The Ambassadors (4 page)

That note had been meanwhile—since the previous afternoon,
thanks to this happier device—such a consciousness of personal
freedom as he hadn't known for years; such a deep taste of change
and of having above all for the moment nobody and nothing to
consider, as promised already, if headlong hope were not too
foolish, to colour his adventure with cool success. There were
people on the ship with whom he had easily consorted—so far as ease
could up to now be imputed to him—and who for the most part plunged
straight into the current that set from the landing-stage to
London; there were others who had invited him to a tryst at the inn
and had even invoked his aid for a "look round" at the beauties of
Liverpool; but he had stolen away from every one alike, had kept no
appointment and renewed no acquaintance, had been indifferently
aware of the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in
being, unlike himself, "met," and had even independently,
unsociably, alone, without encounter or relapse and by mere quiet
evasion, given his afternoon and evening to the immediate and the
sensible. They formed a qualified draught of Europe, an afternoon
and an evening on the banks of the Mersey, but such as it was he
took his potion at least undiluted. He winced a little, truly, at
the thought that Waymarsh might be already at Chester; he reflected
that, should he have to describe himself there as having "got in"
so early, it would be difficult to make the interval look
particularly eager; but he was like a man who, elatedly finding in
his pocket more money than usual, handles it a while and idly and
pleasantly chinks it before addressing himself to the business of
spending. That he was prepared to be vague to Waymarsh about the
hour of the ship's touching, and that he both wanted extremely to
see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of delay—these things,
it is to be conceived, were early signs in him that his relation to
his actual errand might prove none of the simplest. He was
burdened, poor Strether—it had better be confessed at the
outset—with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was
detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.

After the young woman in the glass cage had held up to him
across her counter the pale-pink leaflet bearing his friend's name,
which she neatly pronounced, he turned away to find himself, in the
hall, facing a lady who met his eyes as with an intention suddenly
determined, and whose features—not freshly young, not markedly
fine, but on happy terms with each other—came back to him as from a
recent vision. For a moment they stood confronted; then the moment
placed her: he had noticed her the day before, noticed her at his
previous inn, where—again in the hall—she had been briefly engaged
with some people of his own ship's company. Nothing had actually
passed between them, and he would as little have been able to say
what had been the sign of her face for him on the first occasion as
to name the ground of his present recognition. Recognition at any
rate appeared to prevail on her own side as well—which would only
have added to the mystery. All she now began by saying to him
nevertheless was that, having chanced to catch his enquiry, she was
moved to ask, by his leave, if it were possibly a question of Mr.
Waymarsh of Milrose Connecticut—Mr. Waymarsh the American
lawyer.

"Oh yes," he replied, "my very well-known friend. He's to meet
me here, coming up from Malvern, and I supposed he'd already have
arrived. But he doesn't come till later, and I'm relieved not to
have kept him. Do you know him?" Strether wound up.

It wasn't till after he had spoken that he became aware of how
much there had been in him of response; when the tone of her own
rejoinder, as well as the play of something more in her
face—something more, that is, than its apparently usual restless
light—seemed to notify him. "I've met him at Milrose—where I used
sometimes, a good while ago, to stay; I had friends there who were
friends of his, and I've been at his house. I won't answer for it
that he would know me," Strether's new acquaintance pursued; "but I
should be delighted to see him. Perhaps," she added, "I shall—for
I'm staying over." She paused while our friend took in these
things, and it was as if a good deal of talk had already passed.
They even vaguely smiled at it, and Strether presently observed
that Mr. Waymarsh would, no doubt, be easily to be seen. This,
however, appeared to affect the lady as if she might have advanced
too far. She appeared to have no reserves about anything. "Oh," she
said, "he won't care!"—and she immediately thereupon remarked that
she believed Strether knew the Munsters; the Munsters being the
people he had seen her with at Liverpool.

But he didn't, it happened, know the Munsters well enough to
give the case much of a lift; so that they were left together as if
over the mere laid table of conversation. Her qualification of the
mentioned connexion had rather removed than placed a dish, and
there seemed nothing else to serve. Their attitude remained, none
the less, that of not forsaking the board; and the effect of this
in turn was to give them the appearance of having accepted each
other with an absence of preliminaries practically complete. They
moved along the hall together, and Strether's companion threw off
that the hotel had the advantage of a garden. He was aware by this
time of his strange inconsequence: he had shirked the intimacies of
the steamer and had muffled the shock of Waymarsh only to find
himself forsaken, in this sudden case, both of avoidance and of
caution. He passed, under this unsought protection and before he
had so much as gone up to his room, into the garden of the hotel,
and at the end of ten minutes had agreed to meet there again, as
soon as he should have made himself tidy, the dispenser of such
good assurances. He wanted to look at the town, and they would
forthwith look together. It was almost as if she had been in
possession and received him as a guest. Her acquaintance with the
place presented her in a manner as a hostess, and Strether had a
rueful glance for the lady in the glass cage. It was as if this
personage had seen herself instantly superseded.

When in a quarter of an hour he came down, what his hostess saw,
what she might have taken in with a vision kindly adjusted, was the
lean, the slightly loose figure of a man of the middle height and
something more perhaps than the middle age—a man of five-and-fifty,
whose most immediate signs were a marked bloodless brownness of
face, a thick dark moustache, of characteristically American cut,
growing strong and falling low, a head of hair still abundant but
irregularly streaked with grey, and a nose of bold free prominence,
the even line, the high finish, as it might have been called, of
which, had a certain effect of mitigation. A perpetual pair of
glasses astride of this fine ridge, and a line, unusually deep and
drawn, the prolonged pen-stroke of time, accompanying the curve of
the moustache from nostril to chin, did something to complete the
facial furniture that an attentive observer would have seen
catalogued, on the spot, in the vision of the other party to
Strether's appointment. She waited for him in the garden, the other
party, drawing on a pair of singularly fresh soft and elastic light
gloves and presenting herself with a superficial readiness which,
as he approached her over the small smooth lawn and in the watery
English sunshine, he might, with his rougher preparation, have
marked as the model for such an occasion. She had, this lady, a
perfect plain propriety, an expensive subdued suitability, that her
companion was not free to analyse, but that struck him, so that his
consciousness of it was instantly acute, as a quality quite new to
him. Before reaching her he stopped on the grass and went through
the form of feeling for something, possibly forgotten, in the light
overcoat he carried on his arm; yet the essence of the act was no
more than the impulse to gain time. Nothing could have been odder
than Strether's sense of himself as at that moment launched in
something of which the sense would be quite disconnected from the
sense of his past and which was literally beginning there and then.
It had begun in fact already upstairs and before the dressing glass
that struck him as blocking further, so strangely, the dimness of
the window of his dull bedroom; begun with a sharper survey of the
elements of Appearance than he had for a long time been moved to
make. He had during those moments felt these elements to be not so
much to his hand as he should have liked, and then had fallen back
on the thought that they were precisely a matter as to which help
was supposed to come from what he was about to do. He was about to
go up to London, so that hat and necktie might wait. What had come
as straight to him as a ball in a well-played game—and caught
moreover not less neatly—was just the air, in the person of his
friend, of having seen and chosen, the air of achieved possession
of those vague qualities and quantities that collectively figured
to him as the advantage snatched from lucky chances. Without pomp
or circumstance, certainly, as her original address to him, equally
with his own response, had been, he would have sketched to himself
his impression of her as: "Well, she's more thoroughly civilized—!"
If "More thoroughly than WHOM?" would not have been for him a
sequel to this remark, that was just by reason of his deep
consciousness of the bearing of his comparison.

The amusement, at all events, of a civilisation intenser was
what—familiar compatriot as she was, with the full tone of the
compatriot and the rattling link not with mystery but only with
dear dyspeptic Waymarsh—she appeared distinctly to promise. His
pause while he felt in his overcoat was positively the pause of
confidence, and it enabled his eyes to make out as much of a case
for her, in proportion, as her own made out for himself. She
affected him as almost insolently young; but an easily carried
five-and-thirty could still do that. She was, however, like himself
marked and wan; only it naturally couldn't have been known to him
how much a spectator looking from one to the other might have
discerned that they had in common. It wouldn't for such a spectator
have been altogether insupposable that, each so finely brown and so
sharply spare, each confessing so to dents of surface and aids to
sight, to a disproportionate nose and a head delicately or grossly
grizzled, they might have been brother and sister. On this ground
indeed there would have been a residuum of difference; such a
sister having surely known in respect to such a brother the
extremity of separation, and such a brother now feeling in respect
to such a sister the extremity of surprise. Surprise, it was true,
was not on the other hand what the eyes of Strether's friend most
showed him while she gave him, stroking her gloves smoother, the
time he appreciated. They had taken hold of him straightway
measuring him up and down as if they knew how; as if he were human
material they had already in some sort handled. Their possessor was
in truth, it may be communicated, the mistress of a hundred cases
or categories, receptacles of the mind, subdivisions for
convenience, in which, from a full experience, she pigeon-holed her
fellow mortals with a hand as free as that of a compositor
scattering type. She was as equipped in this particular as Strether
was the reverse, and it made an opposition between them which he
might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected
it. So far as he did suspect it he was on the contrary, after a
short shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly passive as might
be. He really had a sort of sense of what she knew. He had quite
the sense that she knew things he didn't, and though this was a
concession that in general he found not easy to make to women, he
made it now as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes
were so quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might almost
have been absent without changing his face, which took its
expression mainly, and not least its stamp of sensibility, from
other sources, surface and grain and form. He joined his guide in
an instant, and then felt she had profited still better than he by
his having been for the moments just mentioned, so at the disposal
of her intelligence. She knew even intimate things about him that
he hadn't yet told her and perhaps never would. He wasn't unaware
that he had told her rather remarkably many for the time, but these
were not the real ones. Some of the real ones, however, precisely,
were what she knew.

They were to pass again through the hall of the inn to get into
the street, and it was here she presently checked him with a
question. "Have you looked up my name?"

He could only stop with a laugh. "Have you looked up mine?"

"Oh dear, yes—as soon as you left me. I went to the office and
asked. Hadn't YOU better do the same?"

He wondered. "Find out who you are?—after the uplifted young
woman there has seen us thus scrape acquaintance!"

She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his
amusement. "Isn't it a reason the more? If what you're afraid of is
the injury for me—my being seen to walk off with a gentleman who
has to ask who I am—I assure you I don't in the least mind. Here,
however," she continued, "is my card, and as I find there's
something else again I have to say at the office, you can just
study it during the moment I leave you."

She left him after he had taken from her the small pasteboard
she had extracted from her pocket-book, and he had extracted
another from his own, to exchange with it, before she came back. He
read thus the simple designation "Maria Gostrey," to which was
attached, in a corner of the card, with a number, the name of a
street, presumably in Paris, without other appreciable identity
than its foreignness. He put the card into his waistcoat pocket,
keeping his own meanwhile in evidence; and as he leaned against the
door-post he met with the smile of a straying thought what the
expanse before the hotel offered to his view. It was positively
droll to him that he should already have Maria Gostrey, whoever she
was—of which he hadn't really the least idea—in a place of safe
keeping. He had somehow an assurance that he should carefully
preserve the little token he had just tucked in. He gazed with
unseeing lingering eyes as he followed some of the implications of
his act, asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify it
as disloyal. It was prompt, it was possibly even premature, and
there was little doubt of the expression of face the sight of it
would have produced in a certain person. But if it was "wrong"—why
then he had better not have come out at all. At this, poor man, had
he already—and even before meeting Waymarsh—arrived. He had
believed he had a limit, but the limit had been transcended within
thirty-six hours. By how long a space on the plane of manners or
even of morals, moreover, he felt still more sharply after Maria
Gostrey had come back to him and with a gay decisive "So now—!" led
him forth into the world. This counted, it struck him as he walked
beside her with his overcoat on an arm, his umbrella under another
and his personal pasteboard a little stiffly retained between
forefinger and thumb, this struck him as really, in comparison his
introduction to things. It hadn't been "Europe" at Liverpool no—not
even in the dreadful delightful impressive streets the night
before—to the extent his present companion made it so. She hadn't
yet done that so much as when, after their walk had lasted a few
minutes and he had had time to wonder if a couple of sidelong
glances from her meant that he had best have put on gloves she
almost pulled him up with an amused challenge. "But why—fondly as
it's so easy to imagine your clinging to it—don't you put it away?
Or if it's an inconvenience to you to carry it, one's often glad to
have one's card back. The fortune one spends in them!"