The Ambassadors (13 page)

Many things came over him here, and one of them was that he
should doubtless presently know whether he had been shallow or
sharp. Another was that the balcony in question didn't somehow show
as a convenience easy to surrender. Poor Strether had at this very
moment to recognise the truth that wherever one paused in Paris the
imagination reacted before one could stop it. This perpetual
reaction put a price, if one would, on pauses; but it piled up
consequences till there was scarce room to pick one's steps among
them. What call had he, at such a juncture, for example, to like
Chad's very house? High broad clear—he was expert enough to make
out in a moment that it was admirably built—it fairly embarrassed
our friend by the quality that, as he would have said, it "sprang"
on him. He had struck off the fancy that it might, as a
preliminary, be of service to him to be seen, by a happy accident,
from the third-story windows, which took all the March sun, but of
what service was it to find himself making out after a moment that
the quality "sprung," the quality produced by measure and balance,
the fine relation of part to part and space to space, was
probably—aided by the presence of ornament as positive as it was
discreet, and by the complexion of the stone, a cold fair grey,
warmed and polished a little by life—neither more nor less than a
case of distinction, such a case as he could only feel unexpectedly
as a sort of delivered challenge? Meanwhile, however, the chance he
had allowed for—the chance of being seen in time from the
balcony—had become a fact. Two or three of the windows stood open
to the violet air; and, before Strether had cut the knot by
crossing, a young man had come out and looked about him, had
lighted a cigarette and tossed the match over, and then, resting on
the rail, had given himself up to watching the life below while he
smoked. His arrival contributed, in its order, to keeping Strether
in position; the result of which in turn was that Strether soon
felt himself noticed. The young man began to look at him as in
acknowledgement of his being himself in observation.

This was interesting so far as it went, but the interest was
affected by the young man's not being Chad. Strether wondered at
first if he were perhaps Chad altered, and then saw that this was
asking too much of alteration. The young man was light bright and
alert—with an air too pleasant to have been arrived at by patching.
Strether had conceived Chad as patched, but not beyond recognition.
He was in presence, he felt, of amendments enough as they stood; it
was a sufficient amendment that the gentleman up there should be
Chad's friend. He was young too then, the gentleman up there—he was
very young; young enough apparently to be amused at an elderly
watcher, to be curious even to see what the elderly watcher would
do on finding himself watched. There was youth in that, there was
youth in the surrender to the balcony, there was youth for Strether
at this moment in everything but his own business; and Chad's thus
pronounced association with youth had given the next instant an
extraordinary quick lift to the issue. The balcony, the
distinguished front, testified suddenly, for Strether's fancy, to
something that was up and up; they placed the whole case
materially, and as by an admirable image, on a level that he found
himself at the end of another moment rejoicing to think he might
reach. The young man looked at him still, he looked at the young
man; and the issue, by a rapid process, was that this knowledge of
a perched privacy appeared to him the last of luxuries. To him too
the perched privacy was open, and he saw it now but in one
light—that of the only domicile, the only fireside, in the great
ironic city, on which he had the shadow of a claim. Miss Gostrey
had a fireside; she had told him of it, and it was something that
doubtless awaited him; but Miss Gostrey hadn't yet arrived—she
mightn't arrive for days; and the sole attenuation of his excluded
state was his vision of the small, the admittedly secondary hotel
in the bye-street from the Rue de la Paix, in which her solicitude
for his purse had placed him, which affected him somehow as all
indoor chill, glass-roofed court and slippery staircase, and which,
by the same token, expressed the presence of Waymarsh even at times
when Waymarsh might have been certain to be round at the bank. It
came to pass before he moved that Waymarsh, and Waymarsh alone,
Waymarsh not only undiluted but positively strengthened, struck him
as the present alternative to the young man in the balcony. When he
did move it was fairly to escape that alternative. Taking his way
over the street at last and passing through the porte-cochere of
the house was like consciously leaving Waymarsh out. However, he
would tell him all about it.

Strether told Waymarsh all about it that very evening, on their
dining together at the hotel; which needn't have happened, he was
all the while aware, hadn't he chosen to sacrifice to this occasion
a rarer opportunity. The mention to his companion of the sacrifice
was moreover exactly what introduced his recital—or, as he would
have called it with more confidence in his interlocutor, his
confession. His confession was that he had been captured and that
one of the features of the affair had just failed to be his
engaging himself on the spot to dinner. As by such a freedom
Waymarsh would have lost him he had obeyed his scruple; and he had
likewise obeyed another scruple—which bore on the question of his
himself bringing a guest.

Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished soup, at this
array of scruples; Strether hadn't yet got quite used to being so
unprepared for the consequences of the impression he produced. It
was comparatively easy to explain, however, that he hadn't felt
sure his guest would please. The person was a young man whose
acquaintance he had made but that afternoon in the course of rather
a hindered enquiry for another person—an enquiry his new friend had
just prevented in fact from being vain. "Oh," said Strether, "I've
all sorts of things to tell you!"—and he put it in a way that was a
virtual hint to Waymarsh to help him to enjoy the telling. He
waited for his fish, he drank of his wine, he wiped his long
moustache, he leaned back in his chair, he took in the two English
ladies who had just creaked past them and whom he would even have
articulately greeted if they hadn't rather chilled the impulse; so
that all he could do was—by way of doing something—to say "Merci,
Francois!" out quite loud when his fish was brought. Everything was
there that he wanted, everything that could make the moment an
occasion, that would do beautifully—everything but what Waymarsh
might give. The little waxed salle-a-manger was sallow and
sociable; Francois, dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a
brother; the high-shouldered patronne, with her high-held,
much-rubbed hands, seemed always assenting exuberantly to something
unsaid; the Paris evening in short was, for Strether, in the very
taste of the soup, in the goodness, as he was innocently pleased to
think it, of the wine, in the pleasant coarse texture of the napkin
and the crunch of the thick-crusted bread. These all were things
congruous with his confession, and his confession was that he
HAD—it would come out properly just there if Waymarsh would only
take it properly—agreed to breakfast out, at twelve literally, the
next day. He didn't quite know where; the delicacy of the case came
straight up in the remembrance of his new friend's "We'll see; I'll
take you somewhere!"—for it had required little more than that,
after all, to let him right in. He was affected after a minute,
face to face with his actual comrade, by the impulse to overcolour.
There had already been things in respect to which he knew himself
tempted by this perversity. If Waymarsh thought them bad he should
at least have his reason for his discomfort; so Strether showed
them as worse. Still, he was now, in his way, sincerely
perplexed.

Chad had been absent from the Boulevard Malesherbes—was absent
from Paris altogether; he had learned that from the concierge, but
had nevertheless gone up, and gone up—there were no two ways about
it—from an uncontrollable, a really, if one would, depraved
curiosity. The concierge had mentioned to him that a friend of the
tenant of the troisieme was for the time in possession; and this
had been Strether's pretext for a further enquiry, an experiment
carried on, under Chad's roof, without his knowledge. "I found his
friend in fact there keeping the place warm, as he called it, for
him; Chad himself being, as appears, in the south. He went a month
ago to Cannes and though his return begins to be looked for it
can't be for some days. I might, you see, perfectly have waited a
week; might have beaten a retreat as soon as I got this essential
knowledge. But I beat no retreat; I did the opposite; I stayed, I
dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I saw, in fine; and—I
don't know what to call it—I sniffed. It's a detail, but it's as if
there were something—something very good—TO sniff."

Waymarsh's face had shown his friend an attention apparently so
remote that the latter was slightly surprised to find it at this
point abreast with him. "Do you mean a smell? What of?"

"A charming scent. But I don't know."

Waymarsh gave an inferential grunt. "Does he live there with a
woman?"

"I don't know."

Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then resumed. "Has he taken
her off with him?"

"And will he bring her back?"—Strether fell into the enquiry.
But he wound it up as before. "I don't know."

The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was with another
drop back, another degustation of the Leoville, another wipe of his
moustache and another good word for Francois, seemed to produce in
his companion a slight irritation. "Then what the devil DO you
know?"

"Well," said Strether almost gaily, "I guess I don't know
anything!" His gaiety might have been a tribute to the fact that
the state he had been reduced to did for him again what had been
done by his talk of the matter with Miss Gostrey at the London
theatre. It was somehow enlarging; and the air of that amplitude
was now doubtless more or less—and all for Waymarsh to feel—in his
further response. "That's what I found out from the young man."

"But I thought you said you found out nothing."

"Nothing but that—that I don't know anything."

"And what good does that do you?"

"It's just," said Strether, "what I've come to you to help me to
discover. I mean anything about anything over here. I FELT that, up
there. It regularly rose before me in its might. The young man
moreover—Chad's friend—as good as told me so."

"As good as told you you know nothing about anything?" Waymarsh
appeared to look at some one who might have as good as told HIM.
"How old is he?"

"Well, I guess not thirty."

"Yet you had to take that from him?"

"Oh I took a good deal more—since, as I tell you, I took an
invitation to dejeuner."

"And are you GOING to that unholy meal?"

"If you'll come with me. He wants you too, you know. I told him
about you. He gave me his card," Strether pursued, "and his name's
rather funny. It's John Little Bilham, and he says his two surnames
are, on account of his being small, inevitably used together."

"Well," Waymarsh asked with due detachment from these details,
"what's he doing up there?"

"His account of himself is that he's 'only a little artist-man.'
That seemed to me perfectly to describe him. But he's yet in the
phase of study; this, you know, is the great art-school—to pass a
certain number of years in which he came over. And he's a great
friend of Chad's, and occupying Chad's rooms just now because
they're so pleasant. HE'S very pleasant and curious too," Strether
added—"though he's not from Boston."

Waymarsh looked already rather sick of him. "Where is he
from?"

Strether thought. "I don't know that, either. But he's
'notoriously,' as he put it himself, not from Boston."

"Well," Waymarsh moralised from dry depths, "every one can't
notoriously be from Boston. Why," he continued, "is he
curious?"

"Perhaps just for THAT—for one thing! But really," Strether
added, "for everything. When you meet him you'll see."

"Oh I don't want to meet him," Waymarsh impatiently growled.
"Why don't he go home?"

Strether hesitated. "Well, because he likes it over here."

This appeared in particular more than Waymarsh could bear. "He
ought then to be ashamed of himself, and, as you admit that you
think so too, why drag him in?"

Strether's reply again took time. "Perhaps I do think so
myself—though I don't quite yet admit it. I'm not a bit sure—it's
again one of the things I want to find out. I liked him, and CAN
you like people—? But no matter." He pulled himself up. "There's no
doubt I want you to come down on me and squash me."

Waymarsh helped himself to the next course, which, however
proving not the dish he had just noted as supplied to the English
ladies, had the effect of causing his imagination temporarily to
wander. But it presently broke out at a softer spot. "Have they got
a handsome place up there?"

"Oh a charming place; full of beautiful and valuable things. I
never saw such a place"—and Strether's thought went back to it.
"For a little artist-man—!" He could in fact scarce express it.

But his companion, who appeared now to have a view, insisted.
"Well?"

"Well, life can hold nothing better. Besides, they're things of
which he's in charge."

"So that he does doorkeeper for your precious pair? Can life,"
Waymarsh enquired, "hold nothing better than THAT?" Then as
Strether, silent, seemed even yet to wonder, "Doesn't he know what
SHE is?" he went on.

"I don't know. I didn't ask him. I couldn't. It was impossible.
You wouldn't either. Besides I didn't want to. No more would you."
Strether in short explained it at a stroke. "You can't make out
over here what people do know."