by Henry James
Many things came over him here, and one of them was that he should doubtless presently know whether he had been shallow or sharp. Another was that the balcony in question didn’t somehow show as a convenience easy to surrender. Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognise the truth that wherever one paused in Paris the imagination reacted before one could stop it. This perpetual reaction put a price, if one would, on pauses; but it piled up consequences till there was scarce room to pick one’s steps among them. What call had he, at such a juncture, for example, to like Chad’s very house? High broad clear—he was expert enough to make out in a moment that it was admirably built—it fairly embarrassed our friend by the quality that, as he would have said, it “sprang” on him. He had struck off the fancy that it might, as a preliminary, be of service to him to be seen, by a happy accident, from the third-story windows, which took all the March sun, but of what service was it to find himself making out after a moment that the quality “sprung,” the quality produced by measure and balance, the fine relation of part to part and space to space, was probably— aided by the presence of ornament as positive as it was discreet, and by the complexion of the stone, a cold fair grey, warmed and polished a little by life—neither more nor less than a case of distinction, such a case as he could only feel unexpectedly as a sort of delivered challenge? Meanwhile, however, the chance he had allowed for—the chance of being seen in time from the balcony—had become a fact. Two or three of the windows stood open to the violet air; and, before Strether had cut the knot by crossing, a young man had come out and looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and tossed the match over, and then, resting on the rail, had given himself up to watching the life below while he smoked. His arrival contributed, in its order, to keeping Strether in position; the result of which in turn was that Strether soon felt himself noticed. The young man began to look at him as in acknowledgement of his being himself in observation.
This was interesting so far as it went, but the interest was affected by the young man’s not being Chad. Strether wondered at first if he were perhaps Chad altered, and then saw that this was asking too much of alteration. The young man was light bright and alert—with an air too pleasant to have been arrived at by patching. Strether had conceived Chad as patched, but not beyond recognition. He was in presence, he felt, of amendments enough as they stood; it was a sufficient amendment that the gentleman up there should be Chad’s friend. He was young too then, the gentleman up there—he was very young; young enough apparently to be amused at an elderly watcher, to be curious even to see what the elderly watcher would do on finding himself watched. There was youth in that, there was youth in the surrender to the balcony, there was youth for Strether at this moment in everything but his own business; and Chad’s thus pronounced association with youth had given the next instant an extraordinary quick lift to the issue. The balcony, the distinguished front, testified suddenly, for Strether’s fancy, to something that was up and up; they placed the whole case materially, and as by an admirable image, on a level that he found himself at the end of another moment rejoicing to think he might reach. The young man looked at him still, he looked at the young man; and the issue, by a rapid process, was that this knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to him the last of luxuries. To him too the perched privacy was open, and he saw it now but in one light—that of the only domicile, the only fireside, in the great ironic city, on which he had the shadow of a claim. Miss Gostrey had a fireside; she had told him of it, and it was something that doubtless awaited him; but Miss Gostrey hadn’t yet arrived—she mightn’t arrive for days; and the sole attenuation of his excluded state was his vision of the small, the admittedly secondary hotel in the bye-street from the Rue de la Paix, in which her solicitude for his purse had placed him, which affected him somehow as all indoor chill, glass-roofed court and slippery staircase, and which, by the same token, expressed the presence of Waymarsh even at times when Waymarsh might have been certain to be round at the bank. It came to pass before he moved that Waymarsh, and Waymarsh alone, Waymarsh not only undiluted but positively strengthened, struck him as the present alternative to the young man in the balcony. When he did move it was fairly to escape that alternative. Taking his way over the street at last and passing through the porte-cochere of the house was like consciously leaving Waymarsh out. However, he would tell him all about it.
Book Third
I
Strether told Waymarsh all about it that very evening, on their dining together at the hotel; which needn’t have happened, he was all the while aware, hadn’t he chosen to sacrifice to this occasion a rarer opportunity. The mention to his companion of the sacrifice was moreover exactly what introduced his recital—or, as he would have called it with more confidence in his interlocutor, his confession. His confession was that he had been captured and that one of the features of the affair had just failed to be his engaging himself on the spot to dinner. As by such a freedom Waymarsh would have lost him he had obeyed his scruple; and he had likewise obeyed another scruple—which bore on the question of his himself bringing a guest.
Waymarsh looked gravely ardent, over the finished soup, at this array of scruples; Strether hadn’t yet got quite used to being so unprepared for the consequences of the impression he produced. It was comparatively easy to explain, however, that he hadn’t felt sure his guest would please. The person was a young man whose acquaintance he had made but that afternoon in the course of rather a hindered enquiry for another person—an enquiry his new friend had just prevented in fact from being vain. “Oh,” said Strether, “I’ve all sorts of things to tell you!”—and he put it in a way that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh to help him to enjoy the telling. He waited for his fish, he drank of his wine, he wiped his long moustache, he leaned back in his chair, he took in the two English ladies who had just creaked past them and whom he would even have articulately greeted if they hadn’t rather chilled the impulse; so that all he could do was—by way of doing something—to say “Merci, Francois!” out quite loud when his fish was brought. Everything was there that he wanted, everything that could make the moment an occasion, that would do beautifully—everything but what Waymarsh might give. The little waxed salle-a-manger was sallow and sociable; Francois, dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a brother; the high-shouldered patronne, with her high-held, much-rubbed hands, seemed always assenting exuberantly to something unsaid; the Paris evening in short was, for Strether, in the very taste of the soup, in the goodness, as he was innocently pleased to think it, of the wine, in the pleasant coarse texture of the napkin and the crunch of the thick-crusted bread. These all were things congruous with his confession, and his confession was that he HAD— it would come out properly just there if Waymarsh would only take it properly—agreed to breakfast out, at twelve literally, the next day. He didn’t quite know where; the delicacy of the case came straight up in the remembrance of his new friend’s “We’ll see; I’ll take you somewhere!”—for it had required little more than that, after all, to let him right in. He was affected after a minute, face to face with his actual comrade, by the impulse to overcolour. There had already been things in respect to which he knew himself tempted by this perversity. If Waymarsh thought them bad he should at least have his reason for his discomfort; so Strether showed them as worse. Still, he was now, in his way, sincerely perplexed.
Chad had been absent from the Boulevard Malesherbes—was absent from Paris altogether; he had learned that from the concierge, but had nevertheless gone up, and gone up—there were no two ways about it—from an uncontrollable, a really, if one would, depraved curiosity. The concierge had mentioned to him that a friend of the tenant of the troisieme was for the time in possession; and this had been Strether’s pretext for a further enquiry, an experiment carried on, under Chad’s roof, without his knowledge. “I found his friend in fact there keeping the place warm, as he called it, for him; Chad himself being, as appears, in the south. He went a month ago to Cannes and though his retu
rn begins to be looked for it can’t be for some days. I might, you see, perfectly have waited a week; might have beaten a retreat as soon as I got this essential knowledge. But I beat no retreat; I did the opposite; I stayed, I dawdled, I trifled; above all I looked round. I saw, in fine; and— I don’t know what to call it—I sniffed. It’s a detail, but it’s as if there were something—something very good—TO sniff.”
Waymarsh’s face had shown his friend an attention apparently so remote that the latter was slightly surprised to find it at this point abreast with him. “Do you mean a smell? What of?”
“A charming scent. But I don’t know.”
Waymarsh gave an inferential grunt. “Does he live there with a woman?”
“I don’t know.”
Waymarsh waited an instant for more, then resumed. “Has he taken her off with him?”
“And will he bring her back?”—Strether fell into the enquiry. But he wound it up as before. “I don’t know.”
The way he wound it up, accompanied as this was with another drop back, another degustation of the Leoville, another wipe of his moustache and another good word for Francois, seemed to produce in his companion a slight irritation. “Then what the devil DO you know?”
“Well,” said Strether almost gaily, “I guess I don’t know anything!” His gaiety might have been a tribute to the fact that the state he had been reduced to did for him again what had been done by his talk of the matter with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre. It was somehow enlarging; and the air of that amplitude was now doubtless more or less—and all for Waymarsh to feel—in his further response. “That’s what I found out from the young man.”
“But I thought you said you found out nothing.”
“Nothing but that—that I don’t know anything.”
“And what good does that do you?”
“It’s just,” said Strether, “what I’ve come to you to help me to discover. I mean anything about anything over here. I FELT that, up there. It regularly rose before me in its might. The young man moreover—Chad’s friend—as good as told me so.”
“As good as told you you know nothing about anything?” Waymarsh appeared to look at some one who might have as good as told HIM. “How old is he?”
“Well, I guess not thirty.”
“Yet you had to take that from him?”
“Oh I took a good deal more—since, as I tell you, I took an invitation to dejeuner.”
“And are you GOING to that unholy meal?”
“If you’ll come with me. He wants you too, you know. I told him about you. He gave me his card,” Strether pursued, “and his name’s rather funny. It’s John Little Bilham, and he says his two surnames are, on account of his being small, inevitably used together.”
“Well,” Waymarsh asked with due detachment from these details, “what’s he doing up there?”
“His account of himself is that he’s ‘only a little artist-man.’ That seemed to me perfectly to describe him. But he’s yet in the phase of study; this, you know, is the great art-school—to pass a certain number of years in which he came over. And he’s a great friend of Chad’s, and occupying Chad’s rooms just now because they’re so pleasant. HE’S very pleasant and curious too,” Strether added—”though he’s not from Boston.”
Waymarsh looked already rather sick of him. “Where is he from?”
Strether thought. “I don’t know that, either. But he’s ‘notoriously,’ as he put it himself, not from Boston.”
“Well,” Waymarsh moralised from dry depths, “every one can’t notoriously be from Boston. Why,” he continued, “is he curious?”
“Perhaps just for THAT—for one thing! But really,” Strether added, “for everything. When you meet him you’ll see.”
“Oh I don’t want to meet him,” Waymarsh impatiently growled. “Why don’t he go home?”
Strether hesitated. “Well, because he likes it over here.”
This appeared in particular more than Waymarsh could bear. “He ought then to be ashamed of himself, and, as you admit that you think so too, why drag him in?”
Strether’s reply again took time. “Perhaps I do think so myself— though I don’t quite yet admit it. I’m not a bit sure—it’s again one of the things I want to find out. I liked him, and CAN you like people—? But no matter.” He pulled himself up. “There’s no doubt I want you to come down on me and squash me.”
Waymarsh helped himself to the next course, which, however proving not the dish he had just noted as supplied to the English ladies, had the effect of causing his imagination temporarily to wander. But it presently broke out at a softer spot. “Have they got a handsome place up there?”
“Oh a charming place; full of beautiful and valuable things. I never saw such a place”—and Strether’s thought went back to it. “For a little artist-man—!” He could in fact scarce express it.
But his companion, who appeared now to have a view, insisted. “Well?”
“Well, life can hold nothing better. Besides, they’re things of which he’s in charge.”
“So that he does doorkeeper for your precious pair? Can life,” Waymarsh enquired, “hold nothing better than THAT?” Then as Strether, silent, seemed even yet to wonder, “Doesn’t he know what SHE is?” he went on.
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. I couldn’t. It was impossible. You wouldn’t either. Besides I didn’t want to. No more would you.” Strether in short explained it at a stroke. “You can’t make out over here what people do know.”
“Then what did you come over for?”
“Well, I suppose exactly to see for myself—without their aid.”
“Then what do you want mine for?”
“Oh,” Strether laughed, “you’re not one of THEM! I do know what you know.”
As, however, this last assertion caused Waymarsh again to look at him hard—such being the latter’s doubt of its implications—he felt his justification lame. Which was still more the case when Waymarsh presently said: “Look here, Strether. Quit this.”
Our friend smiled with a doubt of his own. “Do you mean my tone?”
“No—damn your tone. I mean your nosing round. Quit the whole job. Let them stew in their juice. You’re being used for a thing you ain’t fit for. People don’t take a fine-tooth comb to groom a horse.”
“Am I a fine-tooth comb?” Strether laughed. “It’s something I never called myself!”
“It’s what you are, all the same. You ain’t so young as you were, but you’ve kept your teeth.”
He acknowledged his friend’s humour. “Take care I don’t get them into YOU! You’d like them, my friends at home, Waymarsh,” he declared; “you’d really particularly like them. And I know”—it was slightly irrelevant, but he gave it sudden and singular force—”I know they’d like you!”
“Oh don’t work them off on ME!” Waymarsh groaned.
Yet Strether still lingered with his hands in his pockets. “It’s really quite as indispensable as I say that Chad should be got back.”
“Indispensable to whom? To you?”
“Yes,” Strether presently said.
“Because if you get him you also get Mrs. Newsome?”
Strether faced it. “Yes.”
“And if you don’t get him you don’t get her?”
It might be merciless, but he continued not to flinch. “I think it might have some effect on our personal understanding. Chad’s of real importance—or can easily become so if he will—to the business.”
“And the business is of real importance to his mother’s husband?”
“Well, I naturally want what my future wife wants. And the thing will be much better if we have our own man in it.”
“If you have your own man in it, in other words,” Waymarsh said, “you’ll marry—you personally—more money. She’s already rich, as I understand you, but she’ll be richer still if the business can be made to boom on certain lines that you’ve laid down.”
“I hav
en’t laid them down,” Strether promptly returned. “Mr. Newsome —who knew extraordinarily well what he was about—laid them down ten years ago.”
Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake of his mane, THAT didn’t matter! “You’re fierce for the boom anyway.”
His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice of the charge. “I can scarcely be called fierce, I think, when I so freely take my chance of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced in a sense counter to Mrs. Newsome’s own feelings.”
Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look. “I see. You’re afraid yourself of being squared. But you’re a humbug,” he added, all the same.”
“Oh!” Strether quickly protested.
“Yes, you ask me for protection—which makes you very interesting; and then you won’t take it. You say you want to be squashed—”