“Ah like me, poor thing?” Strether also got to his feet.
“Exactly—she had a bad moment. It was very soon distinct to her, to pull her up, to let her down, that, alas, he was, he is, saved. There’s nothing left for her to do.”
“Not even to love him?”
“She would have loved him better as she originally believed him.”
Strether wondered. “Of course one asks one’s self what notion a little girl forms, where a young man’s in question, of such a history and such a state.”
“Well, this little girl saw them, no doubt, as obscure, but she saw them practically as wrong. The wrong for her was the obscure. Chad turns out at any rate right and good and disconcerting, while what she was all prepared for, primed and girded and wound up for, was to deal with him as the general opposite.”
“Yet wasn’t her whole point”—Strether weighed it—“that he was to be, that he could be, made better, redeemed?”
Little Bilham fixed it all a moment, and then with a small headshake that diffused a tenderness: “She’s too late. Too late for the miracle.”
“Yes”—his companion saw enough. “Still, if the worst fault of his condition is that it may be all there for her to profit by—?”
“Oh she doesn’t want to ‘profit,’ in that flat way. She doesn’t want to profit by another woman’s work—she wants the miracle to have been her own miracle. That’s what she’s too late for.”
Strether quite felt how it all fitted, yet there seemed one loose piece. “I’m bound to say, you know, that she strikes one, on these lines, as fastidious—what you call here difficile.”
Little Bilham tossed up his chin. “Of course she’s difficile—on any lines! What else in the world are our Mamies—the real, the right ones?”
“I see, I see,” our friend repeated, charmed by the responsive wisdom he had ended by so richly extracting. “Mamie is one of the real and the right.”
“The very thing itself.”
“And what it comes to then,” Strether went on, “is that poor awful Chad is simply too good for her.”
“Ah too good was what he was after all to be; but it was she herself, and she herself only, who was to have made him so.”
It hung beautifully together, but with still a loose end. “Wouldn’t he do for her even if he should after all break—”
“With his actual influence?” Oh little Bilham had for this enquiry the sharpest of all his controls. “How can he ‘do’—on any terms whatever—when he’s flagrantly spoiled?”
Strether could only meet the question with his passive, his receptive pleasure. “Well, thank goodness, you’re not! You remain for her to save, and I come back, on so beautiful and full a demonstration, to my contention of just now—that of your showing distinct signs of her having already begun.”
The most he could further say to himself—as his young friend turned away—was that the charge encountered for the moment no renewed denial. Little Bilham, taking his course back to the music, only shook his good-natured ears an instant, in the manner of a terrier who has got wet; while Strether relapsed into the sense—which had for him in these days most of comfort—that he was free to believe in anything that from hour to hour kept him going. He had positively motions and flutters of this conscious hour-to-hour kind, temporary surrenders to irony, to fancy, frequent instinctive snatches at the growing rose of observation, constantly stronger for him, as he felt, in scent and colour, and in which he could bury his nose even to wantonness. This last resource was offered him, for that matter, in the very form of his next clear perception—the vision of a prompt meeting, in the doorway of the room, between little Bilham and brilliant Miss Barrace, who was entering as Bilham withdrew. She had apparently put him a question, to which he had replied by turning to indicate his late interlocutor; toward whom, after an interrogation further aided by a resort to that optical machinery which seemed, like her other ornaments, curious and archaic, the genial lady, suggesting more than ever for her fellow guest the old French print, the historic portrait, directed herself with an intention that Strether instantly met. He knew in advance the first note she would sound, and took in as she approached all her need of sounding it. Nothing yet had been so “wonderful” between them as the present occasion; and it was her special sense of this quality in occasions that she was there, as she was in most places, to feed. That sense had already been so well fed by the situation about them that she had quitted the other room, forsaken the music, dropped out of the play, abandoned, in a word, the stage itself, that she might stand a minute behind the scenes with Strether and so perhaps figure as one of the famous augurs replying, behind the oracle, to the wink of the other. Seated near him presently where little Bilham had sat, she replied in truth to many things; beginning as soon as he had said to her—what he hoped he said without fatuity—“All you ladies are extraordinarily kind to me.”
She played her long handle, which shifted her observation; she saw in an instant all the absences that left them free. “How can we be anything else? But isn’t that exactly your plight? ‘We ladies’—oh we’re nice, and you must be having enough of us! As one of us, you know, I don’t pretend I’m crazy about us. But Miss Gostrey at least to-night has left you alone, hasn’t she?” With which she again looked about as if Maria might still lurk.
“Oh yes,” said Strether; “she’s only sitting up for me at home.” And then as this elicited from his companion her gay “Oh, oh, oh!” he explained that he meant sitting up in suspense and prayer. “We thought it on the whole better she shouldn’t be present; and either way of course it’s a terrible worry for her.” He abounded in the sense of his appeal to the ladies, and they might take their choice of his doing so from humility or from pride. “Yet she inclines to believe I shall come out.”
“Oh I incline to believe too you’ll come out!”—Miss Barrace, with her laugh, was not to be behind. “Only the question’s about where, isn’t it? However,” she happily continued, “if it’s anywhere at all it must be very far on, mustn’t it? To do us justice, I think, you know,” she laughed, “we do, among us all, want you rather far on. Yes, yes,” she repeated in her quick droll way; “we want you very, very far on!” After which she wished to know why he had thought it better Maria shouldn’t be present.
“Oh,” he replied, “it was really her own idea. I should have wished it. But she dreads responsibility.”
“And isn’t that a new thing for her?”
“To dread it? No doubt—no doubt. But her nerve has given way.”
Miss Barrace looked at him a moment. “She has too much at stake.” Then less gravely: “Mine, luckily for me, holds out.”
“Luckily for me too”—Strether came back to that. “My own isn’t so firm, my appetite for responsibility isn’t so sharp, as that I haven’t felt the very principle of this occasion to be ‘the more the merrier.’ If we are so merry it’s because Chad has understood so well.”
“He has understood amazingly,” said Miss Barrace.
“It’s wonderful!”—Strether anticipated for her.
“It’s wonderful!” she, to meet it, intensified; so that, face to face over it, they largely and recklessly laughed. But she presently added: “Oh I see the principle. If one didn’t one would be lost. But when once one has got hold of it—”
“It’s as simple as twice two! From the moment he had to do something—”
“A crowd”—she took him straight up—“was the only thing? Rather, rather: a rumpus of sound,” she laughed, “or nothing. Mrs. Pocock’s built in, or built out—whichever you call it; she’s packed so tight she can’t move. She’s in splendid isolation”—Miss Barrace embroidered the theme.
Strether followed, but scrupulous of justice. “Yet with everyone in the place successively introduced to her.”
“Wonderfully—but just so that it does build her out. She’s bricked up, she’s buried alive!”
Strether seemed for a moment to look at it; but it
brought him to a sigh. “Oh but she’s not dead! It will take more than this to kill her.”
His companion had a pause that might have been for pity. “No, I can’t pretend I think she’s finished—or that it’s for more than to-night.” She remained pensive as if with the same compunction. “It’s only up to her chin.” Then again for the fun of it: “She can breathe.”
“She can breathe!”—he echoed it in the same spirit. “And do you know,” he went on, “what’s really all this time happening to me?—through the beauty of music, the gaiety of voices, the uproar in short of our revel and the felicity of your wit? The sound of Mrs. Pocock’s respiration drowns for me, I assure you, every other. It’s literally all I hear.”
She focussed him with her clink of chains. “Well—!” she breathed ever so kindly.
“Well, what?”
“She is free from her chin up,” she mused; “and that will be enough for her.”
“It will be enough for me!” Strether ruefully laughed. “Waymarsh has really,” he then asked, “brought her to see you?”
“Yes—but that’s the worst of it. I could do you no good. And yet I tried hard.”
Strether wondered. “And how did you try?”
“Why I didn’t speak of you.”
“I see. That was better.”
“Then what would have been worse? For speaking or silent,” she lightly wailed, “I somehow ‘compromise.’ And it has never been any one but you.”
“That shows”—he was magnanimous—“that it’s something not in you, but in one’s self. It’s my fault.”
She was silent a little. “No, it’s Mr. Waymarsh’s. It’s the fault of his having brought her.”
“Ah then,” said Strether good-naturedly, “why did he bring her?”
“He couldn’t afford not to.”
“Oh you were a trophy—one of the spoils of conquest? But why in that case, since you do ‘compromise’—”
“Don’t I compromise him as well? I do compromise him as well,” Miss Barrace smiled. “I compromise him as hard as I can. But for Mr. Waymarsh it isn’t fatal. It’s—so far as his wonderful relation with Mrs. Pocock is concerned—favourable.” And then, as he still seemed slightly at sea: “The man who had succeeded with me, don’t you see? For her to get him from me was such an added incentive.”
Strether saw, but as if his path was still strewn with surprises. “It’s ‘from’ you then that she has got him?”
She was amused at his momentary muddle. “You can fancy my fight! She believes in her triumph. I think it has been part of her joy.”
“Oh her joy!” Strether sceptically murmured.
“Well, she thinks she has had her own way. And what’s to-night for her but a kind of apotheosis? Her frock’s really good.”
“Good enough to go to heaven in? For after a real apotheosis,” Strether went on, “there’s nothing but heaven. For Sarah there’s only to-morrow.”
“And you mean that she won’t find to-morrow heavenly?”
“Well, I mean that I somehow feel to-night—on her behalf—too good to be true. She has had her cake; that is she’s in the act now of having it, of swallowing the largest and sweetest piece. There won’t be another left for her. Certainly I haven’t one. It can only, at the best, be Chad.” He continued to make it out as for their common entertainment. “He may have one, as it were, up his sleeve; yet it’s borne in upon me that if he had—”
“He wouldn’t”—she quite understood—“have taken all this trouble? I dare say not, and, if I may be quite free and dreadful, I very much hope he won’t take any more. Of course I won’t pretend now,” she added, “not to know what it’s a question of.”
“Oh everyone must know now,” poor Strether thoughtfully admitted; “and it’s strange enough and funny enough that one should feel everybody here at this very moment to be knowing and watching and waiting.”
“Yes—isn’t it indeed funny?” Miss Barrace quite rose to it. “That’s the way we are in Paris.” She was always pleased with a new contribution to that queerness. “It’s wonderful! But, you know,” she declared, “it all depends on you. I don’t want to turn the knife in your vitals, but that’s naturally what you just now meant by our all being on top of you. We know you as the hero of the drama, and we’re gathered to see what you’ll do.”
Strether looked at her a moment with a light perhaps slightly obscured. “I think that must be why the hero has taken refuge in this corner. He’s scared at his heroism—he shrinks from his part.”
“Ah but we nevertheless believe he’ll play it. That’s why,” Miss Barrace kindly went on, “we take such an interest in you. We feel you’ll come up to the scratch.” And then as he seemed perhaps not quite to take fire: “Don’t let him do it.”
“Don’t let Chad go?”
“Yes, keep hold of him. With all this”—and she indicated the general tribute—“he has done enough. We love him here—he’s charming.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Strether, “the way you all can simplify when you will.”
But she gave it to him back. “It’s nothing to the way you will when you must.”
He winced at it as at the very voice of prophecy, and it kept him a moment quiet. He detained her, however, on her appearing about to leave him alone in the rather cold clearance their talk had made. “There positively isn’t a sign of a hero to-night; the hero’s dodging and shirking, the hero’s ashamed. Therefore, you know, I think, what you must all really be occupied with is the heroine.”
Miss Barrace took a minute. “The heroine?”
“The heroine. I’ve treated her,” said Strether, “not a bit like a hero. Oh,” he sighed, “I don’t do it well!”
She eased him off. “You do it as you can.” And then after another hesitation: “I think she’s satisfied.”
But he remained compunctious. “I haven’t been near her. I haven’t looked at her.”
“Ah then you’ve lost a good deal!”
He showed he knew it. “She’s more wonderful than ever?”
“Than ever. With Mr. Pocock.”
Strether wondered. “Madame de Vionnet—with Jim?”
“Madame de Vionnet—with ‘Jim.’ ” Miss Barrace was historic.
“And what’s she doing with him?”
“Ah you must ask him!”
Strether’s face lighted again at the prospect. “It will be amusing to do so.” Yet he continued to wonder. “But she must have some idea.”
“Of course she has—she has twenty ideas. She has in the first place,” said Miss Barrace, swinging a little her tortoise-shell, “that of doing her part. Her part is to help you.”
It came out as nothing had come yet; links were missing and connexions unnamed, but it was suddenly as if they were at the heart of their subject. “Yes; how much more she does it,” Strether gravely reflected, “than I help her!” It all came over him as with the near presence of the beauty, the grace, the intense, dissimulated spirit with which he had, as he said, been putting off contact. “She has courage.”
“Ah she has courage!” Miss Barrace quite agreed; and it was as if for a moment they saw the quantity in each other’s face.
But indeed the whole thing was present. “How much she must care!”
“Ah there it is. She does care. But it isn’t, is it,” Miss Barrace considerately added, “as if you had ever had any doubt of that?”
Strether seemed suddenly to like to feel that he really never had. “Why of course it’s the whole point.”
“Voilà!” Miss Barrace smiled.
“It’s why one came out,” Strether went on. “And it’s why one has stayed so long. And it’s also”—he abounded—“why one’s going home. It’s why, it’s why—”
“It’s why everything!” she concurred. “It’s why she might be to-night—for all she looks and shows, and for all your friend ‘Jim’ does—about twenty years old. That’s another of her ideas; to be for him, and to be quite easi
ly and charmingly, as young as a little girl.”
Strether assisted at his distance. “ ‘For him’? For Chad—?”
“For Chad, in a manner, naturally, always. But in particular to-night for Mr. Pocock.” And then as her friend still stared: “Yes, it is of a bravery! But that’s what she has: her high sense of duty.” It was more than sufficiently before them. “When Mr. Newsome has his hands so embarrassed with his sister—”
“It’s quite the least”—Strether filled it out—“that she should take his sister’s husband? Certainly—quite the least. So she has taken him.”
“She has taken him.” It was all Miss Barrace had meant.
Still it remained enough. “It must be funny.”
“Oh it is funny.” That of course essentially went with it.
But it brought them back. “How indeed then she must care!” In answer to which Strether’s entertainer dropped a comprehensive “Ah!” expressive perhaps of some impatience for the time he took to get used to it. She herself had got used to it long before.
II
When one morning within the week he perceived the whole thing to be really at last upon him Strether’s immediate feeling was all relief. He had known this morning that something was about to happen—known it, in a moment, by Waymarsh’s manner when Waymarsh appeared before him during his brief consumption of coffee and a roll in the small slippery salle-à-manger so associated with rich rumination. Strether had taken there of late various lonely and absent-minded meals; he communed there, even at the end of June, with a suspected chill, the air of old shivers mixed with old savours, the air in which so many of his impressions had perversely matured; the place meanwhile renewing its message to him by the very circumstance of his single state. He now sat there, for the most part, to sigh softly, while he vaguely tilted his carafe, over the vision of how much better Waymarsh was occupied. That was really his success by the common measure—to have led this companion so on and on. He remembered how at first there had been scarce a squatting-place he could beguile him into passing; the actual outcome of which at last was that there was scarce one that could arrest him in his rush. His rush—as Strether vividly and amusedly figured it—continued to be all with Sarah, and contained perhaps moreover the word of the whole enigma, whipping up in its fine full-flavoured froth the very principle, for good or for ill, of his own, of Strether’s destiny. It might after all, to the end, only be that they had united to save him, and indeed, so far as Waymarsh was concerned, that had to be the spring of action. Strether was glad at all events, in connexion with the case, that the saving he required was not more scant; so constituted a luxury was it in certain lights just to lurk there out of the full glare. He had moments of quite seriously wondering whether Waymarsh wouldn’t in fact, thanks to old friendship and a conceivable indulgence, make about as good terms for him as he might make for himself. They wouldn’t be the same terms of course; but they might have the advantage that he himself probably should be able to make none at all.