The Ambassadors Part 50

"True enough; but I've got a certain quant.i.ty," Chad returned after a moment. "Whereas you, my dear man, you--"

"I can't be at all said"--Strether took him up--"to have a 'quant.i.ty'

certain or uncertain? Very true. Still, I shan't starve."

"Oh you mustn't STARVE!" Chad pacifically emphasised; and so, in the pleasant conditions, they continued to talk; though there was, for that matter, a pause in which the younger companion might have been taken as weighing again the delicacy of his then and there promising the elder some provision against the possibility just mentioned. This, however, he presumably thought best not to do, for at the end of another minute they had moved in quite a different direction. Strether had broken in by returning to the subject of Chad's pa.s.sage with Sarah and enquiring if they had arrived, in the event, at anything in the nature of a "scene." To this Chad replied that they had on the contrary kept tremendously polite; adding moreover that Sally was after all not the woman to have made the mistake of not being. "Her hands are a good deal tied, you see. I got so, from the first," he sagaciously observed, "the start of her."

"You mean she has taken so much from you?"

"Well, I couldn't of course in common decency give less: only she hadn't expected, I think, that I'd give her nearly so much. And she began to take it before she knew it."

"And she began to like it," said Strether, "as soon as she began to take it!"

"Yes, she has liked it--also more than she expected." After which Chad observed: "But she doesn't like ME. In fact she hates me."

Strether's interest grew. "Then why does she want you at home?"

"Because when you hate you want to triumph, and if she should get me neatly stuck there she WOULD triumph."

Strether followed afresh, but looking as he went. "Certainly--in a manner. But it would scarce be a triumph worth having if, once entangled, feeling her dislike and possibly conscious in time of a certain quant.i.ty of your own, you should on the spot make yourself unpleasant to her."

"Ah," said Chad, "she can bear ME--could bear me at least at home. It's my being there that would be her triumph. She hates me in Paris."

"She hates in other words--"

"Yes, THAT'S it!"--Chad had quickly understood this understanding; which formed on the part of each as near an approach as they had yet made to naming Madame de Vionnet. The limitations of their distinctness didn't, however, prevent its fairly lingering in the air that it was this lady Mrs. Poc.o.c.k hated. It added one more touch moreover to their established recognition of the rare intimacy of Chad's a.s.sociation with her. He had never yet more twitched away the last light veil from this phenomenon than in presenting himself as confounded and submerged in the feeling she had created at Woollett.

"And I'll tell you who hates me too," he immediately went on.

Strether knew as immediately whom he meant, but with as prompt a protest. "Ah no! Mamie doesn't hate--well," he caught himself in time--"anybody at all. Mamie's beautiful."

Chad shook his head. "That's just why I mind it. She certainly doesn't like me."

"How much do you mind it? What would you do for her?"

"Well, I'd like her if she'd like me. Really, really," Chad declared.

It gave his companion a moment's pause. "You asked me just now if I don't, as you said, 'care' about a certain person. You rather tempt me therefore to put the question in my turn. Don't YOU care about a certain other person?"

Chad looked at him hard in the lamplight of the window. "The difference is that I don't want to."

Strether wondered. "'Don't want' to?"

"I try not to--that is I HAVE tried. I've done my best. You can't be surprised," the young man easily went on, "when you yourself set me on it. I was indeed," he added, "already on it a little; but you set me harder. It was six weeks ago that I thought I had come out."

Strether took it well in. "But you haven't come out!"

"I don't know--it's what I WANT to know," said Chad. "And if I could have sufficiently wanted--by myself--to go back, I think I might have found out."

"Possibly"--Strether considered. "But all you were able to achieve was to want to want to! And even then," he pursued, "only till our friends there came. Do you want to want to still?" As with a sound half-dolorous, half-droll and all vague and equivocal, Chad buried his face for a little in his hands, rubbing it in a whimsical way that amounted to an evasion, he brought it out more sharply: "DO you?"

Chad kept for a time his att.i.tude, but at last he looked up, and then abruptly, "Jim IS a d.a.m.ned dose!" he declared.

"Oh I don't ask you to abuse or describe or in any way p.r.o.nounce on your relatives; I simply put it to you once more whether you're NOW ready. You say you've 'seen.' Is what you've seen that you can't resist?"

Chad gave him a strange smile--the nearest approach he had ever shown to a troubled one. "Can't you make me NOT resist?"

"What it comes to," Strether went on very gravely now and as if he hadn't heard him, "what it comes to is that more has been done for you, I think, than I've ever seen done--attempted perhaps, but never so successfully done--by one human being for another."

"Oh an immense deal certainly"--Chad did it full justice. "And you yourself are adding to it."

It was without heeding this either that his visitor continued. "And our friends there won't have it."

"No, they simply won't."

"They demand you on the basis, as it were, of repudiation and ingrat.i.tude; and what has been the matter with me," Strether went on, "is that I haven't seen my way to working with you for repudiation."

Chad appreciated this. "Then as you haven't seen yours you naturally haven't seen mine. There it is." After which he proceeded, with a certain abruptness, to a sharp interrogation. "NOW do you say she doesn't hate me?"

Strether hesitated. "'She'--?"

"Yes--Mother. We called it Sarah, but it comes to the same thing."

"Ah," Strether objected, "not to the same thing as her hating YOU."

On which--though as if for an instant it had hung fire--Chad remarkably replied: "Well, if they hate my good friend, THAT comes to the same thing." It had a note of inevitable truth that made Strether take it as enough, feel he wanted nothing more. The young man spoke in it for his "good friend" more than he had ever yet directly spoken, confessed to such deep ident.i.ties between them as he might play with the idea of working free from, but which at a given moment could still draw him down like a whirlpool. And meanwhile he had gone on. "Their hating you too moreover--that also comes to a good deal."

"Ah," said Strether, "your mother doesn't."

Chad, however, loyally stuck to it--loyally, that is, to Strether. "She will if you don't look out."

"Well, I do look out. I am, after all, looking out. That's just why,"

our friend explained, "I want to see her again."

It drew from Chad again the same question. "To see Mother?"

"To see--for the present--Sarah."

"Ah then there you are! And what I don't for the life of me make out,"

Chad pursued with resigned perplexity, "is what you GAIN by it."

Oh it would have taken his companion too long to say! "That's because you have, I verily believe, no imagination. You've other qualities.

But no imagination, don't you see? at all."

"I dare say. I do see." It was an idea in which Chad showed interest.

"But haven't you yourself rather too much?"

"Oh RATHER--!" So that after an instant, under this reproach and as if it were at last a fact really to escape from, Strether made his move for departure.