The Ambassadors (52 page)

"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 fore legs 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."

"Then she was awfully unpleasant?"

Again Strether exhaled. "She was what she had to be. I mean that
from the moment they're not delighted they can only be—well what I
admit she was. We gave them," he went on, "their chance to be
delighted, and they've walked up to it, and looked all round it,
and not taken it."

"You can bring a horse to water—!" Chad suggested.

"Precisely. And the tune to which this morning Sarah wasn't
delighted—the tune to which, to adopt your metaphor, she refused to
drink—leaves us on that side nothing more to hope."

Chad had a pause, and then as if consolingly: "It was never of
course really the least on the cards that they would be
'delighted.'"

"Well, I don't know, after all," Strether mused. "I've had to
come as far round. However"—he shook it off—"it's doubtless MY
performance that's absurd."

"There are certainly moments," said Chad, "when you seem to me
too good to be true. Yet if you are true," he added, "that seems to
be all that need concern me."

"I'm true, but I'm incredible. I'm fantastic and ridiculous—I
don't explain myself even TO myself. How can they then," Strether
asked, "understand me? So I don't quarrel with them."

"I see. They quarrel," said Chad rather comfortably, "with US."
Strether noted once more the comfort, but his young friend had
already gone on. "I should feel greatly ashamed, all the same, if I
didn't put it before you again that you ought to think, after all,
tremendously well. I mean before giving up beyond recall—" With
which insistence, as from a certain delicacy, dropped.

Ah but Strether wanted it. "Say it all, say it all."

"Well, at your age, and with what—when all's said and
done—Mother might do for you and be for you."

Chad had said it all, from his natural scruple, only to that
extent; so that Strether after an instant himself took a hand. "My
absence of an assured future. The little I have to show toward the
power to take care of myself. The way, the wonderful way, she would
certainly take care of me. Her fortune, her kindness, and the
constant miracle of her having been disposed to go even so far. Of
course, of course"—he summed it up. "There are those sharp
facts."

Chad had meanwhile thought of another still. "And don't you
really care—?"

His friend slowly turned round to him. "Will you go?"

"I'll go if you'll say you now consider I should. You know," he
went on, "I was ready six weeks ago."

"Ah," said Strether, "that was when you didn't know I wasn't!
You're ready at present because you do know it."

"That may be," Chad returned; "but all the same I'm sincere. You
talk about taking the whole thing on your shoulders, but in what
light do you regard me that you think me capable of letting you
pay?" Strether patted his arm, as they stood together against the
parapet, reassuringly—seeming to wish to contend that he HAD the
wherewithal; but it was again round this question of purchase and
price that the young man's sense of fairness continued to hover.
"What it literally comes to for you, if you'll pardon my putting it
so, is that you give up money. Possibly a good deal of money."

"Oh," Strether laughed, "if it were only just enough you'd still
be justified in putting it so! But I've on my side to remind you
too that YOU give up money; and more than 'possibly'—quite
certainly, as I should suppose—a good deal."

"True enough; but I've got a certain quantity," Chad returned
after a moment. "Whereas you, my dear man, you—"

"I can't be at all said"—Strether took him up—"to have a
'quantity' certain or uncertain? Very true. Still, I shan't
starve."

"Oh you mustn't STARVE!" Chad pacifically emphasised; and so, in
the pleasant conditions, they continued to talk; though there was,
for that matter, a pause in which the younger companion might have
been taken as weighing again the delicacy of his then and there
promising the elder some provision against the possibility just
mentioned. This, however, he presumably thought best not to do, for
at the end of another minute they had moved in quite a different
direction. Strether had broken in by returning to the subject of
Chad's passage with Sarah and enquiring if they had arrived, in the
event, at anything in the nature of a "scene." To this Chad replied
that they had on the contrary kept tremendously polite; adding
moreover that Sally was after all not the woman to have made the
mistake of not being. "Her hands are a good deal tied, you see. I
got so, from the first," he sagaciously observed, "the start of
her."