The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) 📖

hand was on the door, by not answering; after which she answered by repeating her question. “What do you stand to lose?”

Why the question now affected him as other he couldn’t have said; he could only this time meet it otherwise. “Everything.”

“So I thought. Then you shall succeed. And to that end I’m yours⁠—”

“Ah, dear lady!” he kindly breathed.

“Till death!” said Maria Gostrey. “Good night.”

II

Strether called, his second morning in Paris, on the bankers of the Rue Scribe to whom his letter of credit was addressed, and he made this visit attended by Waymarsh, in whose company he had crossed from London two days before. They had hastened to the Rue Scribe on the morrow of their arrival, but Strether had not then found the letters the hope of which prompted this errand. He had had as yet none at all; hadn’t expected them in London, but had counted on several in Paris, and, disconcerted now, had presently strolled back to the Boulevard with a sense of injury that he felt himself taking for as good a start as any other. It would serve, this spur to his spirit, he reflected, as, pausing at the top of the street, he looked up and down the great foreign avenue, it would serve to begin business with. His idea was to begin business immediately, and it did much for him the rest of his day that the beginning of business awaited him. He did little else till night but ask himself what he should do if he hadn’t fortunately had so much to do; but he put himself the question in many different situations and connections. What carried him hither and yon was an admirable theory that nothing he could do wouldn’t be in some manner related to what he fundamentally had on hand, or would be⁠—should he happen to have a scruple⁠—wasted for it. He did happen to have a scruple⁠—a scruple about taking no definite step till he should get letters; but this reasoning carried it off. A single day to feel his feet⁠—he had felt them as yet only at Chester and in London⁠—was he could consider, none too much; and having, as he had often privately expressed it, Paris to reckon with, he threw these hours of freshness consciously into the reckoning. They made it continually greater, but that was what it had best be if it was to be anything at all, and he gave himself up till far into the evening, at the theatre and on the return, after the theatre, along the bright congested Boulevard, to feeling it grow. Waymarsh had accompanied him this time to the play, and the two men had walked together, as a first stage, from the Gymnase to the Café Riche, into the crowded “terrace” of which establishment⁠—the night, or rather the morning, for midnight had struck, being bland and populous⁠—they had wedged themselves for refreshment. Waymarsh, as a result of some discussion with his friend, had made a marked virtue of his having now let himself go; and there had been elements of impression in their half-hour over their watered beer-glasses that gave him his occasion for conveying that he held this compromise with his stiffer self to have become extreme. He conveyed it⁠—for it was still, after all, his stiffer self who gloomed out of the glare of the terrace⁠—in solemn silence; and there was indeed a great deal of critical silence, every way, between the companions, even till they gained the Place de l’Opéra, as to the character of their nocturnal progress.

This morning there were letters⁠—letters which had reached London, apparently all together, the day of Strether’s journey, and had taken their time to follow him; so that, after a controlled impulse to go into them in the reception-room of the bank, which, reminding him of the post-office at Woollett, affected him as the abutment of some transatlantic bridge, he slipped them into the pocket of his loose grey overcoat with a sense of the felicity of carrying them off. Waymarsh, who had had letters yesterday, had had them again today, and Waymarsh suggested in this particular no controlled impulses. The last one he was at all events likely to be observed to struggle with was clearly that of bringing to a premature close any visit to the Rue Scribe. Strether had left him there yesterday; he wanted to see the papers, and he had spent, by what his friend could make out, a succession of hours with the papers. He spoke of the establishment, with emphasis, as a post of superior observation; just as he spoke generally of his actual damnable doom as a device for hiding from him what was going on. Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs. Strether, on his side, set himself to walk again⁠—he had his relief in his pocket; and indeed, much as he had desired his budget, the growth of restlessness might have been marked in him from the moment he had assured himself of the superscription of most of the missives it contained. This restlessness became therefore his temporary law; he knew he should recognise as soon as see it the best place of all for settling down with his chief correspondent. He had for the next hour an accidental air of looking for it in the windows of shops; he came down the Rue de la Paix in the sun and, passing across the Tuileries and the river, indulged more than once⁠—as if on finding himself determined⁠—in a sudden pause before the bookstalls of the opposite quay. In the garden of the Tuileries he had lingered, on two or three spots, to look; it was as