The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) 📖

in the path though she freely enough declared, on reflection, that there was always in such cases a choice of opposed policies. “There are times when to give them their head, you know⁠—!”

They had gone to wait together in the garden for the dressing of the meal, and Strether found her more suggestive than ever. “Well, what?”

“Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations⁠—unless indeed we call it a simplicity!⁠—that the situation has to wind itself up. They want to go back.”

“And you want them to go!” Strether gaily concluded.

“I always want them to go, and I send them as fast as I can.”

“Oh I know⁠—you take them to Liverpool.”

“Any port will serve in a storm. I’m⁠—with all my other functions⁠—an agent for repatriation. I want to re-people our stricken country. What will become of it else? I want to discourage others.”

The ordered English garden, in the freshness of the day, was delightful to Strether, who liked the sound, under his feet, of the tight fine gravel, packed with the chronic damp, and who had the idlest eye for the deep smoothness of turf and the clean curves of paths. “Other people?”

“Other countries. Other people⁠—yes. I want to encourage our own.”

Strether wondered. “Not to come? Why then do you ‘meet’ them⁠—since it doesn’t appear to be to stop them?”

“Oh that they shouldn’t come is as yet too much to ask. What I attend to is that they come quickly and return still more so. I meet them to help it to be over as soon as possible, and though I don’t stop them I’ve my way of putting them through. That’s my little system; and, if you want to know,” said Maria Gostrey, “it’s my real secret, my innermost mission and use. I only seem, you see, to beguile and approve; but I’ve thought it all out and I’m working all the while underground. I can’t perhaps quite give you my formula, but I think that practically I succeed. I send you back spent. So you stay back. Passed through my hands⁠—”

“We don’t turn up again?” The further she went the further he always saw himself able to follow. “I don’t want your formula⁠—I feel quite enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses. Spent!” he echoed. “If that’s how you’re arranging so subtly to send me I thank you for the warning.”

For a minute, amid the pleasantness⁠—poetry in tariffed items, but all the more, for guests already convicted, a challenge to consumption⁠—they smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship. “Do you call it subtly? It’s a plain poor tale. Besides, you’re a special case.”

“Oh special cases⁠—that’s weak!” She was weak enough, further still, to defer her journey and agree to accompany the gentlemen on their own, might a separate carriage mark her independence; though it was in spite of this to befall after luncheon that she went off alone and that, with a tryst taken for a day of her company in London, they lingered another night. She had, during the morning⁠—spent in a way that he was to remember later on as the very climax of his foretaste, as warm with presentiments, with what he would have called collapses⁠—had all sorts of things out with Strether; and among them the fact that though there was never a moment of her life when she wasn’t “due” somewhere, there was yet scarce a perfidy to others of which she wasn’t capable for his sake. She explained moreover that wherever she happened to be she found a dropped thread to pick up, a ragged edge to repair, some familiar appetite in ambush, jumping out as she approached, yet appeasable with a temporary biscuit. It became, on her taking the risk of the deviation imposed on him by her insidious arrangement of his morning meal, a point of honour for her not to fail with Waymarsh of the larger success too; and her subsequent boast to Strether was that she had made their friend fare⁠—and quite without his knowing what was the matter⁠—as Major Pendennis would have fared at the Megatherium. She had made him breakfast like a gentleman, and it was nothing, she forcibly asserted, to what she would yet make him do. She made him participate in the slow reiterated ramble with which, for Strether, the new day amply filled itself; and it was by her art that he somehow had the air, on the ramparts and in the Rows, of carrying a point of his own.

The three strolled and stared and gossiped, or at least the two did; the case really yielding for their comrade, if analysed, but the element of stricken silence. This element indeed affected Strether as charged with audible rumblings, but he was conscious of the care of taking it explicitly as a sign of pleasant peace. He wouldn’t appeal too much, for that provoked stiffness; yet he wouldn’t be too freely tacit, for that suggested giving up. Waymarsh himself adhered to an ambiguous dumbness that might have represented either the growth of a perception or the despair of one; and at times and in places⁠—where the low-browed galleries were darkest, the opposite gables queerest, the solicitations of every kind densest⁠—the others caught him fixing hard some object of minor interest, fixing even at moments nothing discernible, as if he were indulging it with a truce. When he met Strether’s eye on such occasions he looked guilty and furtive, fell the next minute into some attitude of retractation. Our friend couldn’t show him the right things for fear of provoking some total renouncement, and was tempted even to show him the wrong in order to make him differ with triumph. There were moments when he himself felt shy of professing the full sweetness of the taste of leisure, and there were others when he found himself feeling as if his passages of interchange with the lady at his side might fall upon the third member of their party very much as Mr. Burchell, at Dr. Primrose’s