The Ambassadors

by Henry James

  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.”

  Miss Gostrey gave a comprehensive sigh. “The way you reduce people to subjection!”

  “It’s certainly, on one side, wonderful. But it’s quite equalled, on another, by the way I don’t. I haven’t reduced Sarah, since yesterday; though I’ve succeeded in seeing her again, as I’ll presently tell you. The others however are really all right. Mamie, by that blessed law of ours, absolutely must have a young man.”

  “But what must poor Mr. Bilham have? Do you mean they’ll marry for you?”

  “I mean that, by the same blessed law, it won’t matter a grain if they don’t—I shan’t have in the least to worry.”

  She saw as usual what he meant. “And Mr. Jim?—who goes for him?”

  “Oh,” Strether had to admit, “I couldn’t manage that. He’s thrown, as usual, on the world; the world which, after all, by his account—for he has prodigious adventures—seems very good to him. He fortunately—‘over here,’ as he says—finds the world everywhere; and his most prodigious adventure of all,” he went on, “has been of course of the last few days.”

  Miss Gostrey, already knowing, instantly made the connexion. “He has seen Marie de Vionnet again?”

  “He went, all by himself, the day after Chad’s party—didn’t I tell you?—to tea with her. By her invitation—all alone.”

  “Quite like yourself!” Maria smiled.

  “Oh but he’s more wonderful about her than I am!” And then as his friend showed how she could believe it, filling it out, fitting it on to old memories of the wonderful woman: “What I should have liked to manage would have been her going.
”

  “To Switzerland with the party?”

  “For Jim—and for symmetry. If it had been workable moreover for a fortnight she’d have gone. She’s ready”—he followed up his renewed vision of her—“for anything.”

  Miss Gostrey went with him a minute. “She’s too perfect!”

  “She will, I think,” he pursued, “go to-night to the station.”

  “To see him off?”

  “With Chad—marvellously—as part of their general attention. And she does it”—it kept before him—“with a light, light grace, a free, free gaiety, that may well softly bewilder Mr. Pocock.”

  It kept her so before him that his companion had after an instant a friendly comment. “As in short it has softly bewildered a saner man. Are you really in love with her?” Maria threw off.

  “It’s of no importance I should know,” he replied. “It matters so little—has nothing to do, practically, with either of us.”

  “All the same”—Maria continued to smile—“they go, the five, as I understand you, and you and Madame de Vionnet stay.”

  “Oh and Chad.” To which Strether added: “And you.”

  “Ah ‘me’!”—she gave a small impatient wail again, in which something of the unreconciled seemed suddenly to break out. “I don’t stay, it somehow seems to me, much to my advantage. In the presence of all you cause to pass before me I’ve a tremendous sense of privation.”

  Strether hesitated. “But your privation, your keeping out of everything, has been—hasn’t it?—by your own choice.”

  “Oh yes; it has been necessary—that is it has been better for you. What I mean is only that I seem to have ceased to serve you.”

  “How can you tell that?” he asked. “You don’t know how you serve me. When you cease—”

  “Well?” she said as he dropped.

  “Well, I’ll let you know. Be quiet till then.”

  She thought a moment. “Then you positively like me to stay?”

  “Don’t I treat you as if I did?”

  “You’re certainly very kind to me. But that,” said Maria, “is for myself. It’s getting late, as you see, and Paris turning rather hot and dusty. People are scattering, and some of them, in other places, want me. But if you want me here—!”

  She had spoken as resigned to his word, but he had of a sudden a still sharper sense than he would have expected of desiring not to lose her. “I want you here.”

  She took it as if the words were all she had wished; as if they brought her, gave her something that was the compensation of her case. “Thank you,” she simply answered. And then as he looked at her a little harder, “Thank you very much,” she repeated.

  It had broken as with a slight arrest into the current of their talk, and it held him a moment longer. “Why, two months, or whatever the time was, ago, did you so suddenly dash off? The reason you afterwards gave me for having kept away three weeks wasn’t the real one.”

  She recalled. “I never supposed you believed it was. Yet,” she continued, “if you didn’t guess it that was just what helped you.”

  He looked away from her on this; he indulged, so far as space permitted, in one of his slow absences. “I’ve often thought of it, but never to feel that I could guess it. And you see the consideration with which I’ve treated you in never asking till now.”

  “Now then why do you ask?”

  “To show you how I miss you when you’re not here, and what it does for me.”

  “It doesn’t seem to have done,” she laughed, “all it might! However,” she added, “if you’ve really never guessed the truth I’ll tell it you.”

  “I’ve never guessed it,” Strether declared.

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Well then I dashed off, as you say, so as not to have the confusion of being there if Marie de Vionnet should tell you anything to my detriment.”

  He looked as if he considerably doubted. “You even then would have had to face it on your return.”

  “Oh if I had found reason to believe it something very bad I’d have left you altogether.”

  “So then,” he continued, “it was only on guessing she had been on the whole merciful that you ventured back?”

  Maria kept it together. “I owe her thanks. Whatever her temptation she didn’t separate us. That’s one of my reasons,” she went on, “for admiring her so.”

  “Let it pass then,” said Strether, “for one of mine as well. But what would have been her temptation?”

  “What are ever the temptations of women?”

  He thought—but hadn’t, naturally, to think too long. “Men?”

  “She would have had you, with it, more for herself. But she saw she could have you without it.”

  “Oh ‘have’ me!” Strether a trifle ambiguously sighed. “You,” he handsomely declared, “would have had me at any rate with it.”

  “Oh ‘have’ you!”—she echoed it as he had done. “I do have you, however,” she less ironically said, “from the moment you express a wish.”

  He stopped before her, full of the disposition. “I’ll express fifty.”

  Which indeed begot in her, with a certain inconsequence, a return of her small wail. “Ah there you are!”

  There, if it were so, he continued for the rest of the time to be, and it was as if to show her how she could still serve him that, coming back to the departure of the Pococks, he gave her the view, vivid with a hundred more touches than we can reproduce, of what had happened for him that morning. He had had ten minutes with Sarah at her hotel, ten minutes reconquered, by irresistible pressure, from the time over which he had already described her to Miss Gostrey as having, at the end of their interview on his own premises, passed the great sponge of the future. He had caught her by not announcing himself, had found her in her sitting-room with a dressmaker and a lingère whose accounts she appeared to have been more or less ingenuously settling and who soon withdrew. Then he had explained to her how he had succeeded, late the night before, in keeping his promise of seeing Chad. “I told her I’d take it all.”

  “You’d ‘take’ it?”

  “Why if he doesn’t go.”

  Maria waited. “And who takes it if he does?” she enquired with a certain grimness of gaiety.

  “Well,” said Strether, “I think I take, in any event, everything.”

  “By which I suppose you mean,” his companion brought out after a moment, “that you definitely understand you now lose everything.”

  He stood before her again. “It does come perhaps to the same thing. But Chad, now that he has seen, doesn’t really want it.”

  She could believe that, but she made, as always, for clearness. “Still, what, after all, has he seen?”

  “What they want of him. And it’s enough.”

  “It contrasts so unfavourably with what Madame de Vionnet wants?”

  “It contrasts—just so; all round, and tremendously.”

  “Therefore, perhaps, most of all with what you want?”

  “Oh,” said Strether, “what I want is a thing I’ve ceased to measure or even to understand.”

  But his friend none the less went on. “Do you want Mrs. Newsome—after such a way of treating you?”

  It was a straighter mode of dealing with this lady than they had as yet—such was their high form—permitted themselves; but it seemed not wholly for this that he delayed a moment. “I dare say it has been, after all, the only way she could have imagined.”

  “And does that make you want her any more?”

  “I’ve tremendously disappointed her,” Strether thought it worth while to mention.

  “Of course you have. That’s rudimentary; that was plain to us long ago. But isn’t it almost as plain,” Maria went on, “that you’ve even yet your straight remedy? Really drag him away, as I believe you still can, and you’d cease to have to count with her disappointment.”

  “Ah then,” he laughed, “I should have to count with yours!”
>
  But this barely struck her now. “What, in that case, should you call counting? You haven’t come out where you are, I think, to please me.”

  “Oh,” he insisted, “that too, you know, has been part of it. I can’t separate—it’s all one; and that’s perhaps why, as I say, I don’t understand.” But he was ready to declare again that this didn’t in the least matter; all the more that, as he affirmed, he hadn’t really as yet “come out.” “She gives me after all, on its coming to the pinch, a last mercy, another chance. They don’t sail, you see, for five or six weeks more, and they haven’t—she admits that—expected Chad would take part in their tour. It’s still open to him to join them, at the last, at Liverpool.”

  Miss Gostrey considered. “How in the world is it ‘open’ unless you open it? How can he join them at Liverpool if he but sinks deeper into his situation here?”

  “He has given her—as I explained to you that she let me know yesterday—his word of honour to do as I say.”

  Maria stared. “But if you say nothing!”

  Well, he as usual walked about on it. “I did say something this morning. I gave her my answer—the word I had promised her after hearing from himself what he had promised. What she demanded of me yesterday, you’ll remember, was the engagement then and there to make him take up this vow.”

  “Well then,” Miss Gostrey enquired, “was the purpose of your visit to her only to decline?”

  “No; it was to ask, odd as that may seem to you, for another delay.”

  “Ah that’s weak!”

  “Precisely!” She had spoken with impatience, but, so far as that at least, he knew where he was. “If I am weak I want to find it out. If I don’t find it out I shall have the comfort, the little glory, of thinking I’m strong.”

  “It’s all the comfort, I judge,” she returned, “that you will have!”

  “At any rate,” he said, “it will have been a month more. Paris may grow, from day to day, hot and dusty, as you say; but there are other things that are hotter and dustier. I’m not afraid to stay on; the summer here must be amusing in a wild—if it isn’t a tame—way of its own; the place at no time more picturesque. I think I shall like it. And then,” he benevolently smiled for her, “there will be always you.”