The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) 📖

times, to pass the house without going in; but he had never passed it without again feeling how it had then spoken to him. He stopped short tonight on coming to sight of it: it was as if his last day were oddly copying his first. The windows of Chad’s apartment were open to the balcony⁠—a pair of them lighted; and a figure that had come out and taken up little Bilham’s attitude, a figure whose cigarette-spark he could see leaned on the rail and looked down at him. It denoted however no reappearance of his younger friend; it quickly defined itself in the tempered darkness as Chad’s more solid shape; so that Chad’s was the attention that after he had stepped forward into the street and signalled, he easily engaged; Chad’s was the voice that, sounding into the night with promptness and seemingly with joy, greeted him and called him up.

That the young man had been visible there just in this position expressed somehow for Strether that, as Maria Gostrey had reported, he had been absent and silent; and our friend drew breath on each landing⁠—the lift, at that hour, having ceased to work⁠—before the implications of the fact. He had been for a week intensely away, away to a distance and alone; but he was more back than ever, and the attitude in which Strether had surprised him was something more than a return⁠—it was clearly a conscious surrender. He had arrived but an hour before, from London, from Lucerne, from Homburg, from no matter where⁠—though the visitor’s fancy, on the staircase, liked to fill it out; and after a bath, a talk with Baptiste and a supper of light cold clever French things, which one could see the remains of there in the circle of the lamp, pretty and ultra-Parisian, he had come into the air again for a smoke, was occupied at the moment of Strether’s approach in what might have been called taking up his life afresh. His life, his life!⁠—Strether paused anew, on the last flight, at this final rather breathless sense of what Chad’s life was doing with Chad’s mother’s emissary. It was dragging him, at strange hours, up the staircases of the rich; it was keeping him out of bed at the end of long hot days; it was transforming beyond recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently uniform thing that had anciently passed with him for a life of his own. Why should it concern him that Chad was to be fortified in the pleasant practice of smoking on balconies, of supping on salads, of feeling his special conditions agreeably reaffirm themselves, of finding reassurance in comparisons and contrasts? There was no answer to such a question but that he was still practically committed⁠—he had perhaps never yet so much known it. It made him feel old, and he would buy his railway-ticket⁠—feeling, no doubt, older⁠—the next day; but he had meanwhile come up four flights, counting the entresol, at midnight and without a lift, for Chad’s life. The young man, hearing him by this time, and with Baptiste sent to rest, was already at the door; so that Strether had before him in full visibility the cause in which he was labouring and even, with the troisième fairly gained, panting a little.

Chad offered him, as always, a welcome in which the cordial and the formal⁠—so far as the formal was the respectful⁠—handsomely met; and after he had expressed a hope that he would let him put him up for the night Strether was in full possession of the key, as it might have been called, to what had lately happened. If he had just thought of himself as old Chad was at sight of him thinking of him as older: he wanted to put him up for the night just because he was ancient and weary. It could never be said the tenant of these quarters wasn’t nice to him; a tenant who, if he might indeed now keep him, was probably prepared to work it all still more thoroughly. Our friend had in fact the impression that with the minimum of encouragement Chad would propose to keep him indefinitely; an impression in the lap of which one of his own possibilities seemed to sit. Madame de Vionnet had wished him to stay⁠—so why didn’t that happily fit? He could enshrine himself for the rest of his days in his young host’s chambre d’ami and draw out these days at his young host’s expense: there could scarce be greater logical expression of the countenance he had been moved to give. There was literally a minute⁠—it was strange enough⁠—during which he grasped the idea that as he was acting, as he could only act, he was inconsistent. The sign that the inward forces he had obeyed really hung together would be that⁠—in default always of another career⁠—he should promote the good cause by mounting guard on it. These things, during his first minutes, came and went; but they were after all practically disposed of as soon as he had mentioned his errand. He had come to say goodbye⁠—yet that was only a part; so that from the moment Chad accepted his farewell the question of a more ideal affirmation gave way to something else. He proceeded with the rest of his business. “You’ll be a brute, you know⁠—you’ll be guilty of the last infamy⁠—if you ever forsake her.”

That, uttered there at the solemn hour, uttered in the place that was full of her influence, was the rest of his business; and when once he had heard himself say it he felt that his message had never before been spoken. It placed his present call immediately on solid ground, and the effect of it was to enable him quite to play with what we have called the key. Chad showed no shade of embarrassment, but had none the less been troubled for him after their meeting in the country; had