The Ambassadors (45 page)

"Mr. Waymarsh? Never!"

"Never indeed. I'm not ALWAYS thinking of Mr. Waymarsh; in fact
I find now I never am." Then he mentioned the person as if there
were a good deal in it. "Mamie."

"His own sister?" Oddly enough it but let her down. "What good
will that do?"

"None perhaps. But there—as usual—we are!"

There they were yet again, accordingly, for two days more; when
Strether, on being, at Mrs. Pocock's hotel, ushered into that
lady's salon, found himself at first assuming a mistake on the part
of the servant who had introduced him and retired. The occupants
hadn't come in, for the room looked empty as only a room can look
in Paris, of a fine afternoon when the faint murmur of the huge
collective life, carried on out of doors, strays among scattered
objects even as a summer air idles in a lonely garden. Our friend
looked about and hesitated; observed, on the evidence of a table
charged with purchases and other matters, that Sarah had become
possessed—by no aid from HIM—of the last number of the
salmon-coloured Revue; noted further that Mamie appeared to have
received a present of Fromentin's "Maitres d'Autrefois" from Chad,
who had written her name on the cover; and pulled up at the sight
of a heavy letter addressed in a hand he knew. This letter,
forwarded by a banker and arriving in Mrs. Pocock's absence, had
been placed in evidence, and it drew from the fact of its being
unopened a sudden queer power to intensify the reach of its author.
It brought home to him the scale on which Mrs. Newsome—for she had
been copious indeed this time—was writing to her daughter while she
kept HIM in durance; and it had altogether such an effect upon him
as made him for a few minutes stand still and breathe low. In his
own room, at his own hotel, he had dozens of well-filled envelopes
superscribed in that character; and there was actually something in
the renewal of his interrupted vision of the character that played
straight into the so frequent question of whether he weren't
already disinherited beyond appeal. It was such an assurance as the
sharp downstrokes of her pen hadn't yet had occasion to give him;
but they somehow at the present crisis stood for a probable
absoluteness in any decree of the writer. He looked at Sarah's name
and address, in short, as if he had been looking hard into her
mother's face, and then turned from it as if the face had declined
to relax. But since it was in a manner as if Mrs. Newsome were
thereby all the more, instead of the less, in the room, and were
conscious, sharply and sorely conscious, of himself, so he felt
both held and hushed, summoned to stay at least and take his
punishment. By staying, accordingly, he took it—creeping softly and
vaguely about and waiting for Sarah to come in. She WOULD come in
if he stayed long enough, and he had now more than ever the sense
of her success in leaving him a prey to anxiety. It wasn't to be
denied that she had had a happy instinct, from the point of view of
Woollett, in placing him thus at the mercy of her own initiative.
It was very well to try to say he didn't care—that she might break
ground when she would, might never break it at all if she wouldn't,
and that he had no confession whatever to wait upon her with: he
breathed from day to day an air that damnably required clearing,
and there were moments when he quite ached to precipitate that
process. He couldn't doubt that, should she only oblige him by
surprising him just as he then was, a clarifying scene of some sort
would result from the concussion.

He humbly circulated in this spirit till he suddenly had a fresh
arrest. Both the windows of the room stood open to the balcony, but
it was only now that, in the glass of the leaf of one of them,
folded back, he caught a reflexion quickly recognised as the colour
of a lady's dress. Somebody had been then all the while on the
balcony, and the person, whoever it might be, was so placed between
the windows as to be hidden from him; while on the other hand the
many sounds of the street had covered his own entrance and
movements. If the person were Sarah he might on the spot therefore
be served to his taste. He might lead her by a move or two up to
the remedy for his vain tension; as to which, should he get nothing
else from it, he would at least have the relief of pulling down the
roof on their heads. There was fortunately no one at hand to
observe—in respect to his valour—that even on this completed
reasoning he still hung fire. He had been waiting for Mrs. Pocock
and the sound of the oracle; but he had to gird himself
afresh—which he did in the embrasure of the window, neither
advancing nor retreating—before provoking the revelation. It was
apparently for Sarah to come more into view; he was in that case
there at her service. She did however, as meanwhile happened, come
more into view; only she luckily came at the last minute as a
contradiction of Sarah. The occupant of the balcony was after all
quite another person, a person presented, on a second look, by a
charming back and a slight shift of her position, as beautiful
brilliant unconscious Mamie—Mamie alone at home, Mamie passing her
time in her own innocent way, Mamie in short rather shabbily used,
but Mamie absorbed interested and interesting. With her arms on the
balustrade and her attention dropped to the street she allowed
Strether to watch her, to consider several things, without her
turning round.

But the oddity was that when he HAD so watched and considered he
simply stepped back into the room without following up his
advantage. He revolved there again for several minutes, quite as
with something new to think of and as if the bearings of the
possibility of Sarah had been superseded. For frankly, yes, it HAD
bearings thus to find the girl in solitary possession. There was
something in it that touched him to a point not to have been
reckoned beforehand, something that softly but quite pressingly
spoke to him, and that spoke the more each time he paused again at
the edge of the balcony and saw her still unaware. Her companions
were plainly scattered; Sarah would be off somewhere with Waymarsh
and Chad off somewhere with Jim. Strether didn't at all mentally
impute to Chad that he was with his "good friend"; he gave him the
benefit of supposing him involved in appearances that, had he had
to describe them—for instance to Maria—he would have conveniently
qualified as more subtle. It came to him indeed the next thing that
there was perhaps almost an excess of refinement in having left
Mamie in such weather up there alone; however she might in fact
have extemporised, under the charm of the Rue de Rivoli, a little
makeshift Paris of wonder arid fancy. Our friend in any case now
recognised—and it was as if at the recognition Mrs. Newsome's fixed
intensity had suddenly, with a deep audible gasp, grown thin and
vague—that day after day he had been conscious in respect to his
young lady of something odd and ambiguous, yet something into which
he could at last read a meaning. It had been at the most, this
mystery, an obsession—oh an obsession agreeable; and it had just
now fallen into its place as at the touch of a spring. It had
represented the possibility between them of some communication
baffled by accident and delay—the possibility even of some relation
as yet unacknowledged.

There was always their old relation, the fruit of the Woollett
years; but that—and it was what was strangest—had nothing whatever
in common with what was now in the air. As a child, as a "bud," and
then again as a flower of expansion, Mamie had bloomed for him,
freely, in the almost incessantly open doorways of home; where he
remembered her as first very forward, as then very backward—for he
had carried on at one period, in Mrs. Newsome's parlours (oh Mrs.
Newsome's phases and his own!) a course of English Literature
re-enforced by exams and teas—and once more, finally, as very much
in advance. But he had kept no great sense of points of contact; it
not being in the nature of things at Woollett that the freshest of
the buds should find herself in the same basket with the most
withered of the winter apples. The child had given sharpness, above
all, to his sense of the flight of time; it was but the day before
yesterday that he had tripped up on her hoop, yet his experience of
remarkable women—destined, it would seem, remarkably to grow—felt
itself ready this afternoon, quite braced itself, to include her.
She had in fine more to say to him than he had ever dreamed the
pretty girl of the moment COULD have; and the proof of the
circumstance was that, visibly, unmistakeably, she had been able to
say it to no one else. It was something she could mention neither
to her brother, to her sister-in-law nor to Chad; though he could
just imagine that had she still been at home she might have brought
it out, as a supreme tribute to age, authority and attitude, for
Mrs. Newsome. It was moreover something in which they all took an
interest; the strength of their interest was in truth just the
reason of her prudence. All this then, for five minutes, was vivid
to Strether, and it put before him that, poor child, she had now
but her prudence to amuse her. That, for a pretty girl in Paris,
struck him, with a rush, as a sorry state; so that under the
impression he went out to her with a step as hypocritically alert,
he was well aware, as if he had just come into the room. She turned
with a start at his voice; preoccupied with him though she might
be, she was just a scrap disappointed. "Oh I thought you were Mr.
Bilham!"

The remark had been at first surprising and our friend's private
thought, under the influence of it, temporarily blighted; yet we
are able to add that he presently recovered his inward tone and
that many a fresh flower of fancy was to bloom in the same air.
Little Bilham—since little Bilham was, somewhat incongruously,
expected—appeared behindhand; a circumstance by which Strether was
to profit. They came back into the room together after a little,
the couple on the balcony, and amid its crimson-and-gold elegance,
with the others still absent, Strether passed forty minutes that he
appraised even at the time as far, in the whole queer connexion,
from his idlest. Yes indeed, since he had the other day so agreed
with Maria about the inspiration of the lurid, here was something
for his problem that surely didn't make it shrink and that was
floated in upon him as part of a sudden flood. He was doubtless not
to know till afterwards, on turning them over in thought, of how
many elements his impression was composed; but he none the less
felt, as he sat with the charming girl, the signal growth of a
confidence. For she WAS charming, when all was said—and none the
less so for the visible habit and practice of freedom and fluency.
She was charming, he was aware, in spite of the fact that if he
hadn't found her so he would have found her something he should
have been in peril of expressing as "funny." Yes, she was funny,
wonderful Mamie, and without dreaming it; she was bland, she was
bridal—with never, that he could make out as yet, a bridegroom to
support it; she was handsome and portly and easy and chatty, soft
and sweet and almost disconcertingly reassuring. She was dressed,
if we might so far discriminate, less as a young lady than as an
old one—had an old one been supposable to Strether as so committed
to vanity; the complexities of her hair missed moreover also the
looseness of youth; and she had a mature manner of bending a
little, as to encourage and reward, while she held neatly together
in front of her a pair of strikingly polished hands: the
combination of all of which kept up about her the glamour of her
"receiving," placed her again perpetually between the windows and
within sound of the ice-cream plates, suggested the enumeration of
all the names, all the Mr. Brookses and Mr. Snookses, gregarious
specimens of a single type, she was happy to "meet." But if all
this was where she was funny, and if what was funnier than the rest
was the contrast between her beautiful benevolent patronage—such a
hint of the polysyllabic as might make her something of a bore
toward middle age—and her rather flat little voice, the voice,
naturally, unaffectedly yet, of a girl of fifteen; so Strether,
none the less, at the end of ten minutes, felt in her a quiet
dignity that pulled things bravely together. If quiet dignity,
almost more than matronly, with voluminous, too voluminous clothes,
was the effect she proposed to produce, that was an ideal one could
like in her when once one had got into relation. The great thing
now for her visitor was that this was exactly what he had done; it
made so extraordinary a mixture of the brief and crowded hour. It
was the mark of a relation that he had begun so quickly to find
himself sure she was, of all people, as might have been said, on
the side and of the party of Mrs. Newsome's original ambassador.
She was in HIS interest and not in Sarah's, and some sign of that
was precisely what he had been feeling in her, these last days, as
imminent. Finally placed, in Paris, in immediate presence of the
situation and of the hero of it—by whom Strether was incapable of
meaning any one but Chad—she had accomplished, and really in a
manner all unexpected to herself, a change of base; deep still
things had come to pass within her, and by the time she had grown
sure of them Strether had become aware of the little drama. When
she knew where she was, in short, he had made it out; and he made
it out at present still better; though with never a direct word
passing between them all the while on the subject of his own
predicament. There had been at first, as he sat there with her, a
moment during which he wondered if she meant to break ground in
respect to his prime undertaking. That door stood so strangely ajar
that he was half-prepared to be conscious, at any juncture, of her
having, of any one's having, quite bounced in. But, friendly,
familiar, light of touch and happy of tact, she exquisitely stayed
out; so that it was for all the world as if to show she could deal
with him without being reduced to—well, scarcely anything.