end with the proper joke: "And now for
the eye I shall keep on you!"

"Oh but I don't know that I want to be, at your age, too
different from you!"

"Ah prepare while you're about it," said Strether, "to be more
amusing."

Little Bilham continued to think, but at last had a smile.
"Well, you ARE amusing—to ME."

"Impayable, as you say, no doubt. But what am I to myself?"
Strether had risen with this, giving his attention now to an
encounter that, in the middle of the garden, was in the act of
taking place between their host and the lady at whose side Madame
de Vionnet had quitted him. This lady, who appeared within a few
minutes to have left her friends, awaited Gloriani's eager approach
with words on her lips that Strether couldn't catch, but of which
her interesting witty face seemed to give him the echo. He was sure
she was prompt and fine, but also that she had met her match, and
he liked—in the light of what he was quite sure was the Duchess's
latent insolence—the good humour with which the great artist
asserted equal resources. Were they, this pair, of the "great
world"?—and was he himself, for the moment and thus related to them
by his observation, IN it? Then there was something in the great
world covertly tigerish, which came to him across the lawn and in
the charming air as a waft from the jungle. Yet it made him admire
most of the two, made him envy, the glossy male tiger,
magnificently marked. These absurdities of the stirred sense,
fruits of suggestion ripening on the instant, were all reflected in
his next words to little Bilham. "I know—if we talk of that—whom I
should enjoy being like!"

Little Bilham followed his eyes; but then as with a shade of
knowing surprise: "Gloriani?"

Our friend had in fact already hesitated, though not on the hint
of his companion's doubt, in which there were depths of critical
reserve. He had just made out, in the now full picture, something
and somebody else; another impression had been superimposed. A
young girl in a white dress and a softly plumed white hat had
suddenly come into view, and what was presently clear was that her
course was toward them. What was clearer still was that the
handsome young man at her side was Chad Newsome, and what was
clearest of all was that she was therefore Mademoiselle de Vionnet,
that she was unmistakeably pretty—bright gentle shy happy
wonderful—and that Chad now, with a consummate calculation of
effect, was about to present her to his old friend's vision. What
was clearest of all indeed was something much more than this,
something at the single stroke of which—and wasn't it simply
juxtaposition?—all vagueness vanished. It was the click of a
spring—he saw the truth. He had by this time also met Chad's look;
there was more of it in that; and the truth, accordingly, so far as
Bilham's enquiry was concerned, had thrust in the answer. "Oh
Chad!"—it was that rare youth he should have enjoyed being "like."
The virtuous attachment would be all there before him; the virtuous
attachment would be in the very act of appeal for his blessing;
Jeanne de Vionnet, this charming creature, would be exquisitely,
intensely now—the object of it. Chad brought her straight up to
him, and Chad was, oh yes, at this moment—for the glory of Woollett
or whatever—better still even than Gloriani. He had plucked this
blossom; he had kept it over-night in water; and at last as he held
it up to wonder he did enjoy his effect. That was why Strether had
felt at first the breath of calculation—and why moreover, as he now
knew, his look at the girl would be, for the young man, a sign of
the latter's success. What young man had ever paraded about that
way, without a reason, a maiden in her flower? And there was
nothing in his reason at present obscure. Her type sufficiently
told of it—they wouldn't, they couldn't, want her to go to
Woollett. Poor Woollett, and what it might miss!—though brave Chad
indeed too, and what it might gain! Brave Chad however had just
excellently spoken. "This is a good little friend of mine who knows
all about you and has moreover a message for you. And this, my
dear"—he had turned to the child herself—"is the best man in the
world, who has it in his power to do a great deal for us and whom I
want you to like and revere as nearly as possible as much as I
do."