III
There they were yet again, accordingly, for two days more; when
Strether, on being, at Mrs. Pocock's hotel, ushered into that
lady's salon, found himself at first assuming a mistake on the part
of the servant who had introduced him and retired. The occupants
hadn't come in, for the room looked empty as only a room can look
in Paris, of a fine afternoon when the faint murmur of the huge
collective life, carried on out of doors, strays among scattered
objects even as a summer air idles in a lonely garden. Our friend
looked about and hesitated; observed, on the evidence of a table
charged with purchases and other matters, that Sarah had become
possessed--by no aid from HIM--of the last number of the
salmon-coloured Revue; noted further that Mamie appeared to have
received a present of Fromentin's "Maitres d'Autrefois" from Chad,
who had written her name on the cover; and pulled up at the sight of
a heavy letter addressed in a hand he knew. This letter, forwarded
by a banker and arriving in Mrs. Pocock's absence, had been placed
in evidence, and it drew from the fact of its being unopened a sudden
queer power to intensify the reach of its author. It brought home
to him the scale on which Mrs. Newsome--for she had been copious
indeed this time--was writing to her daughter while she kept HIM in
durance; and it had altogether such an effect upon him as made him
for a few minutes stand still and breathe low. In his own room, at
his own hotel, he had dozens of well-filled envelopes superscribed
in that character; and there was actually something in the renewal
of his interrupted vision of the character that played straight
into the so frequent question of whether he weren't already
disinherited beyond appeal. It was such an assurance as the sharp
downstrokes of her pen hadn't yet had occasion to give him; but
they somehow at the present crisis stood for a probable
absoluteness in any decree of the writer. He looked at Sarah's name
and address, in short, as if he had been looking hard into her
mother's face, and then turned from it as if the face had declined
to relax. But since it was in a manner as if Mrs. Newsome were
thereby all the more, instead of the less, in the room, and were
conscious, sharply and sorely conscious, of himself, so he felt
both held and hushed, summoned to stay at least and take his
punishment. By staying, accordingly, he took it--creeping softly
and vaguely about and waiting for Sarah to come in. She WOULD come
in if he stayed long enough, and he had now more than ever the
sense of her success in leaving him a prey to anxiety. It wasn't to
be denied that she had had a happy instinct, from the point of view
of Woollett, in placing him thus at the mercy of her own initiative.
It was very well to try to say he didn't care--that she might
break ground when she would, might never break it at all if she
wouldn't, and that he had no confession whatever to wait upon her
with: he breathed from day to day an air that damnably required
clearing, and there were moments when he quite ached to precipitate
that process. He couldn't doubt that, should she only oblige him by
surprising him just as he then was, a clarifying scene of some sort
would result from the concussion.
He humbly circulated in this spirit till he suddenly had a fresh
arrest. Both the windows of the room stood open to the balcony, but
it was only now that, in the glass of the leaf of one of them,
folded back, he caught a reflexion quickly recognised as the colour
of a lady's dress. Somebody had been then all the while on the
balcony, and the person, whoever it might be, was so placed between
the windows as to be hidden from him; while on the other hand the
many sounds of the street had covered his own entrance and
movements. If the person were Sarah he might on the spot therefore
be served to his taste. He might lead her by a move or two up to
the remedy for his vain tension; as to which, should he get nothing
else from it, he would at least have the relief of pulling down the
roof on their heads. There was fortunately no one at hand to
observe--in respect to his valour--that even on this completed
reasoning he still hung fire. He had been waiting for Mrs. Pocock
and the sound of the oracle; but he had to gird himself afresh--
which he did in the embrasure of the window, neither advancing nor
retreating--before provoking the revelation. It was apparently for
Sarah to come more into view; he was in that case there at her
service. She did however, as meanwhile happened, come more into
view; only she luckily came at the last minute as a contradiction
of Sarah. The occupant of the balcony was after all quite another
person, a person presented, on a second look, by a charming back
and a slight shift of her position, as beautiful brilliant
unconscious Mamie--Mamie alone at home, Mamie passing her time in
her own innocent way, Mamie in short rather shabbily used, but
Mamie absorbed interested and interesting. With her arms on the
balustrade and her attention dropped to the street she allowed
Strether to watch her, to consider several things, without her
turning round.
But the oddity was that when he HAD so watched and considered he
simply stepped back into the room without following up his
advantage. He revolved there again for several minutes, quite as
with something new to think of and as if the bearings of the
possibility of Sarah had been superseded. For frankly, yes, it HAD
bearings thus to find the girl in solitary possession. There was
something in it that touched him to a point not to have been
reckoned beforehand, something that softly but quite pressingly
spoke to him, and that spoke the more each time he paused again at
the edge of the balcony and saw her still unaware. Her companions
were plainly scattered; Sarah would be off somewhere with Waymarsh
and Chad off somewhere with Jim. Strether didn't at all mentally
impute to Chad that he was with his "good friend"; he gave him the
benefit of supposing him involved in appearances that, had he had
to describe them--for instance to Maria--he would have conveniently
qualified as more subtle. It came to him indeed the next thing that
there was perhaps almost an excess of refinement in having left
Mamie in such weather up there alone; however she might in fact
have extemporised, under the charm of the Rue de Rivoli, a little
makeshift Paris of wonder arid fancy. Our friend in any case now
recognised--and it was as if at the recognition Mrs. Newsome's
fixed intensity had suddenly, with a deep audible gasp, grown thin
and vague--that day after day he had been conscious in respect to
his young lady of something odd and ambiguous, yet something into
which he could at last read a meaning. It had been at the most,
this mystery, an obsession--oh an obsession agreeable; and it had
just now fallen into its place as at the touch of a spring. It had
represented the possibility between them of some communication
baffled by accident and delay--the possibility even of some
relation as yet unacknowledged.
There was always their old relation, the fruit of the Woollett
years; but that--and it was what was strangest--had nothing
whatever in common with what was now in the air. As a child, as a
"bud," and then again as a flower of expansion, Mamie had bloomed
for him, freely, in the almost incessantly open doorways of home;
where he remembered her as first very forward, as then very
backward--for he had carried on at one period, in Mrs. Newsome's
parlours (oh Mrs. Newsome's phases and his own!) a course of
English Literature re-enforced by exams and teas--and once more,
finally, as very much in advance. But he had kept no great sense of
points of contact; it not being in the nature of things at Woollett
that the freshest of the buds should find herself in the same
basket with the most withered of the winter apples. The child had
given sharpness, above all, to his sense of the flight of time; it
was but the day before yesterday that he had tripped up on her
hoop, yet his experience of remarkable women--destined, it would
seem, remarkably to grow--felt itself ready this afternoon, quite
braced itself, to include her. She had in fine more to say to him
than he had ever dreamed the pretty girl of the moment COULD have;
and the proof of the circumstance was that, visibly, unmistakeably,
she had been able to say it to no one else. It was something she
could mention neither to her brother, to her sister-in-law nor to
Chad; though he could just imagine that had she still been at home
she might have brought it out, as a supreme tribute to age,
authority and attitude, for Mrs. Newsome. It was moreover something
in which they all took an interest; the strength of their interest
was in truth just the reason of her prudence. All this then, for
five minutes, was vivid to Strether, and it put before him that,
poor child, she had now but her prudence to amuse her. That, for a
pretty girl in Paris, struck him, with a rush, as a sorry state; so
that under the impression he went out to her with a step as
hypocritically alert, he was well aware, as if he had just come
into the room. She turned with a start at his voice; preoccupied
with him though she might be, she was just a scrap disappointed.
"Oh I thought you were Mr. Bilham!"
The remark had been at first surprising and our friend's private
thought, under the influence of it, temporarily blighted; yet we
are able to add that he presently recovered his inward tone and
that many a fresh flower of fancy was to bloom in the same air.
Little Bilham--since little Bilham was, somewhat incongruously,
expected--appeared behindhand; a circumstance by which Strether was
to profit. They came back into the room together after a little,
the couple on the balcony, and amid its crimson-and-gold elegance,
with the others still absent, Strether passed forty minutes that he
appraised even at the time as far, in the whole queer connexion,
from his idlest. Yes indeed, since he had the other day so agreed
with Maria about the inspiration of the lurid, here was something
for his problem that surely didn't make it shrink and that was
floated in upon him as part of a sudden flood. He was doubtless not
to know till afterwards, on turning them over in thought, of how
many elements his impression was composed; but he none the less
felt, as he sat with the charming girl, the signal growth of a
confidence. For she WAS charming, when all was said--and none the
less so for the visible habit and practice of freedom and fluency.
She was charming, he was aware, in spite of the fact that if he
hadn't found her so he would have found her something he should
have been in peril of expressing as "funny." Yes, she was funny,
wonderful Mamie, and without dreaming it; she was bland, she was
bridal--with never, that he could make out as yet, a bridegroom to
support it; she was handsome and portly and easy and chatty, soft
and sweet and almost disconcertingly reassuring. She was dressed,
if we might so far discriminate, less as a young lady than as an
old one--had an old one been supposable to Strether as so committed
to vanity; the complexities of her hair missed moreover also the
looseness of youth; and she had a mature manner of bending a
little, as to encourage and reward, while she held neatly together
in front of her a pair of strikingly polished hands: the
combination of all of which kept up about her the glamour of her
"receiving," placed her again perpetually between the windows and
within sound of the ice-cream plates, suggested the enumeration of
all the names, all the Mr. Brookses and Mr. Snookses, gregarious
specimens of a single type. she was happy to "meet." But if all
this was where she was funny, and if what was funnier than the rest
was the contrast between her beautiful benevolent patronage--such a
hint of the polysyllabic as might make her something of a bore
toward middle age--and her rather flat little voice, the voice,
naturally, unaffectedly yet, of a girl of fifteen; so Strether,
none the less, at the end of ten minutes, felt in her a quiet
dignity that pulled things bravely together. If quiet dignity,
almost more than matronly, with voluminous, too voluminous clothes,
was the effect she proposed to produce, that was an ideal one could
like in her when once one had got into relation. The great thing
now for her visitor was that this was exactly what he had done; it
made so extraordinary a mixture of the brief and crowded hour. It
was the mark of a relation that he had begun so quickly to find
himself sure she was, of all people, as might have been said, on
the side and of the party of Mrs. Newsome's original ambassador.
She was in HIS interest and not in Sarah's, and some sign of that
was precisely what he had been feeling in her, these last days, as
imminent. Finally placed, in Paris, in immediate presence of the
situation and of the hero of it--by whom Strether was incapable of
meaning any one but Chad--she had accomplished, and really in a
manner all unexpected to herself, a change of base; deep still
things had come to pass within her, and by the time she had grown
sure of them Strether had become aware of the little drama. When
she knew where she was, in short, he had made it out; and he made
it out at present still better; though with never a direct word
passing between them all the while on the subject of his own
predicament. There had been at first, as he sat there with her, a
moment during which he wondered if she meant to break ground in
respect to his prime undertaking. That door stood so strangely ajar
that he was half-prepared to be conscious, at any juncture, of her
having, of any one's having, quite bounced in. But, friendly,
familiar, light of touch and happy of tact, she exquisitely stayed
out; so that it was for all the world as if to show she could deal
with him without being reduced to--well, scarcely anything.
It fully came up for them then, by means of their talking of
everything BUT Chad, that Mamie, unlike Sarah, unlike Jim, knew
perfectly what had become of him. It fully came up that she had
taken to the last fraction of an inch the measure of the change in
him, and that she wanted Strether to know what a secret she
proposed to make of it. They talked most conveniently--as if they
had had no chance yet--about Woollett; and that had virtually the
effect of their keeping the secret more close. The hour took on for
Strether, little by little, a queer sad sweetness of quality, he
had such a revulsion in Mamie's favour and on behalf of her social
value as might have come from remorse at some early injustice. She
made him, as under the breath of some vague western whiff, homesick
and freshly restless; he could really for the time have fancied
himself stranded with her on a far shore, during an ominous calm,
in a quaint community of shipwreck. Their little interview was like
a picnic on a coral strand; they passed each other, with melancholy
smiles and looks sufficiently allusive, such cupfuls of water as
they had saved. Especially sharp in Strether meanwhile was the
conviction that his companion really knew, as we have hinted, where
she had come out. It was at a very particular place--only THAT she
would never tell him; it would be above all what he should have to
puzzle for himself. This was what he hoped for, because his interest
in the girl wouldn't be complete without it. No more would the
appreciation to which she was entitled--so assured was he that
the more he saw of her process the more he should see of her pride.
She saw, herself, everything; but she knew what she didn't want,
and that it was that had helped her. What didn't she want?--there
was a pleasure lost for her old friend in not yet knowing, as there
would doubtless be a thrill in getting a glimpse. Gently and
sociably she kept that dark to him, and it was as if she soothed
and beguiled him in other ways to make up for it. She came out with
her impression of Madame de Vionnet--of whom she had "heard so
much"; she came out with her impression of Jeanne, whom she had
been "dying to see": she brought it out with a blandness by which
her auditor was really stirred that she had been with Sarah early
that very afternoon, and after dreadful delays caused by all sorts
of things, mainly, eternally, by the purchase of clothes--clothes
that unfortunately wouldn't be themselves eternal--to call in the
Rue de Bellechasse.
At the sound of these names Strether almost blushed to feel that he
couldn't have sounded them first--and yet couldn't either have
justified his squeamishness. Mamie made them easy as he couldn't
have begun to do, and yet it could only have cost her more than he
should ever have had to spend. It was as friends of Chad's, friends
special, distinguished, desirable, enviable, that she spoke of
them, and she beautifully carried it off that much as she had heard
of them--though she didn't say how or where, which was a touch of
her own--she had found them beyond her supposition. She abounded in
praise of them, and after the manner of Woollett--which made the
manner of Woollett a loveable thing again to Strether. He had never
so felt the true inwardness of it as when his blooming companion
pronounced the elder of the ladies of the Rue de Bellechasse too
fascinating for words and declared of the younger that she was
perfectly ideal, a real little monster of charm. "Nothing," she said
of Jeanne, "ought ever to happen to her--she's so awfully right as
she is. Another touch will spoil her--so she oughtn't to BE touched."
"Ah but things, here in Paris," Strether observed, "do happen to
little girls." And then for the joke's and the occasion's sake:
"Haven't you found that yourself?"
"That things happen--? Oh I'm not a little girl. I'm a big
battered blowsy one. I don't care," Mamie laughed, "WHAT happens."
Strether had a pause while he wondered if it mightn't happen that
he should give her the pleasure of learning that he found her nicer
than he had really dreamed--a pause that ended when he had said to
himself that, so far as it at all mattered for her, she had in fact
perhaps already made this out. He risked accordingly a different
question--though conscious, as soon as he had spoken, that he
seemed to place it in relation to her last speech. "But that
Mademoiselle de Vionnet is to be married--I suppose you've heard of
THAT."
For all, he then found, he need fear! "Dear, yes; the gentleman
was there: Monsieur de Montbron, whom Madame de Vionnet
presented to us."
"And was he nice?"
Mamie bloomed and bridled with her best reception manner. "Any
man's nice when he's in love."
It made Strether laugh. "But is Monsieur de Montbron in love--
already--with YOU?"
"Oh that's not necessary--it's so much better he should be so with
HER: which, thank goodness, I lost no time in discovering for
myself. He's perfectly gone--and I couldn't have borne it for her
if he hadn't been. She's just too sweet."
Strether hesitated. "And through being in love too?"
On which with a smile that struck him as wonderful Mamie had a
wonderful answer. "She doesn't know if she is or not."
It made him again laugh out. "Oh but YOU do!"
She was willing to take it that way. "Oh yes, I know everything."
And as she sat there rubbing her polished hands and making the best
of it--only holding her elbows perhaps a little too much out--the
momentary effect for Strether was that every one else, in all their
affair, seemed stupid.
"Know that poor little Jeanne doesn't know what's the matter with
her?"
It was as near as they came to saying that she was probably in love
with Chad; but it was quite near enough for what Strether wanted;
which was to be confirmed in his certitude that, whether in love or
not, she appealed to something large and easy in the girl before
him. Mamie would be fat, too fat, at thirty; but she would always
be the person who, at the present sharp hour, had been
disinterestedly tender. "If I see a little more of her, as I hope
I shall, I think she'll like me enough--for she seemed to like me
to-day--to want me to tell her."
"And SHALL you?"
"Perfectly. I shall tell her the matter with her is that she wants
only too much to do right. To do right for her, naturally," said
Mamie, "is to please."
"Her mother, do you mean?"
"Her mother first."
Strether waited. "And then?"
"Well, 'then'--Mr. Newsome."
There was something really grand for him in the serenity of this
reference. "And last only Monsieur de Montbron?"
"Last only"--she good-humouredly kept it up.
Strether considered. "So that every one after all then will be
suited?"
She had one of her few hesitations, but it was a question only of a
moment; and it was her nearest approach to being explicit with him
about what was between them. "I think I can speak for myself. I
shall be."
It said indeed so much, told such a story of her being ready to
help him, so committed to him that truth, in short, for such use as
he might make of it toward those ends of his own with which,
patiently and trustfully, she had nothing to do--it so fully
achieved all this that he appeared to himself simply to meet it in
its own spirit by the last frankness of admiration. Admiration was
of itself almost accusatory, but nothing less would serve to show
her how nearly he understood. He put out his hand for good-bye
with a "Splendid, splendid, splendid!" And he left her, in her
splendour, still waiting for little Bilham.
