by Henry James
Strether assented to this proposition with full lucidity, his companion’s plural pronoun, which stood all for Mrs. Newsome and her daughter, having no ambiguity for him. There was nothing, apparently, to stand for Mamie and Jim; and this added to our friend’s sense of Chad’s knowing what he thought. “But they’ve made up their minds to the opposite—that you CAN’T go on as you are.”
“No,” Chad continued in the same way; “they won’t have it for a minute.”
Strether on his side also reflectively smoked. It was as if their high place really represented some moral elevation from which they could look down on their recent past. “There never was the smallest chance, do you know, that they WOULD have it for a moment.”
“Of course not—no real chance. But if they were willing to think there was—!”
“They weren’t willing.” Strether had worked it all out. “It wasn’t for you they came out, but for me. It wasn’t to see for themselves what you’re doing, but what I’m doing. The first branch of their curiosity was inevitably destined, under my culpable delay, to give way to the second; and it’s on the second that, if I may use the expression and you don’t mind my marking the invidious fact, they’ve been of late exclusively perched. When Sarah sailed it was me, in other words, they were after.”
Chad took it in both with intelligence and with indulgence. “It IS rather a business then—what I’ve let you in for!”
Strether had again a brief pause; which ended in a reply that seemed to dispose once for all of this element of compunction. Chad was to treat it, at any rate, so far as they were again together, as having done so. “I was ‘in’ when you found me.”
“Ah but it was you,” the young man laughed, “who found ME.”
“I only found you out. It was you who found me in. It was all in the day’s work for them, at all events, that they should come. And they’ve greatly enjoyed it,” Strether declared.
“Well, I’ve tried to make them,” said Chad.
His companion did himself presently the same justice. “So have I. I tried even this very morning—while Mrs. Pocock was with me. She enjoys for instance, almost as much as anything else, not being, as I’ve said, afraid of me; and I think I gave her help in that.”
Chad took a deeper interest. “Was she very very nasty?”
Strether debated. “Well, she was the most important thing—she was definite. She was—at last—crystalline. And I felt no remorse. I saw that they must have come.”
“Oh I wanted to see them for myself; so that if it were only for THAT—!” Chad’s own remorse was as small.
This appeared almost all Strether wanted. “Isn’t your having seen them for yourself then THE thing, beyond all others, that has come of their visit?”
Chad looked as if he thought it nice of his old friend to put it so. “Don’t you count it as anything that you’re dished—if you ARE dished? Are you, my dear man, dished?”
It sounded as if he were asking if he had caught cold or hurt his foot, and Strether for a minute but smoked and smoked. “I want to see her again. I must see her.”
“Of course you must.” Then Chad hesitated. “Do you mean—a—Mother herself?”
“Oh your mother—that will depend.”
It was as if Mrs. Newsome had somehow been placed by the words very far off. Chad however endeavoured in spite of this to reach the place. “What do you mean it will depend on?”
Strether, for all answer, gave him a longish look. “I was speaking of Sarah. I must positively—though she quite cast me off—see HER again. I can’t part with her that way.”
“Then she was awfully unpleasant?”
Again Strether exhaled. “She was what she had to be. I mean that from the moment they’re not delighted they can only be—well what I admit she was. We gave them,” he went on, “their chance to be delighted, and they’ve walked up to it, and looked all round it, and not taken it.”
“You can bring a horse to water—!” Chad suggested.
“Precisely. And the tune to which this morning Sarah wasn’t delighted—the tune to which, to adopt your metaphor, she refused to drink—leaves us on that side nothing more to hope.”
Chad had a pause, and then as if consolingly: “It was never of course really the least on the cards that they would be ‘delighted.’”
“Well, I don’t know, after all,” Strether mused. “I’ve had to come as far round. However”—he shook it off—”it’s doubtless MY performance that’s absurd.”
“There are certainly moments,” said Chad, “when you seem to me too good to be true. Yet if you are true,” he added, “that seems to be all that need concern me.”
“I’m true, but I’m incredible. I’m fantastic and ridiculous— I don’t explain myself even TO myself. How can they then,” Strether asked, “understand me? So I don’t quarrel with them.”
“I see. They quarrel,” said Chad rather comfortably, “with US.” Strether noted once more the comfort, but his young friend had already gone on. “I should feel greatly ashamed, all the same, if I didn’t put it before you again that you ought to think, after all, tremendously well. I mean before giving up beyond recall—” With which insistence, as from a certain delicacy, dropped.
Ah but Strether wanted it. “Say it all, say it all.”
“Well, at your age, and with what—when all’s said and done— Mother might do for you and be for you.”
Chad had said it all, from his natural scruple, only to that extent; so that Strether after an instant himself took a hand. “My absence of an assured future. The little I have to show toward the power to take care of myself. The way, the wonderful way, she would certainly take care of me. Her fortune, her kindness, and the constant miracle of her having been disposed to go even so far. Of course, of course”—he summed it up. “There are those sharp facts.”
Chad had meanwhile thought of another still. “And don’t you really care—?”
His friend slowly turned round to him. “Will you go?”
“I’ll go if you’ll say you now consider I should. You know,” he went on, “I was ready six weeks ago.”
“Ah,” said Strether, “that was when you didn’t know I wasn’t! You’re ready at present because you do know it.”
“That may be,” Chad returned; “but all the same I’m sincere. You talk about taking the whole thing on your shoulders, but in what light do you regard me that you think me capable of letting you pay?” Strether patted his arm, as they stood together against the parapet, reassuringly—seeming to wish to contend that he HAD the wherewithal; but it was again round this question of purchase and price that the young man’s sense of fairness continued to hover. “What it literally comes to for you, if you’ll pardon my putting it so, is that you give up money. Possibly a good deal of money.”
“Oh,” Strether laughed, “if it were only just enough you’d still be justified in putting it so! But I’ve on my side to remind you too that YOU give up money; and more than ‘possibly’—quite certainly, as I should suppose—a good deal.”
“True enough; but I’ve got a certain quantity,” Chad returned after a moment. “Whereas you, my dear man, you—”
“I can’t be at all said”—Strether took him up—”to have a ‘quantity’ certain or uncertain? Very true. Still, I shan’t starve.”
“Oh you mustn’t STARVE!” Chad pacifically emphasised; and so, in the pleasant conditions, they continued to talk; though there was, for that matter, a pause in which the younger companion might have been taken as weighing again the delicacy of his then and there promising the elder some provision against the possibility just mentioned. This, however, he presumably thought best not to do, for at the end of another minute they had moved in quite a different direction. Strether had broken in by returning to the subject of Chad’s passage with Sarah and enquiring if they had arrived, in the event, at anything in the nature of a “scene.” To this Chad replied that they had on the contrary kept tremendously polite; add
ing moreover that Sally was after all not the woman to have made the mistake of not being. “Her hands are a good deal tied, you see. I got so, from the first,” he sagaciously observed, “the start of her.”
“You mean she has taken so much from you?”
“Well, I couldn’t of course in common decency give less: only she hadn’t expected, I think, that I’d give her nearly so much. And she began to take it before she knew it.”
“And she began to like it,” said Strether, “as soon as she began to take it!”
“Yes, she has liked it—also more than she expected.” After which Chad observed: “But she doesn’t like ME. In fact she hates me.”
Strether’s interest grew. “Then why does she want you at home?”
“Because when you hate you want to triumph, and if she should get me neatly stuck there she WOULD triumph.”
Strether followed afresh, but looking as he went. “Certainly—in a manner. But it would scarce be a triumph worth having if, once entangled, feeling her dislike and possibly conscious in time of a certain quantity of your own, you should on the spot make yourself unpleasant to her.”
“Ah,” said Chad, “she can bear ME—could bear me at least at home. It’s my being there that would be her triumph. She hates me in Paris.”
“She hates in other words—”
“Yes, THAT’S it!”—Chad had quickly understood this understanding; which formed on the part of each as near an approach as they had yet made to naming Madame de Vionnet. The limitations of their distinctness didn’t, however, prevent its fairly lingering in the air that it was this lady Mrs. Pocock hated. It added one more touch moreover to their established recognition of the rare intimacy of Chad’s association with her. He had never yet more twitched away the last light veil from this phenomenon than in presenting himself as confounded and submerged in the feeling she had created at Woollett. “And I’ll tell you who hates me too,” he immediately went on.
Strether knew as immediately whom he meant, but with as prompt a protest. “Ah no! Mamie doesn’t hate—well,” he caught himself in time—”anybody at all. Mamie’s beautiful.”
Chad shook his head. “That’s just why I mind it. She certainly doesn’t like me.”
“How much do you mind it? What would you do for her?”
“Well, I’d like her if she’d like me. Really, really,” Chad declared.
It gave his companion a moment’s pause. “You asked me just now if I don’t, as you said, ‘care’ about a certain person. You rather tempt me therefore to put the question in my turn. Don’t YOU care about a certain other person?”
Chad looked at him hard in the lamplight of the window. “The difference is that I don’t want to.”
Strether wondered. “‘Don’t want’ to?”
“I try not to—that is I HAVE tried. I’ve done my best. You can’t be surprised,” the young man easily went on, “when you yourself set me on it. I was indeed,” he added, “already on it a little; but you set me harder. It was six weeks ago that I thought I had come out.”
Strether took it well in. “But you haven’t come out!”
“I don’t know—it’s what I WANT to know,” said Chad. “And if I could have sufficiently wanted—by myself—to go back, I think I might have found out.”
“Possibly”—Strether considered. “But all you were able to achieve was to want to want to! And even then,” he pursued, “only till our friends there came. Do you want to want to still?” As with a sound half-dolorous, half-droll and all vague and equivocal, Chad buried his face for a little in his hands, rubbing it in a whimsical way that amounted to an evasion, he brought it out more sharply: “DO you?”
Chad kept for a time his attitude, but at last he looked up, and then abruptly, “Jim IS a damned dose!” he declared.
“Oh I don’t ask you to abuse or describe or in any way pronounce on your relatives; I simply put it to you once more whether you’re NOW ready. You say you’ve ‘seen.’ Is what you’ve seen that you can’t resist?”
Chad gave him a strange smile—the nearest approach he had ever shown to a troubled one. “Can’t you make me NOT resist?”
“What it comes to,” Strether went on very gravely now and as if he hadn’t heard him, “what it comes to is that more has been done for you, I think, than I’ve ever seen done—attempted perhaps, but never so successfully done—by one human being for another.”
“Oh an immense deal certainly”—Chad did it full justice. “And you yourself are adding to it.”
It was without heeding this either that his visitor continued. “And our friends there won’t have it.”
“No, they simply won’t.”
“They demand you on the basis, as it were, of repudiation and ingratitude; and what has been the matter with me,” Strether went on, “is that I haven’t seen my way to working with you for repudiation.”
Chad appreciated this. “Then as you haven’t seen yours you naturally haven’t seen mine. There it is.” After which he proceeded, with a certain abruptness, to a sharp interrogation. “NOW do you say she doesn’t hate me?”
Strether hesitated. “‘She’—?”
“Yes—Mother. We called it Sarah, but it comes to the same thing.”
“Ah,” Strether objected, “not to the same thing as her hating YOU.”
On which—though as if for an instant it had hung fire—Chad remarkably replied: “Well, if they hate my good friend, THAT comes to the same thing.” It had a note of inevitable truth that made Strether take it as enough, feel he wanted nothing more. The young man spoke in it for his “good friend” more than he had ever yet directly spoken, confessed to such deep identities between them as he might play with the idea of working free from, but which at a given moment could still draw him down like a whirlpool. And meanwhile he had gone on. “Their hating you too moreover—that also comes to a good deal.”
“Ah,” said Strether, “your mother doesn’t.”
Chad, however, loyally stuck to it—loyally, that is, to Strether. “She will if you don’t look out.”
“Well, I do look out. I am, after all, looking out. That’s just why,” our friend explained, “I want to see her again.”
It drew from Chad again the same question. “To see Mother?”
“To see—for the present—Sarah.”
“Ah then there you are! And what I don’t for the life of me make out,” Chad pursued with resigned perplexity, “is what you GAIN by it.”
Oh it would have taken his companion too long to say! “That’s because you have, I verily believe, no imagination. You’ve other qualities. But no imagination, don’t you see? at all.”
“I dare say. I do see.” It was an idea in which Chad showed interest. “But haven’t you yourself rather too much?”
“Oh RATHER—!” So that after an instant, under this reproach and as if it were at last a fact really to escape from, Strether made his move for departure.
II
One of the features of the restless afternoon passed by him after Mrs. Pocock’s visit was an hour spent, shortly before dinner, with Maria Gostrey, whom of late, in spite of so sustained a call on his attention from other quarters, he had by no means neglected. And that he was still not neglecting her will appear from the fact that he was with her again at the same hour on the very morrow—with no less fine a consciousness moreover of being able to hold her ear. It continued inveterately to occur, for that matter, that whenever he had taken one of his greater turns he came back to where she so faithfully awaited him. None of these excursions had on the whole been livelier than the pair of incidents—the fruit of the short interval since his previous visit—on which he had now to report to her. He had seen Chad Newsome late the night before, and he had had that morning, as a sequel to this conversation, a second interview with Sarah. “But they’re all off,” he said, “at last.”
It puzzled her a moment. “All?—Mr. Newsome with them?”
“Ah not yet! Sarah and Jim and
Mamie. But Waymarsh with them— for Sarah. It’s too beautiful,” Strether continued; “I find I don’t get over that—it’s always a fresh joy. But it’s a fresh joy too,” he added, “that—well, what do you think? Little Bilham also goes. But he of course goes for Mamie.”
Miss Gostrey wondered. “‘For’ her? Do you mean they’re already engaged?”
“Well,” said Strether, “say then for ME. He’ll do anything for me; just as I will, for that matter—anything I can—for him. Or for Mamie either. SHE’LL do anything for me.”