II
Strether quitted the station half an hour later in different
company. Chad had taken charge, for the journey to the hotel, of
Sarah, Mamie, the maid and the luggage, all spaciously installed
and conveyed; and it was only after the four had rolled away that
his companion got into a cab with Jim. A strange new feeling had
come over Strether, in consequence of which his spirits had risen;
it was as if what had occurred on the alighting of his critics had
been something other than his fear, though his fear had vet not
been of an instant scene of violence. His impression had been
nothing but what was inevitable--he said that to himself; yet
relief and reassurance had softly dropped upon him. Nothing could
be so odd as to be indebted for these things to the look of faces
and the sound of voices that had been with him to satiety, as he
might have said, for years; but he now knew, all the same, how
uneasy he had felt; that was brought home to him by his present
sense of a respite. It had come moreover in the flash of an eye, it
had come in the smile with which Sarah, whom, at the window of her
compartment, they had effusively greeted from the platform, rustled
down to them a moment later, fresh and handsome from her cool June
progress through the charming land. It was only a sign, but enough:
she was going to be gracious and unallusive, she was going to play
the larger game--which was still more apparent, after she had
emerged from Chad's arms, in her direct greeting to the valued
friend of her family.
Strether WAS then as much as ever the valued friend of her family,
it was something he could at all events go on with; and the manner
of his response to it expressed even for himself how little he had
enjoyed the prospect of ceasing to figure in that likeness. He had
always seen Sarah gracious--had in fact rarely seen her shy or dry,
her marked thin-lipped smile, intense without brightness and as
prompt to act as the scrape of a safety-match; the protrusion of
her rather remarkably long chin, which in her case represented
invitation and urbanity, and not, as in most others, pugnacity and
defiance; the penetration of her voice to a distance, the general
encouragement and approval of her manner, were all elements with
which intercourse had made him familiar, but which he noted today
almost as if she had been a new acquaintance. This first glimpse of
her had given a brief but vivid accent to her resemblance to her
mother; he could have taken her for Mrs. Newsome while she met his
eyes as the train rolled into the station. It was an impression
that quickly dropped; Mrs. Newsome was much handsomer, and while
Sarah inclined to the massive her mother had, at an age, still the
girdle of a maid; also the latter's chin was rather short, than
long, and her smile, by good fortune, much more, oh ever so much
more, mercifully vague. Strether had seen Mrs. Newsome reserved; he
had literally heard her silent, though he had never known her
unpleasant. It was the case with Mrs. Pocock that he had known HER
unpleasant, even though he had never known her not affable. She had
forms of affability that were in a high degree assertive; nothing
for instance had ever been more striking than that she was affable
to Jim.
What had told in any case at the window of the train was her high
clear forehead, that forehead which her friends, for some reason,
always thought of as a "brow"; the long reach of her eyes--it came
out at this juncture in such a manner as to remind him, oddly
enough, also of that of Waymarsh's; and the unusual gloss of her
dark hair, dressed and hatted, after her mother's refined example,
with such an avoidance of extremes that it was always spoken of at
Woollett as "their own." Though this analogy dropped as soon as she
was on the platform it had lasted long enough to make him feel all
the advantage, as it were, of his relief. The woman at home, the
woman to whom he was attached, was before him just long enough to
give him again the measure of the wretchedness, in fact really of
the shame, of their having to recognise the formation, between
them, of a "split." He had taken this measure in solitude and
meditation: but the catastrophe, as Sarah steamed up, looked for
its seconds unprecedentedly dreadful--or proved, more exactly,
altogether unthinkable; so that his finding something free and
familiar to respond to brought with it an instant renewal of his
loyalty. He had suddenly sounded the whole depth, had gasped at
what he might have lost.
Well, he could now, for the quarter of an hour of their detention
hover about the travellers as soothingly as if their direct message
to him was that he had lost nothing. He wasn't going to have Sarah
write to her mother that night that he was in any way altered or
strange. There had been times enough for a month when it had seemed
to him that he was strange, that he was altered, in every way; but
that was a matter for himself; he knew at least whose business it
was not; it was not at all events such a circumstance as Sarah's
own unaided lights would help her to. Even if she had come out to
flash those lights more than yet appeared she wouldn't make much
headway against mere pleasantness. He counted on being able to be
merely pleasant to the end, and if only from incapacity moreover to
formulate anything different. He couldn't even formulate to himself
his being changed and queer; it had taken place, the process,
somewhere deep down; Maria Gostrey had caught glimpses of it; but
how was he to fish it up, even if he desired, for Mrs. Pocock? This
was then the spirit in which he hovered, and with the easier throb
in it much indebted furthermore to the impression of high and
established adequacy as a pretty girl promptly produced in him by
Mamie. He had wondered vaguely--turning over many things in the
fidget of his thoughts--if Mamie WERE as pretty as Woollett
published her; as to which issue seeing her now again was to be so
swept away by Woollett's opinion that this consequence really let
loose for the imagination an avalanche of others. There were
positively five minutes in which the last word seemed of necessity
to abide with a Woollett represented by a Mamie. This was the sort
of truth the place itself would feel; it would send her forth in
confidence; it would point to her with triumph; it would take its
stand on her with assurance; it would be conscious of no
requirements she didn't meet, of no question she couldn't answer.
Well, it was right, Strether slipped smoothly enough into the
cheerfulness of saying: granted that a community MIGHT be best
represented by a young lady of twenty-two, Mamie perfectly played
the part, played it as if she were used to it, and looked and spoke
and dressed the character. He wondered if she mightn't, in the high
light of Paris, a cool full studio-light, becoming yet treacherous,
show as too conscious of these matters; but the next moment he felt
satisfied that her consciousness was after all empty for its size,
rather too simple than too mixed, and that the kind way with her
would be not to take many things out of it, but to put as many as
possible in. She was robust and conveniently tall; just a trifle
too bloodlessly fair perhaps, but with a pleasant public familiar
radiance that affirmed her vitality. She might have been
"receiving" for Woollett, wherever she found herself, and there was
something in her manner, her tone, her motion, her pretty blue
eyes, her pretty perfect teeth and her very small, too small, nose,
that immediately placed her, to the fancy, between the windows of a
hot bright room in which voices were high--up at that end to which
people were brought to be "presented." They were there to
congratulate, these images, and Strether's renewed vision, on this
hint, completed the idea. What Mamie was like was the happy bride,
the bride after the church and just before going away. She wasn't
the mere maiden, and yet was only as much married as that quantity
came to. She was in the brilliant acclaimed festal stage. Well,
might it last her long!
Strether rejoiced in these things for Chad, who was all genial
attention to the needs of his friends, besides having arranged that
his servant should reinforce him; the ladies were certainly
pleasant to see, and Mamie would be at any time and anywhere
pleasant to exhibit. She would look extraordinarily like his young
wife--the wife of a honeymoon, should he go about with her; but
that was his own affair--or perhaps it was hers; it was at any rate
something she couldn't help. Strether remembered how he had seen
him come up with Jeanne de Vionnet in Gloriani's garden, and the
fancy he had had about that--the fancy obscured now, thickly
overlaid with others; the recollection was during these minutes his
only note of trouble. He had often, in spite of himself, wondered
if Chad but too probably were not with Jeanne the object of a still
and shaded flame. It was on the cards that the child MIGHT be
tremulously in love, and this conviction now flickered up not a bit
the less for his disliking to think of it, for its being, in a
complicated situation, a complication the more, and for something
indescribable in Mamie, something at all events straightway lent
her by his own mind, something that gave her value, gave her
intensity and purpose, as the symbol of an opposition. Little
Jeanne wasn't really at all in question--how COULD she be?--yet
from the moment Miss Pocock had shaken her skirts on the platform,
touched up the immense bows of her hat and settled properly over
her shoulder the strap of her morocco-and-gilt travelling-satchel,
from that moment little Jeanne was opposed.
It was in the cab with Jim that impressions really crowded on
Strether, giving him the strangest sense of length of absence from
people among whom he had lived for years. Having them thus come out
to him was as if he had returned to find them: and the droll
promptitude of Jim's mental reaction threw his own initiation far
back into the past. Whoever might or mightn't be suited by what was
going on among them, Jim, for one, would certainly be: his instant
recognition--frank and whimsical--of what the affair was for HIM
gave Strether a glow of pleasure. "I say, you know, this IS about
my shape, and if it hadn't been for YOU--!" so he broke out as the
charming streets met his healthy appetite; and he wound up, after
an expressive nudge, with a clap of his companion's knee and an "Oh
you, you--you ARE doing it!" that was charged with rich meaning.
Strether felt in it the intention of homage, but, with a curiosity
otherwise occupied, postponed taking it up. What he was asking
himself for the time was how Sarah Pocock, in the opportunity
already given her, had judged her brother--from whom he himself, as
they finally, at the station, separated for their different
conveyances, had had a look into which he could read more than one
message. However Sarah was judging her brother, Chad's conclusion
about his sister, and about her husband and her husband's sister,
was at the least on the way not to fail of confidence. Strether
felt the confidence, and that, as the look between them was an
exchange, what he himself gave back was relatively vague. This
comparison of notes however could wait; everything struck him as
depending on the effect produced by Chad. Neither Sarah nor Mamie
had in any way, at the station--where they had had after all ample
time--broken out about it; which, to make up for this, was what our
friend had expected of Jim as soon as they should find themselves
together.
It was queer to him that he had that noiseless brush with Chad; an
ironic intelligence with this youth on the subject of his
relatives, an intelligence carried on under their nose and, as
might be said, at their expense--such a matter marked again for him
strongly the number of stages he had come; albeit that if the
number seemed great the time taken for the final one was but the
turn of a hand. He had before this had many moments of wondering if
he himself weren't perhaps changed even as Chad was changed. Only
what in Chad was conspicuous improvement--well, he had no name
ready for the working, in his own organism, of his own more timid
dose. He should have to see first what this action would amount to.
And for his occult passage with the young man, after all, the
directness of it had no greater oddity than the fact that the young
man's way with the three travellers should have been so happy a
manifestation. Strether liked him for it, on the spot, as he hadn't
yet liked him; it affected him while it lasted as he might have
been affected by some light pleasant perfect work of art: to that
degree that he wondered if they were really worthy of it, took it
in and did it justice; to that degree that it would have been
scarce a miracle if, there in the luggage-room, while they waited
for their things, Sarah had pulled his sleeve and drawn him aside.
"You're right; we haven't quite known what you mean, Mother and I,
but now we see. Chad's magnificent; what can one want more? If THIS
is the kind of thing--!" On which they might, as it were, have
embraced and begun to work together.
Ah how much, as it was, for all her bridling brightness--which was
merely general and noticed nothing--WOULD they work together?
Strether knew he was unreasonable; he set it down to his being
nervous: people couldn't notice everything and speak of everything
in a quarter of an hour. Possibly, no doubt, also, he made too much
of Chad's display. Yet, none the less, when, at the end of five
minutes, in the cab, Jim Pocock had said nothing either--hadn't
said, that is, what Strether wanted, though he had said much else--
it all suddenly bounced back to their being either stupid or
wilful. It was more probably on the whole the former; so that that
would be the drawback of the bridling brightness. Yes, they would
bridle and be bright; they would make the best of what was before
them, but their observation would fail; it would be beyond them;
they simply wouldn't understand. Of what use would it be then that
they had come?--if they weren't to be intelligent up to THAT point:
unless indeed he himself were utterly deluded and extravagant? Was
he, on this question of Chad's improvement, fantastic and away from
the truth? Did he live in a false world, a world that had grown
simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation--in the
face now of Jim's silence in particular--but the alarm of the vain
thing menaced by the touch of the real? Was this contribution of
the real possibly the mission of the Pococks?--had they come to
make the work of observation, as HE had practised observation,
crack and crumble, and to reduce Chad to the plain terms in which
honest minds could deal with him? Had they come in short to be sane
where Strether was destined to feel that he himself had only been
silly?
He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long
when once he had reflected that he would have been silly, in this
case, with Maria Gostrey and little Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet
and little Jeanne, with Lambert Strether, in fine, and above all
with Chad Newsome himself. Wouldn't it be found to have made more
for reality to be silly with these persons than sane with Sarah and
Jim? Jim in fact, he presently made up his mind, was individually
out of it; Jim didn't care; Jim hadn't come out either for Chad or
for him; Jim in short left the moral side to Sally and indeed
simply availed himself now, for the sense of recreation, of the
fact that he left almost everything to Sally. He was nothing
compared to Sally, and not so much by reason of Sally's temper and
will as by that of her more developed type and greater acquaintance
with the world. He quite frankly and serenely confessed, as he sat
there with Strether, that he felt his type hang far in the rear of
his wife's and still further, if possible, in the rear of his
sister's. Their types, he well knew, were recognised and acclaimed;
whereas the most a leading Woollett business-man could hope to
achieve socially, and for that matter industrially, was a certain
freedom to play into this general glamour.
The impression he made on our friend was another of the things that
marked our friend's road. It was a strange impression, especially
as so soon produced; Strether had received it, he judged, all in
the twenty minutes; it struck him at least as but in a minor degree
the work of the long Woollett years. Pocock was normally and
consentingly though not quite wittingly out of the question. It was
despite his being normal; it was despite his being cheerful; it was
despite his being a leading Woollett business-man; and the
determination of his fate left him thus perfectly usual--as
everything else about it was clearly, to his sense, not less so. He
seemed to say that there was a whole side of life on which the
perfectly usual WAS for leading Woollett business-men to be out of
the question. He made no more of it than that, and Strether, so far
as Jim was concerned, desired to make no more. Only Strether's
imagination, as always, worked, and he asked himself if this side
of life were not somehow connected, for those who figured on it
with the fact of marriage. Would HIS relation to it, had he married
ten years before, have become now the same as Pocock's? Might it
even become the same should he marry in a few months? Should he
ever know himself as much out of the question for Mrs. Newsome as
Jim knew himself--in a dim way--for Mrs. Jim?
To turn his eyes in that direction was to be personally reassured;
he was different from Pocock; he had affirmed himself differently
and was held after all in higher esteem. What none the less came
home to him, however, at this hour, was that the society over
there, that of which Sarah and Mamie--and, in a more eminent way,
Mrs. Newsome herself--were specimens, was essentially a society of
women, and that poor Jim wasn't in it. He himself Lambert Strether,
WAS as yet in some degree--which was an odd situation for a man;
but it kept coming back to him in a whimsical way that he should
perhaps find his marriage had cost him his place. This occasion
indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a time of sensible
exclusion for Jim, who was in a state of manifest response to the
charm of his adventure. Small and fat and constantly facetious,
straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he would have been
practically indistinguishable hadn't his constant preference for
light-grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very
little stories, done what it could for his identity. There were
signs in him, though none of them plaintive, of always paying for
others; and the principal one perhaps was just this failure of
type. It was with this that he paid, rather than with fatigue or
waste; and also doubtless a little with the effort of humour--never
irrelevant to the conditions, to the relations, with which he was
acquainted.
He gurgled his joy as they rolled through the happy streets; he
declared that his trip was a regular windfall, and that he wasn't
there, he was eager to remark, to hang back from anything: he
didn't know quite what Sally had come for, but HE had come for a
good time. Strether indulged him even while wondering if what Sally
wanted her brother to go back for was to become like her husband.
He trusted that a good time was to be, out and out, the programme
for all of them; and he assented liberally to Jim's proposal that,
disencumbered and irresponsible--his things were in the omnibus
with those of the others--they should take a further turn round
before going to the hotel. It wasn't for HIM to tackle Chad--it was
Sally's job; and as it would be like her, he felt, to open fire on
the spot, it wouldn't be amiss of them to hold off and give her
time. Strether, on his side, only asked to give her time; so he
jogged with his companion along boulevards and avenues, trying to
extract from meagre material some forecast of his catastrophe. He
was quick enough to see that Jim Pocock declined judgement, had
hovered quite round the outer edge of discussion and anxiety,
leaving all analysis of their question to the ladies alone and now
only feeling his way toward some small droll cynicism. It broke out
afresh, the cynicism--it had already shown a flicker--in a but
slightly deferred: "Well, hanged if I would if I were he!"
"You mean you wouldn't in Chad's place--?"
"Give up this to go back and boss the advertising!" Poor Jim, with
his arms folded and his little legs out in the open fiacre, drank
in the sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of
their vista to the other. "Why I want to come right out and live
here myself. And I want to live while I AM here too. I feel with
YOU--oh you've been grand, old man, and I've twigged--that it ain't
right to worry Chad. I don't mean to persecute him; I couldn't in
conscience. It's thanks to you at any rate that I'm here, and I'm
sure I'm much obliged. You're a lovely pair."
There were things in this speech that Strether let pass for the
time. "Don't you then think it important the advertising should be
thoroughly taken in hand? Chad WILL be, so far as capacity is
concerned," he went on, "the man to do it."
"Where did he get his capacity," Jim asked, "over here?"
"He didn't get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that over
here he hasn't inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for
business, an extraordinary head. He comes by that," Strether
explained, "honestly enough. He's in that respect his father's son,
and also--for she's wonderful in her way too--his mother's. He has
other tastes and other tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife
are quite right about his having that. He's very remarkable."
"Well, I guess he is!" Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. "But if
you've believed so in his making us hum, why have you so prolonged
the discussion? Don't you know we've been quite anxious about you?"
These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether
saw he must none the less make a choice and take a line. "Because,
you see, I've greatly liked it. I've liked my Paris, I dare say
I've liked it too much."
"Oh you old wretch!" Jim gaily exclaimed.
"But nothing's concluded," Strether went on. "The case is more
complex than it looks from Woollett."
"Oh well, it looks bad enough from Woollett!" Jim declared.
"Even after all I've written?"
Jim bethought himself. "Isn't it what you've written that has made
Mrs. Newsome pack us off? That at least and Chad's not turning up?"
Strether made a reflexion of his own. "I see. That she should do
something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore of
course come out to act."
"Oh yes," Jim concurred--"to act. But Sally comes out to act, you
know," he lucidly added, "every time she leaves the house. She
never comes out but she DOES act. She's acting moreover now for her
mother, and that fixes the scale." Then he wound up, opening all
his senses to it, with a renewed embrace of pleasant Paris. "We
haven't all the same at Woollett got anything like this."
Strether continued to consider. "I'm bound to say for you all that
you strike me as having arrived in a very mild and reasonable frame
of mind. You don't show your claws. I felt just now in Mrs. Pocock
no symptom of that. She isn't fierce," he went on. "I'm such a
nervous idiot that I thought she might be."
"Oh don't you know her well enough," Pocock asked, "to have noticed
that she never gives herself away, any more than her mother ever
does? They ain't fierce, either of 'em; they let you come quite
close. They wear their fur the smooth side out--the warm side in.
Do you know what they are?" Jim pursued as he looked about him,
giving the question, as Strether felt, but half his care--"do you
know what they are? They're about as intense as they can live."
"Yes"--and Strether's concurrence had a positive precipitation;
"they're about as intense as they can live."
"They don't lash about and shake the cage," said Jim, who seemed
pleased with his analogy; "and it's at feeding-time that they're
quietest. But they always get there."
"They do indeed--they always get there!" Strether replied with a
laugh that justified his confession of nervousness. He disliked to
be talking sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he could have
talked insincerely. But there was something he wanted to know, a
need created in him by her recent intermission, by his having
given from the first so much, as now more than ever appeared to
him, and got so little. It was as if a queer truth in his
companion's metaphor had rolled over him with a rush. She HAD been
quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her,
out of the big bowl of all his recent free communication, his
vividness and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even his eloquence,
while the current of her response had steadily run thin. Jim
meanwhile however, it was true, slipped characteristically into
shallowness from the moment he ceased to speak out of the
experience of a husband.
"But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before
her. If he doesn't work that for all it's worth--!" He sighed with
contingent pity at his brother-in-law's possible want of resource.
"He has worked it on YOU, pretty well, eh?" and he asked the next
moment if there were anything new at the Varieties, which he
pronounced in the American manner. They talked about the
Varieties--Strether confessing to a knowledge which produced again
on Pocock's part a play of innuendo as vague as a nursery-rhyme,
yet as aggressive as an elbow in his side; and they finished their
drive under the protection of easy themes. Strether waited to the
end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim had seen Chad as
different; and he could scarce have explained the discouragement
he drew from the absence of this testimony. It was what he had
taken his own stand on, so far as he had taken a stand; and if
they were all only going to see nothing he had only wasted his
time. He gave his friend till the very last moment, till they had
come into sight of the hotel; and when poor Pocock only continued
cheerful and envious and funny he fairly grew to dislike him, to
feel him extravagantly common. If they were ALL going to see
nothing!--Strether knew, as this came back to him, that he was
also letting Pocock represent for him what Mrs. Newsome wouldn't
see. He went on disliking, in the light of Jim's commonness, to
talk to him about that lady; yet just before the cab pulled up he
knew the extent of his desire for the real word from Woollett.
"Has Mrs. Newsome at all given way--?"
"'Given way'?"--Jim echoed it with the practical derision of his
sense of a long past.
"Under the strain, I mean, of hope deferred, of disappointment
repeated and thereby intensified."
"Oh is she prostrate, you mean?"--he had his categories in hand.
"Why yes, she's prostrate--just as Sally is. But they're never so
lively, you know, as when they're prostrate."
"Ah Sarah's prostrate?" Strether vaguely murmured.
"It's when they're prostrate that they most sit up."
"And Mrs. Newsome's sitting up?"
"All night, my boy--for YOU!" And Jim fetched him, with a vulgar
little guffaw, a thrust that gave relief to the picture. But he
had got what he wanted. He felt on the spot that this WAS the real
word from Woollett. "So don't you go home!" Jim added while he
alighted and while his friend, letting him profusely pay the
cabman, sat on in a momentary muse. Strether wondered if that
were the real word too.
