The Ambassadors, Henry James [essential books to read TXT] 📗

oddity of this tone between them grew sharper for him even while they spoke. It placed the young man so before them as the result of her interest and the product of her genius, acknowledged so her part in the phenomenon and made the phenomenon so rare, that more than ever yet he might have been on the very point of asking her for some more detailed account of the whole business than he had yet received from her. The occasion almost forced upon him some question as to how she had managed and as to the appearance such miracles presented from her own singularly close place of survey. The moment in fact however passed, giving way to more present history, and he continued simply to mark his appreciation of the happy truth. "It's a tremendous comfort to feel how one can trust him." And then again while for a little she said nothing--as if after all to HER trust there might be a special limit: "I mean for making a good show to them."

"Yes," she thoughtfully returned--"but if they shut their eyes to it!"

Strether for an instant had his own thought. "Well perhaps that won't matter!"

"You mean because he probably--do what they will--won't like them?"

"Oh 'do what they will'--! They won't do much; especially if Sarah hasn't more--well, more than one has yet made out--to give."

Madame de Vionnet weighed it. "Ah she has all her grace!" It was a statement over which, for a little, they could look at each other sufficiently straight, and though it produced no protest from Strether the effect was somehow as if he had treated it as a joke. "She may be persuasive and caressing with him; she may be eloquent beyond words. She may get hold of him," she wound up--"well, as neither you nor I have."

"Yes, she MAY"--and now Strether smiled. "But he has spent all his time each day with Jim. He's still showing Jim round."

She visibly wondered. "Then how about Jim?"

Strether took a turn before he answered. "Hasn't he given you Jim? Hasn't he before this 'done' him for you?" He was a little at a loss. "Doesn't he tell you things?"

She hesitated. "No"--and their eyes once more gave and took. "Not as you do. You somehow make me see them--or at least feel them. And I haven't asked too much," she added; "I've of late wanted so not to worry him."

"Ah for that, so have I," he said with encouraging assent; so that-- as if she had answered everything--they were briefly sociable on it. It threw him back on his other thought, with which he took another turn; stopping again, however, presently with something of a glow. "You see Jim's really immense. I think it will be Jim who'll do it."

She wondered. "Get hold of him?"

"No--just the other thing. Counteract Sarah's spell." And he showed now, our friend, how far he had worked it out. "Jim's intensely cynical."

"Oh dear Jim!" Madame de Vionnet vaguely smiled.

"Yes, literally--dear Jim! He's awful. What HE wants, heaven forgive him, is to help us."

"You mean"--she was eager--"help ME?"

"Well, Chad and me in the first place. But he throws you in too, though without as yet seeing you much. Only, so far as he does see you--if you don't mind--he sees you as awful."

"'Awful'?"--she wanted it all.

"A regular bad one--though of course of a tremendously superior kind. Dreadful, delightful, irresistible."

"Ah dear Jim! I should like to know him. I MUST."

"Yes, naturally. But will it do? You may, you know," Strether suggested, "disappoint him."

She was droll and humble about it. "I can but try. But my wickedness then," she went on, "is my recommendation for him?"

"Your wickedness and the charms with which, in such a degree as yours, he associates it. He understands, you see, that Chad and I have above all wanted to have a good time, and his view is simple and sharp. Nothing will persuade him--in the light, that is, of my behaviour--that I really didn't, quite as much as Chad, come over to have one before it was too late. He wouldn't have expected it of me; but men of my age, at Woollett--and especially the least likely ones--have been noted as liable to strange outbreaks, belated uncanny clutches at the unusual, the ideal. It's an effect that a lifetime of Woollett has quite been observed as having; and I thus give it to you, in Jim's view, for what it's worth. Now his wife and his mother-in-law," Strether continued to explain, "have, as in honour bound, no patience with such phenomena, late or early--which puts Jim, as against his relatives, on the other side. Besides," he added, "I don't think he really wants Chad back. If Chad doesn't come--"

"He'll have"--Madame de Vionnet quite apprehended--"more of the free hand?"

"Well, Chad's the bigger man."

"So he'll work now, en dessous, to keep him quiet?"

"No--he won't 'work' at all, and he won't do anything en dessous. He's very decent and won't be a traitor in the camp. But he'll be amused with his own little view of our duplicity, he'll sniff up what he supposes to be Paris from morning till night, and he'll be, as to the rest, for Chad--well, just what he is."

She thought it over. "A warning?"

He met it almost with glee. "You ARE as wonderful as everybody says!" And then to explain all he meant: "I drove him about for his first hour, and do you know what--all beautifully unconscious--he most put before me? Why that something like THAT is at bottom, as an improvement to his present state, as in fact the real redemption of it, what they think it may not be too late to make of our friend." With which, as, taking it in, she seemed, in her recurrent alarm, bravely to gaze at the possibility, he completed his statement. "But it IS too late. Thanks to you!"

It drew from her again one of her indefinite reflexions. "Oh 'me'-- after all!"

He stood before her so exhilarated by his demonstration that he could fairly be jocular. "Everything's comparative. You're better than THAT."

"You"--she could but answer him--"are better than anything." But she had another thought. "WILL Mrs. Pocock come to me?"

"Oh yes--she'll do that. As soon, that is, as my friend Waymarsh-- HER friend now--leaves her leisure."

She showed an interest. "Is he so much her friend as that?"

"Why, didn't you see it all at the hotel?"

"Oh"--she was amused--"'all' is a good deal to say. I don't know-- I forget. I lost myself in HER."

"You were splendid," Strether returned--"but 'all' isn't a good deal to say: it's only a little. Yet it's charming so far as it goes. She wants a man to herself."

"And hasn't she got you?"

"Do you think she looked at me--or even at you--as if she had?" Strether easily dismissed that irony. "Every one, you see, must strike her as having somebody. You've got Chad--and Chad has got you."

"I see"--she made of it what she could. "And you've got Maria."

Well, he on his side accepted that. "I've got Maria. And Maria has got me. So it goes."

"But Mr. Jim--whom has he got?"

"Oh he has got--or it's as IF he had--the whole place."

"But for Mr. Waymarsh"--she recalled--"isn't Miss Barrace before any one else?"

He shook his head. "Miss Barrace is a raffinee, and her amusement won't lose by Mrs. Pocock. It will gain rather--especially if Sarah triumphs and she comes in for a view of it."

"How well you know us!" Madame de Vionnet, at this, frankly sighed.

"No--it seems to me it's we that I know. I know Sarah--it's perhaps on that ground only that my feet are firm. Waymarsh will take her round while Chad takes Jim--and I shall be, I assure you delighted for both of them. Sarah will have had what she requires--she will have paid her tribute to the ideal; and he will have done about the same. In Paris it's in the air--so what can one do less? If there's a point that, beyond any other, Sarah wants to make, it's that she didn't come out to be narrow. We shall feel at least that."

"Oh," she sighed, "the quantity we seem likely to 'feel'! But what becomes, in these conditions, of the girl?"

"Of Mamie--if we're all provided? Ah for that," said Strether, "you can trust Chad."

"To be, you mean, all right to her?"

"To pay her every attention as soon as he has polished off Jim. He wants what Jim can give him--and what Jim really won't--though he has had it all, and more than all, from me. He wants in short his own personal impression, and he'll get it--strong. But as soon as he has got it Mamie won't suffer."

"Oh Mamie mustn't SUFFER!" Madame de Vionnet soothingly emphasised.

But Strether could reassure her. "Don't fear. As soon as he has done with Jim, Jim will fall to me. And then you'll see."

It was as if in a moment she saw already; yet she still waited. Then "Is she really quite charming?" she asked.

He had got up with his last words and gathered in his hat and gloves. "I don't know; I'm watching. I'm studying the case, as it were-- and I dare say I shall be able to tell you."

She wondered. "Is it a case?"

"Yes--I think so. At any rate I shall see.'

"But haven't you known her before?"

"Yes," he smiled--"but somehow at home she wasn't a case. She has become one since." It was as if he made it out for himself. "She has become one here."

"So very very soon?"

He measured it, laughing. "Not sooner than I did."

"And you became one--?"

"Very very soon. The day I arrived."

Her intelligent eyes showed her thought of it. "Ah but the day you arrived you met Maria. Whom has Miss Pocock met?"

He paused again, but he brought it out. "Hasn't she met Chad?"

"Certainly--but not for the first time. He's an old friend." At which Strether had a slow amused significant headshake that made her go on: "You mean that for HER at least he's a new person-- that she sees him as different?"

"She sees him as different."

"And how does she see him?"

Strether gave it up. "How can one tell how a deep little girl sees a deep young man?"

"Is every one so deep? Is she too?"

"So it strikes me deeper than I thought. But wait a little--between us we'll make it out. You'll judge for that matter yourself."

Madame de Vionnet looked for the moment fairly bent on the chance. "Then she WILL come with her?--I mean Mamie with Mrs. Pocock?"

"Certainly. Her curiosity, if nothing else, will in any case work that. But leave it all to Chad."

"Ah," wailed Madame de Vionnet, turning away a little wearily, "the things I leave to Chad!"

The tone of it made him look at her with a kindness that showed his vision of her suspense. But he fell back on his confidence. "Oh well--trust him. Trust him all the way." He had indeed no sooner so spoken than the queer displacement of his point of view appeared again to come up for him in the very sound, which drew from him a short laugh, immediately checked. He became still more advisory. "When they do come give them plenty of Miss Jeanne. Let Mamie see her well."

She looked for a moment as if she placed them face to face. "For Mamie to hate her?"

He had another of his corrective headshakes. "Mamie won't. Trust THEM."

She looked at him hard, and then as if it were what she must always come back to: "It's you I trust. But I was sincere," she