The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) 📖

ceased to adorn with hesitations or apologies, and that had, by the same token, in spite of their extreme straightness, ceased to produce in Strether the least embarrassment. She made him believe them, and they became thereby as impersonal as truth itself. “It’s just your particular charm.”

His answer too was always the same. “Of course I’m youth⁠—youth for the trip to Europe. I began to be young, or at least to get the benefit of it, the moment I met you at Chester, and that’s what has been taking place ever since. I never had the benefit at the proper time⁠—which comes to saying that I never had the thing itself. I’m having the benefit at this moment; I had it the other day when I said to Chad ‘Wait’; I shall have it still again when Sarah Pocock arrives. It’s a benefit that would make a poor show for many people; and I don’t know who else but you and I, frankly, could begin to see in it what I feel. I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t spend money; I don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m making up late for what I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say what they like⁠—it’s my surrender, it’s my tribute, to youth. One puts that in where one can⁠—it has to come in somewhere, if only out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of other persons. Chad gives me the sense of it, for all his grey hairs, which merely make it solid in him and safe and serene; and she does the same, for all her being older than he, for all her marriageable daughter, her separated husband, her agitated history. Though they’re young enough, my pair, I don’t say they’re, in the freshest way, their own absolutely prime adolescence; for that has nothing to do with it. The point is that they’re mine. Yes, they’re my youth; since somehow at the right time nothing else ever was. What I meant just now therefore is that it would all go⁠—go before doing its work⁠—if they were to fail me.”

On which, just here, Miss Gostrey inveterately questioned. “What do you, in particular, call its work?”

“Well, to see me through.”

“But through what?”⁠—she liked to get it all out of him.

“Why through this experience.” That was all that would come.

It regularly gave her none the less the last word. “Don’t you remember how in those first days of our meeting it was I who was to see you through?”

“Remember? Tenderly, deeply”⁠—he always rose to it. “You’re just doing your part in letting me maunder to you thus.”

“Ah don’t speak as if my part were small; since whatever else fails you⁠—”

“You won’t, ever, ever, ever?”⁠—he thus took her up. “Oh I beg your pardon; you necessarily, you inevitably will. Your conditions⁠—that’s what I mean⁠—won’t allow me anything to do for you.”

“Let alone⁠—I see what you mean⁠—that I’m drearily dreadfully old. I am, but there’s a service⁠—possible for you to render⁠—that I know, all the same, I shall think of.”

“And what will it be?”

This, in fine, however, she would never tell him. “You shall hear only if your smash takes place. As that’s really out of the question, I won’t expose myself”⁠—a point at which, for reasons of his own, Strether ceased to press.

He came round, for publicity⁠—it was the easiest thing⁠—to the idea that his smash was out of the question, and this rendered idle the discussion of what might follow it. He attached an added importance, as the days elapsed, to the arrival of the Pococks; he had even a shameful sense of waiting for it insincerely and incorrectly. He accused himself of making believe to his own mind that Sarah’s presence, her impression, her judgement would simplify and harmonise, he accused himself of being so afraid of what they might do that he sought refuge, to beg the whole question, in a vain fury. He had abundantly seen at home what they were in the habit of doing, and he had not at present the smallest ground. His clearest vision was when he made out that what he most desired was an account more full and free of Mrs. Newsome’s state of mind than any he felt he could now expect from herself; that calculation at least went hand in hand with the sharp consciousness of wishing to prove to himself that he was not afraid to look his behaviour in the face. If he was by an inexorable logic to pay for it he was literally impatient to know the cost, and he held himself ready to pay in instalments. The first instalment would be precisely this entertainment of Sarah; as a consequence of which moreover, he should know vastly better how he stood.

Book VIII I

Strether rambled alone during these few days, the effect of the incident of the previous week having been to simplify in a marked fashion his mixed relations with Waymarsh. Nothing had passed between them in reference to Mrs. Newsome’s summons but that our friend had mentioned to his own the departure of the deputation actually at sea⁠—giving him thus an opportunity to confess to the occult intervention he imputed to him. Waymarsh however in the event confessed to nothing; and though this falsified in some degree Strether’s forecast the latter amusedly saw in it the same depth of good conscience out of which the dear man’s impertinence had originally sprung. He was patient with the dear man now and delighted to observe how unmistakeably he had put on flesh; he felt his own holiday so successfully large and free that he was full of allowances and charities in respect to those cabined and confined: his instinct toward a spirit so strapped down as Waymarsh’s was to walk round it