The Ambassadors (8 page)

He really appeared at present to insist on that by just perching there with the gas in his eyes. This of itself somehow conveyed the
futility of single rectifications in a multiform failure. He had a large handsome head and a large sallow seamed face—a striking significant physiognomic total, the upper range of which, the great political brow, the thick loose hair, the dark fuliginous eyes, recalled even to a generation whose standard had dreadfully deviated the impressive image, familiar by engravings and busts, of some great national worthy of the earlier part of the mid-century. He was of the personal type—and it was an element in the power and promise that in their early time Strether had found in him—of the American statesman, the statesman trained in “Congressional halls,” of an elder day. The legend had been in later years that as the lower part of his face, which was weak, and slightly crooked, spoiled the likeness, this was the real reason for the growth of his beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those not in the secret. He shook his mane; he fixed, with his admirable eyes, his auditor or his observer; he wore no glasses and had a way, partly formidable, yet also partly encouraging, as from a representative to a constituent, of looking very hard at those who approached him. He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you enter. Strether, who hadn’t seen him for so long an interval, apprehended him now with a freshness of taste, and had perhaps never done him such ideal justice. The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than they need have been for the career; but that only meant, after all, that the career was itself expressive. What it expressed at midnight in the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject of it had, at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight in time, a general nervous collapse. But this very proof of the full life, as the full life was understood at Milrose, would have made to Strether’s imagination an element in which Waymarsh could have floated easily had he only consented to float. Alas nothing so little resembled floating as the rigour with which, on the edge of his bed, he hugged his posture of prolonged
impermanence. It suggested to his comrade something that always, when kept up, worried him—a person established in a railway-coach with a forward inclination. It represented the angle at which poor Waymarsh was to sit through the ordeal of Europe.

Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions, the absorption and embarrassment of each, they had not, at home, during years before this sudden brief and almost bewildering reign of comparative ease, found so much as a day for a meeting; a fact that was in some degree an explanation of the sharpness with which most of his friend’s features stood out to Strether. Those he had lost sight of since the early time came back to him; others that it was never possible to forget struck him now as sitting, clustered and expectant, like a somewhat defiant family-group, on the door-step of their residence. The room was narrow for its length, and the occupant of the bed thrust so far a pair of slippered feet that the visitor had almost to step over them in his recurrent rebounds from his chair to fidget back and forth. There were marks the friends made on things to talk about, and on things not to, and one of the latter in particular fell like the tap of chalk on the blackboard. Married at thirty, Waymarsh had not lived with his wife for fifteen years, and it came up vividly between them in the glare of the gas that Strether wasn’t to ask about her. He knew they were still separate and that she lived at hotels, travelled in Europe, painted her face and wrote her husband abusive letters, of not one of which, to a certainty, that sufferer spared himself the perusal; but he respected without difficulty the cold twilight that had settled on this side of his companion’s life. It was a province in which mystery reigned and as to which Waymarsh had never spoken the informing word. Strether, who wanted to do him the highest justice wherever he
could
do it, singularly admired him for the dignity of this reserve, and even counted it as one of the grounds—grounds all handled and numbered—for
ranking him, in the range of their acquaintance, as a success. He
was
a success. Waymarsh, in spite of overwork, or prostration, of sensible shrinkage, of his wife’s letters and of his not liking Europe. Strether would have reckoned his own career less futile had he been able to put into it anything so handsome as so much fine silence. One might one’s self easily have left Mrs. Waymarsh; and one would assuredly have paid one’s tribute to the ideal in covering with that attitude the derision of having been left by her. Her husband had held his tongue and had made a large income; and these were in especial the achievements as to which Strether envied him. Our friend had had indeed on his side too a subject for silence, which he fully appreciated; but it was a matter of a different sort, and the figure of the income he had arrived at had never been high enough to look any one in the face.

“I don’t know as I quite see what you require it for. You don’t appear sick to speak of.” It was of Europe Waymarsh thus finally spoke.

“Well,” said Strether, who fell as much as possible into step, “I guess I don’t
feel
sick now that I’ve started. But I had pretty well run down before I did start.”

Waymarsh raised his melancholy look. “Ain’t you about up to your usual average?”

It was not quite pointedly sceptical, but it seemed somehow a plea for the purest veracity, and it thereby affected our friend as the very voice of Milrose. He had long since made a mental distinction—though never in truth daring to betray it—between the voice of Milrose and the voice even of Woollett. It was the former, he felt, that was most in the real tradition. There had been occasions in his past when the sound of it had reduced him to temporary confusion, and the present, for some reason, suddenly became such another. It was nevertheless no light matter that the very effect of his confusion should be to make him again
prevaricate. “That description hardly does justice to a man to whom it has done such a lot of good to see
you
.”

Waymarsh fixed on his washing-stand the silent detached stare with which Milrose in person, as it were, might have marked the unexpectedness of a compliment from Woollett; and Strether, for his part, felt once more like Woollett in person. “I mean,” his friend presently continued, “that your appearance isn’t as bad as I’ve seen it: it compares favourably with what it was when I last noticed it.” On this appearance Waymarsh’s eyes yet failed to rest; it was almost as if they obeyed an instinct of propriety, and the effect was still stronger when, always considering the basin and jug, he added: “You’ve filled out some since then.”

“I’m afraid I have,” Strether laughed: “one does fill out some with all one takes in, and I’ve taken in, I dare say, more than I’ve natural room for. I was dog-tired when I sailed.” It had the oddest sound of cheerfulness.

“
I
was dog-tired,” his companion returned, “when I arrived, and it’s this wild hunt for rest that takes all the life out of me. The fact is, Strether—and it’s a comfort to have you here at last to say it to; though I don’t know, after all, that I’ve really waited; I’ve told it to people I’ve met in the cars—the fact is, such a country as this ain’t my
kind
of country anyway. There ain’t a country I’ve seen over here that
does
seem my kind. Oh I don’t say but what there are plenty of pretty places and remarkable old things; but the trouble is that I don’t seem to feel anywhere in tune. That’s one of the reasons why I suppose I’ve gained so little. I haven’t had the first sign of that lift I was led to expect.” With this he broke out more earnestly. “Look here—I want to go back.”

His eyes were all attached to Strether’s now, for he was one of the men who fully face you when they talk of themselves. This enabled his friend to look at him hard and immediately to appear to the highest advantage in his eyes by doing so. “That’s a genial
thing to say to a fellow who has come out on purpose to meet you!”

Nothing could have been finer, on this, than Waymarsh’s sombre glow. “
Have
you come out on purpose?”

“Well—very largely.”

“I thought from the way you wrote there was something back of it.”

Strether hesitated. “Back of my desire to be with you?”

“Back of your prostration.”

Strether, with a smile made more dim by a certain consciousness, shook his head. “There are all the causes of it!”

“And no particular cause that seemed most to drive you?”

Our friend could at last conscientiously answer. “Yes. One. There
is
a matter that has had much to do with my coming out.”

Waymarsh waited a little. “Too private to mention?”

“No, not too private—for
you
. Only rather complicated.”

“Well,” said Waymarsh, who had waited again, “I
may
lose my mind over here, but I don’t know as I’ve done so yet.”

“Oh you shall have the whole thing. But not tonight.”

Waymarsh seemed to sit stiffer and to hold his elbows tighter. “Why not—if I can’t sleep?”

“Because, my dear man, I
can
!”

“Then where’s your prostration?”

“Just in that—that I can put in eight hours.” And Strether brought it out that if Waymarsh didn’t “gain” it was because he didn’t go to bed: the result of which was, in its order, that, to do the latter justice, he permitted his friend to insist on his really getting settled. Strether, with a kind coercive hand for it, assisted him to this consummation, and again found his own part in their relation auspiciously enlarged by the smaller touches of lowering the lamp and seeing to a sufficiency of blanket. It somehow ministered for him to indulgence to feel Waymarsh, who looked unnaturally big
and black in bed, as much tucked in as a patient in a hospital and, with his covering up to his chin, as much simplified by it. He hovered in vague pity, to be brief, while his companion challenged him out of the bedclothes. “Is she really after you? Is that what’s behind?”

Strether felt an uneasiness at the direction taken by his companion’s insight, but he played a little at uncertainty. “Behind my coming out?”

“Behind your prostration or whatever. It’s generally felt, you know, that she follows you up pretty close.”

Strether’s candour was never very far off. “Oh it has occurred to you that I’m literally running away from Mrs. Newsome?”

“Well, I haven’t
known
but what you are. You’re a very attractive man, Strether. You’ve seen for yourself,” said Waymarsh, “what that lady downstairs makes of it. Unless indeed,” he rambled on with an effect between the ironic and the anxious, “it’s you who are after
her
. Is Mrs. Newsome
over
here?” He spoke as with a droll dread of her.

It made his friend—though rather dimly—smile. “Dear no; she’s safe, thank goodness—as I think I more and more feel—at home. She thought of coming, but she gave it up. I’ve come in a manner instead of her; and come to that extent—for you’re right in your inference—on her business. So you see there
is
plenty of connexion.”

Waymarsh continued to see at least all there was. “Involving accordingly the particular one I’ve referred to?”

Strether took another turn about the room, giving a twitch to his companion’s blanket and finally gaining the door. His feeling was that of a nurse who had earned personal rest by having made everything straight. “Involving more things than I can think of breaking ground on now. But don’t be afraid—you shall have them from me: you’ll probably find yourself having quite as much
of them as you can do with. I shall—if we keep together—very much depend on your impression of some of them.”

Waymarsh’s acknowledgement of this tribute was characteristically indirect. “You mean to say you don’t believe we
will
keep together?”

“I only glance at the danger,” Strether paternally said, “because when I hear you wail to go back I seem to see you open up such possibilities of folly.”

Waymarsh took it—silent a little—like a large snubbed child. “What are you going to do with me?”

It was the very question Strether himself had put to Miss Gostrey, and he wondered if he had sounded like that. But
he
at least could be more definite. “I’m going to take you right down to London.”

“Oh I’ve
been
down to London!” Waymarsh more softly moaned. “I’ve no use, Strether, for anything down there.”

“Well,” said Strether, good-humouredly, “I guess you’ve some use for me.”

“So I’ve got to go?”

“Oh you’ve got to go further yet.”

“Well,” Waymarsh sighed, “do your damnedest! Only you
will
tell me before you lead me on all the way—?”

Our friend had again so lost himself, both for amusement and for contrition, in the wonder of whether he had made, in his own challenge that afternoon, such another figure, that he for an instant missed the thread. “Tell you—?”

“Why what you’ve got on hand.”

Strether hesitated. “Why it’s such a matter as that even if I positively wanted I shouldn’t be able to keep it from you.”

Waymarsh gloomily gazed. “What does that mean then but that your trip is just
for
her?”

“For Mrs. Newsome? Oh it certainly is, as I say. Very much.”

“Then why do you also say it’s for me?”

Strether, in impatience, violently played with his latch. “It’s simple enough. It’s for both of you.”

Waymarsh at last turned over with a groan. “Well,
I
won’t marry you!”

“Neither, when it comes to that—!” But the visitor had already laughed and escaped.

He had told Miss Gostrey he should probably take, for departure with Waymarsh, some afternoon train, and it thereupon in the morning appeared that this lady had made her own plan for an earlier one. She had breakfasted when Strether came into the coffee-room; but, Waymarsh not having yet emerged, he was in time to recall her to the terms of their understanding and to pronounce her discretion overdone. She was surely not to break away at the very moment she had created a want. He had met her as she rose from her little table in a window, where, with the morning papers beside her, she reminded him, as he let her know, of Major Pendennis breakfasting at his club—a compliment of which she professed a deep appreciation; and he detained her as pleadingly as if he had already—and notably under pressure of the visions of the night—learned to be unable to do without her. She must teach him at all events, before she went, to order breakfast as breakfast was ordered in Europe, and she must especially sustain him in the problem of ordering for Waymarsh. The latter had laid
upon his friend, by desperate sounds through the door of his room, dreadful divined responsibilities in respect to beefsteak and oranges—responsibilities which Miss Gostrey took over with an alertness of action that matched her quick intelligence. She had before this weaned the expatriated from traditions compared with which the matutinal beefsteak was but the creature of an hour, and it was not for her, with some of her memories, to falter in the path; though she freely enough declared, on reflexion, that there was always in such cases a choice of opposed policies. “There are times when to give them their head, you know—!”