“Yes—I’m afraid it is,” Strether unguardedly replied.
Chad’s quick rejoinder lighted his precipitation. “Why do you say you’re afraid?”
“Well, because I feel a certain responsibility. It’s my testimony, I imagine, that will have been at the bottom of Mrs. Pocock’s curiosity. My letters, as I’ve supposed you to understand from the beginning, have spoken freely. I’ve certainly said my little say about Madame de Vionnet.”
All that, for Chad, was beautifully obvious. “Yes, but you’ve only spoken handsomely.”
“Never more handsomely of any woman. But it’s just that tone—!”
“That tone,” said Chad, “that has fetched her? I dare say; but I’ve no quarrel with you about it. And no more has Madame de Vionnet. Don’t you know by this time how she likes you?”
“Oh!”—and Strether had, with his groan, a real pang of melancholy. “For all I’ve done for her!”
“Ah you’ve done a great deal.”
Chad’s urbanity fairly shamed him, and he was at this moment absolutely impatient to see the face Sarah Pocock would present to a sort of thing, as he synthetically phrased it to himself, with no adequate forecast of which, despite his admonitions, she would certainly arrive. “I’ve done this!”
“Well, this is all right. She likes,” Chad comfortably remarked, “to be liked.”
It gave his companion a moment’s thought. “And she’s sure Mrs. Pocock will—?”
“No, I say that for you. She likes your liking her; it’s so much, as it were,” Chad laughed, “to the good. However, she doesn’t despair of Sarah either, and is prepared, on her own side, to go all lengths.”
“In the way of appreciation?”
“Yes, and of everything else. In the way of general amiability, hospitality and welcome. She’s under arms,” Chad laughed again; “she’s prepared.”
Strether took it in; then as if an echo of Miss Barrace were in the air: “She’s wonderful.”
“You don’t begin to know how wonderful!”
There was a depth in it, to Strether’s ear, of confirmed luxury—almost a kind of unconscious insolence of proprietorship; but the effect of the glimpse was not at this moment to foster speculation: there was something so conclusive in so much graceful and generous assurance. It was in fact a fresh evocation; and the evocation had before many minutes another consequence. “Well, I shall see her oftener now. I shall see her as much as I like—by your leave; which is what I hitherto haven’t done.”
“It has been,” said Chad, but without reproach, “only your own fault. I tried to bring you together, and she, my dear fellow—I never saw her more charming to any man. But you’ve got your extraordinary ideas.”
“Well, I did have,” Strether murmured; while he felt both how they had possessed him and how they had now lost their authority. He couldn’t have traced the sequence to the end, but it was all because of Mrs. Pocock. Mrs. Pocock might be because of Mrs. Newsome, but that was still to be proved. What came over him was the sense of having stupidly failed to profit where profit would have been precious. It had been open to him to see so much more of her, and he had but let the good days pass. Fierce in him almost was the resolve to lose no more of them, and he whimsically reflected, while at Chad’s side he drew nearer to his destination, that it was after all Sarah who would have quickened his chance. What her visit of inquisition might achieve in other directions was as yet all obscure—only not obscure that it would do supremely much to bring two earnest persons together. He had but to listen to Chad at this moment to feel it; for Chad was in the act of remarking to him that they of course both counted on him—he himself and the other earnest person—for cheer and support. It was brave to Strether to hear him talk as if the line of wisdom they had struck out was to make things ravishing to the Pococks. No, if Madame de Vionnet compassed that, compassed the ravishment of the Pococks, Madame de Vionnet would be prodigious. It would be a beautiful plan if it succeeded, and it all came to the question of Sarah’s being really bribeable. The precedent of his own case helped Strether perhaps but little to consider she might prove so; it being distinct that her character would rather make for every possible difference. This idea of his own bribeability set him apart for himself; with the further mark in fact that his case was absolutely proved. He liked always, where Lambert Strether was concerned, to know the worst, and what he now seemed to know was not only that he was bribeable, but that he had been effectually bribed. The only difficulty was that he couldn’t quite have said with what. It was as if he had sold himself, but hadn’t somehow got the cash. That, however, was what, characteristically, would happen to him. It would naturally be his kind of traffic. While he thought of these things he reminded Chad of the truth they mustn’t lose sight of—the truth that, with all deference to her susceptibility to new interests, Sarah would have come out with a high firm definite purpose. “She hasn’t come out, you know, to be bamboozled. We may all be ravishing—nothing perhaps can be more easy for us; but she hasn’t come out to be ravished. She has come out just simply to take you home.”
“Oh well, with her I’ll go,” said Chad good-humouredly. “I suppose you’ll allow that.” And then as for a minute Strether said nothing: “Or is your idea that when I’ve seen her I shan’t want to go?” As this question, however, again left his friend silent he presently went on: “My own idea at any rate is that they shall have while they’re here the best sort of time.”
It was at this that Strether spoke. “Ah there you are! I think if you really wanted to go—!”
“Well?” said Chad to bring it out.
“Well, you wouldn’t trouble about our good time. You wouldn’t care what sort of a time we have.”
Chad could always take in the easiest way in the world any ingenious suggestion. “I see. But can I help it? I’m too decent.”
“Yes, you’re too decent!” Strether heavily sighed. And he felt for the moment as if it were the preposterous end of his mission.
It ministered for the time to this temporary effect that Chad made no rejoinder. But he spoke again as they came in sight of the station. “Do you mean to introduce her to Miss Gostrey?”
As to this Strether was ready. “No.”
“But haven’t you told me they know about her?”
“I think I’ve told you your mother knows.”
“And won’t she have told Sally?”
“That’s one of the things I want to see.”
“And if you find she has—?”
“Will I then, you mean, bring them together?”
“Yes,” said Chad with his pleasant promptness: “to show her there’s nothing in it.”
Strether hesitated. “I don’t know that I care very much what she may think there’s in it.”
“Not if it represents what Mother thinks?”
“Ah what does your mother think?” There was in this some sound of bewilderment.
But they were just driving up, and help, of a sort, might after all be quite at hand. “Isn’t that, my dear man, what we’re both just going to make out?”
II
Strether quitted the station half an hour later in different company. Chad had taken charge, for the journey to the hotel, of Sarah, Mamie, the maid and the luggage, all spaciously installed and conveyed; and it was only after the four had rolled away that his companion got into a cab with Jim. A strange new feeling had come over Strether, in consequence of which his spirits had risen; it was as if what had occurred on the alighting of his critics had been something other than his fear, though his fear had yet not been of an instant scene of violence. His impression had been nothing but what was inevitable—he said that to himself; yet relief and reassurance had softly dropped upon him. Nothing could be so odd as to be indebted for these things to the look of faces and the sound of voices that had been with him to satiety, as he might have said, for years; but he now knew, all the same, how uneasy he had felt; that was brought home to him by his present sens
e of a respite. It had come moreover in the flash of an eye; it had come in the smile with which Sarah, whom, at the window of her compartment, they had effusively greeted from the platform, rustled down to them a moment later, fresh and handsome from her cool June progress through the charming land. It was only a sign, but enough: she was going to be gracious and unallusive, she was going to play the larger game—which was still more apparent, after she had emerged from Chad’s arms, in her direct greeting to the valued friend of her family.
Strether was then as much as ever the valued friend of her family; it was something he could at all events go on with; and the manner of his response to it expressed even for himself how little he had enjoyed the prospect of ceasing to figure in that likeness. He had always seen Sarah gracious—had in fact rarely seen her shy or dry; her marked thin-lipped smile, intense without brightness and as prompt to act as the scrape of a safety-match; the protrusion of her rather remarkably long chin, which in her case represented invitation and urbanity, and not, as in most others, pugnacity and defiance; the penetration of her voice to a distance, the general encouragement and approval of her manner, were all elements with which intercourse had made him familiar, but which he noted to-day almost as if she had been a new acquaintance. This first glimpse of her had given a brief but vivid accent to her resemblance to her mother; he could have taken her for Mrs. Newsome while she met his eyes as the train rolled into the station. It was an impression that quickly dropped; Mrs. Newsome was much handsomer, and while Sarah inclined to the massive her mother had, at an age, still the girdle of a maid; also the latter’s chin was rather short, than long, and her smile, by good fortune, much more, oh ever so much more, mercifully vague. Strether had seen Mrs. Newsome reserved; he had literally heard her silent, though he had never known her unpleasant. It was the case with Mrs. Pocock that he had known her unpleasant, even though he had never known her not affable. She had forms of affability that were in a high degree assertive; nothing for instance had ever been more striking than that she was affable to Jim.
What had told in any case at the window of the train was her high clear forehead, that forehead which her friends, for some reason, always thought of as a “brow”; the long reach of her eyes—it came out at this juncture in such a manner as to remind him, oddly enough, also of that of Waymarsh’s; and the unusual gloss of her dark hair, dressed and hatted, after her mother’s refined example, with such an avoidance of extremes that it was always spoken of at Woollett as “their own.” Though this analogy dropped as soon as she was on the platform it had lasted long enough to make him feel all the advantage, as it were, of his relief. The woman at home, the woman to whom he was attached, was before him just long enough to give him again the measure of the wretchedness, in fact really of the shame, of their having to recognize the formation, between them, of a “split.” He had taken this measure in solitude and meditation; but the catastrophe, as Sarah steamed up, looked for its seconds unprecedentedly dreadful—or proved, more exactly, altogether unthinkable; so that his finding something free and familiar to respond to brought with it an instant renewal of his loyalty. He had suddenly sounded the whole depth, had gasped at what he might have lost.
Well, he could now, for the quarter of an hour of their detention, hover about the travellers as soothingly as if their direct message to him was that he had lost nothing. He wasn’t going to have Sarah write to her mother that night that he was in any way altered or strange. There had been times enough for a month when it had seemed to him that he was strange, that he was altered, in every way; but that was a matter for himself; he knew at least whose business it was not; it was not at all events such a circumstance as Sarah’s own unaided lights would help her to. Even if she had come out to flash those lights more than yet appeared she wouldn’t make much headway against mere pleasantness. He counted on being able to be merely pleasant to the end, and if only from incapacity moreover to formulate anything different. He couldn’t even formulate to himself his being changed and queer; it had taken place, the process, somewhere deep down; Maria Gostrey had caught glimpses of it; but how was he to fish it up, even if he desired, for Mrs. Pocock? This was then the spirit in which he hovered, and with the easier throb in it much indebted furthermore to the impression of high and established adequacy as a pretty girl promptly produced in him by Mamie. He had wondered vaguely—turning over many things in the fidget of his thoughts—if Mamie were as pretty as Woollett published her; as to which issue seeing her now again was to be so swept away by Woollett’s opinion that this consequence really let loose for the imagination an avalanche of others. There were positively five minutes in which the last word seemed of necessity to abide with a Woollett represented by a Mamie. This was the sort of truth the place itself would feel; it would send her forth in confidence; it would point to her with triumph; it would take its stand on her with assurance; it would be conscious of no requirements she didn’t meet, of no question she couldn’t answer.
Well, it was right, Strether slipped smoothly enough into the cheerfulness of saying: granted that a community might be best represented by a young lady of twenty-two, Mamie perfectly played the part, played it as if she were used to it, and looked and spoke and dressed the character. He wondered if she mightn’t, in the high light of Paris, a cool full studio-light, becoming yet treacherous, show as too conscious of these matters; but the next moment he felt satisfied that her consciousness was after all empty for its size, rather too simple than too mixed, and that the kind way with her would be not to take many things out of it, but to put as many as possible in. She was robust and conveniently tall; just a trifle too bloodlessly fair perhaps, but with a pleasant public familiar radiance that affirmed her vitality. She might have been “receiving” for Woollett, wherever she found herself, and there was something in her manner, her tone, her motion, her pretty blue eyes, her pretty perfect teeth and her very small, too small, nose, that immediately placed her, to the fancy, between the windows of a hot bright room in which voices were high—up at that end to which people were brought to be “presented.” They were there to congratulate, these images, and Strether’s renewed vision, on this hint, completed the idea. What Mamie was like was the happy bride, the bride after the church and just before going away. She wasn’t the mere maiden, and yet was only as much married as that quantity came to. She was in the brilliant acclaimed festal stage. Well, might it last her long!
Strether rejoiced in these things for Chad, who was all genial attention to the needs of his friends, besides having arranged that his servant should re-enforce him; the ladies were certainly pleasant to see, and Mamie would be at any time and anywhere pleasant to exhibit. She would look extraordinarily like his young wife—the wife of a honeymoon, should he go about with her; but that was his own affair—or perhaps it was hers; it was at any rate something she couldn’t help. Strether remembered how he had seen him come up with Jeanne de Vionnet in Gloriani’s garden, and the fancy he had had about that—the fancy obscured now, thickly overlaid with others; the recollection was during these minutes his only note of trouble. He had often, in spite of himself, wondered if Chad but too probably were not with Jeanne the object of a still and shaded flame. It was on the cards that the child might be tremulously in love, and this conviction now flickered up not a bit the less for his disliking to think of it, for its being, in a complicated situation, a complication the more, and for something indescribable in Mamie, something at all events straightway lent her by his own mind, something that gave her value, gave her intensity and purpose, as the symbol of an opposition. Little Jeanne wasn’t really at all in question—how could she be?—yet from the moment Miss Pocock had shaken her skirts on the platform, touched up the immense bows of her hat and settled properly over her shoulder the strap of her morocco-and-gilt travelling-satchel, from that moment little Jeanne was opposed.
It was in the cab with Jim that impressions really crowded on Strether, giving him the strangest sense of length of absence from
people among whom he had lived for years. Having them thus come out to him was as if he had returned to find them; and the droll promptitude of Jim’s mental reaction threw his own initiation far back into the past. Whoever might or mightn’t be suited by what was going on among them, Jim, for one, would certainly be: his instant recognition—frank and whimsical—of what the affair was for him gave Strether a glow of pleasure. “I say, you know, this is about my shape, and if it hadn’t been for you—!” so he broke out as the charming streets met his healthy appetite; and he wound up, after an expressive nudge, with a clap of his companion’s knee and an “Oh you, you—you are doing it!” that was charged with rich meaning. Strether felt in it the intention of homage, but, with a curiosity otherwise occupied, postponed taking it up. What he was asking himself for the time was how Sarah Pocock, in the opportunity already given her, had judged her brother—from whom he himself, as they finally, at the station, separated for their different conveyances, had had a look into which he could read more than one message. However Sarah was judging her brother, Chad’s conclusion about his sister, and about her husband and her husband’s sister, was at the least on the way not to fail of confidence. Strether felt the confidence, and that, as the look between them was an exchange, what he himself gave back was relatively vague. This comparison of notes however could wait; everything struck him as depending on the effect produced by Chad. Neither Sarah nor Mamie had in any way, at the station—where they had had after all ample time—broken out about it; which, to make up for this, was what our friend had expected of Jim as soon as they should find themselves together.
It was queer to him that he had that noiseless brush with Chad; an ironic intelligence with this youth on the subject of his relatives, an intelligence carried on under their nose and, as might be said, at their expense—such a matter marked again for him strongly the number of stages he had come; albeit that if the number seemed great the time taken for the final one was but the turn of a hand. He had before this had many moments of wondering if he himself weren’t perhaps changed even as Chad was changed. Only what in Chad was conspicuous improvement—well, he had no name ready for the working, in his own organism, of his own more timid dose. He should have to see first what this action would amount to. And for his occult passage with the young man, after all, the directness of it had no greater oddity than the fact that the young man’s way with the three travellers should have been so happy a manifestation. Strether liked him for it, on the spot, as he hadn’t yet liked him; it affected him while it lasted as he might have been affected by some light pleasant perfect work of art: to that degree that he wondered if they were really worthy of it, took it in and did it justice; to that degree that it would have been scarce a miracle if, there in the luggage-room, while they waited for their things, Sarah had pulled his sleeve and drawn him aside. “You’re right; we haven’t quite known what you mean, Mother and I, but now we see. Chad’s magnificent; what can one want more? If this is the kind of thing—!” On which they might, as it were, have embraced and begun to work together.