The Ambassadors (31 page)

"Oh for us 'all'—!" Strether could but laugh at that. It brought
him back, however, to the point he had really wished to make.
"They've accepted their situation—hard as it is. They're not
free—at least she's not; but they take what's left to them. It's a
friendship, of a beautiful sort; and that's what makes them so
strong. They're straight, they feel; and they keep each other up.
It's doubtless she, however, who, as you yourself have hinted,
feels it most."

Little Bilham appeared to wonder what he had hinted. "Feels most
that they're straight?"

"Well, feels that SHE is, and the strength that comes from it.
She keeps HIM up—she keeps the whole thing up. When people are able
to it's fine. She's wonderful, wonderful, as Miss Barrace says; and
he is, in his way, too; however, as a mere man, he may sometimes
rebel and not feel that he finds his account in it. She has simply
given him an immense moral lift, and what that can explain is
prodigious. That's why I speak of it as a situation. It IS one, if
there ever was." And Strether, with his head back and his eyes on
the ceiling, seemed to lose himself in the vision of it.

His companion attended deeply. "You state it much better than I
could." "Oh you see it doesn't concern you."

Little Bilham considered. "I thought you said just now that it
doesn't concern you either."

"Well, it doesn't a bit as Madame de Vionnet's affair. But as we
were again saying just now, what did I come out for but to save
him?"

"Yes—to remove him."

"To save him by removal; to win him over to HIMSELF thinking it
best he shall take up business—thinking he must immediately do
therefore what's necessary to that end."

"Well," said little Bilham after a moment, "you HAVE won him
over. He does think it best. He has within a day or two again said
to me as much."

"And that," Strether asked, "is why you consider that he cares
less than she?"

"Cares less for her than she for him? Yes, that's one of the
reasons. But other things too have given me the impression. A man,
don't you think?" little Bilham presently pursued, "CAN'T, in such
conditions, care so much as a woman. It takes different conditions
to make him, and then perhaps he cares more. Chad," he wound up,
"has his possible future before him."

"Are you speaking of his business future?"

"No—on the contrary; of the other, the future of what you so
justly call their situation. M. de Vionnet may live for ever."

"So that they can't marry?"

The young man waited a moment. "Not being able to marry is all
they've with any confidence to look forward to. A woman—a
particular woman—may stand that strain. But can a man?" he
propounded.

Strether's answer was as prompt as if he had already, for
himself, worked it out. "Not without a very high ideal of conduct.
But that's just what we're attributing to Chad. And how, for that
matter," he mused, "does his going to America diminish the
particular strain? Wouldn't it seem rather to add to it?"

"Out of sight out of mind!" his companion laughed. Then more
bravely: "Wouldn't distance lessen the torment?" But before
Strether could reply, "The thing is, you see, Chad ought to marry!"
he wound up.

Strether, for a little, appeared to think of it. "If you talk of
torments you don't diminish mine!" he then broke out. The next
moment he was on his feet with a question. "He ought to marry
whom?"

Little Bilham rose more slowly. "Well, some one he CAN—some
thoroughly nice girl."

Strether's eyes, as they stood together, turned again to Jeanne.
"Do you mean HER?"

His friend made a sudden strange face. "After being in love with
her mother? No."

"But isn't it exactly your idea that he ISn't in love with her
mother?"

His friend once more had a pause. "Well, he isn't at any rate in
love with Jeanne."

"I dare say not."

"How CAN he be with any other woman?"

"Oh that I admit. But being in love isn't, you know,
here"—little Bilham spoke in friendly reminder—"thought necessary,
in strictness, for marriage."

"And what torment—to call a torment—can there ever possibly be
with a woman like that?" As if from the interest of his own
question Strether had gone on without hearing. "Is it for her to
have turned a man out so wonderfully, too, only for somebody else?"
He appeared to make a point of this, and little Bilham looked at
him now. "When it's for each other that people give things up they
don't miss them." Then he threw off as with an extravagance of
which he was conscious: "Let them face the future together!"

Little Bilham looked at him indeed. "You mean that after all he
shouldn't go back?"

"I mean that if he gives her up—!"

"Yes?"

"Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself." But Strether spoke
with a sound that might have passed for a laugh.

It wasn't the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim
church—still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so far
as conditions permitted, to its beneficent action on his nerves. He
had been to Notre Dame with Waymarsh, he had been there with Miss
Gostrey, he had been there with Chad Newsome, and had found the
place, even in company, such a refuge from the obsession of his
problem that, with renewed pressure from that source, he had not
unnaturally recurred to a remedy meeting the case, for the moment,
so indirectly, no doubt, but so relievingly. He was conscious
enough that it was only for the moment, but good moments—if he
could call them good—still had their value for a man who by this
time struck himself as living almost disgracefully from hand to
mouth. Having so well learnt the way, he had lately made the
pilgrimage more than once by himself—had quite stolen off, taking
an unnoticed chance and making no point of speaking of the
adventure when restored to his friends.

His great friend, for that matter, was still absent, as well as
remarkably silent; even at the end of three weeks Miss Gostrey
hadn't come back. She wrote to him from Mentone, admitting that he
must judge her grossly inconsequent—perhaps in fact for the time
odiously faithless; but asking for patience, for a deferred
sentence, throwing herself in short on his generosity. For her too,
she could assure him, life was complicated—more complicated than he
could have guessed; she had moreover made certain of him—certain of
not wholly missing him on her return—before her disappearance. If
furthermore she didn't burden him with letters it was frankly
because of her sense of the other great commerce he had to carry
on. He himself, at the end of a fortnight, had written twice, to
show how his generosity could be trusted; but he reminded himself
in each case of Mrs. Newsome's epistolary manner at the times when
Mrs. Newsome kept off delicate ground. He sank his problem, he
talked of Waymarsh and Miss Barrace, of little Bilham and the set
over the river, with whom he had again had tea, and he was easy,
for convenience, about Chad and Madame de Vionnet and Jeanne. He
admitted that he continued to see them, he was decidedly so
confirmed a haunter of Chad's premises and that young man's
practical intimacy with them was so undeniably great; but he had
his reason for not attempting to render for Miss Gostrey's benefit
the impression of these last days. That would be to tell her too
much about himself—it being at present just from himself he was
trying to escape.

This small struggle sprang not a little, in its way, from the
same impulse that had now carried him across to Notre Dame; the
impulse to let things be, to give them time to justify themselves
or at least to pass. He was aware of having no errand in such a
place but the desire not to be, for the hour, in certain other
places; a sense of safety, of simplification, which each time he
yielded to it he amused himself by thinking of as a private
concession to cowardice. The great church had no altar for his
worship, no direct voice for his soul; but it was none the less
soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel while there what he
couldn't elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the
holiday he had earned. He was tired, but he wasn't plain—that was
the pity and the trouble of it; he was able, however, to drop his
problem at the door very much as if it had been the copper piece
that he deposited, on the threshold, in the receptacle of the
inveterate blind beggar. He trod the long dim nave, sat in the
splendid choir, paused before the cluttered chapels of the east
end, and the mighty monument laid upon him its spell. He might have
been a student under the charm of a museum—which was exactly what,
in a foreign town, in the afternoon of life, he would have liked to
be free to be. This form of sacrifice did at any rate for the
occasion as well as another; it made him quite sufficiently
understand how, within the precinct, for the real refugee, the
things of the world could fall into abeyance. That was the
cowardice, probably—to dodge them, to beg the question, not to deal
with it in the hard outer light; but his own oblivions were too
brief, too vain, to hurt any one but himself, and he had a vague
and fanciful kindness for certain persons whom he met, figures of
mystery and anxiety, and whom, with observation for his pastime, he
ranked as those who were fleeing from justice. Justice was outside,
in the hard light, and injustice too; but one was as absent as the
other from the air of the long aisles and the brightness of the
many altars.

Thus it was at all events that, one morning some dozen days
after the dinner in the Boulevard Malesherbes at which Madame de
Vionnet had been present with her daughter, he was called upon to
play his part in an encounter that deeply stirred his imagination.
He had the habit, in these contemplations, of watching a fellow
visitant, here and there, from a respectable distance, remarking
some note of behaviour, of penitence, of prostration, of the
absolved, relieved state; this was the manner in which his vague
tenderness took its course, the degree of demonstration to which it
naturally had to confine itself. It hadn't indeed so felt its
responsibility as when on this occasion he suddenly measured the
suggestive effect of a lady whose supreme stillness, in the shade
of one of the chapels, he had two or three times noticed as he
made, and made once more, his slow circuit. She wasn't
prostrate—not in any degree bowed, but she was strangely fixed, and
her prolonged immobility showed her, while he passed and paused, as
wholly given up to the need, whatever it was, that had brought her
there. She only sat and gazed before her, as he himself often sat;
but she had placed herself, as he never did, within the focus of
the shrine, and she had lost herself, he could easily see, as he
would only have liked to do. She was not a wandering alien, keeping
back more than she gave, but one of the familiar, the intimate, the
fortunate, for whom these dealings had a method and a meaning. She
reminded our friend—since it was the way of nine tenths of his
current impressions to act as recalls of things imagined—of some
fine firm concentrated heroine of an old story, something he had
heard, read, something that, had he had a hand for drama, he might
himself have written, renewing her courage, renewing her clearness,
in splendidly-protected meditation. Her back, as she sat, was
turned to him, but his impression absolutely required that she
should be young and interesting, and she carried her head moreover,
even in the sacred shade, with a discernible faith in herself, a
kind of implied conviction of consistency, security, impunity. But
what had such a woman come for if she hadn't come to pray?
Strether's reading of such matters was, it must be owned, confused;
but he wondered if her attitude were some congruous fruit of
absolution, of "indulgence." He knew but dimly what indulgence, in
such a place, might mean; yet he had, as with a soft sweep, a
vision of how it might indeed add to the zest of active rites. All
this was a good deal to have been denoted by a mere lurking figure
who was nothing to him; but, the last thing before leaving the
church, he had the surprise of a still deeper quickening.

He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in
the museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft,
to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient
terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for
once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound
volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the
shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked,
doubtless, while he played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms,
sufficiently rapt in reverence; but what his thought had finally
bumped against was the question of where, among packed
accumulations, so multiform a wedge would be able to enter. Were
seventy volumes in red-and-gold to be perhaps what he should most
substantially have to show at Woollett as the fruit of his mission?
It was a possibility that held him a minute—held him till he
happened to feel that some one, unnoticed, had approached him and
paused. Turning, he saw that a lady stood there as for a greeting,
and he sprang up as he next took her, securely, for Madame de
Vionnet, who appeared to have recognised him as she passed near him
on her way to the door. She checked, quickly and gaily, a certain
confusion in him, came to meet it, turned it back, by an art of her
own; the confusion having threatened him as he knew her for the
person he had lately been observing. She was the lurking figure of
the dim chapel; she had occupied him more than she guessed; but it
came to him in time, luckily, that he needn't tell her and that no
harm, after all, had been done. She herself, for that matter,
straightway showing she felt their encounter as the happiest of
accidents, had for him a "You come here too?" that despoiled
surprise of every awkwardness.