The Ambassadors by Henry James (read people like a book .TXT) 📕

his heart always sank when the clouds of explanation gathered. His highest ingenuity was in keeping the sky of life clear of them. Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was in fact⁠—for anyone else⁠—explained. One went through the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life. A personal relation was a relation only so long as people either perfectly understood or, better still, didn’t care if they didn’t. From the moment they cared if they didn’t it was living by the sweat of one’s brow; and the sweat of one’s brow was just what one might buy one’s self off from by keeping the ground free of the wild weed of delusion. It easily grew too fast, and the Atlantic cable now alone could race with it. That agency would each day have testified for him to something that was not what Woollett had argued. He was not at this moment absolutely sure that the effect of the morrow’s⁠—or rather of the night’s⁠—appreciation of the crisis wouldn’t be to determine some brief missive. “Have at last seen him, but oh dear!”⁠—some temporary relief of that sort seemed to hover before him. It hovered somehow as preparing them all⁠—yet preparing them for what? If he might do so more luminously and cheaply he would tick out in four words: “Awfully old⁠—grey hair.” To this particular item in Chad’s appearance he constantly, during their mute half-hour, reverted; as if so very much more than he could have said had been involved in it. The most he could have said would have been: “If he’s going to make me feel young⁠—!” which indeed, however, carried with it quite enough. If Strether was to feel young, that is, it would be because Chad was to feel old; and an aged and hoary sinner had been no part of the scheme.

The question of Chadwick’s true time of life was, doubtless, what came up quickest after the adjournment of the two, when the play was over, to a café in the Avenue de l’Opéra. Miss Gostrey had in due course been perfect for such a step; she had known exactly what they wanted⁠—to go straight somewhere and talk; and Strether had even felt she had known what he wished to say and that he was arranging immediately to begin. She hadn’t pretended this, as she had pretended on the other hand, to have divined Waymarsh’s wish to extend to her an independent protection homeward; but Strether nevertheless found how, after he had Chad opposite to him at a small table in the brilliant halls that his companion straightway selected, sharply and easily discriminated from others, it was quite, to his mind, as if she heard him speak; as if, sitting up, a mile away, in the little apartment he knew, she would listen hard enough to catch. He found too that he liked that idea, and he wished that, by the same token, Mrs. Newsome might have caught as well. For what had above all been determined in him as a necessity of the first order was not to lose another hour, nor a fraction of one; was to advance, to overwhelm, with a rush. This was how he would anticipate⁠—by a night-attack, as might be⁠—any forced maturity that a crammed consciousness of Paris was likely to take upon itself to assert on behalf of the boy. He knew to the full, on what he had just extracted from Miss Gostrey, Chad’s marks of alertness; but they were a reason the more for not dawdling. If he was himself moreover to be treated as young he wouldn’t at all events be so treated before he should have struck out at least once. His arms might be pinioned afterwards, but it would have been left on record that he was fifty. The importance of this he had indeed begun to feel before they left the theatre; it had become a wild unrest, urging him to seize his chance. He could scarcely wait for it as they went; he was on the verge of the indecency of bringing up the question in the street; he fairly caught himself going on⁠—so he afterwards invidiously named it⁠—as if there would be for him no second chance should the present be lost. Not till, on the purple divan before the perfunctory bock, he had brought out the words themselves, was he sure, for that matter, that the present would be saved.

Book IV I

“I’ve come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither more nor less, and take you straight home; so you’ll be so good as immediately and favourably to consider it!”⁠—Strether, face to face with Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone. For Chad’s receptive attitude was that of a person who had been gracefully quiet while the messenger at last reaching him has run a mile through the dust. During some seconds after he had spoken Strether felt as if he had made some such exertion; he was not even certain that the perspiration wasn’t on his brow. It was the kind of consciousness for which he had to thank the look that, while the strain lasted, the young man’s eyes gave him. They reflected⁠—and the deuce of the thing was that they reflected really with a sort of shyness of kindness⁠—his momentarily disordered state; which fact brought on in its turn for our friend the dawn of a fear that Chad might simply “take it out”⁠—take everything out⁠—in being sorry for him. Such a fear, any fear, was unpleasant. But everything was unpleasant; it was odd how everything had suddenly turned so. This however was no reason for letting the least thing go. Strether had the next minute proceeded as roundly as if with an advantage to follow up. “Of course