The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) 📖

He’s just preparing to draw in another; to pounce⁠—don’t you see him?⁠—on Madame de Vionnet.”

“Madame de Vionnet? Oh, oh, oh!” Miss Barrace cried in a wonderful crescendo. There was more in it, our friend made out, than met the ear. Was it after all a joke that he should be serious about anything? He envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being. She seemed, with little cries and protests and quick recognitions, movements like the darts of some fine high-feathered free-pecking bird, to stand before life as before some full shopwindow. You could fairly hear, as she selected and pointed, the tap of her tortoiseshell against the glass. “It’s certain that we do need seeing about; only I’m glad it’s not I who have to do it. One does, no doubt, begin that way; then suddenly one finds that one has given it up. It’s too much, it’s too difficult. You’re wonderful, you people,” she continued to Strether, “for not feeling those things⁠—by which I mean impossibilities. You never feel them. You face them with a fortitude that makes it a lesson to watch you.”

“Ah but”⁠—little Bilham put it with discouragement⁠—“what do we achieve after all? We see about you and report⁠—when we even go so far as reporting. But nothing’s done.”

“Oh you, Mr. Bilham,” she replied as with an impatient rap on the glass, “you’re not worth sixpence! You come over to convert the savages⁠—for I know you verily did, I remember you⁠—and the savages simply convert you.”

“Not even!” the young man woefully confessed: “they haven’t gone through that form. They’ve simply⁠—the cannibals!⁠—eaten me; converted me if you like, but converted me into food. I’m but the bleached bones of a Christian.”

“Well then there we are! Only”⁠—and Miss Barrace appealed again to Strether⁠—“don’t let it discourage you. You’ll break down soon enough, but you’ll meanwhile have had your moments. Il faut en avoir. I always like to see you while you last. And I’ll tell you who will last.”

“Waymarsh?”⁠—he had already taken her up.

She laughed out as at the alarm of it. “He’ll resist even Miss Gostrey: so grand is it not to understand. He’s wonderful.”

“He is indeed,” Strether conceded. “He wouldn’t tell me of this affair⁠—only said he had an engagement; but with such a gloom, you must let me insist, as if it had been an engagement to be hanged. Then silently and secretly he turns up here with you. Do you call that ‘lasting’?”

“Oh I hope it’s lasting!” Miss Barrace said. “But he only, at the best, bears with me. He doesn’t understand⁠—not one little scrap. He’s delightful. He’s wonderful,” she repeated.

“Michelangelesque!”⁠—little Bilham completed her meaning. “He is a success. Moses, on the ceiling, brought down to the floor; overwhelming, colossal, but somehow portable.”

“Certainly, if you mean by portable,” she returned, “looking so well in one’s carriage. He’s too funny beside me in his corner; he looks like somebody, somebody foreign and famous, en exil; so that people wonder⁠—it’s very amusing⁠—whom I’m taking about. I show him Paris, show him everything, and he never turns a hair. He’s like the Indian chief one reads about, who, when he comes up to Washington to see the Great Father, stands wrapt in his blanket and gives no sign. I might be the Great Father⁠—from the way he takes everything.” She was delighted at this hit of her identity with that personage⁠—it fitted so her character; she declared it was the title she meant henceforth to adopt. “And the way he sits, too, in the corner of my room, only looking at my visitors very hard and as if he wanted to start something! They wonder what he does want to start. But he’s wonderful,” Miss Barrace once more insisted. “He has never started anything yet.”

It presented him none the less, in truth, to her actual friends, who looked at each other in intelligence, with frank amusement on Bilham’s part and a shade of sadness on Strether’s. Strether’s sadness sprang⁠—for the image had its grandeur⁠—from his thinking how little he himself was wrapt in his blanket, how little, in marble halls, all too oblivious of the Great Father, he resembled a really majestic aboriginal. But he had also another reflection. “You’ve all of you here so much visual sense that you’ve somehow all ‘run’ to it. There are moments when it strikes one that you haven’t any other.”

“Any moral,” little Bilham explained, watching serenely, across the garden, the several femmes du monde. “But Miss Barrace has a moral distinction,” he kindly continued; speaking as if for Strether’s benefit not less than for her own.

“Have you?” Strether, scarce knowing what he was about, asked of her almost eagerly.

“Oh not a distinction”⁠—she was mightily amused at his tone⁠—“Mr. Bilham’s too good. But I think I may say a sufficiency. Yes, a sufficiency. Have you supposed strange things of me?”⁠—and she fixed him again, through all her tortoiseshell, with the droll interest of it. “You are all indeed wonderful. I should awfully disappoint you. I do take my stand on my sufficiency. But I know, I confess,” she went on, “strange people. I don’t know how it happens; I don’t do it on purpose; it seems to be my doom⁠—as if I were always one of their habits: it’s wonderful! I dare say moreover,” she pursued with an interested gravity, “that I do, that we all do here, run too much to mere eye. But how can it be helped? We’re all looking at each other⁠—and in the light of Paris one sees what things resemble. That’s what the light of Paris seems always to show. It’s the fault of the light of Paris⁠—dear old light!”

“Dear old Paris!” little Bilham echoed.

“Everything, everyone shows,” Miss Barrace went on.

“But for what they really are?” Strether asked.

“Oh I like your Boston ‘reallys’! But sometimes⁠—yes.”

“Dear old Paris then!” Strether resignedly sighed while for a moment they looked at each other. Then he broke out: “Does Madame de Vionnet do that? I