The Ambassadors Part 38

"Oh 'do what they will'--! They won't do much; especially if Sarah hasn't more--well, more than one has yet made out--to give."

Madame de Vionnet weighed it. "Ah she has all her grace!" It was a statement over which, for a little, they could look at each other sufficiently straight, and though it produced no protest from Strether the effect was somehow as if he had treated it as a joke. "She may be persuasive and caressing with him; she may be eloquent beyond words.

She may get hold of him," she wound up--"well, as neither you nor I have."

"Yes, she MAY"--and now Strether smiled. "But he has spent all his time each day with Jim. He's still showing Jim round."

She visibly wondered. "Then how about Jim?"

Strether took a turn before he answered. "Hasn't he given you Jim?

Hasn't he before this 'done' him for you?" He was a little at a loss.

"Doesn't he tell you things?"

She hesitated. "No"--and their eyes once more gave and took. "Not as you do. You somehow make me see them--or at least feel them. And I haven't asked too much," she added; "I've of late wanted so not to worry him."

"Ah for that, so have I," he said with encouraging a.s.sent; so that--as if she had answered everything--they were briefly sociable on it. It threw him back on his other thought, with which he took another turn; stopping again, however, presently with something of a glow. "You see Jim's really immense. I think it will be Jim who'll do it."

She wondered. "Get hold of him?"

"No--just the other thing. Counteract Sarah's spell." And he showed now, our friend, how far he had worked it out. "Jim's intensely cynical."

"Oh dear Jim!" Madame de Vionnet vaguely smiled.

"Yes, literally--dear Jim! He's awful. What HE wants, heaven forgive him, is to help us."

"You mean"--she was eager--"help ME?"

"Well, Chad and me in the first place. But he throws you in too, though without as yet seeing you much. Only, so far as he does see you--if you don't mind--he sees you as awful."

"'Awful'?"--she wanted it all.

"A regular bad one--though of course of a tremendously superior kind.

Dreadful, delightful, irresistible."

"Ah dear Jim! I should like to know him. I MUST."

"Yes, naturally. But will it do? You may, you know," Strether suggested, "disappoint him."

She was droll and humble about it. "I can but try. But my wickedness then," she went on, "is my recommendation for him?"

"Your wickedness and the charms with which, in such a degree as yours, he a.s.sociates it. He understands, you see, that Chad and I have above all wanted to have a good time, and his view is simple and sharp.

Nothing will persuade him--in the light, that is, of my behaviour--that I really didn't, quite as much as Chad, come over to have one before it was too late. He wouldn't have expected it of me; but men of my age, at Woollett--and especially the least likely ones--have been noted as liable to strange outbreaks, belated uncanny clutches at the unusual, the ideal. It's an effect that a lifetime of Woollett has quite been observed as having; and I thus give it to you, in Jim's view, for what it's worth. Now his wife and his mother-in-law," Strether continued to explain, "have, as in honour bound, no patience with such phenomena, late or early--which puts Jim, as against his relatives, on the other side. Besides," he added, "I don't think he really wants Chad back. If Chad doesn't come--"

"He'll have"--Madame de Vionnet quite apprehended--"more of the free hand?"

"Well, Chad's the bigger man."

"So he'll work now, en dessous, to keep him quiet?"

"No--he won't 'work' at all, and he won't do anything en dessous. He's very decent and won't be a traitor in the camp. But he'll be amused with his own little view of our duplicity, he'll sniff up what he supposes to be Paris from morning till night, and he'll be, as to the rest, for Chad--well, just what he is."

She thought it over. "A warning?"

He met it almost with glee. "You ARE as wonderful as everybody says!"

And then to explain all he meant: "I drove him about for his first hour, and do you know what--all beautifully unconscious--he most put before me? Why that something like THAT is at bottom, as an improvement to his present state, as in fact the real redemption of it, what they think it may not be too late to make of our friend." With which, as, taking it in, she seemed, in her recurrent alarm, bravely to gaze at the possibility, he completed his statement. "But it IS too late. Thanks to you!"

It drew from her again one of her indefinite reflexions. "Oh 'me'--after all!"

He stood before her so exhilarated by his demonstration that he could fairly be jocular. "Everything's comparative. You're better than THAT."

"You"--she could but answer him--"are better than anything." But she had another thought. "WILL Mrs. Poc.o.c.k come to me?"

"Oh yes--she'll do that. As soon, that is, as my friend Waymarsh--HER friend now--leaves her leisure."

She showed an interest. "Is he so much her friend as that?"

"Why, didn't you see it all at the hotel?"

"Oh"--she was amused--"'all' is a good deal to say. I don't know--I forget. I lost myself in HER."

"You were splendid," Strether returned--"but 'all' isn't a good deal to say: it's only a little. Yet it's charming so far as it goes. She wants a man to herself."

"And hasn't she got you?"

"Do you think she looked at me--or even at you--as if she had?"

Strether easily dismissed that irony. "Every one, you see, must strike her as having somebody. You've got Chad--and Chad has got you."

"I see"--she made of it what she could. "And you've got Maria."

Well, he on his side accepted that. "I've got Maria. And Maria has got me. So it goes."

"But Mr. Jim--whom has he got?"

"Oh he has got--or it's as IF he had--the whole place."

"But for Mr. Waymarsh"--she recalled--"isn't Miss Barrace before any one else?"

He shook his head. "Miss Barrace is a raffinee, and her amus.e.m.e.nt won't lose by Mrs. Poc.o.c.k. It will gain rather--especially if Sarah triumphs and she comes in for a view of it."

"How well you know us!" Madame de Vionnet, at this, frankly sighed.

"No--it seems to me it's we that I know. I know Sarah--it's perhaps on that ground only that my feet are firm. Waymarsh will take her round while Chad takes Jim--and I shall be, I a.s.sure you delighted for both of them. Sarah will have had what she requires--she will have paid her tribute to the ideal; and he will have done about the same. In Paris it's in the air--so what can one do less? If there's a point that, beyond any other, Sarah wants to make, it's that she didn't come out to be narrow. We shall feel at least that."

"Oh," she sighed, "the quant.i.ty we seem likely to 'feel'! But what becomes, in these conditions, of the girl?"

"Of Mamie--if we're all provided? Ah for that," said Strether, "you can trust Chad."

"To be, you mean, all right to her?"