by Henry James
Miss Gostrey had dined with him at his hotel, face to face over a small table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured shades; and the rose-coloured shades and the small table and the soft fragrance of the lady—had anything to his mere sense ever been so soft?—were so many touches in he scarce knew what positive high picture. He had been to the theatre, even to the opera, in Boston, with Mrs. Newsome, more than once acting as her only escort; but there had been no little confronted dinner, no pink lights, no whiff of vague sweetness, as a preliminary: one of the results of which was that at present, mildly rueful, though with a sharpish accent, he actually asked himself why there hadn’t. There was much the same difference in his impression of the noticed state of his companion, whose dress was “cut down,” as he believed the term to be, in respect to shoulders and bosom, in a manner quite other than Mrs. Newsome’s, and who wore round her throat a broad red velvet band with an antique jewel—he was rather complacently sure it was antique—attached to it in front. Mrs. Newsome’s dress was never in any degree “cut down,” and she never wore round her throat a broad red velvet band: if she had, moreover, would it ever have served so to carry on and complicate, as he now almost felt, his vision?
It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey’s trinket depended, had he not for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled perceptions. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his friend’s velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of every other item—to that of her smile and of the way she carried her head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her hair? What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man’s work in the world to do with red velvet bands? He wouldn’t for anything have so exposed himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he had none the less not only caught himself in the act—frivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpected—of liking it: he had in addition taken it as a starting-point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh lateral flights. The manner in which Mrs. Newsome’s throat was encircled suddenly represented for him, in an alien order, almost as many things as the manner in which Miss Gostrey’s was. Mrs. Newsome wore, at operatic hours, a black silk dress—very handsome, he knew it was “handsome”—and an ornament that his memory was able further to identify as a ruche. He had his association indeed with the ruche, but it was rather imperfectly romantic. He had once said to the wearer—and it was as “free” a remark as he had ever made to her—that she looked, with her ruff and other matters, like Queen Elizabeth; and it had after this in truth been his fancy that, as a consequence of that tenderness and an acceptance of the idea, the form of this special tribute to the “frill” had grown slightly more marked. The connexion, as he sat there and let his imagination roam, was to strike him as vaguely pathetic; but there it all was, and pathetic was doubtless in the conditions the best thing it could possibly be. It had assuredly existed at any rate; for it seemed now to come over him that no gentleman of his age at Woollett could ever, to a lady of Mrs. Newsome’s, which was not much less than his, have embarked on such a smile.
All sorts of things in fact now seemed to come over him, comparatively few of which his chronicler can hope for space to mention. It came over him for instance that Miss Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary Stuart: Lambert Strether had a candour of fancy which could rest for an instant gratified in such an antithesis. It came over him that never before—no, literally never—had a lady dined with him at a public place before going to the play. The publicity of the place was just, in the matter, for Strether, the rare strange thing; it affected him almost as the achievement of privacy might have affected a man of a different experience. He had married, in the far-away years, so young as to have missed the time natural in Boston for taking girls to the Museum; and it was absolutely true of him that—even after the close of the period of conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life, the grey middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that, ten years later, of his boy—he had never taken any one anywhere. It came over him in especial—though the monition had, as happened, already sounded, fitfully gleamed, in other forms—that the business he had come out on hadn’t yet been so brought home to him as by the sight of the people about him. She gave him the impression, his friend, at first, more straight than he got it for himself—gave it simply by saying with off-hand illumination: “Oh yes, they’re types!”—but after he had taken it he made to the full his own use of it; both while he kept silence for the four acts and while he talked in the intervals. It was an evening, it was a world of types, and this was a connexion above all in which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the stage.
He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who conversed with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much sound that he wondered they hadn’t more sense; and he recognized by the same law, beyond the footlights, what he was pleased to take for the very flush of English life. He had distracted drops in which he couldn’t have said if it were actors or auditors who were most true, and the upshot of which, each time, was the consciousness of new contacts. However he viewed his job it was “types” he should have to tackle. Those before him and around him were not as the types of Woollett, where, for that matter, it had begun to seem to him that there must only have been the male and the female. These made two exactly, even with the individual varieties. Here, on the other hand, apart from the personal and the sexual range—which might be greater or less—a series of strong stamps had been applied, as it were, from without; stamps that his observation played with as, before a glass case on a table, it might have passed from medal to medal and from copper to gold. It befell that in the drama precisely there was a bad woman in a yellow frock who made a pleasant weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening dress do the most dreadful things. Strether felt himself on the whole not afraid of the yellow frock, but he was vaguely anxious over a certain kindness into which he found himself drifting for its victim. He hadn’t come out, he reminded himself, to be too kind, or indeed to be kind at all, to Chadwick Newsome. Would Chad also be in perpetual evening dress? He somehow rather hoped it—it seemed so to add to this young man’s general amenability; though he wondered too if, to fight him with his own weapons, he himself (a thought almost startling) would have likewise to be. This young man furthermore would have been much more easy to handle—at least for him—than appeared probable in respect to Chad.
It came up for him with Miss Gostrey that there were things of which she would really perhaps after all have heard; and she admitted when a little pressed that she was never quite sure of what she heard as distinguished from things such as, on occasions like the present, she only extravagantly guessed. “I seem with this freedom, you see, to have guessed Mr. Chad. He’s a young man on whose head high hopes are placed at Woollett; a young man a wicked woman has got hold of and whom his family over there have sent you out to rescue. You’ve accepted the mission of separating him from the wicked woman. Are you quite sure she’s very bad for him?”
Something in his manner showed it as quite pulling him up.
“Of course we are. Wouldn’t you be?”
“Oh I don’t know. One never does—does one?—beforehand. One can only judge on the facts. Yours are quite new to me; I’m really not in the least, as you see, in possession of them: so it will be awfully interesting to have them from you. If you’re satisfied, that’s all that’s required. I mean if you’re sure you are sure: sure it won’t do.”
“That he should lead such a life? Rather!”
“Oh but I don’t know, you see, about his life; you’ve not told me about his life. She may be charming—his life!”
“Charming?”—Strether stared before him. “She’s base, venal—out of the streets.”
“I see. And h
e—?”
“Chad, wretched boy?”
“Of what type and temper is he?” she went on as Strether had lapsed.
“Well—the obstinate.” It was as if for a moment he had been going to say more and had then controlled himself.
That was scarce what she wished. “Do you like him?”
This time he was prompt. “No. How can I?”
“Do you mean because of your being so saddled with him?”
“I’m thinking of his mother,” said Strether after a moment. “He has darkened her admirable life.” He spoke with austerity. “He has worried her half to death.”
“Oh that’s of course odious.” She had a pause as if for renewed emphasis of this truth, but it ended on another note. “Is her life very admirable?”
“Extraordinarily.”
There was so much in the tone that Miss Gostrey had to devote another pause to the appreciation of it. “And has he only her? I don’t mean the bad woman in Paris,” she quickly added—“for I assure you I shouldn’t even at the best be disposed to allow him more than one. But has he only his mother?”
“He has also a sister, older than himself and married; and they’re both remarkably fine women.”
“Very handsome, you mean?”
This promptitude—almost, as he might have thought, this precipitation, gave him a brief drop; but he came up again. “Mrs. Newsome, I think, is handsome, though she’s not of course, with a son of twenty-eight and a daughter of thirty, in her very first youth. She married, however, extremely young.”
“And is wonderful,” Miss Gostrey asked, “for her age?”
Strether seemed to feel with a certain disquiet the pressure of it. “I don’t say she’s wonderful. Or rather,” he went on the next moment, “I do say it. It’s exactly what she is—wonderful. But I wasn’t thinking of her appearance,” he explained—“striking as that doubtless is. I was thinking—well, of many other things.” He seemed to look at these as if to mention some of them; then took, pulling himself up, another turn. “About Mrs. Pocock people may differ.”
“Is that the daughter’s name—‘Pocock’?”
“That’s the daughter’s name,” Strether sturdily confessed.
“And people may differ, you mean, about her beauty?”
“About everything.”
“But you admire her?”
He gave his friend a glance as to show how he could bear this. “I’m perhaps a little afraid of her.”
“Oh,” said Miss Gostrey, “I see her from here! You may say then I see very fast and very far, but I’ve already shown you I do. The young man and the two ladies,” she went on, “are at any rate all the family?”
“Quite all. His father has been dead ten years, and there’s no brother, nor any other sister. They’d do,” said Strether, “anything in the world for him.”
“And you’d do anything in the world for them?”
He shifted again; she had made it perhaps just a shade too affirmative for his nerves. “Oh I don’t know!”
“You’d do at any rate this, and the ‘anything’ they’d do is represented by their making you do it.”
“Ah they couldn’t have come—either of them. They’re very busy people and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life. She’s moreover highly nervous—and not at all strong.”
“You mean she’s an American invalid?”
He carefully distinguished. “There’s nothing she likes less than to be called one, but she would consent to be one of those things, I think,” he laughed, “if it were the only way to be the other.”
“Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?”
“No,” said Strether, “the other way round. She’s at any rate delicate sensitive high-strung. She puts so much of herself into everything—”
Ah Maria knew these things! “That she has nothing left for anything else? Of course she hasn’t. To whom do you say it? High-strung? Don’t I spend my life, for them, jamming down the pedal? I see moreover how it has told on you.”
Strether took this more lightly. “Oh I jam down the pedal too!”
“Well,” she lucidly returned, “we must from this moment bear on it together with all our might.” And she forged ahead. “Have they money?”
But it was as if, while her energetic image still held him, her enquiry fell short. “Mrs. Newsome,” he wished further to explain, “hasn’t moreover your courage on the question of contact. If she had come it would have been to see the person herself.”
“The woman? Ah but that’s courage.”
“No—it’s exaltation, which is a very different thing. Courage,” he, however, accommodatingly threw out, “is what you have.”
She shook her head. “You say that only to patch me up—to cover the nudity of my want of exaltation. I’ve neither the one nor the other. I’ve mere battered indifference. I see that what you mean,” Miss Gostrey pursued, “is that if your friend had come she would take great views, and the great views, to put it simply, would be too much for her.”
Strether looked amused at her notion of the simple, but he adopted her formula. “Everything’s too much for her.”
“Ah then such a service as this of yours—”
“Is more for her than anything else? Yes—far more. But so long as it isn’t too much for me—!”
“Her condition doesn’t matter? Surely not; we leave her condition out; we take it, that is, for granted. I see it, her condition, as behind and beneath you; yet at the same time I see it as bearing you up.”
“Oh it does bear me up!” Strether laughed.
“Well then as yours bears me nothing more’s needed.” With which she put again her question. “Has Mrs. Newsome money?”
This time he heeded. “Oh plenty. That’s the root of the evil. There’s money, to very large amounts, in the concern. Chad has had the free use of a great deal. But if he’ll pull himself together and come home, all the same, he’ll find his account in it.”
She had listened with all her interest. “And I hope to goodness you’ll find yours!”
“He’ll take up his definite material reward,” said Strether without acknowledgement of this. “He’s at the parting of the ways. He can come into the business now—he can’t come later.”
“Is there a business?”
“Lord, yes—a big brave bouncing business. A roaring trade.”
“A great shop?”
“Yes—a workshop; a great production, a great industry. The concern’s a manufacture—and a manufacture that, if it’s only properly looked after, may well be on the way to become a monopoly. It’s a little thing they make—make better, it appears, than other people can, or than other people, at any rate, do. Mr. Newsome, being a man of ideas, at least in that particular line,” Strether explained, “put them on it with great effect, and gave the place altogether, in his time, an immense lift.”
“It’s a place in itself?”
“Well, quite a number of buildings; almost a little industrial colony. But above all it’s a thing. The article produced.”
“And what is the article produced?”
Strether looked about him as in slight reluctance to say; then the curtain, which he saw about to rise, came to his aid. “I’ll tell you next time.” But when the next time came he only said he’d tell her later on—after they should have left the theatre; for she had immediately reverted to their topic, and even for himself the picture of the stage was now overlaid with another image. His postponements, however, made her wonder—wonder if the article referred to were anything bad. And she explained that she meant improper or ridiculous or wrong. But Strether, so far as that went, could satisfy her. “Unmentionable? Oh no, we constantly talk of it; we are quite familiar and brazen about it. Only, as a small, trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use, it’s just wanting in—what shall I say? Well, dignity, or the least approach to distinction. Right here therefore, with everything about us so grand—!” In short he s
hrank.
“It’s a false note?”
“Sadly. It’s vulgar.”
“But surely not vulgarer than this.” Then on his wondering as she herself had done: “Than everything about us.” She seemed a trifle irritated. “What do you take this for?”
“Why for—comparatively—divine!”
“This dreadful London theatre? It’s impossible, if you really want to know.”
“Oh then,” laughed Strether, “I don’t really want to know!”
It made between them a pause, which she, however, still fascinated by the mystery of the production at Woollett, presently broke. “ ‘Rather ridiculous’? Clothes-pins? Saleratus? Shoe-polish?”
It brought him round. “No—you don’t even ‘burn.’ I don’t think, you know, you’ll guess it.”
“How then can I judge how vulgar it is?”
