Lily by the Lake
As soon as he found Strether’s name on the Royal Awards list—and he had been looking for it there—Strether’s son, George, plunged into preparations for the expedition to London to accept the honor, even though George had just returned from conducting a pilgrimage of Mohawk Valley literati to the British Isles and, one would have thought, might have felt decidedly lukewarm about a second trans-Atlantic journey. But George briskly booked a stateroom on a sailing of The Prince of Wales in three months’ time, reserved a suite in a quiet, secluded annex of The Grosvenor, and engaged Strether for five luncheons and two evening lectures; then Strether fell out of bed, suffering a paralysis of his arm.
A few weeks later, when he could put on his coat by himself, Strether traveled alone down to Schenectady to consult with an old college chum become physician; this chum, whom Strether was shocked to find looking so aged, gravely informed him that the paralysis was not the result of the fall, but that both were the result of an apoplectic stroke.
It was a leading principle with Strether not to report on one’s own tribulations, so on returning to the lodge at Speculator, where George and his wife, Lily, had elected to care for him in his senescence, Strether kept the doctor’s diagnosis to himself, letting stand the original theory that he had hurt himself through falling, although, in less courageous moments, he hoped that George would guess the truth somehow and call off their journey.
Lily had guessed he was more ill than he was letting on—Strether was sure of this. He had seen it in her face as she stood with them on the shore of the lake, bidding them good-bye. And Strether was sure she must have voiced her concern to George, but George evidently could not face the disappointment of his plans and maintained a hearty insensibility to his father’s real condition. While this narrowness in another man would have roused Strether to cancel the trip without giving any reason, simply to wreak the disappointment that was being so meanly avoided, he could not disappoint his own son, and he forgave him with the generalization that the minds of all men are similarly piggish, and with the particular excuse that in George’s case the ruling passion was, after all, to celebrate his father’s notoriety.
Now, in London, Strether sat at an odd, rhomboid window overlooking a grey, rain-drenched park, with nothing to do but cerebrate how inappropriate a setting this would be for the final pages of his drama.
George was already up and out on his touristic rambles when Strether had arisen, but he had left a note promising to return in time to take him to the luncheon at The Swinburne Club where, Strether knew, he would have to say a few words before coffee, but then could immediately be hastened away by a solicitous George for his habitual afternoon nap.
Strether had already stood in line for a handshake and a bauble from the King and had tottered up to the podium in a ballroom to present to The Royal Society of Arts and Letters—after he had caught his breath—a modest accounting of his own place in literature. Now, against George’s insisting that they put off their departure for two weeks for an “historic” meeting with Edward Driffield on his return from The Canaries, Strether, who usually was not ashamed to use the most flimsy excuses to avoid things he found even slightly inconvenient, could think of nothing but that one large excuse which, on principle, he would not voice, and which really did call for him to be fixed a good deal closer to all that was familiar and comforting than these little rooms in Pimlico.
“What am I doing here?” thought Strether. Then for a while he simply sat and listened to his heart running out.
A sneeze from the outer hallway, a feminine sneeze, startled him out of his depression and he shuffled in curiosity into the corridor. A woman was about to enter the facing apartment (Strether had thought the rooms unoccupied), but she turned as he emerged, saying in a small, precise voice, rippling with a continental accent, “Mr. Strether, I am so pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Strether half-nodded, half-bowed—gruffness and courtesy warring in him, as they often did. He was struck by the woman’s coat, which he judged as a beautiful one; it was rosy brown, narrow and shapely, with a large fur-lined hood that shadowed the part of her face where dark eyes glimmered.
“Madame Gerhardt Pasny,” said the woman, introducing herself, “and if I did not already know you were staying here, Mr. Strether, I would have recognized you from your likeness in The Times, not a week ago.” (This was sheer flattery, Strether knew—the sketch had been too kind.) “I hope you will forgive me for being so forward, but although we meet in person for the first time only today, I feel I have been intimate with your soul for many years now.”
“Well,” said Strether, “I am glad to know I possess one.”
“I have offended you.”
“On the contrary, Madame,” Strether summoned up long unused veins of wit, “I am only sorry that I cannot aver the same, for I have heard that the soul of Beauty is a most beneficial tonic.”
Madame Pasny’s smile brightened at this, then brightened further. “I know it is a poor substitute, but may I offer you a cup of chocolate instead?”
Strether chuckled and followed her through the door.
As Madame Pasny slipped out of her wrap, freeing herself from its hood with a graceful dip of her head, her hair, which had become unfastened, fell down in a great black wave over her shoulder. Strether’s heart skipped a beat and for an instant he thought that he would now die. Hurriedly pinning back her hair, Madame Pasny apologized for not having a maid, explaining that her faithful Marguerite had taken ill on the train near Amiens, where Madame Pasny was forced to leave her in the care of conveniently nearby relations and continue on alone—a better alternative, she said, than traveling with a strange servant. Then, after ringing the kitchen and asking for chocolate through a speaking instrument on the wall, the lady absented herself “for the sake of civilization.”
Madame Pasny emerged in time to admit a white-jacketed boy with the chocolate. She directed him to place the service on a low, marble table before the sofa, then, after showing him out, sat down, leaning forward to pour. Strether was reminded of how her luxuriant hair, now swept up in elegant, artless waves, had cascaded negligently over her shoulder; desire stirred in him—probably for the last time, he thought—and he nourished it, imagining the soft rolls of flesh that infolded her navel at that moment, bent over the table as she was. Then she turned to face him with a smile so incongruously eager that it immediately chilled his carnal impulse.
Madame Pasny seemed to know everything there was to know about Strether, and had his London itinerary by heart in such extraordinary detail that she even knew they were awaiting the return of Edward Driffield, something that had not been in any of the newspapers. And she knew all about George too, even—oddly enough—had read some of his poetry, although where in her native Basel she could have come across those particular issues of The Sheaf and The Journal Gratia Artis, Strether could not guess; nor could he phrase it into a question that would not seem somehow to slight the broad culture which Madame Pasny complacently imputed to herself, with the demur that she owed it to her possession, “by happy chance, of an unusually receptive mind. Not a passive one, however,” she continued, coquettishly, “for just see how I have attacked you.”
“On the contrary, you have been most hospitable,” said Strether, missing for a moment the tone of her remark; then, recollecting, he joined in, “Oh, but I felt no need to parry, so it could not have been much of an attack.”
She laughed and turned her head to smile at him again, but this time there was a clear seductive intent in the corners of her mouth. Strether felt a strong impulse to say what he knew he would never say, never, even now on the verge of his unmaking, “Let your hair down again!” Instead he said, “You are one of these modern, quicksilver characters, aren’t you?”
She took it as a compliment, grinning. “And you, you are solid and simple,” she said.
“Oh yes?” Strether was used to being analyzed.
“Of course,” said Madame Pasny. “It is your simple strengths that have made you such a favorite with the public.”
“Well,” said Strether, “they are studied.”
“Certainly,” said Madame Pasny, suddenly becoming serious, lowering her eyes, as if Strether had said something profound. “But the effect is the important thing.”
Strether was astonished to find himself reacting sexually again—and again the thought crossed his mind that it might be for the last time. He wondered if, as the elder solacer, he was permitted to reach out and touch that shoulder.
“You are not at all like George,” said Madame Pasny.
“You know George?”
“We are good friends,” said Madame Pasny.
“Ah!” said Strether, pleased to have found the solution to that gnawing little puzzle of how she had come to have read George’s poetry. Meanwhile, he shrewdly deduced that this person out of somewhere in his son’s past—Strether thought he was familiar with all its important characters (Lily’s face as he had last seen it flashed in his mind and some new anxiety, as yet undefined, began to work there)—this Bovary, who already knew so much about them, was obviously a devotee, whose interception of the Strethers’ path was hardly a coincidence. All the better, thought Strether, it would make her presence even more of a diversion, since she surely would accept graciously whatever degree of intimacy was still seemly at his age.
“Were you at the Sorbonne with George?” Strether asked, probing for the common ground between Madame Pasny and his son. Perhaps they had been lovers, he thought.
“We met more recently,” said Madame Pasny, “at the railway station in Canterbury.”
“Canterbury?” said Strether. “Then that was last year.”
“Yes,” said Madame Pasny, “last year, in Canterbury.” Then she grinned naughtily, which Strether did not like at all. “It was you I first met at the university, in my English courses, and I have harbored a fancy for you ever since then. I am embarrassed to tell you, and George does not know it, but I would never have given him a second glance if I had not heard his name. Nor would I have given in to his entreaties to make this really compromising journey—he was sure you would win the Award this year—if it had not been for the prospect of meeting you. I am sorry if this encounter in any way has been inconvenient for you, as George has said it would be, and I hope you uphold me in the verdict that it was purely accidental. I have with me some translations I have done of some works of an important group of young Swiss poets, and I so wish you would read them.”
Then Madame Pasny launched into a paean to English literature in general and Strether in particular, which Strether listened to in an attitude of polite attention, but blocking out its sense. Too much of a gentleman to close or avert his eyes, he attempted to obliterate his vision of Madame Pasny, who was seeming increasingly unwholesome, by bringing back the mental image of Lily, by the lake, the sunlight making a golden halo about her soft red hair, as it always seemed to do, her sad, smiling face in troubled adieu, her large, yielding hands warm about his own. Then desire rose in him again, with Madame Pasny in his senses and Lily in his mind, so shocking him that he forgot to think—again—that it was, perhaps, for the last time.
A knock at the door was followed by a voice—George’s. “Charlotte?”
“I believe that is George now,” remarked Madame Pasny, and rose to answer the door.
George Strether had perfected an almost impregnable demeanor of solemnity as a bulwark against the opinion of the world, which was always comparing him with his father. The elder Strether seldom saw this gravity broken involuntarily, so it was with great interest that he watched his son’s face turn white, his eyes begin to blink maddeningly and his lower jaw drop in a ghastly way.
“Father—” said George, when he was able to correct the latter effect, although his eyes, which were now turned on Madame Pasny, continued blinking.
“Ah, George,” said Strether, “I am glad to see you. I just remembered, I promised Geary I would speak to his Freshmen, so we must abandon Edward Driffield to his own devices and try to repossess that stateroom on The Prince of Wales. And will you send round my apologies to The Swinburne Club?”
Strether only bowed to Madame Pasny, then let himself out, hearing their voices begin through the door, first George’s, then the lady’s, rising in pitch, if not volume, as he crossed the hall.
Lily’s face remained with him until, deliberately recalling and testing every feature, Strether had satisfied himself that all the care, affection and sympathy he had last seen there were for himself alone. Then, with a keen determination in his thin, rubbly lips, he energetically plunged into all that had to be done to return as soon as possible to where she was waiting for him.
As soon as he found Strether’s name on the Royal Awards list—and he had been looking for it there—Strether’s son, George, plunged into preparations for the expedition to London to accept the honor, even though George had just returned from conducting a pilgrimage of Mohawk Valley literati to the British Isles and, one would have thought, might have felt decidedly lukewarm about a second trans-Atlantic journey. But George briskly booked a stateroom on a sailing of The Prince of Wales in three months’ time, reserved a suite in a quiet, secluded annex of The Grosvenor, and engaged Strether for five luncheons and two evening lectures; then Strether fell out of bed, suffering a paralysis of his arm.
A few weeks later, when he could put on his coat by himself, Strether traveled alone down to Schenectady to consult with an old college chum become physician; this chum, whom Strether was shocked to find looking so aged, gravely informed him that the paralysis was not the result of the fall, but that both were the result of an apoplectic stroke.
It was a leading principle with Strether not to report on one’s own tribulations, so on returning to the lodge at Speculator, where George and his wife, Lily, had elected to care for him in his senescence, Strether kept the doctor’s diagnosis to himself, letting stand the original theory that he had hurt himself through falling, although, in less courageous moments, he hoped that George would guess the truth somehow and call off their journey.
Lily had guessed he was more ill than he was letting on—Strether was sure of this. He had seen it in her face as she stood with them on the shore of the lake, bidding them good-bye. And Strether was sure she must have voiced her concern to George, but George evidently could not face the disappointment of his plans and maintained a hearty insensibility to his father’s real condition. While this narrowness in another man would have roused Strether to cancel the trip without giving any reason, simply to wreak the disappointment that was being so meanly avoided, he could not disappoint his own son, and he forgave him with the generalization that the minds of all men are similarly piggish, and with the particular excuse that in George’s case the ruling passion was, after all, to celebrate his father’s notoriety.
Now, in London, Strether sat at an odd, rhomboid window overlooking a grey, rain-drenched park, with nothing to do but cerebrate how inappropriate a setting this would be for the final pages of his drama.
George was already up and out on his touristic rambles when Strether had arisen, but he had left a note promising to return in time to take him to the luncheon at The Swinburne Club where, Strether knew, he would have to say a few words before coffee, but then could immediately be hastened away by a solicitous George for his habitual afternoon nap.
Strether had already stood in line for a handshake and a bauble from the King and had tottered up to the podium in a ballroom to present to The Royal Society of Arts and Letters—after he had caught his breath—a modest accounting of his own place in literature. Now, against George’s insisting that they put off their departure for two weeks for an “historic” meeting with Edward Driffield on his return from The Canaries, Strether, who usually was not ashamed to use the most flimsy excuses to avoid things he found even slightly inconvenient, could think of nothing but that one large excuse which, on principle, he would not voice, and which really did call for him to be fixed a good deal closer to all that was familiar and comforting than these little rooms in Pimlico.
“What am I doing here?” thought Strether. Then for a while he simply sat and listened to his heart running out.
A sneeze from the outer hallway, a feminine sneeze, startled him out of his depression and he shuffled in curiosity into the corridor. A woman was about to enter the facing apartment (Strether had thought the rooms unoccupied), but she turned as he emerged, saying in a small, precise voice, rippling with a continental accent, “Mr. Strether, I am so pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Strether half-nodded, half-bowed—gruffness and courtesy warring in him, as they often did. He was struck by the woman’s coat, which he judged as a beautiful one; it was rosy brown, narrow and shapely, with a large fur-lined hood that shadowed the part of her face where dark eyes glimmered.
“Madame Gerhardt Pasny,” said the woman, introducing herself, “and if I did not already know you were staying here, Mr. Strether, I would have recognized you from your likeness in The Times, not a week ago.” (This was sheer flattery, Strether knew—the sketch had been too kind.) “I hope you will forgive me for being so forward, but although we meet in person for the first time only today, I feel I have been intimate with your soul for many years now.”
“Well,” said Strether, “I am glad to know I possess one.”
“I have offended you.”
“On the contrary, Madame,” Strether summoned up long unused veins of wit, “I am only sorry that I cannot aver the same, for I have heard that the soul of Beauty is a most beneficial tonic.”
Madame Pasny’s smile brightened at this, then brightened further. “I know it is a poor substitute, but may I offer you a cup of chocolate instead?”
Strether chuckled and followed her through the door.
As Madame Pasny slipped out of her wrap, freeing herself from its hood with a graceful dip of her head, her hair, which had become unfastened, fell down in a great black wave over her shoulder. Strether’s heart skipped a beat and for an instant he thought that he would now die. Hurriedly pinning back her hair, Madame Pasny apologized for not having a maid, explaining that her faithful Marguerite had taken ill on the train near Amiens, where Madame Pasny was forced to leave her in the care of conveniently nearby relations and continue on alone—a better alternative, she said, than traveling with a strange servant. Then, after ringing the kitchen and asking for chocolate through a speaking instrument on the wall, the lady absented herself “for the sake of civilization.”
Madame Pasny emerged in time to admit a white-jacketed boy with the chocolate. She directed him to place the service on a low, marble table before the sofa, then, after showing him out, sat down, leaning forward to pour. Strether was reminded of how her luxuriant hair, now swept up in elegant, artless waves, had cascaded negligently over her shoulder; desire stirred in him—probably for the last time, he thought—and he nourished it, imagining the soft rolls of flesh that infolded her navel at that moment, bent over the table as she was. Then she turned to face him with a smile so incongruously eager that it immediately chilled his carnal impulse.
Madame Pasny seemed to know everything there was to know about Strether, and had his London itinerary by heart in such extraordinary detail that she even knew they were awaiting the return of Edward Driffield, something that had not been in any of the newspapers. And she knew all about George too, even—oddly enough—had read some of his poetry, although where in her native Basel she could have come across those particular issues of The Sheaf and The Journal Gratia Artis, Strether could not guess; nor could he phrase it into a question that would not seem somehow to slight the broad culture which Madame Pasny complacently imputed to herself, with the demur that she owed it to her possession, “by happy chance, of an unusually receptive mind. Not a passive one, however,” she continued, coquettishly, “for just see how I have attacked you.”
“On the contrary, you have been most hospitable,” said Strether, missing for a moment the tone of her remark; then, recollecting, he joined in, “Oh, but I felt no need to parry, so it could not have been much of an attack.”
She laughed and turned her head to smile at him again, but this time there was a clear seductive intent in the corners of her mouth. Strether felt a strong impulse to say what he knew he would never say, never, even now on the verge of his unmaking, “Let your hair down again!” Instead he said, “You are one of these modern, quicksilver characters, aren’t you?”
She took it as a compliment, grinning. “And you, you are solid and simple,” she said.
“Oh yes?” Strether was used to being analyzed.
“Of course,” said Madame Pasny. “It is your simple strengths that have made you such a favorite with the public.”
“Well,” said Strether, “they are studied.”
“Certainly,” said Madame Pasny, suddenly becoming serious, lowering her eyes, as if Strether had said something profound. “But the effect is the important thing.”
Strether was astonished to find himself reacting sexually again—and again the thought crossed his mind that it might be for the last time. He wondered if, as the elder solacer, he was permitted to reach out and touch that shoulder.
“You are not at all like George,” said Madame Pasny.
“You know George?”
“We are good friends,” said Madame Pasny.
“Ah!” said Strether, pleased to have found the solution to that gnawing little puzzle of how she had come to have read George’s poetry. Meanwhile, he shrewdly deduced that this person out of somewhere in his son’s past—Strether thought he was familiar with all its important characters (Lily’s face as he had last seen it flashed in his mind and some new anxiety, as yet undefined, began to work there)—this Bovary, who already knew so much about them, was obviously a devotee, whose interception of the Strethers’ path was hardly a coincidence. All the better, thought Strether, it would make her presence even more of a diversion, since she surely would accept graciously whatever degree of intimacy was still seemly at his age.
“Were you at the Sorbonne with George?” Strether asked, probing for the common ground between Madame Pasny and his son. Perhaps they had been lovers, he thought.
“We met more recently,” said Madame Pasny, “at the railway station in Canterbury.”
“Canterbury?” said Strether. “Then that was last year.”
“Yes,” said Madame Pasny, “last year, in Canterbury.” Then she grinned naughtily, which Strether did not like at all. “It was you I first met at the university, in my English courses, and I have harbored a fancy for you ever since then. I am embarrassed to tell you, and George does not know it, but I would never have given him a second glance if I had not heard his name. Nor would I have given in to his entreaties to make this really compromising journey—he was sure you would win the Award this year—if it had not been for the prospect of meeting you. I am sorry if this encounter in any way has been inconvenient for you, as George has said it would be, and I hope you uphold me in the verdict that it was purely accidental. I have with me some translations I have done of some works of an important group of young Swiss poets, and I so wish you would read them.”
Then Madame Pasny launched into a paean to English literature in general and Strether in particular, which Strether listened to in an attitude of polite attention, but blocking out its sense. Too much of a gentleman to close or avert his eyes, he attempted to obliterate his vision of Madame Pasny, who was seeming increasingly unwholesome, by bringing back the mental image of Lily, by the lake, the sunlight making a golden halo about her soft red hair, as it always seemed to do, her sad, smiling face in troubled adieu, her large, yielding hands warm about his own. Then desire rose in him again, with Madame Pasny in his senses and Lily in his mind, so shocking him that he forgot to think—again—that it was, perhaps, for the last time.
A knock at the door was followed by a voice—George’s. “Charlotte?”
“I believe that is George now,” remarked Madame Pasny, and rose to answer the door.
George Strether had perfected an almost impregnable demeanor of solemnity as a bulwark against the opinion of the world, which was always comparing him with his father. The elder Strether seldom saw this gravity broken involuntarily, so it was with great interest that he watched his son’s face turn white, his eyes begin to blink maddeningly and his lower jaw drop in a ghastly way.
“Father—” said George, when he was able to correct the latter effect, although his eyes, which were now turned on Madame Pasny, continued blinking.
“Ah, George,” said Strether, “I am glad to see you. I just remembered, I promised Geary I would speak to his Freshmen, so we must abandon Edward Driffield to his own devices and try to repossess that stateroom on The Prince of Wales. And will you send round my apologies to The Swinburne Club?”
Strether only bowed to Madame Pasny, then let himself out, hearing their voices begin through the door, first George’s, then the lady’s, rising in pitch, if not volume, as he crossed the hall.
Lily’s face remained with him until, deliberately recalling and testing every feature, Strether had satisfied himself that all the care, affection and sympathy he had last seen there were for himself alone. Then, with a keen determination in his thin, rubbly lips, he energetically plunged into all that had to be done to return as soon as possible to where she was waiting for him.