The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) 📖

Bilham appeared to wonder what he had hinted. “Feels most that they’re straight?”

“Well, feels that she is, and the strength that comes from it. She keeps him up⁠—she keeps the whole thing up. When people are able to it’s fine. She’s wonderful, wonderful, as Miss Barrace says; and he is, in his way, too; however, as a mere man, he may sometimes rebel and not feel that he finds his account in it. She has simply given him an immense moral lift, and what that can explain is prodigious. That’s why I speak of it as a situation. It is one, if there ever was.” And Strether, with his head back and his eyes on the ceiling, seemed to lose himself in the vision of it.

His companion attended deeply. “You state it much better than I could.”

“Oh you see it doesn’t concern you.”

Little Bilham considered. “I thought you said just now that it doesn’t concern you either.”

“Well, it doesn’t a bit as Madame de Vionnet’s affair. But as we were again saying just now, what did I come out for but to save him?”

“Yes⁠—to remove him.”

“To save him by removal; to win him over to himself thinking it best he shall take up business⁠—thinking he must immediately do therefore what’s necessary to that end.”

“Well,” said little Bilham after a moment, “you have won him over. He does think it best. He has within a day or two again said to me as much.”

“And that,” Strether asked, “is why you consider that he cares less than she?”

“Cares less for her than she for him? Yes, that’s one of the reasons. But other things too have given me the impression. A man, don’t you think?” little Bilham presently pursued, “can’t, in such conditions, care so much as a woman. It takes different conditions to make him, and then perhaps he cares more. Chad,” he wound up, “has his possible future before him.”

“Are you speaking of his business future?”

“No⁠—on the contrary; of the other, the future of what you so justly call their situation. M. de Vionnet may live forever.”

“So that they can’t marry?”

The young man waited a moment. “Not being able to marry is all they’ve with any confidence to look forward to. A woman⁠—a particular woman⁠—may stand that strain. But can a man?” he propounded.

Strether’s answer was as prompt as if he had already, for himself, worked it out. “Not without a very high ideal of conduct. But that’s just what we’re attributing to Chad. And how, for that matter,” he mused, “does his going to America diminish the particular strain? Wouldn’t it seem rather to add to it?”

“Out of sight out of mind!” his companion laughed. Then more bravely: “Wouldn’t distance lessen the torment?” But before Strether could reply, “The thing is, you see, Chad ought to marry!” he wound up.

Strether, for a little, appeared to think of it. “If you talk of torments you don’t diminish mine!” he then broke out. The next moment he was on his feet with a question. “He ought to marry whom?”

Little Bilham rose more slowly. “Well, someone he can⁠—some thoroughly nice girl.”

Strether’s eyes, as they stood together, turned again to Jeanne. “Do you mean her?”

His friend made a sudden strange face. “After being in love with her mother? No.”

“But isn’t it exactly your idea that he isn’t in love with her mother?”

His friend once more had a pause. “Well, he isn’t at any rate in love with Jeanne.”

“I dare say not.”

“How can he be with any other woman?”

“Oh that I admit. But being in love isn’t, you know, here”⁠—little Bilham spoke in friendly reminder⁠—“thought necessary, in strictness, for marriage.”

“And what torment⁠—to call a torment⁠—can there ever possibly be with a woman like that?” As if from the interest of his own question Strether had gone on without hearing. “Is it for her to have turned a man out so wonderfully, too, only for somebody else?” He appeared to make a point of this, and little Bilham looked at him now. “When it’s for each other that people give things up they don’t miss them.” Then he threw off as with an extravagance of which he was conscious: “Let them face the future together!”

Little Bilham looked at him indeed. “You mean that after all he shouldn’t go back?”

“I mean that if he gives her up⁠—!”

“Yes?”

“Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself.” But Strether spoke with a sound that might have passed for a laugh.

Book VII I

It wasn’t the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim church⁠—still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so far as conditions permitted, to its beneficent action on his nerves. He had been to Notre Dame with Waymarsh, he had been there with Miss Gostrey, he had been there with Chad Newsome, and had found the place, even in company, such a refuge from the obsession of his problem that, with renewed pressure from that source, he had not unnaturally recurred to a remedy meeting the case, for the moment, so indirectly, no doubt, but so relievingly. He was conscious enough that it was only for the moment, but good moments⁠—if he could call them good⁠—still had their value for a man who by this time struck himself as living almost disgracefully from hand to mouth. Having so well learnt the way, he had lately made the pilgrimage more than once by himself⁠—had quite stolen off, taking an unnoticed chance and making no point of speaking of the adventure when restored to his friends.

His great friend, for that matter, was still absent, as well as remarkably silent; even at the end of three weeks Miss Gostrey hadn’t come back. She wrote to him from Mentone, admitting that he must judge her grossly inconsequent⁠—perhaps in fact for the time odiously faithless; but asking for patience, for a deferred sentence, throwing herself in short on his generosity. For her too, she could assure him, life