Charles Strong Strether

“ She has only to know what you've done to him never again to raise a finger."
"I've done," said Strether, "what I could—one can't do more. He protests his devotion and his horror. But I'm not sure I've saved him. He protests too much. He asks how one can dream of his being tired. But he has all life before him." ”

“ Strether hesitated, but it came out. “Not enough for your mother!” Spoken, however, it sounded a trifle odd—the effect of which was that Chad broke into a laugh. Strether, at this, succumbed as well, though with extreme brevity. “Permit us to have still our theory. But if you are so free and so strong you’re inexcusable. ”

“ I’m fantastic and ridiculous—I don’t explain myself even to myself. How can they then,” Strether asked, “understand me? So I don’t quarrel with them.”
“I see. They quarrel,” said Chad rather comfortably, “with us.” Strether noted once more the comfort, but his young friend had already gone on. “I should feel greatly ashamed, all the same, if I didn’t put it before you again that you ought to think, after all, tremendously well. I mean before giving up beyond recall—” With which insistence, as from a certain delicacy, dropped.
Ah but Strether wanted it. “Say it all, say it all.” ”

“ He was a success, Waymarsh, in spite of overwork, or prostration, of sensible shrinkage, of his wife’s letters and of his not liking Europe. Strether would have reckoned his own career less futile had he been able to put into it anything so handsome as so much fine silence. One might one’s self easily have left Mrs. Waymarsh; and one would assuredly have paid one’s tribute to the ideal in covering with that attitude the derision of having been left by her. Her husband had held his tongue and had made a large income; and these were in especial the achievements as to which Strether envied him. ”

“ The evil temper of Sir Charles was so strong within him, that, desirous only of vexing Juxon to the uttermost, he replied with a sneer, “You have taken care to secure yourself a friend in the enemy’s camp ”

“ Strelsa flushed and lifted her purple-gray eyes to meet the little green ones scanning her slyly.
"I am sorry," she said, "but I couldn't discuss such a thing, you see. Don't you see I can't, dear Mrs. Sprowl?"
"Pooh! Rubbish! Anybody can discuss anything," rejoined the old lady with impersonal and boisterous informality. "I'm fond of you. Everybody knows it. I'm fond of Sir Charles. He's a fine figure of a man. You match him in everything, except wealth. ”

“ His friend listened with respect to his enumeration of these disparities; then she disposed of them at a stroke. “Those things are nothing when a woman’s hit. It’s very awful. She was hit.”
Strether, on his side, did justice to that plea. “Oh of course I saw she was hit. That she was hit was what we were busy with; that she was hit was our great affair. But somehow I couldn’t think of her as down in the dust. And as put there by our little Chad!”
“Yet wasn’t ‘your’ little Chad just your miracle?”
Strether admitted it. “Of course I moved among miracles. It was all phantasmagoric. ”

“ Strether, for a moment, said nothing; then he spoke gravely, with a return of his dryness. "Oh, if you didn't do her justice———!"
"I should be a beast, eh?"
Strether devoted no time to saying what he would be; that, visibly, would take them far. If there was nothing for it but to repeat, however, repetition was no mistake. "You owe her everything—very much more than she can ever owe you. You've in other words duties to her of the most positive sort; and I don't see what other duties—as the others are presented to you—can be held to go before them."
Chad looked at him with a smile. ”

“ It was at all events over the shop-windows that he made, with Waymarsh, most free; though it would have been easier had not the latter most sensibly yielded to the appeal of the merely useful trades. He pierced with his sombre detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers, while Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped letter-paper and in smart neckties. Strether was in fact recurrently shameless in the presence of the tailors, though it was just over the heads of the tailors that his countryman most loftily looked. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Strether echoed again with a rueful reflexion. How many nosegays had her present converser sent?
“Innocent flowers,” she pursued, “as much as he likes. And he sends me splendours; he knows all the best places—he has found them for himself; he’s wonderful.”
“He hasn’t told them to me,” her friend smiled, “he has a life of his own.” But Strether had swung back to the consciousness that for himself after all it never would have done. Waymarsh hadn’t Mrs. Waymarsh in the least to consider, whereas Lambert Strether had constantly, in the inmost honour of his thoughts, to consider Mrs. Newsome. ”

“ This little effect was sudden and rapid, so rapid that Strether's sense of it was separate only for an instant from a sharp start of his own. He too had, within the minute, taken in something, taken in that he knew the lady whose parasol, shifting as if to hide her face, made so fine a pink point in the shining scene. It was too prodigious, a chance in a million; but, if he knew the lady, the gentleman, who still showed his back and kept his distance, the gentleman, the coatless hero of the idyl, who had responded to her start, was, to match the marvel, none other than Chad. ”

“ Chad returned. “Sally took a place, certainly; but it was never, I saw from the first moment, to be yours. No one—with us—will ever take yours. It wouldn’t be possible.”
“Ah of course,” sighed Strether, “I knew it. I believe you’re right. No one in the world, I imagine, was ever so portentously solemn. ”

“ It stirred in her friend a sceptical echo which was at the same time the protest of the faith of years. “Waymarsh stupid?”
“Compared with you.”
Strether had still his eyes on the jeweller’s front, and he waited a moment to answer. “He’s a success of a kind that I haven’t approached.”
“Do you mean he has made money?”
“He makes it—to my belief. And I,” said Strether, “though with a back quite as bent, have never made anything. I’m a perfectly equipped failure.”
He feared an instant she’d ask him if he meant he was poor ”

“ It was a part of the deep impression for Strether, and not the least of the deep interest, that they could so communicate—that Chad, in particular, could let her know he left it to her. He habitually left things to others, as Strether was so well aware, and it in fact came over our friend in these meditations that there had been as yet no such vivid illustration of his famous knowing how to live. ”

“ Strelsa coloured: "Everything worthy is founded on Truth," she said.
"That sounds like Tupper or a copy-book," said [Pg 349] Molly, laughing. "For surely those profound reflections never emanated originally from you or Rix—did they?"
Strelsa, much annoyed, picked up the field glasses and levelled them on the river.
Sir Charles was out there in a launch with Chrysos Lacy. Chrysos fished and Sir Charles baited her hook. ”

“ Chad had risked it jocosely, but Strether remained blank. “Enough?”
“If one should wish to live on one’s accumulations?” After which, however, as his friend appeared cold to the joke, the young man as easily dropped it. “Of course I really never forget, night or day, what I owe her. I owe her everything. I give you my word of honour,” he frankly rang out, “that I’m not a bit tired of her.” Strether at this only gave him a stare: the way youth could express itself was again and again a wonder. ”

“ Meanwhile, however, the chance he had allowed for—the chance of being seen, in time, from the balcony—had become a fact. Two or three of the windows stood open to the violet air; and, before Strether had cut the knot by crossing, a young man had come out and looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and tossed the match over, and then, resting on the rail, had given himself up, while he smoked, to watching the life below. His arrival contributed, in its order, to keeping Strether in position; the result of which, in turn, was that Strether soon felt himself noticed. ”

“ My getting all this good is what Chad has waited for, and I gather that if I'm ready to go he's the same."
She shook her head with a finer, deeper wisdom. "You're not ready. If you're ready, why did you write to Mrs. Newsome in the sense you've mentioned to me?"
Strether considered. "I shan't go before I hear from her. You're too much afraid of her," he added.
It produced between them a long look from which neither shrank. "I don't think you believe that—believe I've not really reason to fear her."
"She's capable of great generosity," Strether presently declared. ”

“ And he was quite right," said Strether. "It would certainly have been nicer. Even when a thing's already nice there mostly is some other thing that would have been nicer—or as to which we wonder if it wouldn't. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest. “It isn’t so much your being ‘right’—it’s your horrible sharp eye for what makes you so.”
“Oh but you’re just as bad yourself. You can’t resist me when I point that out.”
She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away. “I can’t indeed resist you.”
“Then there we are!” said Strether. ”

“ There was an experience on his interlocutor’s part that looked out at him from under the displaced hat, and that looked out moreover by a force of its own, the deep fact of its quantity and quality, and not through Chad’s intending bravado or swagger. That was then the way men marked out by women were—and also the men by whom the women were doubtless in turn sufficiently distinguished. It affected Strether for thirty seconds as a relevant truth, a truth which, however, the next minute, had fallen into its relation. ”

“ That’s when a woman pities.”
“Ah but I do help you!” she cheerfully insisted.
Again he looked at her hard, and then after a pause: “No you don’t!”
Her tortoise-shell, on its long chain, rattled down. “I help you with Sitting Bull. That’s a good deal.”
“Oh that, yes.” But Strether hesitated. “Do you mean he talks of me?”
“So that I have to defend you? No, never.’
“I see,” Strether mused. “It’s too deep.”
“That’s his only fault,” she returned—“that everything, with him, is too deep. He has depths of silence—which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. ”

“ They had gone to wait together in the garden for the dressing of the meal, and Strether found her more suggestive than ever “Well, what?”
“Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations—unless indeed we call it a simplicity!—that the situation has to wind itself up. They want to go back.”
“And you want them to go!” Strether gaily concluded.
“I always want them to go, and I send them as fast as I can.’
“Oh I know—you take them to Liverpool.”
“Any port will serve in a storm. I’m—with all my other functions—an agent for repatriation. I want to re-people our stricken country. ”

“ Strether felt for a moment as if Sarah were actually walking up and down outside. Wasn’t she hanging about the porte-cochère while her friend thus summarily opened a way? Strether would meet her but to take it, and everything would be for the best in the best of possible worlds. He had never so much known what any one meant as, in the light of this demonstration, he knew what Mrs. Newsome did. It had reached Waymarsh from Sarah, but it had reached Sarah from her mother, and there was no break in the chain by which it reached him. ”

“ Strether's being an American who can be contrasted with Europeans, however, does not exhaust his function. He stands also for a common enough human type, the individual brought up in a limited community who discovers too late, or almost too late, what richness, what content, what joy might have awaited him in some fuller existence. "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to," Strether says in a speech which Henry James himself pointed out to be the essence of The Ambassadors. "It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. ”

“ Strether made out in this quick ray that a Pagan was perhaps, at the pass they had come to, the thing most wanted at Woollett. They’d be able to do with one—a good one; he’d find an opening—yes; and Strether’s imagination even now prefigured and accompanied the first appearance there of the rousing personage. He had only the slight discomfort of feeling, as the young man turned away from the lamp, that his thought had in the momentary silence possibly been guessed. “Well, I’ve no doubt,” said Chad, “you’ve come near enough. ”