The Ambassadors, Henry James [short novels in english .txt] 📗

Her eyebrows went up. “The Pococks are coming?”

“That, I mean, is what will happen⁠—and happen as quickly as possible⁠—in consequence of Chad’s cable. They’ll simply embark. Sarah will come to speak for her mother⁠—with an effect different from my muddle.”

Miss Gostrey more gravely wondered. “She then will take him back?”

“Very possibly⁠—and we shall see. She must at any rate have the chance, and she may be trusted to do all she can.”

“And do you want that?”

“Of course,” said Strether, “I want it. I want to play fair.”

But she had lost for a moment the thread. “If it devolves on the Pococks why do you stay?”

“Just to see that I do play fair⁠—and a little also, no doubt, that they do.” Strether was luminous as he had never been. “I came out to find myself in presence of new facts⁠—facts that have kept striking me as less and less met by our old reasons. The matter’s perfectly simple. New reasons⁠—reasons as new as the facts themselves⁠—are wanted; and of this our friends at Woollett⁠—Chad’s and mine⁠—were at the earliest moment definitely notified. If any are producible Mrs. Pocock will produce them; she’ll bring over the whole collection. They’ll be,” he added with a pensive smile “a part of the ‘fun’ you speak of.”

She was quite in the current now and floating by his side. “It’s Mamie⁠—so far as I’ve had it from you⁠—who’ll be their great card.” And then as his contemplative silence wasn’t a denial she significantly added: “I think I’m sorry for her.”

“I think I am!”⁠—and Strether sprang up, moving about a little as her eyes followed him. “But it can’t be helped.”

“You mean her coming out can’t be?”

He explained after another turn what he meant. “The only way for her not to come is for me to go home⁠—as I believe that on the spot I could prevent it. But the difficulty as to that is that if I do go home⁠—”

“I see, I see”⁠—she had easily understood. “Mr. Newsome will do the same, and that’s not”⁠—she laughed out now⁠—“to be thought of.”

Strether had no laugh; he had only a quiet comparatively placid look that might have shown him as proof against ridicule. “Strange, isn’t it?”

They had, in the matter that so much interested them, come so far as this without sounding another name⁠—to which however their present momentary silence was full of a conscious reference. Strether’s question was a sufficient implication of the weight it had gained with him during the absence of his hostess; and just for that reason a single gesture from her could pass for him as a vivid answer. Yet he was answered still better when she said in a moment: “Will Mr. Newsome introduce his sister⁠—?”

“To Madame de Vionnet?” Strether spoke the name at last. “I shall be greatly surprised if he doesn’t.”

She seemed to gaze at the possibility. “You mean you’ve thought of it and you’re prepared.”

“I’ve thought of it and I’m prepared.”

It was to her visitor now that she applied her consideration. “Bon! You are magnificent!”

“Well,” he answered after a pause and a little wearily, but still standing there before her⁠—“well, that’s what, just once in all my dull days, I think I shall like to have been!”

Two days later he had news from Chad of a communication from Woollett in response to their determinant telegram, this missive being addressed to Chad himself and announcing the immediate departure for France of Sarah and Jim and Mamie. Strether had meanwhile on his own side cabled; he had but delayed that act till after his visit to Miss Gostrey, an interview by which, as so often before, he felt his sense of things cleared up and settled. His message to Mrs. Newsome, in answer to her own, had consisted of the words: “Judge best to take another month, but with full appreciation of all reinforcements.” He had added that he was writing, but he was of course always writing; it was a practice that continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, to make him come nearer than anything else to the consciousness of doing something: so that he often wondered if he hadn’t really, under his recent stress, acquired some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of make-believe. Wouldn’t the pages he still so freely dispatched by the American post have been worthy of a showy journalist, some master of the great new science of beating the sense out of words? Wasn’t he writing against time, and mainly to show he was kind?⁠—since it had become quite his habit not to like to read himself over. On those lines he could still be liberal, yet it was at best a sort of whistling in the dark. It was unmistakeable moreover that the sense of being in the dark now pressed on him more sharply⁠—creating thereby the need for a louder and livelier whistle. He whistled long and hard after sending his message; he whistled again and again in celebration of Chad’s news; there was an interval of a fortnight in which this exercise helped him. He had no great notion of what, on the spot, Sarah Pocock would have to say, though he had indeed confused premonitions; but it shouldn’t be in her power to say⁠—it shouldn’t be in anyone’s anywhere to say⁠—that he was neglecting her mother. He might have written before more freely, but he had never written more copiously; and he frankly gave for a reason at Woollett that he wished to fill the void created there by Sarah’s departure.

The increase of his darkness, however, and the quickening, as I have called it, of his tune, resided in the fact that he was hearing almost nothing. He had for some time been aware that he was hearing less than before, and he was now clearly following a process by which Mrs. Newsome’s letters could but logically stop. He hadn’t had a line for many days, and he needed no proof⁠—though he was, in time, to