Book Twelfth
I
Strether couldn't have said he had during the previous hours
definitely expected it; yet when. later on, that morning--though
no later indeed than for his coming forth at ten o'clock--he saw
the concierge produce, on his approach, a petit bleu delivered
since his letters had been sent up, he recognised the appearance as
the first symptom of a sequel. He then knew he had been thinking
of some early sign from Chad as more likely, after all, than not;
and this would be precisely the early sign. He took it so for
granted that he opened the petit bleu just where he had stopped, in
the pleasant cool draught of the porte-cochere--only curious to see
where the young man would, at such a juncture, break out. His
curiosity, however, was more than gratified; the small missive,
whose gummed edge he had detached without attention to the address,
not being from the young man at all, but from the person whom the
case gave him on the spot as still more worth while. Worth while
or not, he went round to the nearest telegraph-office, the big one
on the Boulevard, with a directness that almost confessed to a fear
of the danger of delay. He might have been thinking that if he didn't
go before he could think he wouldn't perhaps go at all. He at
any rate kept, in the lower side-pocket of his morning coat, a very
deliberate hand on his blue missive, crumpling it up rather tenderly
than harshly. He wrote a reply, on the Boulevard, also in the form
of a petit bleu--which was quickly done, under pressure of the place,
inasmuch as, like Madame de Vionnet's own communication, it consisted
of the fewest words. She had asked him if he could do her the very
great kindness of coming to see her that evening at half-past nine,
and he answered, as if nothing were easier, that he would present
himself at the hour she named. She had added a line of postscript,
to the effect that she would come to him elsewhere and at his own hour
if he preferred; but he took no notice of this, feeling that if he
saw her at all half the value of it would be in seeing her where he
had already seen her best. He mightn't see her at all; that was
one of the reflexions he made after writing and before he dropped
his closed card into the box; he mightn't see any one at all
any more at all; he might make an end as well now as ever,
leaving things as they were, since he was doubtless not to leave
them better, and taking his way home so far as should appear that
a home remained to him. This alternative was for a few minutes
so sharp that if he at last did deposit his missive it was perhaps
because the pressure of the place had an effect.
There was none other, however, than the common and constant pressure,
familiar to our friend under the rubric of Postes et Telegraphes--
the something in the air of these establishments; the vibration of
the vast strange life of the town, the influence of the types,
the performers concocting their messages; the little prompt Paris women,
arranging, pretexting goodness knew what, driving the dreadful
needle-pointed public pen at the dreadful sand-strewn public table:
implements that symbolised for Strether's too interpretative innocence
something more acute in manners, more sinister in morals, more fierce
in the national life. After he had put in his paper he had ranged
himself, he was really amused to think, on the side of the fierce,
the sinister, the acute. He was carrying on a correspondence,
across the great city, quite in the key of the Postes et Telegraphes
in general; and it was fairly as if the acceptance of that fact had
come from something in his state that sorted with the occupation of
his neighbours. He was mixed up with the typical tale of Paris, and so
were they, poor things--how could they all together help being?
They were no worse than he, in short, and he no worse than they--
if, queerly enough, no better; and at all events he had settled his
hash, so that he went out to begin, from that moment, his day of
waiting. The great settlement was, as he felt, in his preference
for seeing his correspondent in her own best conditions. THAT was
part of the typical tale, the part most significant in respect to
himself. He liked the place she lived in, the picture that each
time squared itself, large and high and clear, around her: every
occasion of seeing it was a pleasure of a different shade. Yet
what precisely was he doing with shades of pleasure now, and why
hadn't he properly and logically compelled her to commit herself
to whatever of disadvantage and penalty the situation might throw
up? He might have proposed, as for Sarah Pocock, the cold
hospitality of his own salon de lecture, in which the chill of
Sarah's visit seemed still to abide and shades of pleasure were
dim; he might have suggested a stone bench in the dusty Tuileries
or a penny chair at the back part of the Champs Elysees. These
things would have been a trifle stern, and sternness alone now
wouldn't be sinister. An instinct in him cast about for some form
of discipline in which they might meet--some awkwardness they would
suffer from, some danger, or at least some grave inconvenience,
they would incur. This would give a sense--which the spirit
required, rather ached and sighed in the absence of--that somebody
was paying something somewhere and somehow, that they were at least
not all floating together on the silver stream of impunity. Just
instead of that to go and see her late in the evening, as if, for
all the world--well, as if he were as much in the swim as anybody
else: this had as little as possible in common with the penal form.
Even when he had felt that objection melt away, however, the
practical difference was small; the long stretch of his interval
took the colour it would, and if he lived on thus with the sinister
from hour to hour it proved an easier thing than one might have
supposed in advance. He reverted in thought to his old tradition,
the one he had been brought up on and which even so many years of
life had but little worn away; the notion that the state of the
wrongdoer, or at least this person's happiness, presented some
special difficulty. What struck him now rather was the ease of it--
for nothing in truth appeared easier. It was an ease he himself
fairly tasted of for the rest of the day; giving himself quite up;
not so much as trying to dress it out, in any particular whatever,
as a difficulty; not after all going to see Maria--which would have
been in a manner a result of such dressing; only idling, lounging,
smoking, sitting in the shade, drinking lemonade and consuming
ices. The day had turned to heat and eventual thunder, and he now
and again went back to his hotel to find that Chad hadn't been
there. He hadn't yet struck himself, since leaving Woollett, so
much as a loafer, though there had been times when he believed
himself touching bottom. This was a deeper depth than any, and
with no foresight, scarcely with a care, as to what he should bring
up. He almost wondered if he didn't LOOK demoralised and
disreputable; he had the fanciful vision, as he sat and smoked,
of some accidental, some motived, return of the Pococks, who would
be passing along the Boulevard and would catch this view of him.
They would have distinctly, on his appearance, every ground for scandal.
But fate failed to administer even that sternness; the Pococks never
passed and Chad made no sign. Strether meanwhile continued to hold off
from Miss Gostrey, keeping her till to-morrow; so that by evening
his irresponsibility, his impunity, his luxury, had become--there was
no other word for them--immense.
Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picture--he was
moving in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever
canvas--he drew a long breath: it was so presented to him from the
first that the spell of his luxury wouldn't be broken. He wouldn't
have, that is, to become responsible--this was admirably in the air:
she had sent for him precisely to let him feel it, so that he
might go on with the comfort (comfort already established, hadn't
it been?) of regarding his ordeal, the ordeal of the weeks of
Sarah's stay and of their climax, as safely traversed and left
behind him. Didn't she just wish to assure him that SHE now took
it all and so kept it; that he was absolutely not to worry any
more, was only to rest on his laurels and continue generously to
help her? The light in her beautiful formal room was dim, though
it would do, as everything would always do; the hot night had kept
out lamps, but there was a pair of clusters of candles that
glimmered over the chimney-piece like the tall tapers of an altar.
The windows were all open, their redundant hangings swaying a
little, and he heard once more, from the empty court, the small
plash of the fountain. From beyond this, and as from a great
distance--beyond the court, beyond the corps de logis forming the
front--came, as if excited and exciting, the vague voice of Paris.
Strether had all along been subject to sudden gusts of fancy in
connexion with such matters as these--odd starts of the historic
sense, suppositions and divinations with no warrant but their
intensity. Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates,
the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the
omens, the beginnings broken out. They were the smell of
revolution, the smell of the public temper--or perhaps simply the
smell of blood.
It was at present queer beyond words, "subtle," he would have
risked saying, that such suggestions should keep crossing the
scene; but it was doubtless the effect of the thunder in the air,
which had hung about all day without release. His hostess was
dressed as for thunderous times, and it fell in with the kind of
imagination we have just attributed to him that she should be in
simplest coolest white, of a character so old-fashioned, if he were
not mistaken, that Madame Roland must on the scaffold have worn
something like it. This effect was enhanced by a small black fichu
or scarf, of crape or gauze, disposed quaintly round her bosom and
now completing as by a mystic touch the pathetic, the noble analogy.
Poor Strether in fact scarce knew what analogy was evoked for him
as the charming woman, receiving him and making him, as she could do
such things, at once familiarly and gravely welcome, moved over her
great room with her image almost repeated in its polished floor,
which had been fully bared for summer. The associations of the place,
all felt again; the gleam here and there, in the subdued light,
of glass and gilt and parquet, with the quietness of her own note
as the centre--these things were at first as delicate as if they
had been ghostly, and he was sure in a moment that, whatever he should
find he had come for, it wouldn't be for an impression that had
previously failed him. That conviction held him from the outset,
and, seeming singularly to simplify, certified to him that the objects
about would help him, would really help them both. No, he might
never see them again--this was only too probably the last time;
and he should certainly see nothing in the least degree like them.
He should soon be going to where such things were not, and it would be
a small mercy for memory, for fancy, to have, in that stress,
a loaf on the shelf. He knew in advance he should look back on the
perception actually sharpest with him as on the view of something
old, old, old, the oldest thing he had ever personally touched;
and he also knew, even while he took his companion in as the feature
among features, that memory and fancy couldn't help being enlisted
for her. She might intend what she would, but this was beyond anything
she could intend, with things from far back--tyrannies of history,
facts of type, values, as the painters said, of expression--
all working for her and giving her the supreme chance, the chance
of the happy, the really luxurious few, the chance, on a great
occasion, to be natural and simple. She had never, with him,
been more so; or if it was the perfection of art it would never--
and that came to the same thing--be proved against her.
What was truly wonderful was her way of differing so from time to
time without detriment to her simplicity. Caprices, he was sure
she felt, were before anything else bad manners, and that judgement
in her was by itself a thing making more for safety of intercourse
than anything that in his various own past intercourses he had had
to reckon on. If therefore her presence was now quite other than
the one she had shown him the night before, there was nothing of
violence in the change--it was all harmony and reason. It gave him
a mild deep person, whereas he had had on the occasion to which
their interview was a direct reference a person committed to
movement and surface and abounding in them; but she was in either
character more remarkable for nothing than for her bridging of
intervals, and this now fell in with what he understood he was to
leave to her. The only thing was that, if he was to leave it ALL
to her, why exactly had she sent for him? He had had, vaguely, in
advance, his explanation, his view of the probability of her
wishing to set something right, to deal in some way with the fraud
so lately practised on his presumed credulity. Would she attempt
to carry it further or would she blot it out? Would she throw over
it some more or less happy colour; or would she do nothing about it
at all? He perceived soon enough at least that, however reasonable
she might be, she wasn't vulgarly confused, and it herewith
pressed upon him that their eminent "lie," Chad's and hers, was
simply after all such an inevitable tribute to good taste as he
couldn't have wished them not to render. Away from them, during
his vigil, he had seemed to wince at the amount of comedy involved;
whereas in his present posture he could only ask himself how he
should enjoy any attempt from her to take the comedy back. He
shouldn't enjoy it at all; but, once more and yet once more, he
could trust her. That is he could trust her to make deception
right. As she presented things the ugliness--goodness knew why--
went out of them; none the less too that she could present them,
with an art of her own, by not so much as touching them. She let
the matter, at all events, lie where it was--where the previous
twenty-four hours had placed it; appearing merely to circle about
it respectfully, tenderly, almost piously, while she took up
another question.
She knew she hadn't really thrown dust in his eyes; this, the
previous night, before they separated, had practically passed
between them; and, as she had sent for him to see what the
difference thus made for him might amount to, so he was conscious
at the end of five minutes that he had been tried and tested. She
had settled with Chad after he left them that she would, for her
satisfaction, assure herself of this quantity, and Chad had, as
usual, let her have her way. Chad was always letting people have
their way when he felt that it would somehow turn his wheel for
him; it somehow always did turn his wheel. Strether felt, oddly
enough, before these facts, freshly and consentingly passive; they
again so rubbed it into him that the couple thus fixing his
attention were intimate, that his intervention had absolutely aided
and intensified their intimacy, and that in fine he must accept the
consequence of that. He had absolutely become, himself, with his
perceptions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the
droll mixture, as it must seem to them, of his braveries and his
fears, the general spectacle of his art and his innocence, almost
an added link and certainly a common priceless ground for them to
meet upon. It was as if he had been hearing their very tone when
she brought out a reference that was comparatively straight.
"The last twice that you've been here, you know, I never asked you,"
she said with an abrupt transition--they had been pretending before
this to talk simply of the charm of yesterday and of the interest
of the country they had seen. The effort was confessedly vain; not
for such talk had she invited him; and her impatient reminder was
of their having done for it all the needful on his coming to her
after Sarah's flight. What she hadn't asked him then was to state
to her where and how he stood for her; she had been resting on
Chad's report of their midnight hour together in the Boulevard
Malesherbes. The thing therefore she at present desired was
ushered in by this recall of the two occasions on which,
disinterested and merciful, she hadn't worried him. To-night
truly she WOULD worry him, and this was her appeal to him to let
her risk it. He wasn't to mind if she bored him a little:
she had behaved, after all--hadn't she?--so awfully, awfully well.
