Mrs. Newsome

“ The sombre glow stared it at him till it fairly sounded out—“to save you, poor old man, to save you; to save you in spite of yourself.” Yet it was somehow just this communication that showed him to himself as more than ever lost. Still another result of it was to put before him as never yet that between his comrade and the interest represented by Sarah there was already a basis. Beyond all question now, yes: Waymarsh had been in occult relation with Mrs. Newsome—out, out it all came in the very effort of his face. ”

“ Newsome?"
"No—not Mrs. Newsome; since I understand you that it doesn't matter now what Mrs. Newsome hears. Hasn't she heard everything?"
"Practically—yes." He had thought a moment, but he went on. "You wish Mme. de Vionnet could hear me?"
"Mme. de Vionnet." She had come back to him. "She thinks just the contrary of what you say. That you judge her differently now."
He turned over the scene as the two women thus placed together for him seemed to give it. "She might have known———!"
"Might have known you don't?" Miss Gostrey asked, as he let it drop. ”

“ That possibility was now ever so much further from sight than on the eve of his arrival, and he perfectly felt that, should it come at all, it would have to be at best inconsequent and violent. He struck himself as a little nearer to it only when he asked himself what service, in such a life of utility, he was after all rendering Mrs. Newsome. When he wished to help himself to believe that he was still all right he reflected—and in fact with wonder—on the unimpaired frequency of their correspondence ”

“ What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man’s work in the world to do with red velvet bands? He wouldn’t for anything have so exposed himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he had none the less not only caught himself in the act—frivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpected—of liking it: he had in addition taken it as a starting-point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh lateral flights. The manner in which Mrs. Newsome’s throat was encircled suddenly represented for him, in an alien order, almost as many things as the manner in which Miss Gostrey’s was. ”

“ Strether promptly returned. “Mr. Newsome—who knew extraordinarily well what he was about—laid them down ten years ago.”
Oh well, Waymarsh seemed to indicate with a shake of his mane, that didn’t matter! “You’re fierce for the boom anyway.”
His friend weighed a moment in silence the justice of the charge. “I can scarcely be called fierce, I think, when I so freely take my chance of the possibility, the danger, of being influenced in a sense counter to Mrs. Newsome’s own feelings.”
Waymarsh gave this proposition a long hard look. “I see. You’re afraid yourself of being squared. ”

“ Newsome feels things.”
But she seemed doomed always to come back to doubt. “No one feels so much as you. No—not any one.”
“So much the worse then for every one. It’s very easy.”
They were by this time in the antechamber, still alone together, as she hadn’t rung for a servant. The antechamber was high and square, grave and suggestive too, a little cold and slippery even in summer, and with a few old prints that were precious, Strether divined, on the walls. ”

“ They’re very busy people and Mrs. Newsome in particular has a large full life. She’s moreover highly nervous—and not at all strong.”
“You mean she’s an American invalid?”
He carefully distinguished. “There’s nothing she likes less than to be called one, but she would consent to be one of those things, I think,” he laughed, “if it were the only way to be the other.”
“Consent to be an American in order to be an invalid?”
“No,” said Strether, “the other way round. She’s at any rate delicate sensitive high-strung. She puts so much of herself into everything—”
Ah Maria knew these things! ”

“ This promptitude—almost, as he might have thought, this precipitation, gave him a brief drop; but he came up again. “Mrs. Newsome, I think, is handsome, though she’s not of course, with a son of twenty-eight and a daughter of thirty, in her very first youth. She married, however, extremely young.”
“And is wonderful,” Miss Gostrey asked, “for her age?”
Strether seemed to feel with a certain disquiet the pressure of it. “I don’t say she’s wonderful. Or rather,” he went on the next moment, “I do say it. It’s exactly what she is—wonderful. ”

“ Strether had a pause. “The difficulty’s Jim. Jim’s the note of home.”
She debated. “Ah surely not the note of Mrs. Newsome.”
But he had it all. “The note of the home for which Mrs. Newsome wants him—the home of the business. Jim stands, with his little legs apart, at the door of that tent; and Jim is, frankly speaking, extremely awful.”
Maria stared. “And you in, you poor thing, for your evening with him?”
“Oh he’s all right for me!” Strether laughed. “Any one’s good enough for me. But Sarah shouldn’t, all the same, have brought him. She doesn’t appreciate him.” ”

“ He had announced himself—six months before; had written out, at least, that Chad was not to be surprised should he see him some day turn up. Chad had thereupon, in a few words of rather carefully colourless answer, offered him a general welcome; and Strether, ruefully reflecting that he might have understood the warning as a hint to hospitality, a bid for an invitation, had fallen back upon silence as the corrective most to his own taste. He had asked Mrs. Newsome moreover not to announce him again; he had so distinct an opinion on attacking his job, should he attack it at all, in his own way. ”

“ Had ever a man, he had finally fallen into the way of asking himself, lost so much and even done so much for so little? There had been particular reasons why all yesterday, beyond other days, he should have had in one ear this cold enquiry. His name on the green cover, where he had put it for Mrs. Newsome, expressed him doubtless just enough to make the world—the world as distinguished, both for more and for less, from Woollett—ask who he was. ”

“ Newsome wants to marry the young lady he hasn’t already done it or hasn’t been prepared with some statement to you about it. And if he both wants to marry her and is on good terms with them why isn’t he ‘free’?”
Strether, responsively, wondered indeed. “Perhaps the girl herself doesn’t like him.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ He made no more of it than that, and Strether, so far as Jim was concerned, desired to make no more. Only Strether's imagination, as always, worked, and he asked himself if this side of life were not somehow connected, for those who figured on it, with the fact of marriage. Would his relation to it, had he married ten years before, have become now the same as Pocock's? Might it even become the same should he marry in a few months? Should he ever know himself as much out of the question for Mrs. Newsome as Jim knew himself—in a dim way—for Mrs. Jim? ”

“ Miss Gostrey, however, wouldn’t let it depend on anything—wouldn’t have it, and wouldn’t want him, at any price. “It suits my book,” she said, “that he should be impossible; and it suits it still better,” she more imaginatively added, “that Mrs. Newsome doesn’t know he is.”
Strether, in consequence, had to take it from her, but he fell back on something else. “I’ll tell you who does really know.”
“Mr. Waymarsh? Never!”
“Never indeed. I’m not always thinking of Mr. Waymarsh; in fact I find now I never am.” Then he mentioned the person as if there were a good deal in it. “Mamie.” ”

“ Strether assented to this proposition with full lucidity, his companion's plural pronoun, which stood all for Mrs. Newsome and her daughter, having no ambiguity for him. There was nothing, apparently, to stand for Mamie and Jim; and this added to our friend's sense of Chad's knowing what he thought.
"But they've made up their minds to the opposite—that you can't go on as you are."
"No," Chad continued in the same way; "they won't have it for a minute." ”

“ Jim bethought himself. "Isn't it what you've written that has made Mrs. Newsome pack us off? That, at least, and Chad's still hanging on."
Strether made a reflection of his own. "I see. That she should do something was, no doubt, inevitable, and your wife has therefore, of course, come out to act."
"Oh yes," Jim concurred—"to act. But Sally comes out to act, you know," he lucidly added, "every time she leaves the house. She never comes out but she does act. She's acting moreover now for her mother, and that fixes the scale." ”

“ He had struck himself at the hotel, before Sarah and Waymarsh, as being in her boat; but where on earth was he now? This question was in the air till her own lips quenched it with another. "And do you suppose he—who loves her so—would do anything reckless or cruel?"
He wondered what he supposed. "Do you mean your young man———?"
"I mean yours. I mean Mr. Newsome." It flashed for Strether the next moment a finer light, and the light deepened as she went on. "He takes, thank God, the truest, tenderest interest in her." ”

“ Newsome had occurred in consequence. Mme. de Vionnet had by her visit held up the torch to these truths, and what now lingered in poor Maria's face was the somewhat smoky light of the scene between them. If the light, however, was not, as we have hinted, the glow of joy, the reasons for this also were perhaps discernible to Strether even through the blur cast over them by his natural modesty. She had held herself for months with a firm hand; she had not interfered on any chance—and chances were specious enough—that she might interfere to her profit. ”

“ Newsome, away off with her finger on the pulse of Massachusetts, should yet be no less intensely than circuitously present through the whole thing, should be no less felt as to be reckoned with than the most direct exhibition, the finest portrayal at first hand could make her, such a sign of artistic good faith, I say, once it’s unmistakeably there, takes on again an actuality not too much impaired by the comparative dimness of the particular success. ”

“ He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long when once he had reflected that he would have been silly, in this case, with Maria Gostrey and little Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet and little Jeanne, with Lambert Strether, in fine, and above all with Chad Newsome himself. Wouldn’t it be found to have made more for reality to be silly with these persons than sane with Sarah and Jim? ”

“ I do judge—I have judged. A woman can't. You're safe—with every right to be. You'd be much happier if you'd only believe it."
Strether was silent a little; then he found himself speaking with a cynicism of confidence of which, even at the moment, the sources were strange to him. "I try to believe it. But it's a marvel," he exclaimed, "how you already get at it!"
"Oh," she was able to say, "remember how much I was, through Mr. Newsome—before I saw you—on the way to it. He thinks everything of your strength." ”

“ But she further knew, or would know very soon, that, again conscientiously, he hadn’t repeated his visit; and that when Chad had asked him on the Countess’s behalf—Strether made her out vividly, with a thought at the back of his head, a Countess—if he wouldn’t name a day for dining with her, he had replied lucidly: “Thank you very much—impossible.” He had begged the young man would present his excuses and had trusted him to understand that it couldn’t really strike one as quite the straight thing. He hadn’t reported to Mrs. Newsome that he had promised to “save” Madame de Vionnet ”

“ What remains is with himself. I’ve had my rest, my amusement and refreshment; I’ve had, as we say at Woollett, a lovely time. Nothing in it has been more lovely than this happy meeting with you—in these fantastic conditions to which you’ve so delightfully consented. I’ve a sense of success. It’s what I wanted. 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. ”

“ The young man had met Chad, and he got a friend to approach him—as having a decent interest in us. Mr. Newsome looked well before he leaped; he kept beautifully quiet and satisfied himself fully; then only he spoke. It’s what has for some time past occupied us. It seems as if it were what would do; really, really all one could wish. There are only two or three points to be settled—they depend on her father. But this time I think we’re safe.”
Strether, consciously gaping a little, had fairly hung upon her lips. ”

“ He had been to Notre Dame with Waymarsh, he had been there with Miss Gostrey, he had been there with Chad Newsome, and had found the place, even in company, such a refuge from the obsession of his problem that, with renewed pressure from that source, he had not unnaturally recurred to a remedy meeting the case, for the moment, so indirectly, no doubt, but so relievingly. He was conscious enough that it was only for the moment, but good moments—if he could call them good—still had their value for a man who by this time struck himself as living almost disgracefully from hand to mouth. ”