The Ambassadors

by Henry James

  Chad had applied for counsel only, by way of intimating that he knew what to do; and he had clearly never known it better than in now presenting to his sister the whole circle of his society. This was all in the sense and the spirit of the note struck by him on that lady’s arrival; he had taken at the station itself a line that led him without a break, and that enabled him to lead the Pococks—though dazed a little, no doubt, breathless, no doubt, and bewildered—to the uttermost end of the passage accepted by them perforce as pleasant. He had made it for them violently pleasant and mercilessly full; the upshot of which was, to Strether’s vision, that they had come all the way without discovering it to be really no passage at all. It was a brave blind alley, where to pass was impossible and where, unless they stuck fast, they would have—which was always awkward—publicly to back out. They were touching bottom assuredly tonight; the whole scene represented the terminus of the cul-de-sac. So could things go when there was a hand to keep them consistent—a hand that pulled the wire with a skill at which the elder man more and more marvelled. The elder man felt responsible, but he also felt successful, since what had taken place was simply the issue of his own contention, six weeks before, that they properly should wait to see what their friends would have really to say. He had determined Chad to wait, he had determined him to see; he was therefore not to quarrel with the time given up to the business. As much as ever, accordingly, now that a fortnight had elapsed, the situation created for Sarah, and against which she had raised no protest, was that of her having accommodated herself to her adventure as to a pleasure-party surrendered perhaps even somewhat in excess to bustle and to “pace.” If her brother had been at any point the least bit open to criticism it might have been on the ground of his spicing the draught too highly and pouring the cup too full. Frankly treating the whole occasion of the presence of his relatives as an opportunity for amusement, he left it, no doubt, but scant margin as an opportunity for anything else. He suggested, invented, abounded—yet all the while with the loosest easiest rein. Strether, during his own weeks, had gained a sense of knowing Paris; but he saw it afresh, and with fresh emotion, in the form of the knowledge offered to his colleague.

  A thousand unuttered thoughts hummed for him in the air of these observations; not the least frequent of which was that Sarah might well of a truth not quite know whither she was drifting. She was in no position not to appear to expect that Chad should treat her handsomely; yet she struck our friend as privately stiffening a little each time she missed the chance of marking the great nuance. The great nuance was in brief that of course her brother must treat her handsomely—she should like to see him not; but that treating her handsomely, none the less, wasn’t all in all—treating her handsomely buttered no parsnips; and that in fine there were moments when she felt the fixed eyes of their admirable absent mother fairly screw into the flat of her back. Strether, watching, after his habit, and overscoring with thought, positively had moments of his own in which he found himself sorry for her—occasions on which she affected him as a person seated in a runaway vehicle and turning over the question of a possible jump. Would she jump, could she, would that be a safe place?—this question, at such instants, sat for him in her lapse into pallor, her tight lips, her conscious eyes. It came back to the main point at issue: would she be, after all, to be squared? He believed on the whole she would jump; yet his alternations on this subject were the more especial stuff of his suspense. One thing remained well before him—a conviction that was in fact to gain sharpness from the impressions of this evening: that if she should gather in her skirts, close her eyes and quit the carriage while in motion, he would promptly enough become aware. She would alight from her headlong course more or less directly upon him; it would be appointed to him, unquestionably, to receive her entire weight. Signs and portents of the experience thus in reserve for him had, as it happened, multiplied even through the dazzle of Chad’s party. It was partly under the nervous consciousness of such a prospect that, leaving almost every one in the two other rooms, leaving those of the guests already known to him as well as a mass of brilliant strangers of both sexes and of several varieties of speech, he had desired five quiet minutes with little Bilham, whom he always found soothing and even a little inspiring, and to whom he had actually moreover something distinct and important to say.

  He had felt of old—for it already seemed long ago—rather humiliated at discovering he could learn in talk with a personage so much his junior the lesson of a certain moral ease; but he had now got used to that—whether or no the mixture of the fact with other humiliations had made it indistinct, whether or no directly from little Bilham’s example, the example of his being contentedly just the obscure and acute little Bilham he was. It worked so for him, Strether seemed to see; and our friend had at private hours a wan smile over the fact that he himself, after so many more years, was still in search of something that would work. However, as we have said, it worked just now for them equally to have found a corner a little apart. What particularly kept it apart was the circumstance that the music in the salon was admirable, with two or three such singers as it was a privilege to hear in private. Their presence gave a distinction to Chad’s entertainment, and the interest of calculating their effect on Sarah was actually so sharp as to be almost painful. Unmistakeably, in her single person, the motive of the composition and dressed in a splendour of crimson which affected Strether as the sound of a fall through a skylight, she would now be in the forefront of the listening circle and committed by it up to her eyes. Those eyes during the wonderful dinner itself he hadn’t once met; having confessedly—perhaps a little pusillanimously—arranged with Chad that he should be on the same side of the table. But there was no use in having arrived now with little Bilham at an unprecedented point of intimacy unless he could pitch everything into the pot. “You who sat where you could see her, what does she make of it all? By which I mean on what terms does she take it?”

  “Oh she takes it, I judge, as proving that the claim of his family is more than ever justified.”

  “She isn’t then pleased with what he has to show?”

  “On the contrary; she’s pleased with it as with his capacity to do this kind of thing—more than she has been pleased with anything for a long time. But she wants him to show it there. He has no right to waste it on the likes of us.”

  Strether wondered. “She wants him to move the whole thing over?”

  “The whole thing—with an important exception. Everything he has ‘picked up’—and the way he knows how. She sees no difficulty in that. She’d run the show herself, and she’ll make the handsome concession that Woollett would be on the whole in some ways the better for it. Not that it wouldn’t be also in some ways the better for Woollett. The people there are just as good.”

  “Just as good as you and these others? Ah that may be. But such an occasion as this, whether or no,” Strether said, “isn’t the people. It’s what has made the people possible.”

  “Well then,” his friend replied, “there you are; I give you my impression for what it’s worth. Mrs. Pocock has seen, and that’s to-night how she sits there. If you were to have a glimpse of her face you’d understand me. She has made up her mind—to the sound of expensive music.”

  Strether took it freely in. “Ah then I shall have news of her.”

  “I don’t want to frighten you, but I think that likely. However,” little Bilham continued, “if I’m of the least use to you to hold on by—!”

  “You’re not of the least!”—and Strether laid an appreciative hand on him to say it. “No one’s of the least.” With which, to mark how gaily he could take it, he patted his companion’s knee. “I must meet my fate alone, and I shall—oh you’ll see! And yet,” he pursued the next moment, “you can help me too. You once said to me”—he followed this further—“that you held Chad should marry. I didn’t see then so well as I know now that you meant he should marry Miss Pocock. Do you still consider that he should? Because if
you do”—he kept it up—“I want you immediately to change your mind. You can help me that way.”

  “Help you by thinking he should not marry?”

  “Not marry at all events Mamie.”

  “And who then?”

  “Ah,” Strether returned, “that I’m not obliged to say. But Madame de Vionnet—I suggest—when he can.”

  “Oh!” said little Bilham with some sharpness.

  “Oh precisely! But he needn’t marry at all—I’m at any rate not obliged to provide for it. Whereas in your case I rather feel that I am.”

  Little Bilham was amused. “Obliged to provide for my marrying?”

  “Yes—after all I’ve done to you!”

  The young man weighed it. “Have you done as much as that?”

  “Well,” said Strether, thus challenged, “of course I must remember what you’ve also done to me. We may perhaps call it square. But all the same,” he went on, “I wish awfully you’d marry Mamie Pocock yourself.”

  Little Bilham laughed out. “Why it was only the other night, in this very place, that you were proposing to me a different union altogether.”

  “Mademoiselle de Vionnet?” Well, Strether easily confessed it. “That, I admit, was a vain image. This is practical politics. I want to do something good for both of you—I wish you each so well; and you can see in a moment the trouble it will save me to polish you off by the same stroke. She likes you, you know. You console her. And she’s splendid.”

  Little Bilham stared as a delicate appetite stares at an over-heaped plate. “What do I console her for?”

  It just made his friend impatient. “Oh come, you know!”

  “And what proves for you that she likes me?”

  “Why the fact that I found her three days ago stopping at home alone all the golden afternoon on the mere chance that you’d come to her, and hanging over her balcony on that of seeing your cab drive up. I don’t know what you want more.”

  Little Bilham after a moment found it. “Only just to know what proves to you that I like her.”

  “Oh if what I’ve just mentioned isn’t enough to make you do it, you’re a stony-hearted little fiend. Besides”—Strether encouraged his fancy’s flight—“you showed your inclination in the way you kept her waiting, kept her on purpose to see if she cared enough for you.”

  His companion paid his ingenuity the deference of a pause. “I didn’t keep her waiting. I came at the hour. I wouldn’t have kept her waiting for the world,” the young man honourably declared.

  “Better still—then there you are!” And Strether, charmed, held him the faster. “Even if you didn’t do her justice, moreover,” he continued, “I should insist on your immediately coming round to it. I want awfully to have worked it. I want”—and our friend spoke now with a yearning that was really earnest—“at least to have done that.”

  “To have married me off—without a penny?”

  “Well, I shan’t live long; and I give you my word, now and here, that I’ll leave you every penny of my own. I haven’t many, unfortunately, but you shall have them all. And Miss Pocock, I think, has a few. I want,” Strether went on, “to have been at least to that extent constructive—even expiatory. I’ve been sacrificing so to strange gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity—fundamentally unchanged after all—to our own. I feel as if my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars—of another faith altogether. There it is—it’s done.” And then he further explained. “It took hold of me because the idea of getting her quite out of the way for Chad helps to clear my ground.”

  The young man, at this, bounced about, and it brought them face to face in admitted amusement. “You want me to marry as a convenience to Chad?”

  “No,” Strether debated—“he doesn’t care whether you marry or not. It’s as a convenience simply to my own plan for him.”

  “ ‘Simply’!”—and little Bilham’s concurrence was in itself a lively comment. “Thank you. But I thought,” he continued, “you had exactly no plan ‘for’ him.”

  “Well then call it my plan for myself—which may be well, as you say, to have none. His situation, don’t you see? is reduced now to the bare facts one has to recognize. Mamie doesn’t want him, and he doesn’t want Mamie: so much as that these days have made clear. It’s a thread we can wind up and tuck in.”

  But little Bilham still questioned. “You can—since you seem so much to want to. But why should I?”

  Poor Strether thought it over, but was obliged of course to admit that his demonstration did superficially fail. “Seriously, there is no reason. It’s my affair—I must do it alone. I’ve only my fantastic need of making my dose stiff.”

  Little Bilham wondered. “What do you call your dose?”

  “Why what I have to swallow. I want my conditions unmitigated.”

  He had spoken in the tone of talk for talk’s sake, and yet with an obscure truth lurking in the loose folds; a circumstance presently not without its effect on his young friend. Little Bilham’s eyes rested on him a moment with some intensity; then suddenly, as if everything had cleared up, he gave a happy laugh. It seemed to say that if pretending, or even trying, or still even hoping, to be able to care for Mamie would be of use, he was all there for the job. “I’ll do anything in the world for you!”

  “Well,” Strether smiled, “anything in the world is all I want. I don’t know anything that pleased me in her more,” he went on, “than the way that, on my finding her up there all alone, coming on her unawares and feeling greatly for her being so out of it, she knocked down my tall house of cards with her instant and cheerful allusion to the next young man. It was somehow so the note I needed—her staying at home to receive him.”

  “It was Chad of course,” said little Bilham, “who asked the next young man—I like your name for me!—to call.”

  “So I supposed—all of which, thank God, is in our innocent and natural manners. But do you know,” Strether asked, “if Chad knows—?” And then as this interlocutor seemed at a loss: “Why where she has come out.”

  Little Bilham, at this, met his face with a conscious look; it was as if, more than anything yet, the allusion had penetrated.

  “Do you know yourself?”

  Strether lightly shook his head. “There I stop. Oh, odd as it may appear to you, there are things I don’t know. I only got the sense from her of something very sharp, and yet very deep down, that she was keeping all to herself. That is I had begun with the belief that she had kept it to herself; but face to face with her there I soon made out that there was a person with whom she would have shared it. I had thought she possibly might with me—but I saw then that I was only half in her confidence. When, turning to me to greet me—for she was on the balcony and I had come in without her knowing it—she showed me she had been expecting you and was proportionately disappointed, I got hold of the tail of my conviction. Half an hour later I was in possession of all the rest of it. You know what has happened.” He looked at his young friend hard—then he felt sure. “For all you say, you’re up to your eyes. So there you are.”

  Little Bilham after an instant pulled half round. “I assure you she hasn’t told me anything.”

  “Of course she hasn’t. For what do you suggest that I suppose her to take you? But you’ve been with her every day, you’ve seen her freely, you’ve liked her greatly—I stick to that—and you’ve made your profit of it. You know what she has been through as well as you know that she has dined here to-night—which must have put her, by the way, through a good deal more.”

  The young man faced this blast; after which he pulled round the rest of the way. “I haven’t in the least said she hasn’t been nice to me. But she’s proud.”

  “And quite properly. But not too proud for that.”

  “It’s just her pride that has made her. Chad,” little Bilham loyally went on, “has really been as kind to her as possible. It’s awkward for a man when a girl’s in love with him.” />
  “Ah but she isn’t—now.”

  Little Bilham sat staring before him; then he sprang up as if his friend’s penetration, recurrent and insistent, made him really after all too nervous. “No—she isn’t now. It isn’t in the least,” he went on, “Chad’s fault. He’s really all right. I mean he would have been willing. But she came over with ideas. Those she had got at home. They had been her motive and support in joining her brother and his wife. She was to save our friend.”