The Ambassadors (63 page)

“Ah but,” he interrupted, “she’s not.” And as Miss Gostrey wondered again: “She’s the same. She’s more than ever the same. But I do what I didn’t before—I
see
her.”

He spoke gravely and as if responsibly—since he had to pronounce; and the effect of it was slightly solemn, so that she simply exclaimed “Oh!” Satisfied and grateful, however, she showed in her own next words an acceptance of his statement. “What then do you go home to?”

He had pushed his plate a little away, occupied with another side of the matter; taking refuge verily in that side and feeling so moved that he soon found himself on his feet. He was affected in advance by what he believed might come from her, and he would have liked to forestall it and deal with it tenderly; yet in the presence of it he wished still more to be—though as smoothly as possible—deterrent and conclusive. He put her question by for the moment; he told her more about Chad. “It would have been impossible to meet me more than he did last night on the question of the infamy of not sticking to her.”

“Is that what you called it for him—‘infamy’?”

“Oh rather! I described to him in detail the base creature he’d be, and he quite agrees with me about it.”

“So that it’s really as if you had nailed him?”

“Quite really as if—! I told him I should curse him.”

“Oh,” she smiled, “you
have
done it.” And then having thought again: “You
can’t
after that propose—!” Yet she scanned his face.

“Propose again to Mrs. Newsome?”

She hesitated afresh, but she brought it out. “I’ve never believed, you know, that you did propose. I always believed it was really she—and, so far as that goes, I can understand it. What I mean is,” she explained, “that with such a spirit—the spirit of
curses!—your breach is past mending. She has only to know what you’ve done to him never again to raise a finger.”

“I’ve done,” said Strether, “what I could—one can’t do more. He protests his devotion and his horror. But I’m not sure I’ve saved him. He protests too much. He asks how one can dream of his being tired. But he has all life before him.”

Maria saw what he meant. “He’s formed to please.”

“And it’s our friend who has formed him.” Strether felt in it the strange irony.

“So it’s scarcely his fault!”

“It’s at any rate his danger. I mean,” said Strether, “it’s hers. But she knows it.”

“Yes, she knows it. And is your idea,” Miss Gostrey asked, “that there was some other woman in London?”

“Yes. No. That is I
have
no ideas. I’m afraid of them. I’ve done with them.” And he put out his hand to her. “Good-bye.”

It brought her back to her unanswered question. “To what do you go home?”

“I don’t know. There will always be something.”

“To a great difference,” she said as she kept his hand.

“A great difference—no doubt. Yet I shall see what I can make of it.”

“Shall you make anything so good—?” But, as if remembering what Mrs. Newsome had done, it was as far as she went.

He had sufficiently understood. “So good as this place at this moment? So good as what
you
make of everything you touch?” He took a moment to say, for, really and truly, what stood about him there in her offer—which was as the offer of exquisite service, of lightened care, for the rest of his days—might well have tempted. It built him softly round, it roofed him warmly over, it rested, all so firm, on selection. And what ruled selection was beauty and knowledge. It was awkward, it was almost stupid, not to seem to
prize such things; yet, none the less, so far as they made his opportunity they made it only for a moment. She’d moreover understand—she always understood.

That indeed might be, but meanwhile she was going on. “There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you.”

“Oh yes—I know.”

“There’s nothing,” she repeated, “in all the world.”

“I know. I know. But all the same I must go.” He had got it at last. “To be right.”

“To be right?”

She had echoed it in vague deprecation, but he felt it already clear for her. “That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.”

She thought. “But with your wonderful impressions you’ll have got a great deal.”

“A great deal”—he agreed. “But nothing like
you
. It’s you who would make me wrong!”

Honest and fine, she couldn’t greatly pretend she didn’t see it. Still she could pretend just a little. “But why should you be so dreadfully right?”

“That’s the way that—if I must go—you yourself would be the first to want me. And I can’t do anything else.”

So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest. “It isn’t so much your
being
‘right’—it’s your horrible sharp eye for what makes you so.”

“Oh but you’re just as bad yourself. You can’t resist me when I point that out.”

She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away. “I can’t indeed resist you.”

“Then there we are!” said Strether.

Henry James was born in New York City on April 15, 1843, of Scottish and Irish ancestry. His father, Henry James, Sr., was a whimsical, utterly charming, maddeningly open-minded parent—a Swedenborgian philosopher of considerable wealth who believed in a universal but wholly unformed society. He gave both Henry and his elder son, William, an infant baptism by taking them to Europe before they could even speak. In fact, Henry James later claimed that his first memory, dating from the age of two, was a glimpse of the column of the Place Vendôme framed by the window of the carriage in which he was riding. His peripatetic childhood took him to experimental schools in Geneva, Paris, and London. Even back in the United States he was shuffled from New York City to Albany to Newport to Boston and finally to Cambridge, where in 1862 he briefly attended Harvard Law School. “An obscure hurt,” probably to his back, exempted him from service in the Civil War, and James felt he had failed as a man when it counted most to be one and he vowed never to marry.

In search of a possible occupation, the young James turned to literature; within five years it had become his profession. His earliest story appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly
in 1865, when he was twenty-two. From the start of his career James supported himself as a writer, and over the next ten years he produced book reviews, drama and art criticism, newspaper columns, travel pieces and travel books, short stories, novelettes, a biography, and his first novel—
Roderick Hudson
(1876). Late in 1875, following two recent trips to Europe, James settled in Paris, where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola, and wrote
The American
(1877). In December 1876 he moved to London, where he produced
The Europeans
(1878). Soon afterward he achieved fame on both sides of the Atlantic with the publication of
Daisy Miller
(1879), the book that forever identified him with the “international theme” of the effect of Americans and Europeans on each other.

Yet Henry James aspired to more than the success of
Daisy Miller
. Determined to scale new literary heights, James abandoned the intense social life of his earlier years and, with Balzac as his role model, devoted himself all out to the craft of fiction. Although
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881) was critically acclaimed and sold well, the other novels of James’s “Balzac” period—
Washington Square
(1881),
The Bostonians
(1886),
The Princess Casamassima
(1886), and
The Tragic Muse
(1890)—were not popular with the public. As a result, he decided to redirect his efforts and began writing for the stage. In 1895, the disastrous opening night of his play
Guy Domville
—when James came onstage only to be hissed and booed by the London audience—forever ended his career as a playwright.

Rededicating himself to fiction, he wrote
The Spoils of Poynton
(1897),
What Maisie Knew
(1897),
The Turn of the Screw
(1898), and
The Awkward Age
(1899). Then, as he approached and passed the age of sixty, James’s three greatest novels appeared in rapid
succession:
The Wings of the Dove
(1902),
The Ambassadors
(1903), and
The Golden Bowl
(1904). He spent most of his remaining years at Lamb House, his ivy-covered home in Rye, writing his memoirs and revising his novels for the twenty-four-volume New York Edition of his life-work. When World War I broke out, he was eager to serve his adopted country and threw himself into the civilian war effort. In 1915, after four decades of living in England, James became a British subject, and King George V conferred the Order of Merit on him in January 1916. Henry James died in London on February 28, 1916, and his ashes were buried in the James family lot in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Commenting on the enormous contemporary interest in James, novelist Louis Auchincloss said: “How he would have loved his posthumous fame! One can imagine Emily Brontë and Herman Melville shrugging shoulders, faintly scornful, but James would have bristled with pride at every mention of his name.… It is pleasant to think that in the end he had at least a whiff of it and that the silent, grave, bearded young man should have evolved into the portly figure of the rolling, resolute gait, simple in emotion but quick and spontaneous in affection, leaving among his recording disciples a deep impression of majesty, beauty and greatness.”

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