III
Almost the first thing, strangely enough, that, about an hour
later, Strether found himself doing in Sarah's presence was to
remark articulately on this failure, in their friend, of what had
been superficially his great distinction. It was as if--he alluded
of course to the grand manner--the dear man had sacrificed it to
some other advantage; which would be of course only for himself to
measure. It might be simply that he was physically so much more
sound than on his first coming out; this was all prosaic,
comparatively cheerful and vulgar. And fortunately, if one came to
that, his improvement in health was really itself grander than any
manner it could be conceived as having cost him. "You yourself
alone, dear Sarah"--Strether took the plunge--"have done him, it
strikes me, in these three weeks, as much good as all the rest of
his time together."
It was a plunge because somehow the range of reference was, in the
conditions, "funny," and made funnier still by Sarah's attitude, by
the turn the occasion had, with her appearance, so sensibly taken.
Her appearance was really indeed funnier than anything else--the
spirit in which he felt her to be there as soon as she was there,
the shade of obscurity that cleared up for him as soon as he was
seated with her in the small salon de lecture that had, for the
most part, in all the weeks, witnessed the wane of his early
vivacity of discussion with Waymarsh. It was an immense thing,
quite a tremendous thing, for her to have come: this truth opened
out to him in spite of his having already arrived for himself at a
fairly vivid view of it. He had done exactly what he had given
Waymarsh his word for--had walked and re-walked the court while he
awaited her advent; acquiring in this exercise an amount of light
that affected him at the time as flooding the scene. She had
decided upon the step in order to give him the benefit of a doubt,
in order to be able to say to her mother that she had, even to
abjectness, smoothed the way for him. The doubt had been as to
whether he mightn't take her as not having smoothed it--and the
admonition had possibly come from Waymarsh's more detached spirit.
Waymarsh had at any rate, certainly, thrown his weight into the
scale--he had pointed to the importance of depriving their friend
of a grievance. She had done justice to the plea, and it was to
set herself right with a high ideal that she actually sat there in
her state. Her calculation was sharp in the immobility with which
she held her tall parasol-stick upright and at arm's length, quite
as if she had struck the place to plant her flag; in the separate
precautions she took not to show as nervous; in the aggressive
repose in which she did quite nothing but wait for him. Doubt
ceased to be possible from the moment he had taken in that she had
arrived with no proposal whatever; that her concern was simply to
show what she had come to receive. She had come to receive his
submission, and Waymarsh was to have made it plain to him that she
would expect nothing less. He saw fifty things, her host, at this
convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was that their
anxious friend hadn't quite had the hand required of him.
Waymarsh HAD, however, uttered the request that she might find him
mild, and while hanging about the court before her arrival he had
turned over with zeal the different ways in which he could be so.
The difficulty was that if he was mild he wasn't, for her purpose,
conscious. If she wished him conscious--as everything about her
cried aloud that she did--she must accordingly be at costs to make
him so. Conscious he was, for himself--but only of too many
things; so she must choose the one she required.
Practically, however, it at last got itself named, and when once
that had happened they were quite at the centre of their situation.
One thing had really done as well as another; when Strether had
spoken of Waymarsh's leaving him, and that had necessarily brought
on a reference to Mrs. Pocock's similar intention, the jump was but
short to supreme lucidity. Light became indeed after that so
intense that Strether would doubtless have but half made out, in
the prodigious glare, by which of the two the issue had been in
fact precipitated. It was, in their contracted quarters, as much
there between them as if it had been something suddenly spilled
with a crash and a splash on the floor. The form of his submission
was to be an engagement to acquit himself within the twenty-four
hours. "He'll go in a moment if you give him the word--he assures
me on his honour he'll do that": this came in its order, out of
its order, in respect to Chad, after the crash had occurred. It
came repeatedly during the time taken by Strether to feel that he
was even more fixed in his rigour than he had supposed--the time he
was not above adding to a little by telling her that such a way of
putting it on her brother's part left him sufficiently surprised.
She wasn't at all funny at last--she was really fine; and he felt
easily where she was strong--strong for herself. It hadn't yet so
come home to him that she was nobly and appointedly officious.
She was acting in interests grander and clearer than that of her
poor little personal, poor little Parisian equilibrium, and all his
consciousness of her mother's moral pressure profited by this proof
of its sustaining force. She would be held up; she would be
strengthened; he needn't in the least be anxious for her.
What would once more have been distinct to him had he tried to
make it so was that, as Mrs. Newsome was essentially all moral pressure,
the presence of this element was almost identical with her own presence.
It wasn't perhaps that he felt he was dealing with her straight,
but it was certainly as if she had been dealing straight with HIM.
She was reaching him somehow by the lengthened arm of the spirit,
and he was having to that extent to take her into account;
but he wasn't reaching her in turn, not making her take HIM;
he was only reaching Sarah, who appeared to take so little of him.
"Something has clearly passed between you and Chad," he presently said,
"that I think I ought to know something more about. Does he put it all,"
he smiled, "on me?"
"Did you come out," she asked, "to put it all on HIM?"
But he replied to this no further than, after an instant, by
saying: "Oh it's all right. Chad I mean's all right in having
said to you--well anything he may have said. I'll TAKE it all--
what he does put on me. Only I must see him before I see you
again."
She hesitated, but she brought it out. "Is it absolutely necessary
you should see me again?"
"Certainly, if I'm to give you any definite word about anything."
"Is it your idea then," she returned, "that I shall keep on meeting
you only to be exposed to fresh humiliation?"
He fixed her a longer time. "Are your instructions from
Mrs. Newsome that you shall, even at the worst, absolutely and
irretrievably break with me?"
"My instructions from Mrs. Newsome are, if you please, my affair.
You know perfectly what your own were, and you can judge for
yourself of what it can do for you to have made what you have of
them. You can perfectly see, at any rate, I'll go so far as to
say, that if I wish not to expose myself I must wish still less to
expose HER." She had already said more than she had quite
expected; but, though she had also pulled up, the colour in her
face showed him he should from one moment to the other have it all.
He now indeed felt the high importance of his having it. "What is
your conduct," she broke out as if to explain--"what is your
conduct but an outrage to women like US? I mean your acting as if
there can be a doubt--as between us and such another--of his duty?"
He thought a moment. It was rather much to deal with at once; not
only the question itself, but the sore abysses it revealed.
"Of course they're totally different kinds of duty."
"And do you pretend that he has any at all--to such another?"
"Do you mean to Madame de Vionnet?" He uttered the name not to
affront her, but yet again to gain time--time that he needed for
taking in something still other and larger than her demand of a
moment before. It wasn't at once that he could see all that was
in her actual challenge; but when he did he found himself just
checking a low vague sound, a sound which was perhaps the nearest
approach his vocal chords had ever known to a growl. Everything
Mrs. Pocock had failed to give a sign of recognising in Chad as a
particular part of a transformation--everything that had lent
intention to this particular failure--affected him as gathered into
a large loose bundle and thrown, in her words, into his face. The
missile made him to that extent catch his breath; which however he
presently recovered. "Why when a woman's at once so charming and
so beneficent--"
"You can sacrifice mothers and sisters to her without a blush and
can make them cross the ocean on purpose to feel the more and take
from you the straighter, HOW you do it?"
Yes, she had taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but he
tried not to flounder in her grasp. "I don't think there's
anything I've done in any such calculated way as you describe.
Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of
everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to my having
come before you, and my having come was a result of our general
state of mind. Our general state of mind had proceeded, on its
side, from our queer ignorance, our queer misconceptions and
confusions--from which, since then, an inexorable tide of light
seems to have floated us into our perhaps still queerer knowledge.
Don't you LIKE your brother as he is," he went on, "and haven't
you given your mother an intelligible account of all that that
comes to?"
It put to her also, doubtless, his own tone, too many things, this
at least would have been the case hadn't his final challenge
directly helped her. Everything, at the stage they had reached,
directly helped her, because everything betrayed in him such a
basis of intention. He saw--the odd way things came out!--that he
would have been held less monstrous had he only been a little
wilder. What exposed him was just his poor old trick of quiet
inwardness, what exposed him was his THINKING such offence. He hadn't
in the least however the desire to irritate that Sarah imputed to him,
and he could only at last temporise, for the moment, with her
indignant view. She was altogether more inflamed than he had
expected, and he would probably understand this better when he
should learn what had occurred for her with Chad. Till then her
view of his particular blackness, her clear surprise at his not
clutching the pole she held out, must pass as extravagant. "I
leave you to flatter yourself," she returned, "that what you speak
of is what YOU'VE beautifully done. When a thing has been already
described in such a lovely way--!" But she caught herself up, and
her comment on his description rang out sufficiently loud. "Do you
consider her even an apology for a decent woman?"
Ah there it was at last! She put the matter more crudely than, for
his own mixed purposes, he had yet had to do; but essentially it
was all one matter. It was so much--so much; and she treated it,
poor lady, as so little. He grew conscious, as he was now apt to
do, of a strange smile, and the next moment he found himself
talking like Miss Barrace. "She has struck me from the first as
wonderful. I've been thinking too moreover that, after all, she
would probably have represented even for yourself something rather
new and rather good."
He was to have given Mrs. Pocock with this, however, but her best
opportunity for a sound of derision. "Rather new? I hope so with
all my heart!"
"I mean," he explained, "that she might have affected you by her
exquisite amiability--a real revelation, it has seemed to myself;
her high rarity, her distinction of every sort."
He had been, with these words, consciously a little "precious"; but
he had had to be--he couldn't give her the truth of the case
without them; and it seemed to him moreover now that he didn't
care. He had at all events not served his cause, for she sprang at
its exposed side. "A 'revelation'--to ME: I've come to such a
woman for a revelation? You talk to me about 'distinction'--
YOU, you who've had your privilege?--when the most distinguished woman
we shall either of us have seen in this world sits there insulted,
in her loneliness, by your incredible comparison!"
Strether forbore, with an effort, from straying; but he looked all
about him. "Does your mother herself make the point that she
sits insulted?"
Sarah's answer came so straight, so "pat," as might have been said,
that he felt on the instant its origin. "She has confided to my
judgement and my tenderness the expression of her personal sense of
everything, and the assertion of her personal dignity."
They were the very words of the lady of Woollett--he would have
known them in a thousand; her parting charge to her child. Mrs.
Pocock accordingly spoke to this extent by book, and the fact
immensely moved him. "If she does really feel as you say it's of
course very very dreadful. I've given sufficient proof, one would
have thought," he added, "of my deep admiration for Mrs. Newsome."
"And pray what proof would one have thought you'd CALL sufficient?
That of thinking this person here so far superior to her?"
He wondered again; he waited. "Ah dear Sarah, you must LEAVE me
this person here!"
In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even
perversely, he clung to his rag of reason, he had softly almost
wailed this plea. Yet he knew it to be perhaps the most positive
declaration he had ever made in his life, and his visitor's
reception of it virtually gave it that importance. "That's exactly
what I'm delighted to do. God knows WE don't want her! You take
good care not to meet," she observed in a still higher key,
"my question about their life. If you do consider it a thing
one can even SPEAK of, I congratulate you on your taste!"
The life she alluded to was of course Chad's and Madame de Vionnet's,
which she thus bracketed together in a way that made him wince
a little; there being nothing for him but to take home her
full intention. It was none the less his inconsequence that while
he had himself been enjoying for weeks the view of the brilliant
woman's specific action, he just suffered from any characterisation
of it by other lips. "I think tremendously well of her, at the
same time that I seem to feel her 'life' to be really none of my
business. It's my business, that is, only so far as Chad's own
life is affected by it; and what has happened, don't you see? is
that Chad's has been affected so beautifully. The proof of the
pudding's in the eating"--he tried, with no great success, to help
it out with a touch of pleasantry, while she let him go on as if to
sink and sink. He went on however well enough, as well as he could
do without fresh counsel; he indeed shouldn't stand quite firm, he
felt, till he should have re-established his communications with
Chad. Still, he could always speak for the woman he had so
definitely promised to "save." This wasn't quite for her the air
of salvation; but as that chill fairly deepened what did it become
but a reminder that one might at the worst perish WITH her? And it
was simple enough--it was rudimentary: not, not to give her away.
"I find in her more merits than you would probably have patience
with my counting over. And do you know," he enquired, "the effect
you produce on me by alluding to her in such terms? It's as if you
had some motive in not recognising all she has done for your
brother, and so shut your eyes to each side of the matter, in
order, whichever side comes up, to get rid of the other. I don't,
you must allow me to say, see how you can with any pretence to
candour get rid of the side nearest you."
"Near me--THAT sort of thing?" And Sarah gave a jerk back of her
head that well might have nullified any active proximity.
It kept her friend himself at his distance, and he respected for a
moment the interval. Then with a last persuasive effort he bridged
it. "You don't, on your honour, appreciate Chad's fortunate
development?"
"Fortunate?" she echoed again. And indeed she was prepared.
"I call it hideous."
Her departure had been for some minutes marked as imminent, and she
was already at the door that stood open to the court, from the
threshold of which she delivered herself of this judgement. It
rang out so loud as to produce for the time the hush of everything
else. Strether quite, as an effect of it, breathed less bravely;
he could acknowledge it, but simply enough. "Oh if you think THAT--!"
"Then all's at an end? So much the better. I do think that!" She
passed out as she spoke and took her way straight across the court,
beyond which, separated from them by the deep arch of the
porte-cochere the low victoria that had conveyed her from her own hotel
was drawn up. She made for it with decision, and the manner of her
break, the sharp shaft of her rejoinder, had an intensity by which
Strether was at first kept in arrest. She had let fly at him as
from a stretched cord, and it took him a minute to recover from the
sense of being pierced. It was not the penetration of surprise;
it was that, much more, of certainty; his case being put for him as
he had as yet only put it to himself. She was away at any rate;
she had distanced him--with rather a grand spring, an effect of pride
and ease, after all; she had got into her carriage before he could
overtake her, and the vehicle was already in motion. He stopped
halfway; he stood there in the court only seeing her go and noting
that she gave him no other look. The way he had put it to himself
was that all quite MIGHT be at an end. Each of her movements,
in this resolute rupture, reaffirmed, re-enforced that idea.
Sarah passed out of sight in the sunny street while, planted there
in the centre of the comparatively grey court, he continued merely
to look before him. It probably WAS all at an end.
