The Ambassadors (7 page)

They had gone to wait together in the garden for the dressing of
the meal, and Strether found her more suggestive than ever "Well,
what?"

"Is to bring about for them such a complexity of
relations-unless indeed we call it a simplicity!—that the situation
HAS to wind itself up. They want to go back."

"And you want them to go!" Strether gaily concluded.

"I always want them to go, and I send them as fast as I
can.'

"Oh I know—you take them to Liverpool."

"Any port will serve in a storm. I'm—with all my other
functions—an agent for repatriation. I want to re-people our
stricken country. What will become of it else? I want to discourage
others."

The ordered English garden, in the freshness of the day, was
delightful to Strether, who liked the sound, under his feet, of the
tight fine gravel, packed with the chronic damp, and who had the
idlest eye for the deep smoothness of turf and the clean curves of
paths. "Other people?"

"Other countries. Other people—yes. I want to encourage our
own."

Strether wondered. "Not to come? Why then do you 'meet'
them—since it doesn't appear to be to stop them?"

"Oh that they shouldn't come is as yet too much to ask. What I
attend to is that they come quickly and return still more so. I
meet them to help it to be over as soon as possible, and though I
don't stop them I've my way of putting them through. That's my
little system; and, if you want to know," said Maria Gostrey, "it's
my real secret, my innermost mission and use. I only seem, you see,
to beguile and approve; but I've thought it all out and I'm working
all the while underground. I can't perhaps quite give you my
formula, but I think that practically I succeed. I send you back
spent. So you stay back. Passed through my hands—"

"We don't turn up again?" The further she went the further he
always saw himself able to follow. "I don't want your formula—I
feel quite enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses. Spent!" he
echoed. "If that's how you're arranging so subtly to send me I
thank you for the warning."

For a minute, amid the pleasantness—poetry in tariffed items,
but all the more, for guests already convicted, a challenge to
consumption—they smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship. "Do
you call it subtly? It's a plain poor tale. Besides, you're a
special case."

"Oh special cases—that's weak!" She was weak enough, further
still, to defer her journey and agree to accompany the gentlemen on
their own, might a separate carriage mark her independence; though
it was in spite of this to befall after luncheon that she went off
alone and that, with a tryst taken for a day of her company in
London, they lingered another night. She had, during the
morning—spent in a way that he was to remember later on as the very
climax of his foretaste, as warm with presentiments, with what he
would have called collapses—had all sorts of things out with
Strether; and among them the fact that though there was never a
moment of her life when she wasn't "due" somewhere, there was yet
scarce a perfidy to others of which she wasn't capable for his
sake. She explained moreover that wherever she happened to be she
found a dropped thread to pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some
familiar appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet
appeasable with a temporary biscuit. It became, on her taking the
risk of the deviation imposed on him by her insidious arrangement
of his morning meal, a point of honour for her not to fail with
Waymarsh of the larger success too; and her subsequent boast to
Strether was that she had made their friend fare—and quite without
his knowing what was the matter—as Major Pendennis would have fared
at the Megatherium. She had made him breakfast like a gentleman,
and it was nothing, she forcibly asserted, to what she would yet
make him do. She made him participate in the slow reiterated ramble
with which, for Strether, the new day amply filled itself; and it
was by her art that he somehow had the air, on the ramparts and in
the Rows, of carrying a point of his own.

The three strolled and stared and gossiped, or at least the two
did; the case really yielding for their comrade, if analysed, but
the element of stricken silence. This element indeed affected
Strether as charged with audible rumblings, but he was conscious of
the care of taking it explicitly as a sign of pleasant peace. He
wouldn't appeal too much, for that provoked stiffness; yet he
wouldn't be too freely tacit, for that suggested giving up.
Waymarsh himself adhered to an ambiguous dumbness that might have
represented either the growth of a perception or the despair of
one; and at times and in places—where the low-browed galleries were
darkest, the opposite gables queerest, the solicitations of every
kind densest—the others caught him fixing hard some object of minor
interest, fixing even at moments nothing discernible, as if he were
indulging it with a truce. When he met Strether's eye on such
occasions he looked guilty and furtive, fell the next minute into
some attitude of retractation. Our friend couldn't show him the
right things for fear of provoking some total renouncement, and was
tempted even to show him the wrong in order to make him differ with
triumph. There were moments when he himself felt shy of professing
the full sweetness of the taste of leisure, and there were others
when he found himself feeling as if his passages of interchange
with the lady at his side might fall upon the third member of their
party very much as Mr. Burchell, at Dr. Primrose's fireside, was
influenced by the high flights of the visitors from London. The
smallest things so arrested and amused him that he repeatedly
almost apologised—brought up afresh in explanation his plea of a
previous grind. He was aware at the same time that his grind had
been as nothing to Waymarsh's, and he repeatedly confessed that, to
cover his frivolity, he was doing his best for his previous virtue.
Do what he might, in any case, his previous virtue was still there,
and it seemed fairly to stare at him out of the windows of shops
that were not as the shops of Woollett, fairly to make him want
things that he shouldn't know what to do with. It was by the
oddest, the least admissible of laws demoralising him now; and the
way it boldly took was to make him want more wants. These first
walks in Europe were in fact a kind of finely lurid intimation of
what one might find at the end of that process. Had he come back
after long years, in something already so like the evening of life,
only to be exposed to it? It was at all events over the
shop-windows that he made, with Waymarsh, most free; though it
would have been easier had not the latter most sensibly yielded to
the appeal of the merely useful trades. He pierced with his sombre
detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers, while
Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped
letter-paper and in smart neckties. Strether was in fact
recurrently shameless in the presence of the tailors, though it was
just over the heads of the tailors that his countryman most loftily
looked. This gave Miss Gostrey a grasped opportunity to back up
Waymarsh at his expense. The weary lawyer—it was unmistakeable—had
a conception of dress; but that, in view of some of the features of
the effect produced, was just what made the danger of insistence on
it. Strether wondered if he by this time thought Miss Gostrey less
fashionable or Lambert Strether more so; and it appeared probable
that most of the remarks exchanged between this latter pair about
passers, figures, faces, personal types, exemplified in their
degree the disposition to talk as "society" talked.

Was what was happening to himself then, was what already HAD
happened, really that a woman of fashion was floating him into
society and that an old friend deserted on the brink was watching
the force of the current? When the woman of fashion permitted
Strether—as she permitted him at the most—the purchase of a pair of
gloves, the terms she made about it, the prohibition of neckties
and other items till she should be able to guide him through the
Burlington Arcade, were such as to fall upon a sensitive ear as a
challenge to just imputations. Miss Gostrey was such a woman of
fashion as could make without a symptom of vulgar blinking an
appointment for the Burlington Arcade. Mere discriminations about a
pair of gloves could thus at any rate represent—always for such
sensitive ears as were in question—possibilities of something that
Strether could make a mark against only as the peril of apparent
wantonness. He had quite the consciousness of his new friend, for
their companion, that he might have had of a Jesuit in petticoats,
a representative of the recruiting interests of the Catholic
Church. The Catholic Church, for Waymarsh-that was to say the
enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and far-reaching quivering
groping tentacles—was exactly society, exactly the multiplication
of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types and tones,
exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism;
exactly in short Europe.

There was light for observation, however, in an incident that
occurred just before they turned back to luncheon. Waymarsh had
been for a quarter of an hour exceptionally mute and distant, and
something, or other—Strether was never to make out exactly
what—proved, as it were, too much for him after his comrades had
stood for three minutes taking in, while they leaned on an old
balustrade that guarded the edge of the Row, a particularly crooked
and huddled street-view. "He thinks us sophisticated, he thinks us
worldly, he thinks us wicked, he thinks us all sorts of queer
things," Strether reflected; for wondrous were the vague quantities
our friend had within a couple of short days acquired the habit of
conveniently and conclusively lumping together. There seemed
moreover a direct connexion between some such inference and a
sudden grim dash taken by Waymarsh to the opposite side. This
movement was startlingly sudden, and his companions at first
supposed him to have espied, to be pursuing, the glimpse of an
acquaintance. They next made out, however, that an open door had
instantly received him, and they then recognised him as engulfed in
the establishment of a jeweller, behind whose glittering front he
was lost to view. The fact had somehow the note of a demonstration,
and it left each of the others to show a face almost of fear. But
Miss Gostrey broke into a laugh. "What's the matter with him?"

"Well," said Strether, "he can't stand it."

"But can't stand what?"

"Anything. Europe."

"Then how will that jeweller help him?"

Strether seemed to make it out, from their position, between the
interstices of arrayed watches, of close-hung dangling gewgaws.
"You'll see."

"Ah that's just what—if he buys anything—I'm afraid of: that I
shall see something rather dreadful."

Strether studied the finer appearances. "He may buy
everything."

"Then don't you think we ought to follow him?"

"Not for worlds. Besides we can't. We're paralysed. We exchange
a long scared look, we publicly tremble. The thing is, you see, we
'realise.' He has struck for freedom."

She wondered but she laughed. "Ah what a price to pay! And I was
preparing some for him so cheap."

"No, no," Strether went on, frankly amused now; "don't call it
that: the kind of freedom you deal in is dear." Then as to justify
himself: "Am I not in MY way trying it? It's this."

"Being here, you mean, with me?"

"Yes, and talking to you as I do. I've known you a few hours,
and I've known HIM all my life; so that if the ease I thus take
with you about him isn't magnificent"—and the thought of it held
him a moment—"why it's rather base."

"It's magnificent!" said Miss Gostrey to make an end of it. "And
you should hear," she added, "the ease I take—and I above all
intend to take—with Mr. Waymarsh."

Strether thought. "About ME? Ah that's no equivalent. The
equivalent would be Waymarsh's himself serving me up—his
remorseless analysis of me. And he'll never do that"—he was sadly
clear. "He'll never remorselessly analyse me." He quite held her
with the authority of this. "He'll never say a word to you about
me."

She took it in; she did it justice; yet after an instant her
reason, her restless irony, disposed of it. "Of course he won't.
For what do you take people, that they're able to say words about
anything, able remorselessly to analyse? There are not many like
you and me. It will be only because he's too stupid."

It stirred in her friend a sceptical echo which was at the same
time the protest of the faith of years. "Waymarsh stupid?"

"Compared with you."

Strether had still his eyes on the jeweller's front, and he
waited a moment to answer. "He's a success of a kind that I haven't
approached."

"Do you mean he has made money?"

"He makes it—to my belief. And I," said Strether, "though with a
back quite as bent, have never made anything. I'm a perfectly
equipped failure."

He feared an instant she'd ask him if he meant he was poor; and
he was glad she didn't, for he really didn't know to what the truth
on this unpleasant point mightn't have prompted her. She only,
however, confirmed his assertion. "Thank goodness you're a
failure—it's why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too
hideous. Look about you—look at the successes. Would you BE one, on
your honour? Look, moreover," she continued, "at me."

For a little accordingly their eyes met. "I see," Strether
returned. "You too are out of it."

"The superiority you discern in me," she concurred, "announces
my futility. If you knew," she sighed, "the dreams of my youth! But
our realities are what has brought us together. We're beaten
brothers in arms."

He smiled at her kindly enough, but he shook his head. "It
doesn't alter the fact that you're expensive. You've cost me
already—!"