The Golden Bowl — Complete

“Do you call that LESS?” Charlotte asked with a smile. “From the point of view of my freedom I call it more. Let it take, my position, any name you like.”

“Don’t let it, at any rate”—and Mrs. Assingham’s impatience prevailed at last over her presence of mind—“don’t let it make you think too much of your freedom.”

“I don’t know what you call too much—for how can I not see it as it is? You’d see your own quickly enough if the Colonel gave you the same liberty—and I haven’t to tell you, with your so much greater knowledge of everything, what it is that gives such liberty most. For yourself personally of course,” Charlotte went on, “you only know the state of neither needing it nor missing it. Your husband doesn’t treat you as of less importance to him than some other woman.”

“Ah, don’t talk to me of other women!” Fanny now overtly panted. “Do you call Mr. Verver’s perfectly natural interest in his daughter—?”

“The greatest affection of which he is capable?” Charlotte took it up in all readiness. “I do distinctly—and in spite of my having done all I could think of—to make him capable of a greater. I’ve done, earnestly, everything I could—I’ve made it, month after month, my study. But I haven’t succeeded—it has been vividly brought home to me to-night. However,” she pursued, “I’ve hoped against hope, for I recognise that, as I told you at the time, I was duly warned.” And then as she met in her friend’s face the absence of any such remembrance: “He did tell me that he wanted me just BECAUSE I could be useful about her.” With which Charlotte broke into a wonderful smile. “So you see I AM!”

It was on Fanny Assingham’s lips for the moment to reply that this was, on the contrary, exactly what she didn’t see; she came in fact within an ace of saying: “You strike me as having quite failed to help his idea to work—since, by your account, Maggie has him not less, but so much more, on her mind. How in the world, with so much of a remedy, comes there to remain so much of what was to be obviated?” But she saved herself in time, conscious above all that she was in presence of still deeper things than she had yet dared to fear, that there was “more in it” than any admission she had made represented—and she had held herself familiar with admissions: so that, not to seem to understand where she couldn’t accept, and not to seem to accept where she couldn’t approve, and could still less, with precipitation, advise, she invoked the mere appearance of casting no weight whatever into the scales of her young friend’s consistency. The only thing was that, as she was quickly enough to feel, she invoked it rather to excess. It brought her, her invocation, too abruptly to her feet. She brushed away everything. “I can’t conceive, my dear, what you’re talking about!”

Charlotte promptly rose then, as might be, to meet it, and her colour, for the first time, perceptibly heightened. She looked, for the minute, as her companion had looked—as if twenty protests, blocking each other’s way, had surged up within her. But when Charlotte had to make a selection, her selection was always the most effective possible. It was happy now, above all, for being made not in anger but in sorrow. “You give me up then?”

“Give you up—?”

“You forsake me at the hour of my life when it seems to me I most deserve a friend’s loyalty? If you do you’re not just, Fanny; you’re even, I think,” she went on, “rather cruel; and it’s least of all worthy of you to seem to wish to quarrel with me in order to cover your desertion.” She spoke, at the same time, with the noblest moderation of tone, and the image of high, pale, lighted disappointment she meanwhile presented, as of a creature patient and lonely in her splendour, was an impression so firmly imposed that she could fill her measure to the brim and yet enjoy the last word, as it is called in such cases, with a perfection void of any vulgarity of triumph. She merely completed, for truth’s sake, her demonstration. “What is a quarrel with me but a quarrel with my right to recognise the conditions of my bargain? But I can carry them out alone,” she said as she turned away. She turned to meet the Ambassador and the Prince, who, their colloquy with their Field-Marshal ended, were now at hand and had already, between them, she was aware, addressed her a remark that failed to penetrate the golden glow in which her intelligence was temporarily bathed. She had made her point, the point she had foreseen she must make; she had made it thoroughly and once for all, so that no more making was required; and her success was reflected in the faces of the two men of distinction before her, unmistakably moved to admiration by her exceptional radiance. She at first but watched this reflection, taking no note of any less adequate form of it possibly presented by poor Fanny—poor Fanny left to stare at her incurred “score,” chalked up in so few strokes on the wall; then she took in what the Ambassador was saying, in French, what he was apparently repeating to her.

“A desire for your presence, Madame, has been expressed en tres-haut lieu, and I’ve let myself in for the responsibility, to say nothing of the honour, of seeing, as the most respectful of your friends, that so august an impatience is not kept waiting.” The greatest possible Personage had, in short, according to the odd formula of societies subject to the greatest personages possible, “sent for” her, and she asked, in her surprise, “What in the world does he want to do to me?” only to know, without looking, that Fanny’s bewilderment was called to a still larger application, and to hear the Prince say with authority, indeed with a certain prompt dryness: “You must go immediately—it’s a summons.” The Ambassador, using authority as well, had already somehow possessed himself of her hand, which he drew into his arm, and she was further conscious as she went off with him that, though still speaking for her benefit, Amerigo had turned to Fanny Assingham. He would explain afterwards—besides which she would understand for herself. To Fanny, however, he had laughed—as a mark, apparently, that for this infallible friend no explanation at all would be necessary.

XV

It may be recorded none the less that the Prince was the next moment to see how little any such assumption was founded. Alone with him now Mrs. Assingham was incorruptible. “They send for Charlotte through YOU?”

“No, my dear; as you see, through the Ambassador.”

“Ah, but the Ambassador and you, for the last quarter-of-an-hour, have been for them as one. He’s YOUR ambassador.” It may indeed be further mentioned that the more Fanny looked at it the more she saw in it. “They’ve connected her with you—she’s treated as your appendage.”

“Oh, my ‘appendage,’” the Prince amusedly exclaimed—“cara mia, what a name! She’s treated, rather, say, as my ornament and my glory. And it’s so remarkable a case for a mother-in-law that you surely can’t find fault with it.”

“You’ve ornaments enough, it seems to me—as you’ve certainly glories enough—without her. And she’s not the least little bit,” Mrs. Assingham observed, “your mother-in-law. In such a matter a shade of difference is enormous. She’s no relation to you whatever, and if she’s known in high quarters but as going about with you, then—then—!” She failed, however, as from positive intensity of vision. “Then, then what?” he asked with perfect good-nature.

“She had better in such a case not be known at all.”

“But I assure you I never, just now, so much as mentioned her. Do you suppose I asked them,” said the young man, still amused, “if they didn’t want to see her? You surely don’t need to be shown that Charlotte speaks for herself—that she does so above all on such an occasion as this and looking as she does to-night. How, so looking, can she pass unnoticed? How can she not have ‘success’? Besides,” he added as she but watched his face, letting him say what he would, as if she wanted to see how he would say it, “besides, there IS always the fact that we’re of the same connection, of—what is your word?—the same ‘concern.’ We’re certainly not, with the relation of our respective sposi, simply formal acquaintances. We’re in the same boat”—and the Prince smiled with a candour that added an accent to his emphasis.

Fanny Assingham was full of the special sense of his manner: it caused her to turn for a moment’s refuge to a corner of her general consciousness in which she could say to herself that she was glad SHE wasn’t in love with such a man. As with Charlotte just before, she was embarrassed by the difference between what she took in and what she could say, what she felt and what she could show. “It only appears to me of great importance that—now that you all seem more settled here—Charlotte should be known, for any presentation, any further circulation or introduction, as, in particular, her husband’s wife; known in the least possible degree as anything else. I don’t know what you mean by the ‘same’ boat. Charlotte is naturally in Mr. Verver’s boat.”

“And, pray, am I not in Mr. Verver’s boat too? Why, but for Mr. Verver’s boat, I should have been by this time”—and his quick Italian gesture, an expressive direction and motion of his forefinger, pointed to deepest depths—“away down, down, down.” She knew of course what he meant—how it had taken his father-in-law’s great fortune, and taken no small slice, to surround him with an element in which, all too fatally weighted as he had originally been, he could pecuniarily float; and with this reminder other things came to her—how strange it was that, with all allowance for their merit, it should befall some people to be so inordinately valued, quoted, as they said in the stock-market, so high, and how still stranger, perhaps, that there should be cases in which, for some reason, one didn’t mind the so frequently marked absence in them of the purpose really to represent their price. She was thinking, feeling, at any rate, for herself; she was thinking that the pleasure SHE could take in this specimen of the class didn’t suffer from his consent to be merely made buoyant: partly because it was one of those pleasures (he inspired them) that, by their nature, COULDN’T suffer, to whatever proof they were put; and partly because, besides, he after all visibly had on his conscience some sort of return for services rendered. He was a huge expense assuredly—but it had been up to now her conviction that his idea was to behave beautifully enough to make the beauty well nigh an equivalent. And that he had carried out his idea, carried it out by continuing to lead the life, to breathe the air, very nearly to think the thoughts, that best suited his wife and her father— this she had till lately enjoyed the comfort of so distinctly perceiving as to have even been moved more than once, to express to him the happiness it gave her. He had that in his favour as against other matters; yet it discouraged her too, and rather oddly, that he should so keep moving, and be able to show her that he moved, on the firm ground of the truth. His acknowledgment of obligation was far from unimportant, but she could find in his grasp of the real itself a kind of ominous intimation. The intimation appeared to peep at her even out of his next word, lightly as he produced it.

“Isn’t it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing us together, a benefactor in common?” And the effect, for his interlocutress, was still further to be deepened. “I somehow feel, half the time, as if he were her father-in-law too. It’s as if he had saved us both—which is a fact in our lives, or at any rate in our hearts, to make of itself a link. Don’t you remember”—he kept it up—“how, the day she suddenly turned up for you, just before my wedding, we so frankly and funnily talked, in her presence, of the advisability, for her, of some good marriage?” And then as his friend’s face, in her extremity, quite again as with Charlotte, but continued to fly the black flag of general repudiation: “Well, we really began then, as it seems to me, the work of placing her where she is. We were wholly right—and so was she. That it was exactly the thing is shown by its success. We recommended a good marriage at almost any price, so to speak, and, taking us at our word, she has made the very best. That was really what we meant, wasn’t it? Only—what she has got—something thoroughly good. It would be difficult, it seems to me, for her to have anything better—once you allow her the way it’s to be taken. Of course if you don’t allow her that the case is different. Her offset is a certain decent freedom— which, I judge, she’ll be quite contented with. You may say that will be very good of her, but she strikes me as perfectly humble about it. She proposes neither to claim it nor to use it with any sort of retentissement. She would enjoy it, I think, quite as quietly as it might be given. The ‘boat,’ you see”—the Prince explained it no less considerately and lucidly—“is a good deal tied up at the dock, or anchored, if you like, out in the stream. I have to jump out from time to time to stretch my legs, and you’ll probably perceive, if you give it your attention, that Charlotte really can’t help occasionally doing the same. It isn’t even a question, sometimes, of one’s getting to the dock—one has to take a header and splash about in the water. Call our having remained here together to-night, call the accident of my having put them, put our illustrious friends there, on my companion’s track—for I grant you this as a practical result of our combination—call the whole thing one of the harmless little plunges off the deck, inevitable for each of us. Why not take them, when they occur, as inevitable—and, above all, as not endangering life or limb? We shan’t drown, we shan’t sink—at least I can answer for myself. Mrs. Verver too, moreover—do her the justice—visibly knows how to swim.”

He could easily go on, for she didn’t interrupt him; Fanny felt now that she wouldn’t have interrupted him for the world. She found his eloquence precious; there was not a drop of it that she didn’t, in a manner, catch, as it came, for immediate bottling, for future preservation. The crystal flask of her innermost attention really received it on the spot, and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug laboratory of her afterthought, she should be able chemically to analyse it. There were moments, positively, still beyond this, when, with the meeting of their eyes, something as yet unnamable came out for her in his look, when something strange and subtle and at variance with his words, something that GAVE THEM AWAY, glimmered deep down, as an appeal, almost an incredible one, to her finer comprehension. What, inconceivably, was it like? Wasn’t it, however gross, such a rendering of anything so occult, fairly like a quintessential wink, a hint of the possibility of their REALLY treating their subject—of course on some better occasion—and thereby, as well, finding it much more interesting? If this far red spark, which might have been figured by her mind as the head-light of an approaching train seen through the length of a tunnel, was not, on her side, an ignis fatuus, a mere subjective phenomenon, it twinkled there at the direct expense of what the Prince was inviting her to understand. Meanwhile too, however, and unmistakably, the real treatment of their subject did, at a given moment, sound. This was when he proceeded, with just the same perfect possession of his thought—on the manner of which he couldn’t have improved—to complete his successful simile by another, in fact by just the supreme touch, the touch for which it had till now been waiting. “For Mrs. Verver to be known to people so intensely and exclusively as her husband’s wife, something is wanted that, you know, they haven’t exactly got. He should manage to be known—or at least to be seen—a little more as his wife’s husband. You surely must by this time have seen for yourself that he has his own habits and his own ways, and that he makes, more and more—as of course he has a perfect right to do—his own discriminations. He’s so perfect, so ideal a father, and, doubtless largely by that very fact, a generous, a comfortable, an admirable father-in-law, that I should really feel it base to avail myself of any standpoint whatever to criticise him. To YOU, nevertheless, I may make just one remark; for you’re not stupid—you always understand so blessedly what one means.”

He paused an instant, as if even this one remark might be difficult for him should she give no sign of encouraging him to produce it. Nothing would have induced her, however, to encourage him; she was now conscious of having never in her life stood so still or sat, inwardly, as it were, so tight; she felt like the horse of the adage, brought—and brought by her own fault—to the water, but strong, for the occasion, in the one fact that she couldn’t be forced to drink. Invited, in other words, to understand, she held her breath for fear of showing she did, and this for the excellent reason that she was at last fairly afraid to. It was sharp for her, at the same time, that she was certain, in advance, of his remark; that she heard it before it had sounded, that she already tasted, in fine, the bitterness it would have for her special sensibility. But her companion, from an inward and different need of his own, was presently not deterred by her silence. “What I really don’t see is why, from his own point of view—given, that is, his conditions, so fortunate as they stood—he should have wished to marry at all.” There it was then—exactly what she knew would come, and exactly, for reasons that seemed now to thump at her heart, as distressing to her. Yet she was resolved, meanwhile, not to suffer, as they used to say of the martyrs, then and there; not to suffer, odiously, helplessly, in public—which could be prevented but by her breaking off, with whatever inconsequence; by her treating their discussion as ended and getting away. She suddenly wanted to go home much as she had wanted, an hour or two before, to come. She wanted to leave well behind her both her question and the couple in whom it had, abruptly, taken such vivid form—but it was dreadful to have the appearance of disconcerted flight. Discussion had of itself, to her sense, become danger—such light, as from open crevices, it let in; and the overt recognition of danger was worse than anything else. The worst in fact came while she was thinking how she could retreat and still not overtly recognise. Her face had betrayed her trouble, and with that she was lost. “I’m afraid, however,” the Prince said, “that I, for some reason, distress you—for which I beg your pardon. We’ve always talked so well together—it has been, from the beginning, the greatest pull for me.” Nothing so much as such a tone could have quickened her collapse; she felt he had her now at his mercy, and he showed, as he went on, that he knew it. “We shall talk again, all the same, better than ever—I depend on it too much. Don’t you remember what I told you, so definitely, one day before my marriage?—that, moving as I did in so many ways among new things, mysteries, conditions, expectations, assumptions different from any I had known, I looked to you, as my original sponsor, my fairy godmother, to see me through. I beg you to believe,” he added, “that I look to you yet.”

His very insistence had, fortunately, the next moment, affected her as bringing her help; with which, at least, she could hold up her head to speak. “Ah, you ARE through—you were through long ago. Or if you aren’t you ought to be.”

“Well then, if I ought to be it’s all the more reason why you should continue to help me. Because, very distinctly, I assure you, I’m not. The new things or ever so many of them—are still for me new things; the mysteries and expectations and assumptions still contain an immense element that I’ve failed to puzzle out. As we’ve happened, so luckily, to find ourselves again really taking hold together, you must let me, as soon as possible, come to see you; you must give me a good, kind hour. If you refuse it me”—and he addressed himself to her continued reserve—“I shall feel that you deny, with a stony stare, your responsibility.”

At this, as from a sudden shake, her reserve proved an inadequate vessel. She could bear her own, her private reference to the weight on her mind, but the touch of another hand made it too horribly press. “Oh, I deny responsibility—to YOU. So far as I ever had it I’ve done with it.”

He had been, all the while, beautifully smiling; but she made his look, now, penetrate her again more. “As to whom then do you confess it?”

“Ah, mio caro, that’s—if to anyone—my own business!”

He continued to look at her hard. “You give me up then?”

It was what Charlotte had asked her ten minutes before, and its coming from him so much in the same way shook her in her place. She was on the point of replying “Do you and she agree together for what you’ll say to me?”—but she was glad afterwards to have checked herself in time, little as her actual answer had perhaps bettered it. “I think I don’t know what to make of you.”

“You must receive me at least,” he said.

“Oh, please, not till I’m ready for you!”—and, though she found a laugh for it, she had to turn away. She had never turned away from him before, and it was quite positively for her as if she were altogether afraid of him.

XVI

Later on, when their hired brougham had, with the long vociferation that tormented her impatience, been extricated from the endless rank, she rolled into the London night, beside her husband, as into a sheltering darkness where she could muffle herself and draw breath. She had stood for the previous half-hour in a merciless glare, beaten upon, stared out of countenance, it fairly seemed to her, by intimations of her mistake. For what she was most immediately feeling was that she had, in the past, been active, for these people, to ends that were now bearing fruit and that might yet bear a larger crop. She but brooded, at first, in her corner of the carriage: it was like burying her exposed face, a face too helplessly exposed, in the cool lap of the common indifference, of the dispeopled streets, of the closed shops and darkened houses seen through the window of the brougham, a world mercifully unconscious and unreproachful. It wouldn’t, like the world she had just left, know sooner or later what she had done, or would know it, at least, only if the final consequence should be some quite overwhelming publicity. She fixed this possibility itself so hard, however, for a few moments, that the misery of her fear produced the next minute a reaction; and when the carriage happened, while it grazed a turn, to catch the straight shaft from the lamp of a policeman in the act of playing his inquisitive flash over an opposite house-front, she let herself wince at being thus incriminated only that she might protest, not less quickly, against mere blind terror. It had become, for the occasion, preposterously, terror—of which she must shake herself free before she could properly measure her ground. The perception of this necessity had in truth soon aided her; since she found, on trying, that, lurid as her prospect might hover there, she could none the less give it no name. The sense of seeing was strong in her, but she clutched at the comfort of not being sure of what she saw. Not to know what it would represent on a longer view was a help, in turn, to not making out that her hands were embrued; since if she had stood in the position of a producing cause she should surely be less vague about what she had produced. This, further, in its way, was a step toward reflecting that when one’s connection with any matter was too indirect to be traced it might be described also as too slight to be deplored. By the time they were nearing Cadogan Place she had in fact recognised that she couldn’t be as curious as she desired without arriving at some conviction of her being as innocent. But there had been a moment, in the dim desert of Eaton Square, when she broke into speech.

“It’s only their defending themselves so much more than they need—it’s only THAT that makes me wonder. It’s their having so remarkably much to say for themselves.”

Her husband had, as usual, lighted his cigar, remaining apparently as busy with it as she with her agitation. “You mean it makes you feel that you have nothing?” To which, as she made no answer, the Colonel added: “What in the world did you ever suppose was going to happen? The man’s in a position in which he has nothing in life to do.”

Her silence seemed to characterise this statement as superficial, and her thoughts, as always in her husband’s company, pursued an independent course. He made her, when they were together, talk, but as if for some other person; who was in fact for the most part herself. Yet she addressed herself with him as she could never have done without him. “He has behaved beautifully—he did from the first. I’ve thought it, all along, wonderful of him; and I’ve more than once, when I’ve had a chance, told him so. Therefore, therefore—!” But it died away as she mused.

“Therefore he has a right, for a change, to kick up his heels?”

“It isn’t a question, of course, however,” she undivertedly went on, “of their behaving beautifully apart. It’s a question of their doing as they should when together—which is another matter.”

“And how do you think then,” the Colonel asked with interest, “that, when together, they SHOULD do? The less they do, one would say, the better—if you see so much in it.”

His wife, at this, appeared to hear him. “I don’t see in it what YOU’D see. And don’t, my dear,” she further answered, “think it necessary to be horrid or low about them. They’re the last people, really, to make anything of that sort come in right.”

“I’m surely never horrid or low,” he returned, “about anyone but my extravagant wife. I can do with all our friends—as I see them myself: what I can’t do with is the figures you make of them. And when you take to adding your figures up—!” But he exhaled it again in smoke.

“My additions don’t matter when you’ve not to pay the bill.” With which her meditation again bore her through the air. “The great thing was that when it so suddenly came up for her he wasn’t afraid. If he had been afraid he could perfectly have prevented it. And if I had seen he was—if I hadn’t seen he wasn’t—so,” said Mrs. Assingham, “could I. So,” she declared, “WOULD I. It’s perfectly true,” she went on—“it was too good a thing for her, such a chance in life, not to be accepted. And I LIKED his not keeping her out of it merely from a fear of his own nature. It was so wonderful it should come to her. The only thing would have been if Charlotte herself couldn’t have faced it. Then, if SHE had not had confidence, we might have talked. But she had it to any amount.”

“Did you ask her how much?” Bob Assingham patiently inquired.

He had put the question with no more than his usual modest hope of reward, but he had pressed, this time, the sharpest spring of response. “Never, never—it wasn’t a time to ‘ask.’ Asking is suggesting—and it wasn’t a time to suggest. One had to make up one’s mind, as quietly as possible, by what one could judge. And I judge, as I say, that Charlotte felt she could face it. For which she struck me at the time as—for so proud a creature—almost touchingly grateful. The thing I should never forgive her for would be her forgetting to whom it is her thanks have remained most due.”

“That is to Mrs. Assingham?”

She said nothing for a little—there were, after all, alternatives. “Maggie herself of course—astonishing little Maggie.”

“Is Maggie then astonishing too?”—and he gloomed out of his window.

His wife, on her side now, as they rolled, projected the same look. “I’m not sure that I don’t begin to see more in her than—dear little person as I’ve always thought—I ever supposed there was. I’m not sure that, putting a good many things together, I’m not beginning to make her out rather extraordinary.”

“You certainly will if you can,” the Colonel resignedly remarked.