# The Ambassadors (London: Methuen & Co., 1903)/Part 8/Chapter 18

XVIII
At four o'clock the same afternoon Strether had still not seen his old friend, but he was then, as to make up for that, engaged in talk about him with Miss Gostrey. He had kept away from home all day, given himself up to the town and to his thoughts, wandered and mused, been at once restless and absorbed—and all with the present climax of a rich little welcome to the Quartier Marbœuf. "Waymarsh has been, 'unbeknown' to me, I'm convinced"—for Miss Gostrey had inquired—"in communication with Woollett, the consequence of which was, last night, the loudest possible call for me."
"Do you mean a letter to bring you home?"
"No; a cable, which I have at this moment in my pocket—a 'Come back by the first ship.'"
Strether's hostess, it might have been made out, just escaped changing colour. Reflection arrived but in time, and established a provisional serenity. It was perhaps exactly this that enabled her to say with duplicity, "And you're going———?"
"You almost deserve it when you abandon me so."
She shook her head as if this were not worth taking up. "My absence has helped you—as I've only to look at you to see. It was my calculation, and I'm justified. You're not where you were. And the thing," she smiled, "was for me not to be there either. You can go of yourself."
"Oh, but I feel to-day," he comfortably declared, "that I shall want you yet."
She took him all in again. "Well, I promise you not again to leave you, but it will only be to follow you. You've got your momentum, and you can toddle alone."
He intelligently accepted it. "Yes, I suppose I can toddle. It's the sight of that, in fact, that has upset our friend. He can bear it—the way I strike him as going— ​no longer. That's only the climax of his original feeling. He wants me to quit; and he must have written to Woollett that I'm in peril of perdition."
"Ah, good!" she murmured. "But is it only your supposition?"
"I make it out. It explains."
"Then he denies?—or you haven't asked him?"
"I've not had time," Strether said. "I made it out but last night, putting various things together, and I've not been since then face to face with him."
She wondered. "Because you're too disgusted—you can't trust yourself?"
He settled his glasses on his nose. "Do I look in a great rage?"
"You look exquisite!"
"There's nothing," he went on, "to be angry about. He has done me, on the contrary, a service."
She made it out. "By bringing things to a head?"
"How well you understand!" he almost groaned. "Waymarsh won't in the least, at any rate, when I have it out with him, deny or extenuate. He has acted from the deepest conviction, with the best conscience, and after wakeful nights. He'll recognise that he's fully responsible, and will consider that he has been highly successful; so that any discussion we may have will bring us quite together again—bridge the dark stream that has kept us so thoroughly apart. We shall have at last, in the consequences of his act, something we can definitely talk about."
She was silent a little. "How wonderfully you take it! But you're always wonderful."
He had a pause that matched her own; then he had, with an adequate spirit, a complete admission. "It's quite true. I'm extremely wonderful just now. I dare say, in fact, I'm quite fantastic, and I shouldn't be at all surprised if I were mad."
"Then tell me!" she earnestly pressed. As he, however, for the time answered nothing, only returning the look with which she watched him, she presented herself where it was easier to meet her. "What will Mr. Waymarsh exactly have done?"
​"Simply have written a letter. One will have been quite enough. He has told them I want looking after."
"And do you?" She was all interest.
"Immensely. And I shall get it."
"By which you mean you don't budge?"
"I don't budge."
"You've cabled?"
"No. I've made Chad do it."
"That you decline to come? "
"That he declines. We had it out this morning, and I brought him round. He had come in before I was down to tell me he was ready—ready, I mean, to return. And he went off, after ten minutes with me, to say he wouldn't."
Miss Gostrey followed with intensity. "Then you've stopped him?"
Strether settled himself afresh in his chair. "I've stopped him. That is for the time. That"—he gave it to her more vividly—"is where I am."
"I see, I see. But where is Mr. Newsome? He was ready," she asked, "to go?"
"All ready."
"And sincerely—believing you would be?"
"Perfectly, I think; so that he was amazed to find the hand I had laid on him to pull him over suddenly converted into an engine for keeping him still."
It was an account of the matter Miss Gostrey could be absorbed by. "Does he think the conversion sudden?"
"Well," said Strether, "I'm not altogether sure what he thinks. I'm not sure of anything that concerns him, except that the more I've seen of him the less I've found him what I originally expected. He's obscure, and that's why I'm waiting."
She wondered. "But for what in particular?"
"For the answer to his cable."
"And what was his cable?"
"I don't know," Strether replied; "it was to be, when he left me, according to his own taste. I simply said to him, 'I want to stay, and the only way for me to do so is for you to.' That I wanted to stay seemed to impress him, and he acted on that."
​Miss Gostrey turned it over. "He wants then himself to stay?"
"He half wants it. That is he half wants to go. My original appeal has to that extent worked in him. Nevertheless," Strether pursued, "he won't go. Not, at least, so long as I'm here."
"But you can't," his companion suggested, "stay here always. I wish you could."
"By no means. Still, I want to see him a little further. He's not in the least the case I supposed; he's quite another case. And it's as such that he interests me." It was almost as if for his own intelligence that, deliberate and lucid, our friend thus expressed the matter. "I don't want to give him up."
Miss Gostrey but wanted to help his lucidity. She had, however, to be light and tactful. "Up, you mean—a—to his mother?"
"Well, I'm not thinking of his mother now. I'm thinking of the plan of which I was the mouthpiece, which, as soon as we met, I put before him as persuasively as I knew how, and which was drawn up, as it were, in complete ignorance of all that, in this last long period, has been happening to him. It took no account whatever of the impressions I was, here on the spot, immediately to begin to receive from him—impressions of which I feel sure I'm far from having had the last."
Miss Gostrey had a smile of the most genial criticism. "So your idea is—more or less—to stay out of curiosity?"
"Call it what you like! I don't care what it's called———"
"So long as you do stay? Certainly not then. I call it, all the same, immense fun," Maria Gostrey declared; "and to see you work it out will be one of the sensations of my life. It is clear you can toddle alone!"
He received this tribute without elation. "I shan't be alone when the Pococks have come."
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 was not a denial, she significantly added: "I think I'm sorry for Mamie."
"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 Mme. 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, make him come nearer than anything else to the consciousness of doing something; so that he often wondered if he had not really, under his recent stress, acquired some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of make-believe. Wouldn't the pages he still so frequently despatched 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 unmistakable, 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 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 naught. He had for some time been aware that he was hearing less than before, but he was now clearly following a process by which Mrs. Newsome's letters could only, logically, stop. He had not had a line for many days, and he needed no proof—though he was, in time, to have plenty—that she wouldn't have put pen to paper after receiving the hint that had determined her telegram. She wouldn't write till Sarah should have seen him and reported on him. It was strange, though it might well be less so than his own behaviour appeared at Woollett. It was at any rate significant, and what was remarkable was the way his friend's nature and manner put on for him, through this very drop of demonstration, a greater intensity. It struck him really that he had never so lived with her as during this period of her silence, the silence being a sacred hush, a finer, clearer medium, in which her idiosyncrasies showed. He walked about with her, sat with her, drove with her, and dined face to face with her—a rare treat "in his life," as he could perhaps have scarce escaped phrasing it; and if he had never seen her so soundless, so, on the other hand, he had never felt her so highly, so almost austerely, her very self: pure and by the vulgar estimate "cold," but deep, devoted, delicate, ​sensitive, noble. Her vividness in these respects became for him, in the special conditions, almost an obsession; and though the obsession sharpened his pulses, adding really to the excitement of time, there were hours at which, to be less on the stretch, he directly sought forgetfulness. He knew it for the queerest of adventures—such a circumstance as could play such a part only for Lambert Strether—that in Paris itself, of all places, he should find this ghost of the lady of Woollett more importunate than any other presence.
When he went back to Maria Gostrey it was for the change to something else. And yet, after all, the change scarcely operated, for he talked to her of Mrs. Newsome in these days as he had never talked before. He had observed in that particular hitherto a discretion and a law; considerations that at present broke down quite as if relations had altered. They hadn't really altered, he said to himself, so much as that came to; for if what had occurred was of course that Mrs. Newsome had ceased to trust him, there was nothing, on the other hand, to prove that he shouldn't win back her confidence. It was quite his present theory that he would leave no stone unturned to do so; and in fact if he now told Maria things about her that he had never told before, this was largely because it kept before him the idea of the honour of such a woman's esteem. His relation with Maria as well was, strangely enough, no longer quite the same; this truth—though not too disconcertingly—had come up between them on the renewal of their meetings. It was all contained in what she had then almost immediately said to him; it was represented by the remark she had needed but ten minutes to make, and that he had not been disposed to gainsay. He could toddle alone, and the difference that showed was extraordinary. The turn taken by their talk had promptly confirmed this difference; his larger confidence on the score of Mrs. Newsome did the rest; and the time seemed already far off when he had held out his small thirsty cup to the spout of her pail. Her pail was scarce touched now, and other fountains had flowed for him; she fell into her place as but one of his tributaries; and there was a strange sweetness—a ​melancholy mildness that touched him in her acceptance of the altered order.
This marked for himself the flight of time, or at any rate what he was pleased to think of with irony and pity as the rush of experience, it having been but the day before yesterday that he sat at her feet and held on by her garment and was fed by her hand. It was the proportions that were changed, and the proportions were at all times, he philosophised, the very conditions of perception, the terms of thought. It was as if, with her effective little entresol and her wide acquaintance, her activities, varieties, promiscuities, duties and devotions, which consumed nine-tenths of her time and of which he got, guardedly, but the side wind—it was as if she had shrunk to a secondary element and had consented to the shrinkage with the perfection of tact. This perfection had never failed her; it had originally been greater than his prime measure for it; it had kept him quite apart, kept him out of the shop, as she called her huge general acquaintance, made their commerce as quiet, as much a thing of the home alone—the opposite of the shop—as if she had never another customer. She had been wonderful to him at first, with the memory of her little entresol, the image to which, on most mornings at that time, his eyes directly opened; but now she mainly figured for him as but part of the bristling total—though of course always as a person to whom he should never cease to be indebted. It would never be given to him certainly to have inspired a greater kindness. She had decked him out for others, and he saw at this point at least nothing she would ever ask for. She only wondered and questioned and listened, rendering him the homage of a wistful speculation. She expressed it repeatedly; he was already far beyond her and she must prepare herself to lose him. There was but one little chance for her.
Often as she had said it he met it—for it was a touch he liked—each time the same way. "My coming to grief?"
"Yes—then I might patch you up."
"Oh, for my real smash, if it takes place, there will be no patching."
"But you surely don't mean it will kill you."
​"No—worse. It will make me old."
"Ah, nothing can do that! The wonderful and special thing about you is that you are, at this time of day, youth." Then she always made, further, one of those remarks that she had completely ceased to adorn with hesitations or apologies, and that had, by the same token, in spite of their extreme straightness, ceased to produce in Strether the least embarrassment. She made him believe them, and they became thereby as impersonal as truth itself. "It's just your particular attraction."
His answer, too, was always the same. "Of course I'm youth—youth for the trip to Europe. I began to be young, or at least to get the benefit of it, the moment I met you at Chester, and that's what has been taking place ever since. I never had the benefit at the proper time, which comes to saying that I never had the thing itself. I'm having the benefit at this moment; I had it the other day when I said to Chad 'Wait'; I shall have it still again when Sarah Pocock arrives. It's a benefit that would make a poor show for many people; and I don't know who else but you and I, frankly, could begin to see in it what I feel. I don't get drunk; I don't pursue the ladies; I don't spend money; I don't even write sonnets. But, nevertheless, I'm making up late for what I didn't have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say what they like—it's my surrender, it's my tribute, to youth. One puts that in where one can—it has to come in somewhere, if only out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of other persons. Chad gives me the sense of it, for all his gray hairs, which merely make it solid in him and safe and serene; and she does the same, for all her being older than he, for all her marriageable daughter, her separated husband, her agitated history. Though they're young enough, my pair, I don't say they're, in the freshest way, their own absolutely prime adolescence, for that has nothing to do with it. The point is that they're mine. Yes, they're my youth, since somehow, at the right time, nothing else ever was. What I meant just now therefore is that it would all go—go before doing its work—if they were to fail me."
​On which, just here, Miss Gostrey inveterately questioned. "What do you, in particular, call its work?"
"Well, to see me through."
"But through what?" She liked to get it all out of him.
"Why, through this experience." That was all that would come.
It regularly gave her, none the less, the last word. "Don't you remember how, in those first days of our meeting, it was I who was to see you through?"
"Remember? Tenderly, deeply." He always rose to it. "You're just doing your part in letting me maunder to you thus."
"Ah, don't speak as if my part were small, since whatever else fails you———"
"You won't—ever, ever, ever?" He thus took her up. "Oh, I beg your pardon. You necessarily, you inevitably will. Your conditions—that's what I mean—won't allow me anything to do for you."
"Let alone—I see what you mean—that I'm drearily, dreadfully old. I am; but there's a service possible for you to render—that I know, all the same, I shall think of."
"And what will it be?"
This, in fine, however, she would never tell him. "You shall hear only if your smash takes place. As that is really out of the question, I won't expose myself"—a point at which, for reasons of his own, Strether ceased to press.
He came round, for publicity—it was the easiest thing—to the idea that his smash was out of the question, and this rendered idle the discussion of what might follow it. He attached an added importance, as the days elapsed, to the arrival of the Pococks; he had even a shameful sense of waiting for it insincerely and incorrectly. He accused himself of making believe to his own mind that Sarah's presence, her impression, her judgment would simplify and harmonise; he accused himself of being so afraid of what they might do, that he sought refuge, to beg the whole question, in a vain fury. He had abundantly seen at home what they were in the habit of doing, and he had not at present the smallest ground. His clearest vision was ​when he made out that what he most desired was an account more full and free of Mrs. Newsome's state of mind than any he felt he could now expect from herself. That calculation, at least, went hand in hand with the sharp consciousness of wishing to prove to himself that he was not afraid to look his behaviour in the face. If he was, by an inexorable logic, to pay for it, he was literally impatient to know the cost; he held himself ready to pay in instalments. The first instalment would be, precisely, this entertainment of Sarah, as a consequence of which, moreover, he should know vastly better how he stood.