The Golden Bowl, Volume I

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

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She had in a word not only mounted, cheerfully, the London
treadmill--she had handsomely professed herself, for the further
comfort of the three others, sustained in the effort by a
"frivolous side," if that were not too harsh a name for a
pleasant constitutional curiosity. There were possibilities of
dulness, ponderosities of practice, arid social sands, the bad
quarters-of-an-hour that turned up like false pieces in a debased
currency, of which she made, on principle, very nearly as light
as if she had not been clever enough to distinguish. The Prince
had, on this score, paid her his compliment soon after her return
from her wedding-tour in America, where, by all accounts, she had
wondrously borne the brunt; facing brightly, at her husband's
side, everything that came up--and what had come, often, was
beyond words: just as, precisely, with her own interest only at
stake, she had thrown up the game during the visit paid before
her marriage. The discussion of the American world, the
comparison of notes, impressions and adventures, had been all at
hand, as a ground of meeting for Mrs. Verver and her husband's
son-in-law, from the hour of the reunion of the two couples. Thus
it had been, in short, that Charlotte could, for her friend's
appreciation, so promptly make her point; even using expressions
from which he let her see, at the hour, that he drew amusement of
his own. "What could be more simple than one's going through with
everything," she had asked, "when it's so plain a part of one's
contract? I've got so much, by my marriage"--for she had never
for a moment concealed from him how "much" she had felt it and
was finding it "that I should deserve no charity if I stinted my
return. Not to do that, to give back on the contrary all one can,
are just one's decency and one's honour and one's virtue. These
things, henceforth, if you're interested to know, are my rule of
life, the absolute little gods of my worship, the holy images set
up on the wall. Oh yes, since I'm not a brute," she had wound up,
"you shall see me as I AM!" Which was therefore as he had seen
her--dealing always, from month to month, from day to day and
from one occasion to the other, with the duties of a remunerated
office. Her perfect, her brilliant efficiency had doubtless, all
the while, contributed immensely to the pleasant ease in which
her husband and her husband's daughter were lapped. It had in
fact probably done something more than this--it had given them a
finer and sweeter view of the possible scope of that ease. They
had brought her in--on the crudest expression of it--to do the
"worldly" for them, and she had done it with such genius that
they had themselves in consequence renounced it even more than
they had originally intended. In proportion as she did it,
moreover, was she to be relieved of other and humbler doings;
which minor matters, by the properest logic, devolved therefore
upon Maggie, in whose chords and whose province they more
naturally lay. Not less naturally, by the same token, they
included the repair, at the hands of the latter young woman, of
every stitch conceivably dropped by Charlotte in Eaton Square.
This was homely work, but that was just what made it Maggie's.
Bearing in mind dear Amerigo, who was so much of her own great
mundane feather, and whom the homeliness in question didn't, no
doubt, quite equally provide for--that would be, to balance, just
in a manner Charlotte's very most charming function, from the
moment Charlotte could be got adequately to recognise it.

Well, that Charlotte might be appraised as at last not
ineffectually recognising it, was a reflection that, during the
days with which we are actually engaged, completed in the
Prince's breast these others, these images and ruminations of his
leisure, these gropings and fittings of his conscience and his
experience, that we have attempted to set in order there. They
bore him company, not insufficiently--considering, in especial,
his fuller resources in that line--while he worked out--to the
last lucidity the principle on which he forbore either to seek
Fanny out in Cadogan Place or to perpetrate the error of too
marked an assiduity in Eaton Square. This error would be his not
availing himself to the utmost of the convenience of any artless
theory of his constitution, or of Charlotte's, that might prevail
there. That artless theories could and did prevail was a fact he
had ended by accepting, under copious evidence, as definite and
ultimate; and it consorted with common prudence, with the
simplest economy of life, not to be wasteful of any odd gleaning.
To haunt Eaton Square, in fine, would be to show that he had not,
like his brilliant associate, a sufficiency of work in the world.
It was just his having that sufficiency, it was just their having
it together, that, so strangely and so blessedly, made, as they
put it to each other, everything possible. What further propped
up the case, moreover, was that the "world," by still another
beautiful perversity of their chance, included Portland Place
without including to anything like the same extent Eaton Square.
The latter residence, at the same time, it must promptly be
added, did, on occasion, wake up to opportunity and, as giving
itself a frolic shake, send out a score of invitations--one of
which fitful flights, precisely, had, before Easter, the effect
of disturbing a little our young man's measure of his margin.
Maggie, with a proper spirit, held that her father ought from
time to time to give a really considered dinner, and Mr. Verver,
who had as little idea as ever of not meeting expectation, was of
the harmonious opinion that his wife ought. Charlotte's own
judgment was, always, that they were ideally free--the proof of
which would always be, she maintained, that everyone they feared
they might most have alienated by neglect would arrive, wreathed
with smiles, on the merest hint of a belated signal. Wreathed in
smiles, all round, truly enough, these apologetic banquets struck
Amerigo as being; they were, frankly, touching occasions to him,
marked, in the great London bousculade, with a small, still grace
of their own, an investing amenity and humanity. Everybody came,
everybody rushed; but all succumbed to the soft influence, and
the brutality of mere multitude, of curiosity without tenderness,
was put off, at the foot of the fine staircase, with the
overcoats and shawls. The entertainment offered a few evenings
before Easter, and at which Maggie and he were inevitably present
as guests, was a discharge of obligations not insistently
incurred, and had thereby, possibly, all the more, the note of
this almost Arcadian optimism: a large, bright, dull, murmurous,
mild-eyed, middle-aged dinner, involving for the most part very
bland, though very exalted, immensely announceable and
hierarchically placeable couples, and followed, without the
oppression of a later contingent, by a brief instrumental
concert, over the preparation of which, the Prince knew, Maggie's
anxiety had conferred with Charlotte's ingenuity and both had
supremely revelled, as it were, in Mr. Verver's solvency.

The Assinghams were there, by prescription, though quite at the
foot of the social ladder, and with the Colonel's wife, in spite
of her humility of position, the Prince was more inwardly
occupied than with any other person except Charlotte. He was
occupied with Charlotte because, in the first place, she looked
so inordinately handsome and held so high, where so much else was
mature and sedate, the torch of responsive youth and the standard
of passive grace; and because of the fact that, in the second,
the occasion, so far as it referred itself with any confidence of
emphasis to a hostess, seemed to refer itself preferentially,
well-meaningly and perversely, to Maggie. It was not
indistinguishable to him, when once they were all stationed, that
his wife too had in perfection her own little character; but he
wondered how it managed so visibly to simplify itself--and this,
he knew, in spite of any desire she entertained--to the essential
air of having overmuch on her mind the felicity, and indeed the
very conduct and credit, of the feast. He knew, as well, the
other things of which her appearance was at any time--and in
Eaton Square especially--made up: her resemblance to her father,
at times so vivid, and coming out, in the delicate warmth of
occasions, like the quickened fragrance of a flower; her
resemblance, as he had hit it off for her once in Rome, in the
first flushed days, after their engagement, to a little
dancing-girl at rest, ever so light of movement but most often
panting gently, even a shade compunctiously, on a bench; her
approximation, finally--for it was analogy, somehow, more than
identity--to the transmitted images of rather neutral and
negative propriety that made up, in his long line, the average of
wifehood and motherhood. If the Roman matron had been, in
sufficiency, first and last, the honour of that line, Maggie
would no doubt, at fifty, have expanded, have solidified to some
such dignity, even should she suggest a little but a Cornelia in
miniature. A light, however, broke for him in season, and when
once it had done so it made him more than ever aware of Mrs.
Verver's vaguely, yet quite exquisitely, contingent
participation--a mere hinted or tendered discretion; in short of
Mrs. Verver's indescribable, unfathomable relation to the scene.
Her placed condition, her natural seat and neighbourhood, her
intenser presence, her quieter smile, her fewer jewels, were
inevitably all as nothing compared with the preoccupation that
burned in Maggie like a small flame and that had in fact kindled
in each of her cheeks a little attesting, but fortunately by no
means unbecoming, spot. The party was her father's party, and its
greater or smaller success was a question having for her all the
importance of his importance; so that sympathy created for her a
sort of visible suspense, under pressure of which she bristled
with filial reference, with little filial recalls of expression,
movement, tone. It was all unmistakable, and as pretty as
possible, if one would, and even as funny; but it put the pair so
together, as undivided by the marriage of each, that the Princess
il n'y avait pas a dire--might sit where she liked: she would
still, always, in that house, be irremediably Maggie Verver. The
Prince found himself on this occasion so beset with that
perception that its natural complement for him would really have
been to wonder if Mr. Verver had produced on people something of
the same impression in the recorded cases of his having dined
with his daughter.

This backward speculation, had it begun to play, however, would
have been easily arrested; for it was at present to come over
Amerigo as never before that his remarkable father-in-law was the
man in the world least equipped with different appearances for
different hours. He was simple, he was a revelation of
simplicity, and that was the end of him so far as he consisted of
an appearance at all--a question that might verily, for a
weakness in it, have been argued. It amused our young man, who
was taking his pleasure to-night, it will be seen, in sundry
occult ways, it amused him to feel how everything else the master
of the house consisted of, resources, possessions, facilities and
amiabilities amplified by the social legend, depended, for
conveying the effect of quantity, on no personal "equation," no
mere measurable medium. Quantity was in the air for these good
people, and Mr. Verver's estimable quality was almost wholly in
that pervasion. He was meagre and modest and clearbrowed, and his
eyes, if they wandered without fear, yet stayed without defiance;
his shoulders were not broad, his chest was not high, his
complexion was not fresh, and the crown of his head was not
covered; in spite of all of which he looked, at the top of his
table, so nearly like a little boy shyly entertaining in virtue
of some imposed rank, that he COULD only be one of the powers,
the representative of a force--quite as an infant king is the
representative of a dynasty. In this generalised view of his
father-in-law, intensified to-night but always operative, Amerigo
had now for some time taken refuge. The refuge, after the reunion
of the two households in England, had more and more offered
itself as the substitute for communities, from man to man, that,
by his original calculation, might have become possible, but that
had not really ripened and flowered. He met the decent family
eyes across the table, met them afterwards in the music-room, but
only to read in them still what he had learned to read during his
first months, the time of over-anxious initiation, a kind of
apprehension in which the terms and conditions were finally fixed
and absolute. This directed regard rested at its ease, but it
neither lingered nor penetrated, and was, to the Prince's fancy,
much of the same order as any glance directed, for due attention,
from the same quarter, to the figure of a cheque received in the
course of business and about to be enclosed to a banker. It made
sure of the amount--and just so, from time to time, the amount of
the Prince was made sure. He was being thus, in renewed
instalments, perpetually paid in; he already reposed in the bank
as a value, but subject, in this comfortable way, to repeated, to
infinite endorsement. The net result of all of which, moreover,
was that the young man had no wish to see his value diminish. He
himself, after all, had not fixed it--the "figure" was a
conception all of Mr. Verver's own. Certainly, however,
everything must be kept up to it; never so much as to-night had
the Prince felt this. He would have been uncomfortable, as these
quiet expressions passed, had the case not been guaranteed for
him by the intensity of his accord with Charlotte. It was
impossible that he should not now and again meet Charlotte's
eyes, as it was also visible that she too now and again met her
husband's. For her as well, in all his pulses, he felt the
conveyed impression. It put them, it kept them together, through
the vain show of their separation, made the two other faces, made
the whole lapse of the evening, the people, the lights, the
flowers, the pretended talk, the exquisite music, a mystic golden
bridge between them, strongly swaying and sometimes almost
vertiginous, for that intimacy of which the sovereign law would
be the vigilance of "care," would be never rashly to forget and
never consciously to wound.

XX

The main interest of these hours for us, however, will have been
in the way the Prince continued to know, during a particular
succession of others, separated from the evening in Eaton Square
by a short interval, a certain persistent aftertaste. This was
the lingering savour of a cup presented to him by Fanny
Assingham's hand after dinner, while the clustered quartette kept
their ranged companions, in the music-room, moved if one would,
but conveniently motionless. Mrs. Assingham contrived, after a
couple of pieces, to convey to her friend that, for her part, she
was moved--by the genius of Brahms--beyond what she could bear;
so that, without apparent deliberation, she had presently floated
away, at the young man's side, to such a distance as permitted
them to converse without the effect of disdain. It was the twenty
minutes enjoyed with her, during the rest of the concert, in the
less associated electric glare of one of the empty rooms--it was
their achieved and, as he would have said, successful, most
pleasantly successful, talk on one of the sequestered sofas, it
was this that was substantially to underlie his consciousness of
the later occasion. The later occasion, then mere matter of
discussion, had formed her ground for desiring--in a light
undertone into which his quick ear read indeed some nervousness--
these independent words with him: she had sounded, covertly but
distinctly, by the time they were seated together, the great
question of what it might involve. It had come out for him before
anything else, and so abruptly that this almost needed an
explanation. Then the abruptness itself had appeared to explain--
which had introduced, in turn, a slight awkwardness. "Do you know
that they're not, after all, going to Matcham; so that, if they
don't--if, at least, Maggie doesn't--you won't, I suppose, go by
yourself?" It was, as I say, at Matcham, where the event had
placed him, it was at Matcham during the Easter days, that it
most befell him, oddly enough, to live over, inwardly, for its
wealth of special significance, this passage by which the event
had been really a good deal determined. He had paid, first and
last, many an English country visit; he had learned, even from of
old, to do the English things, and to do them, all sufficiently,
in the English way; if he didn't always enjoy them madly he
enjoyed them at any rate as much, to an appearance, as the good
people who had, in the night of time, unanimously invented them,
and who still, in the prolonged afternoon of their good faith,
unanimously, even if a trifle automatically, practised them; yet,
with it all, he had never so much as during such sojourns the
trick of a certain detached, the amusement of a certain inward
critical, life; the determined need, which apparently all
participant, of returning upon itself, of backing noiselessly in,
far in again, and rejoining there, as it were, that part of his
mind that was not engaged at the front. His body, very
constantly, was engaged at the front--in shooting, in riding, in
golfing, in walking, over the fine diagonals of meadow-paths or
round the pocketed corners of billiard-tables; it sufficiently,
on the whole, in fact, bore the brunt of bridge-playing, of
breakfasting, lunching, tea-drinking, dining, and of the nightly
climax over the bottigliera, as he called it, of the bristling
tray; it met, finally, to the extent of the limited tax on lip,
on gesture, on wit, most of the current demands of conversation
and expression. Therefore something of him, he often felt at
these times, was left out; it was much more when he was alone, or
when he was with his own people--or when he was, say, with Mrs.
Verver and nobody else--that he moved, that he talked, that he
listened, that he felt, as a congruous whole.

"English society," as he would have said, cut him, accordingly,
in two, and he reminded himself often, in his relations with it,
of a man possessed of a shining star, a decoration, an order of
some sort, something so ornamental as to make his identity not
complete, ideally, without it, yet who, finding no other such
object generally worn, should be perpetually, and the least bit
ruefully, unpinning it from his breast to transfer it to his
pocket. The Prince's shining star may, no doubt, having been
nothing more precious than his private subtlety; but whatever the
object was he just now fingered it a good deal, out of sight--
amounting as it mainly did for him to a restless play of memory
and a fine embroidery of thought. Something had rather
momentously occurred, in Eaton Square, during his enjoyed minutes
with his old friend: his present perspective made definitely
clear to him that she had plumped out for him her first little
lie. That took on--and he could scarce have said why--a sharpness
of importance: she had never lied to him before--if only because
it had never come up for her, properly, intelligibly, morally,
that she must. As soon as she had put to him the question of what
he would do--by which she meant of what Charlotte would also do--
in that event of Maggie's and Mr. Verver's not embracing the
proposal they had appeared for a day or two resignedly to
entertain; as soon as she had betrayed her curiosity as to the
line the other pair, so left to themselves, might take, a desire
to avoid the appearance of at all too directly prying had become
marked in her. Betrayed by the solicitude of which she had,
already, three weeks before, given him a view, she had been
obliged, on a second thought, to name, intelligibly, a reason for
her appeal; while the Prince, on his side, had had, not without
mercy, his glimpse of her momentarily groping for one and yet
remaining unprovided. Not without mercy because, absolutely, he
had on the spot, in his friendliness, invented one for her use,
presenting it to her with a look no more significant than if he
had picked up, to hand back to her, a dropped flower. "You ask if
I'm likely also to back out then, because it may make a
difference in what you and the Colonel decide?"--he had gone as
far as that for her, fairly inviting her to assent, though not
having had his impression, from any indication offered him by
Charlotte, that the Assinghams were really in question for the
large Matcham party. The wonderful thing, after this, was that
the active couple had, in the interval, managed to inscribe
themselves on the golden roll; an exertion of a sort that, to do
her justice, he had never before observed Fanny to make. This
last passage of the chapter but proved, after all, with what
success she could work when she would.

Once launched, himself, at any rate, as he had been directed by
all the terms of the intercourse between Portland Place and Eaton
Square, once steeped, at Matcham, in the enjoyment of a splendid
hospitality, he found everything, for his interpretation, for his
convenience, fall easily enough into place; and all the more that
Mrs. Verver was at hand to exchange ideas and impressions with.
The great house was full of people, of possible new combinations,
of the quickened play of possible propinquity, and no appearance,
of course, was less to be cultivated than that of his having
sought an opportunity to foregather with his friend at a safe
distance from their respective sposi. There was a happy boldness,
at the best, in their mingling thus, each unaccompanied, in the
same sustained sociability--just exactly a touch of that
eccentricity of associated freedom which sat so lightly on the
imagination of the relatives left behind. They were exposed as
much as one would to its being pronounced funny that they should,
at such a rate, go about together--though, on the other hand,
this consideration drew relief from the fact that, in their high
conditions and with the easy tradition, the almost inspiring
allowances, of the house in question, no individual line, however
freely marked, was pronounced anything more than funny. Both our
friends felt afresh, as they had felt before, the convenience of
a society so placed that it had only its own sensibility to
consider--looking as it did well over the heads of all lower
growths; and that moreover treated its own sensibility quite as
the easiest, friendliest, most informal and domesticated party to
the general alliance. What anyone "thought" of anyone else--above
all of anyone else with anyone else--was a matter incurring in
these lulls so little awkward formulation that hovering judgment,
the spirit with the scales, might perfectly have been imaged
there as some rather snubbed and subdued, but quite trained and
tactful poor relation, of equal, of the properest, lineage, only
of aspect a little dingy, doubtless from too limited a change of
dress, for whose tacit and abstemious presence, never betrayed by
a rattle of her rusty machine, a room in the attic and a plate at
the side-table were decently usual. It was amusing, in such
lightness of air, that the Prince should again present himself
only to speak for the Princess, so unfortunately unable, again,
to leave home; and that Mrs. Verver should as regularly figure as
an embodied, a beautifully deprecating apology for her husband,
who was all geniality and humility among his own treasures, but
as to whom the legend had grown up that he couldn't bear, with
the height of his standards and the tone of the company, in the
way of sofas and cabinets, habitually kept by him, the irritation
and depression to which promiscuous visiting, even at pompous
houses, had been found to expose him. That was all right, the
noted working harmony of the clever son-in-law and the charming
stepmother, so long as the relation was, for the effect in
question, maintained at the proper point between sufficiency and
excess.

What with the noble fairness of the place, meanwhile, the
generous mood of the sunny, gusty, lusty English April, all
panting and heaving with impatience, or kicking and crying, even,
at moments, like some infant Hercules who wouldn't be dressed;
what with these things and the bravery of youth and beauty, the
insolence of fortune and appetite so diffused among his
fellow-guests that the poor Assinghams, in their comparatively
marked maturity and their comparatively small splendour, were the
only approach to a false note in the concert, the stir of the air
was such, for going, in a degree, to one's head, that, as a mere
matter of exposure, almost grotesque in its flagrancy, his
situation resembled some elaborate practical joke carried out at
his expense. Every voice in the great bright house was a call to
the ingenuities and impunities of pleasure; every echo was a
defiance of difficulty, doubt or danger; every aspect of the
picture, a glowing plea for the immediate, and as with plenty
more to come, was another phase of the spell. For a world so
constituted was governed by a spell, that of the smile of the
gods and the favour of the powers; the only handsome, the only
gallant, in fact the only intelligent acceptance of which was a
faith in its guarantees and a high spirit for its chances. Its
demand--to that the thing came back--was above all for courage
and good-humour; and the value of this as a general assurance--
that is for seeing one through at the worst--had not even in the
easiest hours of his old Roman life struck the Prince so
convincingly. His old Roman life had had more poetry, no doubt,
but as he looked back upon it now it seemed to hang in the air of
mere iridescent horizons, to have been loose and vague and thin,
with large languorous unaccountable blanks. The present order, as
it spread about him, had somehow the ground under its feet, and a
trumpet in its ears, and a bottomless bag of solid shining
British sovereigns--which was much to the point--in its hand.
Courage and good-humour therefore were the breath of the day;
though for ourselves at least it would have been also much to the
point that, with Amerigo, really, the innermost effect of all
this perceptive ease was perhaps a strange final irritation. He
compared the lucid result with the extraordinary substitute for
perception that presided, in the bosom of his wife, at so
contented a view of his conduct and course--a state of mind that
was positively like a vicarious good conscience, cultivated
ingeniously on his behalf, a perversity of pressure innocently
persisted in; and this wonder of irony became on occasion too
intense to be kept wholly to himself. It wasn't that, at Matcham,
anything particular, anything monstrous, anything that had to be
noticed permitted itself, as they said, to "happen"; there were
only odd moments when the breath of the day, as it has been
called, struck him so full in the face that he broke out with all
the hilarity of "What indeed would THEY have made of it?" "They"
were of course Maggie and her father, moping--so far as they ever
consented to mope in monotonous Eaton Square, but placid too in
the belief that they knew beautifully what their expert
companions were in for. They knew, it might have appeared in
these lights, absolutely nothing on earth worth speaking of--
whether beautifully or cynically; and they would perhaps
sometimes be a little less trying if they would only once for all
peacefully admit that knowledge wasn't one of their needs and
that they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it. They
were good children, bless their hearts, and the children of good
children; so that, verily, the Principino himself, as less
consistently of that descent, might figure to the fancy as the
ripest genius of the trio.

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