The Ambassadors

by Henry James

  It was at present queer beyond words, “subtle,” he would have risked saying, that such suggestions should keep crossing the scene; but it was doubtless the effect of the thunder in the air, which had hung about all day without release. His hostess was dressed as for thunderous times, and it fell in with the kind of imagination we have just attributed to him that she should be in simplest coolest white, of a character so old-fashioned, if he were not mistaken, that Madame Roland must on the scaffold have worn something like it. This effect was enhanced by a small black fichu or scarf, of crape or gauze, disposed quaintly round her bosom and now completing as by a mystic touch the pathetic, the noble analogy. Poor Strether in fact scarce knew what analogy was evoked for him as the charming woman, receiving him and making him, as she could do such things, at once familiarly and gravely welcome, moved over her great room with her image almost repeated in its polished floor, which had been fully bared for summer. The associations of the place, all felt again; the gleam here and there, in the subdued light, of glass and gilt and parquet, with the quietness of her own note as the centre—these things were at first as delicate as if they had been ghostly, and he was sure in a moment that, whatever he should find he had come for, it wouldn’t be for an impression that had previously failed him. That conviction held him from the outset, and, seeming singularly to simplify, certified to him that the objects about would help him, would really help them both. No, he might never see them again—this was only too probably the last time; and he should certainly see nothing in the least degree like them. He should soon be going to where such things were not, and it would be a small mercy for memory, for fancy, to have, in that stress, a loaf on the shelf. He knew in advance he should look back on the perception actually sharpest with him as on the view of something old, old, old, the oldest thing he had ever personally touched; and he also knew, even while he took his companion in as the feature among features, that memory and fancy couldn’t help being enlisted for her. She might intend what she would, but this was beyond anything she could intend, with things from far back—tyrannies of history, facts of type, values, as the painters said, of expression—all working for her and giving her the supreme chance, the chance of the happy, the really luxurious few, the chance, on a great occasion, to be natural and simple. She had never, with him, been more so; or if it was the perfection of art it would never—and that came to the same thing—be proved against her.

  What was truly wonderful was her way of differing so from time to time without detriment to her simplicity. Caprices, he was sure she felt, were before anything else bad manners, and that judgement in her was by itself a thing making more for safety of intercourse than anything that in his various own past intercourses he had had to reckon on. If therefore her presence was now quite other than the one she had shown him the night before, there was nothing of violence in the change—it was all harmony and reason. It gave him a mild deep person, whereas he had had on the occasion to which their interview was a direct reference a person committed to movement and surface and abounding in them; but she was in either character more remarkable for nothing than for her bridging of intervals, and this now fell in with what he understood he was to leave to her. The only thing was that, if he was to leave it all to her, why exactly had she sent for him? He had had, vaguely, in advance, his explanation, his view of the probability of her wishing to set something right, to deal in some way with the fraud so lately practised on his presumed credulity. Would she attempt to carry it further or would she blot it out? Would she throw over it some more or less happy colour; or would she do nothing about it at all? He perceived soon enough at least that, however reasonable she might be, she wasn’t vulgarly confused, and it herewith pressed upon him that their eminent “lie,” Chad’s and hers, was simply after all such an inevitable tribute to good taste as he couldn’t have wished them not to render. Away from them, during his vigil, he had seemed to wince at the amount of comedy involved; whereas in his present posture he could only ask himself how he should enjoy any attempt from her to take the comedy back. He shouldn’t enjoy it at all; but, once more and yet once more, he could trust her. That is he could trust her to make deception right. As she presented things the ugliness—goodness knew why—went out of them; none the less too that she could present them, with an art of her own, by not so much as touching them. She let the matter, at all events, lie where it was—where the previous twenty-four hours had placed it; appearing merely to circle about it respectfully, tenderly, almost piously, while she took up another question.

  She knew she hadn’t really thrown dust in his eyes; this, the previous night, before they separated, had practically passed between them; and, as she had sent for him to see what the difference thus made for him might amount to, so he was conscious at the end of five minutes that he had been tried and tested. She had settled with Chad after he left them that she would, for her satisfaction, assure herself of this quantity, and Chad had, as usual, let her have her way. Chad was always letting people have their way when he felt that it would somehow turn his wheel for him; it somehow always did turn his wheel. Strether felt, oddly enough, before these facts, freshly and consentingly passive; they again so rubbed it into him that the couple thus fixing his attention were intimate, that his intervention had absolutely aided and intensified their intimacy, and that in fine he must accept the consequence of that. He had absolutely become, himself, with his perceptions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the droll mixture, as it must seem to them, of his braveries and his fears, the general spectacle of his art and his innocence, almost an added link and certainly a common priceless ground for them to meet upon. It was as if he had been hearing their very tone when she brought out a reference that was comparatively straight. “The last twice that you’ve been here, you know, I never asked you,” she said with an abrupt transition—they had been pretending before this to talk simply of the charm of yesterday and of the interest of the country they had seen. The effort was confessedly vain; not for such talk had she invited him; and her impatient reminder was of their having done for it all the needful on his coming to her after Sarah’s flight. What she hadn’t asked him then was to state to her where and how he stood for her; she had been resting on Chad’s report of their midnight hour together in the Boulevard Malesherbes. The thing therefore she at present desired was ushered in by this recall of the two occasions on which, disinterested and merciful, she hadn’t worried him. To-night truly she would worry him, and this was her appeal to him to let her risk it. He wasn’t to mind if she bored him a little: she had behaved, after all—hadn’t she?—so awfully, awfully well.

  II

  “Oh, you’re all right, you’re all right,” he almost impatiently declared; his impatience being moreover not for her pressure, but for her scruple. More and more distinct to him was the tune to which she would have had the matter out with Chad; more and more vivid for him the idea that she had been nervous as to what he might be able to “stand.” Yes, it had been a question if he had “stood” what the scene on the river had given him, and, though the young man had doubtless opined in favour of his recuperation, her own last word must have been that she should feel easier in seeing for herself. That was it, unmistakeably; she was seeing for herself. What he could stand was thus, in these moments, in the balance for Strether, who reflected, as he became fully aware of it, that he must properly brace himself. He wanted fully to appear to stand all he might; and there was a certain command of the situation for him in this very wish not to look too much at sea. She was ready with everything, but so, sufficiently, was he; that is he was at one point the more prepared of the two, inasmuch as, for all her cleverness, she couldn’t produce on the spot—and it was surprising—an account of the motive of her note. He had the advantage that his pronouncing her “all right” gave him for an enquiry. “May I ask, delighted as I’ve been to come, if you’ve wished to say something special?” He spoke as if she might have seen he had been waiting for it—not
indeed with discomfort, but with natural interest. Then he saw that she was a little taken aback, was even surprised herself at the detail she had neglected—the only one ever yet; having somehow assumed he would know, would recognize, would leave some things not to be said. She looked at him, however, an instant as if to convey that if he wanted them all—!

  “Selfish and vulgar—that’s what I must seem to you. You’ve done everything for me, and here I am as if I were asking for more. But it isn’t,” she went on, “because I’m afraid—though I am of course afraid, as a woman in my position always is. I mean it isn’t because one lives in terror—it isn’t because of that one is selfish, for I’m ready to give you my word to-night that I don’t care; don’t care what still may happen and what I may lose. I don’t ask you to raise your little finger for me again, nor do I wish so much as to mention to you what we’ve talked of before, either my danger or my safety, or his mother, or his sister, or the girl he may marry, or the fortune he may make or miss, or the right or the wrong, of any kind, he may do. If after the help one has had from you one can’t either take care of one’s self or simply hold one’s tongue, one must renounce all claim to be an object of interest. It’s in the name of what I do care about that I’ve tried still to keep hold of you. How can I be indifferent,” she asked, “to how I appear to you?” And as he found himself unable immediately to say: “Why, if you’re going, need you, after all? Is it impossible you should stay on—so that one mayn’t lose you?”

  “Impossible I should live with you here instead of going home?”

  “Not ‘with’ us, if you object to that, but near enough to us, somewhere, for us to see you—well,” she beautifully brought out, “when we feel must. How shall we not sometimes feel it? I’ve wanted to see you often when I couldn’t,” she pursued, “all these last weeks. How shan’t I then miss you now, with the sense of your being gone forever?” Then as if the straightness of this appeal, taking him unprepared, had visibly left him wondering: “Where is your ‘home’ moreover now—what has become of it? I’ve made a change in your life, I know I have; I’ve upset everything in your mind as well; in your sense of—what shall I call it?—all the decencies and possibilities. It gives me a kind of detestation—” She pulled up short.

  Oh but he wanted to hear. “Detestation of what?”

  “Of everything—of life.”

  “Ah that’s too much,” he laughed—“or too little!”

  “Too little, precisely”—she was eager. “What I hate is myself—when I think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the lives of others, and that one isn’t happy even then. One does it to cheat one’s self and to stop one’s mouth—but that’s only at the best for a little. The wretched self is always there, always making one somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it’s not, that it’s never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to take. The only safe thing is to give. It’s what plays you least false.” Interesting, touching, strikingly sincere as she let these things come from her, she yet puzzled and troubled him—so fine was the quaver of her quietness. He felt what he had felt before with her, that there was always more behind what she showed, and more and more again behind that. “You know so, at least,” she added, “where you are!”

  “You ought to know it indeed then; for isn’t what you’ve been giving exactly what has brought us together this way? You’ve been making, as I’ve so fully let you know I’ve felt,” Strether said, “the most precious present I’ve ever seen made, and if you can’t sit down peacefully on that performance you are, no doubt, born to torment yourself. But you ought,” he wound up, “to be easy.”

  “And not trouble you any more, no doubt—not thrust on you even the wonder and the beauty of what I’ve done; only let you regard our business as over, and well over, and see you depart in a peace that matches my own? No doubt, no doubt, no doubt,” she nervously repeated—“all the more that I don’t really pretend I believe you couldn’t, for yourself, not have done what you have. I don’t pretend you feel yourself victimized, for this evidently is the way you live, and it’s what—we’re agreed—is the best way. Yes, as you say,” she continued after a moment, “I ought to be easy and rest on my work. Well then here am I doing so. I am easy. You’ll have it for your last impression. When is it you say you go?” she asked with a quick change.

  He took some time to reply—his last impression was more and more so mixed a one. It produced in him a vague disappointment, a drop that was deeper even than the fall of his elation the previous night. The good of what he had done, if he had done so much, wasn’t there to enliven him quite to the point that would have been ideal for a grand gay finale. Women were thus endlessly absorbent, and to deal with them was to walk on water. What was at bottom the matter with her, embroider as she might and disclaim as she might—what was at bottom the matter with her was simply Chad himself. It was of Chad she was after all renewedly afraid; the strange strength of her passion was the very strength of her fear; she clung to him, Lambert Strether, as to a source of safety she had tested, and, generous graceful truthful as she might try to be, exquisite as she was, she dreaded the term of his being within reach. With this sharpest perception yet, it was like a chill in the air to him, it was almost appalling, that a creature so fine could be, by mysterious forces, a creature so exploited. For at the end of all things they were mysterious: she had but made Chad what he was—so why could she think she had made him infinite? She had made him better, she had made him best, she had made him anything one would; but it came to our friend with supreme queerness that he was none the less only Chad. Strether had the sense that he, a little, had made him too; his high appreciation had, as it were, consecrated her work. The work, however admirable, was nevertheless of the strict human order, and in short it was marvellous that the companion of mere earthly joys, of comforts, aberrations (however one classed them) within the common experience, should be so transcendently prized. It might have made Strether hot or shy, as such secrets of others brought home sometimes do make us; but he was held there by something so hard that it was fairly grim. This was not the discomposure of last night; that had quite passed—such discomposures were a detail; the real coercion was to see a man ineffably adored. There it was again—it took women, it took women; if to deal with them was to walk on water what wonder that the water rose? And it had never surely risen higher than round this woman. He presently found himself taking a long look from her, and the next thing he knew he had uttered all his thought. “You’re afraid for your life!”

  It drew out her long look, and he soon enough saw why. A spasm came into her face, the tears she had already been unable to hide overflowed at first in silence, and then, as the sound suddenly comes from a child, quickened to gasps, to sobs. She sat and covered her face with her hands, giving up all attempt at a manner. “It’s how you see me, it’s how you see me”—she caught her breath with it—“and it’s as I am, and as I must take myself, and of course it’s no matter.” Her emotion was at first so incoherent that he could only stand there at a loss, stand with his sense of having upset her, though of having done it by the truth. He had to listen to her in a silence that he made no immediate effort to attenuate, feeling her doubly woeful amid all her dim diffused elegance; consenting to it as he had consented to the rest, and even conscious of some vague inward irony in the presence of such a fine free range of bliss and bale. He couldn’t say it was not no matter; for he was serving her to the end, he now knew, anyway—quite as if what he thought of her had nothing to do with it. It was actually moreover as if he didn’t think of her at all, as if he could think of nothing but the passion, mature, abysmal, pitiful, she represented, and the possibilities she betrayed. She was older for him to-night, visibly less exempt from the touch of time; but she was as much as ever the finest and subtlest creature, the happiest apparition, it had been given him, in all his years, to meet; and yet he could see her there as vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a maidservant crying for her young man
. The only thing was that she judged herself as the maidservant wouldn’t; the weakness of which wisdom too, the dishonour of which judgement, seemed but to sink her lower. Her collapse, however, no doubt, was briefer and she had in a manner recovered herself before he intervened. “Of course I’m afraid for my life. But that’s nothing. It isn’t that.”

  He was silent a little longer, as if thinking what it might be. “There’s something I have in mind that I can still do.”

  But she threw off at last, with a sharp sad headshake, drying her eyes, what he could still do. “I don’t care for that. Of course, as I’ve said, you’re acting, in your wonderful way, for yourself; and what’s for yourself is no more my business—though I may reach out unholy hands so clumsily to touch it—than if it were something in Timbuctoo. It’s only that you don’t snub me, as you’ve had fifty chances to do—it’s only your beautiful patience that makes one forget one’s manners. In spite of your patience, all the same,” she went on, “you’d do anything rather than be with us here, even if that were possible. You’d do everything for us but be mixed up with us—which is a statement you can easily answer to the advantage of your own manners. You can say ‘What’s the use of talking of things that at the best are impossible?’ What is of course the use? It’s only my little madness. You’d talk if you were tormented. And I don’t mean now about him. Oh for him—!” Positively, strangely, bitterly, as it seemed to Strether, she gave “him,” for the moment, away. “You don’t care what I think of you; but I happen to care what you think of me. And what you might,” she added. “What you perhaps even did.”