The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) 📖

had fears and doubts on the subject of his comfort. He was disturbed, as it were, only for him, and had positively gone away to ease him off, to let him down⁠—if it wasn’t indeed rather to screw him up⁠—the more gently. Seeing him now fairly jaded he had come, with characteristic good humour, all the way to meet him, and what Strether thereupon supremely made out was that he would abound for him to the end in conscientious assurances. This was what was between them while the visitor remained; so far from having to go over old ground he found his entertainer keen to agree to everything. It couldn’t be put too strongly for him that he’d be a brute. “Oh rather!⁠—if I should do anything of that sort. I hope you believe I really feel it.”

“I want it,” said Strether, “to be my last word of all to you. I can’t say more, you know; and I don’t see how I can do more, in every way, than I’ve done.”

Chad took this, almost artlessly, as a direct allusion. “You’ve seen her?”

“Oh yes⁠—to say goodbye. And if I had doubted the truth of what I tell you⁠—”

“She’d have cleared up your doubt?” Chad understood⁠—“rather”⁠—again! It even kept him briefly silent. But he made that up. “She must have been wonderful.”

“She was,” Strether candidly admitted⁠—all of which practically told as a reference to the conditions created by the accident of the previous week.

They appeared for a little to be looking back at it; and that came out still more in what Chad next said. “I don’t know what you’ve really thought, all along; I never did know⁠—for anything, with you, seemed to be possible. But of course⁠—of course⁠—” Without confusion, quite with nothing but indulgence, he broke down, he pulled up. “After all, you understand. I spoke to you originally only as I had to speak. There’s only one way⁠—isn’t there?⁠—about such things. However,” he smiled with a final philosophy, “I see it’s all right.”

Strether met his eyes with a sense of multiplying thoughts. What was it that made him at present, late at night and after journeys, so renewedly, so substantially young? Strether saw in a moment what it was⁠—it was that he was younger again than Madame de Vionnet. He himself said immediately none of the things that he was thinking; he said something quite different. “You have really been to a distance?”

“I’ve been to England.” Chad spoke cheerfully and promptly, but gave no further account of it than to say: “One must sometimes get off.”

Strether wanted no more facts⁠—he only wanted to justify, as it were, his question. “Of course you do as you’re free to do. But I hope, this time, that you didn’t go for me.”

“For very shame at bothering you really too much? My dear man,” Chad laughed, “what wouldn’t I do for you?”

Strether’s easy answer for this was that it was a disposition he had exactly come to profit by. “Even at the risk of being in your way I’ve waited on, you know, for a definite reason.”

Chad took it in. “Oh yes⁠—for us to make if possible a still better impression.” And he stood there happily exhaling his full general consciousness. “I’m delighted to gather that you feel we’ve made it.”

There was a pleasant irony in the words, which his guest, preoccupied and keeping to the point, didn’t take up. “If I had my sense of wanting the rest of the time⁠—the time of their being still on this side,” he continued to explain⁠—“I know now why I wanted it.”

He was as grave, as distinct, as a demonstrator before a blackboard, and Chad continued to face him like an intelligent pupil. “You wanted to have been put through the whole thing.”

Strether again, for a moment, said nothing; he turned his eyes away, and they lost themselves, through the open window, in the dusky outer air. “I shall learn from the Bank here where they’re now having their letters, and my last word, which I shall write in the morning and which they’re expecting as my ultimatum, will so immediately reach them.” The light of his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his companion’s face as he again met it; and he completed his demonstration. He pursued indeed as if for himself. “Of course I’ve first to justify what I shall do.”

“You’re justifying it beautifully!” Chad declared.

“It’s not a question of advising you not to go,” Strether said, “but of absolutely preventing you, if possible, from so much as thinking of it. Let me accordingly appeal to you by all you hold sacred.”

Chad showed a surprise. “What makes you think me capable⁠—?”

“You’d not only be, as I say, a brute; you’d be,” his companion went on in the same way, “a criminal of the deepest dye.”

Chad gave a sharper look, as if to gauge a possible suspicion. “I don’t know what should make you think I’m tired of her.”

Strether didn’t quite know either, and such impressions, for the imaginative mind, were always too fine, too floating, to produce on the spot their warrant. There was none the less for him, in the very manner of his host’s allusion to satiety as a thinkable motive, a slight breath of the ominous. “I feel how much more she can do for you. She hasn’t done it all yet. Stay with her at least till she has.”

“And leave her then?”

Chad had kept smiling, but its effect in Strether was a shade of dryness. “Don’t leave her before. When you’ve got all that can be got⁠—I don’t say,” he added a trifle grimly. “That will be the proper time. But as, for you, from such a woman, there will always be something to be got, my remark’s not a wrong to her.” Chad let him go on, showing every decent deference, showing perhaps also a candid curiosity for this sharper accent. “I remember you, you know, as you were.”

“An awful ass, wasn’t I?”

The response was as prompt