by Henry James
Then it was that he saw how she had decidedly come all the way; and there accompanied it an extraordinary sense of her raising from somewhere below him her beautiful suppliant eyes. He might have been perched at his door-step or at his window and she standing in the road. For a moment he let her stand and couldn’t moreover have spoken. It had been sad, of a sudden, with a sadness that was like a cold breath in his face. “What can I do,” he finally asked, “but listen to you as I promised Chadwick?”
“Ah but what I’m asking you,” she quickly said, “isn’t what Mr. Newsome had in mind.” She spoke at present, he saw, as if to take courageously all her risk. “This is my own idea and a different thing.”
It gave poor Strether in truth—uneasy as it made him too—something of the thrill of a bold perception justified. “Well,” he answered kindly enough, “I was sure a moment since that some idea of your own had come to you.”
She seemed still to look up at him, but now more serenely. “I made out you were sure—and that helped it to come. So you see,” she continued, “we do get on.”
“Oh but it appears to me I don’t at all meet your request. How can I when I don’t understand it?”
“It isn’t at all necessary you should understand; it will do quite well enough if you simply remember it. Only feel I trust you—and for nothing so tremendous after all. Just,” she said with a wonderful smile, “for common civility.”
Strether had a long pause while they sat again face to face, as they had sat, scarce less conscious, before the poor lady had crossed the stream. She was the poor lady for Strether now because clearly she had some trouble, and her appeal to him could only mean that her trouble was deep. He couldn’t help it; it wasn’t his fault; he had done nothing; but by a turn of the hand she had somehow made their encounter a relation. And the relation profited by a mass of things that were not strictly in it or of it; by the very air in which they sat, by the high cold delicate room, by the world outside and the little plash in the court, by the First Empire and the relics in the stiff cabinets, by matters as far off as those and by others as near as the unbroken clasp of her hands in her lap and the look her expression had of being most natural when her eyes were most fixed. “You count upon me of course for something really much greater than it sounds.”
“Oh it sounds great enough too!” she laughed at this.
He found himself in time on the point of telling her that she was, as Miss Barrace called it, wonderful; but, catching himself up, he said something else instead. “What was it Chad’s idea then that you should say to me?”
“Ah his idea was simply what a man’s idea always is—to put every effort off on the woman.”
“The ‘woman’—?” Strether slowly echoed.
“The woman he likes—and just in proportion as he likes her. In proportion too—for shifting the trouble—as she likes him.”
Strether followed it; then with an abruptness of his own: “How much do you like Chad?”
“Just as much as that—to take all, with you, on myself.” But she got at once again away from this. “I’ve been trembling as if we were to stand or fall by what you may think of me; and I’m even now,” she went on wonderfully, “drawing a long breath—and, yes, truly taking a great courage—from the hope that I don’t in fact strike you as impossible.”
“That’s at all events, clearly,” he observed after an instant, “the way I don’t strike you.”
“Well,” she so far assented, “as you haven’t yet said you won’t have the little patience with me I ask for—”
“You draw splendid conclusions? Perfectly. But I don’t understand them,” Strether pursued. “You seem to me to ask for much more than you need. What, at the worst for you, what at the best for myself, can I after all do? I can use no pressure that I haven’t used. You come really late with your request. I’ve already done all that for myself the case admits of. I’ve said my say, and here I am.”
“Yes, here you are, fortunately!” Madame de Vionnet laughed. “Mrs. Newsome,” she added in another tone, “didn’t think you can do so little.”
He had an hesitation, but he brought the words out. “Well, she thinks so now.”
“Do you mean by that—?” But she also hung fire.
“Do I mean what?”
She still rather faltered. “Pardon me if I touch on it, but if I’m saying extraordinary things, why, perhaps, mayn’t I? Besides, doesn’t it properly concern us to know?”
“To know what?” he insisted as after thus beating about the bush she had again dropped.
She made the effort. “Has she given you up?”
He was amazed afterwards to think how simply and quietly he had met it. “Not yet.” It was almost as if he were a trifle disappointed—had expected still more of her freedom. But he went straight on. “Is that what Chad has told you will happen to me?”
She was evidently charmed with the way he took it. “If you mean if we’ve talked of it—most certainly. And the question’s not what has had least to do with my wishing to see you.”
“To judge if I’m the sort of man a woman can—?”
“Precisely,” she exclaimed—“you wonderful gentleman! I do judge—I have judged. A woman can’t. You’re safe—with every right to be. You’d be much happier if you’d only believe it.”
Strether was silent a little; then he found himself speaking with a cynicism of confidence of which even at the moment the sources were strange to him. “I try to believe it. But it’s a marvel,” he exclaimed, “how you already get at it!”
Oh she was able to say. “Remember how much I was on the way to it through Mr. Newsome—before I saw you. He thinks everything of your strength.”
“Well, I can bear almost anything!” our friend briskly interrupted. Deep and beautiful on this her smile came back, and with the effect of making him hear what he had said just as she had heard it. He easily enough felt that it gave him away, but what in truth had everything done but that? It had been all very well to think at moments that he was holding her nose down and that he had coerced her: what had he by this time done but let her practically see that he accepted their relation? What was their relation moreover—though light and brief enough in form as yet—but whatever she might choose to make it? Nothing could prevent her—certainly he couldn’t—from making it pleasant. At the back of his head, behind everything, was the sense that she was—there, before him, close to him, in vivid imperative form—one of the rare women he had so often heard of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous fact of whom, from the moment it was at all presented, made a relation of mere recognition. That was not the kind of woman he had ever found Mrs. Newsome, a contemporaneous fact who had been distinctly slow to establish herself; and at present, confronted with Madame de Vionnet, he felt the simplicity of his original impression of Miss Gostrey. She certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the world was wide, each day was more and more a new lesson. There were at any rate even among the stranger ones relations and relations. “Of course I suit Chad’s grand way,” he quickly added. “He hasn’t had much difficulty in working me in.”
She seemed to deny a little, on the young man’s behalf, by the rise of her eyebrows, an intention of any process at all inconsiderate. “You must know how grieved he’d be if you were to lose anything. He believes you can keep his mother patient.”
Strether wondered with his eyes on her. “I see. That’s then what you really want of me. And how am I to do it? Perhaps you’ll tell me that.”
“Simply tell her the truth.”
“And what do you call the truth?”
“Well, any truth—about us all—that you see yourself. I leave it to you.”
“Thank you very much. I like,” Strether laughed with a slight harshness, “the way you leave things!”
But she insisted kindly, gently, as if it wasn’t so bad. “Be perfectly honest. Tell her all.”
“All?” he odd
ly echoed.
“Tell her the simple truth,” Madame de Vionnet again pleaded.
“But what is the simple truth? The simple truth is exactly what I’m trying to discover.”
She looked about a while, but presently she came back to him. “Tell her, fully and clearly, about us.”
Strether meanwhile had been staring. “You and your daughter?”
“Yes—little Jeanne and me. Tell her,” she just slightly quavered, “you like us.”
“And what good will that do me? Or rather”—he caught himself up—“what good will it do you?”
She looked graver. “None, you believe, really?”
Strether debated. “She didn’t send me out to ‘like’ you.”
“Oh,” she charmingly contended, “she sent you out to face the facts.”
He admitted after an instant that there was something in that. “But how can I face them till I know what they are? Do you want him,” he then braced himself to ask, “to marry your daughter?”
She gave a headshake as noble as it was prompt. “No—not that.”
“And he really doesn’t want to himself?”
She repeated the movement, but now with a strange light in her face. “He likes her too much.”
Strether wondered. “To be willing to consider, you mean, the question of taking her to America?”
“To be willing to do anything with her but be immensely kind and nice—really tender of her. We watch over her, and you must help us. You must see her again.”
Strether felt awkward. “Ah with pleasure—she’s so remarkably attractive.”
The mother’s eagerness with which Madame de Vionnet jumped at this was to come back to him later as beautiful in its grace. “The dear thing did please you?” Then as he met it with the largest “Oh!” of enthusiasm: “She’s perfect. She’s my joy.”
“Well, I’m sure that—if one were near her and saw more of her—she’d be mine.”
“Then,” said Madame de Vionnet, “tell Mrs. Newsome that!”
He wondered the more. “What good will that do you?” As she appeared unable at once to say, however, he brought out something else. “Is your daughter in love with our friend?”
“Ah,” she rather startlingly answered, “I wish you’d find out!”
He showed his surprise. “I? A stranger?”
“Oh you won’t be a stranger—presently. You shall see her quite, I assure you, as if you weren’t.”
It remained for him none the less an extraordinary notion. “It seems to me surely that if her mother can’t—”
“Ah little girls and their mothers to-day!” she rather inconsequently broke in. But she checked herself with something she seemed to give out as after all more to the point. “Tell her I’ve been good for him. Don’t you think I have?”
It had its effect on him—more than at the moment he quite measured. Yet he was consciously enough touched. “Oh if it’s all you—!”
“Well, it may not be ‘all,’ ” she interrupted, “but it’s to a great extent. Really and truly,” she added in a tone that was to take its place with him among things remembered.
“Then it’s very wonderful.” He smiled at her from a face that he felt as strained, and her own face for a moment kept him so. At last she also got up. “Well, don’t you think that for that—”
“I ought to save you?” So it was that the way to meet her—and the way, as well, in a manner, to get off—came over him. He heard himself use the exorbitant word, the very sound of which helped to determine his flight. “I’ll save you if I can.”
II
In Chad’s lovely home, however, one evening ten days later, he felt himself present at the collapse of the question of Jeanne de Vionnet’s shy secret. He had been dining there in the company of that young lady and her mother, as well as of other persons, and he had gone into the petit salon, at Chad’s request, on purpose to talk with her. The young man had put this to him as a favour—“I should like so awfully to know what you think of her. It will really be a chance for you,” he had said, “to see the jeune fille—I mean the type—as she actually is, and I don’t think that, as an observer of manners, it’s a thing you ought to miss. It will be an impression that—whatever else you take—you can carry home with you, where you’ll find again so much to compare it with.”
Strether knew well enough with what Chad wished him to compare it, and though he entirely assented he hadn’t yet somehow been so deeply reminded that he was being, as he constantly though mutely expressed it, used. He was as far as ever from making out exactly to what end; but he was none the less constantly accompanied by a sense of the service he rendered. He conceived only that this service was highly agreeable to those who profited by it; and he was indeed still waiting for the moment at which he should catch it in the act of proving disagreeable, proving in some degree intolerable, to himself. He failed quite to see how his situation could clear up at all logically except by some turn of events that would give him the pretext of disgust. He was building from day to day on the possibility of disgust, but each day brought forth meanwhile a new and more engaging bend of the road. That possibility was now ever so much further from sight than on the eve of his arrival, and he perfectly felt that, should it come at all, it would have to be at best inconsequent and violent. He struck himself as a little nearer to it only when he asked himself what service, in such a life of utility, he was after all rendering Mrs. Newsome. When he wished to help himself to believe that he was still all right he reflected—and in fact with wonder—on the unimpaired frequency of their correspondence; in relation to which what was after all more natural than that it should become more frequent just in proportion as their problem became more complicated?
Certain it is at any rate that he now often brought himself balm by the question, with the rich consciousness of yesterday’s letter, “Well, what can I do more than that—what can I do more than tell her everything?” To persuade himself that he did tell her, had told her, everything, he used to try to think of particular things he hadn’t told her. When at rare moments and in the watches of the night he pounced on one it generally showed itself to be—to a deeper scrutiny—not quite truly of the essence. When anything new struck him as coming up, or anything already noted as reappearing, he always immediately wrote, as if for fear that if he didn’t he would miss something; and also that he might be able to say to himself from time to time “She knows it now—even while I worry.” It was a great comfort to him in general not to have left past things to be dragged to light and explained; not to have to produce at so late a stage anything not produced, or anything even veiled and attenuated, at the moment. She knew it now: that was what he said to himself to-night in relation to the fresh fact of Chad’s acquaintance with the two ladies—not to speak of the fresher one of his own. Mrs. Newsome knew in other words that very night at Woollett that he himself knew Madame de Vionnet and that he had conscientiously been to see her; also that he had found her remarkably attractive and that there would probably be a good deal more to tell. But she further knew, or would know very soon, that, again conscientiously, he hadn’t repeated his visit; and that when Chad had asked him on the Countess’s behalf—Strether made her out vividly, with a thought at the back of his head, a Countess—if he wouldn’t name a day for dining with her, he had replied lucidly: “Thank you very much—impossible.” He had begged the young man would present his excuses and had trusted him to understand that it couldn’t really strike one as quite the straight thing. He hadn’t reported to Mrs. Newsome that he had promised to “save” Madame de Vionnet; but, so far as he was concerned with that reminiscence, he hadn’t at any rate promised to haunt her house. What Chad had understood could only, in truth, be inferred from Chad’s behaviour, which had been in this connexion as easy as in every other. He was easy, always, when he understood; he was easier still, if possible, when he didn’t; he had replied that he would make it all right; and he had proceeded to do this by substituting the
present occasion—as he was ready to substitute others—for any, for every occasion as to which his old friend should have a funny scruple.
“Oh but I’m not a little foreign girl; I’m just as English as I can be,” Jeanne de Vionnet had said to him as soon as, in the petit salon, he sank, shyly enough on his own side, into the place near her vacated by Madame Gloriani at his approach. Madame Gloriani, who was in black velvet, with white lace and powdered hair, and whose somewhat massive majesty melted, at any contact, into the graciousness of some incomprehensible tongue, moved away to make room for the vague gentleman, after benevolent greetings to him which embodied, as he believed, in baffling accents, some recognition of his face from a couple of Sundays before. Then he had remarked—making the most of the advantage of his years—that it frightened him quite enough to find himself dedicated to the entertainment of a little foreign girl. There were girls he wasn’t afraid of—he was quite bold with little Americans. Thus it was that she had defended herself to the end—“Oh but I’m almost American too. That’s what Mamma has wanted me to be—I mean like that; for she has wanted me to have lots of freedom. She has known such good results from it.”
She was fairly beautiful to him—a faint pastel in an oval frame: he thought of her already as of some lurking image in a long gallery, the portrait of a small old-time princess of whom nothing was known but that she had died young. Little Jeanne wasn’t, doubtless, to die young, but one couldn’t, all the same, bear on her lightly enough. It was bearing hard, it was bearing as he, in any case, wouldn’t bear, to concern himself, in relation to her, with the question of a young man. Odious really the question of a young man; one didn’t treat such a person as a maidservant suspected of a “follower.” And then young men, young men—well, the thing was their business simply, or was at all events hers. She was fluttered, fairly fevered—to the point of a little glitter that came and went in her eyes and a pair of pink spots that stayed in her cheeks—with the great adventure of dining out and with the greater one still, possibly, of finding a gentleman whom she must think of as very, very old, a gentleman with eye-glasses, wrinkles, a long grizzled moustache. She spoke the prettiest English, our friend thought, that he had ever heard spoken, just as he had believed her a few minutes before to be speaking the prettiest French. He wondered almost wistfully if such a sweep of the lyre didn’t react on the spirit itself; and his fancy had in fact, before he knew it, begun so to stray and embroider that he finally found himself, absent and extravagant, sitting with the child in a friendly silence. Only by this time he felt her flutter to have fortunately dropped and that she was more at her ease. She trusted him, liked him, and it was to come back to him afterwards that she had told him things. She had dipped into the waiting medium at last and found neither surge nor chill—nothing but the small splash she could herself make in the pleasant warmth, nothing but the safety of dipping and dipping again. At the end of the ten minutes he was to spend with her his impression—with all it had thrown off and all it had taken in—was complete. She had been free, as she knew freedom, partly to show him that, unlike other little persons she knew, she had imbibed that ideal. She was delightfully quaint about herself, but the vision of what she had imbibed was what most held him. It really consisted, he was soon enough to feel, in just one great little matter, the fact that, whatever her nature, she was thoroughly—he had to cast about for the word, but it came—bred. He couldn’t of course on so short an acquaintance speak for her nature, but the idea of breeding was what she had meanwhile dropped into his mind. He had never yet known it so sharply presented. Her mother gave it, no doubt; but her mother, to make that less sensible, gave so much else besides, and on neither of the two previous occasions, extraordinary woman, Strether felt, anything like what she was giving to-night. Little Jeanne was a case, an exquisite case of education; whereas the Countess, whom it so amused him to think of by that denomination, was a case, also exquisite, of—well, he didn’t know what.