The Golden Bowl - 40

“Oh no; it isn’t as if they were leaving each other. They’re only bringing to a close—without knowing when it may open again—a time that has been, naturally, awfully interesting to them.” Yes, she could talk so of their “time”—she was somehow sustained; she was sustained even to affirm more intensely her present possession of her ground. “They have their reasons—many things to think of; how can one tell? But there’s always, also, the chance of his proposing to me that we shall have our last hours together; I mean that he and I shall. He may wish to take me off to dine with him somewhere alone—and to do it in memory of old days. I mean,” the Princess went on, “the real old days; before my grand husband was invented and, much more, before his grand wife was: the wonderful times of his first great interest in what he has since done, his first great plans and opportunities, discoveries and bargains. The way we’ve sat together late, ever so late, in foreign restaurants, which he used to like; the way that, in every city in Europe, we’ve stayed on and on, with our elbows on the table and most of the lights put out, to talk over things he had that day seen or heard of or made his offer for, the things he had secured or refused or lost! There were places he took me to—you wouldn’t believe!—for often he could only have left me with servants. If he should carry me off with him to-night, for old sake’s sake, to the Earl’s Court Exhibition, it will be a little—just a very, very little—like our young adventures.” After which while Amerigo watched her, and in fact quite because of it, she had an inspiration, to which she presently yielded. If he was wondering what she would say next she had found exactly the thing. “In that case he will leave you Charlotte to take care of in our absence. You’ll have to carry her off somewhere for your last evening; unless you may prefer to spend it with her here. I shall then see that you dine, that you have everything, quite beautifully. You’ll be able to do as you like.”

She couldn’t have been sure beforehand, and had really not been; but the most immediate result of this speech was his letting her see that he took it for no cheap extravagance either of irony or of oblivion. Nothing in the world, of a truth, had ever been so sweet to her, as his look of trying to be serious enough to make no mistake about it. She troubled him—which hadn’t been at all her purpose; she mystified him—which she couldn’t help and, comparatively, didn’t mind; then it came over her that he had, after all, a simplicity, very considerable, on which she had never dared to presume. It was a discovery—not like the other discovery she had once made, but giving out a freshness; and she recognised again in the light of it the number of the ideas of which he thought her capable. They were all, apparently, queer for him, but she had at least, with the lapse of the months, created the perception that there might be something in them; whereby he stared there, beautiful and sombre, at what she was at present providing him with. There was something of his own in his mind, to which, she was sure, he referred everything for a measure and a meaning; he had never let go of it, from the evening, weeks before, when, in her room, after his encounter with the Bloomsbury cup, she had planted it there by flinging it at him, on the question of her father’s view of him, her determined “Find out for yourself!” She had been aware, during the months, that he had been trying to find out, and had been seeking, above all, to avoid the appearance of any evasions of such a form of knowledge as might reach him, with violence or with a penetration more insidious, from any other source. Nothing, however, had reached him; nothing he could at all conveniently reckon with had disengaged itself for him even from the announcement, sufficiently sudden, of the final secession of their companions. Charlotte was in pain, Charlotte was in torment, but he himself had given her reason enough for that; and, in respect to the rest of the whole matter of her obligation to follow her husband, that personage and she, Maggie, had so shuffled away every link between consequence and cause, that the intention remained, like some famous poetic line in a dead language, subject to varieties of interpretation. What renewed the obscurity was her strange image of their common offer to him, her father’s and her own, of an opportunity to separate from Mrs. Verver with the due amount of form—and all the more that he was, in so pathetic a way, unable to treat himself to a quarrel with it on the score of taste. Taste, in him, as a touchstone, was now all at sea; for who could say but that one of her fifty ideas, or perhaps forty-nine of them, wouldn’t be, exactly, that taste by itself, the taste he had always conformed to, had no importance whatever? If meanwhile, at all events, he felt her as serious, this made the greater reason for her profiting by it as she perhaps might never be able to profit again. She was invoking that reflection at the very moment he brought out, in reply to her last words, a remark which, though perfectly relevant and perfectly just, affected her at first as a high oddity. “They’re doing the wisest thing, you know. For if they were ever to go—!” And he looked down at her over his cigar.

If they were ever to go, in short, it was high time, with her father’s age, Charlotte’s need of initiation, and the general magnitude of the job of their getting settled and seasoned, their learning to “live into” their queer future—it was high time that they should take up their courage. This was eminent sense, but it didn’t arrest the Princess, who, the next moment, had found a form for her challenge. “But shan’t you then so much as miss her a little? She’s wonderful and beautiful, and I feel somehow as if she were dying. Not really, not physically,” Maggie went on—“she’s so far, naturally, splendid as she is, from having done with life. But dying for us—for you and me; and making us feel it by the very fact of there being so much of her left.”

The Prince smoked hard a minute. “As you say, she’s splendid, but there is—there always will be—much of her left. Only, as you also say, for others.”

“And yet I think,” the Princess returned, “that it isn’t as if we had wholly done with her. How can we not always think of her? It’s as if her unhappiness had been necessary to us—as if we had needed her, at her own cost, to build us up and start us.”

He took it in with consideration, but he met it with a lucid inquiry. “Why do you speak of the unhappiness of your father’s wife?”

They exchanged a long look—the time that it took her to find her reply. “Because not to—!”

“Well, not to—?”

“Would make me have to speak of him. And I can’t,” said Maggie, “speak of him.”

“You ‘can’t’—?”

“I can’t.” She said it as for definite notice, not to be repeated. “There are too many things,” she nevertheless added. “He’s too great.”

The Prince looked at his cigar-tip, and then as he put back the weed: “Too great for whom?” Upon which as she hesitated, “Not, my dear, too great for you,” he declared. “For me—oh, as much as you like.”

“Too great for me is what I mean. I know why I think it,” Maggie said. “That’s enough.”

He looked at her yet again as if she but fanned his wonder; he was on the very point, she judged, of asking her why she thought it. But her own eyes maintained their warning, and at the end of a minute he had uttered other words. “What’s of importance is that you’re his daughter. That at least we’ve got. And I suppose that, if I may say nothing else, I may say at least that I value it.”

“Oh yes, you may say that you value it. I myself make the most of it.”

This again he took in, letting it presently put forth for him a striking connection. “She ought to have known you. That’s what’s present to me. She ought to have understood you better.”

“Better than you did?”

“Yes,” he gravely maintained, “better than I did. And she didn’t really know you at all. She doesn’t know you now.”

“Ah, yes she does!” said Maggie.

But he shook his head—he knew what he meant. “She not only doesn’t understand you more than I, she understands you ever so much less. Though even I—!”

“Well, even you?” Maggie pressed as he paused. “Even I, even I even yet—!” Again he paused and the silence held them.

But Maggie at last broke it. “If Charlotte doesn’t understand me, it is that I’ve prevented her. I’ve chosen to deceive her and to lie to her.”

The Prince kept his eyes on her. “I know what you’ve chosen to do. But I’ve chosen to do the same.”

“Yes,” said Maggie after an instant—“my choice was made when I had guessed yours. But you mean,” she asked, “that she understands YOU?”

“It presents small difficulty!”

“Are you so sure?” Maggie went on.

“Sure enough. But it doesn’t matter.” He waited an instant; then looking up through the fumes of his smoke, “She’s stupid,” he abruptly opined.

“O—oh!” Maggie protested in a long wail.

It had made him in fact quickly change colour. “What I mean is that she’s not, as you pronounce her, unhappy.” And he recovered, with this, all his logic. “Why is she unhappy if she doesn’t know?”

“Doesn’t know—?” She tried to make his logic difficult.

“Doesn’t know that YOU know.”

It came from him in such a way that she was conscious, instantly, of three or four things to answer. But what she said first was: “Do you think that’s all it need take?” And before he could reply, “She knows, she knows!” Maggie proclaimed.

“Well then, what?”

But she threw back her head, she turned impatiently away from him. “Oh, I needn’t tell you! She knows enough. Besides,” she went on, “she doesn’t believe us.”

It made the Prince stare a little. “Ah, she asks too much!” That drew, however, from his wife another moan of objection, which determined in him a judgment. “She won’t let you take her for unhappy.”

“Oh, I know better than any one else what she won’t let me take her for!”

“Very well,” said Amerigo, “you’ll see.”

“I shall see wonders, I know. I’ve already seen them, and I’m prepared for them.” Maggie recalled—she had memories enough. “It’s terrible”—her memories prompted her to speak. “I see it’s ALWAYS terrible for women.”

The Prince looked down in his gravity. “Everything’s terrible, cara, in the heart of man. She’s making her life,” he said. “She’ll make it.”

His wife turned back upon him; she had wandered to a table, vaguely setting objects straight. “A little by the way then too, while she’s about it, she’s making ours.” At this he raised his eyes, which met her own, and she held him while she delivered herself of some thing that had been with her these last minutes.

“You spoke just now of Charlotte’s not having learned from you that I ‘know.’ Am I to take from you then that you accept and recognise my knowledge?”

He did the inquiry all the honours—visibly weighed its importance and weighed his response. “You think I might have been showing you that a little more handsomely?”

“It isn’t a question of any beauty,” said Maggie; “it’s only a question of the quantity of truth.”

“Oh, the quantity of truth!” the Prince richly, though ambiguously, murmured.

“That’s a thing by itself, yes. But there are also such things, all the same, as questions of good faith.”

“Of course there are!” the Prince hastened to reply. After which he brought up more slowly: “If ever a man, since the beginning of time, acted in good faith!” But he dropped it, offering it simply for that.

For that then, when it had had time somewhat to settle, like some handful of gold-dust thrown into the air—for that then Maggie showed herself, as deeply and strangely taking it. “I see.” And she even wished this form to be as complete as she could make it. “I see.”

The completeness, clearly, after an instant, had struck him as divine. “Ah, my dear, my dear, my dear—!” It was all he could say.

She wasn’t talking, however, at large. “You’ve kept up for so long a silence—!”

“Yes, yes, I know what I’ve kept up. But will you do,” he asked, “still one thing more for me?”

It was as if, for an instant, with her new exposure, it had made her turn pale. “Is there even one thing left?”

“Ah, my dear, my dear, my dear!”—it had pressed again in him the fine spring of the unspeakable. There was nothing, however, that the Princess herself couldn’t say. “I’ll do anything, if you’ll tell me what.”

“Then wait.” And his raised Italian hand, with its play of admonitory fingers, had never made gesture more expressive. His voice itself dropped to a tone—! “Wait,” he repeated. “Wait.”

She understood, but it was as if she wished to have it from him. “Till they’ve been here, you mean?”

“Yes, till they’ve gone. Till they’re away.”

She kept it up. “Till they’ve left the country?” She had her eyes on him for clearness; these were the conditions of a promise—so that he put the promise, practically, into his response. “Till we’ve ceased to see them—for as long as God may grant! Till we’re really alone.”

“Oh, if it’s only that—!” When she had drawn from him thus then, as she could feel, the thick breath of the definite—which was the intimate, the immediate, the familiar, as she hadn’t had them for so long—she turned away again, she put her hand on the knob of the door. But her hand rested at first without a grasp; she had another effort to make, the effort of leaving him, of which everything that had just passed between them, his presence, irresistible, overcharged with it, doubled the difficulty. There was something—she couldn’t have told what; it was as if, shut in together, they had come too far—too far for where they were; so that the mere act of her quitting him was like the attempt to recover the lost and gone. She had taken in with her something that, within the ten minutes, and especially within the last three or four, had slipped away from her—which it was vain now, wasn’t it? to try to appear to clutch or to pick up. That consciousness in fact had a pang, and she balanced, intensely, for the lingering moment, almost with a terror of her endless power of surrender. He had only to press, really, for her to yield inch by inch, and she fairly knew at present, while she looked at him through her cloud, that the confession of this precious secret sat there for him to pluck. The sensation, for the few seconds, was extraordinary; her weakness, her desire, so long as she was yet not saving herself, flowered in her face like a light or a darkness. She sought for some word that would cover this up; she reverted to the question of tea, speaking as if they shouldn’t meet sooner. “Then about five. I count on you.”

On him too, however, something had descended; as to which this exactly gave him his chance. “Ah, but I shall see you—! No?” he said, coming nearer.

She had, with her hand still on the knob, her back against the door, so that her retreat, under his approach must be less than a step, and yet she couldn’t for her life, with the other hand, have pushed him away. He was so near now that she could touch him, taste him, smell him, kiss him, hold him; he almost pressed upon her, and the warmth of his face—frowning, smiling, she mightn’t know which; only beautiful and strange—was bent upon her with the largeness with which objects loom in dreams. She closed her eyes to it, and so, the next instant, against her purpose, she had put out her hand, which had met his own and which he held. Then it was that, from behind her closed eyes, the right word came. “Wait!” It was the word of his own distress and entreaty, the word for both of them, all they had left, their plank now on the great sea. Their hands were locked, and thus she said it again. “Wait. Wait.” She kept her eyes shut, but her hand, she knew, helped her meaning—which after a minute she was aware his own had absorbed. He let her go—he turned away with this message, and when she saw him again his back was presented, as he had left her, and his face staring out of the window. She had saved herself and she got off.

XLII

Later on, in the afternoon, before the others arrived, the form of their reunion was at least remarkable: they might, in their great eastward drawing-room, have been comparing notes or nerves in apprehension of some stiff official visit. Maggie’s mind, in its restlessness, even played a little with the prospect; the high cool room, with its afternoon shade, with its old tapestries uncovered, with the perfect polish of its wide floor reflecting the bowls of gathered flowers and the silver and linen of the prepared tea-table, drew from her a remark in which this whole effect was mirrored, as well as something else in the Prince’s movement while he slowly paced and turned. “We’re distinctly bourgeois!” she a trifle grimly threw off, as an echo of their old community; though to a spectator sufficiently detached they might have been quite the privileged pair they were reputed, granted only they were taken as awaiting the visit of Royalty. They might have been ready, on the word passed up in advance, to repair together to the foot of the staircase—the Prince somewhat in front, advancing indeed to the open doors and even going down, for all his princedom, to meet, on the stopping of the chariot, the august emergence. The time was stale, it was to be admitted, for incidents of magnitude; the September hush was in full possession, at the end of the dull day, and a couple of the long windows stood open to the balcony that overhung the desolation— the balcony from which Maggie, in the springtime, had seen Amerigo and Charlotte look down together at the hour of her return from the Regent’s Park, near by, with her father, the Principino and Miss Bogle. Amerigo now again, in his punctual impatience, went out a couple of times and stood there; after which, as to report that nothing was in sight, he returned to the room with frankly nothing else to do. The Princess pretended to read; he looked at her as he passed; there hovered in her own sense the thought of other occasions when she had cheated appearances of agitation with a book. At last she felt him standing before her, and then she raised her eyes.

“Do you remember how, this morning, when you told me of this event, I asked you if there were anything particular you wished me to do? You spoke of my being at home, but that was a matter of course. You spoke of something else,” he went on, while she sat with her book on her knee and her raised eyes; “something that makes me almost wish it may happen. You spoke,” he said, “of the possibility of my seeing her alone. Do you know, if that comes,” he asked, “the use I shall make of it?” And then as she waited: “The use is all before me.”

“Ah, it’s your own business now!” said his wife. But it had made her rise.

“I shall make it my own,” he answered. “I shall tell her I lied to her.”

“Ah no!” she returned.

“And I shall tell her you did.”

She shook her head again. “Oh, still less!”

With which therefore they stood at difference, he with his head erect and his happy idea perched, in its eagerness, on his crest. “And how then is she to know?”

“She isn’t to know.”

“She’s only still to think you don’t—?”

“And therefore that I’m always a fool? She may think,” said Maggie, “what she likes.”

“Think it without my protest—?”

The Princess made a movement. “What business is it of yours?”

“Isn’t it my right to correct her—?”

Maggie let his question ring—ring long enough for him to hear it himself; only then she took it up. “‘Correct’ her?”—and it was her own now that really rang. “Aren’t you rather forgetting who she is?” After which, while he quite stared for it, as it was the very first clear majesty he had known her to use, she flung down her book and raised a warning hand. “The carriage. Come!”

The “Come!” had matched, for lucid firmness, the rest of her speech, and, when they were below, in the hall, there was a “Go!” for him, through the open doors and between the ranged servants, that matched even that. He received Royalty, bareheaded, therefore, in the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Verver, as it alighted on the pavement, and Maggie was at the threshold to welcome it to her house. Later on, upstairs again, she even herself felt still more the force of the limit of which she had just reminded him; at tea, in Charlotte’s affirmed presence—as Charlotte affirmed it—she drew a long breath of richer relief. It was the strangest, once more, of all impressions; but what she most felt, for the half-hour, was that Mr. and Mrs. Verver were making the occasion easy. They were somehow conjoined in it, conjoined for a present effect as Maggie had absolutely never yet seen them; and there occurred, before long, a moment in which Amerigo’s look met her own in recognitions that he couldn’t suppress. The question of the amount of correction to which Charlotte had laid herself open rose and hovered, for the instant, only to sink, conspicuously, by its own weight; so high a pitch she seemed to give to the unconsciousness of questions, so resplendent a show of serenity she succeeded in making. The shade of the official, in her beauty and security, never for a moment dropped; it was a cool, high refuge, like the deep, arched recess of some coloured and gilded image, in which she sat and smiled and waited, drank her tea, referred to her husband and remembered her mission. Her mission had quite taken form—it was but another name for the interest of her great opportunity—that of representing the arts and the graces to a people languishing, afar off, in ignorance. Maggie had sufficiently intimated to the Prince, ten minutes before, that she needed no showing as to what their friend wouldn’t consent to be taken for; but the difficulty now indeed was to choose, for explicit tribute of admiration, between the varieties of her nobler aspects. She carried it off, to put the matter coarsely, with a taste and a discretion that held our young woman’s attention, for the first quarter-of-an-hour, to the very point of diverting it from the attitude of her overshadowed, her almost superseded companion. But Adam Verver profited indeed at this time, even with his daughter, by his so marked peculiarity of seeming on no occasion to have an attitude; and so long as they were in the room together she felt him still simply weave his web and play out his long fine cord, knew herself in presence of this tacit process very much as she had known herself at Fawns. He had a way, the dear man, wherever he was, of moving about the room, noiselessly, to see what it might contain; and his manner of now resorting to this habit, acquainted as he already was with the objects in view, expressed with a certain sharpness the intention of leaving his wife to her devices. It did even more than this; it signified, to the apprehension of the Princess, from the moment she more directly took thought of him, almost a special view of these devices, as actually exhibited in their rarity, together with an independent, a settled appreciation of their general handsome adequacy, which scarcely required the accompaniment of his faint contemplative hum.

Charlotte throned, as who should say, between her hostess and her host, the whole scene having crystallised, as soon as she took her place, to the right quiet lustre; the harmony was not less sustained for being superficial, and the only approach to a break in it was while Amerigo remained standing long enough for his father-in-law, vaguely wondering, to appeal to him, invite or address him, and then, in default of any such word, selected for presentation to the other visitor a plate of petits fours. Maggie watched her husband—if it now could be called watching—offer this refreshment; she noted the consummate way—for “consummate” was the term she privately applied—in which Charlotte cleared her acceptance, cleared her impersonal smile, of any betrayal, any slightest value, of consciousness; and then felt the slow surge of a vision that, at the end of another minute or two, had floated her across the room to where her father stood looking at a picture, an early Florentine sacred subject, that he had given her on her marriage. He might have been, in silence, taking his last leave of it; it was a work for which he entertained, she knew, an unqualified esteem. The tenderness represented for her by his sacrifice of such a treasure had become, to her sense, a part of the whole infusion, of the immortal expression; the beauty of his sentiment looked out at her, always, from the beauty of the rest, as if the frame made positively a window for his spiritual face: she might have said to herself, at this moment, that in leaving the thing behind him, held as in her clasping arms, he was doing the most possible toward leaving her a part of his palpable self. She put her hand over his shoulder, and their eyes were held again, together, by the abiding felicity; they smiled in emulation, vaguely, as if speech failed them through their having passed too far; she would have begun to wonder the next minute if it were reserved to them, for the last stage, to find their contact, like that of old friends reunited too much on the theory of the unchanged, subject to shy lapses.

“It’s all right, eh?”

“Oh, my dear—rather!”

He had applied the question to the great fact of the picture, as she had spoken for the picture in reply, but it was as if their words for an instant afterwards symbolised another truth, so that they looked about at everything else to give them this extension. She had passed her arm into his, and the other objects in the room, the other pictures, the sofas, the chairs, the tables, the cabinets, the “important” pieces, supreme in their way, stood out, round them, consciously, for recognition and applause. Their eyes moved together from piece to piece, taking in the whole nobleness—quite as if for him to measure the wisdom of old ideas. The two noble persons seated, in conversation, at tea, fell thus into the splendid effect and the general harmony: Mrs. Verver and the Prince fairly “placed” themselves, however unwittingly, as high expressions of the kind of human furniture required, esthetically, by such a scene. The fusion of their presence with the decorative elements, their contribution to the triumph of selection, was complete and admirable; though, to a lingering view, a view more penetrating than the occasion really demanded, they also might have figured as concrete attestations of a rare power of purchase. There was much indeed in the tone in which Adam Verver spoke again, and who shall say where his thought stopped? “Le compte y est. You’ve got some good things.”

Maggie met it afresh—“Ah, don’t they look well?” Their companions, at the sound of this, gave them, in a spacious intermission of slow talk, an attention, all of gravity, that was like an ampler submission to the general duty of magnificence; sitting as still, to be thus appraised, as a pair of effigies of the contemporary great on one of the platforms of Madame Tussaud. “I’m so glad—for your last look.”

With which, after Maggie—quite in the air—had said it, the note was struck indeed; the note of that strange accepted finality of relation, as from couple to couple, which almost escaped an awkwardness only by not attempting a gloss. Yes, this was the wonder, that the occasion defied insistence precisely because of the vast quantities with which it dealt—so that separation was on a scale beyond any compass of parting. To do such an hour justice would have been in some degree to question its grounds—which was why they remained, in fine, the four of them, in the upper air, united in the firmest abstention from pressure. There was no point, visibly, at which, face to face, either Amerigo or Charlotte had pressed; and how little she herself was in danger of doing so Maggie scarce needed to remember. That her father wouldn’t, by the tip of a toe—of that she was equally conscious: the only thing was that, since he didn’t, she could but hold her breath for what he would do instead. When, at the end of three minutes more, he had said, with an effect of suddenness, “Well, Mag—and the Principino?” it was quite as if that were, by contrast, the hard, the truer voice.

She glanced at the clock. “I ‘ordered’ him for half-past five—which hasn’t yet struck. Trust him, my dear, not to fail you!”