The Ambassadors by Henry James Read Free Book Online

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 Gostrey lingered near him, full of
an air, to which she more and more justified her right, of
understanding the effect of things. She quite concurred. "You've
indeed somebody." And she added: "I wish you WOULD let me show you
how!"
    "Oh 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 good-humoured
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.