The Ambassadors (52 page)

He went late that evening to the Boulevard Malesherbes, having his impression that it would be vain to go early, and having also, more than once in the course of the day, made enquiries of the concierge. Chad hadn’t come in and had left no intimation; he had affairs, apparently, at this juncture—as it occurred to Strether he so well might have—that kept him long abroad. Our friend asked once for him at the hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, but the only contribution offered there was the fact that every one was out. It was with the idea that he would have to come home to sleep that Strether went up to his rooms, from which however he was still absent, though, from the balcony, a few moments later, his visitor heard eleven o’clock strike. Chad’s servant had by this time answered for his reappearance; he
had
, the visitor learned, come quickly in to dress for dinner and vanish again. Strether spent an hour in waiting for him—an hour full of strange suggestions, persuasions, recognitions; one of those that he was to recall, at the end of his adventure, as the particular handful that most had
counted. The mellowest lamplight and the easiest chair had been placed at his disposal by Baptiste, subtlest of servants; the novel half-uncut, the novel lemon-coloured and tender, with the ivory knife athwart it like the dagger in a contadina’s hair, had been pushed within the soft circle—a circle which, for some reason, affected Strether as softer still after the same Baptiste had remarked that in the absence of a further need of anything by Monsieur he would betake himself to bed. The night was hot and heavy and the single lamp sufficient; the great flare of the lighted city, rising high, spending itself afar, played up from the Boulevard and, through the vague vista of the successive rooms, brought objects into view and added to their dignity. Strether found himself in possession as he never yet had been; he had been there alone, had turned over books and prints, had invoked, in Chad’s absence, the spirit of the place, but never at the witching hour and never with a relish quite so like a pang.

He spent a long time on the balcony; he hung over it as he had seen little Bilham hang the day of his first approach, as he had seen Mamie hang over her own the day little Bilham himself might have seen her from below; he passed back into the rooms, the three that occupied the front and that communicated by wide doors; and, while he circulated and rested, tried to recover the impression that they had made on him three months before, to catch again the voice in which they had seemed then to speak to him. That voice, he had to note, failed audibly to sound; which he took as the proof of all the change in himself. He had heard, of old, only what he
could
then hear; what he could do now was to think of three months ago as a point in the far past. All voices had grown thicker and meant more things; they crowded on him as he moved about—it was the way they sounded together that wouldn’t let him be still. He felt, strangely, as sad as if he had come for some wrong, and yet as excited as if he had come for some freedom. But
the freedom was what was most in the place and the hour; it was the freedom that most brought him round again to the youth of his own that he had long ago missed. He could have explained little enough to-day either why he had missed it or why, after years and years, he should care that he had; the main truth of the actual appeal of everything was none the less that everything represented the substance of his loss, put it within reach, within touch, made it, to a degree it had never been, an affair of the senses. That was what it became for him at this singular time, the youth he had long ago missed—a queer concrete presence, full of mystery, yet full of reality, which he could handle, taste, smell, the deep breathing of which he could positively hear. It was in the outside air as well as within; it was in the long watch, from the balcony, in the summer night, of the wide late life of Paris, the unceasing soft quick rumble, below, of the little lighted carriages that, in the press, always suggested the gamblers he had seen of old at Monte Carlo pushing up to the tables. This image was before him when he at last became aware that Chad was behind.

“She tells me you put it all on me”—he had arrived after this promptly enough at that information; which expressed the case however quite as the young man appeared willing for the moment to leave it. Other things, with this advantage of their virtually having the night before them, came up for them, and had, as well, the odd effect of making the occasion, instead of hurried and feverish, one of the largest, loosest and easiest to which Strether’s whole adventure was to have treated him. He had been pursuing Chad from an early hour and had overtaken him only now; but now the delay was repaired by their being so exceptionally confronted. They had foregathered enough of course in all the various times; they had again and again, since that first night at the theatre, been face to face over their question; but they had never been so alone together as they were actually alone—their talk hadn’t yet been so
supremely for themselves. And if many things moreover passed before them, none passed more distinctly for Strether than that striking truth about Chad of which he had been so often moved to take note: the truth that everything came happily back with him to his knowing how to live. It had been seated in his pleased smile—a smile that pleased exactly in the right degree—as his visitor turned round, on the balcony, to greet his advent; his visitor in fact felt on the spot that there was nothing their meeting would so much do as bear witness to that facility. He surrendered himself accordingly to so approved a gift; for what was the meaning of the facility but that others
did
surrender themselves? He didn’t want, luckily, to prevent Chad from living; but he was quite aware that even if he had he would himself have thoroughly gone to pieces. It was in truth essentially by bringing down his personal life to a function all subsidiary to the young man’s own that he held together. And the great point, above all, the sign of how completely Chad possessed the knowledge in question, was that one thus became, not only with a proper cheerfulness, but with wild native impulses, the feeder of his stream. Their talk had accordingly not lasted three minutes without Strether’s feeling basis enough for the excitement in which he had waited. This overflow fairly deepened, wastefully abounded, as he observed the smallness of anything corresponding to it on the part of his friend. That was exactly this friend’s happy case; he “put out” his excitement, or whatever other emotion the matter involved, as he put out his washing; than which no arrangement could make more for domestic order. It was quite for Strether himself in short to feel a personal analogy with the laundress bringing home the triumphs of the mangle.

When he had reported on Sarah’s visit, which he did very fully, Chad answered his question with perfect candour. “I positively referred her to you—told her she must absolutely see you. This
was last night, and it all took place in ten minutes. It was our first free talk—really the first time she had tackled me. She knew I also knew what her line had been with yourself; knew moreover how little you had been doing to make anything difficult for her. So I spoke for you frankly—assured her you were all at her service. I assured her
I
was too,” the young man continued; “and I pointed out how she could perfectly, at any time, have got at me. Her difficulty has been simply her not finding the moment she fancied.”

“Her difficulty,” Strether returned, “has been simply that she finds she’s afraid of you. She’s not afraid of
me
, Sarah, one little scrap; and it was just because she has seen how I can fidget when I give my mind to it that she has felt her best chance, rightly enough, to be in making me as uneasy as possible. I think she’s at bottom as pleased to
have
you put it on me as you yourself can possibly be to put it.”

“But what in the world, my dear man,” Chad enquired in objection to this luminosity, “have I done to make Sally afraid?”

“You’ve been ‘wonderful, wonderful,’ as we say—we poor people who watch the play from the pit; and that’s what has, admirably, made her. Made her all the more effectually that she could see you didn’t set about it on purpose—I mean set about affecting her as with fear.”

Chad cast a pleasant backward glance over his possibilities of motive. “I’ve only wanted to be kind and friendly, to be decent and attentive—and I still only want to be.”

Strether smiled at his comfortable clearness. “Well, there can certainly be no way for it better than by my taking the onus. It reduces your personal friction and your personal offence to almost nothing.”

Ah but Chad, with his completer conception of the friendly, wouldn’t quite have this! They had remained on the balcony, where, after their day of great and premature heat, the midnight
air was delicious; and they leaned back in turn against the balustrade, all in harmony with the chairs and the flower-pots, the cigarettes and the starlight. “The onus isn’t
really
yours—after our agreeing so to wait together and judge together. That was all my answer to Sally,” Chad pursued—“that we have been, that we are, just judging together.”

“I’m not afraid of the burden,” Strether explained; “I haven’t come in the least that you should take it off me. I’ve come very much, it seems to me, to double up my forelegs in the manner of the camel when he gets down on his knees to make his back convenient. But I’ve supposed you all this while to have been doing a lot of special and private judging—about which I haven’t troubled you; and I’ve only wished to have your conclusion first from you. I don’t ask more than that; I’m quite ready to take it as it has come.”

Chad turned up his face to the sky with a slow puff of his smoke. “Well, I’ve seen.”

Strether waited a little. “I’ve left you wholly alone; haven’t, I think I may say, since the first hour or two—when I merely preached patience—so much as breathed on you.”

“Oh you’ve been awfully good!”

“We’ve both been good then—we’ve played the game. We’ve given them the most liberal conditions.”

“Ah,” said Chad, “splendid conditions! It was open to them, open to them”—he seemed to make it out, as he smoked, with his eyes still on the stars. He might in quiet sport have been reading their horoscope. Strether wondered meanwhile what had been open to them, and he finally let him have it. “It was open to them simply to let me alone; to have made up their minds, on really seeing me for themselves, that I could go on well enough as I was.”

Strether assented to this proposition with full lucidity, his companion’s plural pronoun, which stood all for Mrs. Newsome and
her daughter, having no ambiguity for him. There was nothing, apparently, to stand for Mamie and Jim; and this added to our friend’s sense of Chad’s knowing what he thought. “But they’ve made up their minds to the opposite—that you
can’t
go on as you are.”

“No,” Chad continued in the same way; “they won’t have it for a minute.”

Strether on his side also reflectively smoked. It was as if their high place really represented some moral elevation from which they could look down on their recent past. “There never was the smallest chance, do you know, that they
would
have it for a moment.”

“Of course not—no real chance. But if they were willing to think there was—!”

“They weren’t willing.” Strether had worked it all out. “It wasn’t for you they came out, but for me. It wasn’t to see for themselves what you’re doing, but what I’m doing. The first branch of their curiosity was inevitably destined, under my culpable delay, to give way to the second; and it’s on the second that, if I may use the expression and you don’t mind my marking the invidious fact, they’ve been of late exclusively perched. When Sarah sailed it was me, in other words, they were after.”

Chad took it in both with intelligence and with indulgence. “It
is
rather a business then—what I’ve let you in for!”

Strether had again a brief pause; which ended in a reply that seemed to dispose once for all of this element of compunction. Chad was to treat it, at any rate, so far as they were again together, as having done so. “I was ‘in’ when you found me.”

“Ah but it was you,” the young man laughed, “who found me.”

“I only found you out. It was you who found me in. It was all in the day’s work for them, at all events, that they should come. And they’ve greatly enjoyed it,” Strether declared.

“Well, I’ve tried to make them,” said Chad.

His companion did himself presently the same justice. “So have I. I tried even this very morning—while Mrs. Pocock was with me. She enjoys for instance, almost as much as anything else, not being, as I’ve said, afraid of me; and I think I gave her help in that.”

Chad took a deeper interest. “Was she very very nasty?”

Strether debated. “Well, she was the most important thing—she was definite. She was—at last—crystalline. And I felt no remorse. I saw that they must have come.”

“Oh I wanted to see them for myself; so that if it were only for
that
—!” Chad’s own remorse was as small.

This appeared almost all Strether wanted. “Isn’t your having seen them for yourself then
the
thing, beyond all others, that has come of their visit?”

Chad looked as if he thought it nice of his old friend to put it so. “Don’t you count it as anything that you’re dished—if you
are
dished? Are you, my dear man, dished?”

It sounded as if he were asking if he had caught cold or hurt his foot, and Strether for a minute but smoked and smoked. “I want to see her again. I must see her.”

“Of course you must.” Then Chad hesitated. “Do you mean—a—Mother herself?”

“Oh your mother—that will depend.”

It was as if Mrs. Newsome had somehow been placed by the words very far off. Chad however endeavoured in spite of this to reach the place. “What do you mean it will depend on?”

Strether, for all answer, gave him a longish look. “I was speaking of Sarah. I must positively—though she quite cast me off—see
her
again. I can’t part with her that way.”