III
He had taken the train a few days after this from a station--
as well as to a station--selected almost at random; such days,
whatever should happen, were numbered, and he had gone forth under
the impulse--artless enough, no doubt--to give the whole of one of
them to that French ruralism, with its cool special green, into
which he had hitherto looked only through the little oblong window
of the picture-frame. It had been as yet for the most part but a
land of fancy for him--the background of fiction, the medium of
art, the nursery of letters; practically as distant as Greece, but
practically also well-nigh as consecrated. Romance could weave
itself, for Strether's sense, out of elements mild enough; and even
after what he had, as he felt, lately "been through," he could
thrill a little at the chance of seeing something somewhere that
would remind him of a certain small Lambinet that had charmed him,
long years before, at a Boston dealer's and that he had quite
absurdly never forgotten. It had been offered, he remembered, at a
price he had been instructed to believe the lowest ever named for a
Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on having to recognise,
all the same, as beyond a dream of possibility. He had dreamed--
had turned and twisted possibilities for an hour: it had been
the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase
of a work of art. The adventure, it will be perceived, was modest;
but the memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of
association, was sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the
picture he WOULD have bought--the particular production that had
made him for the moment overstep the modesty of nature. He was
quite aware that if he were to see it again he should perhaps have
a drop or a shock, and he never found himself wishing that the
wheel of time would turn it up again, just as he had seen it in the
maroon-coloured, sky-lighted inner shrine of Tremont Street.
It would be a different thing, however, to see the remembered mixture
resolved back into its elements--to assist at the restoration to
nature of the whole far-away hour: the dusty day in Boston, the
background of the Fitchburg Depot, of the maroon-coloured sanctum,
the special-green vision, the ridiculous price, the poplars, the
willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady
woody horizon.
He observed in respect to his train almost no condition save that
it should stop a few times after getting out of the banlieue;
he threw himself on the general amiability of the day for the hint of
where to alight. His theory of his excursion was that he could
alight anywhere--not nearer Paris than an hour's run--on catching a
suggestion of the particular note required. It made its sign, the
suggestion--weather, air, light, colour and his mood all favouring--
at the end of some eighty minutes; the train pulled up just at the
right spot, and he found himself getting out as securely as if to
keep an appointment. It will be felt of him that he could amuse
himself, at his age, with very small things if it be again noted
that his appointment was only with a superseded Boston fashion. He
hadn't gone far without the quick confidence that it would be
quite sufficiently kept. The oblong gilt frame disposed its
enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and river--
a river of which he didn't know, and didn't want to know, the name--
fell into a composition, full of felicity, within them; the sky
was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left was
white and the church on the right was grey; it was all there, in
short--it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France,
it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking about in it.
He did this last, for an hour, to his heart's content, making
for the shady woody horizon and boring so deep into his impression
and his idleness that he might fairly have got through them again
and reached the maroon-coloured wall. It was a wonder, no doubt,
that the taste of idleness for him shouldn't need more time to
sweeten; but it had in fact taken the few previous days; it had
been sweetening in truth ever since the retreat of the Pococks.
He walked and walked as if to show himself how little he had now to do;
he had nothing to do but turn off to some hillside where he might
stretch himself and hear the poplars rustle, and whence--in the
course of an afternoon so spent, an afternoon richly suffused too
with the sense of a book in his pocket--he should sufficiently
command the scene to be able to pick out just the right little
rustic inn for an experiment in respect to dinner. There was a
train back to Paris at 9.20, and he saw himself partaking, at the
close of the day, with the enhancements of a coarse white cloth and
a sanded door, of something fried and felicitous, washed down with
authentic wine; after which he might, as he liked, either stroll
back to his station in the gloaming or propose for the local
carriole and converse with his driver, a driver who naturally wouldn't
fail of a stiff clean blouse, of a knitted nightcap and of the genius
of response--who, in fine, would sit on the shafts, tell him what
the French people were thinking, and remind him, as indeed the whole
episode would incidentally do, of Maupassant. Strether heard his lips,
for the first time in French air, as this vision assumed consistency,
emit sounds of expressive intention without fear of his company.
He had been afraid of Chad and of Maria and of Madame de Vionnet;
he had been most of all afraid of Waymarsh, in whose presence,
so far as they had mixed together in the light of the town, he had
never without somehow paying for it aired either his vocabulary
or his accent. He usually paid for it by meeting immediately
afterwards Waymarsh's eye.
Such were the liberties with which his fancy played after he had
turned off to the hillside that did really and truly, as well as
most amiably, await him beneath the poplars, the hillside that made
him feel, for a murmurous couple of hours, how happy had been his
thought. He had the sense of success, of a finer harmony in
things; nothing but what had turned out as yet according to his plan.
It most of all came home to him, as he lay on his back on the grass,
that Sarah had really gone, that his tension was really relaxed;
the peace diffused in these ideas might be delusive, but it hung about
him none the less for the time. It fairly, for half an hour,
sent him to sleep; he pulled his straw hat over his eyes--
he had bought it the day before with a reminiscence of Waymarsh's--
and lost himself anew in Lambinet. It was as if he had found out
he was tired--tired not from his walk, but from that inward
exercise which had known, on the whole, for three months, so little
intermission. That was it--when once they were off he had dropped;
this moreover was what he had dropped to, and now he was touching
bottom. He was kept luxuriously quiet, soothed and amused by the
consciousness of what he had found at the end of his descent. It
was very much what he had told Maria Gostrey he should like to stay
on for, the hugely-distributed Paris of summer, alternately
dazzling and dusky, with a weight lifted for him off its columns
and cornices and with shade and air in the flutter of awnings as
wide as avenues. It was present to him without attenuation that,
reaching out, the day after making the remark, for some proof of
his freedom, he had gone that very afternoon to see Madame de Vionnet.
He had gone again the next day but one, and the effect of the two
visits, the after-sense of the couple of hours spent with her,
was almost that of fulness and frequency. The brave intention of
frequency, so great with him from the moment of his finding himself
unjustly suspected at Woollett, had remained rather theoretic,
and one of the things he could muse about under his poplars was
the source of the special shyness that had still made him careful.
He had surely got rid of it now, this special shyness; what had become
of it if it hadn't precisely, within the week, rubbed off?
It struck him now in fact as sufficiently plain that if he had
still been careful he had been so for a reason. He had really
feared, in his behaviour, a lapse from good faith; if there was a
danger of one's liking such a woman too much one's best safety was
in waiting at least till one had the right to do so. In the light
of the last few days the danger was fairly vivid; so that it was
proportionately fortunate that the right was likewise established.
It seemed to our friend that he had on each occasion profited to
the utmost by the latter: how could he have done so more, he at
all events asked himself, than in having immediately let her know
that, if it was all the same to her, he preferred not to talk about
anything tiresome? He had never in his life so sacrificed an
armful of high interests as in that remark; he had never so prepared
the way for the comparatively frivolous as in addressing it to
Madame de Vionnet's intelligence. It hadn't been till later that
he quite recalled how in conjuring away everything but the pleasant
he had conjured away almost all they had hitherto talked about;
it was not till later even that he remembered how, with their new tone,
they hadn't so much as mentioned the name of Chad himself.
One of the things that most lingered with him on his hillside was
this delightful facility, with such a woman, of arriving at a new tone;
he thought, as he lay on his back, of all the tones she might make
possible if one were to try her, and at any rate of the probability
that one could trust her to fit them to occasions. He had wanted her
to feel that, as he was disinterested now, so she herself should be,
and she had showed she felt it, and he had showed he was grateful,
and it had been for all the world as if he were calling for
the first time. They had had other, but irrelevant, meetings;
it was quite as if, had they sooner known how much they REALLY
had in common, there were quantities of comparatively dull matters
they might have skipped. Well, they were skipping them now,
even to graceful gratitude, even to handsome "Don't mention it!"--
and it was amazing what could still come up without reference to
what had been going on between them. It might have been, on analysis,
nothing more than Shakespeare and the musical glasses; but it had
served all the purpose of his appearing to have said to her:
"Don't like me, if it's a question of liking me, for anything obvious
and clumsy that I've, as they call it, 'done' for you: like me--
well, like me, hang it, for anything else you choose. So, by
the same propriety, don't be for me simply the person I've come to know
through my awkward connexion with Chad--was ever anything, by the way,
MORE awkward? Be for me, please, with all your admirable tact and trust,
just whatever I may show you it's a present pleasure to me to think you."
It had been a large indication to meet; but if she hadn't met it
what HAD she done, and how had their time together slipped along
so smoothly, mild but not slow, and melting, liquefying, into his
happy illusion of idleness? He could recognise on the other hand
that he had probably not been without reason, in his prior, his
restricted state, for keeping an eye on his liability to lapse
from good faith.
He really continued in the picture--that being for himself his
situation--all the rest of this rambling day; so that the charm was
still, was indeed more than ever upon him when, toward six o'clock
he found himself amicably engaged with a stout white-capped
deep-voiced woman at the door of the auberge of the biggest village,
a village that affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness and
crookedness, set in coppery green, and that had the river flowing
behind or before it--one couldn't say which; at the bottom, in
particular, of the inn-garden. He had had other adventures before this;
had kept along the height, after shaking off slumber; had admired,
had almost coveted, another small old church, all steep roof and
dim slate-colour without and all whitewash and paper flowers within;
had lost his way and had found it again; had conversed with rustics
who struck him perhaps a little more as men of the world than he had
expected; had acquired at a bound a fearless facility in French;
had had, as the afternoon waned, a watery bock, all pale and Parisian,
in the cafe of the furthest village, which was not the biggest;
and had meanwhile not once overstepped the oblong gilt frame.
The frame had drawn itself out for him, as much as you please;
but that was just his luck. He had finally come down again to the
valley, to keep within touch of stations and trains, turning his face
to the quarter from which he had started; and thus it was that he had
at last pulled up before the hostess of the Cheval Blanc, who met him,
with a rough readiness that was like the clatter of sabots over stones,
on their common ground of a cotelette de veau a l'oseille and a
subsequent lift. He had walked many miles and didn't know he was tired;
but he still knew he was amused, and even that, though he had been
alone all day, he had never yet so struck himself as engaged with
others and in midstream of his drama. It might have passed for
finished his drama, with its catastrophe all but reached: it had,
however, none the less been vivid again for him as he thus gave it
its fuller chance. He had only had to be at last well out of it to
feel it, oddly enough, still going on.
For this had been all day at bottom the spell of the picture--that
it was essentially more than anything else a scene and a stage,
that the very air of the play was in the rustle of the willows and
the tone of the sky. The play and the characters had, without his
knowing it till now, peopled all his space for him, and it seemed
somehow quite happy that they should offer themselves, in the
conditions so supplied, with a kind of inevitability. It was as if
the conditions made them not only inevitable, but so much more
nearly natural and right as that they were at least easier,
pleasanter, to put up with. The conditions had nowhere so asserted
their difference from those of Woollett as they appeared to him to
assert it in the little court of the Cheval Blanc while he arranged
with his hostess for a comfortable climax. They were few and
simple, scant and humble, but they were THE THING, as he would have
called it, even to a greater degree than Madame de Vionnet's old
high salon where the ghost of the Empire walked. "The" thing was
the thing that implied the greatest number of other things of the
sort he had had to tackle; and it was queer of course, but so it
was--the implication here was complete. Not a single one of his
observations but somehow fell into a place in it; not a breath of
the cooler evening that wasn't somehow a syllable of the text.
The text was simply, when condensed, that in THESE places such
things were, and that if it was in them one elected to move about
one had to make one's account with what one lighted on. Meanwhile
at all events it was enough that they did affect one--so far as the
village aspect was concerned--as whiteness, crookedness and
blueness set in coppery green; there being positively, for that
matter, an outer wall of the White Horse that was painted the most
improbable shade. That was part of the amusement--as if to show
that the fun was harmless; just as it was enough, further, that the
picture and the play seemed supremely to melt together in the good
woman's broad sketch of what she could do for her visitor's
appetite. He felt in short a confidence, and it was general, and
it was all he wanted to feel. It suffered no shock even on her
mentioning that she had in fact just laid the cloth for two persons
who, unlike Monsieur, had arrived by the river--in a boat of their
own; who had asked her, half an hour before, what she could do for
them, and had then paddled away to look at something a little
further up--from which promenade they would presently return.
Monsieur might meanwhile, if he liked, pass into the garden, such
as it was, where she would serve him, should he wish it--for there
were tables and benches in plenty--a "bitter" before his repast.
Here she would also report to him on the possibility of a
conveyance to his station, and here at any rate he would have the
agrement of the river .
It may be mentioned without delay that Monsieur had the agrement of
everything, and in particular, for the next twenty minutes,
of a small and primitive pavilion that, at the garden's edge, almost
overhung the water, testifying, in its somewhat battered state, to
much fond frequentation. It consisted of little more than a
platform, slightly raised, with a couple of benches and a table, a
protecting rail and a projecting roof; but it raked the full
grey-blue stream, which, taking a turn a short distance above,
passed out of sight to reappear much higher up; and it was clearly
in esteemed requisition for Sundays and other feasts. Strether sat
there and, though hungry, felt at peace; the confidence that had so
gathered for him deepened with the lap of the water, the ripple of
the surface, the rustle of the reeds on the opposite bank, the
faint diffused coolness and the slight rock of a couple of small
boats attached to a rough landing-place hard by. The valley on the
further side was all copper-green level and glazed pearly sky, a
sky hatched across with screens of trimmed trees, which looked
flat, like espaliers; and though the rest of the village straggled
away in the near quarter the view had an emptiness that made one of
the boats suggestive. Such a river set one afloat almost before
one could take up the oars--the idle play of which would be
moreover the aid to the full impression. This perception went so
far as to bring him to his feet; but that movement, in turn, made
him feel afresh that he was tired, and while he leaned against a
post and continued to look out he saw something that gave him a
sharper arrest.
