Book Third
I
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."
"Then what did you come over for?"
"Well, I suppose exactly to see for myself--without their aid."
"Then what do you want mine for?"
"Oh," Strether laughed, "you're not one of THEM! I do know what you
know."
As, however, this last assertion caused Waymarsh again to look at
him hard--such being the latter's doubt of its implications--he
felt his justification lame. Which was still more the case when
Waymarsh presently said: "Look here, Strether. Quit this."
Our friend smiled with a doubt of his own. "Do you mean my tone?"
"No--damn your tone. I mean your nosing round. Quit the whole job.
Let them stew in their juice. You're being used for a thing you
ain't fit for. People don't take a fine-tooth comb to groom a
horse."
"Am I a fine-tooth comb?" Strether laughed. "It's something I never
called myself!"
"It's what you are, all the same. You ain't so young as you were,
but you've kept your teeth."
He acknowledged his friend's humour. "Take care I don't get them
into YOU! You'd like them, my friends at home, Waymarsh," he
declared; "you'd really particularly like them. And I know"--it was
slightly irrelevant, but he gave it sudden and singular force--"I
know they'd like you!"
"Oh don't work them off on ME!" Waymarsh groaned.
Yet Strether still lingered with his hands in his pockets. "It's
really quite as indispensable as I say that Chad should be got
back."
"Indispensable to whom? To you?"
"Yes," Strether presently said.
"Because if you get him you also get Mrs. Newsome?"
Strether faced it. "Yes."
"And if you don't get him you don't get her?"
It might be merciless, but he continued not to flinch. "I think it
might have some effect on our personal understanding. Chad's of
real importance--or can easily become so if he will--to the
business."
"And the business is of real importance to his mother's husband?"
"Well, I naturally want what my future wife wants. And the thing
will be much better if we have our own man in it."
"If you have your own man in it, in other words," Waymarsh said,
"you'll marry--you personally--more money. She's already rich, as I
understand you, but she'll be richer still if the business can be
made to boom on certain lines that you've laid down."
"I haven't laid them down," Strether promptly returned. "Mr. Newsome
--who knew extraordinarily well what he was about--laid them down
ten years ago."
Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake of his mane, THAT
didn't matter! "You're fierce for the boom anyway."
His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice of the charge.
"I can scarcely be called fierce, I think, when I so freely take my
chance of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced in a
sense counter to Mrs. Newsome's own feelings."
Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look. "I see. You're
afraid yourself of being squared. But you're a humbug," he added,
all the same."
"Oh!" Strether quickly protested.
"Yes, you ask me for protection--which makes you very interesting;
and then you won't take it. You say you want to be squashed--"
"Ah but not so easily! Don't you see," Strether demanded "where my
interest, as already shown you, lies? It lies in my not being
squared. If I'm squared where's my marriage? If I miss my errand I
miss that; and if I miss that I miss everything--I'm nowhere."
Waymarsh--but all relentlessly--took this in. "What do I care where
you are if you're spoiled?"
Their eyes met on it an instant. "Thank you awfully," Strether at
last said. "But don't you think HER judgement of that--?"
"Ought to content me? No."
It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that
Strether again laughed. "You do her injustice. You really MUST know
her. Good-night."
He breakfasted with Mr. Bilham on the morrow, and, as
inconsequently befell, with Waymarsh massively of the party. The
latter announced, at the eleventh hour and much to his friend's
surprise, that, damn it, he would as soon join him as do anything
else; on which they proceeded together, strolling in a state of
detachment practically luxurious for them to the Boulevard
Malesherbes, a couple engaged that day with the sharp spell of
Paris as confessedly, it might have been seen, as any couple
among the daily thousands so compromised. They walked, wandered,
wondered and, a little, lost themselves; Strether hadn't had for
years so rich a consciousness of time--a bag of gold into which
he constantly dipped for a handful. It was present to him that
when the little business with Mr. Bilham should be over he would
still have shining hours to use absolutely as he liked. There was
no great pulse of haste yet in this process of saving Chad; nor
was that effect a bit more marked as he sat, half an hour later,
with his legs under Chad's mahogany, with Mr. Bilham on one side,
with a friend of Mr. Bilham's on the other, with Waymarsh
stupendously opposite, and with the great hum of Paris coming up
in softness, vagueness-for Strether himself indeed already
positive sweetness--through the sunny windows toward which, the
day before, his curiosity had raised its wings from below. The
feeling strongest with him at that moment had borne fruit almost
faster than he could taste it, and Strether literally felt at the
present hour that there was a precipitation in his fate. He had
known nothing and nobody as he stood in the street; but hadn't
his view now taken a bound in the direction of every one and of
every thing?
"What's he up to, what's he up to?"--something like that was at
the back of his head all the while in respect to little Bilham;
but meanwhile, till he should make out, every one and every thing
were as good as represented for him by the combination of his
host and the lady on his left. The lady on his left, the lady
thus promptly and ingeniously invited to "meet" Mr. Strether and
Mr. Waymarsh--it was the way she herself expressed her case--was
a very marked person, a person who had much to do with our
friend's asking himself if the occasion weren't in its essence
the most baited, the most gilded of traps. Baited it could
properly be called when the repast was of so wise a savour, and
gilded surrounding objects seemed inevitably to need to be when
Miss Barrace--which was the lady's name--looked at them with
convex Parisian eyes and through a glass with a remarkably long
tortoise-shell handle. Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect and
eminently gay, highly adorned, perfectly familiar, freely
contradictions and reminding him of some last-century portrait of
a clever head without powder--why Miss Barrace should have been
in particular the note of a "trap" Strether couldn't on the spot
have explained; he blinked in the light of a conviction that he
should know later on, and know well--as it came over him, for
that matter, with force, that he should need to. He wondered what
he was to think exactly of either of his new friends; since the
young man, Chad's intimate and deputy, had, in thus constituting
the scene, practised so much more subtly than he had been
prepared for, and since in especial Miss Barrace, surrounded
clearly by every consideration, hadn't scrupled to figure as a
familiar object. It was interesting to him to feel that he was in
the presence of new measures, other standards, a different scale
of relations, and that evidently here were a happy pair who
didn't think of things at all as he and Waymarsh thought. Nothing
was less to have been calculated in the business than that it
should now be for him as if he and Waymarsh were comparatively
quite at one.
The latter was magnificent--this at least was an assurance
privately given him by Miss Barrace. "Oh your friend's a type,
the grand old American--what shall one call it? The Hebrew
prophet, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, who used when I was a little girl in
the Rue Montaigne to come to see my father and who was usually
the American Minister to the Tuileries or some other court. I
haven't seen one these ever so many years; the sight of it warms
my poor old chilled heart; this specimen is wonderful; in the
right quarter, you know, he'll have a succes fou." Strether
hadn't failed to ask what the right quarter might be, much as he
required his presence of mind to meet such a change in their
scheme. "Oh the artist-quarter and that kind of thing; HERE
already, for instance, as you see." He had been on the point of
echoing "'Here'?--is THIS the artist-quarter?" but she had
already disposed of the question with a wave of all her tortoise-shell
and an easy "Bring him to ME!" He knew on the spot how little he
should be able to bring him, for the very air was by this time,
to his sense, thick and hot with poor Waymarsh's judgement of it.
He was in the trap still more than his companion and, unlike
his companion, not making the best of it; which was precisely what
doubtless gave him his admirable sombre glow. Little did Miss Barrace
know that what was behind it was his grave estimate of her own laxity.
The general assumption with which our two friends had arrived had been
that of finding Mr. Bilham ready to conduct them to one or other of
those resorts of the earnest, the aesthetic fraternity which were shown
among the sights of Paris. In this character it would have justified
them in a proper insistence on discharging their score. Waymarsh's
only proviso at the last had been that nobody should pay for him;
but he found himself, as the occasion developed, paid for on a
scale as to which Strether privately made out that he already
nursed retribution. Strether was conscious across the table of
what worked in him, conscious when they passed back to the small
salon to which, the previous evening, he himself had made so rich
a reference; conscious most of all as they stepped out to the
balcony in which one would have had to be an ogre not to
recognise the perfect place for easy aftertastes. These things
were enhanced for Miss Barrace by a succession of excellent
cigarettes--acknowledged, acclaimed, as a part of the wonderful
supply left behind him by Chad--in an almost equal absorption of
which Strether found himself blindly, almost wildly pushing
forward. He might perish by the sword as well as by famine, and
he knew that his having abetted the lady by an excess that was
rare with him would count for little in the sum--as Waymarsh
might so easily add it up--of her licence. Waymarsh had smoked of
old, smoked hugely; but Waymarsh did nothing now, and that gave
him his advantage over people who took things up lightly just
when others had laid them heavily down. Strether had never
smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had
been only because of a reason. The reason, it now began to appear
even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke with.
It was this lady's being there at all, however, that was the
strange free thing; perhaps, since she WAS there, her smoking was
the least of her freedoms. If Strether had been sure at each
juncture of what--with Bilham in especial--she talked about, he
might have traced others and winced at them and felt Waymarsh
wince; but he was in fact so often at sea that his sense of the
range of reference was merely general and that he on several
different occasions guessed and interpreted only to doubt. He
wondered what they meant, but there were things he scarce thought
they could be supposed to mean, and "Oh no--not THAT!" was at the
end of most of his ventures. This was the very beginning with him
of a condition as to which, later on, it will be seen, he found
cause to pull himself up; and he was to remember the moment duly
as the first step in a process. The central fact of the place was
neither more nor less, when analysed--and a pressure superficial
sufficed--than the fundamental impropriety of Chad's situation,
round about which they thus seemed cynically clustered.
Accordingly, since they took it for granted, they took for
granted all that was in connexion with it taken for granted at
Woollett--matters as to which, verily, he had been reduced with
Mrs. Newsome to the last intensity of silence. That was the
consequence of their being too bad to be talked about, and was
the accompaniment, by the same token, of a deep conception of
their badness. It befell therefore that when poor Strether put it
to himself that their badness was ultimately, or perhaps even
insolently, what such a scene as the one before him was, so to
speak, built upon, he could scarce shirk the dilemma of reading a
roundabout echo of them into almost anything that came up. This,
he was well aware, was a dreadful necessity; but such was the
stern logic, he could only gather, of a relation to the irregular
life.
It was the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss
Barrace that was the insidious, the delicate marvel. He was eager
to concede that their relation to it was all indirect, for
anything else in him would have shown the grossness of bad
manners; but the indirectness was none the less consonant--THAT
was striking-with a grateful enjoyment of everything that was
Chad's. They spoke of him repeatedly, invoking his good name and
good nature, and the worst confusion of mind for Strether was
that all their mention of him was of a kind to do him honour.
They commended his munificence and approved his taste, and in
doing so sat down, as it seemed to Strether, in the very soil out
of which these things flowered. Our friend's final predicament
was that he himself was sitting down, for the time, WITH them,
and there was a supreme moment at which, compared with his
collapse, Waymarsh's erectness affected him as really high. One
thing was certain--he saw he must make up his mind. He must
approach Chad, must wait for him, deal with him, master him, but
he mustn't dispossess himself of the faculty of seeing things as
they were. He must bring him to HIM--not go himself, as it were,
so much of the way. He must at any rate be clearer as to what--
should he continue to do that for convenience--he was still
condoning. It was on the detail of this quantity--and what could
the fact be but mystifying?-that Bilham and Miss Barrace threw so
little light. So there they were.
