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. 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.