The Ambassadors (53 page)

"You mean she has taken so much from you?"

"Well, I couldn't of course in common decency give less: only
she hadn't expected, I think, that I'd give her nearly so much. And
she began to take it before she knew it."

"And she began to like it," said Strether, "as soon as she began
to take it!"

"Yes, she has liked it—also more than she expected." After which
Chad observed: "But she doesn't like ME. In fact she hates me."

Strether's interest grew. "Then why does she want you at
home?"

"Because when you hate you want to triumph, and if she should
get me neatly stuck there she WOULD triumph."

Strether followed afresh, but looking as he went. "Certainly—in
a manner. But it would scarce be a triumph worth having if, once
entangled, feeling her dislike and possibly conscious in time of a
certain quantity of your own, you should on the spot make yourself
unpleasant to her."

"Ah," said Chad, "she can bear ME—could bear me at least at
home. It's my being there that would be her triumph. She hates me
in Paris."

"She hates in other words—"

"Yes, THAT'S it!"—Chad had quickly understood this
understanding; which formed on the part of each as near an approach
as they had yet made to naming Madame de Vionnet. The limitations
of their distinctness didn't, however, prevent its fairly lingering
in the air that it was this lady Mrs. Pocock hated. It added one
more touch moreover to their established recognition of the rare
intimacy of Chad's association with her. He had never yet more
twitched away the last light veil from this phenomenon than in
presenting himself as confounded and submerged in the feeling she
had created at Woollett. "And I'll tell you who hates me too," he
immediately went on.

Strether knew as immediately whom he meant, but with as prompt a
protest. "Ah no! Mamie doesn't hate—well," he caught himself in
time—"anybody at all. Mamie's beautiful."

Chad shook his head. "That's just why I mind it. She certainly
doesn't like me."

"How much do you mind it? What would you do for her?"

"Well, I'd like her if she'd like me. Really, really," Chad
declared.

It gave his companion a moment's pause. "You asked me just now
if I don't, as you said, 'care' about a certain person. You rather
tempt me therefore to put the question in my turn. Don't YOU care
about a certain other person?"

Chad looked at him hard in the lamplight of the window. "The
difference is that I don't want to."

Strether wondered. "'Don't want' to?"

"I try not to—that is I HAVE tried. I've done my best. You can't
be surprised," the young man easily went on, "when you yourself set
me on it. I was indeed," he added, "already on it a little; but you
set me harder. It was six weeks ago that I thought I had come
out."

Strether took it well in. "But you haven't come out!"

"I don't know—it's what I WANT to know," said Chad. "And if I
could have sufficiently wanted—by myself—to go back, I think I
might have found out."

"Possibly"—Strether considered. "But all you were able to
achieve was to want to want to! And even then," he pursued, "only
till our friends there came. Do you want to want to still?" As with
a sound half-dolorous, half-droll and all vague and equivocal, Chad
buried his face for a little in his hands, rubbing it in a
whimsical way that amounted to an evasion, he brought it out more
sharply: "DO you?"

Chad kept for a time his attitude, but at last he looked up, and
then abruptly, "Jim IS a damned dose!" he declared.

"Oh I don't ask you to abuse or describe or in any way pronounce
on your relatives; I simply put it to you once more whether you're
NOW ready. You say you've 'seen.' Is what you've seen that you
can't resist?"

Chad gave him a strange smile—the nearest approach he had ever
shown to a troubled one. "Can't you make me NOT resist?"

"What it comes to," Strether went on very gravely now and as if
he hadn't heard him, "what it comes to is that more has been done
for you, I think, than I've ever seen done—attempted perhaps, but
never so successfully done—by one human being for another."

"Oh an immense deal certainly"—Chad did it full justice. "And
you yourself are adding to it."

It was without heeding this either that his visitor continued.
"And our friends there won't have it."

"No, they simply won't."

"They demand you on the basis, as it were, of repudiation and
ingratitude; and what has been the matter with me," Strether went
on, "is that I haven't seen my way to working with you for
repudiation."

Chad appreciated this. "Then as you haven't seen yours you
naturally haven't seen mine. There it is." After which he
proceeded, with a certain abruptness, to a sharp interrogation.
"NOW do you say she doesn't hate me?"

Strether hesitated. "'She'—?"

"Yes—Mother. We called it Sarah, but it comes to the same
thing."

"Ah," Strether objected, "not to the same thing as her hating
YOU."

On which—though as if for an instant it had hung fire—Chad
remarkably replied: "Well, if they hate my good friend, THAT comes
to the same thing." It had a note of inevitable truth that made
Strether take it as enough, feel he wanted nothing more. The young
man spoke in it for his "good friend" more than he had ever yet
directly spoken, confessed to such deep identities between them as
he might play with the idea of working free from, but which at a
given moment could still draw him down like a whirlpool. And
meanwhile he had gone on. "Their hating you too moreover—that also
comes to a good deal."

"Ah," said Strether, "your mother doesn't."

Chad, however, loyally stuck to it—loyally, that is, to
Strether. "She will if you don't look out."

"Well, I do look out. I am, after all, looking out. That's just
why," our friend explained, "I want to see her again."

It drew from Chad again the same question. "To see Mother?"

"To see—for the present—Sarah."

"Ah then there you are! And what I don't for the life of me make
out," Chad pursued with resigned perplexity, "is what you GAIN by
it."

Oh it would have taken his companion too long to say! "That's
because you have, I verily believe, no imagination. You've other
qualities. But no imagination, don't you see? at all."

"I dare say. I do see." It was an idea in which Chad showed
interest. "But haven't you yourself rather too much?"

"Oh RATHER—!" So that after an instant, under this reproach and
as if it were at last a fact really to escape from, Strether made
his move for departure.

One of the features of the restless afternoon passed by him
after Mrs. Pocock's visit was an hour spent, shortly before dinner,
with Maria Gostrey, whom of late, in spite of so sustained a call
on his attention from other quarters, he had by no means neglected.
And that he was still not neglecting her will appear from the fact
that he was with her again at the same hour on the very morrow—with
no less fine a consciousness moreover of being able to hold her
ear. It continued inveterately to occur, for that matter, that
whenever he had taken one of his greater turns he came back to
where she so faithfully awaited him. None of these excursions had
on the whole been livelier than the pair of incidents—the fruit of
the short interval since his previous visit—on which he had now to
report to her. He had seen Chad Newsome late the night before, and
he had had that morning, as a sequel to this conversation, a second
interview with Sarah. "But they're all off," he said, "at
last."

It puzzled her a moment. "All?—Mr. Newsome with them?"

"Ah not yet! Sarah and Jim and Mamie. But Waymarsh with them—for
Sarah. It's too beautiful," Strether continued; "I find I don't get
over that—it's always a fresh joy. But it's a fresh joy too," he
added, "that—well, what do you think? Little Bilham also goes. But
he of course goes for Mamie."

Miss Gostrey wondered. "'For' her? Do you mean they're already
engaged?"

"Well," said Strether, "say then for ME. He'll do anything for
me; just as I will, for that matter—anything I can—for him. Or for
Mamie either. SHE'LL do anything for me."

Miss Gostrey gave a comprehensive sigh. "The way you reduce
people to subjection!"

"It's certainly, on one side, wonderful. But it's quite
equalled, on another, by the way I don't. I haven't reduced Sarah,
since yesterday; though I've succeeded in seeing her again, as I'll
presently tell you. The others however are really all right. Mamie,
by that blessed law of ours, absolutely must have a young man."

"But what must poor Mr. Bilham have? Do you mean they'll MARRY
for you?"

"I mean that, by the same blessed law, it won't matter a grain
if they don't—I shan't have in the least to worry."

She saw as usual what he meant. "And Mr. Jim?—who goes for
him?"

"Oh," Strether had to admit, "I couldn't manage THAT. He's
thrown, as usual, on the world; the world which, after all, by his
account—for he has prodigious adventures—seems very good to him. He
fortunately—'over here,' as he says—finds the world everywhere; and
his most prodigious adventure of all," he went on, "has been of
course of the last few days."

Miss Gostrey, already knowing, instantly made the connexion. "He
has seen Marie de Vionnet again?"

"He went, all by himself, the day after Chad's party—didn't I
tell you?—to tea with her. By her invitation—all alone."

"Quite like yourself!" Maria smiled.

"Oh but he's more wonderful about her than I am!" And then as
his friend showed how she could believe it, filling it out, fitting
it on to old memories of the wonderful woman: "What I should have
liked to manage would have been HER going."

"To Switzerland with the party?"

"For Jim—and for symmetry. If it had been workable moreover for
a fortnight she'd have gone. She's ready"—he followed up his
renewed vision of her—"for anything."

Miss Gostrey went with him a minute. "She's too perfect!"

"She WILL, I think," he pursued, "go to-night to the
station."

"To see him off?"

"With Chad—marvellously—as part of their general attention. And
she does it"—it kept before him—"with a light, light grace, a free,
free gaiety, that may well softly bewilder Mr. Pocock."

It kept her so before him that his companion had after an
instant a friendly comment. "As in short it has softly bewildered a
saner man. Are you really in love with her?" Maria threw off.

"It's of no importance I should know," he replied. "It matters
so little—has nothing to do, practically, with either of us."

"All the same"—Maria continued to smile—"they go, the five, as I
understand you, and you and Madame de Vionnet stay."

"Oh and Chad." To which Strether added: "And you."

"Ah 'me'!"—she gave a small impatient wail again, in which
something of the unreconciled seemed suddenly to break out. "I
don't stay, it somehow seems to me, much to my advantage. In the
presence of all you cause to pass before me I've a tremendous sense
of privation."

Strether hesitated. "But your privation, your keeping out of
everything, has been—hasn't it?—by your own choice."

"Oh yes; it has been necessary—that is it has been better for
you. What I mean is only that I seem to have ceased to serve
you."

"How can you tell that?" he asked. "You don't know how you serve
me. When you cease—"

"Well?" she said as he dropped.

"Well, I'll LET you know. Be quiet till then."

She thought a moment. "Then you positively like me to stay?"

"Don't I treat you as if I did?"

"You're certainly very kind to me. But that," said Maria, "is
for myself. It's getting late, as you see, and Paris turning rather
hot and dusty. People are scattering, and some of them, in other
places want me. But if you want me here—!"

She had spoken as resigned to his word, but he had of a sudden a
still sharper sense than he would have expected of desiring not to
lose her. "I want you here."

She took it as if the words were all she had wished; as if they
brought her, gave her something that was the compensation of her
case. "Thank you," she simply answered. And then as he looked at
her a little harder, "Thank you very much," she repeated.

It had broken as with a slight arrest into the current of their
talk, and it held him a moment longer. "Why, two months, or
whatever the time was, ago, did you so suddenly dash off? The
reason you afterwards gave me for having kept away three weeks
wasn't the real one."

She recalled. "I never supposed you believed it was. Yet," she
continued, "if you didn't guess it that was just what helped
you."

He looked away from her on this; he indulged, so far as space
permitted, in one of his slow absences. "I've often thought of it,
but never to feel that I could guess it. And you see the
consideration with which I've treated you in never asking till
now."

"Now then why DO you ask?"

"To show you how I miss you when you're not here, and what it
does for me."

"It doesn't seem to have done," she laughed, "all it might!
However," she added, "if you've really never guessed the truth I'll
tell it you."

"I've never guessed it," Strether declared.

"Never?"

"Never."

"Well then I dashed off, as you say, so as not to have the
confusion of being there if Marie de Vionnet should tell you
anything to my detriment."

He looked as if he considerably doubted. "You even then would
have had to face it on your return."

"Oh if I had found reason to believe it something very bad I'd
have left you altogether."

"So then," he continued, "it was only on guessing she had been
on the whole merciful that you ventured back?"

Maria kept it together. "I owe her thanks. Whatever her
temptation she didn't separate us. That's one of my reasons," she
went on "for admiring her so."