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BOOK EIGHTH 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 vet 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 sense 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 today 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 recognise 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 ***; 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 reinforce 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 *** 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.
Ah how much, as it was, for all her bridling brightness--which was merely
general and noticed nothing--WOULD they work together?
Strether knew he was unreasonable; he set it down to his being nervous: people
couldn't notice everything and speak of everything in a quarter of an hour.
Possibly, no doubt, also, he made too much of Chad's display.
Yet, none the less, when, at the end of five minutes, in the cab, Jim Pocock had
said nothing either--hadn't said, that is, what Strether wanted, though he had said
much else--it all suddenly bounced back to their being either stupid or wilful.
It was more probably on the whole the former; so that that would be the drawback
of the bridling brightness.
Yes, they would bridle and be bright; they would make the best of what was before
them, but their observation would fail; it would be beyond them; they simply wouldn't
understand.
Of what use would it be then that they had come?--if they weren't to be intelligent up
to THAT point: unless indeed he himself were utterly deluded and extravagant?
Was he, on this question of Chad's improvement, fantastic and away from the
truth?
Did he live in a false world, a world that had grown simply to suit him, and was his
present slight irritation--in the face now of Jim's silence in particular--but the
alarm of the vain thing menaced by the touch of the real?
Was this contribution of the real possibly the mission of the Pococks?--had they come
to make the work of observation, as HE had practised observation, crack and crumble,
and to reduce Chad to the plain terms in which honest minds could deal with him?
Had they come in short to be sane where Strether was destined to feel that he
himself had only been silly?
He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long when once he had
reflected that he would have been silly, in this case, with Maria Gostrey and little
Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet and little
Jeanne, with Lambert Strether, in fine, and above all with Chad Newsome himself.
Wouldn't it be found to have made more for reality to be silly with these persons than
sane with Sarah and Jim?
Jim in fact, he presently made up his mind, was individually out of it; Jim didn't
care; Jim hadn't come out either for Chad or for him; Jim in short left the moral
side to Sally and indeed simply availed
himself now, for the sense of recreation, of the fact that he left almost everything
to Sally.
He was nothing compared to Sally, and not so much by reason of Sally's temper and
will as by that of her more developed type and greater acquaintance with the world.
He quite frankly and serenely confessed, as he sat there with Strether, that he felt
his type hang far in the rear of his wife's and still further, if possible, in the rear
of his sister's.
Their types, he well knew, were recognised and acclaimed; whereas the most a leading
Woollett business-man could hope to achieve socially, and for that matter industrially,
was a certain freedom to play into this general glamour.
The impression he made on our friend was another of the things that marked our
friend's road.
It was a strange impression, especially as so soon produced; Strether had received it,
he judged, all in the twenty minutes; it struck him at least as but in a minor
degree the work of the long Woollett years.
Pocock was normally and consentingly though not quite wittingly out of the question.
It was despite his being normal; it was despite his being cheerful; it was despite
his being a leading Woollett business-man; and the determination of his fate left him
thus perfectly usual--as everything else
about it was clearly, to his sense, not less so.
He seemed to say that there was a whole side of life on which the perfectly usual
WAS for leading Woollett business-men to be out of the question.
He made no more of it than that, and Strether, so far as Jim was concerned,
desired to make no more.
Only Strether's imagination, as always, worked, and he asked himself if this side
of life were not somehow connected, for those who figured on it with the fact of
marriage.
Would HIS relation to it, had he married ten years before, have become now the same
as Pocock's? Might it even become the same should he
marry in a few months?
Should he ever know himself as much out of the question for Mrs. Newsome as Jim knew
himself--in a dim way--for Mrs. Jim?
To turn his eyes in that direction was to be personally reassured; he was different
from Pocock; he had affirmed himself differently and was held after all in
higher esteem.
What none the less came home to him, however, at this hour, was that the society
over there, that of which Sarah and Mamie-- and, in a more eminent way, Mrs. Newsome
herself--were specimens, was essentially a
society of women, and that poor Jim wasn't in it.
He himself Lambert Strether, WAS as yet in some degree--which was an odd situation for
a man; but it kept coming back to him in a whimsical way that he should perhaps find
his marriage had cost him his place.
This occasion indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a time of sensible
exclusion for Jim, who was in a state of manifest response to the charm of his
adventure.
Small and fat and constantly facetious, straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he
would have been practically indistinguishable hadn't his constant
preference for light-grey clothes, for
white hats, for very big cigars and very little stories, done what it could for his
identity.
There were signs in him, though none of them plaintive, of always paying for
others; and the principal one perhaps was just this failure of type.
It was with this that he paid, rather than with fatigue or waste; and also doubtless a
little with the effort of humour--never irrelevant to the conditions, to the
relations, with which he was acquainted.
He gurgled his joy as they rolled through the happy streets; he declared that his
trip was a regular windfall, and that he wasn't there, he was eager to remark, to
hang back from anything: he didn't know
quite what Sally had come for, but HE had come for a good time.
Strether indulged him even while wondering if what Sally wanted her brother to go back
for was to become like her husband.
He trusted that a good time was to be, out and out, the programme for all of them; and
he assented liberally to Jim's proposal that, disencumbered and irresponsible--his
things were in the omnibus with those of
the others--they should take a further turn round before going to the hotel.
It wasn't for HIM to tackle Chad--it was Sally's job; and as it would be like her,
he felt, to open fire on the spot, it wouldn't be amiss of them to hold off and
give her time.
Strether, on his side, only asked to give her time; so he jogged with his companion
along boulevards and avenues, trying to extract from meagre material some forecast
of his catastrophe.
He was quick enough to see that Jim Pocock declined judgement, had hovered quite round
the outer edge of discussion and anxiety, leaving all analysis of their question to
the ladies alone and now only feeling his way toward some small droll cynicism.
It broke out afresh, the cynicism--it had already shown a flicker--in a but slightly
deferred: "Well, hanged if I would if I were he!"
"You mean you wouldn't in Chad's place--?"
"Give up this to go back and boss the advertising!"
Poor Jim, with his arms folded and his little legs out in the open fiacre, drank
in the sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of their vista to the
other.
"Why I want to come right out and live here myself.
And I want to live while I AM here too.
I feel with YOU--oh you've been grand, old man, and I've twigged--that it ain't right
to worry Chad. I don't mean to persecute him; I couldn't
in conscience.
It's thanks to you at any rate that I'm here, and I'm sure I'm much obliged.
You're a lovely pair." There were things in this speech that
Strether let pass for the time.
"Don't you then think it important the advertising should be thoroughly taken in
hand? Chad WILL be, so far as capacity is
concerned," he went on, "the man to do it."
"Where did he get his capacity," Jim asked, "over here?"
"He didn't get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that over here he hasn't
inevitably lost it.
He has a natural turn for business, an extraordinary head.
He comes by that," Strether explained, "honestly enough.
He's in that respect his father's son, and also--for she's wonderful in her way too--
his mother's.
He has other tastes and other tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife are quite
right about his having that. He's very remarkable."
"Well, I guess he is!"
Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. "But if you've believed so in his making us
hum, why have you so prolonged the discussion?
Don't you know we've been quite anxious about you?"
These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether saw he must none
the less make a choice and take a line.
"Because, you see, I've greatly liked it. I've liked my Paris, I dare say I've liked
it too much." "Oh you old wretch!"
Jim gaily exclaimed.
"But nothing's concluded," Strether went on.
"The case is more complex than it looks from Woollett."
"Oh well, it looks bad enough from Woollett!"
Jim declared. "Even after all I've written?"
Jim bethought himself.
"Isn't it what you've written that has made Mrs. Newsome pack us off?
That at least and Chad's not turning up?" Strether made a reflexion of his own.
"I see.
That she should do something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore of
course come out to act." "Oh yes," Jim concurred--"to act.
But Sally comes out to act, you know," he lucidly added, "every time she leaves the
house. She never comes out but she DOES act.
She's acting moreover now for her mother, and that fixes the scale."
Then he wound up, opening all his senses to it, with a renewed embrace of pleasant
Paris.
"We haven't all the same at Woollett got anything like this."
Strether continued to consider.
"I'm bound to say for you all that you strike me as having arrived in a very mild
and reasonable frame of mind. You don't show your claws.
I felt just now in Mrs. Pocock no symptom of that.
She isn't fierce," he went on. "I'm such a nervous idiot that I thought
she might be."
"Oh don't you know her well enough," Pocock asked, "to have noticed that she never
gives herself away, any more than her mother ever does?
They ain't fierce, either of 'em; they let you come quite close.
They wear their fur the smooth side out-- the warm side in.
Do you know what they are?"
Jim pursued as he looked about him, giving the question, as Strether felt, but half
his care--"do you know what they are? They're about as intense as they can live."
"Yes"--and Strether's concurrence had a positive precipitation; "they're about as
intense as they can live."
"They don't lash about and shake the cage," said Jim, who seemed pleased with his
analogy; "and it's at feeding-time that they're quietest.
But they always get there."
"They do indeed--they always get there!" Strether replied with a laugh that
justified his confession of nervousness.
He disliked to be talking sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he could have talked
insincerely.
But there was something he wanted to know, a need created in him by her recent
intermission, by his having given from the first so much, as now more than ever
appeared to him, and got so little.
It was as if a *** truth in his companion's metaphor had rolled over him
with a rush.
She HAD been quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her, out of the
big bowl of all his recent free communication, his vividness and
pleasantness, his ingenuity and even his
eloquence, while the current of her response had steadily run thin.
Jim meanwhile however, it was true, slipped characteristically into shallowness from
the moment he ceased to speak out of the experience of a husband.
"But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before her.
If he doesn't work that for all it's worth- -!"
He sighed with contingent pity at his brother-in-law's possible want of resource.
"He has worked it on YOU, pretty well, eh?" and he asked the next moment if there were
anything new at the Varieties, which he pronounced in the American manner.
They talked about the Varieties--Strether confessing to a knowledge which produced
again on Pocock's part a play of innuendo as vague as a nursery-rhyme, yet as
aggressive as an elbow in his side; and
they finished their drive under the protection of easy themes.
Strether waited to the end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim had seen Chad
as different; and he could scarce have explained the discouragement he drew from
the absence of this testimony.
It was what he had taken his own stand on, so far as he had taken a stand; and if they
were all only going to see nothing he had only wasted his time.
He gave his friend till the very last moment, till they had come into sight of
the hotel; and when poor Pocock only continued cheerful and envious and funny he
fairly grew to dislike him, to feel him extravagantly common.
If they were ALL going to see nothing!-- Strether knew, as this came back to him,
that he was also letting Pocock represent for him what Mrs. Newsome wouldn't see.
He went on disliking, in the light of Jim's commonness, to talk to him about that lady;
yet just before the cab pulled up he knew the extent of his desire for the real word
from Woollett.
"Has Mrs. Newsome at all given way--?" "'Given way'?"--Jim echoed it with the
practical derision of his sense of a long past.
"Under the strain, I mean, of hope deferred, of disappointment repeated and
thereby intensified." "Oh is she prostrate, you mean?"--he had
his categories in hand.
"Why yes, she's prostrate--just as Sally is.
But they're never so lively, you know, as when they're prostrate."
"Ah Sarah's prostrate?"
Strether vaguely murmured. "It's when they're prostrate that they most
sit up." "And Mrs. Newsome's sitting up?"
"All night, my boy--for YOU!"
And Jim fetched him, with a vulgar little guffaw, a thrust that gave relief to the
picture. But he had got what he wanted.
He felt on the spot that this WAS the real word from Woollett.
"So don't you go home!"
Jim added while he alighted and while his friend, letting him profusely pay the
cabman, sat on in a momentary muse. Strether wondered if that were the real
word too.