The Ambassadors

by Henry James

  “Oh,” she objected, “it won’t be as a part of the picturesqueness that I shall stay, for I shall be the plainest thing about you. You may, you see, at any rate,” she pursued, “have nobody else. Madame de Vionnet may very well be going off, mayn’t she?—and Mr. Newsome by the same stroke: unless indeed you’ve had an assurance from them to the contrary. So that if your idea’s to stay for them”—it was her duty to suggest it—“you may be left in the lurch. Of course if they do stay”—she kept it up—“they would be part of the picturesqueness. Or else indeed you might join them somewhere.”

  Strether seemed to face it as if it were a happy thought; but the next moment he spoke more critically. “Do you mean that they’ll probably go off together?”

  She just considered. “I think it will be treating you quite without ceremony if they do; though after all,” she added, “it would be difficult to see now quite what degree of ceremony properly meets your case.”

  “Of course,” Strether conceded, “my attitude toward them is extraordinary.”

  “Just so; so that one may ask one’s self what style of proceeding on their own part can altogether match it. The attitude of their own that won’t pale in its light they’ve doubtless still to work out. The really handsome thing perhaps,” she presently threw off, “would be for them to withdraw into more secluded conditions, offering at the same time to share them with you.” He looked at her, on this, as if some generous irritation—all in his interest—had suddenly again flickered in her; and what she next said indeed half-explained it. “Don’t really be afraid to tell me if what now holds you is the pleasant prospect of the empty town, with plenty of seats in the shade, cool drinks, deserted museums, drives to the Bois in the evening, and our wonderful woman all to yourself.” And she kept it up still more. “The handsomest thing of all, when one makes it out, would, I dare say, be that Mr. Chad should for a while go off by himself. It’s a pity, from that point of view,” she wound up, “that he doesn’t pay his mother a visit. It would at least occupy your interval.” The thought in fact held her a moment. “Why doesn’t he pay his mother a visit? Even a week, at this good moment, would do.”

  “My dear lady,” Strether replied—and he had it even to himself surprisingly ready—“my dear lady, his mother has paid him a visit. Mrs. Newsome has been with him, this month, with an intensity that I’m sure he has thoroughly felt; he has lavishly entertained her, and she has let him have her thanks. Do you suggest he shall go back for more of them?”

  Well, she succeeded after a little in shaking it off. “I see. It’s what you don’t suggest—what you haven’t suggested. And you know.”

  “So would you, my dear,” he kindly said, “if you had so much as seen her.”

  “As seen Mrs. Newsome?”

  “No, Sarah—which, both for Chad and for myself, has served all the purpose.”

  “And served it in a manner,” she responsively mused, “so extraordinary!”

  “Well, you see,” he partly explained, “what it comes to is that she’s all cold thought—which Sarah could serve to us cold without its really losing anything. So it is that we know what she thinks of us.”

  Maria had followed, but she had an arrest. “What I’ve never made out, if you come to that, is what you think—I mean you personally—of her. Don’t you so much, when all’s said, as care a little?”

  “That,” he answered with no loss of promptness, “is what even Chad himself asked me last night. He asked me if I don’t mind the loss—well, the loss of an opulent future. Which moreover,” he hastened to add, “was a perfectly natural question.”

  “I call your attention, all the same,” said Miss Gostrey, “to the fact that I don’t ask it. What I venture to ask is whether it’s to Mrs. Newsome herself that you’re indifferent.”

  “I haven’t been so”—he spoke with all assurance. “I’ve been the very opposite. I’ve been, from the first moment, preoccupied with the impression everything might be making on her—quite oppressed, haunted, tormented by it. I’ve been interested only in her seeing what I’ve seen. And I’ve been as disappointed in her refusal to see it as she has been in what has appeared to her the perversity of my insistence.”

  “Do you mean that she has shocked you as you’ve shocked her?”

  Strether weighed it. “I’m probably not so shockable. But on the other hand I’ve gone much further to meet her. She, on her side, hasn’t budged an inch.”

  “So that you’re now at last”—Maria pointed the moral—“in the sad stage of recriminations.”

  “No—it’s only to you I speak. I’ve been like a lamb to Sarah. I’ve only put my back to the wall. It’s to that one naturally staggers when one has been violently pushed there.”

  She watched him a moment. “Thrown over?”

  “Well, as I feel I’ve landed somewhere I think I must have been thrown.”

  She turned it over, but as hoping to clarify much rather than to harmonize. “The thing is that I suppose you’ve been disappointing—”

  “Quite from the very first of my arrival? I dare say. I admit I was surprising even to myself.”

  “And then of course,” Maria went on, “I had much to do with it.”

  “With my being surprising—?”

  “That will do,” she laughed, “if you’re too delicate to call it my being! Naturally,” she added, “you came over more or less for surprises.”

  “Naturally!”—he valued the reminder.

  “But they were to have been all for you”—she continued to piece it out—“and none of them for her.”

  Once more he stopped before her as if she had touched the point. “That’s just her difficulty—that she doesn’t admit surprises. It’s a fact that, I think, describes and represents her; and it falls in with what I tell you—that she’s all, as I’ve called it, fine cold thought. She had, to her own mind, worked the whole thing out in advance, and worked it out for me as well as for herself. Whenever she has done that, you see, there’s no room left; no margin, as it were, for any alteration. She’s filled as full, packed as tight, as she’ll hold, and if you wish to get anything more or different either out or in—”

  “You’ve got to make over altogether the woman herself?”

  “What it comes to,” said Strether, “is that you’ve got morally and intellectually to get rid of her.”

  “Which would appear,” Maria returned, “to be practically what you’ve done.”

  But her friend threw back his head. “I haven’t touched her. She won’t be touched. I see it now as I’ve never done; and she hangs together with a perfection of her own,” he went on, “that does suggest a kind of wrong in any change of her composition. It was at any rate,” he wound up, “the woman herself, as you call her, the whole moral and intellectual being or block, that Sarah brought me over to take or to leave.”

  It turned Miss Gostrey to deeper thought. “Fancy having to take at the point of the bayonet a whole moral and intellectual being or block!”

  “It was in fact,” said Strether, “what, at home, I had done. But somehow over there I didn’t quite know it.”

  “One never does, I suppose,” Miss Gostrey concurred, “realize in advance, in such a case, the size, as you may say, of the block. Little by little it looms up. It has been looming for you more and more till at last you see it all.”

  “I see it all,” he absently echoed, while his eyes might have been fixing some particularly large iceberg in a cool blue northern sea. “It’s magnificent!” he then rather oddly exclaimed.

  But his friend, who was used to this kind of inconsequence in him, kept the thread. “There’s nothing so magnificent—for making others feel you—as to have no imagination.”

  It brought him straight round. “Ah there you are! It’s what I said last night to Chad. That he himself, I mean, has none.”

  “Then it would appear,” Maria suggested, “that he has, after all, something in common with his mother.”

  “
He has in common that he makes one, as you say, ‘feel’ him. And yet,” he added, as if the question were interesting, “one feels others too, even when they have plenty.”

  Miss Gostrey continued suggestive. “Madame de Vionnet?”

  “She has plenty.”

  “Certainly—she had quantities of old. But there are different ways of making one’s self felt.”

  “Yes, it comes, no doubt, to that. You now—”

  He was benevolently going on, but she wouldn’t have it. “Oh I don’t make myself felt; so my quantity needn’t be settled. Yours, you know,” she said, “is monstrous. No one has ever had so much.”

  It struck him for a moment. “That’s what Chad also thinks.”

  “There you are then—though it isn’t for him to complain of it!”

  “Oh he doesn’t complain of it,” said Strether.

  “That’s all that would be wanting! But apropos of what,” Maria went on, “did the question come up?”

  “Well, of his asking me what it is I gain.”

  She had a pause. “Then as I’ve asked you too it settles my case. Oh you have,” she repeated, “treasures of imagination.”

  But he had been for an instant thinking away from this, and he came up in another place. “And yet Mrs. Newsome—it’s a thing to remember—has imagined, did, that is, imagine, and apparently still does, horrors about what I should have found. I was booked, by her vision—extraordinarily intense, after all—to find them; and that I didn’t, that I couldn’t, that, as she evidently felt, I wouldn’t—this evidently didn’t at all, as they say, ‘suit’ her book. It was more than she could bear. That was her disappointment.”

  “You mean you were to have found Chad himself horrible?”

  “I was to have found the woman.”

  “Horrible?”

  “Found her as she imagined her.” And Strether paused as if for his own expression of it he could add no touch to that picture.

  His companion had meanwhile thought. “She imagined stupidly—so it comes to the same thing.”

  “Stupidly? Oh!” said Strether.

  But she insisted. “She imagined meanly.”

  He had it, however, better. “It couldn’t but be ignorantly.”

  “Well, intensity with ignorance—what do you want worse?”

  This question might have held him, but he let it pass. “Sarah isn’t ignorant—now; she keeps up the theory of the horrible.”

  “Ah but she’s intense—and that by itself will do sometimes as well. If it doesn’t do, in this case, at any rate, to deny that Marie’s charming, it will do at least to deny that she’s good.”

  “What I claim is that she’s good for Chad.”

  “You don’t claim”—she seemed to like it clear—“that she’s good for you.”

  But he continued without heeding. “That’s what I wanted them to come out for—to see for themselves if she’s bad for him.”

  “And now that they’ve done so they won’t admit that she’s good even, for anything?”

  “They do think,” Strether presently admitted, “that she’s on the whole about as bad for me. But they’re consistent of course, inasmuch as they’ve their clear view of what’s good for both of us.”

  “For you, to begin with”—Maria, all responsive, confined the question for the moment—“to eliminate from your existence and if possible even from your memory the dreadful creature that I must gruesomely shadow forth for them, even more than to eliminate the distincter evil—thereby a little less portentous—of the person whose confederate you’ve suffered yourself to become. However, that’s comparatively simple. You can easily, at the worst, after all, give me up.”

  “I can easily at the worst, after all, give you up.” The irony was so obvious that it needed no care. “I can easily at the worst, after all, even forget you.”

  “Call that then workable. But Mr. Newsome has much more to forget. How can he do it?”

  “Ah there again we are! That’s just what I was to have made him do; just where I was to have worked with him and helped.”

  She took it in silence and without attenuation—as if perhaps from very familiarity with the facts; and her thought made a connexion without showing the links. “Do you remember how we used to talk at Chester and in London about my seeing you through?” She spoke as of far-off things and as if they had spent weeks at the places she named.

  “It’s just what you are doing.”

  “Ah but the worst—since you’ve left such a margin—may be still to come. You may yet break down.”

  “Yes, I may yet break down. But will you take me—?”

  He had hesitated, and she waited. “Take you—?”

  “For as long as I can bear it.”

  She also debated. “Mr. Newsome and Madame de Vionnet may, as we were saying, leave town. How long do you think you can bear it without them?”

  Strether’s reply to this was at first another question. “Do you mean in order to get away from me?”

  Her answer had an abruptness. “Don’t find me rude if I say I should think they’d want to!”

  He looked at her hard again—seemed even for an instant to have an intensity of thought under which his colour changed. But he smiled. “You mean after what they’ve done to me?”

  “After what she has.”

  At this, however, with a laugh, he was all right again. “Ah but she hasn’t done it yet!”

  III

  He had taken the train a few days after this from a station—as well as to a station—selected almost at random; such days, whatever should happen, were numbered, and he had gone forth under the impulse—artless enough, no doubt—to give the whole of one of them to that French ruralism, with its cool special green, into which he had hitherto looked only through the little oblong window of the picture-frame. It had been as yet for the most part but a land of fancy for him—the background of fiction, the medium of art, the nursery of letters; practically as distant as Greece, but practically also well-nigh as consecrated. Romance could weave itself, for Strether’s sense, out of elements mild enough; and even after what he had, as he felt, lately “been through,” he could thrill a little at the chance of seeing something somewhere that would remind him of a certain small Lambinet that had charmed him, long years before, at a Boston dealer’s and that he had quite absurdly never forgotten. It had been offered, he remembered, at a price he had been instructed to believe the lowest ever named for a Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on having to recognize, all the same, as beyond a dream of possibility. He had dreamed—had turned and twisted possibilities for an hour: it had been the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase of a work of art. The adventure, it will be perceived, was modest; but the memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of association, was sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the picture he would have bought—the particular production that had made him for the moment overstep the modesty of nature. He was quite aware that if he were to see it again he should perhaps have a drop or a shock, and he never found himself wishing that the wheel of time would turn it up again, just as he had seen it in the maroon-coloured, sky-lighted inner shrine of Tremont Street. It would be a different thing, however, to see the remembered mixture resolved back into its elements—to assist at the restoration to nature of the whole far-away hour: the dusty day in Boston, the background of the Fitchburg Depot, of the maroon-coloured sanctum, the special-green vision, the ridiculous price, the poplars, the willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady woody horizon.

  He observed in respect to his train almost no condition save that it should stop a few times after getting out of the banlieue; he threw himself on the general amiability of the day for the hint of where to alight. His theory of his excursion was that he could alight anywhere—not nearer Paris than an hour’s run—on catching a suggestion of the particular note required. It made its sign, the suggestion—weather, air, light, colour and his mood all
favouring—at the end of some eighty minutes; the train pulled up just at the right spot, and he found himself getting out as securely as if to keep an appointment. It will be felt of him that he could amuse himself, at his age, with very small things if it be again noted that his appointment was only with a superseded Boston fashion. He hadn’t gone far without the quick confidence that it would be quite sufficiently kept. The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and river—a river of which he didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, the name—fell into a composition, full of felicity, within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left was white and the church on the right was grey; it was all there, in short—it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking about in it. He did this last, for an hour, to his heart’s content, making for the shady woody horizon and boring so deep into his impression and his idleness that he might fairly have got through them again and reached the maroon-coloured wall. It was a wonder, no doubt, that the taste of idleness for him shouldn’t need more time to sweeten; but it had in fact taken the few previous days; it had been sweetening in truth ever since the retreat of the Pococks. He walked and walked as if to show himself how little he had now to do; he had nothing to do but turn off to some hillside where he might stretch himself and hear the poplars rustle, and whence—in the course of an afternoon so spent, an afternoon richly suffused too with the sense of a book in his pocket—he should sufficiently command the scene to be able to pick out just the right little rustic inn for an experiment in respect to dinner. There was a train back to Paris at 9.20, and he saw himself partaking, at the close of the day, with the enhancements of a coarse white cloth and a sanded floor, of something fried and felicitous, washed down with authentic wine; after which he might, as he liked, either stroll back to his station in the gloaming or propose for the local carriole and converse with his driver, a driver who naturally wouldn’t fail of a stiff clean blouse, of a knitted nightcap and of the genius of response—who, in fine, would sit on the shafts, tell him what the French people were thinking, and remind him, as indeed the whole episode would incidentally do, of Maupassant. Strether heard his lips, for the first time in French air, as this vision assumed consistency, emit sounds of expressive intention without fear of his company. He had been afraid of Chad and of Maria and of Madame de Vionnet; he had been most of all afraid of Waymarsh, in whose presence, so far as they had mixed together in the light of the town, he had never without somehow paying for it aired either his vocabulary or his accent. He usually paid for it by meeting immediately afterwards Waymarsh’s eye.