The Ambassadors (56 page)

He really continued in the picture—that being for himself his
situation—all the rest of this rambling day; so that the charm was
still, was indeed more than ever upon him when, toward six o'clock
he found himself amicably engaged with a stout white-capped
deep-voiced woman at the door of the auberge of the biggest
village, a village that affected him as a thing of whiteness,
blueness and crookedness, set in coppery green, and that had the
river flowing behind or before it—one couldn't say which; at the
bottom, in particular, of the inn-garden. He had had other
adventures before this; had kept along the height, after shaking
off slumber; had admired, had almost coveted, another small old
church, all steep roof and dim slate-colour without and all
whitewash and paper flowers within; had lost his way and had found
it again; had conversed with rustics who struck him perhaps a
little more as men of the world than he had expected; had acquired
at a bound a fearless facility in French; had had, as the afternoon
waned, a watery bock, all pale and Parisian, in the cafe of the
furthest village, which was not the biggest; and had meanwhile not
once overstepped the oblong gilt frame. The frame had drawn itself
out for him, as much as you please; but that was just his luck. He
had finally come down again to the valley, to keep within touch of
stations and trains, turning his face to the quarter from which he
had started; and thus it was that he had at last pulled up before
the hostess of the Cheval Blanc, who met him, with a rough
readiness that was like the clatter of sabots over stones, on their
common ground of a cotelette de veau a l'oseille and a subsequent
lift. He had walked many miles and didn't know he was tired; but he
still knew he was amused, and even that, though he had been alone
all day, he had never yet so struck himself as engaged with others
and in midstream of his drama. It might have passed for finished
his drama, with its catastrophe all but reached: it had, however,
none the less been vivid again for him as he thus gave it its
fuller chance. He had only had to be at last well out of it to feel
it, oddly enough, still going on.

For this had been all day at bottom the spell of the
picture—that it was essentially more than anything else a scene and
a stage, that the very air of the play was in the rustle of the
willows and the tone of the sky. The play and the characters had,
without his knowing it till now, peopled all his space for him, and
it seemed somehow quite happy that they should offer themselves, in
the conditions so supplied, with a kind of inevitability. It was as
if the conditions made them not only inevitable, but so much more
nearly natural and right as that they were at least easier,
pleasanter, to put up with. The conditions had nowhere so asserted
their difference from those of Woollett as they appeared to him to
assert it in the little court of the Cheval Blanc while he arranged
with his hostess for a comfortable climax. They were few and
simple, scant and humble, but they were THE THING, as he would have
called it, even to a greater degree than Madame de Vionnet's old
high salon where the ghost of the Empire walked. "The" thing was
the thing that implied the greatest number of other things of the
sort he had had to tackle; and it was queer of course, but so it
was—the implication here was complete. Not a single one of his
observations but somehow fell into a place in it; not a breath of
the cooler evening that wasn't somehow a syllable of the text. The
text was simply, when condensed, that in THESE places such things
were, and that if it was in them one elected to move about one had
to make one's account with what one lighted on. Meanwhile at all
events it was enough that they did affect one—so far as the village
aspect was concerned—as whiteness, crookedness and blueness set in
coppery green; there being positively, for that matter, an outer
wall of the White Horse that was painted the most improbable shade.
That was part of the amusement—as if to show that the fun was
harmless; just as it was enough, further, that the picture and the
play seemed supremely to melt together in the good woman's broad
sketch of what she could do for her visitor's appetite. He felt in
short a confidence, and it was general, and it was all he wanted to
feel. It suffered no shock even on her mentioning that she had in
fact just laid the cloth for two persons who, unlike Monsieur, had
arrived by the river—in a boat of their own; who had asked her,
half an hour before, what she could do for them, and had then
paddled away to look at something a little further up—from which
promenade they would presently return. Monsieur might meanwhile, if
he liked, pass into the garden, such as it was, where she would
serve him, should he wish it—for there were tables and benches in
plenty—a "bitter" before his repast. Here she would also report to
him on the possibility of a conveyance to his station, and here at
any rate he would have the agrement of the river.

It may be mentioned without delay that Monsieur had the agrement
of everything, and in particular, for the next twenty minutes, of a
small and primitive pavilion that, at the garden's edge, almost
overhung the water, testifying, in its somewhat battered state, to
much fond frequentation. It consisted of little more than a
platform, slightly raised, with a couple of benches and a table, a
protecting rail and a projecting roof; but it raked the full
grey-blue stream, which, taking a turn a short distance above,
passed out of sight to reappear much higher up; and it was clearly
in esteemed requisition for Sundays and other feasts. Strether sat
there and, though hungry, felt at peace; the confidence that had so
gathered for him deepened with the lap of the water, the ripple of
the surface, the rustle of the reeds on the opposite bank, the
faint diffused coolness and the slight rock of a couple of small
boats attached to a rough landing-place hard by. The valley on the
further side was all copper-green level and glazed pearly sky, a
sky hatched across with screens of trimmed trees, which looked
flat, like espaliers; and though the rest of the village straggled
away in the near quarter the view had an emptiness that made one of
the boats suggestive. Such a river set one afloat almost before one
could take up the oars—the idle play of which would be moreover the
aid to the full impression. This perception went so far as to bring
him to his feet; but that movement, in turn, made him feel afresh
that he was tired, and while he leaned against a post and continued
to look out he saw something that gave him a sharper arrest.

What he saw was exactly the right thing—a boat advancing round
the bend and containing a man who held the paddles and a lady, at
the stern, with a pink parasol. It was suddenly as if these
figures, or something like them, had been wanted in the picture,
had been wanted more or less all day, and had now drifted into
sight, with the slow current, on purpose to fill up the measure.
They came slowly, floating down, evidently directed to the
landing-place near their spectator and presenting themselves to him
not less clearly as the two persons for whom his hostess was
already preparing a meal. For two very happy persons he found
himself straightway taking them—a young man in shirt-sleeves, a
young woman easy and fair, who had pulled pleasantly up from some
other place and, being acquainted with the neighbourhood, had known
what this particular retreat could offer them. The air quite
thickened, at their approach, with further intimations; the
intimation that they were expert, familiar, frequent—that this
wouldn't at all events be the first time. They knew how to do it,
he vaguely felt—and it made them but the more idyllic, though at
the very moment of the impression, as happened, their boat seemed
to have begun to drift wide, the oarsman letting it go. It had by
this time none the less come much nearer—near enough for Strether
to dream the lady in the stern had for some reason taken account of
his being there to watch them. She had remarked on it sharply, yet
her companion hadn't turned round; it was in fact almost as if our
friend had felt her bid him keep still. She had taken in something
as a result of which their course had wavered, and it continued to
waver while they just stood off. This little effect was sudden and
rapid, so rapid that Strether's sense of it was separate only for
an instant from a sharp start of his own. He too had within the
minute taken in something, taken in that he knew the lady whose
parasol, shifting as if to hide her face, made so fine a pink point
in the shining scene. It was too prodigious, a chance in a million,
but, if he knew the lady, the gentleman, who still presented his
back and kept off, the gentleman, the coatless hero of the idyll,
who had responded to her start, was, to match the marvel, none
other than Chad.

Chad and Madame de Vionnet were then like himself taking a day
in the country—though it was as queer as fiction, as farce, that
their country could happen to be exactly his; and she had been the
first at recognition, the first to feel, across the water, the
shock—for it appeared to come to that—of their wonderful accident.
Strether became aware, with this, of what was taking place—that her
recognition had been even stranger for the pair in the boat, that
her immediate impulse had been to control it, and that she was
quickly and intensely debating with Chad the risk of betrayal. He
saw they would show nothing if they could feel sure he hadn't made
them out; so that he had before him for a few seconds his own
hesitation. It was a sharp fantastic crisis that had popped up as
if in a dream, and it had had only to last the few seconds to make
him feel it as quite horrible. They were thus, on either side,
TRYING the other side, and all for some reason that broke the
stillness like some unprovoked harsh note. It seemed to him again,
within the limit, that he had but one thing to do—to settle their
common question by some sign of surprise and joy. He hereupon gave
large play to these things, agitating his hat and his stick and
loudly calling out—a demonstration that brought him relief as soon
as he had seen it answered. The boat, in mid-stream, still went a
little wild—which seemed natural, however, while Chad turned round,
half springing up; and his good friend, after blankness and wonder,
began gaily to wave her parasol. Chad dropped afresh to his paddles
and the boat headed round, amazement and pleasantry filling the air
meanwhile, and relief, as Strether continued to fancy, superseding
mere violence. Our friend went down to the water under this odd
impression as of violence averted—the violence of their having
"cut" him, out there in the eye of nature, on the assumption that
he wouldn't know it. He awaited them with a face from which he was
conscious of not being able quite to banish this idea that they
would have gone on, not seeing and not knowing, missing their
dinner and disappointing their hostess, had he himself taken a line
to match. That at least was what darkened his vision for the
moment. Afterwards, after they had bumped at the landing-place and
he had assisted their getting ashore, everything found itself
sponged over by the mere miracle of the encounter.

They could so much better at last, on either side, treat it as a
wild extravagance of hazard, that the situation was made elastic by
the amount of explanation called into play. Why indeed—apart from
oddity—the situation should have been really stiff was a question
naturally not practical at the moment, and in fact, so far as we
are concerned, a question tackled, later on and in private, only by
Strether himself. He was to reflect later on and in private that it
was mainly HE who had explained—as he had had moreover
comparatively little difficulty in doing. He was to have at all
events meanwhile the worrying thought of their perhaps secretly
suspecting him of having plotted this coincidence, taking such
pains as might be to give it the semblance of an accident. That
possibility—as their imputation—didn't of course bear looking into
for an instant; yet the whole incident was so manifestly, arrange
it as they would, an awkward one, that he could scarce keep
disclaimers in respect to his own presence from rising to his lips.
Disclaimers of intention would have been as tactless as his
presence was practically gross; and the narrowest escape they
either of them had was his lucky escape, in the event, from making
any. Nothing of the sort, so far as surface and sound were
involved, was even in question; surface and sound all made for
their common ridiculous good fortune, for the general
invraisemblance of the occasion, for the charming chance that they
had, the others, in passing, ordered some food to be ready, the
charming chance that he had himself not eaten, the charming chance,
even more, that their little plans, their hours, their train, in
short, from la-bas, would all match for their return together to
Paris. The chance that was most charming of all, the chance that
drew from Madame de Vionnet her clearest, gayest "Comme cela se
trouve!" was the announcement made to Strether after they were
seated at table, the word given him by their hostess in respect to
his carriage for the station, on which he might now count. It
settled the matter for his friends as well; the conveyance—it WAS
all too lucky!—would serve for them; and nothing was more
delightful than his being in a position to make the train so
definite. It might have been, for themselves—to hear Madame de
Vionnet—almost unnaturally vague, a detail left to be fixed; though
Strether indeed was afterwards to remember that Chad had promptly
enough intervened to forestall this appearance, laughing at his
companion's flightiness and making the point that he had after all,
in spite of the bedazzlement of a day out with her, known what he
was about.

Strether was to remember afterwards further that this had had
for him the effect of forming Chad's almost sole intervention; and
indeed he was to remember further still, in subsequent meditation,
many things that, as it were, fitted together. Another of them was
for instance that the wonderful woman's overflow of surprise and
amusement was wholly into French, which she struck him as speaking
with an unprecedented command of idiomatic turns, but in which she
got, as he might have said, somewhat away from him, taking all at
once little brilliant jumps that he could but lamely match. The
question of his own French had never come up for them; it was the
one thing she wouldn't have permitted—it belonged, for a person who
had been through much, to mere boredom; but the present result was
odd, fairly veiling her identity, shifting her back into a mere
voluble class or race to the intense audibility of which he was by
this time inured. When she spoke the charming slightly strange
English he best knew her by he seemed to feel her as a creature,
among all the millions, with a language quite to herself, the real
monopoly of a special shade of speech, beautifully easy for her,
yet of a colour and a cadence that were both inimitable and matters
of accident. She came back to these things after they had shaken
down in the inn-parlour and knew, as it were, what was to become of
them; it was inevitable that loud ejaculation over the prodigy of
their convergence should at last wear itself out. Then it was that
his impression took fuller form—the impression, destined only to
deepen, to complete itself, that they had something to put a face
upon, to carry off and make the best of, and that it was she who,
admirably on the whole, was doing this. It was familiar to him of
course that they had something to put a face upon; their
friendship, their connexion, took any amount of explaining—that
would have been made familiar by his twenty minutes with Mrs.
Pocock if it hadn't already been so. Yet his theory, as we know,
had bountifully been that the facts were specifically none of his
business, and were, over and above, so far as one had to do with
them, intrinsically beautiful; and this might have prepared him for
anything, as well as rendered him proof against mystification. When
he reached home that night, however, he knew he had been, at
bottom, neither prepared nor proof; and since we have spoken of
what he was, after his return, to recall and interpret, it may as
well immediately be said that his real experience of these few
hours put on, in that belated vision—for he scarce went to bed till
morning—the aspect that is most to our purpose.