第16章

He was of the personal type--and it was an element in the power and promise that in their early time Strether had found in him--of the American statesman, the statesman trained in "Congressional halls,"of an elder day.The legend had been in later years that as the lower part of his face, which was weak, and slightly crooked, spoiled the likeness, this was the real reason for the growth of his beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those not in the secret.He shook his mane; he fixed, with his admirable eyes, his auditor or his observer; he wore no glasses and had a way, partly formidable, yet also partly encouraging, as from a representative to a constituent, of looking very hard at those who approached him.

He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you enter.

Strether, who hadn't seen him for so long an interval, apprehended him now with a freshness of taste, and had perhaps never done him such ideal justice.The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than they need have been for the career; but that only meant, after all, that the career was itself expressive.What it expressed at midnight in the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject of it had, at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight in time, a general nervous collapse.But this very proof of the full life, as the full life was understood at Milrose, would have made to Strether's imagination an element in which Waymarsh could have floated easily had he only consented to float.Alas nothing so little resembled floating as the rigour with which, on the edge of his bed, he hugged his posture of prolonged impermanence.It suggested to his comrade something that always, when kept up, worried him--a person established in a railway-coach with a forward inclination.It represented the angle at which poor Waymarsh was to sit through the ordeal of Europe.

Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions, the absorption and embarrassment of each, they had not, at home, during years before this sudden brief and almost bewildering reign of comparative ease, found so much as a day for a meeting; a fact that was in some degree an explanation of the sharpness with which most of his friend's features stood out to Strether.Those he had lost sight of since the early time came back to him; others that it was never possible to forget struck him now as sitting, clustered and expectant, like a somewhat defiant family-group, on the doorstep of their residence.The room was narrow for its length, and the occupant of the bed thrust so far a pair of slippered feet that the visitor had almost to step over them in his recurrent rebounds from his chair to fidget back and forth.There were marks the friends made on things to talk about, and on things not to, and one of the latter in particular fell like the tap of chalk on the blackboard.

Married at thirty, Waymarsh had not lived with his wife for fifteen years, and it came up vividly between them in the glare of the gas that Strether wasn't to ask about her.He knew they were still separate and that she lived at hotels, travelled in Europe, painted her face and wrote her husband abusive letters, of not one of which, to a certainty, that sufferer spared himself the perusal;but he respected without difficulty the cold twilight that had settled on this side of his companion's life.It was a province in which mystery reigned and as to which Waymarsh had never spoken the informing word.Strether, who wanted to do him the highest justice wherever he COULD do it, singularly admired him for the dignity of this reserve, and even counted it as one of the grounds--grounds all handled and numbered--for ranking him, in the range of their acquaintance, as a success.He WAS a success, Waymarsh, in spite of overwork, or prostration, of sensible shrinkage, of his wife's letters and of his not liking Europe.Strether would have reckoned his own career less futile had he been able to put into it anything so handsome as so much fine silence.One might one's self easily have left Mrs.Waymarsh; and one would assuredly have paid one's tribute to the ideal in covering with that attitude the derision of having been left by her.Her husband had held his tongue and had made a large income; and these were in especial the achievements as to which Strether envied him.Our friend had had indeed on his side too a subject for silence, which he fully appreciated; but it was a matter of a different sort, and the figure of the income he had arrived at had never been high enough to look any one in the face.

"I don't know as I quite see what you require it for.You don't appear sick to speak of." It was of Europe Waymarsh thus finally spoke.