Authors: Henry James
Strether occupied beside little Bilham, three evenings after his interview with Mamie Pocock, the same deep divan they had enjoyed together on the first occasion of our friend’s meeting Madame de Vionnet and her daughter in the apartment of the Boulevard Malesherbes, where his position affirmed itself again as ministering to an easy exchange of impressions. The present evening had a different stamp; if the company was much more numerous, so, inevitably, were the ideas set in motion. It was on the other hand, however, now strongly marked that the talkers moved, in respect to such matters, round an inner, a protected circle. They knew at any rate what really concerned them to-night, and Strether had begun by keeping his companion close to it. Only a few of Chad’s guests had dined—that is fifteen or twenty, a few compared with the large concourse offered to sight by eleven o’clock; but number and mass, quantity and quality, light, fragrance, sound, the overflow of hospitality meeting the high tide of response, had all from the first pressed upon Strether’s
consciousness, and he felt himself somehow part and parcel of the most festive scene, as the term was, in which he had ever in his life been engaged. He had perhaps seen, on Fourths of July and on dear old domestic Commencements, more people assembled, but he had never seen so many in proportion to the space, or had at all events never known so great a promiscuity to show so markedly as picked. Numerous as was the company, it had still been made so by selection, and what was above all rare for Strether was that, by no fault of his own, he was in the secret of the principle that had worked. He hadn’t enquired, he had averted his head, but Chad had put him a pair of questions that themselves smoothed the ground. He hadn’t answered the questions, he had replied that they were the young man’s own affair; and he had then seen perfectly that the latter’s direction was already settled.
Chad had applied for counsel only, by way of intimating that he knew what to do; and he had clearly never known it better than in now presenting to his sister the whole circle of his society. This was all in the sense and the spirit of the note struck by him on that lady’s arrival; he had taken at the station itself a line that led him without a break, and that enabled him to lead the Pococks—though dazed a little, no doubt, breathless, no doubt, and bewildered—to the uttermost end of the passage accepted by them perforce as pleasant. He had made it for them violently pleasant and mercilessly full; the upshot of which was, to Strether’s vision, that they had come all the way without discovering it to be really no passage at all. It was a brave blind alley, where to pass was impossible and where, unless they stuck fast, they would have—which was always awkward—publicly to back out. They were touching bottom assuredly tonight; the whole scene represented the terminus of the
cul-de-sac
. So could things go when there was a hand to keep them consistent—a hand that pulled the wire with a skill at which the elder man more and more marvelled. The
elder man felt responsible, but he also felt successful, since what had taken place was simply the issue of his own contention, six weeks before, that they properly should wait to see what their friends would have really to say. He had determined Chad to wait, he had determined him to see; he was therefore not to quarrel with the time given up to the business. As much as ever, accordingly, now that a fortnight had elapsed, the situation created for Sarah, and against which she had raised no protest, was that of her having accommodated herself to her adventure as to a pleasure-party surrendered perhaps even somewhat in excess to bustle and to “pace.” If her brother had been at any point the least bit open to criticism it might have been on the ground of his spicing the draught too highly and pouring the cup too full. Frankly treating the whole occasion of the presence of his relatives as an opportunity for amusement, he left it, no doubt, but scant margin as an opportunity for anything else. He suggested, invented, abounded—yet all the while with the loosest easiest rein. Strether, during his own weeks, had gained a sense of knowing Paris; but he saw it afresh, and with fresh emotion, in the form of the knowledge offered to his colleague.
A thousand unuttered thoughts hummed for him in the air of these observations; not the least frequent of which was that Sarah might well of a truth not quite know whither she was drifting. She was in no position not to appear to expect that Chad should treat her handsomely; yet she struck our friend as privately stiffening a little each time she missed the chance of marking the great
nuance
. The great
nuance
was in brief that of course her brother must treat her handsomely—she should like to see him not; but that treating her handsomely, none the less, wasn’t all in all—treating her handsomely buttered no parsnips; and that in fine there were moments when she felt the fixed eyes of their admirable absent mother fairly screw into the flat of her back. Strether,
watching, after his habit, and overscoring with thought, positively had moments of his own in which he found himself sorry for her—occasions on which she affected him as a person seated in a runaway vehicle and turning over the question of a possible jump.
Would
she jump, could she, would
that
be a safe place?—this question, at such instants, sat for him in her lapse into pallor, her tight lips, her conscious eyes. It came back to the main point at issue: would she be, after all, to be squared? He believed on the whole she would jump; yet his alternations on this subject were the more especial stuff of his suspense. One thing remained well before him—a conviction that was in fact to gain sharpness from the impressions of this evening: that if she
should
gather in her skirts, close her eyes and quit the carriage while in motion, he would promptly enough become aware. She would alight from her headlong course more or less directly upon him; it would be appointed to him, unquestionably, to receive her entire weight. Signs and portents of the experience thus in reserve for him had, as it happened, multiplied even through the dazzle of Chad’s party. It was partly under the nervous consciousness of such a prospect that, leaving almost every one in the two other rooms, leaving those of the guests already known to him as well as a mass of brilliant strangers of both sexes and of several varieties of speech, he had desired five quiet minutes with little Bilham, whom he always found soothing and even a little inspiring, and to whom he had actually moreover something distinct and important to say.
He had felt of old—for it already seemed long ago—rather humiliated at discovering he could learn in talk with a personage so much his junior the lesson of a certain moral ease; but he had now got used to that—whether or no the mixture of the fact with other humiliations had made it indistinct, whether or no directly from little Bilham’s example, the example of his being contentedly just the obscure and acute little Bilham he was. It worked so for him, Strether seemed to see; and our friend had at private hours a
wan smile over the fact that he himself, after so many more years, was still in search of something that would work. However, as we have said, it worked just now for them equally to have found a corner a little apart. What particularly kept it apart was the circumstance that the music in the salon was admirable, with two or three such singers as it was a privilege to hear in private. Their presence gave a distinction to Chad’s entertainment, and the interest of calculating their effect on Sarah was actually so sharp as to be almost painful. Unmistakeably, in her single person, the motive of the composition and dressed in a splendour of crimson which affected Strether as the sound of a fall through a skylight, she would now be in the forefront of the listening circle and committed by it up to her eyes. Those eyes during the wonderful dinner itself he hadn’t once met; having confessedly—perhaps a little pusillanimously—arranged with Chad that he should be on the same side of the table. But there was no use in having arrived now with little Bilham at an unprecedented point of intimacy unless he could pitch everything into the pot. “You who sat where you could see her, what does she make of it all? By which I mean on what terms does she take it?”
“Oh she takes it, I judge, as proving that the claim of his family is more than ever justified.”
“She isn’t then pleased with what he has to show?”
“On the contrary; she’s pleased with it as with his capacity to do this kind of thing—more than she has been pleased with anything for a long time. But she wants him to show it
there
. He has no right to waste it on the likes of us.”
Strether wondered. “She wants him to move the whole thing over?”
“The whole thing—with an important exception. Everything he has ‘picked up’—and the way he knows how. She sees no difficulty in that. She’d run the show herself, and she’ll make the handsome concession that Woollett would be on the whole in
some ways the better for it. Not that it wouldn’t be also in some ways the better for Woollett. The people there are just as good.”
“Just as good as you and these others? Ah that may be. But such an occasion as this, whether or no,” Strether said, “isn’t the people. It’s what has made the people possible.”
“Well then,” his friend replied, “there you are; I give you my impression for what it’s worth. Mrs. Pocock has
seen
, and that’s to-night how she sits there. If you were to have a glimpse of her face you’d understand me. She has made up her mind—to the sound of expensive music.”
Strether took it freely in. “Ah then I shall have news of her.”
“I don’t want to frighten you, but I think that likely. However,” little Bilham continued, “if I’m of the least use to you to hold on by—!”
“You’re not of the least!”—and Strether laid an appreciative hand on him to say it. “No one’s of the least.” With which, to mark how gaily he could take it, he patted his companion’s knee. “I must meet my fate alone, and I
shall
—oh you’ll see! And yet,” he pursued the next moment, “you
can
help me too. You once said to me”—he followed this further—“that you held Chad should marry. I didn’t see then so well as I know now that you meant he should marry Miss Pocock. Do you still consider that he should? Because if you do”—he kept it up—“I want you immediately to change your mind. You can help me that way.”
“Help you by thinking he should
not
marry?”
“Not marry at all events Mamie.”
“And who then?”
“Ah,” Strether returned, “that I’m not obliged to say. But Madame de Vionnet—I suggest—when he can.”
“Oh!” said little Bilham with some sharpness.
“Oh precisely! But he needn’t marry at all—I’m at any rate not obliged to provide for it. Whereas in your case I rather feel that I
am
.”
Little Bilham was amused. “Obliged to provide for my marrying?”
“Yes—after all I’ve done to you!”
The young man weighed it. “Have you done as much as that?”
“Well,” said Strether, thus challenged, “of course I must remember what you’ve also done to
me
. We may perhaps call it square. But all the same,” he went on, “I wish awfully you’d marry Mamie Pocock yourself.”
Little Bilham laughed out. “Why it was only the other night, in this very place, that you were proposing to me a different union altogether.”
“Mademoiselle de Vionnet?” Well, Strether easily confessed it. “That, I admit, was a vain image.
This
is practical politics. I want to do something good for both of you—I wish you each so well; and you can see in a moment the trouble it will save me to polish you off by the same stroke. She likes you, you know. You console her. And she’s splendid.”
Little Bilham stared as a delicate appetite stares at an over-heaped plate. “What do I console her for?”
It just made his friend impatient. “Oh come, you know!”
“And what proves for you that she likes me?”
“Why the fact that I found her three days ago stopping at home alone all the golden afternoon on the mere chance that you’d come to her, and hanging over her balcony on that of seeing your cab drive up. I don’t know what you want more.”
Little Bilham after a moment found it. “Only just to know what proves to you that I like her.”
“Oh if what I’ve just mentioned isn’t enough to make you do it, you’re a stony-hearted little fiend. Besides”—Strether encouraged his fancy’s flight—“you showed your inclination in the way you kept her waiting, kept her on purpose to see if she cared enough for you.”
His companion paid his ingenuity the deference of a pause. “I
didn’t keep her waiting. I came at the hour. I wouldn’t have kept her waiting for the world,” the young man honourably declared.
“Better still—then there you are!” And Strether, charmed, held him the faster. “Even if you didn’t do her justice, moreover,” he continued, “I should insist on your immediately coming round to it. I want awfully to have worked it. I want”—and our friend spoke now with a yearning that was really earnest—“at least to have done that.”
“To have married me off—without a penny?”
“Well, I shan’t live long; and I give you my word, now and here, that I’ll leave you every penny of my own. I haven’t many, unfortunately, but you shall have them all. And Miss Pocock, I think, has a few. I want,” Strether went on, “to have been at least to that extent constructive—even expiatory. I’ve been sacrificing so to strange gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity—fundamentally unchanged after all—to our own. I feel as if my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars—of another faith altogether. There it is—it’s done.” And then he further explained. “It took hold of me because the idea of getting her quite out of the way for Chad helps to clear my ground.”
The young man, at this, bounced about, and it brought them face to face in admitted amusement. “You want me to marry as a convenience to Chad?”
“No,” Strether debated—“he doesn’t care whether you marry or not. It’s as a convenience simply to my own plan
for
him.”
“ ‘Simply’!”—and little Bilham’s concurrence was in itself a lively comment. “Thank you. But I thought,” he continued, “you had exactly
no
plan ‘for’ him.”