pg432 [118]
"Well," said Strether, "the way she has spoken for you, all the same—so far as I've given her a chance—has only made me feel how much she wishes to keep you. If you make nothing of that I don't see why you wanted me to listen to her."
"Why my dear man," Chad exclaimed, "I make everything of it! How can you doubt—?"
"I doubt only because you come to me this morning with your signal to start."
Chad stared, then gave a laugh. "And isn't my signal to start just what you've been waiting for?"
Strether debated; he took another turn. "This last month I've been awaiting, I think, more than anything else, the message I have here."
"You mean you've been afraid of it?"
"Well, I was doing my business in my own way. And I suppose your present announcement," Strether went on, "isn't merely the result of your sense of what I've expected. Otherwise you wouldn't have put me in relation—" But he paused, pulling up.
At this Chad rose. "Ah HER wanting me not to go has nothing to do with it! It's only because she's afraid—afraid of the way that, over there, I may get caught. But her fear's groundless."
He had met again his companion's sufficiently searching look. "Are you tired of her?"
Chad gave him in reply to this, with a movement of the head, the strangest slow smile he had ever had from him. "Never."
It had immediately, on Strether's imagination, so deep and soft an effect that our friend could only for the moment keep it before him. "Never?"
"Never," Chad obligingly and serenely repeated.
It made his companion take several more steps. "Then YOU'RE not afraid."
"Afraid to go?"
Strether pulled up again. "Afraid to stay."
The young man looked brightly amazed. "You want me now to 'stay'?"
"If I don't immediately sail the Pococks will immediately come out. That's what I mean," said Strether, "by your mother's ultimatum ."
Chad showed a still livelier, but not an alarmed interest. "She has turned on Sarah and Jim?"
Strether joined him for an instant in the vision. "Oh and you may be sure Mamie. THAT'S whom she's turning on."
This also Chad saw—he laughed out. "Mamie—to corrupt me?"
"Ah," said Strether, "she's very charming."
"So you've already more than once told me. I should like to see her."
Something happy and easy, something above all unconscious, in the way he said this, brought home again to his companion the facility of his attitude and the enviability of his state. "See her then by all means. And consider too," Strether went on, "that you really give your sister a lift in letting her come to you. You give her a couple of months of Paris, which she hasn't seen, if I'm not mistaken, since just after she was married, and which I'm sure she wants but the pretext to visit."
Chad listened, but with all his own knowledge of the world. "She has had it, the pretext, these several years, yet she has never taken it."
"Do you mean YOU?" Strether after an instant enquired.
"Certainly—the lone exile. And whom do you mean?" said Chad.
"Oh I mean ME. I'm her pretext. That is—for it comes to the same thing—I'm your mother's."
"Then why," Chad asked, "doesn't Mother come herself?"
His friend gave him a long look. "Should you like her to?" And as he for the moment said nothing: "It's perfectly open to you to cable for her."
Chad continued to think. "Will she come if I do?"
"Quite possibly. But try, and you'll see."
"Why don't YOU try?" Chad after a moment asked.
"Because I don't want to."
Chad thought. "Don't desire her presence here?"
Strether faced the question, and his answer was the more emphatic. "Don't put it off, my dear boy, on ME!"
"Well—I see what you mean. I'm sure you'd behave beautifully but you DON'T want to see her. So I won't play you that trick.'
"Ah," Strether declared, "I shouldn't call it a trick. You've a perfect right, and it would be perfectly straight of you." Then he added in a different tone: "You'd have moreover, in the person of Madame de Vionnet, a very interesting