THE AMBASSADORS. Генри Джеймс

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement. “Isn’t it a reason the more? If what you’re afraid of is the injury for me — my being seen to walk off with a gentleman who has to ask who I am — I assure you I don’t in the least mind. Here, however,” she continued, “is my card, and as I find there’s something else again I have to say at the office, you can just study it during the moment I leave you.”

      She left him after he had taken from her the small pasteboard she had extracted from her pocketbook, and he had extracted another from his own, to exchange with it, before she came back. He read thus the simple designation “Maria Gostrey,” to which was attached, in a corner of the card, with a number, the name of a street, presumably in Paris, without other appreciable identity than its foreignness. He put the card into his waistcoat pocket, keeping his own meanwhile in evidence; and as he leaned against the doorpost he met with the smile of a straying thought what the expanse before the hotel offered to his view. It was positively droll to him that he should already have Maria Gostrey, whoever she was — of which he hadn’t really the least idea — in a place of safe keeping. He had somehow an assurance that he should carefully preserve the little token he had just tucked in. He gazed with unseeing lingering eyes as he followed some of the implications of his act, asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify it as disloyal. It was prompt, it was possibly even premature, and there was little doubt of the expression of face the sight of it would have produced in a certain person. But if it was “wrong” — why then he had better not have come out at all. At this, poor man, had he already — and even before meeting Waymarsh — arrived. He had believed he had a limit, but the limit had been transcended within thirty-six hours. By how long a space on the plane of manners or even of morals, moreover, he felt still more sharply after Maria Gostrey had come back to him and with a gay decisive “So now — !” led him forth into the world. This counted, it struck him as he walked beside her with his overcoat on an arm, his umbrella under another and his personal pasteboard a little stiffly retained between forefinger and thumb, this struck him as really, in comparison, his introduction to things. It hadn’t been “Europe” at Liverpool, no — not even in the dreadful delightful impressive streets the night before — to the extent his present companion made it so. She hadn’t yet done that so much as when, after their walk had lasted a few minutes and he had had time to wonder if a couple of sidelong glances from her meant that he had best have put on gloves, she almost pulled him up with an amused challenge. “But why — fondly as it’s so easy to imagine your clinging to it — don’t you put it away? Or if it’s an inconvenience to you to carry it, one’s often glad to have one’s card back. The fortune one spends in them!”

      Then he saw both that his way of marching with his own prepared tribute had affected her as a deviation in one of those directions he couldn’t yet measure, and that she supposed this emblem to be still the one he had received from her. He accordingly handed her the card as if in restitution, but as soon as she had it she felt the difference and, with her eyes on it, stopped short for apology. “I like,” she observed, “your name.”

      “Oh,” he answered, “you won’t have heard of it!” Yet he had his reasons for not being sure but that she perhaps might.

      Ah it was but too visible! She read it over again as one who had never seen it. “‘Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether’” — she sounded it almost as freely as for any stranger. She repeated however that she liked it— “particularly the Lewis Lambert. It’s the name of a novel of Balzac’s.”

      “Oh I know that!” said Strether.

      “But the novel’s an awfully bad one.”

      “I know that too,” Strether smiled. To which he added with an irrelevance that was only superficial: “I come from Woollett Massachusetts.” It made her for some reason — the irrelevance or whatever — laugh. Balzac had described many cities, but hadn’t described Woollett Massachusetts. “You say that,” she returned, “as if you wanted one immediately to know the worst.”

      “Oh I think it’s a thing,” he said, “that you must already have made out. I feel it so that I certainly must look it, speak it, and, as people say there, ‘act’ it. It sticks out of me, and you knew surely for yourself as soon as you looked at me.”

      “The worst, you mean?”

      “Well, the fact of where I come from. There at any rate it IS; so that you won’t be able, if anything happens, to say I’ve not been straight with you.”

      “I see” — and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point he had made. “But what do you think of as happening?”

      Though he wasn’t shy — which was rather anomalous — Strether gazed about without meeting her eyes; a motion that was frequent with him in talk, yet of which his words often seemed not at all the effect. “Why that you should find me too hopeless.” With which they walked on again together while she answered, as they went, that the most “hopeless” of her countryfolk were in general precisely those she liked best. All sorts of other pleasant small things — small things that were yet large for him — flowered in the air of the occasion; but the bearing of the occasion itself on matters still remote concerns us too closely to permit us to multiply our illustrations. Two or three, however, in truth, we should perhaps regret to lose. The tortuous wall — girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands — wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English town and ordered English country. Too deep almost for words was the delight of these things to Strether; yet as deeply mixed with it were certain images of his inward picture. He had trod this walk in the far-off time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling it, only enriched it for present feeling and marked his renewal as a thing substantial enough to share. It was with Waymarsh he should have shared it, and he was now accordingly taking from him something that was his due. He looked repeatedly at his watch, and when he had done so for the fifth time Miss Gostrey took him up.

      “You’re doing something that you think not right.”

      It so touched the place that he quite changed colour and his laugh grew almost awkward. “Am I enjoying it as much as THAT?”

      “You’re not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought.”

      “I see” — he appeared thoughtfully to agree. “Great is my privilege.”

      “Oh it’s not your privilege! It has nothing to do with ME. It has to do with yourself. Your failure’s general.”

      “Ah there you are!” he laughed. “It’s the failure of Woollett. THAT’S general.”

      “The failure to enjoy,” Miss Gostrey explained, “is what I mean.”

      “Precisely. Woollett isn’t sure it ought to enjoy. If it were it would. But it hasn’t, poor thing,” Strether continued, “any one to show it how. It’s not like me. I have somebody.”

      They had stopped, in the afternoon sunshine — constantly pausing, in their stroll, for the sharper sense of what they saw — and Strether rested on one of the high sides of the old stony groove of the little rampart. He leaned back on this support with his face to the tower of the cathedral, now admirably commanded by their station, the high red-brown mass, square and subordinately spired and crocketed, retouched and restored, but charming to his long-sealed eyes and with the first swallows of the year weaving their flight all round it. Miss СКАЧАТЬ