II
He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he
knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that
Waymarsh, even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own
prompt and lucid allusions and enquiries, by their having publicly
partaken of dinner in her company, and by another stroll, to which
she was not a stranger, out into the town to look at the cathedral
by moonlight--it was a blank that the resident of Milrose, though
admitting acquaintance with the Munsters, professed himself unable
to fill. He had no recollection of Miss Gostrey, and two or three
questions that she put to him about those members of his circle
had, to Strether's observation, the same effect he himself had
already more directly felt--the effect of appearing to place all
knowledge, for the time, on this original woman's side. It
interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such relation for
her with his friend as there could possibly be a question of, and
it particularly struck him that they were to be marked altogether
in Waymarsh's quarter. This added to his own sense of having gone
far with her-gave him an early illustration of a much shorter
course. There was a certitude he immediately grasped--a conviction
that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever degree
of acquaintances to profit by her.
There had been after the first interchange among the three a talk
of some five minutes in the hall, and then the two men had
adjourned to the garden, Miss Gostrey for the time disappearing.
Strether in due course accompanied his friend to the room he had
bespoken and had, before going out, scrupulously visited; where at
the end of another half-hour he had no less discreetly left him.
On leaving him he repaired straight to his own room, but with the
prompt effect of feeling the compass of that chamber resented by
his condition. There he enjoyed at once the first consequence of
their reunion. A place was too small for him after it that had
seemed large enough before. He had awaited it with something he
would have been sorry, have been almost ashamed not to recognise as
emotion, yet with a tacit assumption at the same time that emotion
would in the event find itself relieved. The actual oddity was that
he was only more excited; and his excitement-to which indeed he
would have found it difficult instantly to give a name--brought him
once more downstairs and caused him for some minutes vaguely to
wander. He went once more to the garden; he looked into the public
room, found Miss Gostrey writing letters and backed out; he roamed,
fidgeted and wasted time; but he was to have his more intimate
session with his friend before the evening closed.
It was late--not till Strether had spent an hour upstairs with him--
that this subject consented to betake himself to doubtful rest.
Dinner and the subsequent stroll by moonlight--a dream, on
Strether's part, of romantic effects rather prosaically merged in a
mere missing of thicker coats--had measurably intervened, and this
midnight conference was the result of Waymarsh's having (when they
were free, as he put it, of their fashionable friend) found the
smoking-room not quite what he wanted, and yet bed what he wanted
less. His most frequent form of words was that he knew himself, and
they were applied on this occasion to his certainty of not
sleeping. He knew himself well enough to know that he should have a
night of prowling unless he should succeed, as a preliminary, in
getting prodigiously tired. If the effort directed to this end
involved till a late hour the presence of Strether--consisted,
that is, in the detention of the latter for full discourse--there
was yet an impression of minor discipline involved for our friend
in the picture Waymarsh made as he sat in trousers and shirt on the
edge of his couch. With his long legs extended and his large back
much bent, he nursed alternately, for an almost incredible time,
his elbows and his beard. He struck his visitor as extremely, as
almost wilfully uncomfortable; yet what had this been for Strether,
from that first glimpse of him disconcerted in the porch of the
hotel, but the predominant notes. The discomfort was in a manner
contagious, as well as also in a manner inconsequent and unfounded;
the visitor felt that unless he should get used to it--or unless
Waymarsh himself should--it would constitute a menace for his own
prepared, his own already confirmed, consciousness of the
agreeable. On their first going up together to the room Strether
had selected for him Waymarsh had looked it over in silence and
with a sigh that represented for his companion, if not the habit of
disapprobation, at least the despair of felicity; and this look had
recurred to Strether as the key of much he had since observed.
"Europe," he had begun to gather from these things, had up to now
rather failed of its message to him; he hadn't got into tune with
it and had at the end of three months almost renounced any such
expectation.
He really appeared at present to insist on that by just perching
there with the gas in his eyes. This of itself somehow conveyed the
futility of single rectifications in a multiform failure. He had a
large handsome head and a large sallow seamed face--a striking
significant physiognomic total, the upper range of which, the great
political brow, the thick loose hair, the dark fuliginous eyes,
recalled even to a generation whose standard had dreadfully
deviated the impressive image, familiar by engravings and busts, of
some great national worthy of the earlier part of the mid-century.
He was of the personal type--and it was an element in the power and
promise that in their early time Strether had found in him--of the
American statesman, the statesman trained in "Congressional halls,"
of an elder day. The legend had been in later years that as the
lower part of his face, which was weak, and slightly crooked,
spoiled the likeness, this was the real reason for the growth of
his beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those not in the
secret. He shook his mane; he fixed, with his admirable eyes, his
auditor or his observer; he wore no glasses and had a way, partly
formidable, yet also partly encouraging, as from a representative
to a constituent, of looking very hard at those who approached him.
He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you enter.
Strether, who hadn't seen him for so long an interval, apprehended
him now with a freshness of taste, and had perhaps never done him
such ideal justice. The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than they
need have been for the career; but that only meant, after all, that
the career was itself expressive. What it expressed at midnight in
the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject of it had,
at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight in time, a general
nervous collapse. But this very proof of the full life, as the full
life was understood at Milrose, would have made to Strether's
imagination an element in which Waymarsh could have floated easily
had he only consented to float. Alas nothing so little resembled
floating as the rigour with which, on the edge of his bed, he
hugged his posture of prolonged impermanence. It suggested to his
comrade something that always, when kept up, worried him--a person
established in a railway-coach with a forward inclination. It
represented the angle at which poor Waymarsh was to sit through the
ordeal of Europe.
Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions, the
absorption and embarrassment of each, they had not, at home, during
years before this sudden brief and almost bewildering reign of
comparative ease, found so much as a day for a meeting; a fact that
was in some degree an explanation of the sharpness with which most
of his friend's features stood out to Strether. Those he had lost
sight of since the early time came back to him; others that it was
never possible to forget struck him now as sitting, clustered and
expectant, like a somewhat defiant family-group, on the doorstep of
their residence. The room was narrow for its length, and the
occupant of the bed thrust so far a pair of slippered feet that the
visitor had almost to step over them in his recurrent rebounds from
his chair to fidget back and forth. There were marks the friends
made on things to talk about, and on things not to, and one of the
latter in particular fell like the tap of chalk on the blackboard.
Married at thirty, Waymarsh had not lived with his wife for fifteen
years, and it came up vividly between them in the glare of the gas
that Strether wasn't to ask about her. He knew they were still
separate and that she lived at hotels, travelled in Europe, painted
her face and wrote her husband abusive letters, of not one of
which, to a certainty, that sufferer spared himself the perusal;
but he respected without difficulty the cold twilight that had
settled on this side of his companion's life. It was a province in
which mystery reigned and as to which Waymarsh had never spoken the
informing word. Strether, who wanted to do him the highest justice
wherever he COULD do it, singularly admired him for the dignity of
this reserve, and even counted it as one of the grounds--grounds
all handled and numbered--for ranking him, in the range of their
acquaintance, as a success. He WAS a success, Waymarsh, in spite of
overwork, or prostration, of sensible shrinkage, of his wife's
letters and of his not liking Europe. Strether would have reckoned
his own career less futile had he been able to put into it anything
so handsome as so much fine silence. One might one's self easily
have left Mrs. Waymarsh; and one would assuredly have paid one's
tribute to the ideal in covering with that attitude the derision of
having been left by her. Her husband had held his tongue and had
made a large income; and these were in especial the achievements as
to which Strether envied him. Our friend had had indeed on his side
too a subject for silence, which he fully appreciated; but it was a
matter of a different sort, and the figure of the income he had
arrived at had never been high enough to look any one in the face.
"I don't know as I quite see what you require it for. You don't
appear sick to speak of." It was of Europe Waymarsh thus finally
spoke.
"Well," said Strether, who fell as much as possible into step, "I
guess I don't FEEL sick now that I've started. But I had pretty
well run down before I did start."
Waymarsh raised his melancholy look. "Ain't you about up to your
usual average?"
It was not quite pointedly sceptical, but it seemed somehow a plea
for the purest veracity, and it thereby affected our friend as the
very voice of Milrose. He had long since made a mental distinction--
though never in truth daring to betray it--between the voice of
Milrose and the voice even of Woollett. It was the former he felt,
that was most in the real tradition. There had been occasions in
his past when the sound of it had reduced him to temporary
confusion, and the present, for some reason, suddenly became such
another. It was nevertheless no light matter that the very effect
of his confusion should be to make him again prevaricate. "That
description hardly does justice to a man to whom it has done such a
lot of good to see YOU."
Waymarsh fixed on his washing-stand the silent detached stare with
which Milrose in person, as it were, might have marked the
unexpectedness of a compliment from Woollett, and Strether for his
part, felt once more like Woollett in person. "I mean," his friend
presently continued, "that your appearance isn't as bad as I've
seen it: it compares favourably with what it was when I last
noticed it." On this appearance Waymarsh's eyes yet failed to rest;
it was almost as if they obeyed an instinct of propriety, and the
effect was still stronger when, always considering the basin and
jug, he added: "You've filled out some since then."
"I'm afraid I have," Strether laughed: "one does fill out some with
all one takes in, and I've taken in, I dare say, more than I've
natural room for. I was dog-tired when I sailed." It had the oddest
sound of cheerfulness.
"I was dog-tired," his companion returned, "when I arrived, and it's
this wild hunt for rest that takes all the life out of me. The fact
is, Strether--and it's a comfort to have you here at last to say it to;
though I don't know, after all, that I've really waited; I've told
it to people I've met in the cars--the fact is, such a country as this
ain't my KIND of country anyway. There ain't a country I've seen over
here that DOES seem my kind. Oh I don't say but what there are plenty
of pretty places and remarkable old things; but the trouble is that I
don't seem to feel anywhere in tune. That's one of the reasons why I
suppose I've gained so little. I haven't had the first sign of that
lift I was led to expect." With this he broke out more earnestly.
"Look here--I want to go back."
His eyes were all attached to Strether's now, for he was one of the
men who fully face you when they talk of themselves. This enabled
his friend to look at him hard and immediately to appear to the
highest advantage in his eyes by doing so. "That's a genial thing
to say to a fellow who has come out on purpose to meet you!"
Nothing could have been finer, on this, than Waymarsh's sombre
glow. "HAVE you come out on purpose?"
"Well--very largely."
"I thought from the way you wrote there was something back of it."
Strether hesitated. "Back of my desire to be with you?"
"Back of your prostration."
Strether, with a smile made more dim by a certain consciousness,
shook his head. "There are all the causes of it!"
"And no particular cause that seemed most to drive you?"
Our friend could at last conscientiously answer. "Yes. One. There
IS a matter that has had much to do with my coming out."
Waymarsh waited a little. "Too private to mention?"
"No, not too private--for YOU. Only rather complicated."
"Well," said Waymarsh, who had waited again, "I MAY lose my mind
over here, but I don't know as I've done so yet."
"Oh you shall have the whole thing. But not tonight."
Waymarsh seemed to sit stiffer and to hold his elbows tighter. "Why
not--if I can't sleep?"
"Because, my dear man, I CAN!"
"Then where's your prostration?"
"Just in that--that I can put in eight hours." And Strether brought
it out that if Waymarsh didn't "gain" it was because he didn't go
to bed: the result of which was, in its order, that, to do the
latter justice, he permitted his friend to insist on his really
getting settled. Strether, with a kind coercive hand for it,
assisted him to this consummation, and again found his own part in
their relation auspiciously enlarged by the smaller touches of
lowering the lamp and seeing to a sufficiency of blanket. It
somehow ministered for him to indulgence to feel Waymarsh, who
looked unnaturally big and black in bed, as much tucked in as a
patient in a hospital and, with his covering up to his chin, as
much simplified by it He hovered in vague pity, to be brief, while
his companion challenged him out of the bedclothes. "Is she really
after you? Is that what's behind?"
Strether felt an uneasiness at the direction taken by his
companion's insight, but he played a little at uncertainty. "Behind
my coming out?"
"Behind your prostration or whatever. It's generally felt, you
know, that she follows you up pretty close."
Strether's candour was never very far off. "Oh it has occurred to
you that I'm literally running away from Mrs. Newsome?"
"Well, I haven't KNOWN but what you are. You're a very attractive
man, Strether. You've seen for yourself," said Waymarsh "what that
lady downstairs makes of it. Unless indeed," he rambled on with an
effect between the ironic and the anxious, "it's you who are after
HER. IS Mrs. Newsome OVER here?" He spoke as with a droll dread of
her.
It made his friend--though rather dimly--smile. "Dear no she's
safe, thank goodness--as I think I more and more feel--at home. She
thought of coming, but she gave it up. I've come in a manner
instead of her; and come to that extent--for you're right in your
inference--on her business. So you see there IS plenty of
connexion."
Waymarsh continued to see at least all there was. "Involving
accordingly the particular one I've referred to?"
Strether took another turn about the room, giving a twitch to his
companion's blanket and finally gaining the door. His feeling was
that of a nurse who had earned personal rest by having made
everything straight. "Involving more things than I can think of
breaking ground on now. But don't be afraid--you shall have them
from me: you'll probably find yourself having quite as much of them
as you can do with. I shall--if we keep together--very much depend
on your impression of some of them."
Waymarsh's acknowledgement of this tribute was characteristically
indirect. "You mean to say you don't believe we WILL keep
together?"
"I only glance at the danger," Strether paternally said, "because
when I hear you wail to go back I seem to see you open up such
possibilities of folly."
Waymarsh took it--silent a little--like a large snubbed child "What
are you going to do with me?"
It was the very question Strether himself had put to Miss Gostrey,
and he wondered if he had sounded like that. But HE at least could
be more definite. "I'm going to take you right down to London."
"Oh I've been down to London!" Waymarsh more softly moaned. "I've
no use, Strether, for anything down there."
"Well," said Strether, good-humouredly, "I guess you've some use
for me."
"So I've got to go?"
"Oh you've got to go further yet."
"Well," Waymarsh sighed, "do your damnedest! Only you WILL tell me
before you lead me on all the way--?"
Our friend had again so lost himself, both for amusement and for
contrition, in the wonder of whether he had made, in his own
challenge that afternoon, such another figure, that he for an
instant missed the thread. "Tell you--?"
"Why what you've got on hand."
Strether hesitated. "Why it's such a matter as that even if I
positively wanted I shouldn't be able to keep it from you."
Waymarsh gloomily gazed. "What does that mean then but that your
trip is just FOR her?"
"For Mrs. Newsome? Oh it certainly is, as I say. Very much."
"Then why do you also say it's for me?"
Strether, in impatience, violently played with his latch. "It's
simple enough. It's for both of you."
Waymarsh at last turned over with a groan. "Well, I won't marry
you!"
"Neither, when it comes to that--!" But the visitor had already
laughed and escaped.
