The Ambassadors

I

Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from him bespeaking a room “only if not noisy,” reply paid, was produced for the enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they should meet at Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent sound. The same secret principle, however, that had prompted Strether not absolutely to desire Waymarsh’s presence at the dock, that had led him thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now operated to make him feel he could still wait without disappointment. They would dine together at the worst, and, with all respect to dear old Waymarsh⁠—if not even, for that matter, to himself⁠—there was little fear that in the sequel they shouldn’t see enough of each other. The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive⁠—the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first “note,” of Europe. Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether’s part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite a sufficient degree.

That note had been meanwhile⁠—since the previous afternoon, thanks to this happier device⁠—such a consciousness of personal freedom as he hadn’t known for years; such a deep taste of change and of having above all for the moment nobody and nothing to consider, as promised already, if headlong hope were not too foolish, to colour his adventure with cool success. There were people on the ship with whom he had easily consorted⁠—so far as ease could up to now be imputed to him⁠—and who for the most part plunged straight into the current that set from the landing-stage to London; there were others who had invited him to a tryst at the inn and had even invoked his aid for a “look round” at the beauties of Liverpool; but he had stolen away from everyone alike, had kept no appointment and renewed no acquaintance, had been indifferently aware of the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in being, unlike himself, “met,” and had even independently, unsociably, alone, without encounter or relapse and by mere quiet evasion, given his afternoon and evening to the immediate and the sensible. They formed a qualified draught of Europe, an afternoon and an evening on the banks of the Mersey, but such as it was he took his potion at least undiluted. He winced a little, truly, at the thought that Waymarsh might be already at Chester; he reflected that, should he have to describe himself there as having “got in” so early, it would be difficult to make the interval look particularly eager; but he was like a man who, elatedly finding in his pocket more money than usual, handles it a while and idly and pleasantly chinks it before addressing himself to the business of spending. That he was prepared to be vague to Waymarsh about the hour of the ship’s touching, and that he both wanted extremely to see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of delay⁠—these things, it is to be conceived, were early signs in him that his relation to his actual errand might prove none of the simplest. He was burdened, poor Strether⁠—it had better be confessed at the outset⁠—with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.

After the young woman in the glass cage had held up to him across her counter the pale-pink leaflet bearing his friend’s name, which she neatly pronounced, he turned away to find himself, in the hall, facing a lady who met his eyes as with an intention suddenly determined, and whose features⁠—not freshly young, not markedly fine, but on happy terms with each other⁠—came back to him as from a recent vision. For a moment they stood confronted; then the moment placed her: he had noticed her the day before, noticed her at his previous inn, where⁠—again in the hall⁠—she had been briefly engaged with some people of his own ship’s company. Nothing had actually passed between them, and he would as little have been able to say what had been the sign of her face for him on the first occasion as to name the ground of his present recognition. Recognition at any rate appeared to prevail on her own side as well⁠—which would only have added to the mystery. All she now began by saying to him nevertheless was that, having chanced to catch his enquiry, she was moved to ask, by his leave, if it were possibly a question of Mr. Waymarsh of Milrose Connecticut⁠—Mr. Waymarsh the American lawyer.

“Oh yes,” he replied, “my very well-known friend. He’s to meet me here, coming up from Malvern, and I supposed he’d already have arrived. But he doesn’t come till later, and I’m relieved not to have kept him. Do you know him?” Strether wound up.

It wasn’t till after he had spoken that he became aware of how much there had been in him of response; when the tone of her own rejoinder, as well as the play of something more in her face⁠—something more, that is, than its apparently usual restless light⁠—seemed to notify him. “I’ve met him at Milrose⁠—where I used sometimes, a good while ago, to stay; I had friends there who were friends of his, and I’ve been at his house. I won’t answer for it that he would know me,” Strether’s new acquaintance pursued; “but I should be delighted to see him. Perhaps,” she added, “I shall⁠—for I’m staying over.” She paused while our friend took in these things, and it was as if a good deal of talk had already passed. They even vaguely smiled at it, and Strether presently observed that Mr. Waymarsh would, no doubt, be easily to be seen. This, however, appeared to affect the lady as if she might have advanced too far. She appeared to have no reserves about anything. “Oh,” she said, “he won’t care!”⁠—and she immediately thereupon remarked that she believed Strether knew the Munsters; the Munsters being the people he had seen her with at Liverpool.

But he didn’t, it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give the case much of a lift; so that they were left together as if over the mere laid table of conversation. Her qualification of the mentioned connection had rather removed than placed a dish, and there seemed nothing else to serve. Their attitude remained, none the less, that of not forsaking the board; and the effect of this in turn was to give them the appearance of having accepted each other with an absence of preliminaries practically complete. They moved along the hall together, and Strether’s companion threw off that the hotel had the advantage of a garden. He was aware by this time of his strange inconsequence: he had shirked the intimacies of the steamer and had muffled the shock of Waymarsh only to find himself forsaken, in this sudden case, both of avoidance and of caution. He passed, under this unsought protection and before he had so much as gone up to his room, into the garden of the hotel, and at the end of ten minutes had agreed to meet there again, as soon as he should have made himself tidy, the dispenser of such good assurances. He wanted to look at the town, and they would forthwith look together. It was almost as if she had been in possession and received him as a guest. Her acquaintance with the place presented her in a manner as a hostess, and Strether had a rueful glance for the lady in the glass cage. It was as if this personage had seen herself instantly superseded.

When in a quarter of an hour he came down, what his hostess saw, what she might have taken in with a vision kindly adjusted, was the lean, the slightly loose figure of a man of the middle height and something more perhaps than the middle age⁠—a man of five-and-fifty, whose most immediate signs were a marked bloodless brownness of face, a thick dark moustache, of characteristically American cut, growing strong and falling low, a head of hair still abundant but irregularly streaked with grey, and a nose of bold free prominence, the even line, the high finish, as it might have been called, of which, had a certain effect of mitigation. A perpetual pair of glasses astride of this fine ridge, and a line, unusually deep and drawn, the prolonged pen-stroke of time, accompanying the curve of the moustache from nostril to chin, did something to complete the facial furniture that an attentive observer would have seen catalogued, on the spot, in the vision of the other party to Strether’s appointment. She waited for him in the garden, the other party, drawing on a pair of singularly fresh soft and elastic light gloves and presenting herself with a superficial readiness which, as he approached her over the small smooth lawn and in the watery English sunshine, he might, with his rougher preparation, have marked as the model for such an occasion. She had, this lady, a perfect plain propriety, an expensive subdued suitability, that her companion was not free to analyse, but that struck him, so that his consciousness of it was instantly acute, as a quality quite new to him. Before reaching her he stopped on the grass and went through the form of feeling for something, possibly forgotten, in the light overcoat he carried on his arm; yet the essence of the act was no more than the impulse to gain time. Nothing could have been odder than Strether’s sense of himself as at that moment launched in something of which the sense would be quite disconnected from the sense of his past and which was literally beginning there and then. It had begun in fact already upstairs and before the dressing glass that struck him as blocking further, so strangely, the dimness of the window of his dull bedroom; begun with a sharper survey of the elements of Appearance than he had for a long time been moved to make. He had during those moments felt these elements to be not so much to his hand as he should have liked, and then had fallen back on the thought that they were precisely a matter as to which help was supposed to come from what he was about to do. He was about to go up to London, so that hat and necktie might wait. What had come as straight to him as a ball in a well-played game⁠—and caught moreover not less neatly⁠—was just the air, in the person of his friend, of having seen and chosen, the air of achieved possession of those vague qualities and quantities that collectively figured to him as the advantage snatched from lucky chances. Without pomp or circumstance, certainly, as her original address to him, equally with his own response, had been, he would have sketched to himself his impression of her as: “Well, she’s more thoroughly civilized⁠—!” If “More thoroughly than whom?” would not have been for him a sequel to this remark, that was just by reason of his deep consciousness of the bearing of his comparison.

The amusement, at all events, of a civilisation intenser was what⁠—familiar compatriot as she was, with the full tone of the compatriot and the rattling link not with mystery but only with dear dyspeptic Waymarsh⁠—she appeared distinctly to promise. His pause while he felt in his overcoat was positively the pause of confidence, and it enabled his eyes to make out as much of a case for her, in proportion, as her own made out for himself. She affected him as almost insolently young; but an easily carried five-and-thirty could still do that. She was, however, like himself marked and wan; only it naturally couldn’t have been known to him how much a spectator looking from one to the other might have discerned that they had in common. It wouldn’t for such a spectator have been altogether insupposable that, each so finely brown and so sharply spare, each confessing so to dents of surface and aids to sight, to a disproportionate nose and a head delicately or grossly grizzled, they might have been brother and sister. On this ground indeed there would have been a residuum of difference; such a sister having surely known in respect to such a brother the extremity of separation, and such a brother now feeling in respect to such a sister the extremity of surprise. Surprise, it was true, was not on the other hand what the eyes of Strether’s friend most showed him while she gave him, stroking her gloves smoother, the time he appreciated. They had taken hold of him straightway measuring him up and down as if they knew how; as if he were human material they had already in some sort handled. Their possessor was in truth, it may be communicated, the mistress of a hundred cases or categories, receptacles of the mind, subdivisions for convenience, in which, from a full experience, she pigeonholed her fellow mortals with a hand as free as that of a compositor scattering type. She was as equipped in this particular as Strether was the reverse, and it made an opposition between them which he might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected it. So far as he did suspect it he was on the contrary, after a short shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly passive as might be. He really had a sort of sense of what she knew. He had quite the sense that she knew things he didn’t, and though this was a concession that in general he found not easy to make to women, he made it now as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes were so quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might almost have been absent without changing his face, which took its expression mainly, and not least its stamp of sensibility, from other sources, surface and grain and form. He joined his guide in an instant, and then felt she had profited still better than he by his having been for the moments just mentioned, so at the disposal of her intelligence. She knew even intimate things about him that he hadn’t yet told her and perhaps never would. He wasn’t unaware that he had told her rather remarkably many for the time, but these were not the real ones. Some of the real ones, however, precisely, were what she knew.

They were to pass again through the hall of the inn to get into the street, and it was here she presently checked him with a question. “Have you looked up my name?”

He could only stop with a laugh. “Have you looked up mine?”

“Oh dear, yes⁠—as soon as you left me. I went to the office and asked. Hadn’t you better do the same?”

He wondered. “Find out who you are?⁠—after the uplifted young woman there has seen us thus scrape acquaintance!”

She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement. “Isn’t it a reason the more? If what you’re afraid of is the injury for me⁠—my being seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask who I am⁠—I assure you I don’t in the least mind. Here, however,” she continued, “is my card, and as I find there’s something else again I have to say at the office, you can just study it during the moment I leave you.”

She left him after he had taken from her the small pasteboard she had extracted from her pocketbook, and he had extracted another from his own, to exchange with it, before she came back. He read thus the simple designation “Maria Gostrey,” to which was attached, in a corner of the card, with a number, the name of a street, presumably in Paris, without other appreciable identity than its foreignness. He put the card into his waistcoat pocket, keeping his own meanwhile in evidence; and as he leaned against the doorpost he met with the smile of a straying thought what the expanse before the hotel offered to his view. It was positively droll to him that he should already have Maria Gostrey, whoever she was⁠—of which he hadn’t really the least idea⁠—in a place of safe keeping. He had somehow an assurance that he should carefully preserve the little token he had just tucked in. He gazed with unseeing lingering eyes as he followed some of the implications of his act, asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify it as disloyal. It was prompt, it was possibly even premature, and there was little doubt of the expression of face the sight of it would have produced in a certain person. But if it was “wrong”⁠—why then he had better not have come out at all. At this, poor man, had he already⁠—and even before meeting Waymarsh⁠—arrived. He had believed he had a limit, but the limit had been transcended within thirty-six hours. By how long a space on the plane of manners or even of morals, moreover, he felt still more sharply after Maria Gostrey had come back to him and with a gay decisive “So now⁠—!” led him forth into the world. This counted, it struck him as he walked beside her with his overcoat on an arm, his umbrella under another and his personal pasteboard a little stiffly retained between forefinger and thumb, this struck him as really, in comparison his introduction to things. It hadn’t been “Europe” at Liverpool no⁠—not even in the dreadful delightful impressive streets the night before⁠—to the extent his present companion made it so. She hadn’t yet done that so much as when, after their walk had lasted a few minutes and he had had time to wonder if a couple of sidelong glances from her meant that he had best have put on gloves she almost pulled him up with an amused challenge. “But why⁠—fondly as it’s so easy to imagine your clinging to it⁠—don’t you put it away? Or if it’s an inconvenience to you to carry it, one’s often glad to have one’s card back. The fortune one spends in them!”

Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared tribute had affected her as a deviation in one of those directions he couldn’t yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be still the one he had received from her. He accordingly handed her the card as if in restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt the difference and, with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology. “I like,” she observed, “your name.”

“Oh,” he answered, “you won’t have heard of it!” Yet he had his reasons for not being sure but that she perhaps might.

Ah it was but too visible! She read it over again as one who had never seen it. “ ‘Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether’ ”⁠—she sounded it almost as freely as for any stranger. She repeated however that she liked it⁠—“particularly the Lewis Lambert. It’s the name of a novel of Balzac’s.”

“Oh I know that!” said Strether.

“But the novel’s an awfully bad one.”

“I know that too,” Strether smiled. To which he added with an irrelevance that was only superficial: “I come from Woollett Massachusetts.” It made her for some reason⁠—the irrelevance or whatever⁠—laugh. Balzac had described many cities, but hadn’t described Woollett Massachusetts. “You say that,” she returned, “as if you wanted one immediately to know the worst.”

“Oh I think it’s a thing,” he said, “that you must already have made out. I feel it so that I certainly must look it, speak it, and, as people say there, ‘act’ it. It sticks out of me, and you knew surely for yourself as soon as you looked at me.”

“The worst, you mean?”

“Well, the fact of where I come from. There at any rate it is; so that you won’t be able, if anything happens, to say I’ve not been straight with you.”

“I see”⁠—and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point he had made. “But what do you think of as happening?”

Though he wasn’t shy⁠—which was rather anomalous⁠—Strether gazed about without meeting her eyes; a motion that was frequent with him in talk, yet of which his words often seemed not at all the effect. “Why that you should find me too hopeless.” With which they walked on again together while she answered, as they went, that the most “hopeless” of her countryfolk were in general precisely those she liked best. All sorts of other pleasant small things⁠—small things that were yet large for him⁠—flowered in the air of the occasion, but the bearing of the occasion itself on matters still remote concerns us too closely to permit us to multiply our illustrations. Two or three, however, in truth, we should perhaps regret to lose. The tortuous wall⁠—girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands⁠—wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English town and ordered English country. Too deep almost for words was the delight of these things to Strether; yet as deeply mixed with it were certain images of his inward picture. He had trod this walks in the far-off time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling it, only enriched it for present feeling and marked his renewal as a thing substantial enough to share. It was with Waymarsh he should have shared it, and he was now accordingly taking from him something that was his due. He looked repeatedly at his watch, and when he had done so for the fifth time Miss Gostrey took him up.

“You’re doing something that you think not right.”

It so touched the place that he quite changed colour and his laugh grew almost awkward. “Am I enjoying it as much as that?”

“You’re not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought.”

“I see”⁠—he appeared thoughtfully to agree. “Great is my privilege.”

“Oh it’s not your privilege! It has nothing to do with me. It has to do with yourself. Your failure’s general.”

“Ah there you are!” he laughed. “It’s the failure of Woollett. That’s general.”

“The failure to enjoy,” Miss Gostrey explained, “is what I mean.”

“Precisely. Woollett isn’t sure it ought to enjoy. If it were it would. But it hasn’t, poor thing,” Strether continued, “anyone to show it how. It’s not like me. I have somebody.”

They had stopped, in the afternoon sunshine⁠—constantly pausing, in their stroll, for the sharper sense of what they saw⁠—and Strether rested on one of the high sides of the old stony groove of the little rampart. He leaned back on this support with his face to the tower of the cathedral, now admirably commanded by their station, the high red-brown mass, square and subordinately spired and crocketed, retouched and restored, but charming to his long-sealed eyes and with the first swallows of the year weaving their flight all round it. Miss Gostrey lingered near him, full of an air, to which she more and more justified her right, of understanding the effect of things. She quite concurred. “You’ve indeed somebody.” And she added: “I wish you would let me show you how!”

“Oh I’m afraid of you!” he cheerfully pleaded.

She kept on him a moment, through her glasses and through his own, a certain pleasant pointedness. “Ah no, you’re not! You’re not in the least, thank goodness! If you had been we shouldn’t so soon have found ourselves here together. I think,” she comfortably concluded, “you trust me.”

“I think I do!⁠—but that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I shouldn’t mind if I didn’t. It’s falling thus in twenty minutes so utterly into your hands. I dare say,” Strether continued, “it’s a sort of thing you’re thoroughly familiar with; but nothing more extraordinary has ever happened to me.”

She watched him with all her kindness. “That means simply that you’ve recognised me⁠—which is rather beautiful and rare. You see what I am.” As on this, however, he protested, with a good-humoured headshake, a resignation of any such claim, she had a moment of explanation. “If you’ll only come on further as you have come you’ll at any rate make out. My own fate has been too many for me, and I’ve succumbed to it. I’m a general guide⁠—to ‘Europe,’ don’t you know? I wait for people⁠—I put them through. I pick them up⁠—I set them down. I’m a sort of superior ‘courier-maid.’ I’m a companion at large. I take people, as I’ve told you, about. I never sought it⁠—it has come to me. It has been my fate, and one’s fate one accepts. It’s a dreadful thing to have to say, in so wicked a world, but I verily believe that, such as you see me, there’s nothing I don’t know. I know all the shops and the prices⁠—but I know worse things still. I bear on my back the huge load of our national consciousness, or, in other words⁠—for it comes to that⁠—of our nation itself. Of what is our nation composed but of the men and women individually on my shoulders? I don’t do it, you know, for any particular advantage. I don’t do it, for instance⁠—some people do, you know⁠—for money.”

Strether could only listen and wonder and weigh his chance. “And yet, affected as you are then to so many of your clients, you can scarcely be said to do it for love.” He waited a moment. “How do we reward you?”

She had her own hesitation, but “You don’t!” she finally returned, setting him again in motion. They went on, but in a few 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.