The Ambassadors (22 page)

“What game under the sun is he playing?” He signified the next moment that his allusion was not to the fat gentleman immersed in dominoes on whom his eyes had begun by resting, but to their host of the previous hour, as to whom, there on the velvet bench,
with a final collapse of all consistency, he treated himself to the comfort of indiscretion. “Where do you see him come out?”

Little Bilham, in meditation, looked at him with a kindness almost paternal. “Don’t you like it over here?”

Strether laughed out—for the tone was indeed droll; he let himself go. “What has that to do with it? The only thing I’ve any business to like is to feel that I’m moving him. That’s why I ask you whether you believe I
am
? Is the creature”—and he did his best to show that he simply wished to ascertain—“honest?”

His companion looked responsible, but looked it through a small dim smile. “What creature do you mean?”

It was on this that they did have for a little a mute interchange. “Is it untrue that he’s free? How then,” Strether asked wondering, “does he arrange his life?”

“Is the creature you mean Chad himself?” little Bilham said.

Strether here, with a rising hope, just thought, “We must take one of them at a time.” But his coherence lapsed. “
Is
there some woman? Of whom he’s really afraid of course I mean—or who does with him what she likes.”

“It’s awfully charming of you,” Bilham presently remarked, “not to have asked me that before.”

“Oh I’m not fit for my job!”

The exclamation had escaped our friend, but it made little Bilham more deliberate. “Chad’s a rare case!” he luminously observed. “He’s awfully changed,” he added.

“Then you see it too?”

“The way he has improved? Oh yes—I think every one must see it. But I’m not sure,” said little Bilham, “that I didn’t like him about as well in his other state.”

“Then this
is
really a new state altogether?”

“Well,” the young man after a moment returned, “I’m not sure he was really meant by nature to be quite so good. It’s like the new
edition of an old book that one has been fond of—revised and amended, brought up to date, but not quite the thing one knew and loved. However that may be at all events,” he pursued, “I don’t think, you know, that he’s really playing, as you call it, any game. I believe he really wants to go back and take up a career. He’s capable of one, you know, that will improve and enlarge him still more. He won’t then,” little Bilham continued to remark, “be my pleasant well-rubbed old-fashioned volume at all. But of course I’m beastly immoral. I’m afraid it would be a funny world altogether—a world with things the way I like them. I ought, I dare say, to go home and go into business myself. Only I’d simply rather die—simply. And I’ve not the least difficulty in making up my mind not to, and in knowing exactly why, and in defending my ground against all comers. All the same,” he wound up, “I assure you I don’t say a word against it—for himself, I mean—to Chad. I seem to see it as much the best thing for him. You see he’s not happy.”

“
Do
I?”—Strether stared. “I’ve been supposing I see just the opposite—an extraordinary case of the equilibrium arrived at and assured.”

“Oh there’s a lot behind it.”

“Ah there you are!” Strether exclaimed. “That’s just what I want to get at. You speak of your familiar volume altered out of recognition. Well, who’s the editor?”

Little Bilham looked before him a minute in silence. “He ought to get married.
That
would do it. And he wants to.”

“Wants to marry her?”

Again little Bilham waited, and, with a sense that he had information, Strether scarce knew what was coming. “He wants to be free. He isn’t used, you see,” the young man explained in his lucid way, “to being so good.”

Strether hesitated. “Then I may take it from you that he
is
good?”

His companion matched his pause, but making it up with a quiet fulness. “
Do
take it from me.”

“Well then why isn’t he free? He swears to me he is, but meanwhile does nothing—except of course that he’s so kind to me—to prove it; and couldn’t really act much otherwise if he weren’t. My question to you just now was exactly on this queer impression of his diplomacy: as if instead of really giving ground his line were to keep me on here and set me a bad example.”

As the half-hour meanwhile had ebbed Strether paid his score, and the waiter was presently in the act of counting out change. Our friend pushed back to him a fraction of it, with which, after an emphatic recognition, the personage in question retreated. “You give too much,” little Bilham permitted himself benevolently to observe.

“Oh I always give too much!” Strether helplessly sighed. “But you don’t,” he went on as if to get quickly away from the contemplation of that doom, “answer my question. Why isn’t he free?”

Little Bilham had got up as if the transaction with the waiter had been a signal, and had already edged out between the table and the divan. The effect of this was that a minute later they had quitted the place, the gratified waiter alert again at the open door. Strether had found himself deferring to his companion’s abruptness as to a hint that he should be answered as soon as they were more isolated. This happened when after a few steps in the outer air they had turned the next corner. There our friend had kept it up. “Why isn’t he free if he’s good?”

Little Bilham looked him full in the face. “Because it’s a virtuous attachment.”

This had settled the question so effectually for the time—that is for the next few days—that it had given Strether almost a new lease of life. It must be added however that, thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of
experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught. His imagination had in other words already dealt with his young friend’s assertion; of which it had made something that sufficiently came out on the very next occasion of his seeing Maria Gostrey. This occasion moreover had been determined promptly by a new circumstance—a circumstance he was the last man to leave her for a day in ignorance of. “When I said to him last night,” he immediately began, “that without some definite word from him now that will enable me to speak to them over there of our sailing—or at least of mine, giving them some sort of date—my responsibility becomes uncomfortable and my situation awkward; when I said that to him what do you think was his reply?” And then as she this time gave it up: “Why that he has two particular friends, two ladies, mother and daughter, about to arrive in Paris—coming back from an absence; and that he wants me so furiously to meet them, know them and like them, that I shall oblige him by kindly not bringing our business to a crisis till he has had a chance to see them again himself. Is that,” Strether enquired, “the way he’s going to try to get off? These are the people,” he explained, “that he must have gone down to see before I arrived. They’re the best friends he has in the world, and they take more interest than any one else in what concerns him. As I’m his next best he sees a thousand reasons why we should comfortably meet. He hasn’t broached the question sooner because their return was uncertain—seemed in fact for the present impossible. But he more than intimates that—if you can believe it—their desire to make my acquaintance has had to do with their surmounting difficulties.”

“They’re dying to see you?” Miss Gostrey asked.

“Dying. Of course,” said Strether, “they’re the virtuous attachment.” He had already told her about that—had seen her the day after his talk with little Bilham; and they had then threshed out
together the bearing of the revelation. She had helped him to put into it the logic in which little Bilham had left it slightly deficient. Strether hadn’t pressed him as to the object of the preference so unexpectedly described; feeling in the presence of it, with one of his irrepressible scruples, a delicacy from which he had in the quest of the quite other article worked himself sufficiently free. He had held off, as on a small principle of pride, from permitting his young friend to mention a name; wishing to make with this the great point that Chad’s virtuous attachments were none of his business. He had wanted from the first not to think too much of his dignity, but that was no reason for not allowing it any little benefit that might turn up. He had often enough wondered to what degree his interference might pass for interested; so that there was no want of luxury in letting it be seen whenever he could that he didn’t interfere. That had of course at the same time not deprived him of the further luxury of much private astonishment; which however he had reduced to some order before communicating his knowledge. When he had done this at last it was with the remark that, surprised as Miss Gostrey might, like himself, at first be, she would probably agree with him on reflexion that such an account of the matter did after all fit the confirmed appearances. Nothing certainly, on all the indications, could have been a greater change for him than a virtuous attachment, and since they had been in search of the “word” as the French called it, of that change, little Bilham’s announcement—though so long and so oddly delayed—would serve as well as another. She had assured Strether in fact after a pause that the more she thought of it the more it did serve; and yet her assurance hadn’t so weighed with him as that before they parted he hadn’t ventured to challenge her sincerity. Didn’t she believe the attachment
was
virtuous?—he had made sure of her again with the aid of that question. The tidings he brought her on this second occasion were moreover such as would help him to make surer still.

She showed at first none the less as only amused. “You say there are two? An attachment to them both then would, I suppose, almost necessarily be innocent.”

Our friend took the point, but he had his clue. “Mayn’t he be still in the stage of not quite knowing which of them, mother or daughter, he likes best?”

She gave it more thought. “Oh it must be the daughter—at his age.”

“Possibly. Yet what do we know,” Strether asked, “about hers? She may be old enough.”

“Old enough for what?”

“Why to marry Chad. That may be, you know, what they want. And if Chad wants it too, and little Bilham wants it, and even
we
, at a pinch, could do with it—that is if she doesn’t prevent repatriation—why it may be plain sailing yet.”

It was always the case for him in these counsels that each of his remarks, as it came, seemed to drop into a deeper well. He had at all events to wait a moment to hear the slight splash of this one. “I don’t see why if Mr. Newsome wants to marry the young lady he hasn’t already done it or hasn’t been prepared with some statement to you about it. And if he both wants to marry her and is on good terms with them why isn’t he ‘free’?”

Strether, responsively, wondered indeed. “Perhaps the girl herself doesn’t like him.”

“Then why does he speak of them to you as he does?”

Strether’s mind echoed the question, but also again met it. “Perhaps it’s with the mother he’s on good terms.”

“As against the daughter?”

“Well, if she’s trying to persuade the daughter to consent to him, what could make him like the mother more? Only,” Strether threw out, “why shouldn’t the daughter consent to him?”

“Oh,” said Miss Gostrey, “mayn’t it be that every one else isn’t quite so struck with him as you?”

“Doesn’t regard him you mean as such an ‘eligible’ young man?
Is
that what I’ve come to?” he audibly and rather gravely sought to know. “However,” he went on, “his marriage is what his mother most desires—that is if it will help. And oughtn’t
any
marriage to help? They must want him”—he had already worked it out—“to be better off. Almost any girl he may marry will have a direct interest in his taking up his chances. It won’t suit
her
at least that he shall miss them.”

Miss Gostrey cast about. “No—you reason well! But of course on the other hand there’s always dear old Woollett itself.”

“Oh yes,” he mused—“there’s always dear old Woollett itself.”

She waited a moment. “The young lady mayn’t find herself able to swallow
that
quantity. She may think it’s paying too much; she may weigh one thing against another.”

Strether, ever restless in such debates, took a vague turn. “It will all depend on who she is. That of course—the proved ability to deal with dear old Woollett, since I’m sure she does deal with it—is what makes so strongly for Mamie.”

“Mamie?”

He stopped short, at her tone, before her; then, though seeing that it represented not vagueness, but a momentary embarrassed fulness, let his exclamation come. “You surely haven’t forgotten about Mamie!”

“No, I haven’t forgotten about Mamie,” she smiled. “There’s no doubt whatever that there’s ever so much to be said for her. Mamie’s
my
girl!” she roundly declared.

Strether resumed for a minute his walk. “She’s really perfectly lovely, you know. Far prettier than any girl I’ve seen over here yet.”

“That’s precisely on what I perhaps most build.” And she mused a moment in her friend’s way. “I should positively like to take her in hand!”

He humoured the fancy, though indeed finally to deprecate it. “Oh but don’t, in your zeal, go over to her! I need you most and can’t, you know, be left.”

But she kept it up. “I wish they’d send her out to me!”

“If they knew you,” he returned, “they would.”

“Ah but don’t they?—after all that, as I’ve understood you, you’ve told them about me?”

He had paused before her again, but he continued his course. “They
will
—before, as you say, I’ve done.” Then he came out with the point he had wished after all most to make. “It seems to give away now his game. This is what he has been doing—keeping me along for. He has been waiting for them.”

Miss Gostrey drew in her lips. “You see a good deal in it!”

“I doubt if I see as much as you. Do you pretend,” he went on, “that you don’t see—?”

“Well, what?”—she pressed him as he paused.

“Why that there must be a lot between them—and that it has been going on from the first; even from before I came.”