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George Moore - "Celibates"

James Bryce - "William Ewart Gladstone"

Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Volume 1."

Jessie Graham Flower - "Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders on the Great American Desert"

The Golden Bowl, Volume I

H >> Henry James >> The Golden Bowl, Volume I




These allowances of his spirit were, all the same, consistent
with a great gladness at the sight of the term of his ordeal; for
it was the end of his seeming to agree that questions and doubts
had a place. The more he had inwardly turned the matter over the
more it had struck him that they had in truth only an ugliness.
What he could have best borne, as he now believed, would have
been Charlotte's simply saying to him that she didn't like him
enough. This he wouldn't have enjoyed, but he would quite have
understood it and been able ruefully to submit. She did like him
enough--nothing to contradict that had come out for him; so that
he was restless for her as well as for himself. She looked at him
hard a moment when he handed her his telegram, and the look, for
what he fancied a dim, shy fear in it, gave him perhaps his best
moment of conviction that--as a man, so to speak--he properly
pleased her. He said nothing--the words sufficiently did it for
him, doing it again better still as Charlotte, who had left her
chair at his approach, murmured them out. "We start to-night to
bring you all our love and joy and sympathy." There they were,
the words, and what did she want more? She didn't, however, as
she gave him back the little unfolded leaf, say they were enough
--though he saw, the next moment, that her silence was probably
not disconnected from her having just visibly turned pale. Her
extraordinarily fine eyes, as it was his present theory that he
had always thought them, shone at him the more darkly out of this
change of colour; and she had again, with it, her apparent way of
subjecting herself, for explicit honesty and through her
willingness to face him, to any view he might take, all at his
ease, and even to wantonness, of the condition he produced in
her. As soon as he perceived that emotion kept her soundless he
knew himself deeply touched, since it proved that, little as she
professed, she had been beautifully hoping. They stood there a
minute while he took in from this sign that, yes then, certainly
she liked him enough--liked him enough to make him, old as he was
ready to brand himself, flush for the pleasure of it. The
pleasure of it accordingly made him speak first. "Do you begin, a
little, to be satisfied?"

Still, however, she had to think. "We've hurried them, you see.
Why so breathless a start?"

"Because they want to congratulate us. They want," said Adam
Verver, "to SEE our happiness."

She wondered again--and this time also, for him, as publicly as
possible. "So much as that?"

"Do you think it's too much?"

She continued to think plainly. "They weren't to have started for
another week."

"Well, what then? Isn't our situation worth the little sacrifice?
We'll go back to Rome as soon as you like WITH them."

This seemed to hold her--as he had previously seen her held, just
a trifle inscrutably, by his allusions to what they would do
together on a certain contingency. "Worth it, the little
sacrifice, for whom? For us, naturally--yes," she said. "We want
to see them--for our reasons. That is," she rather dimly smiled,
"YOU do."

"And you do, my dear, too!" he bravely declared. "Yes then--I do
too," she after an instant ungrudging enough acknowledged. "For
us, however, something depends on it."

"Rather! But does nothing depend on it for them?"

"What CAN--from the moment that, as appears, they don't want to
nip us in the bud? I can imagine their rushing up to prevent us.
But an enthusiasm for us that can wait so very little--such
intense eagerness, I confess," she went on, "more than a little
puzzles me. You may think me," she also added, "ungracious and
suspicious, but the Prince can't at all want to come back so
soon. He wanted quite too intensely to get away."

Mr. Verver considered. "Well, hasn't he been away?"

"Yes, just long enough to see how he likes it. Besides," said
Charlotte, "he may not be able to join in the rosy view of our
case that you impute to her. It can't in the least have appeared
to him hitherto a matter of course that you should give his wife
a bouncing stepmother."

Adam Verver, at this, looked grave. "I'm afraid then he'll just
have to accept from us whatever his wife accepts; and accept it--
if he can imagine no better reason--just because she does. That,"
he declared, "will have to do for him."

His tone made her for a moment meet his face; after which, "Let
me," she abruptly said, "see it again"--taking from him the
folded leaf that she had given back and he had kept in his hand.
"Isn't the whole thing," she asked when she had read it over,
"perhaps but a way like another for their gaining time?"

He again stood staring; but the next minute, with that upward
spring of his shoulders and that downward pressure of his pockets
which she had already, more than once, at disconcerted moments,
determined in him, he turned sharply away and wandered from her
in silence. He looked about in his small despair; he crossed the
hotel court, which, overarched and glazed, muffled against loud
sounds and guarded against crude sights, heated, gilded, draped,
almost carpeted, with exotic trees in tubs, exotic ladies in
chairs, the general exotic accent and presence suspended, as with
wings folded or feebly fluttering, in the superior, the supreme,
the inexorably enveloping Parisian medium, resembled some
critical apartment of large capacity, some "dental," medical,
surgical waiting-room, a scene of mixed anxiety and desire,
preparatory, for gathered barbarians, to the due amputation or
extraction of excrescences and redundancies of barbarism. He went
as far as the porte-cochere, took counsel afresh of his usual
optimism, sharpened even, somehow, just here, by the very air he
tasted, and then came back smiling to Charlotte. "It is
incredible to you that when a man is still as much in love as
Amerigo his most natural impulse should be to feel what his wife
feels, to believe what she believes, to want what she wants?--in
the absence, that is, of special impediments to his so doing."
The manner of it operated--she acknowledged with no great delay
this natural possibility. "No--nothing is incredible to me of
people immensely in love."

"Well, isn't Amerigo immensely in love?"

She hesitated but as for the right expression of her sense of the
degree--but she after all adopted Mr. Verver's. "Immensely."

"Then there you are!"

She had another smile, however--she wasn't there quite yet. "That
isn't all that's wanted."

"But what more?"

"Why that his wife shall have made him really believe that SHE
really believes." With which Charlotte became still more lucidly
logical. "The reality of his belief will depend in such a case on
the reality of hers. The Prince may for instance now," she went
on, "have made out to his satisfaction that Maggie may mainly
desire to abound in your sense, whatever it is you do. He may
remember that he has never seen her do anything else."

"Well," said Adam Verver, "what kind of a warning will he have
found in that? To what catastrophe will he have observed such a
disposition in her to lead?"

"Just to THIS one!" With which she struck him as rising
straighter and clearer before him than she had done even yet.

"Our little question itself?" Her appearance had in fact, at the
moment, such an effect on him that he could answer but in
marvelling mildness. "Hadn't we better wait a while till we call
it a catastrophe?"

Her rejoinder to this was to wait--though by no means as long as
he meant. When at the end of her minute she spoke, however, it
was mildly too. "What would you like, dear friend, to wait for?"
It lingered between them in the air, this demand, and they
exchanged for the time a look which might have made each of them
seem to have been watching in the other the signs of its overt
irony. These were indeed immediately so visible in Mr. Verver's
face that, as if a little ashamed of having so markedly produced
them--and as if also to bring out at last, under pressure,
something she had all the while been keeping back--she took a
jump to pure plain reason. "You haven't noticed for yourself, but
I can't quite help noticing, that in spite of what you assume--WE
assume, if you like--Maggie wires her joy only to you. She makes
no sign of its overflow to me."

It was a point--and, staring a moment, he took account of it. But
he had, as before, his presence of mind--to say nothing of his
kindly humour. "Why, you complain of the very thing that's most
charmingly conclusive! She treats us already as ONE."

Clearly now, for the girl, in spite of lucidity and logic, there
was something in the way he said things--! She faced him in all
her desire to please him, and then her word quite simply and
definitely showed it. "I do like you, you know."

Well, what could this do but stimulate his humour? "I see what's
the matter with you. You won't be quiet till you've heard from
the Prince himself. I think," the happy man added, "that I'll go
and secretly wire to him that you'd like, reply paid, a few words
for yourself."

It could apparently but encourage her further to smile. "Reply
paid for him, you mean--or for me?"

"Oh, I'll pay, with pleasure, anything back for you--as many
words as you like." And he went on, to keep it up. "Not requiring
either to see your message."

She could take it, visibly, as he meant it. "Should you require
to see the Prince's?"

"Not a bit. You can keep that also to yourself."

On his speaking, however, as if his transmitting the hint were a
real question, she appeared to consider--and almost as if for
good taste--that the joke had gone far enough. "It doesn't
matter. Unless he speaks of his own movement--! And why should it
be," she asked, "a thing that WOULD occur to him?"

"I really think," Mr. Verver concurred, "that it naturally
wouldn't. HE doesn't know you're morbid."

She just wondered--but she agreed. "No--he hasn't yet found it
out. Perhaps he will, but he hasn't yet; and I'm willing to give
him meanwhile the benefit of the doubt." So with this the
situation, to her view, would appear to have cleared had she not
too quickly had one of her restless relapses. "Maggie, however,
does know I'm morbid. SHE hasn't the benefit."

"Well," said Adam Verver a little wearily at last, "I think I
feel that you'll hear from her yet." It had even fairly come over
him, under recurrent suggestion, that his daughter's omission WAS
surprising. And Maggie had never in her life been wrong for more
than three minutes.

"Oh, it isn't that I hold that I've a RIGHT to it," Charlotte the
next instant rather oddly qualified--and the observation itself
gave him a further push.

"Very well--I shall like it myself."

At this then, as if moved by his way of constantly--and more or
less against his own contention--coming round to her, she showed
how she could also always, and not less gently, come half way. "I
speak of it only as the missing GRACE--the grace that's in
everything that Maggie does. It isn't my due"--she kept it up--
"but, taking from you that we may still expect it, it will have
the touch. It will be beautiful."

"Then come out to breakfast." Mr. Verver had looked at his
watch. "It will be here when we get back."

"If it isn't"--and Charlotte smiled as she looked about for a
feather boa that she had laid down on descending from her room--
"if it isn't it will have had but THAT slight fault."

He saw her boa on the arm of the chair from which she had moved
to meet him, and, after he had fetched it, raising it to make its
charming softness brush his face--for it was a wondrous product
of Paris, purchased under his direct auspices the day before--he
held it there a minute before giving it up. "Will you promise me
then to be at peace?"

She looked, while she debated, at his admirable present. "I
promise you."

"Quite for ever?"

"Quite for ever."

"Remember," he went on, to justify his demand, "remember that in
wiring you she'll naturally speak even more for her husband than
she has done in wiring me."

It was only at a word that Charlotte had a demur.
"'Naturally'--?"

"Why, our marriage puts him for you, you see--or puts you for
him--into a new relation, whereas it leaves his relation to me
unchanged. It therefore gives him more to say to you about it."

"About its making me his stepmother-in-law--or whatever I SHOULD
become?" Over which, for a little, she not undivertedly mused.
"Yes, there may easily be enough for a gentleman to say to a
young woman about that."

"Well, Amerigo can always be, according to the case, either as
funny or as serious as you like; and whichever he may be for you,
in sending you a message, he'll be it ALL." And then as the girl,
with one of her so deeply and oddly, yet so tenderly, critical
looks at him, failed to take up the remark, he found himself
moved, as by a vague anxiety, to add a question. "Don't you think
he's charming?"

"Oh, charming," said Charlotte Stant. "If he weren't I shouldn't
mind."

"No more should I!" her friend harmoniously returned.

"Ah, but you DON'T mind. You don't have to. You don't have to, I
mean, as I have. It's the last folly ever to care, in an anxious
way, the least particle more than one is absolutely forced. If I
were you," she went on--"if I had in my life, for happiness and
power and peace, even a small fraction of what you have, it would
take a great deal to make me waste my worry. I don't know," she
said, "what in the world--that didn't touch my luck--I should
trouble my head about."

"I quite understand you--yet doesn't it just depend," Mr. Verver
asked, "on what you call one's luck? It's exactly my luck that
I'm talking about. I shall be as sublime as you like when you've
made me all right. It's only when one is right that one really
has the things you speak of. It isn't they," he explained, "that
make one so: it's the something else I want that makes THEM
right. If you'll give me what I ask, you'll see."

She had taken her boa and thrown it over her shoulders, and her
eyes, while she still delayed, had turned from him, engaged by
another interest, though the court was by this time, the hour of
dispersal for luncheon, so forsaken that they would have had it,
for free talk, should they have been moved to loudness, quite to
themselves. She was ready for their adjournment, but she was also
aware of a pedestrian youth, in uniform, a visible emissary of
the Postes et Telegraphes, who had approached, from the street,
the small stronghold of the concierge and who presented there a
missive taken from the little cartridge-box slung over his
shoulder. The portress, meeting him on the threshold, met
equally, across the court, Charlotte's marked attention to his
visit, so that, within the minute, she had advanced to our
friends with her cap-streamers flying and her smile of
announcement as ample as her broad white apron. She raised aloft
a telegraphic message and, as she delivered it, sociably
discriminated. "Cette fois-ci pour madame!"--with which she as
genially retreated, leaving Charlotte in possession. Charlotte,
taking it, held it at first unopened. Her eyes had come back to
her companion, who had immediately and triumphantly greeted it.
"Ah, there you are!"

She broke the envelope then in silence, and for a minute, as with
the message he himself had put before her, studied its contents
without a sign. He watched her without a question, and at last
she looked up. "I'll give you," she simply said, "what you ask."

The expression of her face was strange--but since when had a
woman's at moments of supreme surrender not a right to be? He
took it in with his own long look and his grateful silence--so
that nothing more, for some instants, passed between them. Their
understanding sealed itself--he already felt that she had made
him right. But he was in presence too of the fact that Maggie had
made HER so; and always, therefore, without Maggie, where, in
fine, would he be? She united them, brought them together as with
the click of a silver spring, and, on the spot, with the vision
of it, his eyes filled, Charlotte facing him meanwhile with her
expression made still stranger by the blur of his gratitude.
Through it all, however, he smiled. "What my child does for
me--!"

Through it all as well, that is still through the blur, he saw
Charlotte, rather than heard her, reply. She held her paper wide
open, but her eyes were all for his. "It isn't Maggie. It's the
Prince."

"I SAY!"--he gaily rang out. "Then it's best of all."

"It's enough."

"Thank you for thinking so!" To which he added "It's enough for
our question, but it isn't--is it? quite enough for our
breakfast? Dejeunons."

She stood there, however, in spite of this appeal, her document
always before them. "Don't you want to read it?"

He thought. "Not if it satisfies you. I don't require it."

But she gave him, as for her conscience, another chance. "You can
if you like."

He hesitated afresh, but as for amiability, not for curiosity.
"Is it funny?"

Thus, finally, she again dropped her eyes on it, drawing in her
lips a little. "No--I call it grave."

"Ah, then, I don't want it."

"Very grave," said Charlotte Stant.

"Well, what did I tell you of him?" he asked, rejoicing, as they
started: a question for all answer to which, before she took his
arm, the girl thrust her paper, crumpled, into the pocket of her
coat.



PART THIRD

XIV

Charlotte, half way up the "monumental" staircase, had begun by
waiting alone--waiting to be rejoined by her companion, who had
gone down all the way, as in common kindness bound, and who, his
duty performed, would know where to find her. She was meanwhile,
though extremely apparent, not perhaps absolutely advertised; but
she would not have cared if she had been--so little was it, by
this time, her first occasion of facing society with a
consciousness materially, with a confidence quite splendidly,
enriched. For a couple of years now she had known as never before
what it was to look "well"--to look, that is, as well as she had
always felt, from far back, that, in certain conditions, she
might. On such an evening as this, that of a great official party
in the full flush of the London spring-time, the conditions
affected her, her nerves, her senses, her imagination, as all
profusely present; so that perhaps at no moment yet had she been
so justified of her faith as at the particular instant of our
being again concerned with her, that of her chancing to glance
higher up from where she stood and meeting in consequence the
quiet eyes of Colonel Assingham, who had his elbows on the broad
balustrade of the great gallery overhanging the staircase and who
immediately exchanged with her one of his most artlessly familiar
signals. This simplicity of his visual attention struck her, even
with the other things she had to think about, as the quietest
note in the whole high pitch--much, in fact, as if she had
pressed a finger on a chord or a key and created, for the number
of seconds, an arrest of vibration, a more muffled thump. The
sight of him suggested indeed that Fanny would be there, though
so far as opportunity went she had not seen her. This was about
the limit of what it could suggest.

The air, however, had suggestions enough--it abounded in them,
many of them precisely helping to constitute those conditions
with which, for our young woman, the hour was brilliantly
crowned. She was herself in truth crowned, and it all hung
together, melted together, in light and colour and sound: the
unsurpassed diamonds that her head so happily carried, the other
jewels, the other perfections of aspect and arrangement that made
her personal scheme a success, the PROVED private theory that
materials to work with had been all she required and that there
were none too precious for her to understand and use--to which
might be added lastly, as the strong-scented flower of the total
sweetness, an easy command, a high enjoyment, of her crisis. For
a crisis she was ready to take it, and this ease it was,
doubtless, that helped her, while she waited, to the right
assurance, to the right indifference, to the right expression,
and above all, as she felt, to the right view of her opportunity
for happiness--unless indeed the opportunity itself, rather,
were, in its mere strange amplitude, the producing, the
precipitating cause. The ordered revellers, rustling and shining,
with sweep of train and glitter of star and clink of sword, and
yet, for all this, but so imperfectly articulate, so vaguely
vocal--the double stream of the coming and the going, flowing
together where she stood, passed her, brushed her, treated her to
much crude contemplation and now and then to a spasm of speech,
an offered hand, even in some cases to an unencouraged pause; but
she missed no countenance and invited no protection: she fairly
liked to be, so long as she might, just as she was--exposed a
little to the public, no doubt, in her unaccompanied state, but,
even if it were a bit brazen, careless of queer reflections on
the dull polish of London faces, and exposed, since it was a
question of exposure, to much more competent recognitions of her
own. She hoped no one would stop--she was positively keeping
herself; it was her idea to mark in a particular manner the
importance of something that had just happened. She knew how she
should mark it, and what she was doing there made already a
beginning.

When presently, therefore, from her standpoint, she saw the
Prince come back she had an impression of all the place as higher
and wider and more appointed for great moments; with its dome of
lustres lifted, its ascents and descents more majestic, its
marble tiers more vividly overhung, its numerosity of royalties,
foreign and domestic, more unprecedented, its symbolism of
"State" hospitality both emphasised and refined. This was
doubtless a large consequence of a fairly familiar cause, a
considerable inward stir to spring from the mere vision, striking
as that might be, of Amerigo in a crowd; but she had her reasons,
she held them there, she carried them in fact, responsibly and
overtly, as she carried her head, her high tiara, her folded fan,
her indifferent, unattended eminence; and it was when he reached
her and she could, taking his arm, show herself as placed in her
relation, that she felt supremely justified. It was her notion of
course that she gave a glimpse of but few of her grounds for this
discrimination--indeed of the most evident alone; yet she would
have been half willing it should be guessed how she drew
inspiration, drew support, in quantity sufficient for almost
anything, from the individual value that, through all the
picture, her husband's son-in-law kept for the eye, deriving it
from his fine unconscious way, in the swarming social sum, of
outshining, overlooking and overtopping. It was as if in
separation, even the shortest, she half forgot or disbelieved how
he affected her sight, so that reappearance had, in him, each
time, a virtue of its own--a kind of disproportionate intensity
suggesting his connection with occult sources of renewal. What
did he do when he was away from her that made him always come
back only looking, as she would have called it, "more so?"
Superior to any shade of cabotinage, he yet almost
resembled an actor who, between his moments on the stage,
revisits his dressing-room and, before the glass, pressed by his
need of effect, retouches his make-up. The Prince was at present,
for instance, though he had quitted her but ten minutes before,
still more than then the person it pleased her to be left with--a
truth that had all its force for her while he made her his care
for their conspicuous return together to the upper rooms.
Conspicuous beyond any wish they could entertain was what, poor
wonderful man, he couldn't help making it; and when she raised
her eyes again, on the ascent, to Bob Assingham, still aloft in
his gallery and still looking down at her, she was aware that, in
spite of hovering and warning inward voices, she even enjoyed the
testimony rendered by his lonely vigil to the lustre she
reflected.

He was always lonely at great parties, the dear Colonel--it
wasn't in such places that the seed he sowed at home was ever
reaped by him; but nobody could have seemed to mind it less, to
brave it with more bronzed indifference; so markedly that he
moved about less like one of the guests than like some quite
presentable person in charge of the police arrangements or the
electric light. To Mrs. Verver, as will be seen, he represented,
with the perfect good faith of his apparent blankness, something
definite enough; though her bravery was not thereby too blighted
for her to feel herself calling him to witness that the only
witchcraft her companion had used, within the few minutes, was
that of attending Maggie, who had withdrawn from the scene, to
her carriage. Notified, at all events, of Fanny's probable
presence, Charlotte was, for a while after this, divided between
the sense of it as a fact somehow to reckon with and deal with,
which was a perception that made, in its degree, for the
prudence, the pusillanimity of postponement, of avoidance--and a
quite other feeling, an impatience that presently ended by
prevailing, an eagerness, really, to BE suspected, sounded,
veritably arraigned, if only that she might have the bad moment
over, if only that she might prove to herself, let alone to
Mrs. Assingham also, that she could convert it to good; if only,
in short, to be "square," as they said, with her question. For
herself indeed, particularly, it wasn't a question; but something
in her bones told her that Fanny would treat it as one, and there
was truly nothing that, from this friend, she was not bound in
decency to take. She might hand things back with every tender
precaution, with acknowledgments and assurances, but she owed it
to them, in any case, and it to all Mrs. Assingham had done for
her, not to get rid of them without having well unwrapped and
turned them over.

Book Prizes Awarded With Nod to History
Annette Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award for nonfiction for “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” while Peter Matthiessen won the fiction award for “Shadow Country.”

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In P. D. James’s latest exercise in impeccable detection, a muckraking London journalist worms her way into a private clinic on a country estate — and ends up the victim of a ghastly murder.

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