The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) 📖

force it upon Woollett that such a career, such a perverted young life, showed after all a certain plausible side, did in the case before them flaunt something like an impunity for the social man; but he could at least treat himself to the statement that would prepare him for the sharpest echo. This echo⁠—as distinct over there in the dry thin air as some shrill “heading” above a column of print⁠—seemed to reach him even as he wrote. “He says there’s no woman,” he could hear Mrs. Newsome report, in capitals almost of newspaper size, to Mrs. Pocock; and he could focus in Mrs. Pocock the response of the reader of the journal. He could see in the younger lady’s face the earnestness of her attention and catch the full scepticism of her but slightly delayed “What is there then?” Just so he could again as little miss the mother’s clear decision: “There’s plenty of disposition, no doubt, to pretend there isn’t.” Strether had, after posting his letter, the whole scene out; and it was a scene during which, coming and going, as befell, he kept his eye not least upon the daughter. He had his fine sense of the conviction Mrs. Pocock would take occasion to reaffirm⁠—a conviction bearing, as he had from the first deeply divined it to bear, on Mr. Strether’s essential inaptitude. She had looked him in his conscious eyes even before he sailed, and that she didn’t believe he would find the woman had been written in her book. Hadn’t she at the best but a scant faith in his ability to find women? It wasn’t even as if he had found her mother⁠—so much more, to her discrimination, had her mother performed the finding. Her mother had, in a case her private judgement of which remained educative of Mrs. Pocock’s critical sense, found the man. The man owed his unchallenged state, in general, to the fact that Mrs. Newsome’s discoveries were accepted at Woollett; but he knew in his bones, our friend did, how almost irresistibly Mrs. Pocock would now be moved to show what she thought of his own. Give her a free hand, would be the moral, and the woman would soon be found.

His impression of Miss Gostrey after her introduction to Chad was meanwhile an impression of a person almost unnaturally on her guard. He struck himself as at first unable to extract from her what he wished; though indeed of what he wished at this special juncture he would doubtless have contrived to make but a crude statement. It sifted and settled nothing to put to her, tout bêtement, as she often said, “Do you like him, eh?”⁠—thanks to his feeling it actually the least of his needs to heap up the evidence in the young man’s favour. He repeatedly knocked at her door to let her have it afresh that Chad’s case⁠—whatever else of minor interest it might yield⁠—was first and foremost a miracle almost monstrous. It was the alteration of the entire man, and was so signal an instance that nothing else, for the intelligent observer, could⁠—could it?⁠—signify. “It’s a plot,” he declared⁠—“there’s more in it than meets the eye.” He gave the rein to his fancy. “It’s a plant!”

His fancy seemed to please her. “Whose then?”

“Well, the party responsible is, I suppose, the fate that waits for one, the dark doom that rides. What I mean is that with such elements one can’t count. I’ve but my poor individual, my modest human means. It isn’t playing the game to turn on the uncanny. All one’s energy goes to facing it, to tracking it. One wants, confound it, don’t you see?” he confessed with a queer face⁠—“one wants to enjoy anything so rare. Call it then life”⁠—he puzzled it out⁠—“call it poor dear old life simply that springs the surprise. Nothing alters the fact that the surprise is paralysing, or at any rate engrossing⁠—all, practically, hang it, that one sees, that one can see.”

Her silences were never barren, nor even dull. “Is that what you’ve written home?”

He tossed it off. “Oh dear, yes!”

She had another pause while, across her carpets, he had another walk. “If you don’t look out you’ll have them straight over.”

“Oh but I’ve said he’ll go back.”

“And will he?” Miss Gostrey asked.

The special tone of it made him, pulling up, look at her long. “What’s that but just the question I’ve spent treasures of patience and ingenuity in giving you, by the sight of him⁠—after everything had led up⁠—every facility to answer? What is it but just the thing I came here today to get out of you? Will he?”

“No⁠—he won’t,” she said at last. “He’s not free.”

The air of it held him. “Then you’ve all the while known⁠—?”

“I’ve known nothing but what I’ve seen; and I wonder,” she declared with some impatience, “that you didn’t see as much. It was enough to be with him there⁠—”

“In the box? Yes,” he rather blankly urged.

“Well⁠—to feel sure.”

“Sure of what?”

She got up from her chair, at this, with a nearer approach than she had ever yet shown to dismay at his dimness. She even, fairly pausing for it, spoke with a shade of pity. “Guess!”

It was a shade, fairly, that brought a flush into his face; so that for a moment, as they waited together, their difference was between them. “You mean that just your hour with him told you so much of his story? Very good; I’m not such a fool, on my side, as that I don’t understand you, or as that I didn’t in some degree understand him. That he has done what he liked most isn’t, among any of us, a matter the least in dispute. There’s equally little question at this time of day of what it is he does like most. But I’m not talking,” he reasonably explained, “of any mere wretch he may still pick up. I’m talking of some person who in his present situation may have held her own, may really have counted.”

“That’s