# The Ambassadors (London: Methuen & Co., 1903)/Part 8/Chapter 20

XX
Strether quitted the station, half an hour later, in different company. Chad had taken charge, for the journey to the hotel, of Sarah, Mamie, the maid and the luggage, all spaciously installed and conveyed; and it was only after the four had rolled away that his companion got into a cab with Jim. A strange new feeling had come over Strether, in consequence of which his spirits had risen; it was as if what had occurred on the alighting of the travellers had been something other than his fear, though his fear had yet not been of an instant scene of violence. His impression had been nothing but what was inevitable—he said that to himself; yet relief and reassurance had softly dropped upon him. Nothing could be so odd as to be indebted for these things to the look of faces and the sound of voices that had been with him to satiety, as he might have said, for years; but he now knew, all the same, how uneasy he had felt; that was brought home to him by his present sense of a respite. It had come, moreover, in the flash of an eye; it had come in the smile with which Sarah, whom, at the window of her compartment, they had effusively greeted from the platform, rustled down to them a moment later, fresh and handsome from her cool June progress through the charming land. It was only a sign, but enough; she was going to be gracious and unallusive, she was going to play the larger game—which was still more apparent, after she had emerged from Chad's arms, in her direct greeting to the valued friend of her family.
Strether was then, as much as ever, the valued friend of her family; it was something he could at all events go on with; and the manner of his response to it expressed even for himself how little he had liked the prospect of ceasing to figure in that character. He had always seen Sarah ​gracious—had in fact rarely seen her shy or dry; her marked, thin-lipped smile, intense without brightness and as prompt to act as the scrape of a safety-match; the protrusion of her rather remarkably long chin, which in her case represented invitation and urbanity, and not, as in most others, pugnacity and defiance; the penetration of her voice to a distance, the general encouragement and approval of her manner, were all elements with which intercourse had made him familiar, but which he noted to-day almost as if she had been a new acquaintance. This first glimpse of her had given a brief but vivid accent to her resemblance to her mother; he could have taken her for Mrs. Newsome while she met his eyes as the train rolled into the station. It was an impression that quickly dropped; Mrs. Newsome was much handsomer, and while Sarah inclined to the massive, her mother had, at an age, still the waist of a girl; the latter's chin, moreover, was rather short than long, and her smile, by good fortune, much more—oh, ever so much more—restfully dim. Strether had seen Mrs. Newsome reserved; he had literally heard her silent; though he had never known her disagreeable. It was the case with Mrs. Pocock that he had known her disagreeable, even though he had never known her not affable. She had forms of affability that were in a high degree affirmative; nothing, for instance, had ever been more striking than that she was affable to Jim.
What had told, at any rate, at the window of the train was her high, clear forehead—that forehead which her friends, for some reason, always thought of as a "brow"; the long reach of her eyes—it came out at this juncture in such a manner as to remind him oddly enough also of that of Waymarsh's; and the unusual gloss of her dark hair, dressed and hatted after her mother's refined example, with such an avoidance of extremes that it was always spoken of at Woollett as "their own." Though this analogy dropped as soon as she was on the platform, it had lasted long enough to make him feel all the advantage, as it were, of his relief. The woman at home, the woman to whom he was attached, was before him just long enough to give him again the measure of the wretchedness, in fact really of the shame, of their having to recognise ​the formation between them of a "split." He had taken this measure in solitude and meditation; but the catastrophe, as Sarah steamed up, looked for its few seconds unprecedentedly dreadful, or proved, more exactly, absolutely unthinkable; so that his finding something free and familiar to respond to brought with it an instant renewal of his loyalty. He had suddenly sounded the whole depth, had gasped at what he might have lost.
Well, he could now, for the quarter of an hour of their detention, hover about the travellers as soothingly as if their direct message to him was that he had lost nothing. He wasn't going to have Sarah write to her mother that night that he was in any way altered or strange. There had been times enough for a month when it had seemed to him that he was strange, that he was altered in every way, but that was a matter for himself. He knew at least whose business it was not; it was not, at all events, such a circumstance as Sarah's own unaided lights would help her to. Even if she had come out to flash those lights more than yet appeared, she wouldn't make much headway against mere pleasantness. He counted on being able to be merely pleasant to the end, and if only from incapacity, moreover, to formulate anything different. He couldn't even formulate to himself his being changed and queer. It had taken place—the process—somewhere deep down. Maria Gostrey had caught glimpses of it. But how was he to fish it up, even if he desired, for Mrs. Pocock? This was the spirit, then, in which he hovered, and with the easier throb in it much indebted, moreover, to the impression of high and established adequacy as a pretty girl promptly produced in him by Mamie. He had wondered vaguely, turning over many things in the fidget of his thoughts, if Mamie were as pretty as Woollett published her; as to which issue seeing her now again was to be so swept away by Woollett's opinion that the consequence really let loose for the imagination an avalanche of others. There were positively five minutes in which the last word seemed of necessity to abide with a Woollett represented by a Mamie. This was the sort of truth the place itself would feel; it would send her forth in confidence; it would point to her with triumph; it would take ​its stand on her with assurance; it would be conscious of no requirement she didn't meet, of no question she couldn't answer.
Well, it was right, Strether slipped smoothly enough into the cheerfulness of saying. Granted that a community might be best represented by a young lady of twenty-two, Mamie perfectly played the part, played it as if she were used to it, and looked and spoke and dressed the character. He wondered if she mightn't, in the high light of Paris—a cool, full studio-light, becoming, yet treacherous—show as too conscious of these matters; but the next moment he felt satisfied that her consciousness was, after all, empty for its size, rather too simple than too mixed, and that the kind way with her would be not to take many things out of it, but to put as many as possible in. She was erect and conveniently tall, just a trifle too bloodlessly fair perhaps, but with a pleasant, public, familiar radiance that affirmed her vitality. She might have been "receiving" for Woollett wherever she found herself, and there was something in her manner, her tone, her motion, her pretty blue eyes, her pretty perfect teeth, and her very small—too small—nose that immediately placed her, to the fancy, between the windows of a hot, bright room in which voices were high—up at that end to which people were brought to be "presented." They were there to congratulate—these images—and Strether's renewed vision completed the idea in this key. What Mamie was like was the happy bride—the bride after the church and just before going away. She wasn't the mere maiden; yet, on the other hand, she was only as much married as that. She was in the brilliant, triumphant, festal stage. Well, might it last her long!
Strether rejoiced in these things for Chad, who was all genial attention to the needs of his friends, besides having arranged that his servant should reinforce him. The ladies were certainly pleasant to see, and Mamie would be at any time and anywhere pleasant to exhibit. She would look extraordinarily like his young wife—the wife of a honeymoon—should he go about with her. But that was his own affair, or perhaps it was hers; it was something, at any rate, she couldn't help, Strether remembered how he ​had seen him come up with Jeanne de Vionnet in Gloriani's garden, and the fancy he had had about that—the fancy obscured now, thickly overlaid with others—this recollection was during these minutes his only note of trouble. He had often, in spite of himself, wondered if Chad were not, with Jeanne, the object of a still and shaded flame. It was on the cards that the child might be tremulously in love, and this conviction now flickered up not a bit the less for his disliking to think of it, for its being, in a complicated situation, a complication the more, and for something indescribable in Mamie, something, at all events, that his own mind straightway lent her, something that gave her value, gave her intensity and purpose as the symbol of an opposition. Little Jeanne wasn't really at all in question—how could she be?—yet from the moment Miss Pocock had shaken her skirts on the platform, touched up the immense bows of her hat, and settled properly over her shoulder the strap of her morocco-and-gilt travelling satchel, from that moment little Jeanne was opposed.
It was in the cab with Jim that impressions really crowded on Strether, giving him the strangest sense of length of absence from people among whom he had lived for years. Having them thus come out to him was as if he had returned to find them, and the droll promptitude of Jim's mental reaction threw his own initiation far back into the past. Whoever might or mightn't be suited by what was going on among them, Jim, for one, would certainly be; his instant recognition—frank and whimsical—of what the affair was for him gave Strether a glow of pleasure. "I say, you know, this is about my shape, and if it hadn't been for you———!" so he broke out as the charming streets met his healthy appetite; and he wound up, after an expressive nudge, with a clap of his companion's knee and an "Oh, you, you—you are doing it!" that was charged with rich meaning. Strether felt in it the intention of homage, but, with a curiosity otherwise occupied, postponed taking it up. What he was asking himself for the time was how Sarah Pocock, in the opportunity already given her, had judged her brother—from whom he himself, as they finally, at the station, separated for their different conveyances, had had a look into which ​he could read more than one message. However Sarah was judging her brother, Chad's conclusion about his sister, and about her husband and her husband's sister, was at the least on the way to be sharp. Strether felt the sharpness, and that, as the look between them was an exchange, what he himself gave back was relatively vague. Any comparison of notes, however, could wait; everything struck him as depending on the effect produced by Chad. Neither Sarah nor Mamie had in any way, at the station—where they had had, after all, full time—broken out about it; which, to make up for this, was what our friend had expected of Jim as soon as they should find themselves together. It was queer to him that he had had that noiseless brush with Chad; an ironic intelligence with this youth on the subject of his relatives, an intelligence carried on under their nose, and, as might be said at their expense, such a matter marked again for him strongly the number of stages he had come; albeit that if the number seemed great the time taken for the final one was but the turn of a hand. He had before this had his moments of wondering if he himself were not perhaps changed even as Chad was changed. Only what in Chad was conspicuous improvement—well, he had no name ready for the action, in his own organism, of his own more timid dose. He should have to see first what this action would be. And for his occult passage with the young man, after all, the directness of it had no greater oddity than the fact that the young man's way with the three travellers should have been so happy a manifestation. Strether liked him for it, on the spot, as he had not yet liked him; it affected him, while it lasted, as he might have been affected by some light, pleasant, perfect work of art; to that degree that he wondered if they were really worthy of it, took it in and did it justice; to that degree that it would have been scarce a miracle if, there in the luggage-room, while they waited for their things, Sarah had pulled his sleeve and drawn him aside. "You're right; we haven't quite known what you mean, mother and I, but now we see. Chad's magnificent; what can one want more? If this be the kind of thing———!" On which they might, as it were, have embraced and begun to work together.
​Ah, how much, as it was, for all her bridling brightness—which was merely general and noticed nothing—would they work together? Strether knew he was unreasonable; he set it down to his being nervous; people couldn't notice everything and speak of everything in a quarter of an hour. Possibly, no doubt, also, he made too much of Chad's display. Yet, none the less, when, at the end of five minutes, in the cab, Jim Pocock had said nothing either—hadn't said, that is, what Strether wanted, though he had said much else—it all suddenly bounced back to their being either stupid or wilful. It was more probably, on the whole, the former, so that that would be the drawback of the bridling brightness. Yes, they would bridle and be bright; they would make the best of what was before them, but their observation would nevertheless fail; it would all be beyond them; they simply wouldn't understand. Of what use would it be then that they had come—if they weren't to be intelligent up to that point—unless indeed he himself were utterly deluded and extravagant? Was he, on this question of Chad's improvement, fantastic and away from the truth? Did he live in a false world, a rank world that he had grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation—in the face, now, of Jim's silence in particular—but the alarm of the vain thing menaced by the touch of the real? Was this contribution of the real possibly the mission of the Pococks? Had they come to make the work of observation as he had practised observation crack and crumble, and to reduce Chad to the plain terms in which honest minds could deal with him? Had they come, in short, to be sane where Strether was destined to feel that he himself had only been silly?
He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long when once he had reflected that he would have been silly, in this case, with Maria Gostrey and little Bilham, with Mme. de Vionnet and little Jeanne, with Lambert Strether, in fine, and, above all, with Chad Newsome himself. Wouldn't it be found to have made more for reality to be silly with these persons than sane with Sarah and Jim? Jim, in fact, he presently made up his mind, was individually out of it; Jim didn't care; Jim ​hadn't come out either for Chad or for him; Jim, in short, left the moral side to Sally, and indeed simply availed himself now, for the sense of recreation, of the fact that he left almost everything to Sally. He was nothing compared to Sally, and not so much by reason of Sally's temper and will as by that of her more developed type and greater acquaintance with the world. He quite frankly and serenely confessed, as he sat there with Strether, that he felt his type hang far in the rear of his wife's, and still further, if possible, in the rear of his sister's. Their types, he well knew, were recognised and acclaimed, whereas the most a leading Woollett business man could hope to achieve socially, and, for that matter, industrially, was a certain freedom to play into this general glamour.
The impression he made on our friend was another of the things that marked our friend's road. It was a strange impression, especially as so soon produced; Strether had received it, he judged, all in the twenty minutes; it struck him at least as but in a minor degree the work of the long Woollett years. Pocock was normally and consentingly, though not quite wittingly, out of the question. It was despite his being normal; it was despite his being cheerful; it was despite his being a leading Woollett business man; and the determination of his fate left him thus perfectly usual—as everything else about it was clearly, to his sense, not less so. He seemed to say that there was a whole side of life on which the perfectly usual was for leading Woollett business men to be out of the question. He made no more of it than that, and Strether, so far as Jim was concerned, desired to make no more. Only Strether's imagination, as always, worked, and he asked himself if this side of life were not somehow connected, for those who figured on it, with the fact of marriage. Would his relation to it, had he married ten years before, have become now the same as Pocock's? Might it even become the same should he marry in a few months? Should he ever know himself as much out of the question for Mrs. Newsome as Jim knew himself—in a dim way—for Mrs. Jim?
To turn his eyes in that direction was to be, personally, reassured; he was different from Pocock; he had affirmed himself differently; and he was held, after all, in higher ​esteem. What none the less came home to him, however, at this hour, was that the society, over there, of which Sarah and Mamie—and, in a more eminent way, Mrs. Newcome herself were specimens, was essentially a society of women, and that poor Jim wasn't in it. He himself, Lambert Strether, was, as yet, in some degree—which was an odd situation for a man; but it kept coming back to him in a whimsical way that he should perhaps find his marriage had cost him his place. This occasion indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a time of sensible exclusion for Jim, who was in a state of manifest response to the charm of his adventure. Small and fat and constantly facetious, straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he would have been practically indistinguishable had not his constant preference for light-gray clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very little stories, done what it could for his identity. There were signs in him, though none of them plaintive, of always paying for others; and the principal one perhaps was just this failure of type. It was with this that he paid, rather than with fatigue or waste; and also, doubtless, a little, with the effort of humour never irrelevant to the conditions, to the relations, with which he was acquainted.
He gurgled his joy as they rolled through the happy streets; he declared that his trip was a regular windfall, and that he wasn't there, he was eager to remark, to hang back from anything; he didn't know quite what Sally had come for, but he had come for a good time. Strether indulged him, even while wondering if what Sally wanted her brother to go back for was to become like her husband. He trusted that a good time was to be, out and out, the programme for all of them; and he assented liberally to Jim's proposal that, disencumbered and irresponsible—his things were in the omnibus with those of the others—they should take a further turn round before going to the hotel. It wasn't for him to tackle Chad—it was Sally's job; and as it would be like her, he felt, to open fire on the spot, it wouldn't be amiss of them to hold off and give her time. Strether, on his side, only asked to give her time; so he jogged with his companion along boulevards and avenues, trying to extract from meagre material some ​forecast of his catastrophe. He was quick enough to see that Jim Pocock declined judgment, had hovered quite round the outer edge of discussion and anxiety, leaving all analysis of their question to the ladies alone and now only feeling his way toward some small, droll cynicism. It broke out afresh, the cynicism—it had already shown a flicker—in a but slightly deferred "Well, hanged if I would if I were he!"
"You mean you wouldn't in Chad's place———?"
"Give up this to go back and run the advertising." Poor Jim, with his arms folded and his little legs out in the open fiacre, drank in the sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of their vista to the other. "Why, I want to come out here and live myself. And I want to live while I am here too. I feel with you—oh, you've been grand, old man, and I've twigged—that it ain't right to worry Chad. I don't mean to persecute him; I couldn't in conscience. It's thanks to you, at any rate, that I'm here; and I'm sure I'm much obliged. You're a lovely pair."
There were things in this speech that Strether, for the time, let pass. "Don't you then think it important the advertising should be thoroughly taken in hand? Chad will be, so far as capacity is concerned," he went on, "the man to do it."
"Where did he pick up his capacity," Jim asked, "over here?"
"He didn't pick it up over here, and the wonderful thing is that over here he hasn't inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for business, an extraordinary head. He comes by that," Strether explained, "honestly enough. He's in that respect his father's son, and also—for she's wonderful, in her way, too—his mother's. He has other tastes and other tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife are quite right about his having that. He's very remarkable."
"Well, I guess he is! " Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. "But if you've believed so in his making us hum, why have you so prolonged the discussion? Don't you know we've been quite anxious about you?"
These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether saw he must none the less make a choice and take ​a line. "Because, you see, I've greatly liked it. I've liked my Paris. I daresay I've liked it too much."
"Oh, you old wretch!" Jim gaily exclaimed.
"But nothing is concluded," Strether went on. "The case is more complex than it looks from Woollett."
"Oh well, it looks bad enough from Woollett!" Jim declared.
"Even after all I've written?"
Jim bethought himself. "Isn't it what you've written that has made Mrs. Newsome pack us off? That, at least, and Chad's still hanging on."
Strether made a reflection of his own. "I see. That she should do something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore, of course, come out to act."
"Oh yes," Jim concurred—"to act. But Sally comes out to act, you know," he lucidly added, "every time she leaves the house. She never comes out but she does act. She's acting moreover now for her mother, and that fixes the scale." Then he wound up, opening all his senses to it, with a renewed embrace of pleasant Paris. "We haven't, all the same, at Woollett, got anything like this."
Strether continued to consider. "I'm bound to say for you all that you strike me as having arrived in a very mild and reasonable frame of mind. You don't show your claws. I felt just now in Mrs. Pocock no symptom of that. She isn't fierce," he went on. "I'm such a nervous idiot that I thought she might be."
"Oh, don't you know her well enough," Pocock asked, "to have noticed that she never gives herself away, any more than her mother ever does? They ain't fierce, either of 'em: they let you come quite close. They wear their fur smooth side out—warm side in. Do you know what they are?" Jim pursued as he looked about him, giving the question, as Strether felt, but half his care—"do you know what they are? They're about as intense as they can live."
"Yes"—and Strether's concurrence had a positive precipitation; "they're about as intense as they can live."
"They don't lash about and shake the cage," said Jim, who seemed pleased with his analogy; "and it's at feeding-time that they're quietest. But they always get there."
​"They do indeed—they always get there!" Strether replied with a laugh that justified his confession of nervousness. He disliked to be talking sincerely of Mrs. Newsome with Pocock; he wouldn't so much have minded talking insincerely. But there was something he wanted to know, a need created in him by her recent intermission, by his having given, from the first, so much, as now more than ever appeared to him, and got so little. It was as if a queer truth in his companion's metaphor had rolled over him with a rush. She had been quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and Sarah had fed with her, out of the big bowl of all his recent free communication, his vividness and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even his eloquence, while the current of her response had steadily run thin. Jim meanwhile, however, it was true, slipped characteristically into shallowness from the moment he ceased to speak out of the experience of a husband.
"But of course Chad has now the advantage of being there before her. If he doesn't work that for all it's worth———!" He sighed with contingent pity at his brother-in-law's possible want of resource. " He has worked it on you pretty well, eh?"—and he asked the next moment if there were anything new at the Varieties, which he pronounced in the American manner. They talked about the Varieties—Strether confessing to a knowledge which produced again on Pocock's part a play of innuendo as vague as a nursery-rhyme, yet as aggressive as an elbow in his side; and they finished their drive under the protection of easy themes. Strether waited to the end, but still in vain, for any show that Jim had seen Chad as different; and he could scarce have explained the discouragement he drew from the absence of this testimony. It was what he had taken his own stand on, so far as he had taken a stand; and if they were all only going to see nothing, he had quite wasted his time. He gave his friend till the very last moment, till they had come into sight of the hotel; and when poor Pocock only continued cheerful and envious and funny, he fairly grew to dislike him, to feel him extravagantly common. If they were all going to see nothing!—Strether knew, as this came back to him, that he was also letting Pocock represent for him ​what Mrs. Newsome wouldn't see. He went on disliking, in the light of Jim's commonness, to talk to him about that lady; yet just before the cab pulled up he knew the extent of his desire for the real word from Woollett.
"Has Mrs. Newsome at all given way———?"
"'Given way'?"—Jim echoed it with the practical derision of his sense of a long past.
"Under the strain, I mean, of hope deferred, of disappointment repeated and thereby intensified."
"Oh, is she prostrate, you mean?"—he had his categories in hand. "Why, yes, she's prostrate—just as Sally is. But they're never so lively, you know, as when they're prostrate."
"Ah, Sarah's prostrate?" Strether vaguely murmured.
"It's when they're prostrate that they most sit up."
"And Mrs. Newsome is sitting up?"
"All night, my boy—for you!" And Jim fetched him, with a vulgar little guffaw, a thrust that gave relief to the picture. But he had got what he wanted. He felt on the spot that this was the real word from Woollett. "So don't you go home!" Jim added while he alighted and while his friend, letting him profusely pay the cabman, sat on in a momentary muse. Strether wondered if that were the real word too.