II
"Oh, you're all right, you're all right," he almost impatiently
declared; his impatience being moreover not for her pressure, but
for her scruple. More and more distinct to him was the tune to
which she would have had the matter out with Chad: more and more
vivid for him the idea that she had been nervous as to what he
might be able to "stand." Yes, it had been a question if he had
"stood" what the scene on the river had given him, and, though the
young man had doubtless opined in favour of his recuperation, her
own last word must have been that she should feel easier in seeing
for herself. That was it, unmistakeably; she WAS seeing for
herself. What he could stand was thus, in these moments, in the
balance for Strether, who reflected, as he became fully aware of
it, that he must properly brace himself. He wanted fully to appear
to stand all he might; and there was a certain command of the
situation for him in this very wish not to look too much at sea.
She was ready with everything, but so, sufficiently, was he; that
is he was at one point the more prepared of the two, inasmuch as,
for all her cleverness, she couldn't produce on the spot--and it
was surprising--an account of the motive of her note. He had the
advantage that his pronouncing her "all right" gave him for an
enquiry. "May I ask, delighted as I've been to come, if you've
wished to say something special?" He spoke as if she might have
seen he had been waiting for it--not indeed with discomfort, but
with natural interest. Then he saw that she was a little taken
aback, was even surprised herself at the detail she had neglected--
the only one ever yet; having somehow assumed he would know, would
recognise, would leave some things not to be said. She looked at
him, however, an instant as if to convey that if he wanted them
ALL--!
"Selfish and vulgar--that's what I must seem to you. You've done
everything for me, and here I am as if I were asking for more. But
it isn't," she went on, "because I'm afraid--though I AM of course
afraid, as a woman in my position always is. I mean it isn't
because one lives in terror--it isn't because of that one is
selfish, for I'm ready to give you my word to-night that I don't
care; don't care what still may happen and what I may lose. I don't
ask you to raise your little finger for me again, nor do I wish
so much as to mention to you what we've talked of before, either
my danger or my safety, or his mother, or his sister, or the girl
he may marry, or the fortune he may make or miss, or the right
or the wrong, of any kind, he may do. If after the help one has
had from you one can't either take care of one's self or simply
hold one's tongue, one must renounce all claim to be an object of
interest. It's in the name of what I DO care about that I've tried
still to keep hold of you. How can I be indifferent," she asked,
"to how I appear to you?" And as he found himself unable
immediately to say: "Why, if you're going, NEED you, after all?
Is it impossible you should stay on--so that one mayn't lose you?"
"Impossible I should live with you here instead of going home?"
"Not 'with' us, if you object to that, but near enough to us,
somewhere, for us to see you--well," she beautifully brought out,
"when we feel we MUST. How shall we not sometimes feel it? I've
wanted to see you often when I couldn't," she pursued, "all these
last weeks. How shan't I then miss you now, with the sense of your
being gone forever?" Then as if the straightness of this appeal,
taking him unprepared, had visibly left him wondering: "Where IS
your 'home' moreover now--what has become of it? I've made a
change in your life, I know I have; I've upset everything in your
mind as well; in your sense of--what shall I call it?--all the
decencies and possibilities. It gives me a kind of detestation--"
She pulled up short.
Oh but he wanted to hear. "Detestation of what?"
"Of everything--of life."
"Ah that's too much," he laughed--"or too little!"
"Too little, precisely"--she was eager. "What I hate is myself--
when I think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the
lives of others, and that one isn't happy even then. One does it
to cheat one's self and to stop one's mouth--but that's only at the
best for a little. The wretched self is always there, always
making one somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it's
not, that it's never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to TAKE.
The only safe thing is to give. It's what plays you least false."
Interesting, touching, strikingly sincere as she let these things
come from her, she yet puzzled and troubled him--so fine was the
quaver of her quietness. He felt what he had felt before with her,
that there was always more behind what she showed, and more and
more again behind that. "You know so, at least," she added, "where
you are!"
"YOU ought to know it indeed then; for isn't what you've been
giving exactly what has brought us together this way? You've been
making, as I've so fully let you know I've felt," Strether said,
"the most precious present I've ever seen made, and if you can't
sit down peacefully on that performance you ARE, no doubt, born to
torment yourself. But you ought," he wound up, "to be easy."
"And not trouble you any more, no doubt--not thrust on you even the
wonder and the beauty of what I've done; only let you regard our
business as over, and well over, and see you depart in a peace that
matches my own? No doubt, no doubt, no doubt," she nervously
repeated--"all the more that I don't really pretend I believe you
couldn't, for yourself, NOT have done what you have. I don't
pretend you feel yourself victimised, for this evidently is the way
you live, and it's what--we're agreed--is the best way. Yes, as
you say," she continued after a moment, "I ought to be easy and
rest on my work. Well then here am I doing so. I AM easy. You'll
have it for your last impression. When is it you say you go?" she
asked with a quick change.
He took some time to reply--his last impression was more and more
so mixed a one. It produced in him a vague disappointment, a drop
that was deeper even than the fall of his elation the previous
night. The good of what he had done, if he had done so much, wasn't
there to enliven him quite to the point that would have been ideal
for a grand gay finale. Women were thus endlessly absorbent, and
to deal with them was to walk on water. What was at bottom the matter
with her, embroider as she might and disclaim as she might--
what was at bottom the matter with her was simply Chad himself.
It was of Chad she was after all renewedly afraid; the strange
strength of her passion was the very strength of her fear; she clung
to HIM, Lambert Strether, as to a source of safety she had tested,
and, generous graceful truthful as she might try to be, exquisite
as she was, she dreaded the term of his being within reach.
With this sharpest perception yet, it was like a chill in the air
to him, it was almost appalling, that a creature so fine could be,
by mysterious forces, a creature so exploited. For at the end
of all things they WERE mysterious: she had but made Chad what
he was--so why could she think she had made him infinite?
She had made him better, she had made him best, she had made him
anything one would; but it came to our friend with supreme
queerness that he was none the less only Chad. Strether had the
sense that HE, a little, had made him too; his high appreciation
had as it were, consecrated her work The work, however admirable,
was nevertheless of the strict human order, and in short it was
marvellous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of comforts,
aberrations (however one classed them) within the common experience
should be so transcendently prized. It might have made Strether
hot or shy, as such secrets of others brought home sometimes do
make us; but he was held there by something so hard that it was
fairly grim. This was not the discomposure of last night; that had
quite passed--such discomposures were a detail; the real coercion
was to see a man ineffably adored. There it was again--it took
women, it took women; if to deal with them was to walk on water
what wonder that the water rose? And it had never surely risen
higher than round this woman. He presently found himself taking a
long look from her, and the next thing he knew he had uttered all
his thought. "You're afraid for your life!"
It drew out her long look, and he soon enough saw why. A spasm
came into her face, the tears she had already been unable to hide
overflowed at first in silence, and then, as the sound suddenly
comes from a child, quickened to gasps, to sobs. She sat and
covered her face with her hands, giving up all attempt at a manner.
"It's how you see me, it's how you see me"--she caught her breath
with it--"and it's as I AM, and as I must take myself, and of
course it's no matter." Her emotion was at first so incoherent that
he could only stand there at a loss, stand with his sense of having
upset her, though of having done it by the truth. He had to listen
to her in a silence that he made no immediate effort to attenuate,
feeling her doubly woeful amid all her dim diffused elegance;
consenting to it as he had consented to the rest, and even
conscious of some vague inward irony in the presence of such a fine
free range of bliss and bale. He couldn't say it was NOT no
matter; for he was serving her to the end, he now knew, anyway--
quite as if what he thought of her had nothing to do with it.
It was actually moreover as if he didn't think of her at all,
as if he could think of nothing but the passion, mature, abysmal,
pitiful, she represented, and the possibilities she betrayed.
She was older for him to-night, visibly less exempt from the
touch of time; but she was as much as ever the finest and
subtlest creature, the happiest apparition, it had been given him,
in all his years, to meet; and yet he could see her there as
vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a maidservant crying for
her young man. The only thing was that she judged herself as
the maidservant wouldn't; the weakness of which wisdom too,
the dishonour of which judgement, seemed but to sink her lower.
Her collapse, however, no doubt, was briefer and she had in a
manner recovered herself before he intervened. "Of course
I'm afraid for my life. But that's nothing. It isn't that."
He was silent a little longer, as if thinking what it might be.
"There's something I have in mind that I can still do."
But she threw off at last, with a sharp sad headshake, drying her
eyes, what he could still do. "I don't care for that. Of course,
as I've said, you're acting, in your wonderful way, for yourself;
and what's for yourself is no more my business--though I may reach
out unholy hands so clumsily to touch it--than if it were something
in Timbuctoo. It's only that you don't snub me, as you've had
fifty chances to do--it's only your beautiful patience that makes
one forget one's manners. In spite of your patience, all the
same," she went on, "you'd do anything rather than be with us here,
even if that were possible. You'd do everything for us but be
mixed up with us--which is a statement you can easily answer to the
advantage of your own manners. You can say 'What's the use of
talking of things that at the best are impossible?' What IS of
course the use? It's only my little madness. You'd talk if you
were tormented. And I don't mean now about HIM. Oh for him--!"
Positively, strangely, bitterly, as it seemed to Strether, she gave
"him," for the moment, away. "You don't care what I think of you;
but I happen to care what you think of me. And what you MIGHT,"
she added. "What you perhaps even did."
He gained time. "What I did--?"
"Did think before. Before this. DIDn't you think--?"
But he had already stopped her. "I didn't think anything. I
never think a step further than I'm obliged to."
"That's perfectly false, I believe," she returned--"except that you
may, no doubt, often pull up when things become TOO ugly; or even,
I'll say, to save you a protest, too beautiful. At any rate, even
so far as it's true, we've thrust on you appearances that you've
had to take in and that have therefore made your obligation. Ugly
or beautiful--it doesn't matter what we call them--you were
getting on without them, and that's where we're detestable. We
bore you--that's where we are. And we may well--for what we've
cost you. All you can do NOW is not to think at all. And I who
should have liked to seem to you--well, sublime!"
He could only after a moment re-echo Miss Barrace. "You're
wonderful!"
"I'm old and abject and hideous"--she went on as without hearing
him. "Abject above all. Or old above all. It's when one's old
that it's worst. I don't care what becomes of it--let what WILL;
there it is. It's a doom--I know it; you can't see it more than I
do myself. Things have to happen as they will." With which she
came back again to what, face to face with him, had so quite broken
down. "Of course you wouldn't, even if possible, and no matter
what may happen to you, be near us. But think of me, think of me--!"
She exhaled it into air.
He took refuge in repeating something he had already said and that
she had made nothing of. "There's something I believe I can still
do." And he put his hand out for good-bye.
She again made nothing of it; she went on with her insistence.
"That won't help you. There's nothing to help you."
"Well, it may help YOU," he said.
She shook her head. "There's not a grain of certainty in my
future--for the only certainty is that I shall be the loser in the
end."
She hadn't taken his hand, but she moved with him to the door.
"That's cheerful," he laughed, "for your benefactor!"
"What's cheerful for ME," she replied, "is that we might, you and
I, have been friends. That's it--that's it. You see how, as I
say, I want everything. I've wanted you too."
"Ah but you've HAD me!" he declared, at the door, with an emphasis
that made an end.
