THE AMBASSADORS. Генри Джеймс
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minutes, though while still thinking over what she had said, he once more took out his watch; mechanically, unconsciously and as if made nervous by the mere exhilaration of what struck him as her strange and cynical wit. He looked at the hour without seeing it, and then, on something again said by his companion, had another pause. “You’re really in terror of him.”
He smiled a smile that he almost felt to be sickly. “Now you can see why I’m afraid of you.”
“Because I’ve such illuminations? Why they’re all for your help! It’s what I told you,” she added, “just now. You feel as if this were wrong.”
He fell back once more, settling himself against the parapet as if to hear more about it. “Then get me out!”
Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the appeal, but, as if it were a question of immediate action, she visibly considered. “Out of waiting for him? — of seeing him at all?”
“Oh no — not that,” said poor Strether, looking grave. “I’ve got to wait for him — and I want very much to see him. But out of the terror. You did put your finger on it a few minutes ago. It’s general, but it avails itself of particular occasions. That’s what it’s doing for me now. I’m always considering something else; something else, I mean, than the thing of the moment. The obsession of the other thing is the terror. I’m considering at present for instance something else than YOU.”
She listened with charming earnestness. “Oh you oughtn’t to do that!”
“It’s what I admit. Make it then impossible.”
She continued to think. “Is it really an ‘order’ from you? — that I shall take the job? WILL you give yourself up?”
Poor Strether heaved his sigh. “If I only could! But that’s the deuce of it — that I never can. No — I can’t.”
She wasn’t, however, discouraged. “But you want to at least?”
“Oh unspeakably!”
“Ah then, if you’ll try!” — and she took over the job, as she had called it, on the spot. “Trust me!” she exclaimed; and the action of this, as they retraced their steps, was presently to make him pass his hand into her arm in the manner of a benign dependent paternal old person who wishes to be “nice” to a younger one. If he drew it out again indeed as they approached the inn this may have been because, after more talk had passed between them, the relation of age, or at least of experience — which, for that matter, had already played to and fro with some freedom — affected him as incurring a readjustment. It was at all events perhaps lucky that they arrived in sufficiently separate fashion within range of the hotel-door. The young lady they had left in the glass cage watched as if she had come to await them on the threshold. At her side stood a person equally interested, by his attitude, in their return, and the effect of the sight of whom was instantly to determine for Strether another of those responsive arrests that we have had so repeatedly to note. He left it to Miss Gostrey to name, with the fine full bravado, as it almost struck him, of her “Mr. Waymarsh!” what was to have been, what — he more than ever felt as his short stare of suspended welcome took things in — would have been, but for herself, his doom. It was already upon him even at that distance — Mr. Waymarsh was for HIS part joyless.
Chapter II
He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that Waymarsh, even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own prompt and lucid allusions and enquiries, by their having publicly partaken of dinner in her company, and by another stroll, to which she was not a stranger, out into the town to look at the cathedral by moonlight — it was a blank that the resident of Milrose, though admitting acquaintance with the Munsters, professed himself unable to fill. He had no recollection of Miss Gostrey, and two or three questions that she put to him about those members of his circle had, to Strether’s observation, the same effect he himself had already more directly felt — the effect of appearing to place all knowledge, for the time, on this original woman’s side. It interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such relation for her with his friend as there could possibly be a question of, and it particularly struck him that they were to be marked altogether in Waymarsh’s quarter. This added to his own sense of having gone far with her — gave him an early illustration of a much shorter course. There was a certitude he immediately grasped — a conviction that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever degree of acquaintance, to profit by her.
There had been after the first interchange among the three a talk of some five minutes in the hall, and then the two men had adjourned to the garden, Miss Gostrey for the time disappearing. Strether in due course accompanied his friend to the room he had bespoken and had, before going out, scrupulously visited; where at the end of another half-hour he had no less discreetly left him. On leaving him he repaired straight to his own room, but with the prompt effect of feeling the compass of that chamber resented by his condition. There he enjoyed at once the first consequence of their reunion. A place was too small for him after it that had seemed large enough before. He had awaited it with something he would have been sorry, have been almost ashamed not to recognise as emotion, yet with a tacit assumption at the same time that emotion would in the event find itself relieved. The actual oddity was that he was only more excited; and his excitement — to which indeed he would have found it difficult instantly to give a name — brought him once more downstairs and caused him for some minutes vaguely to wander. He went once more to the garden; he looked into the public room, found Miss Gostrey writing letters and backed out; he roamed, fidgeted and wasted time; but he was to have his more intimate session with his friend before the evening closed.
It was late — not till Strether had spent an hour upstairs with him — that this subject consented to betake himself to doubtful rest. Dinner and the subsequent stroll by moonlight — a dream, on Strether’s part, of romantic effects rather prosaically merged in a mere missing of thicker coats — had measurably intervened, and this midnight conference was the result of Waymarsh’s having (when they were free, as he put it, of their fashionable friend) found the smoking-room not quite what he wanted, and yet bed what he wanted less. His most frequent form of words was that he knew himself, and they were applied on this occasion to his certainty of not sleeping. He knew himself well enough to know that he should have a night of prowling unless he should succeed, as a preliminary, in getting prodigiously tired. If the effort directed to this end involved till a late hour the presence of Strether — consisted, that is, in the detention of the latter for full discourse — there was yet an impression of minor discipline involved for our friend in the picture Waymarsh made as he sat in trousers and shirt on the edge of his couch. With his long legs extended and his large back much bent, he nursed alternately, for an almost incredible time, his elbows and his beard. He struck his visitor as extremely, as almost wilfully uncomfortable; yet what had this been for Strether, from that first glimpse of him disconcerted in the porch of the hotel, but the predominant note? The discomfort was in a manner contagious, as well as also in a manner inconsequent and unfounded; the visitor felt that unless he should get used to it — or unless Waymarsh himself should — it would constitute a menace for his own prepared, his own already confirmed, consciousness of the agreeable. On their first going up together to the room Strether had selected for him Waymarsh had looked it over in silence and with a sigh that represented for his companion, if not the habit of disapprobation, at least the despair of felicity; and this look had recurred to Strether as the key of much he had since observed. “Europe,” he had begun to gather from these things, had up to now rather failed of its message to him; he hadn’t got into tune with it and had at the end of three months almost renounced any such expectation.
He really appeared at present to insist on that by just perching there with the gas in his eyes. This of itself somehow conveyed the futility of single rectifications in a multiform failure. He had a large handsome head and a large sallow seamed face — a striking significant physiognomic total, the upper range of which,