“What do you call,” Strether asked, “an opportunity? My going to see her?”
“Ah you must go to see her”—Miss Gostrey was a trifle evasive. “You can’t not do that. You’d have gone to see the other woman. I mean if there had been one—a different sort. It’s what you came out for.”
It might be; but Strether distinguished. “I didn’t come out to see this sort.”
She had a wonderful look at him now. “Are you disappointed she isn’t worse?”
He for a moment entertained the question, then found for it the frankest of answers. “Yes. If she were worse she’d be better for our purpose. It would be simpler.”
“Perhaps,” she admitted. “But won’t this be pleasanter?”
“Ah you know,” he promptly replied, “I didn’t come out—wasn’t that just what you originally reproached me with?—for the pleasant.”
“Precisely. Therefore I say again what I said at first. You must take things as they come. Besides,” Miss Gostrey added, “I’m not afraid for myself.”
“For yourself—?”
“Of your seeing her. I trust her. There’s nothing she’ll say about me. In fact there’s nothing she can.”
Strether wondered—little as he had thought of this. Then he broke out. “Oh you women!”
There was something in it at which she flushed.
“Yes—there we are. We’re abysses.” At last she smiled. “But I risk her!”
He gave himself a shake. “Well then so do I!” But he added as they passed into the house that he would see Chad the first thing in the morning.
This was the next day the more easily effected that the young man, as it happened, even before he was down, turned up at his hotel. Strether took his coffee, by habit, in the public room; but on his descending for this purpose Chad instantly proposed an adjournment to what he called greater privacy. He had himself as yet had nothing—they would sit down somewhere together; and when after a few steps and a turn into the Boulevard they had, for their greater privacy, sat down among twenty others, our friend saw in his companion’s move a fear of the advent of Waymarsh. It was the first time Chad had to that extent given this personage “away”; and Strether found himself wondering of what it was symptomatic. He made out in a moment that the youth was in earnest as he hadn’t yet seen him; which in its turn threw a ray perhaps a trifle startling on what they had each up to that time been treating as earnestness. It was sufficiently flattering however that the real thing—if this was at last the real thing—should have been determined, as appeared, precisely by an accretion of Strether’s importance. For this was what it quickly enough came to—that Chad, rising with the lark, had rushed down to let him know while his morning consciousness was yet young that he had literally made the afternoon before a tremendous impression. Madame de Vionnet wouldn’t, couldn’t rest till she should have some assurance from him that he would consent again to see her. The announcement was made, across their marble-topped table, while the foam of the hot milk was in their cups and its plash still in the air, with the smile of Chad’s easiest urbanity; and this expression of his face caused our friend’s doubts to gather on the spot into a challenge of the lips. “See here”—that was all; he only for the moment said again “See here.” Chad met it with all his air of straight intelligence, while Strether remembered again that fancy of the first impression of him, the happy young Pagan, handsome and hard but oddly indulgent, whose mysterious measure he had under the street-lamp tried mentally to take. The young Pagan, while a long look passed between them, sufficiently understood. Strether scarce needed at last to say the rest—“I want to know where I am.” But he said it, adding before any answer something more. “Are you engaged to be married—is that your secret?—to the young lady?”
Chad shook his head with the slow amenity that was one of his ways of conveying that there was time for everything. “I have no secret—though I may have secrets! I haven’t at any rate that one. We’re not engaged. No.”
“Then where’s the hitch?”
“Do you mean why I haven’t already started with you?” Chad, beginning his coffee and buttering his roll, was quite ready to explain. “Nothing would have induced me—nothing will still induce me—not to try to keep you here as long as you can be made to stay. It’s too visibly good for you.” Strether had himself plenty to say about this, but it was amusing also to measure the march of Chad’s tone. He had never been more a man of the world, and it was always in his company present to our friend that one was seeing how in successive connexions a man of the world acquitted himself. Chad kept it up beautifully. “My idea—voyons!—is simply that you should let Madame de Vionnet know you, simply that you should consent to know her. I don’t in the least mind telling you that, clever and charming as she is, she’s ever so much in my confidence. All I ask of you is to let her talk to you. You’ve asked me about what you call my hitch, and so far as it goes she’ll explain it to you. She’s herself my hitch, hang it—if you must really have it all out. But in a sense,” he hastened in the most wonderful manner to add, “that you’ll quite make out for yourself. She’s too good a friend, confound her. Too good, I mean, for me to leave without—without—” It was his first hesitation.
“Without what?”
“Well, without my arranging somehow or other the damnable terms of my sacrifice.”
“It will be a sacrifice then?”
“It will be the greatest loss I ever suffered. I owe her so much.”
It was beautiful, the way Chad said these things, and his plea was now confessedly—oh quite flagrantly and publicly—interesting. The moment really took on for Strether an intensity. Chad owed Madame de Vionnet so much? What did that do then but clear up the whole mystery? He was indebted for alterations, and she was thereby in a position to have sent in her bill for expenses incurred in reconstruction. What was this at bottom but what had been to be arrived at? Strether sat there arriving at it while he munched toast and stirred his second cup. To do this with the aid of Chad’s pleasant earnest face was also to do more besides. No, never before had he been so ready to take him as he was. What was it that had suddenly so cleared up? It was just everybody’s character; that is everybody’s but—in a measure—his own. Strether felt his character receive for the instant a smutch from all the wrong things he had suspected or believed. The person to whom Chad owed it that he could positively turn out such a comfort to other persons—such a person was sufficiently raised above any “breath” by the nature of her work and the young man’s steady light. All of which was vivid enough to come and go quickly; though indeed in the midst of it Strether could utter a question. “Have I your word of honour that if I surrender myself to Madame de Vionnet you’ll surrender yourself to me?”
Chad laid his hand firmly on his friend’s. “My dear man, you have it.”
There was finally something in his felicity almost embarrassing and oppressive—Strether had begun to fidget under it for the open air and the erect posture. He had signed to the waiter that he wished to pay, and this transaction took some moments, during which he thoroughly felt, while he put down money and pretended—it was quite hollow—to estimate change, that Chad’s higher spirit, his youth, his practice, his paganism, his felicity, his assurance, his impudence, whatever it might be, had consciously scored a success. Well, that was all right so far as it went; his sense of the thing in question covered our friend for a minute like a veil through which—as if he had been muffled—he heard his interlocutor ask him if he mightn’t take him over about five. “Over” was over the river, and over the river was where Madame de Vionnet lived, and five was that very afternoon. They got at last out of the place—got out before he answered. He lighted, in the street, a cigarette, which again gave him more time. But it was already sharp for him that there was no use in time. “What does she propose to do to me?” he had presently demanded.
Chad had no delays. “Are you afraid of her?”
“Oh immensely. Don’t
you see it?”
“Well,” said Chad, “she won’t do anything worse to you than make you like her.”
“It’s just of that I’m afraid.”
“Then it’s not fair to me.”
Strether cast about. “It’s fair to your mother.”
“Oh,” said Chad, “are you afraid of her?”
“Scarcely less. Or perhaps even more. But is this lady against your interests at home?” Strether went on.
“Not directly, no doubt; but she’s greatly in favour of them here.”
“And what—‘here’—does she consider them to be?”
“Well, good relations!”
“With herself?”
“With herself.”
“And what is it that makes them so good?”
“What? Well, that’s exactly what you’ll make out if you’ll only go, as I’m supplicating you, to see her.”
Strether stared at him with a little of the wanness, no doubt, that the vision of more to “make out” could scarce help producing. “I mean how good are they?”
“Oh awfully good.”
Again Strether had faltered, but it was brief. It was all very well, but there was nothing now he wouldn’t risk. “Excuse me, but I must really—as I began by telling you—know where I am. Is she bad?”
“ ‘Bad’?”—Chad echoed it, but without a shock. “Is that what’s implied—?”
“When relations are good?” Strether felt a little silly, and was even conscious of a foolish laugh, at having it imposed on him to have appeared to speak so. What indeed was he talking about? His stare had relaxed; he looked now all round him. But something in him brought him back, though he still didn’t know quite how to turn it. The two or three ways he thought of, and one of them in particular, were, even with scruples dismissed, too ugly. He none the less at last found something. “Is her life without reproach?”
It struck him, directly he had found it, as pompous and priggish; so much so that he was thankful to Chad for taking it only in the right spirit. The young man spoke so immensely to the point that the effect was practically of positive blandness. “Absolutely without reproach. A beautiful life. Allez done voir!”
These last words were, in the liberality of their confidence, so imperative that Strether went through no form of assent; but before they separated it had been confirmed that he should be picked up at a quarter to five.
BOOK SIXTH
I
It was quite by half-past five—after the two men had been together in Madame de Vionnet’s drawing-room not more than a dozen minutes—that Chad, with a look at his watch and then another at their hostess, said genially, gaily: “I’ve an engagement, and I know you won’t complain if I leave him with you. He’ll interest you immensely; and as for her,” he declared to Strether, “I assure you, if you’re at all nervous, she’s perfectly safe.”
He had left them to be embarrassed or not by this guarantee, as they could best manage, and embarrassment was a thing that Strether wasn’t at first sure Madame de Vionnet escaped. He escaped it himself, to his surprise; but he had grown used by this time to thinking of himself as brazen. She occupied, his hostess, in the Rue de Bellechasse, the first floor of an old house to which our visitors had had access from an old clean court. The court was large and open, full of revelations, for our friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals, the dignity of distances and approaches; the house, to his restless sense, was in the high homely style of an elder day, and the ancient Paris that he was always looking for—sometimes intensely felt, sometimes more acutely missed—was in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed staircase and in the fine boiseries, the medallions, mouldings, mirrors, great clear spaces, of the greyish-white salon into which he had been shown. He seemed at the very outset to see her in the midst of possessions not vulgarly numerous, but hereditary cherished charming. While his eyes turned after a little from those of his hostess and Chad freely talked—not in the least about him, but about other people, people he didn’t know, and quite as if he did know them—he found himself making out, as a background of the occupant, some glory, some prosperity of the First Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend; elements clinging still to all the consular chairs and mythological brasses and sphinxes’ heads and faded surfaces of satin striped with alternate silk.
The place itself went further back—that he guessed, and how old Paris continued in a manner to echo there; but the post-revolutionary period, the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Châteaubriand, of Madame de Staël, even of the young Lamartine, had left its stamp of harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects, ornaments and relics. He had never before, to his knowledge, had present to him relics, of any special dignity, of a private order—little old miniatures, medallions, pictures, books; books in leather bindings, pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back, ranged, together with other promiscuous properties, under the glass of brass-mounted cabinets. His attention took them all tenderly into account. They were among the matters that marked Madame de Vionnet’s apartment as something quite different from Miss Gostrey’s little museum of bargains and from Chad’s lovely home; he recognized it as founded much more on old accumulations that had possibly from time to time shrunken than on any contemporary method of acquisition or form of curiosity. Chad and Miss Gostrey had rummaged and purchased and picked up and exchanged, sifting, selecting, comparing; whereas the mistress of the scene before him, beautifully passive under the spell of transmission—transmission from her father’s line, he quite made up his mind—had only received, accepted and been quiet. When she hadn’t been quiet she had been moved at the most to some occult charity for some fallen fortune. There had been objects she or her predecessors might even conceivably have parted with under need, but Strether couldn’t suspect them of having sold old pieces to get “better” ones. They would have felt no difference as to better or worse. He could but imagine their having felt—perhaps in emigration, in proscription, for his sketch was slight and confused—the pressure of want or the obligation of sacrifice.
The pressure of want—whatever might be the case with the other force—was, however, presumably not active now, for the tokens of a chastened ease still abounded after all, many marks of a taste whose discriminations might perhaps have been called eccentric. He guessed at intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions, a deep suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right. The general result of this was something for which he had no name on the spot quite ready, but something he would have come nearest to naming in speaking of it as the air of supreme respectability, the consciousness, small, still, reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of private honour. The air of supreme respectability—that was a strange blank wall for his adventure to have brought him to break his nose against. It had in fact, as he was now aware, filled all the approaches, hovered in the court as he passed, hung on the staircase as he mounted, sounded in the grave rumble of the old bell, as little electric as possible, of which Chad, at the door, had pulled the ancient but neatly-kept tassel; it formed in short the clearest medium of its particular kind that he had ever breathed. He would have answered for it at the end of a quarter of an hour that some of the glass cases contained swords and epaulettes of ancient colonels and generals; medals and orders once pinned over hearts that had long since ceased to beat; snuff-boxes bestowed on ministers and envoys; copies of works presented, with inscriptions, by authors now classic. At bottom of it all for him was the sense of her rare unlikeness to the women he had known. This sense had grown, since the day before, the more he recalled her, and had been above all singularly fed by his talk with Chad in the morning. Everything in fine made her immeasurably new, and nothing so new as the old house and the old objects. There were books, two or three, on a small table near his chair, but they hadn’t the lemon-coloured covers with which his eye had begun to dally from the hour of his arrival and to the opportunity of a fur
ther acquaintance with which he had for a fortnight now altogether succumbed. On another table, across the room, he made out the great Revue; but even that familiar face, conspicuous in Mrs. Newsome’s parlours, scarce counted here as a modern note. He was sure on the spot—and he afterwards knew he was right—that this was a touch of Chad’s own hand. What would Mrs. Newsome say to the circumstance that Chad’s interested “influence” kept her paperk-nife in the Revue? The interested influence at any rate had, as we say, gone straight to the point—had in fact soon left it quite behind.
She was seated, near the fire, on a small stuffed and fringed chair, one of the few modern articles in the room; and she leaned back in it with her hands clasped in her lap and no movement, in all her person, but the fine prompt play of her deep young face. The fire, under the low white marble, undraped and academic, had burnt down to the silver ashes of light wood; one of the windows, at a distance, stood open to the mildness and stillness, out of which, in the short pauses, came the faint sound, pleasant and homely, almost rustic, of a plash and a clatter of sabots from some coach-house on the other side of the court. Madame de Vionnet, while Strether sat there, wasn’t to shift her posture by an inch. “I don’t think you seriously believe in what you’re doing,” she said; “but all the same, you know, I’m going to treat you quite as if I did.”
“By which you mean,” Strether directly replied, “quite as if you didn’t! I assure you it won’t make the least difference with me how you treat me.”
“Well,” she said, taking that menace bravely and philosophically enough, “the only thing that really matters is that you shall get on with me.”
“Ah but I don’t!” he immediately returned.
It gave her another pause; which, however, she happily enough shook off. “Will you consent to go on with me a little—provisionally—as if you did?”