by Henry James
“It’s a false note?”
“Sadly. It’s vulgar.”
“But surely not vulgarer than this.” Then on his wondering as she herself had done: “Than everything about us.” She seemed a trifle irritated. “What do you take this for?”
“Why for—comparatively—divine! “
“This dreadful London theatre? It’s impossible, if you really want to know.”
“Oh then,” laughed Strether, “I DON’T really want to know!”
It made between them a pause, which she, however, still fascinated by the mystery of the production at Woollett, presently broke. “‘Rather ridiculous’? Clothes-pins? Saleratus? Shoe-polish?”
It brought him round. “No—you don’t even ‘burn.’ I don’t think, you know, you’ll guess it.”
“How then can I judge how vulgar it is?”
“You’ll judge when I do tell you”—and he persuaded her to patience. But it may even now frankly be mentioned that he in the sequel never WAS to tell her. He actually never did so, and it moreover oddly occurred that by the law, within her, of the incalculable, her desire for the information dropped and her attitude to the question converted itself into a positive cultivation of ignorance. In ignorance she could humour her fancy, and that proved a useful freedom. She could treat the little nameless object as indeed unnameable—she could make their abstention enormously definite. There might indeed have been for Strether the portent of this in what she next said.
“Is it perhaps then because it’s so bad—because your industry as you call it, IS so vulgar—that Mr. Chad won’t come back? Does he feel the taint? Is he staying away not to be mixed up in it?”
“Oh,” Strether laughed, “it wouldn’t appear—would it?—that he feels ‘taints’! He’s glad enough of the money from it, and the money’s his whole basis. There’s appreciation in that—I mean as to the allowance his mother has hitherto made him. She has of course the resource of cutting this allowance off; but even then he has unfortunately, and on no small scale, his independent supply—money left him by his grandfather, her own father.”
“Wouldn’t the fact you mention then,” Miss Gostrey asked, “make it just more easy for him to be particular? Isn’t he conceivable as fastidious about the source—the apparent and public source—of his income?”
Strether was able quite good-humouredly to entertain the proposition. “The source of his grandfather’s wealth—and thereby of his own share in it—was not particularly noble.”
“And what source was it?”
Strether cast about. “Well—practices.”
“In business? Infamies? He was an old swindler?”
“Oh,” he said with more emphasis than spirit, “I shan’t describe HIM nor narrate his exploits.”
“Lord, what abysses! And the late Mr. Newsome then?”
“Well, what about him?”
“Was he like the grandfather?”
“No—he was on the other side of the house. And he was different.”
Miss Gostrey kept it up. “Better?”
Her friend for a moment hung fire. “No.”
Her comment on his hesitation was scarce the less marked for being mute. “Thank you. NOW don’t you see,” she went on, “why the boy doesn’t come home? He’s drowning his shame.”
“His shame? What shame?”
“What shame? Comment donc? THE shame.”
“But where and when,” Strether asked, “is ‘THE shame’—where is any shame—to-day? The men I speak of—they did as every one does; and (besides being ancient history) it was all a matter of appreciation.”
She showed how she understood. “Mrs. Newsome has appreciated?”
“Ah I can’t speak for HER!”
“In the midst of such doings—and, as I understand you, profiting by them, she at least has remained exquisite?”
“Oh I can’t talk of her!” Strether said.
“I thought she was just what you COULD talk of. You DON’T trust me,” Miss Gostrey after a moment declared.
It had its effect. “Well, her money is spent, her life conceived and carried on with a large beneficence—”
“That’s a kind of expiation of wrongs? Gracious,” she added before he could speak, “how intensely you make me see her!”
“If you see her,” Strether dropped, “it’s all that’s necessary.”
She really seemed to have her. “I feel that. She IS, in spite of everything, handsome.”
This at least enlivened him. “What do you mean by everything?”
“Well, I mean YOU.” With which she had one of her swift changes of ground. “You say the concern needs looking after; but doesn’t Mrs. Newsome look after it?”
“So far as possible. She’s wonderfully able, but it’s not her affair, and her life’s a good deal overcharged. She has many, many things.”
“And you also?”
“Oh yes—I’ve many too, if you will.”
“I see. But what I mean is,” Miss Gostrey amended, “do you also look after the business?”
“Oh no, I don’t touch the business.”
“Only everything else?”
“Well, yes—some things.”
“As for instance—?”
Strether obligingly thought. “Well, the Review.”
“The Review?—you have a Review?”
“Certainly. Woollett has a Review—which Mrs. Newsome, for the most part, magnificently pays for and which I, not at all magnificently, edit. My name’s on the cover,” Strether pursued, “and I’m really rather disappointed and hurt that you seem never to have heard of it.”
She neglected for a moment this grievance. “And what kind of a Review is it?”
His serenity was now completely restored. “Well, it’s green.”
“Do you mean in political colour as they say here—in thought?”
“No; I mean the cover’s green—of the most lovely shade.”
“And with Mrs. Newsome’s name on it too?”
He waited a little. “Oh as for that you must judge if she peeps out. She’s behind the whole thing; but she’s of a delicacy and a discretion—!”
Miss Gostrey took it all. “I’m sure. She WOULD be. I don’t underrate her. She must be rather a swell.”
“Oh yes, she’s rather a swell!”
“A Woollett swell—bon! I like the idea of a Woollett swell. And you must be rather one too, to be so mixed up with her.”
“Ah no,” said Strether, “that’s not the way it works.”
But she had already taken him up. “The way it works—you needn’t tell me!—is of course that you efface yourself.”
“With my name on the cover?” he lucidly objected.
“Ah but you don’t put it on for yourself.”
“I beg your pardon—that’s exactly what I do put it on for. It’s exactly the thing that I’m reduced to doing for myself. It seems to rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable little scrap of an identity.”
On this she looked at him as to say many things, but what she at last simply said was: “She likes to see it there. You’re the bigger swell of the two,” she immediately continued, “because you think you’re not one. She thinks she IS one. However,” Miss Gostrey added, “she thinks you’re one too. You’re at all events the biggest she can get hold of.” She embroidered, she abounded. “I don’t say it to interfere between you, but on the day she gets hold of a bigger one—!” Strether had thrown back his head as in silent mirth over something that struck him in her audacity or felicity, and her flight meanwhile was already higher. “Therefore close with her—!”
“Close with her?” he asked as she seemed to hang poised.
“Before you lose your chance.”
Their eyes met over it. “What do you mean by closing?”
“And what do I mean by your chance? I’ll tell you when you tell me all the things YOU don’t. Is it her
GREATEST fad?” she briskly pursued.
“The Review?” He seemed to wonder how he could best describe it. This resulted however but in a sketch. “It’s her tribute to the ideal.”
“I see. You go in for tremendous things.”
“We go in for the unpopular side—that is so far as we dare.”
“And how far DO you dare?”
“Well, she very far. I much less. I don’t begin to have her faith. She provides,” said Strether, “three fourths of that. And she provides, as I’ve confided to you, ALL the money.”
It evoked somehow a vision of gold that held for a little Miss Gostrey’s eyes, and she looked as if she heard the bright dollars shovelled in. “I hope then you make a good thing—”
“I NEVER made a good thing!” he at once returned.
She just waited. “Don’t you call it a good thing to be loved?”
“Oh we’re not loved. We’re not even hated. We’re only just sweetly ignored.”
She had another pause. “You don’t trust me!” she once more repeated.
“Don’t I when I lift the last veil?—tell you the very secret of the prison-house?”
Again she met his eyes, but to the result that after an instant her own turned away with impatience. “You don’t sell? Oh I’m glad of THAT!” After which however, and before he could protest, she was off again. “She’s just a MORAL swell.”
He accepted gaily enough the definition. “Yes—I really think that describes her.”
But it had for his friend the oddest connexion. “How does she do her hair?”
He laughed out. “Beautifully!”
“Ah that doesn’t tell me. However, it doesn’t matter—I know. It’s tremendously neat—a real reproach; quite remarkably thick and without, as yet, a single strand of white. There!”
He blushed for her realism, but gaped at her truth. “You’re the very deuce.”
“What else SHOULD I be? It was as the very deuce I pounced on you. But don’t let it trouble you, for everything but the very deuce— at our age—is a bore and a delusion, and even he himself, after all, but half a joy.” With which, on a single sweep of her wing, she resumed. “You assist her to expiate—which is rather hard when you’ve yourself not sinned.”
“It’s she who hasn’t sinned,” Strether replied. “I’ve sinned the most.”
“Ah,” Miss Gostrey cynically laughed, “what a picture of HER! Have you robbed the widow and the orphan?”
“I’ve sinned enough,” said Strether.
“Enough for whom? Enough for what?”
“Well, to be where I am.”
“Thank you!” They were disturbed at this moment by the passage between their knees and the back of the seats before them of a gentleman who had been absent during a part of the performance and who now returned for the close; but the interruption left Miss Gostrey time, before the subsequent hush, to express as a sharp finality her sense of the moral of all their talk. “I knew you had something up your sleeve!” This finality, however, left them in its turn, at the end of the play, as disposed to hang back as if they had still much to say; so that they easily agreed to let every one go before them—they found an interest in waiting. They made out from the lobby that the night had turned to rain; yet Miss Gostrey let her friend know that he wasn’t to see her home. He was simply to put her, by herself, into a four-wheeler; she liked so in London, of wet nights after wild pleasures, thinking things over, on the return, in lonely four-wheelers. This was her great time, she intimated, for pulling herself together. The delays caused by the weather, the struggle for vehicles at the door, gave them occasion to subside on a divan at the back of the vestibule and just beyond the reach of the fresh damp gusts from the street. Here Strether’s comrade resumed that free handling of the subject to which his own imagination of it already owed so much. “Does your young friend in Paris like you?”
It had almost, after the interval, startled him. “Oh I hope not! Why SHOULD he?”
“Why shouldn’t he?” Miss Gostrey asked. “That you’re coming down on him need have nothing to do with it.”
“You see more in it,” he presently returned, “than I.”
“Of course I see you in it.”
“Well then you see more in ‘me’!”
“Than you see in yourself? Very likely. That’s always one’s right. What I was thinking of,” she explained, “is the possible particular effect on him of his milieu.”
“Oh his milieu—!” Strether really felt he could imagine it better now than three hours before.
“Do you mean it can only have been so lowering?”
“Why that’s my very starting-point.”
“Yes, but you start so far back. What do his letters say?”
“Nothing. He practically ignores us—or spares us. He doesn’t write.”
“I see. But there are all the same,” she went on, “two quite distinct things that—given the wonderful place he’s in—may have happened to him. One is that he may have got brutalised. The other is that he may have got refined.”
Strether stared—this WAS a novelty. “Refined?”
“Oh,” she said quietly, “there ARE refinements.”
The way of it made him, after looking at her, break into a laugh. “YOU have them!”
“As one of the signs,” she continued in the same tone, “they constitute perhaps the worst.”
He thought it over and his gravity returned. “Is it a refinement not to answer his mother’s letters?”
She appeared to have a scruple, but she brought it out. “Oh I should say the greatest of all.”
“Well,” said Strether, “I’M quite content to let it, as one of the signs, pass for the worst that I know he believes he can do what he likes with me.”
This appeared to strike her. “How do you know it?”
“Oh I’m sure of it. I feel it in my bones.”
“Feel he CAN do it?”
“Feel that he believes he can. It may come to the same thing!” Strether laughed.
She wouldn’t, however, have this. “Nothing for you will ever come to the same thing as anything else.” And she understood what she meant, it seemed, sufficiently to go straight on. “You say that if he does break he’ll come in for things at home?”
“Quite positively. He’ll come in for a particular chance—a chance that any properly constituted young man would jump at. The business has so developed that an opening scarcely apparent three years ago, but which his father’s will took account of as in certain conditions possible and which, under that will, attaches to Chad’s availing himself of it a large contingent advantage— this opening, the conditions having come about, now simply awaits him. His mother has kept it for him, holding out against strong pressure, till the last possible moment. It requires, naturally, as it carries with it a handsome ‘part,’ a large share in profits, his being on the spot and making a big effort for a big result. That’s what I mean by his chance. If he misses it he comes in, as you say, for nothing. And to see that he doesn’t miss it is, in a word, what I’ve come out for.”
She let it all sink in. “What you’ve come out for then is simply to render him an immense service.”
Well, poor Strether was willing to take it so. “Ah if you like.”
“He stands, as they say, if you succeed with him, to gain—”
“Oh a lot of advantages.” Strether had them clearly at his fingers’ ends.
“By which you mean of course a lot of money.”
“Well, not only. I’m acting with a sense for him of other things too. Consideration and comfort and security—the general safety of being anchored by a strong chain. He wants, as I see him, to be protected. Protected I mean from life.”
“Ah voila!”—her thought fitted with a click. “From life. What you REALLY want to get him home for is to marry him.”
“Well, that’s about the size of it.”
“Of course,” she said, “it’s rudimentary. But to any one in pa
rticular?”
He smiled at this, looking a little more conscious. “You get everything out.”
For a moment again their eyes met. “You put everything in!”