THE AMBASSADORS. Генри Джеймс

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СКАЧАТЬ I’m afraid of you!” he cheerfully pleaded.

      She kept on him a moment, through her glasses and through his own, a certain pleasant pointedness. “Ah no, you’re not! You’re not in the least, thank goodness! If you had been we shouldn’t so soon have found ourselves here together. I think,” she comfortably concluded, “you trust me.”

      “I think I do! — but that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I shouldn’t mind if I didn’t. It’s falling thus in twenty minutes so utterly into your hands. I dare say,” Strether continued, “it’s a sort of thing you’re thoroughly familiar with; but nothing more extraordinary has ever happened to me.”

      She watched him with all her kindness. “That means simply that you’ve recognised me — which IS rather beautiful and rare. You see what I am.” As on this, however, he protested, with a goodhumoured headshake, a resignation of any such claim, she had a moment of explanation. “If you’ll only come on further as you HAVE come you’ll at any rate make out. My own fate has been too many for me, and I’ve succumbed to it. I’m a general guide — to ‘Europe,’ don’t you know? I wait for people — I put them through. I pick them up — I set them down. I’m a sort of superior ‘courier-maid.’ I’m a companion at large. I take people, as I’ve told you, about. I never sought it — it has come to me. It has been my fate, and one’s fate one accepts. It’s a dreadful thing to have to say, in so wicked a world, but I verily believe that, such as you see me, there’s nothing I don’t know. I know all the shops and the prices — but I know worse things still. 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.” He waited a moment. “How do we reward you?”

      She had her own hesitation, but “You don’t!” she finally returned, setting him again in motion. They went on, but in a few minutes, though while still thinking over what she had said, he once more took out his watch; mechanically, unconsciously and as if made nervous by the mere exhilaration of what struck him as her strange and cynical wit. He looked at the hour without seeing it, and then, on something again said by his companion, had another pause. “You’re really in terror of him.”

      He smiled a smile that he almost felt to be sickly. “Now you can see why I’m afraid of you.”

      “Because I’ve such illuminations? Why they’re all for your help! It’s what I told you,” she added, “just now. You feel as if this were wrong.”

      He fell back once more, settling himself against the parapet as if to hear more about it. “Then get me out!”

      Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the appeal, but, as if it were a question of immediate action, she visibly considered. “Out of waiting for him? — of seeing him at all?”

      “Oh no — not that,” said poor Strether, looking grave. “I’ve got to wait for him — and I want very much to see him. But out of the terror. You did put your finger on it a few minutes ago. It’s general, but it avails itself of particular occasions. That’s what it’s doing for me now. I’m always considering something else; something else, I mean, than the thing of the moment. The obsession of the other thing is the terror. I’m considering at present for instance something else than YOU.”

      She listened with charming earnestness. “Oh you oughtn’t to do that!”

      “It’s what I admit. Make it then impossible.”

      She continued to think. “Is it really an ‘order’ from you? — that I shall take the job? WILL you give yourself up?”

      Poor Strether heaved his sigh. “If I only could! But that’s the deuce of it — that I never can. No — I can’t.”

      She wasn’t, however, discouraged. “But you want to at least?”

      “Oh unspeakably!”

      “Ah then, if you’ll try!” — and she took over the job, as she had called it, on the spot. “Trust me!” she exclaimed; and the action of this, as they retraced their steps, was presently to make him pass his hand into her arm in the manner of a benign dependent paternal old person who wishes to be “nice” to a younger one. If he drew it out again indeed as they approached the inn this may have been because, after more talk had passed between them, the relation of age, or at least of experience — which, for that matter, had already played to and fro with some freedom — affected him as incurring a readjustment. It was at all events perhaps lucky that they arrived in sufficiently separate fashion within range of the hotel-door. The young lady they had left in the glass cage watched as if she had come to await them on the threshold. At her side stood a person equally interested, by his attitude, in their return, and the effect of the sight of whom was instantly to determine for Strether another of those responsive arrests that we have had so repeatedly to note. He left it to Miss Gostrey to name, with the fine full bravado, as it almost struck him, of her “Mr. Waymarsh!” what was to have been, what — he more than ever felt as his short stare of suspended welcome took things in — would have been, but for herself, his doom. It was already upon him even at that distance — Mr. Waymarsh was for HIS part joyless.

Chapter II

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      He had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that Waymarsh, even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own prompt and lucid allusions and enquiries, by their having publicly partaken of dinner in her company, and by another stroll, to which she was not a stranger, out into the town to look at the cathedral by moonlight — it was a blank that the resident of Milrose, though admitting acquaintance with the Munsters, professed himself unable to fill. He had no recollection of Miss Gostrey, and two or three questions that she put to him about those members of his circle had, to Strether’s observation, the same effect he himself had already more directly felt — the effect of appearing to place all knowledge, for the time, on this original woman’s side. It interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such relation for her with his friend as there could possibly be a question of, and it particularly struck him that they were to be marked altogether in Waymarsh’s quarter. This added to his own sense of having gone far with her — gave him an early illustration of a much shorter course. There was a certitude he immediately grasped — a conviction that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever degree of acquaintance, to profit by her.

      There had been after the first interchange among the three a talk of some five minutes in the hall, and then the two men had adjourned to the garden, Miss Gostrey for the time disappearing. Strether in due course accompanied his friend to the room he had bespoken and had, before going out, scrupulously visited; where at the end of another half-hour he had no less discreetly left him. On leaving him he repaired straight to his own room, but with the prompt effect of feeling the compass of that chamber resented by his condition. There he enjoyed at once the first consequence of their reunion. A place was too small for him after it that had seemed large enough before. He had awaited it with something he would have been sorry, have been almost ashamed not to recognise as emotion, yet with a tacit assumption at the same time that emotion would in the event find itself relieved. The actual oddity СКАЧАТЬ