The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) 📖

as yet in some degree⁠—which was an odd situation for a man; but it kept coming back to him in a whimsical way that he should perhaps find his marriage had cost him his place. This occasion indeed, whatever that fancy represented, was not a time of sensible exclusion for Jim, who was in a state of manifest response to the charm of his adventure. Small and fat and constantly facetious, straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he would have been practically indistinguishable hadn’t his constant preference for light-grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very little stories, done what it could for his identity. There were signs in him, though none of them plaintive, of always paying for others; and the principal one perhaps was just this failure of type. It was with this that he paid, rather than with fatigue or waste; and also doubtless a little with the effort of humour⁠—never irrelevant to the conditions, to the relations, with which he was acquainted.

He gurgled his joy as they rolled through the happy streets; he declared that his trip was a regular windfall, and that he wasn’t there, he was eager to remark, to hang back from anything: he didn’t know quite what Sally had come for, but he had come for a good time. Strether indulged him even while wondering if what Sally wanted her brother to go back for was to become like her husband. He trusted that a good time was to be, out and out, the programme for all of them; and he assented liberally to Jim’s proposal that, disencumbered and irresponsible⁠—his things were in the omnibus with those of the others⁠—they should take a further turn round before going to the hotel. It wasn’t for him to tackle Chad⁠—it was Sally’s job; and as it would be like her, he felt, to open fire on the spot, it wouldn’t be amiss of them to hold off and give her time. Strether, on his side, only asked to give her time; so he jogged with his companion along boulevards and avenues, trying to extract from meagre material some forecast of his catastrophe. He was quick enough to see that Jim Pocock declined judgement, had hovered quite round the outer edge of discussion and anxiety, leaving all analysis of their question to the ladies alone and now only feeling his way toward some small droll cynicism. It broke out afresh, the cynicism⁠—it had already shown a flicker⁠—in a but slightly deferred: “Well, hanged if I would if I were he!”

“You mean you wouldn’t in Chad’s place⁠—?”

“Give up this to go back and boss the advertising!” Poor Jim, with his arms folded and his little legs out in the open fiacre, drank in the sparkling Paris noon and carried his eyes from one side of their vista to the other. “Why I want to come right out and live here myself. And I want to live while I am here too. I feel with you⁠—oh you’ve been grand, old man, and I’ve twigged⁠—that it ain’t right to worry Chad. I don’t mean to persecute him; I couldn’t in conscience. It’s thanks to you at any rate that I’m here, and I’m sure I’m much obliged. You’re a lovely pair.”

There were things in this speech that Strether let pass for the time. “Don’t you then think it important the advertising should be thoroughly taken in hand? Chad will be, so far as capacity is concerned,” he went on, “the man to do it.”

“Where did he get his capacity,” Jim asked, “over here?”

“He didn’t get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that over here he hasn’t inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for business, an extraordinary head. He comes by that,” Strether explained, “honestly enough. He’s in that respect his father’s son, and also⁠—for she’s wonderful in her way too⁠—his mother’s. He has other tastes and other tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife are quite right about his having that. He’s very remarkable.”

“Well, I guess he is!” Jim Pocock comfortably sighed. “But if you’ve believed so in his making us hum, why have you so prolonged the discussion? Don’t you know we’ve been quite anxious about you?”

These questions were not informed with earnestness, but Strether saw he must none the less make a choice and take a line. “Because, you see, I’ve greatly liked it. I’ve liked my Paris, I dare say I’ve liked it too much.”

“Oh you old wretch!” Jim gaily exclaimed.

“But nothing’s concluded,” Strether went on. “The case is more complex than it looks from Woollett.”

“Oh well, it looks bad enough from Woollett!” Jim declared.

“Even after all I’ve written?”

Jim bethought himself. “Isn’t it what you’ve written that has made Mrs. Newsome pack us off? That at least and Chad’s not turning up?”

Strether made a reflection of his own. “I see. That she should do something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore of course come out to act.”

“Oh yes,” Jim concurred⁠—“to act. But Sally comes out to act, you know,” he lucidly added, “every time she leaves the house. She never comes out but she does act. She’s acting moreover now for her mother, and that fixes the scale.” Then he wound up, opening all his senses to it, with a renewed embrace of pleasant Paris. “We haven’t all the same at Woollett got anything like this.”

Strether continued to consider. “I’m bound to say for you all that you strike me as having arrived in a very mild and reasonable frame of mind. You don’t show your claws. I felt just now in Mrs. Pocock no symptom of that. She isn’t fierce,” he went on. “I’m such a nervous idiot that I thought she might be.”

“Oh don’t you know her well enough,” Pocock asked, “to have noticed that she never gives herself away, any more than her mother ever does? They ain’t fierce, either of ’em; they let you come quite close. They wear their fur the smooth side out⁠—the