The Ambassadors (11 page)

This morning there WERE letters—letters which had reached
London, apparently all together, the day of Strether's journey, and
had taken their time to follow him; so that, after a controlled
impulse to go into them in the reception-room of the bank, which,
reminding him of the post-office at Woollett, affected him as the
abutment of some transatlantic bridge, he slipped them into the
pocket of his loose grey overcoat with a sense of the felicity of
carrying them off. Waymarsh, who had had letters yesterday, had had
them again to-day, and Waymarsh suggested in this particular no
controlled impulses. The last one he was at all events likely to be
observed to struggle with was clearly that of bringing to a
premature close any visit to the Rue Scribe. Strether had left him
there yesterday; he wanted to see the papers, and he had spent, by
what his friend could make out, a succession of hours with the
papers. He spoke of the establishment, with emphasis, as a post of
superior observation; just as he spoke generally of his actual
damnable doom as a device for hiding from him what was going on.
Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for
dissociating the confined American from that indispensable
knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these
occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering
western airs. Strether, on his side, set himself to walk again—he
had his relief in his pocket; and indeed, much as he had desired
his budget, the growth of restlessness might have been marked in
him from the moment he had assured himself of the superscription of
most of the missives it contained. This restlessness became
therefore his temporary law; he knew he should recognise as soon as
see it the best place of all for settling down with his chief
correspondent. He had for the next hour an accidental air of
looking for it in the windows of shops; he came down the Rue de la
Paix in the sun and, passing across the Tuileries and the river,
indulged more than once—as if on finding himself determined—in a
sudden pause before the book-stalls of the opposite quay. In the
garden of the Tuileries he had lingered, on two or three spots, to
look; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring had stayed him as he
roamed. The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes—in a
soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the
garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong
boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where
terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-frocked brass-labelled
officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references
of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered
red-legged soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures whose
movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their
smooth diagonal from point to point; the air had a taste as of
something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a
white-capped master-chef. The palace was gone, Strether remembered
the palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable void of its
site the historic sense in him might have been freely at play—the
play under which in Paris indeed it so often winces like a touched
nerve. He filled out spaces with dim symbols of scenes; he caught
the gleam of white statues at the base of which, with his letters
out, he could tilt back a straw-bottomed chair. But his drift was,
for reasons, to the other side, and it floated him unspent up the
Rue de Seine and as far as the Luxembourg. In the Luxembourg
Gardens he pulled up; here at last he found his nook, and here, on
a penny chair from which terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains,
little trees in green tubs, little women in white caps and shrill
little girls at play all sunnily "composed" together, he passed an
hour in which the cup of his impressions seemed truly to overflow.
But a week had elapsed since he quitted the ship, and there were
more things in his mind than so few days could account for. More
than once, during the time, he had regarded himself as admonished;
but the admonition this morning was formidably sharp. It took as it
hadn't done yet the form of a question—the question of what he was
doing with such an extraordinary sense of escape. This sense was
sharpest after he had read his letters, but that was also precisely
why the question pressed. Four of the letters were from Mrs.
Newsome and none of them short; she had lost no time, had followed
on his heels while he moved, so expressing herself that he now
could measure the probable frequency with which he should hear.
They would arrive, it would seem, her communications, at the rate
of several a week; he should be able to count, it might even prove,
on more than one by each mail. If he had begun yesterday with a
small grievance he had therefore an opportunity to begin to-day
with its opposite. He read the letters successively and slowly,
putting others back into his pocket but keeping these for a long
time afterwards gathered in his lap. He held them there, lost in
thought, as if to prolong the presence of what they gave him; or as
if at the least to assure them their part in the constitution of
some lucidity. His friend wrote admirably, and her tone was even
more in her style than in her voice—he might almost, for the hour,
have had to come this distance to get its full carrying quality;
yet the plentitude of his consciousness of difference consorted
perfectly with the deepened intensity of the connexion. It was the
difference, the difference of being just where he was and AS he
was, that formed the escape—this difference was so much greater
than he had dreamed it would be; and what he finally sat there
turning over was the strange logic of his finding himself so free.
He felt it in a manner his duty to think out his state, to approve
the process, and when he came in fact to trace the steps and add up
the items they sufficiently accounted for the sum. He had never
expected—that was the truth of it—again to find himself young, and
all the years and other things it had taken to make him so were
exactly his present arithmetic. He had to make sure of them to put
his scruple to rest.

It all sprang at bottom from the beauty of Mrs. Newsome's desire
that he should be worried with nothing that was not of the essence
of his task; by insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and
break she had so provided for his freedom that she would, as it
were, have only herself to thank. Strether could not at this point
indeed have completed his thought by the image of what she might
have to thank herself FOR: the image, at best, of his own
likeness-poor Lambert Strether washed up on the sunny strand by the
waves of a single day, poor Lambert Strether thankful for
breathing-time and stiffening himself while he gasped. There he
was, and with nothing in his aspect or his posture to scandalise:
it was only true that if he had seen Mrs. Newsome coming he would
instinctively have jumped up to walk away a little. He would have
come round and back to her bravely, but he would have had first to
pull himself together. She abounded in news of the situation at
home, proved to him how perfectly she was arranging for his
absence, told him who would take up this and who take up that
exactly where he had left it, gave him in fact chapter and verse
for the moral that nothing would suffer. It filled for him, this
tone of hers, all the air; yet it struck him at the same time as
the hum of vain things. This latter effect was what he tried to
justify—and with the success that, grave though the appearance, he
at last lighted on a form that was happy. He arrived at it by the
inevitable recognition of his having been a fortnight before one of
the weariest of men. If ever a man had come off tired Lambert
Strether was that man; and hadn't it been distinctly on the ground
of his fatigue that his wonderful friend at home had so felt for
him and so contrived? It seemed to him somehow at these instants
that, could he only maintain with sufficient firmness his grasp of
that truth, it might become in a manner his compass and his helm.
What he wanted most was some idea that would simplify, and nothing
would do this so much as the fact that he was done for and
finished. If it had been in such a light that he had just detected
in his cup the dregs of youth, that was a mere flaw of the surface
of his scheme. He was so distinctly fagged-out that it must serve
precisely as his convenience, and if he could but consistently be
good for little enough he might do everything he wanted.

Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon—the
common unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared
to himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation
of the way they didn't come; but perhaps—as they would seemingly
here be things quite other—this long ache might at last drop to
rest. He could easily see that from the moment he should accept the
notion of his foredoomed collapse the last thing he would lack
would be reasons and memories. Oh if he SHOULD do the sum no slate
would hold the figures! The fact that he had failed, as he
considered, in everything, in each relation and in half a dozen
trades, as he liked luxuriously to put it, might have made, might
still make, for an empty present; but it stood solidly for a
crowded past. It had not been, so much achievement missed, a light
yoke nor a short load. It was at present as if the backward picture
had hung there, the long crooked course, grey in the shadow of his
solitude. It had been a dreadful cheerful sociable solitude, a
solitude of life or choice, of community; but though there had been
people enough all round it there had been but three or four persons
IN it. Waymarsh was one of these, and the fact struck him just now
as marking the record. Mrs. Newsome was another, and Miss Gostrey
had of a sudden shown signs of becoming a third. Beyond, behind
them was the pale figure of his real youth, which held against its
breast the two presences paler than itself—the young wife he had
early lost and the young son he had stupidly sacrificed. He had
again and again made out for himself that he might have kept his
little boy, his little dull boy who had died at school of rapid
diphtheria, if he had not in those years so insanely given himself
to merely missing the mother. It was the soreness of his remorse
that the child had in all likelihood not really been dull—had been
dull, as he had been banished and neglected, mainly because the
father had been unwittingly selfish. This was doubtless but the
secret habit of sorrow, which had slowly given way to time; yet
there remained an ache sharp enough to make the spirit, at the
sight now and again of some fair young man just growing up, wince
with the thought of an opportunity lost. Had ever a man, he had
finally fallen into the way of asking himself, lost so much and
even done so much for so little? There had been particular reasons
why all yesterday, beyond other days, he should have had in one ear
this cold enquiry. His name on the green cover, where he had put it
for Mrs. Newsome, expressed him doubtless just enough to make the
world—the world as distinguished, both for more and for less, from
Woollett—ask who he was. He had incurred the ridicule of having to
have his explanation explained. He was Lambert Strether because he
was on the cover, whereas it should have been, for anything like
glory, that he was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether. He
would have done anything for Mrs. Newsome, have been still more
ridiculous—as he might, for that matter, have occasion to be yet;
which came to saying that this acceptance of fate was all he had to
show at fifty-five.

He judged the quantity as small because it WAS small, and all
the more egregiously since it couldn't, as he saw the case, so much
as thinkably have been larger. He hadn't had the gift of making the
most of what he tried, and if he had tried and tried again—no one
but himself knew how often—it appeared to have been that he might
demonstrate what else, in default of that, COULD be made. Old
ghosts of experiments came back to him, old drudgeries and
delusions, and disgusts, old recoveries with their relapses, old
fevers with their chills, broken moments of good faith, others of
still better doubt; adventures, for the most part, of the sort
qualified as lessons. The special spring that had constantly played
for him the day before was the recognition—frequent enough to
surprise him—of the promises to himself that he had after his other
visit never kept. The reminiscence to-day most quickened for him
was that of the vow taken in the course of the pilgrimage that,
newly-married, with the War just over, and helplessly young in
spite of it, he had recklessly made with the creature who was so
much younger still. It had been a bold dash, for which they had
taken money set apart for necessities, but kept sacred at the
moment in a hundred ways, and in none more so than by this private
pledge of his own to treat the occasion as a relation formed with
the higher culture and see that, as they said at Woollett, it
should bear a good harvest. He had believed, sailing home again,
that he had gained something great, and his theory—with an
elaborate innocent plan of reading, digesting, coming back even,
every few years—had then been to preserve, cherish and extend it.
As such plans as these had come to nothing, however, in respect to
acquisitions still more precious, it was doubtless little enough of
a marvel that he should have lost account of that handful of seed.
Buried for long years in dark corners at any rate these few germs
had sprouted again under forty-eight hours of Paris. The process of
yesterday had really been the process of feeling the general
stirred life of connexions long since individually dropped.
Strether had become acquainted even on this ground with short gusts
of speculation—sudden flights of fancy in Louvre galleries, hungry
gazes through clear plates behind which lemon-coloured volumes were
as fresh as fruit on the tree.