Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/409

Rh himself as so engaged with others, so in midstream of his drama. It might have passed for finished, his drama, with its catastrophe all but reached; it had, however, been vivid again for him as he thus gave it its fuller chance. He had but had to be at last well out of it to feel it, oddly enough, still going on.

For this had been all day, at bottom, the spell of the picture—that it was essentially, more than anything else, a scene and a stage, that the very air of the play was in the rustle of the willows and the tone of the sky. The play and the characters had, without his knowing it till now, peopled all his space for him, and it seemed somehow quite happy that they should offer themselves, in the conditions so supplied, with a kind of inevitability. It was as if the conditions made them not only inevitable, but so much more nearly natural and right as that they were at least easier, pleasanter, to put up with. The conditions had nowhere so asserted their difference from those of Woollett as they appeared to him to assert it in the little court of the "Cheval Blanc" while he arranged with his hostess for a comfortable climax. They were few and simple, scant and humble, but they were the thing, as he would have called it, even to a greater degree than Mme. de Vionnet's old, high salon, where the ghost of the Empire walked. "The" thing was the thing that implied the greatest number of other things of the sort he had had to tackle; and it was queer, of course, but so it was—the implication here was complete. Not a single one of his observations but somehow fell into a place in it; not a breath of the cooler evening that wasn't somehow a syllable of the text. The text was simply, when condensed, that in these places such things were, and that if it was in them one elected to move about, one had to make one's account with what one lighted on. Meanwhile, at all events, it was enough that they did affect one—so far as the village aspect was concerned—as whiteness, crookedness and blueness set in coppery green; there being positively, for that matter, an outer wall of the "White Horse" that was painted the most improbable shade. That was part of the amusement—as if to show that the fun was harmless; just as it was enough, further, that the picture