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BOOK NINTH III
There they were yet again, accordingly, for two days more; when Strether, on being, at
Mrs. Pocock's hotel, ushered into that lady's salon, found himself at first
assuming a mistake on the part of the servant who had introduced him and retired.
The occupants hadn't come in, for the room looked empty as only a room can look in
Paris, of a fine afternoon when the faint murmur of the huge collective life, carried
on out of doors, strays among scattered
objects even as a summer air idles in a lonely garden.
Our friend looked about and hesitated; observed, on the evidence of a table
charged with purchases and other matters, that Sarah had become possessed--by no aid
from HIM--of the last number of the salmon-
coloured Revue; noted further that Mamie appeared to have received a present of
Fromentin's "Maitres d'Autrefois" from Chad, who had written her name on the
cover; and pulled up at the sight of a heavy letter addressed in a hand he knew.
This letter, forwarded by a banker and arriving in Mrs. Pocock's absence, had been
placed in evidence, and it drew from the fact of its being unopened a sudden ***
power to intensify the reach of its author.
It brought home to him the scale on which Mrs. Newsome--for she had been copious
indeed this time--was writing to her daughter while she kept HIM in durance; and
it had altogether such an effect upon him
as made him for a few minutes stand still and breathe low.
In his own room, at his own hotel, he had dozens of well-filled envelopes
superscribed in that character; and there was actually something in the renewal of
his interrupted vision of the character
that played straight into the so frequent question of whether he weren't already
disinherited beyond appeal.
It was such an assurance as the sharp downstrokes of her pen hadn't yet had
occasion to give him; but they somehow at the present crisis stood for a probable
absoluteness in any decree of the writer.
He looked at Sarah's name and address, in short, as if he had been looking hard into
her mother's face, and then turned from it as if the face had declined to relax.
But since it was in a manner as if Mrs. Newsome were thereby all the more, instead
of the less, in the room, and were conscious, sharply and sorely conscious, of
himself, so he felt both held and hushed,
summoned to stay at least and take his punishment.
By staying, accordingly, he took it-- creeping softly and vaguely about and
waiting for Sarah to come in.
She WOULD come in if he stayed long enough, and he had now more than ever the sense of
her success in leaving him a prey to anxiety.
It wasn't to be denied that she had had a happy instinct, from the point of view of
Woollett, in placing him thus at the mercy of her own initiative.
It was very well to try to say he didn't care--that she might break ground when she
would, might never break it at all if she wouldn't, and that he had no confession
whatever to wait upon her with: he
breathed from day to day an air that damnably required clearing, and there were
moments when he quite ached to precipitate that process.
He couldn't doubt that, should she only oblige him by surprising him just as he
then was, a clarifying scene of some sort would result from the concussion.
He humbly circulated in this spirit till he suddenly had a fresh arrest.
Both the windows of the room stood open to the balcony, but it was only now that, in
the glass of the leaf of one of them, folded back, he caught a reflexion quickly
recognised as the colour of a lady's dress.
Somebody had been then all the while on the balcony, and the person, whoever it might
be, was so placed between the windows as to be hidden from him; while on the other hand
the many sounds of the street had covered his own entrance and movements.
If the person were Sarah he might on the spot therefore be served to his taste.
He might lead her by a move or two up to the remedy for his vain tension; as to
which, should he get nothing else from it, he would at least have the relief of
pulling down the roof on their heads.
There was fortunately no one at hand to observe--in respect to his valour--that
even on this completed reasoning he still hung fire.
He had been waiting for Mrs. Pocock and the sound of the oracle; but he had to gird
himself afresh--which he did in the embrasure of the window, neither advancing
nor retreating--before provoking the revelation.
It was apparently for Sarah to come more into view; he was in that case there at her
service.
She did however, as meanwhile happened, come more into view; only she luckily came
at the last minute as a contradiction of Sarah.
The occupant of the balcony was after all quite another person, a person presented,
on a second look, by a charming back and a slight shift of her position, as beautiful
brilliant unconscious Mamie--Mamie alone at
home, Mamie passing her time in her own innocent way, Mamie in short rather
shabbily used, but Mamie absorbed interested and interesting.
With her arms on the balustrade and her attention dropped to the street she allowed
Strether to watch her, to consider several things, without her turning round.
But the oddity was that when he HAD so watched and considered he simply stepped
back into the room without following up his advantage.
He revolved there again for several minutes, quite as with something new to
think of and as if the bearings of the possibility of Sarah had been superseded.
For frankly, yes, it HAD bearings thus to find the girl in solitary possession.
There was something in it that touched him to a point not to have been reckoned
beforehand, something that softly but quite pressingly spoke to him, and that spoke the
more each time he paused again at the edge of the balcony and saw her still unaware.
Her companions were plainly scattered; Sarah would be off somewhere with Waymarsh
and Chad off somewhere with Jim.
Strether didn't at all mentally impute to Chad that he was with his "good friend"; he
gave him the benefit of supposing him involved in appearances that, had he had to
describe them--for instance to Maria--he
would have conveniently qualified as more subtle.
It came to him indeed the next thing that there was perhaps almost an excess of
refinement in having left Mamie in such weather up there alone; however she might
in fact have extemporised, under the charm
of the Rue de Rivoli, a little makeshift Paris of wonder arid fancy.
Our friend in any case now recognised--and it was as if at the recognition Mrs.
Newsome's fixed intensity had suddenly, with a deep audible gasp, grown thin and
vague--that day after day he had been
conscious in respect to his young lady of something odd and ambiguous, yet something
into which he could at last read a meaning.
It had been at the most, this mystery, an obsession--oh an obsession agreeable; and
it had just now fallen into its place as at the touch of a spring.
It had represented the possibility between them of some communication baffled by
accident and delay--the possibility even of some relation as yet unacknowledged.
There was always their old relation, the fruit of the Woollett years; but that--and
it was what was strangest--had nothing whatever in common with what was now in the
air.
As a child, as a "bud," and then again as a flower of expansion, Mamie had bloomed for
him, freely, in the almost incessantly open doorways of home; where he remembered her
as first very forward, as then very
backward--for he had carried on at one period, in Mrs. Newsome's parlours (oh Mrs.
Newsome's phases and his own!) a course of English Literature re-enforced by exams and
teas--and once more, finally, as very much in advance.
But he had kept no great sense of points of contact; it not being in the nature of
things at Woollett that the freshest of the buds should find herself in the same basket
with the most withered of the winter apples.
The child had given sharpness, above all, to his sense of the flight of time; it was
but the day before yesterday that he had tripped up on her hoop, yet his experience
of remarkable women--destined, it would
seem, remarkably to grow--felt itself ready this afternoon, quite braced itself, to
include her.
She had in fine more to say to him than he had ever dreamed the pretty girl of the
moment COULD have; and the proof of the circumstance was that, visibly,
unmistakeably, she had been able to say it to no one else.
It was something she could mention neither to her brother, to her sister-in-law nor to
Chad; though he could just imagine that had she still been at home she might have
brought it out, as a supreme tribute to
age, authority and attitude, for Mrs. Newsome.
It was moreover something in which they all took an interest; the strength of their
interest was in truth just the reason of her prudence.
All this then, for five minutes, was vivid to Strether, and it put before him that,
poor child, she had now but her prudence to amuse her.
That, for a pretty girl in Paris, struck him, with a rush, as a sorry state; so that
under the impression he went out to her with a step as hypocritically alert, he was
well aware, as if he had just come into the room.
She turned with a start at his voice; preoccupied with him though she might be,
she was just a scrap disappointed.
"Oh I thought you were Mr. Bilham!"
The remark had been at first surprising and our friend's private thought, under the
influence of it, temporarily blighted; yet we are able to add that he presently
recovered his inward tone and that many a
fresh flower of fancy was to bloom in the same air.
Little Bilham--since little Bilham was, somewhat incongruously, expected--appeared
behindhand; a circumstance by which Strether was to profit.
They came back into the room together after a little, the couple on the balcony, and
amid its crimson-and-gold elegance, with the others still absent, Strether passed
forty minutes that he appraised even at the
time as far, in the whole *** connexion, from his idlest.
Yes indeed, since he had the other day so agreed with Maria about the inspiration of
the lurid, here was something for his problem that surely didn't make it shrink
and that was floated in upon him as part of a sudden flood.
He was doubtless not to know till afterwards, on turning them over in
thought, of how many elements his impression was composed; but he none the
less felt, as he sat with the charming girl, the signal growth of a confidence.
For she WAS charming, when all was said-- and none the less so for the visible habit
and practice of freedom and fluency.
She was charming, he was aware, in spite of the fact that if he hadn't found her so he
would have found her something he should have been in peril of expressing as
"funny."
Yes, she was funny, wonderful Mamie, and without dreaming it; she was bland, she was
bridal--with never, that he could make out as yet, a bridegroom to support it; she was
handsome and portly and easy and chatty,
soft and sweet and almost disconcertingly reassuring.
She was dressed, if we might so far discriminate, less as a young lady than as
an old one--had an old one been supposable to Strether as so committed to vanity; the
complexities of her hair missed moreover
also the looseness of youth; and she had a mature manner of bending a little, as to
encourage and reward, while she held neatly together in front of her a pair of
strikingly polished hands: the combination
of all of which kept up about her the glamour of her "receiving," placed her
again perpetually between the windows and within sound of the ice-cream plates,
suggested the enumeration of all the names,
all the Mr. Brookses and Mr. Snookses, gregarious specimens of a single type, she
was happy to "meet."
But if all this was where she was funny, and if what was funnier than the rest was
the contrast between her beautiful benevolent patronage--such a hint of the
polysyllabic as might make her something of
a bore toward middle age--and her rather flat little voice, the voice, naturally,
unaffectedly yet, of a girl of fifteen; so Strether, none the less, at the end of ten
minutes, felt in her a quiet dignity that pulled things bravely together.
If quiet dignity, almost more than matronly, with voluminous, too voluminous
clothes, was the effect she proposed to produce, that was an ideal one could like
in her when once one had got into relation.
The great thing now for her visitor was that this was exactly what he had done; it
made so extraordinary a mixture of the brief and crowded hour.
It was the mark of a relation that he had begun so quickly to find himself sure she
was, of all people, as might have been said, on the side and of the party of Mrs.
Newsome's original ambassador.
She was in HIS interest and not in Sarah's, and some sign of that was precisely what he
had been feeling in her, these last days, as imminent.
Finally placed, in Paris, in immediate presence of the situation and of the hero
of it--by whom Strether was incapable of meaning any one but Chad--she had
accomplished, and really in a manner all
unexpected to herself, a change of base; deep still things had come to pass within
her, and by the time she had grown sure of them Strether had become aware of the
little drama.
When she knew where she was, in short, he had made it out; and he made it out at
present still better; though with never a direct word passing between them all the
while on the subject of his own predicament.
There had been at first, as he sat there with her, a moment during which he wondered
if she meant to break ground in respect to his prime undertaking.
That door stood so strangely ajar that he was half-prepared to be conscious, at any
juncture, of her having, of any one's having, quite bounced in.
But, friendly, familiar, light of touch and happy of tact, she exquisitely stayed out;
so that it was for all the world as if to show she could deal with him without being
reduced to--well, scarcely anything.
It fully came up for them then, by means of their talking of everything BUT Chad, that
Mamie, unlike Sarah, unlike Jim, knew perfectly what had become of him.
It fully came up that she had taken to the last fraction of an inch the measure of the
change in him, and that she wanted Strether to know what a secret she proposed to make
of it.
They talked most conveniently--as if they had had no chance yet--about Woollett; and
that had virtually the effect of their keeping the secret more close.
The hour took on for Strether, little by little, a *** sad sweetness of quality,
he had such a revulsion in Mamie's favour and on behalf of her social value as might
have come from remorse at some early injustice.
She made him, as under the breath of some vague western whiff, homesick and freshly
restless; he could really for the time have fancied himself stranded with her on a far
shore, during an ominous calm, in a quaint community of shipwreck.
Their little interview was like a picnic on a coral strand; they passed each other,
with melancholy smiles and looks sufficiently allusive, such cupfuls of
water as they had saved.
Especially sharp in Strether meanwhile was the conviction that his companion really
knew, as we have hinted, where she had come out.
It was at a very particular place--only THAT she would never tell him; it would be
above all what he should have to puzzle for himself.
This was what he hoped for, because his interest in the girl wouldn't be complete
without it.
No more would the appreciation to which she was entitled--so assured was he that the
more he saw of her process the more he should see of her pride.
She saw, herself, everything; but she knew what she didn't want, and that it was that
had helped her.
What didn't she want?--there was a pleasure lost for her old friend in not yet knowing,
as there would doubtless be a thrill in getting a glimpse.
Gently and sociably she kept that dark to him, and it was as if she soothed and
beguiled him in other ways to make up for it.
She came out with her impression of Madame de Vionnet--of whom she had "heard so
much"; she came out with her impression of Jeanne, whom she had been "dying to see":
she brought it out with a blandness by
which her auditor was really stirred that she had been with Sarah early that very
afternoon, and after dreadful delays caused by all sorts of things, mainly, eternally,
by the purchase of clothes--clothes that
unfortunately wouldn't be themselves eternal--to call in the Rue de Bellechasse.
At the sound of these names Strether almost blushed to feel that he couldn't have
sounded them first--and yet couldn't either have justified his squeamishness.
Mamie made them easy as he couldn't have begun to do, and yet it could only have
cost her more than he should ever have had to spend.
It was as friends of Chad's, friends special, distinguished, desirable,
enviable, that she spoke of them, and she beautifully carried it off that much as she
had heard of them--though she didn't say
how or where, which was a touch of her own- -she had found them beyond her supposition.
She abounded in praise of them, and after the manner of Woollett--which made the
manner of Woollett a loveable thing again to Strether.
He had never so felt the true inwardness of it as when his blooming companion
pronounced the elder of the ladies of the Rue de Bellechasse too fascinating for
words and declared of the younger that she
was perfectly ideal, a real little monster of charm.
"Nothing," she said of Jeanne, "ought ever to happen to her--she's so awfully right as
she is.
Another touch will spoil her--so she oughtn't to BE touched."
"Ah but things, here in Paris," Strether observed, "do happen to little girls."
And then for the joke's and the occasion's sake: "Haven't you found that yourself?"
"That things happen--? Oh I'm not a little girl.
I'm a big battered blowsy one.
I don't care," Mamie laughed, "WHAT happens."
Strether had a pause while he wondered if it mightn't happen that he should give her
the pleasure of learning that he found her nicer than he had really dreamed--a pause
that ended when he had said to himself
that, so far as it at all mattered for her, she had in fact perhaps already made this
out.
He risked accordingly a different question- -though conscious, as soon as he had
spoken, that he seemed to place it in relation to her last speech.
"But that Mademoiselle de Vionnet is to be married--I suppose you've heard of THAT."
For all, he then found, he need fear!
"Dear, yes; the gentleman was there: Monsieur de Montbron, whom Madame de
Vionnet presented to us." "And was he nice?"
Mamie bloomed and bridled with her best reception manner.
"Any man's nice when he's in love." It made Strether laugh.
"But is Monsieur de Montbron in love-- already--with YOU?"
"Oh that's not necessary--it's so much better he should be so with HER: which,
thank goodness, I lost no time in discovering for myself.
He's perfectly gone--and I couldn't have borne it for her if he hadn't been.
She's just too sweet." Strether hesitated.
"And through being in love too?"
On which with a smile that struck him as wonderful Mamie had a wonderful answer.
"She doesn't know if she is or not." It made him again laugh out.
"Oh but YOU do!"
She was willing to take it that way. "Oh yes, I know everything."
And as she sat there rubbing her polished hands and making the best of it--only
holding her elbows perhaps a little too much out--the momentary effect for Strether
was that every one else, in all their affair, seemed stupid.
"Know that poor little Jeanne doesn't know what's the matter with her?"
It was as near as they came to saying that she was probably in love with Chad; but it
was quite near enough for what Strether wanted; which was to be confirmed in his
certitude that, whether in love or not, she
appealed to something large and easy in the girl before him.
Mamie would be fat, too fat, at thirty; but she would always be the person who, at the
present sharp hour, had been disinterestedly tender.
"If I see a little more of her, as I hope I shall, I think she'll like me enough--for
she seemed to like me to-day--to want me to tell her."
"And SHALL you?"
"Perfectly. I shall tell her the matter with her is
that she wants only too much to do right. To do right for her, naturally," said
Mamie, "is to please."
"Her mother, do you mean?" "Her mother first."
Strether waited. "And then?"
"Well, 'then'--Mr. Newsome."
There was something really grand for him in the serenity of this reference.
"And last only Monsieur de Montbron?" "Last only"--she good-humouredly kept it
up.
Strether considered. "So that every one after all then will be
suited?"
She had one of her few hesitations, but it was a question only of a moment; and it was
her nearest approach to being explicit with him about what was between them.
"I think I can speak for myself.
I shall be."
It said indeed so much, told such a story of her being ready to help him, so
committed to him that truth, in short, for such use as he might make of it toward
those ends of his own with which, patiently
and trustfully, she had nothing to do--it so fully achieved all this that he appeared
to himself simply to meet it in its own spirit by the last frankness of admiration.
Admiration was of itself almost accusatory, but nothing less would serve to show her
how nearly he understood. He put out his hand for good-bye with a
"Splendid, splendid, splendid!"
And he left her, in her splendour, still waiting for little Bilham.