by Henry James
Ah how much, as it was, for all her bridling brightness—which was merely general and noticed nothing—would they work together? Strether knew he was unreasonable; he set it down to his being nervous: people couldn’t notice everything and speak of everything in a quarter of an hour. Possibly, no doubt, also, he made too much of Chad’s display. Yet, none the less, when, at the end of five minutes, in the cab, Jim Pocock had said nothing either—hadn’t said, that is, what Strether wanted, though he had said much else—it all suddenly bounced back to their being either stupid or wilful. It was more probably on the whole the former; so that that would be the drawback of the bridling brightness. Yes, they would bridle and be bright; they would make the best of what was before them, but their observation would fail; it would be beyond them; they simply wouldn’t understand. Of what use would it be then that they had come?—if they weren’t to be intelligent up to that point: unless indeed he himself were utterly deluded and extravagant? Was he, on this question of Chad’s improvement, fantastic and away from the truth? Did he live in a false world, a world that had grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation—in the face now of Jim’s silence in particular—but the alarm of the vain thing menaced by the touch of the real? Was this contribution of the real possibly the mission of the Pococks?—had they come to make the work of observation, as he had practised observation, crack and crumble, and to reduce Chad to the plain terms in which honest minds could deal with him? Had they come in short to be sane where Strether was destined to feel that he himself had only been silly?
He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long when once he had reflected that he would have been silly, in this case, with Maria Gostrey and little Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet and little Jeanne, with Lambert Strether, in fine, and above all with Chad Newsome himself. Wouldn’t it be found to have made more for reality to be silly with these persons than sane with Sarah and Jim? Jim in fact, he presently made up his mind, was individually out of it; Jim didn’t care; Jim hadn’t come out either for Chad or for him; Jim in short left the moral side to Sally and indeed simply availed himself now, for the sense of recreation, of the fact that he left almost everything to Sally. He was nothing compared to Sally, and not so much by reason of Sally’s temper and will as by that of her more developed type and greater acquaintance with the world. He quite frankly and serenely confessed, as he sat there with Strether, that he felt his type hang far in the rear of his wife’s and still further, if possible, in the rear of his sister’s. Their types, he well knew, were recognized and acclaimed; whereas the most a leading Woollett business-man could hope to achieve socially, and for that matter industrially, was a certain freedom to play into this general glamour.
The impression he made on our friend was another of the things that marked our friend’s road. It was a strange impression, especially as so soon produced; Strether had received it, he judged, all in the twenty minutes; it struck him at least as but in a minor degree the work of the long Woollett years. Pocock was normally and consentingly though not quite wittingly out of the question. It was despite his being normal; it was despite his being cheerful; it was despite his being a leading Woollett business-man; and the determination of his fate left him thus perfectly usual—as everything else about it was clearly, to his sense, not less so. He seemed to say that there was a whole side of life on which the perfectly usual was for leading Woollett business-men to be out of the question. He made no more of it than that, and Strether, so far as Jim was concerned, desired to make no more. Only Strether’s imagination, as always, worked, and he asked himself if this side of life were not somehow connected, for those who figured on it, with the fact of marriage. Would his relation to it, had he married ten years before, have become now the same as Pocock’s? Might it even become the same should he marry in a few months? Should he ever know himself as much out of the question for Mrs. Newsome as Jim knew himself—in a dim way—for Mrs. Jim?
To turn his eyes in that direction was to be personally reassured; he was different from Pocock; he had affirmed himself differently and was held after all in higher esteem. What none the less came home to him, however, at this hour, was that the society over there, that of which Sarah and Mamie—and, in a more eminent way, Mrs. Newsome herself—were specimens, was essentially a society of women, and that poor Jim wasn’t in it. He himself, Lambert Strether, was as yet in some degree—which was an odd situation for a man; but it kept coming back to him in a whimsical way that he should perhaps find his marriage had cost him his place. This occasion indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a time of sensible exclusion for Jim, who was in a state of manifest response to the charm of his adventure. Small and fat and constantly facetious, straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he would have been practically indistinguishable hadn’t his constant preference for light-grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very little stories, done what it could for his identity. There were signs in him, though none of them plaintive, of always paying for others; and the principal one perhaps was just this failure of type. It was with this that he paid, rather than with fatigue or waste; and also doubtless a little with the effort of humour—never irrelevant to the conditions, to the relations, with which he was acquainted.
He gurgled his joy as they rolled through the happy streets; he declared that his trip was a regular windfall, and that he wasn’t there, he was eager to remark, to hang back from anything: he didn’t know quite what Sally had come for, but he had come for a good time. Strether indulged him even while wondering if what Sally wanted her brother to go back for was to become like her husband. He trusted that a good time was to be, out and out, the programme for all of them; and he assented liberally to Jim’s proposal that, disencumbered and irresponsible—his things were in the omnibus with those of the others—they should take a further turn round before going to the hotel. It wasn’t for him to tackle Chad—it was Sally’s job; and as it would be like her, he felt, to open fire on the spot, it wouldn’t be amiss of them to hold off and give her time. Strether, on his side, only asked to give her time; so he jogged with his companion along boulevards and avenues, trying to extract from meagre material some forecast of his catastrophe. He was quick enough to see that Jim Pocock declined judgement, had hovered quite round the outer edge of discussion and anxiety, leaving all analysis of their question to the ladies alone and now only feeling his way toward some small droll cynicism. It broke out afresh, the cynicism—it had already shown a flicker—in a but slightly deferred: “Well, hanged if I would if I were he!”
“You mean you wouldn’t in Chad’s place—?”
“Give up this to go back and boss the advertising!” Poor Jim, with his arms folded and his little legs out in the open fiacre, drank in the sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of their vista to the other. “Why I want to come right out and live here myself. And I want to live while I am here too. I feel with you—oh you’ve been grand, old man, and I’ve twigged—that it ain’t right to worry Chad. I don’t mean to persecute him; I couldn’t in conscience. It’s thanks to you at any rate that I’m here, and I’m sure I’m much obliged. You’re a lovely pair.”
There were things in this speech that Strether let pass for the time. “Don’t you then think it important the advertising should be thoroughly taken in hand? Chad will be, so far as capacity is concerned,” he went on, “the man to do it”
“Where did he get his capacity,” Jim asked, “over here?”
“He didn’t get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that over here he hasn’t inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for business, an extraordinary head. He comes by that,” Strether explained, “honestly enough. He’s in that respect his father’s son, and also—for she’s wonderful in her way too—his mother’s. He has other tastes and other tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife are quite right about his having that. He’s very remarkable.”
“Well, I guess he is!” Jim Pocock comforta
bly sighed. “But if you’ve believed so in his making us hum, why have you so prolonged the discussion? Don’t you know we’ve been quite anxious about you?”
These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether saw he must none the less make a choice and take a line. “Because, you see, I’ve greatly liked it. I’ve liked my Paris. I dare say I’ve liked it too much.”
“Oh you old wretch!” Jim gaily exclaimed.
“But nothing’s concluded,” Strether went on. “The case is more complex than it looks from Woollett.”
“Oh well, it looks bad enough from Woollett!” Jim declared.
“Even after all I’ve written?”
Jim bethought himself. “Isn’t it what you’ve written that has made Mrs. Newsome pack us off? That at least and Chad’s not turning up?”
Strether made a reflexion of his own. “I see. That she should do something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore of course come out to act.”
“Oh yes,” Jim concurred—“to act. But Sally comes out to act, you know,” he lucidly added, “every time she leaves the house. She never comes out but she does act. She’s acting moreover now for her mother, and that fixes the scale.” Then he wound up, opening all his senses to it, with a renewed embrace of pleasant Paris. “We haven’t all the same at Woollett got anything like this.”
Strether continued to consider. “I’m bound to say for you all that you strike me as having arrived in a very mild and reasonable frame of mind. You don’t show your claws. I felt just now in Mrs. Pocock no symptom of that. She isn’t fierce,” he went on. “I’m such a nervous idiot that I thought she might be.”
“Oh don’t you know her well enough,” Pocock asked, “to have noticed that she never gives herself away, any more than her mother ever does? They ain’t fierce, either of ’em; they let you come quite close. They wear their fur the smooth side out—the warm side in. Do you know what they are?” Jim pursued as he looked about him, giving the question, as Strether felt, but half his care—“do you know what they are? They’re about as intense as they can live.”
“Yes”—and Strether’s concurrence had a positive precipitation; “they’re about as intense as they can live.”
“They don’t lash about and shake the cage,” said Jim, who seemed pleased with his analogy; “and it’s at feeding-time that they’re quietest. But they always get there.”
“They do indeed—they always get there!” Strether replied with a laugh that justified his confession of nervousness. He disliked to be talking sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he could have talked insincerely. But there was something he wanted to know, a need created in him by her recent intermission, by his having given from the first so much, as now more than ever appeared to him, and got so little. It was as if a queer truth in his companion’s metaphor had rolled over him with a rush. She had been quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her, out of the big bowl of all his recent free communication, his vividness and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even his eloquence, while the current of her response had steadily run thin. Jim meanwhile however, it was true, slipped characteristically into shallowness from the moment he ceased to speak put of the experience of a husband.
“But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before her. If he doesn’t work that for all it’s worth—!” He sighed with contingent pity at his brother-in-law’s possible want of resource. “He has worked it on you, pretty well, eh?” and he asked the next moment if there were anything new at the Varieties which he pronounced in the American manner. They talked about the Varieties—Strether confessing to a knowledge which produced again on Pocock’s part a play of innuendo as vague as a nursery-rhyme, yet as aggressive as an elbow in his side; and they finished their drive under the protection of easy themes. Strether waited to the end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim had seen Chad as different; and he could scarce have explained the discouragement he drew from the absence of this testimony. It was what he had taken his own stand on, so far as he had taken a stand; and if they were all only going to see nothing he had only wasted his time. He gave his friend till the very last moment, till they had come into sight of the hotel; and when poor Pocock only continued cheerful and envious and funny he fairly grew to dislike him, to feel him extravagantly common. If they were all going to see nothing!—Strether knew, as this came back to him, that he was also letting Pocock represent for him what Mrs. Newsome wouldn’t see. He went on disliking, in the light of Jim’s commonness, to talk to him about that lady; yet just before the cab pulled up he knew the extent of his desire for the real word from Woollett.
“Has Mrs. Newsome at all given way—?”
“ ‘Given way’?”—Jim echoed it with the practical derision of his sense of a long past.
“Under the strain, I mean, of hope deferred, of disappointment repeated and thereby intensified.”
“Oh is she prostrate, you mean?”—he had his categories in hand. “Why yes, she’s prostrate—just as Sally is. But they’re never so lively, you know, as when they’re prostrate.”
“Ah Sarah’s prostrate?” Strether vaguely murmured.
“It’s when they’re prostrate that they most sit up.”
“And Mrs. Newsome’s sitting up?”
“All night, my boy—for you!” And Jim fetched him, with a vulgar little guffaw, a thrust that gave relief to the picture. But he had got what he wanted. He felt on the spot that this was the real word from Woollett. “So don’t you go home!” Jim added while he alighted and while his friend, letting him profusely pay the cabman, sat on in a momentary muse. Strether wondered if that were the real word too.
III
As the door of Mrs. Pocock’s salon was pushed open, for him, the next day, well before noon, he was reached by a voice with a charming sound that made him just falter before crossing the threshold. Madame de Vionnet was already on the field, and this gave the drama a quicker pace than he felt it as yet—though his suspense had increased—in the power of any act of his own to do. He had spent the previous evening with all his old friends together; yet he would still have described himself as quite in the dark in respect to a forecast of their influence on his situation. It was strange now, none the less, that in the light of this unexpected note of her presence he felt Madame de Vionnet a part of that situation as she hadn’t even yet been. She was alone, he found himself assuming, with Sarah, and there was a bearing in that—somehow beyond his control—on his personal fate. Yet she was only saying something quite easy and independent—the thing she had come, as a good friend of Chad’s, on purpose to say. “There isn’t anything at all—? I should be so delighted.”
It was clear enough, when they were there before him, how she had been received. He saw this, as Sarah got up to greet him, from something fairly hectic in Sarah’s face. He saw furthermore that they weren’t, as had first come to him, alone together; he was at no loss as to the identity of the broad high back presented to him in the embrasure of the window furthest from the door. Waymarsh, whom he had to-day not yet seen, whom he only knew to have left the hotel before him, and who had taken part, the night previous, on Mrs. Pocock’s kind invitation, conveyed by Chad, in the entertainment, informal but cordial, promptly offered by that lady—Waymarsh had anticipated him even as Madame de Vionnet had done, and, with his hands in his pockets and his attitude unaffected by Strether’s entrance, was looking out, in marked detachment, at the Rue de Rivoli. The latter felt it in the air—it was immense how Waymarsh could mark things—that he had remained deeply dissociated from the overture to their hostess that we have recorded on Madame de Vionnet’s side. He had, conspicuously, tact, besides a stiff general view; and this was why he had left Mrs. Pocock to struggle alone. He would outstay the visitor; he would unmistakeably wait; to what had he been doomed for months past but waiting? Therefore she was to feel that she had him in reserve. What support she drew from this was still to be seen, for, although Sarah was vividly bri
ght, she had given herself up for the moment to an ambiguous flushed formalism. She had had to reckon more quickly than she expected; but it concerned her first of all to signify that she was not to be taken unawares. Strether arrived precisely in time for her showing it. “Oh you’re too good; but I don’t think I feel quite helpless. I have my brother—and these American friends. And then you know I’ve been to Paris. I know Paris,” said Sally Pocock in a tone that breathed a certain chill on Strether’s heart.
“Ah but a woman, in this tiresome place where everything’s always changing, a woman of good will,” Madame de Vionnet threw off, “can always help a woman. I’m sure you ‘know’—but we know perhaps different things.” She too, visibly, wished to make no mistake; but it was a fear of a different order and more kept out of sight. She smiled in welcome at Strether; she greeted him more familiarly than Mrs. Pocock; she put out her hand to him without moving from her place; and it came to him in the course of a minute and in the oddest way that—yes, positively—she was giving him over to ruin. She was all kindness and ease, but she couldn’t help so giving him; she was exquisite, and her being just as she was poured for Sarah a sudden rush of meaning into his own equivocations. How could she know how she was hurting him? She wanted to show as simple and humble—in the degree compatible with operative charm; but it was just this that seemed to put him on her side. She struck him as dressed, as arranged, as prepared infinitely to conciliate—with the very poetry of good taste in her view of the conditions of her early call. She was ready to advise about dressmakers and shops; she held herself wholly at the disposition of Chad’s family. Strether noticed her card on the table—her coronet and her “Comtesse”—and the imagination was sharp in him of certain private adjustments in Sarah’s mind. She had never, he was sure, sat with a “Comtesse” before, and such was the specimen of that class he had been keeping to play on her. She had crossed the sea very particularly for a look at her; but he read in Madame de Vionnet’s own eyes that this curiosity hadn’t been so successfully met as that she herself wouldn’t now have more than ever need of him. She looked much as she had looked to him that morning at Notre Dame; he noted in fact the suggestive sameness of her discreet and delicate dress. It seemed to speak—perhaps a little prematurely or too finely—of the sense in which she would help Mrs. Pocock with the shops. The way that lady took her in, moreover, added depth to his impression of what Miss Gostrey, by their common wisdom, had escaped. He winced as he saw himself but for that timely prudence ushering in Maria as a guide and an example. There was however a touch of relief for him in his glimpse, so far as he had got it, of Sarah’s line. She “knew Paris.” Madame de Vionnet had, for that matter, lightly taken this up. “Ah then you’ve a turn for that, an affinity that belongs to your family. Your brother, though his long experience makes a difference, I admit, has become one of us in a marvellous way.” And she appealed to Strether in the manner of a woman who could always glide off with smoothness into another subject. Wasn’t he struck with the way Mr. Newsome had made the place his own, and hadn’t he been in a position to profit by his friend’s wondrous expertness?