IV
What he saw was exactly the right thing--a boat advancing round the
bend and containing a man who held the paddles and a lady, at the
stern, with a pink parasol. It was suddenly as if these figures,
or something like them, had been wanted in the picture, had been
wanted more or less all day, and had now drifted into sight, with
the slow current, on purpose to fill up the measure. They came
slowly, floating down, evidently directed to the landing-place near
their spectator and presenting themselves to him not less clearly
as the two persons for whom his hostess was already preparing a
meal. For two very happy persons he found himself straightway
taking them--a young man in shirt-sleeves, a young woman easy and
fair, who had pulled pleasantly up from some other place and, being
acquainted with the neighbourhood, had known what this particular
retreat could offer them. The air quite thickened, at their
approach, with further intimations; the intimation that they were
expert, familiar, frequent--that this wouldn't at all events be
the first time. They knew how to do it, he vaguely felt--and it
made them but the more idyllic, though at the very moment
of the impression, as happened, their boat seemed to have begun to
drift wide, the oarsman letting it go. It had by this time none
the less come much nearer--near enough for Strether to dream the
lady in the stern had for some reason taken account of his being
there to watch them. She had remarked on it sharply, yet her
companion hadn't turned round; it was in fact almost as if our
friend had felt her bid him keep still. She had taken in something
as a result of which their course had wavered, and it continued to
waver while they just stood off. This little effect was sudden and
rapid, so rapid that Strether's sense of it was separate only for
an instant from a sharp start of his own. He too had within the
minute taken in something, taken in that he knew the lady whose
parasol, shifting as if to hide her face, made so fine a pink point
in the shining scene. It was too prodigious, a chance in a million,
but, if he knew the lady, the gentleman, who still presented his back
and kept off, the gentleman, the coatless hero of the idyll,
who had responded to her start, was, to match the marvel, none other
than Chad.
Chad and Madame de Vionnet were then like himself taking a day in
the country--though it was as queer as fiction, as farce, that
their country could happen to be exactly his; and she had been the
first at recognition, the first to feel, across the water, the shock--
for it appeared to come to that--of their wonderful accident.
Strether became aware, with this, of what was taking place--
that her recognition had been even stranger for the pair in the boat,
that her immediate impulse had been to control it, and that she was
quickly and intensely debating with Chad the risk of betrayal.
He saw they would show nothing if they could feel sure he hadn't
made them out; so that he had before him for a few seconds his
own hesitation. It was a sharp fantastic crisis that had popped up
as if in a dream, and it had had only to last the few seconds to
make him feel it as quite horrible. They were thus, on either side,
TRYING the other side, and all for some reason that broke the stillness
like some unprovoked harsh note. It seemed to him again, within the
limit, that he had but one thing to do--to settle their common question
by some sign of surprise and joy. He hereupon gave large play to
these things, agitating his hat and his stick and loudly calling out--
a demonstration that brought him relief as soon as he had seen it
answered. The boat, in mid-stream, still went a little wild--
which seemed natural, however, while Chad turned round, half
springing up; and his good friend, after blankness and wonder,
began gaily to wave her parasol. Chad dropped afresh to his paddles
and the boat headed round, amazement and pleasantry filling the air
meanwhile, and relief, as Strether continued to fancy, superseding
mere violence. Our friend went down to the water under this odd
impression as of violence averted--the violence of their having
"cut" him, out there in the eye of nature, on the assumption that
he wouldn't know it. He awaited them with a face from which he
was conscious of not being able quite to banish this idea that they
would have gone on, not seeing and not knowing, missing their dinner
and disappointing their hostess, had he himself taken a line to match.
That at least was what darkened his vision for the moment. Afterwards,
after they had bumped at the landing-place and he had assisted their
getting ashore, everything found itself sponged over by the mere
miracle of the encounter.
They could so much better at last, on either side, treat it as a
wild extravagance of hazard, that the situation was made elastic by
the amount of explanation called into play. Why indeed--apart from
oddity--the situation should have been really stiff was a question
naturally not practical at the moment, and in fact, so far as we
are concerned, a question tackled, later on and in private, only by
Strether himself. He was to reflect later on and in private that
it was mainly HE who had explained--as he had had moreover
comparatively little difficulty in doing. He was to have at all
events meanwhile the worrying thought of their perhaps secretly
suspecting him of having plotted this coincidence, taking such
pains as might be to give it the semblance of an accident. That
possibility--as their imputation--didn't of course bear looking
into for an instant; yet the whole incident was so manifestly,
arrange it as they would, an awkward one, that he could scarce keep
disclaimers in respect to his own presence from rising to his lips.
Disclaimers of intention would have been as tactless as his
presence was practically gross; and the narrowest escape they
either of them had was his lucky escape, in the event, from making
any. Nothing of the sort, so far as surface and sound were
involved, was even in question; surface and sound all made for
their common ridiculous good fortune, for the general
invraisemblance of the occasion, for the charming chance that they
had, the others, in passing, ordered some food to be ready, the
charming chance that he had himself not eaten, the charming chance,
even more, that their little plans, their hours, their train, in
short, from la-bas, would all match for their return together to
Paris. The chance that was most charming of all, the chance that
drew from Madame de Vionnet her clearest, gayest "Comme cela se
trouve!" was the announcement made to Strether after they were
seated at table, the word given him by their hostess in respect to
his carriage for the station, on which he might now count. It
settled the matter for his friends as well; the conveyance--
it WAS all too lucky!--would serve for them; and nothing was more
delightful than his being in a position to make the train so definite.
It might have been, for themselves--to hear Madame de Vionnet--
almost unnaturally vague, a detail left to be fixed; though Strether
indeed was afterwards to remember that Chad had promptly enough
intervened to forestall this appearance, laughing at his companion's
flightiness and making the point that he had after all, in spite of
the bedazzlement of a day out with her, known what he was about.
Strether was to remember afterwards further that this had had for
him the effect of forming Chad's almost sole intervention; and
indeed he was to remember further still, in subsequent meditation,
many things that, as it were, fitted together. Another of them was
for instance that the wonderful woman's overflow of surprise and
amusement was wholly into French, which she struck him as speaking
with an unprecedented command of idiomatic turns, but in which she
got, as he might have said, somewhat away from him, taking all at
once little brilliant jumps that he could but lamely match. The
question of his own French had never come up for them; it was the
one thing she wouldn't have permitted--it belonged, for a person
who had been through much, to mere boredom; but the present result
was odd, fairly veiling her identity, shifting her back into a mere
voluble class or race to the intense audibility of which he was by
this time inured. When she spoke the charming slightly strange
English he best knew her by he seemed to feel her as a creature,
among all the millions, with a language quite to herself, the real
monopoly of a special shade of speech, beautifully easy for her,
yet of a colour and a cadence that were both inimitable and matters
of accident. She came back to these things after they had shaken
down in the inn-parlour and knew, as it were, what was to become of
them; it was inevitable that loud ejaculation over the prodigy of
their convergence should at last wear itself out. Then it was that
his impression took fuller form--the impression, destined only to
deepen, to complete itself, that they had something to put a face
upon, to carry off and make the best of, and that it was she who,
admirably on the whole, was doing this. It was familiar to him of
course that they had something to put a face upon; their
friendship, their connexion, took any amount of explaining--that
would have been made familiar by his twenty minutes with Mrs. Pocock
if it hadn't already been so. Yet his theory, as we know, had
bountifully been that the facts were specifically none of his
business, and were, over and above, so far as one had to do with
them, intrinsically beautiful; and this might have prepared him for
anything, as well as rendered him proof against mystification.
When he reached home that night, however, he knew he had been, at
bottom, neither prepared nor proof; and since we have spoken of
what he was, after his return, to recall and interpret, it may as
well immediately be said that his real experience of these few
hours put on, in that belated vision--for he scarce went to bed
till morning--the aspect that is most to our purpose.
He then knew more or less how he had been affected--he but half
knew at the time. There had been plenty to affect him even after,
as has been said, they had shaken down; for his consciousness,
though muffled, had its sharpest moments during this passage, a
marked drop into innocent friendly Bohemia. They then had put
their elbows on the table, deploring the premature end of their two
or three dishes; which they had tried to make up with another
bottle while Chad joked a little spasmodically, perhaps even a
little irrelevantly, with the hostess. What it all came to had
been that fiction and fable WERE, inevitably, in the air, and not
as a simple term of comparison, but as a result of things said;
also that they were blinking it, all round, and that they yet needn't,
so much as that, have blinked it--though indeed if they hadn't
Strether didn't quite see what else they could have done.
Strether didn't quite see THAT even at an hour or two past midnight,
even when he had, at his hotel, for a long time, without a light
and without undressing, sat back on his bedroom sofa and stared
straight before him. He was, at that point of vantage, in full
possession, to make of it all what he could. He kept making of it
that there had been simply a LIE in the charming affair--a lie
on which one could now, detached and deliberate, perfectly put
one's finger. It was with the lie that they had eaten and drunk
and talked and laughed, that they had waited for their carriole
rather impatiently, and had then got into the vehicle and, sensibly
subsiding, driven their three or four miles through the darkening
summer night. The eating and drinking, which had been a resource,
had had the effect of having served its turn; the talk and laughter
had done as much; and it was during their somewhat tedious progress
to the station, during the waits there, the further delays, their
submission to fatigue, their silences in the dim compartment of the
much-stopping train, that he prepared himself for reflexions to come.
It had been a performance, Madame de Vionnet's manner, and though
it had to that degree faltered toward the end, as through her ceasing
to believe in it, as if she had asked herself, or Chad had found
a moment surreptitiously to ask her, what after all was the use,
a performance it had none the less quite handsomely remained,
with the final fact about it that it was on the whole easier to
keep up than to abandon.
From the point of view of presence of mind it had been very
wonderful indeed, wonderful for readiness, for beautiful assurance,
for the way her decision was taken on the spot, without time to
confer with Chad, without time for anything. Their only conference
could have been the brief instants in the boat before they confessed
to recognising the spectator on the bank, for they hadn't been alone
together a moment since and must have communicated all in silence.
It was a part of the deep impression for Strether, and not the least
of the deep interest, that they COULD so communicate--that Chad
in particular could let her know he left it to her. He habitually
left things to others, as Strether was so well aware, and it in fact
came over our friend in these meditations that there had been as yet
no such vivid illustration of his famous knowing how to live.
It was as if he had humoured her to the extent of letting her lie
without correction--almost as if, really, he would be coming round
in the morning to set the matter, as between Strether and himself,
right. Of course he couldn't quite come; it was a case in which
a man was obliged to accept the woman's version, even when fantastic;
if she had, with more flurry than she cared to show, elected,
as the phrase was, to represent that they had left Paris that morning,
and with no design but of getting back within the day--if she had
so sized-up, in the Woollett phrase, their necessity, she knew best
her own measure. There were things, all the same, it was impossible
to blink and which made this measure an odd one--the too evident fact
for instance that she hadn't started out for the day dressed and hatted
and shod, and even, for that matter, pink parasol'd, as she had been
in the boat. From what did the drop in her assurance proceed as the
tension increased--from what did this slightly baffled ingenuity spring
but from her consciousness of not presenting, as night closed in,
with not so much as a shawl to wrap her round, an appearance that
matched her story? She admitted that she was cold, but only to
blame her imprudence which Chad suffered her to give such account
of as she might. Her shawl and Chad's overcoat and her other
garments, and his, those they had each worn the day before, were at
the place, best known to themselves--a quiet retreat enough, no
doubt--at which they had been spending the twenty-four hours, to
which they had fully meant to return that evening, from which they
had so remarkably swum into Strether's ken, and the tacit
repudiation of which had been thus the essence of her comedy.
Strether saw how she had perceived in a flash that they couldn't
quite look to going back there under his nose; though, honestly,
as he gouged deeper into the matter, he was somewhat surprised, as
Chad likewise had perhaps been, at the uprising of this scruple.
He seemed even to divine that she had entertained it rather for
Chad than for herself, and that, as the young man had lacked the
chance to enlighten her, she had had to go on with it, he meanwhile
mistaking her motive.
He was rather glad, none the less, that they had in point of fact
not parted at the Cheval Blanc, that he hadn't been reduced to
giving them his blessing for an idyllic retreat down the river.
He had had in the actual case to make-believe more than he liked,
but this was nothing, it struck him, to what the other event
would have required. Could he, literally, quite have faced the
other event? Would he have been capable of making the best of it
with them? This was what he was trying to do now; but with the
advantage of his being able to give more time to it a good deal
counteracted by his sense of what, over and above the central fact
itself, he had to swallow. It was the quantity of make-believe
involved and so vividly exemplified that most disagreed with his
spiritual stomach. He moved, however, from the consideration of
that quantity--to say nothing of the consciousness of that organ--
back to the other feature of the show, the deep, deep truth of
the intimacy revealed. That was what, in his vain vigil, he oftenest
reverted to: intimacy, at such a point, was LIKE that--and what in
the world else would one have wished it to be like? It was all
very well for him to feel the pity of its being so much like lying;
he almost blushed, in the dark, for the way he had dressed the
possibility in vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll.
He had made them--and by no fault of their own--momentarily pull it for
him, the possibility, out of this vagueness; and must he not therefore
take it now as they had had simply, with whatever thin attenuations,
to give it to him? The very question, it may be added, made him feel
lonely and cold. There was the element of the awkward all round, but
Chad and Madame de Vionnet had at least the comfort that they could talk
it over together. With whom could HE talk of such things?--unless
indeed always, at almost any stage, with Maria? He foresaw that
Miss Gostrey would come again into requisition on the morrow;
though it wasn't to be denied that he was already a little afraid
of her "What on earth--that's what I want to know now--had you
then supposed?" He recognised at last that he had really been trying
all along to suppose nothing. Verily, verily, his labour had been lost.
He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things.
