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BOOK THIRD 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 recognised 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 *** 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 any one 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 indifference 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.
He liked the ingenuous compatriots--for two or three others soon gathered; he liked the
delicate daubs and the free discriminations--involving references
indeed, involving enthusiasms and
execrations that made him, as they said, sit up; he liked above all the legend of
good-humoured poverty, of mutual accommodation fairly raised to the
romantic, that he soon read into the scene.
The ingenuous compatriots showed a candour, he thought, surpassing even the candour of
Woollett; they were red-haired and long- legged, they were quaint and *** and dear
and droll; they made the place resound with
the vernacular, which he had never known so marked as when figuring for the chosen
language, he must suppose, of contemporary art.
They twanged with a vengeance the aesthetic lyre--they drew from it wonderful airs.
This aspect of their life had an admirable innocence; and he looked on occasion at
Maria Gostrey to see to what extent that element reached her.
She gave him however for the hour, as she had given him the previous day, no further
sign than to show how she dealt with boys; meeting them with the air of old Parisian
practice that she had for every one, for everything, in turn.
Wonderful about the delicate daubs, masterful about the way to make tea,
trustful about the legs of chairs and familiarly reminiscent of those, in the
other time, the named, the numbered or the
caricatured, who had flourished or failed, disappeared or arrived, she had accepted
with the best grace her second course of little Bilham, and had said to Strether,
the previous afternoon on his leaving them,
that, since her impression was to be renewed, she would reserve judgement till
after the new evidence. The new evidence was to come, as it proved,
in a day or two.
He soon had from Maria a message to the effect that an excellent box at the
Francais had been lent her for the following night; it seeming on such
occasions not the least of her merits that she was subject to such approaches.
The sense of how she was always paying for something in advance was equalled on
Strether's part only by the sense of how she was always being paid; all of which
made for his consciousness, in the larger
air, of a lively bustling traffic, the exchange of such values as were not for him
to handle.
She hated, he knew, at the French play, anything but a box--just as she hated at
the English anything but a stall; and a box was what he was already in this phase
girding himself to press upon her.
But she had for that matter her community with little Bilham: she too always, on the
great issues, showed as having known in time.
It made her constantly beforehand with him and gave him mainly the chance to ask
himself how on the day of their settlement their account would stand.
He endeavoured even now to keep it a little straight by arranging that if he accepted
her invitation she should dine with him first; but the upshot of this scruple was
that at eight o'clock on the morrow he
awaited her with Waymarsh under the pillared portico.
She hadn't dined with him, and it was characteristic of their relation that she
had made him embrace her refusal without in the least understanding it.
She ever caused her rearrangements to affect him as her tenderest touches.
It was on that principle for instance that, giving him the opportunity to be amiable
again to little Bilham, she had suggested his offering the young man a seat in their
box.
Strether had dispatched for this purpose a small blue missive to the Boulevard
Malesherbes, but up to the moment of their passing into the theatre he had received no
response to his message.
He held, however, even after they had been for some time conveniently seated, that
their friend, who knew his way about, would come in at his own right moment.
His temporary absence moreover seemed, as never yet, to make the right moment for
Miss Gostrey.
Strether had been waiting till tonight to get back from her in some mirrored form her
impressions and conclusions.
She had elected, as they said, to see little Bilham once; but now she had seen
him twice and had nevertheless not said more than a word.
Waymarsh meanwhile sat opposite him with their hostess between; and Miss Gostrey
spoke of herself as an instructor of youth introducing her little charges to a work
that was one of the glories of literature.
The glory was happily unobjectionable, and the little charges were candid; for herself
she had travelled that road and she merely waited on their innocence.
But she referred in due time to their absent friend, whom it was clear they
should have to give up.
"He either won't have got your note," she said, "or you won't have got his: he has
had some kind of hindrance, and, of course, for that matter, you know, a man never
writes about coming to a box."
She spoke as if, with her look, it might have been Waymarsh who had written to the
youth, and the latter's face showed a mixture of austerity and anguish.
She went on however as if to meet this.
"He's far and away, you know, the best of them."
"The best of whom, ma'am?"
"Why of all the long procession--the boys, the girls, or the old men and old women as
they sometimes really are; the hope, as one may say, of our country.
They've all passed, year after year; but there has been no one in particular I've
ever wanted to stop.
I feel--don't YOU?--that I want to stop little Bilham; he's so exactly right as he
is." She continued to talk to Waymarsh.
"He's too delightful.
If he'll only not spoil it! But they always WILL; they always do; they
always have."
"I don't think Waymarsh knows," Strether said after a moment, "quite what it's open
to Bilham to spoil."
"It can't be a good American," Waymarsh lucidly enough replied; "for it didn't
strike me the young man had developed much in THAT shape."
"Ah," Miss Gostrey sighed, "the name of the good American is as easily given as taken
away! What IS it, to begin with, to BE one, and
what's the extraordinary hurry?
Surely nothing that's so pressing was ever so little defined.
It's such an order, really, that before we cook you the dish we must at least have
your receipt.
Besides the poor chicks have time! What I've seen so often spoiled," she
pursued, "is the happy attitude itself, the state of faith and--what shall I call it?--
the sense of beauty.
You're right about him"--she now took in Strether; "little Bilham has them to a
charm, we must keep little Bilham along." Then she was all again for Waymarsh.
"The others have all wanted so dreadfully to do something, and they've gone and done
it in too many cases indeed. It leaves them never the same afterwards;
the charm's always somehow broken.
Now HE, I think, you know, really won't. He won't do the least dreadful little
thing. We shall continue to enjoy him just as he
No--he's quite beautiful. He sees everything.
He isn't a bit ashamed. He has every scrap of the courage of it
that one could ask.
Only think what he MIGHT do. One wants really--for fear of some
accident--to keep him in view. At this very moment perhaps what mayn't he
be up to?
I've had my disappointments--the poor things are never really safe; or only at
least when you have them under your eye. One can never completely trust them.
One's uneasy, and I think that's why I most miss him now."
She had wound up with a laugh of enjoyment over her embroidery of her idea--an
enjoyment that her face communicated to Strether, who almost wished none the less
at this moment that she would let poor Waymarsh alone.
HE knew more or less what she meant; but the fact wasn't a reason for her not
pretending to Waymarsh that he didn't.
It was craven of him perhaps, but he would, for the high amenity of the occasion, have
liked Waymarsh not to be so sure of his wit.
Her recognition of it gave him away and, before she had done with him or with that
article, would give him worse. What was he, all the same, to do?
He looked across the box at his friend; their eyes met; something *** and stiff,
something that bore on the situation but that it was better not to touch, passed in
silence between them.
Well, the effect of it for Strether was an abrupt reaction, a final impatience of his
own tendency to temporise. Where was that taking him anyway?
It was one of the quiet instants that sometimes settle more matters than the
outbreaks dear to the historic muse.
The only qualification of the quietness was the synthetic "Oh hang it!" into which
Strether's share of the silence soundlessly flowered.
It represented, this mute ***, a final impulse to burn his ships.
These ships, to the historic muse, may seem of course mere cockles, but when he
presently spoke to Miss Gostrey it was with the sense at least of applying the torch.
"Is it then a conspiracy?"
"Between the two young men? Well, I don't pretend to be a seer or a
prophetess," she presently replied; "but if I'm simply a woman of sense he's working
for you to-night.
I don't quite know how--but it's in my bones."
And she looked at him at last as if, little material as she yet gave him, he'd really
understand.
"For an opinion THAT'S my opinion. He makes you out too well not to."
"Not to work for me to-night?" Strether wondered.
"Then I hope he isn't doing anything very bad."
"They've got you," she portentously answered.
"Do you mean he IS--?"
"They've got you," she merely repeated. Though she disclaimed the prophetic vision
she was at this instant the nearest approach he had ever met to the priestess
of the oracle.
The light was in her eyes. "You must face it now."
He faced it on the spot. "They HAD arranged--?"
"Every move in the game.
And they've been arranging ever since. He has had every day his little telegram
from Cannes." It made Strether open his eyes.
"Do you KNOW that?"
"I do better. I see it.
This was, before I met him, what I wondered whether I WAS to see.
But as soon as I met him I ceased to wonder, and our second meeting made me
sure. I took him all in.
He was acting--he is still--on his daily instructions."
"So that Chad has done the whole thing?" "Oh no--not the whole.
WE'VE done some of it.
You and I and 'Europe.'" "Europe--yes," Strether mused.
"Dear old Paris," she seemed to explain. But there was more, and, with one of her
turns, she risked it.
"And dear old Waymarsh. You," she declared, "have been a good bit
of it." He sat massive.
"A good bit of what, ma'am?"
"Why of the wonderful consciousness of our friend here.
You've helped too in your way to float him to where he is."
"And where the devil IS he?"
She passed it on with a laugh. "Where the devil, Strether, are you?"
He spoke as if he had just been thinking it out.
"Well, quite already in Chad's hands, it would seem."
And he had had with this another thought. "Will that be--just all through Bilham--the
way he's going to work it?
It would be, for him, you know, an idea. And Chad with an idea--!"
"Well?" she asked while the image held him. "Well, is Chad--what shall I say?--
monstrous?"
"Oh as much as you like! But the idea you speak of," she said,
"won't have been his best. He'll have a better.
It won't be all through little Bilham that he'll work it."
This already sounded almost like a hope destroyed.
"Through whom else then?"
"That's what we shall see!"
But quite as she spoke she turned, and Strether turned; for the door of the box
had opened, with the click of the ouvreuse, from the lobby, and a gentleman, a stranger
to them, had come in with a quick step.
The door closed behind him, and, though their faces showed him his mistake, his
air, which was striking, was all good confidence.
The curtain had just again arisen, and, in the hush of the general attention,
Strether's challenge was tacit, as was also the greeting, with a quickly deprecating
hand and smile, of the unannounced visitor.
He discreetly signed that he would wait, would stand, and these things and his face,
one look from which she had caught, had suddenly worked for Miss Gostrey.
She fitted to them all an answer for Strether's last question.
The solid stranger was simply the answer-- as she now, turning to her friend,
indicated.
She brought it straight out for him--it presented the intruder.
"Why, through this gentleman!"
The gentleman indeed, at the same time, though sounding for Strether a very short
name, did practically as much to explain.
Strether gasped the name back--then only had he seen Miss Gostrey had said more than
she knew. They were in presence of Chad himself.
Our friend was to go over it afterwards again and again--he was going over it much
of the time that they were together, and they were together constantly for three or
four days: the note had been so strongly
struck during that first half-hour that everything happening since was
comparatively a minor development.
The fact was that his perception of the young man's identity--so absolutely checked
for a minute--had been quite one of the sensations that count in life; he certainly
had never known one that had acted, as he
might have said, with more of a crowded rush.
And the rush though both vague and multitudinous, had lasted a long time,
protected, as it were, yet at the same time aggravated, by the circumstance of its
coinciding with a stretch of decorous silence.
They couldn't talk without disturbing the spectators in the part of the balcony just
below them; and it, for that matter, came to Strether--being a thing of the sort that
did come to him--that these were the
accidents of a high civilisation; the imposed tribute to propriety, the frequent
exposure to conditions, usually brilliant, in which relief has to await its time.
Relief was never quite near at hand for kings, queens, comedians and other such
people, and though you might be yourself not exactly one of those, you could yet, in
leading the life of high pressure, guess a little how they sometimes felt.
It was truly the life of high pressure that Strether had seemed to feel himself lead
while he sat there, close to Chad, during the long tension of the act.
He was in presence of a fact that occupied his whole mind, that occupied for the half-
hour his senses themselves all together; but he couldn't without inconvenience show
anything--which moreover might count really as luck.
What he might have shown, had he shown at all, was exactly the kind of emotion--the
emotion of bewilderment--that he had proposed to himself from the first,
whatever should occur, to show least.
The phenomenon that had suddenly sat down there with him was a phenomenon of change
so complete that his imagination, which had worked so beforehand, felt itself, in the
connexion, without margin or allowance.
It had faced every contingency but that Chad should not BE Chad, and this was what
it now had to face with a mere strained smile and an uncomfortable flush.
He asked himself if, by any chance, before he should have in some way to commit
himself, he might feel his mind settled to the new vision, might habituate it, so to
speak, to the remarkable truth.
But oh it was too remarkable, the truth; for what could be more remarkable than this
sharp rupture of an identity? You could deal with a man as himself--you
couldn't deal with him as somebody else.
It was a small source of peace moreover to be reduced to wondering how little he might
know in such an event what a sum he was setting you.
He couldn't absolutely not know, for you couldn't absolutely not let him.
It was a CASE then simply, a strong case, as people nowadays called such things,' a
case of transformation unsurpassed, and the hope was but in the general law that strong
cases were liable to control from without.
Perhaps he, Strether himself, was the only person after all aware of it.
Even Miss Gostrey, with all her science, wouldn't be, would she?--and he had never
seen any one less aware of anything than Waymarsh as he glowered at Chad.
The social sightlessness of his old friend's survey marked for him afresh, and
almost in an humiliating way, the inevitable limits of direct aid from this
source.
He was not certain, however, of not drawing a shade of compensation from the privilege,
as yet untasted, of knowing more about something in particular than Miss Gostrey
did.
His situation too was a case, for that matter, and he was now so interested, quite
so privately agog, about it, that he had already an eye to the fun it would be to
open up to her afterwards.
He derived during his half-hour no assistance from her, and just this fact of
her not meeting his eyes played a little, it must be confessed, into his predicament.
He had introduced Chad, in the first minutes, under his breath, and there was
never the primness in her of the person unacquainted; but she had none the less
betrayed at first no vision but of the
stage, where she occasionally found a pretext for an appreciative moment that she
invited Waymarsh to share.
The latter's faculty of participation had never had, all round, such an assault to
meet; the pressure on him being the sharper for this chosen attitude in her, as
Strether judged it, of isolating, for their natural intercourse, Chad and himself.
This intercourse was meanwhile restricted to a frank friendly look from the young
man, something markedly like a smile, but falling far short of a grin, and to the
vivacity of Strether's private speculation
as to whether HE carried himself like a fool.
He didn't quite see how he could so feel as one without somehow showing as one.
The worst of that question moreover was that he knew it as a symptom the sense of
which annoyed him.
"If I'm going to be odiously conscious of how I may strike the fellow," he reflected,
"it was so little what I came out for that I may as well stop before I begin."
This sage consideration too, distinctly, seemed to leave untouched the fact that he
WAS going to be conscious. He was conscious of everything but of what
would have served him.
He was to know afterwards, in the watches of the night, that nothing would have been
more open to him than after a minute or two to propose to Chad to seek with him the
refuge of the lobby.
He hadn't only not proposed it, but had lacked even the presence of mind to see it
as possible.
He had stuck there like a schoolboy wishing not to miss a minute of the show; though
for that portion of the show then presented he hadn't had an instant's real attention.
He couldn't when the curtain fell have given the slightest account of what had
happened.
He had therefore, further, not at that moment acknowledged the amenity added by
this acceptance of his awkwardness to Chad's general patience.
Hadn't he none the less known at the very time--known it stupidly and without
reaction--that the boy was accepting something?
He was modestly benevolent, the boy--that was at least what he had been capable of
the superiority of making out his chance to be; and one had one's self literally not
had the gumption to get in ahead of him.
If we should go into all that occupied our friend in the watches of the night we
should have to mend our pen; but an instance or two may mark for us the
vividness with which he could remember.
He remembered the two absurdities that, if his presence of mind HAD failed, were the
things that had had most to do with it.
He had never in his life seen a young man come into a box at ten o'clock at night,
and would, if challenged on the question in advance, have scarce been ready to
pronounce as to different ways of doing so.
But it was in spite of this definite to him that Chad had had a way that was wonderful:
a fact carrying with it an implication that, as one might imagine it, he knew, he
had learned, how.
Here already then were abounding results; he had on the spot and without the least
trouble of intention taught Strether that even in so small a thing as that there were
different ways.
He had done in the same line still more than this; had by a mere shake or two of
the head made his old friend observe that the change in him was perhaps more than
anything else, for the eye, a matter of the
marked streaks of grey, extraordinary at his age, in his thick black hair; as well
as that this new feature was curiously becoming to him, did something for him, as
characterisation, also even--of all things
in the world--as refinement, that had been a good deal wanted.
Strether felt, however, he would have had to confess, that it wouldn't have been easy
just now, on this and other counts, in the presence of what had been supplied, to be
quite clear as to what had been missed.
A reflexion a candid critic might have made of old, for instance, was that it would
have been happier for the son to look more like the mother; but this was a reflexion
that at present would never occur.
The ground had quite fallen away from it, yet no resemblance whatever to the mother
had supervened.
It would have been hard for a young man's face and air to disconnect themselves more
completely than Chad's at this juncture from any discerned, from any imaginable
aspect of a New England female parent.
That of course was no more than had been on the cards; but it produced in Strether none
the less one of those frequent phenomena of mental reference with which all judgement
in him was actually beset.
Again and again as the days passed he had had a sense of the pertinence of
communicating quickly with Woollett-- communicating with a quickness with which
telegraphy alone would rhyme; the fruit
really of a fine fancy in him for keeping things straight, for the happy forestalment
of error.
No one could explain better when needful, nor put more conscience into an account or
a report; which burden of conscience is perhaps exactly the reason why his heart
always sank when the clouds of explanation gathered.
His highest ingenuity was in keeping the sky of life clear of them.
Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was in
fact--for any one else--explained. One went through the vain motions, but it
was mostly a waste of life.
A personal relation was a relation only so long as people either perfectly understood
or, better still, didn't care if they didn't.
From the moment they cared if they didn't it was living by the sweat of one's brow;
and the sweat of one's brow was just what one might buy one's self off from by
keeping the ground free of the wild weed of delusion.
It easily grew too fast, and the Atlantic cable now alone could race with it.
That agency would each day have testified for him to something that was not what
Woollett had argued.
He was not at this moment absolutely sure that the effect of the morrow's--or rather
of the night's--appreciation of the crisis wouldn't be to determine some brief
missive.
"Have at last seen him, but oh dear!"--some temporary relief of that sort seemed to
hover before him. It hovered somehow as preparing them all--
yet preparing them for what?
If he might do so more luminously and cheaply he would tick out in four words:
"Awfully old--grey hair."
To this particular item in Chad's appearance he constantly, during their mute
half-hour, reverted; as if so very much more than he could have said had been
involved in it.
The most he could have said would have been: "If he's going to make me feel
young--!" which indeed, however, carried with it quite enough.
If Strether was to feel young, that is, it would be because Chad was to feel old; and
an aged and hoary sinner had been no part of the scheme.
The question of Chadwick's true time of life was, doubtless, what came up quickest
after the adjournment of the two, when the play was over, to a cafe in the Avenue de
l'Opera.
Miss Gostrey had in due course been perfect for such a step; she had known exactly what
they wanted--to go straight somewhere and talk; and Strether had even felt she had
known what he wished to say and that he was arranging immediately to begin.
She hadn't pretended this, as she HAD pretended on the other hand, to have
divined Waymarsh's wish to extend to her an independent protection homeward; but
Strether nevertheless found how, after he
had Chad opposite to him at a small table in the brilliant halls that his companion
straightway selected, sharply and easily discriminated from others, it was quite, to
his mind, as if she heard him speak; as if,
sitting up, a mile away, in the little apartment he knew, she would listen hard
enough to catch.
He found too that he liked that idea, and he wished that, by the same token, Mrs.
Newsome might have caught as well.
For what had above all been determined in him as a necessity of the first order was
not to lose another hour, nor a fraction of one; was to advance, to overwhelm, with a
rush.
This was how he would anticipate--by a night-attack, as might be--any forced
maturity that a crammed consciousness of Paris was likely to take upon itself to
assert on behalf of the boy.
He knew to the full, on what he had just extracted from Miss Gostrey, Chad's marks
of alertness; but they were a reason the more for not dawdling.
If he was himself moreover to be treated as young he wouldn't at all events be so
treated before he should have struck out at least once.
His arms might be pinioned afterwards, but it would have been left on record that he
was fifty.
The importance of this he had indeed begun to feel before they left the theatre; it
had become a wild unrest, urging him to seize his chance.
He could scarcely wait for it as they went; he was on the verge of the indecency of
bringing up the question in the street; he fairly caught himself going on--so he
afterwards invidiously named it--as if
there would be for him no second chance should the present be lost.
Not till, on the purple divan before the perfunctory bock, he had brought out the
words themselves, was he sure, for that matter, that the present would be saved.