It was this lady’s being there at all, however, that was the strange free thing; perhaps, since she was there, her smoking was the least of her freedoms. If Strether had been sure at each juncture of what—with Bilham in especial—she talked about, he might have traced others and winced at them and felt Waymarsh wince; but he was in fact so often at sea that his sense of the range of reference was merely general and that he on several different occasions guessed and interpreted only to doubt. He wondered what they meant, but there were things he scarce thought they could be supposed to mean, and “Oh no—not that!” was at the end of most of his ventures. This was the very beginning with him of a condition as to which, later on, it will be seen, he found cause to pull himself up; and he was to remember the moment duly as the first step in a process. The central fact of the place was neither more nor less, when analysed—and a pressure superficial sufficed—than the fundamental impropriety of Chad’s situation, round about which they thus seemed cynically clustered. Accordingly, since they took it for granted, they took for granted all that was in connexion with it taken for granted at Woollett—matters as to which, verily, he had been reduced with Mrs. Newsome to the last intensity of silence. That was the consequence of their being too bad to be talked about, and was the accompaniment, by the same token, of a deep conception of their badness. It befell therefore that when poor Strether put it to himself that their badness was ultimately, or perhaps even insolently, what such a scene as the one before him was, so to speak, built upon, he could scarce shirk the dilemma of reading a roundabout echo of them into almost anything that came up. This, he was well aware, was a dreadful necessity; but such was the stern logic, he could only gather, of a relation to the irregular life.
It was the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss Barrace that was the insidious, the delicate marvel. He was eager to concede that their relation to it was all indirect, for anything else in him would have shown the grossness of bad manners; but the indirectness was none the less consonant—that was striking—with a grateful enjoyment of everything that was Chad’s. They spoke of him repeatedly, invoking his good name and good nature, and the worst confusion of mind for Strether was that all their mention of him was of a kind to do him honour. They commended his munificence and approved his taste, and in doing so sat down, as it seemed to Strether, in the very soil out of which these things flowered. Our friend’s final predicament was that he himself was sitting down, for the time, with them, and there was a supreme moment at which, compared with his collapse, Waymarsh’s erectness affected him as really high. One thing was certain—he saw he must make up his mind. He must approach Chad, must wait for him, deal with him, master him, but he mustn’t dispossess himself of the faculty of seeing things as they were. He must bring him to him—not go himself, as it were, so much of the way. He must at any rate be clearer as to what—should he continue to do that for convenience—he was still condoning. It was on the detail of this quantity—and what could the fact be but mystifying?—that Bilham and Miss Barrace threw so little light. So there they were.
II
When Miss Gostrey arrived, at the end of a week, she made him a sign; he went immediately to see her, and it wasn’t till then that he could again close his grasp on the idea of a corrective. This idea however was luckily all before him again from the moment he crossed the threshold of the little entresol of the Quartier Marboeuf into which she had gathered, as she said, picking them up in a thousand flights and funny little passionate pounces, the makings of a final nest. He recognized in an instant that there really, there only, he should find the boon with the vision of which he had first mounted Chad’s stairs. He might have been a little scared at the picture of how much more, in this place, he should know himself “in” hadn’t his friend been on the spot to measure the amount to his appetite. Her compact and crowded little chambers, almost dusky, as they at first struck him, with accumulations, represented a supreme general adjustment to opportunities and conditions. Wherever he looked he saw an old ivory or an old brocade, and he scarce knew where to sit for fear of a misappliance. The life of the occupant struck him of a sudden as more charged with possession even than Chad’s or than Miss Barrace’s; wide as his glimpse had lately become of the empire of “things,” what was before him still enlarged it; the lust of the eyes and the pride of life had indeed thus their temple. It was the innermost nook of the shrine—as brown as a pirate’s cave. In the brownness were glints of gold; patches of purple were in the gloom; objects all that caught, through the muslin, with their high rarity, the light of the low windows. Nothing was clear about them but that they were precious, and they brushed his ignorance with their contempt as a flower, in a liberty taken with him, might have been whisked under his nose. But after a full look at his hostess he knew none the less what most concerned him. The circle in which they stood together was warm with life, and every question between them would live there as nowhere else. A question came up as soon as they had spoken, for his answer, with a laugh, was quickly: “Well, they’ve got hold of me!” Much of their talk on this first occasion was his development of that truth. He was extraordinarily glad to see her, expressing to her frankly what she most showed him, that one might live for years without a blessing unsuspected, but that to know it at last for no more than three days was to need it or miss it for ever. She was the blessing that had now become his need, and what could prove it better than that without her he had lost himself?
“What do you mean?” she asked with an absence of alarm that, correcting him as if he had mistaken the “period” of one of her pieces, gave him afresh a sense of her easy movement through the maze he had but begun to tread. “What in the name of all the Pococks have you managed to do?”
“Why exactly the wrong thing. I’ve made a frantic friend of little Bilham.”
“Ah that sort of thing was of the essence of your case and to have been allowed for from the first.” And it was only after this that, quite as a minor matter, she asked who in the world little Bilham might be. When she learned that he was a friend of Chad’s and living for the time in Chad’s rooms in Chad’s absence, quite as if acting in Chad’s spirit and serving Chad’s cause, she showed, however, more interest. “Should you mind my seeing him? Only once, you know,” she added.
“Oh the oftener the better: he’s amusing—he’s original.”
“He doesn’t shock you?” Miss Gostrey threw out.
“Never in the world! We escape that with a perfection—! I feel it to be largely, no doubt, because I don’t half-understand him; but our modus vivendi isn’t spoiled even by that. You must dine with me to meet him,” Strether went on. “Then you’ll see.”
“Are you giving dinners?”
“Yes—there I am. That’s what I mean.”
All her kindness wondered. “That you’re spending too much money?”
“Dear no—they seem to cost so little. But that I do it to them. I ought to hold off.”
She thought again—she laughed. “The money you must be spending to think it cheap! But I must be out of it—to the naked eye.”
He looked for a moment as if she were really failing him. “Then you won’t meet them?” It was almost as if she had developed an unexpected personal prudence.
She hesitated. “Who are they—first?”
“Why little Bilham to begin with.” He kept back for the moment Miss Barrace. “And Chad—when he comes—you must absolutely see.”
“When then does he come?”
“When Bilham has had time to write him, and hear from him, about me. Bilham, however,” he pursued, “will report favourably—favourably for Chad. That will make him not afraid to come. I want you the more therefore, you see, for my bluff.”
“Oh you’ll do yourself for your bluff.” She was perfectly easy. “At the rate you’ve gone I’m quiet.”
“Ah but I haven’t,” said Strether, “made one protest.”
She turned it over. “Haven’t you been seeing what there??
?s to protest about?”
He let her, with this, however ruefully, have the whole truth. “I haven’t yet found a single thing.”
“Isn’t there anyone with him then?”
“Of the sort I came out about?” Strether took a moment. “How do I know? And what do I care?”
“Oh oh!”—and her laughter spread. He was struck in fact by the effect on her of his joke. He saw now how he meant it as a joke. She saw, however, still other things, though in an instant she had hidden them. “You’ve got at no facts at all?”
He tried to muster them. “Well, he has a lovely home.”
“Ah that, in Paris,” she quickly returned, “proves nothing. That is rather it disproves nothing. They may very well, you see, the people your mission is concerned with, have done it for him.”
“Exactly. And it was on the scene of their doings then that Waymarsh and I sat guzzling.”
“Oh if you forbore to guzzle here on scenes of doings,” she replied, “you might easily die of starvation.” With which she smiled at him. “You’ve worse before you.”
“Ah I’ve everything before me. But on our hypothesis, you know, they must be wonderful.”
“They are!” said Miss Gostrey. “You’re not therefore, you see,” she added, “wholly without facts. They’ve been, in effect, wonderful.”
To have got at something comparatively definite appeared at last a little to help—a wave by which moreover, the next moment, recollection was washed. “My young man does admit furthermore that they’re our friend’s great interest.”
“Is that the expression he uses?”
Strether more exactly recalled. “No—not quite.”
“Something more vivid? Less?”
He had bent, with neared glasses, over a group of articles on a small stand; and at this he came up. “It was a mere allusion, but, on the lookout as I was, it struck me. ‘Awful, you know, as Chad is’—those were Bilham’s words.”
“ ‘Awful, you know’—? Oh!”—and Miss Gostrey turned them over. She seemed, however, satisfied. “Well, what more do you want?”
He glanced once more at a bibelot or two, and everything sent him back. “But it is all the same as if they wished to let me have it between the eyes.”
She wondered. “Quoi donc?”
“Why what I speak of. The amenity. They can stun you with that as well as with anything else.”
“Oh,” she answered, “you’ll come round! I must see them each,” she went on, “for myself. I mean Mr. Bilham and Mr. Newsome—Mr. Bilham naturally first. Once only—once for each; that will do. But face to face—for half an hour. What’s Mr. Chad,” she immediately pursued, “doing at Cannes? Decent men don’t go to Cannes with the—well, with the kind of ladies you mean.”
“Don’t they?” Strether asked with an interest in decent men that amused her.
“No; elsewhere, but not to Cannes. Cannes is different. Cannes is better. Cannes is best. I mean it’s all people you know—when you do know them. And if he does, why that’s different too. He must have gone alone. She can’t be with him.”
“I haven’t,” Strether confessed in his weakness, “the least idea.” There seemed much in what she said, but he was able after a little to help her to a nearer impression. The meeting with little Bilham took place, by easy arrangement, in the great gallery of the Louvre; and when, standing with his fellow visitor before one of the splendid Titians—the overwhelming portrait of the young man with the strangely-shaped glove and the blue-grey eyes—he turned to see the third member of their party advance from the end of the waxed and gilded vista, he had a sense of having at last taken hold. He had agreed with Miss Gostrey—it dated even from Chester—for a morning at the Louvre, and he had embraced independently the same idea as thrown out by little Bilham, whom he had already accompanied to the museum of the Luxembourg. The fusion of these schemes presented no difficulty, and it was to strike him again that in little Bilham’s company contrarieties in general dropped.
“Oh he’s all right—he’s one of us!” Miss Gostrey, after the first exchange, soon found a chance to murmur to her companion; and Strether, as they proceeded and paused and while a quick unanimity between the two appeared to have phrased itself in half a dozen remarks—Strether knew that he knew almost immediately what she meant, and took it as still another sign that he had got his job in hand. This was the more grateful to him that he could think of the intelligence now serving him as an acquisition positively new. He wouldn’t have known even the day before what she meant—that is if she meant, what he assumed, that they were intense Americans together. He had just worked round—and with a sharper turn of the screw than any yet—to the conception of an American intense as little Bilham was intense. The young man was his first specimen; the specimen had profoundly perplexed him; at present however there was light. It was by little Bilham’s amazing serenity that he had at first been affected, but he had inevitably, in his circumspection, felt it as the trail of the serpent, the corruption, as he might conveniently have said, of Europe; whereas the promptness with which it came up for Miss Gostrey but as a special little form of the oldest thing they knew justified it at once to his own vision as well. He wanted to be able to like his specimen with a clear good conscience, and this fully permitted it. What had muddled him was precisely the small artist-man’s way—it was so complete—of being more American than anybody. But it now for the time put Strether vastly at his ease to have this view of a new way.
The amiable youth then looked out, as it had first struck Strether, at a world in respect to which he hadn’t a prejudice. The one our friend most instantly missed was the usual one in favour of an occupation accepted. Little Bilham had an occupation, but it was only an occupation declined; and it was by his general exemption from alarm, anxiety or remorse on this score that the impression of his serenity was made. He had come out to Paris to paint—to fathom, that is, at large, that mystery; but study had been fatal to him so far as anything could be fatal, and his productive power faltered in proportion as his knowledge grew. Strether had gathered from him that at the moment of his finding him in Chad’s rooms he hadn’t saved from his shipwreck a scrap of anything but his beautiful intelligence and his confirmed habit of Paris. He referred to these things with an equal fond familiarity, and it was sufficiently clear that, as an outfit, they still served him. They were charming to Strether through the hour spent at the Louvre, where indeed they figured for him as an unseparated part of the charged iridescent air, the glamour of the name, the splendour of the space, the colour of the masters. Yet they were present too wherever the young man led, and the day after the visit to the Louvre they hung, in a different walk, about the steps of our party. He had invited his companions to cross the river with him, offering to show them his own poor place; and his own poor place, which was very poor, gave to his idiosyncrasies, for Strether—the small sublime indifferences and independences that had struck the latter as fresh—an odd and engaging dignity. He lived at the end of an alley that went out of an old short cobbled street, a street that went in turn out of a new long smooth avenue—street and avenue and alley having, however, in common a sort of social shabbiness; and he introduced them to the rather cold and blank little studio which he had lent to a comrade for the term of his elegant absence. The comrade was another ingenuous compatriot, to whom he had wired that tea was to await them “regardless,” and this reckless repast, and the second ingenuous compatriot, and the faraway makeshift life, with its jokes and its gaps, its delicate daubs and its three or four chairs, its overflow of taste and conviction and its lack of nearly all else—these things wove round the occasion a spell to which our hero unreservedly surrendered.