THE GOLDEN BOWL 105 5 page

She faced round as if he had touched a spring. 'He wanted to, naturally - and it was much the best thing he could do.' She was in possession of the main case, as it truly seemed; she had it all now. 'He was capable of the effort, and he took the best way. Remember too what Maggie then seemed to us.'

'She's very nice, but she always seems to me, more than anything else, the young woman who has a million a year. If you mean that that's what she especially seemed to him, you of course place the thing in your light. The effort to forget Charlotte couldn't, I grant you, have been so difficult.'

This pulled her up but for an instant. 'I never said he didn't from the first -1 never said that he doesn't more and more - like Maggie's money.'

'I never said I shouldn't have liked it myself,' Bob Assingham returned. He made no movement; he smoked another minute. 'How much did Maggie know?'

THE GOLDEN BOWL

'How much?' She seemed to consider - as if it were between quarts and gallons - how best to express the quantity. 'She knew what Charlotte, in Florence, had told her.'

'And what bad Charlotte told her?'

'Very little.'

'What makes you so sure?'

'why, this - that she couldn 't tell her.' And she explained a little what she meant. 'There are things, my dear - haven't you felt it yourself, coarse as you are? - that no one could tell Maggie. There are things that, upon my word, I shouldn't care to attempt to tell her now.'

The Colonel smoked on it. 'She'd be so scandalised?'

'She'd be so frightened. She'd be, in her strange little way, so hurt. She wasn't born to know evil. She must never know it.'

Bob Assingham had a queer grim laugh; the sound of which in fact, fixed his wife before him. 'We're taking grand ways to prevent it.'

But she stood there to protest. 'We're not taking any ways. The ways are all taken; they were taken from the moment he came up to our carriage that day in Villa Borghese³³ - the second or third of her days in Rome, when, as you remember, you went off somewhere with Mr Verver, and the Prince, who had got into the carriage with us, came home with us to tea. They had met; they had seen each other well; they were in relation: the rest was to come of itself and as it could. It began, practically, I recollect, in our drive. Maggie happened to learn, by some other man's greeting of him, in the bright Roman way, from a street-corner as we passed, that one of the Prince's baptismal names, the one always used for him among his relations, was Amerigo:³⁴ which (as you probably don't know, however, even after a lifetime of me) was the name, four hundred years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the sea, in the wake of Columbus and succeeded, where Columbus had failed, in becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new Continent; so that the thought of any connection with him can even now thrill our artless breasts.'

The Colonel's grim placidity could always quite adequately meet his wife's not infrequent imputation of ignorances, on the score of the land of her birth, unperturbed and unashamed; and these dark depths were even at the present moment not directly lighted by an inquiry that managed to be curious without being apologetic. 'But where does the connection come in?'

His wife was prompt. 'By the women - that is by some obliging woman, of old, who was a descendant of the pushing man, the make-believe discoverer, and whom the Prince is therefore luckily able to

4»

THE GOLDEN BOWL

refer to as an ancestress. A branch of the other family had become great - great enough, at least, to marry into his; and the name of the navigator, crowned with glory, was, very naturally, to become so the fashion among them that some son, of every generation, was appointed to wear it. My point is, at any rate, that I recall noticing at the time how the Prince was, from the start, helped with the dear Ververs by his wearing it. The connection became romantic for Maggie the moment she took it in; she filled out, in a flash, every link that might be vague. "By that sign," I quite said to myself, "he'll conquer" - with his good fortune, of course, of having the other necessary signs too. It really,' said Mrs Assingham, 'was, practically, the fine side of the wedge. Which struck me as also,' she wound up, 'a lovely note for the candour of the Ververs.'

The Colonel took in the tale, but his comment was prosaic. 'He knew, Amerigo, what he was about. And I don't mean the old one.'

'I know what you mean!' his wife bravely threw off.

'The old one' - he pointed his effect - 'isn't the only discoverer in the family.'

'Oh, as much as you like! If he discovered America - or got himself honoured as if he had - his successors were, in due time, to discover the Americans. And it was one of them in particular, doubtless, who was to discover how patriotic we are.'

'Wouldn't this be the same one,' the Colonel asked, 'who really discovered what you call the connection?'

She gave him a look. 'The connection's a true thing - the connection's perfectly historic. Your insinuations recoil upon your cynical mind. Don't you understand,' she asked, 'that the history of such people is known, root and branch, at every moment of its course?'

'Oh, it's all right,' said Bob Assingham.

'Go to the British Museum,' his companion continued with spirit.

'And what am I to do there?'

'There's a whole immense room, or recess, or department, or whatever, filled with books written about his family alone. You can see for yourself

'Have you seen for your self?'

She faltered but an instant. 'Certainly - I went one day with Maggie. We looked him up, so to say. They were most civil.' And she fell again into the current her husband had slightly ruffled. 'The effect was produced, the charm began to work, at all events, in Rome, from that hour of the Prince's drive with us. My only course, afterwards, had to be to make the best of it. It was certainly good

THE GOLDEN BOWL

enough for that,' Mrs Assingham hastened to add, 'and I didn't in the least see my duty in making the worst. In the same situation, today, I wouldn't act differently. I entered into the case as it then appeared to me - and as, for the matter of that, it still does. I liked it, I thought all sorts of good of it, and nothing can even now,' she said with some intensity, 'make me think anything else.'

'Nothing can ever make you think anything you don't want to,' the Colonel, still in his chair, remarked over his pipe. 'You've got a precious power of thinking whatever you do want. You want also, from moment to moment, to think such desperately different things. What happened,' he went on, 'was that you fell violently in love with the Prince yourself, and that as you couldn't get me out of the way you had to take some roundabout course. You couldn't marry him, any more than Charlotte could - that is not to yourself. But you could to somebody else - it was always the Prince, it was always marriage. You could to your little friend, to whom there were no objections.'

'Not only there were no objections, but there were reasons, positive ones - and all excellent, all charming.' She spoke with an absence of all repudiation of his exposure of the spring of her conduct; and this abstention, clearly and effectively conscious, evidently cost her nothing. 'It is always the Prince, and it is always, thank heaven, marriage. And these are the things, God grant, that it will always be. That I could help, a year ago, most assuredly made me happy, and it continues to make me happy.'

'Then why aren't you quiet?'

'I am quiet,' said Fanny Assingham.

He looked at her, with his colourless candour, still in his place; she moved about again, a little, emphasising by her unrest her declaration of her tranquillity. He was as silent, at first, as if he had taken her answer, but he was not to keep it long. 'What do you make of it that, by your own show, Charlotte couldn't tell her all? What do you make of it that the Prince didn't tell her anything? Say one understands that there are things she can't be told - since, as you put it, she is so easily scared and shocked.' He produced these objections slowly, giving her time, by his pauses, to stop roaming and come back to him. But she was roaming still when he concluded his inquiry. 'If there hadn't been anything there shouldn't have been between the pair before Char­lotte bolted - in order, precisely, as you say, that there shouldn't be: why in the world was what there bad been too bad to be spoken of?'

Mrs Assingham, after this question, continued still to circulate -not directly meeting it even when at last she stopped. 'I thought you wanted me to be quiet.'

5°

THE GOLDEN BOWL

'So I do - and I'm trying to make you so much so that you won't worry more. Can't you be quiet on that}'

She thought a moment - then seemed to try. 'To relate that she had to "bolt" for the reasons we speak of, even though the bolting had done for her what she wished - that I can perfectly feel Charlotte's not wanting to do.'

'Ah then, if it has done for her what she wished - !' But the Colonel's conclusion hung by the 'if which his wife didn't take up. So it hung but the longer when he presently spoke again. 'All one wonders, in that case, is why then she has come back to him.'

'Say she hasn't come back to him. Not really to him.'

'I'll say anything you like. But that won't do me the same good as your saying it.'

'Nothing, my dear, will do you good,' Mrs Assingham returned. 'You don't care for anything in itself; you care for nothing but to be grossly amused because I don't keep washing my hands - !'

'I thought your whole argument was that everything is so right that this is precisely what you do.'

But his wife, as it was a point she had often made, could go on as she had gone on before. 'You're perfectly indifferent, really; you're perfectly immoral. You've taken part in the sack of cities, and I'm sure you've done dreadful things yourself. But I don't trouble my head, if you like. "So now there!" ' she laughed.

He accepted her laugh, but he kept his way. 'Well, I back poor Charlotte.'

' "Back" her?'

'To know what she wants.'

'Ah then, so do I. She does know what she wants.' And Mrs Assingham produced this quantity, at last, on the girl's behalf, as the ripe result of her late wanderings and musings. She had groped through their talk, for the thread, and now she had got it. 'She wants to be magnificent.'

'She is,' said the Colonel almost cynically.

'She wants' - his wife now had it fast - 'to be thoroughly superior, and she's capable of that.'

'Of wan ting to?'

'Of carrying out her idea.'

'And what is her idea?'

'To see Maggie through.'

Bob Assingham wondered. 'Through what?'

'Through everything. She knows the Prince. And Maggie doesn't. No, dear thing' - Mrs Assingham had to recognise it - 'she doesn't.'

THE GOLDEN BOWL

5¹

'So that Charlotte has come out to give her lessons?'

She continued, Fanny Assingham, to work out her thought. 'She has done this great thing for him. That is, a year ago, she practically did it. She practically, at any rate, helped him to do it himself - and helped me to help him. She kept off, she stayed away, she left him free; and what, moreover, were her silences to Maggie but a direct aid to him? If she had spoken in Florence; if she had told her own poor story; if she had come back at any time - till within a few weeks ago; if she hadn't gone to New York and hadn't held out there; if she hadn't done these things all that has happened since would certainly have been different. Therefore she's in a position to be consistent now. She knows the Prince,' Mrs Assingham repeated. It involved even again her former recognition. 'And Maggie, dear thing, doesn't.'

She was high, she was lucid, she was almost inspired; and it was but the deeper drop therefore to her husband's flat common sense. 'In other words Maggie is, by her ignorance, in danger? Then if she's in danger, there is danger.'

'There won't be - with Charlotte's understanding of it. That's where she has had her conception of being able to be heroic, of being able in fact to be sublime. She is, she will be' - the good lady by this time glowed. 'So she sees it - to become, for her best friend, an element of positive safety.'

Bob Assingham looked at it hard. 'Which of them do you call her best friend?'

She gave a toss of impatience. 'I'll leave you to discover!' But the grand truth thus made out she had now completely adopted. 'It's for us, therefore, to be hers.'

' "Hers"?'

'You and I. It's for us to be Charlotte's. It's for us, on our side, to see her through.'

'Through her sublimity?'

'Through her noble, lonely life. Only - that's essential - it mustn't be lonely. It will be all right if she marries.'

'So we're to marry her?'

'We're to marry her. It will be,' Mrs Assingham continued, 'the great thing I can do.' She made it out more and more. 'It will make up.'

'Make up for what?' As she said nothing, however, his desire for lucidity renewed itself. 'If everything's so all right what is there to make up for?'

'Why, if I did do either of them, by any chance, a wrong. If I made a mistake.'

5²

THE GOLDEN BOWL

'You'll make up for it by making another?' And then as she again took her time: 'I thought your whole point is just that you're sure.'

'One can never be ideally sure of anything. There are always possibilities.'

'Then, if we can but strike so wild, why keep meddling?'

It made her again look at him. 'Where would you have been, my dear, if I hadn't meddled with you?'

'Ah, that wasn't meddling -1 was your own. I was your own,' said the Colonel, 'from the moment I didn't object.'

'Well, these people won't object. They are my own too - in the sense that I'm awfully fond of them. Also in the sense,' she continued, 'that I think they're not so very much less fond of me. Our relation, all round, exists - it's a reality* and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to change it. We must live in it and with it. Therefore to see that Charlotte gets a good husband as soon as possible - that, as I say, will be one of my ways of living. It will cover,' she said with conviction, 'all the ground.' And then as his own conviction appeared to continue as little to match: 'The ground, I mean, of any nervousness I may ever feel. It will be in fact my duty -and I shan't rest till my duty's performed.' She had arrived by this time at something like exaltation. 'I shall give, for the next year or two if necessary, my life to it. I shall have done in that case what I can.'

He took it at last as it came. 'You hold there's no limit to what you "can"?'

'I don't say there's no limit, or anything of the sort. I say there are good chances - enough of them for hope. Why shouldn't there be when a girl is, after all, all that she is?'

'By after "all" you mean after she's in love with somebody else?'

The Colonel put his question with a quietude doubtless designed to be fatal; but it scarcely pulled her up.

'She's not too much in love not herself to want to marry. She would now particularly like to.'

'Has she told you so?'

'Not yet. It's too soon. But she will. Meanwhile, however, I don't require the information. Her marrying will prove the truth.'

'And what truth?'

'The truth of everything I say.'

'Prove it to whom?'

'Well, to myself, to begin with. That will be enough for me - to work for her. What it will prove,' Mrs Assingham presently went on, 'will be that she's cured. That she accepts the situation.'

THE GOLDEN BOWL

He paid this the tribute of a long pull at his pipe. 'The situation of doing the one thing she can that will really seem to cover her tracks?'

His wife looked at him, the good dry man, as if now at last he was merely vulgar. 'The one thing she can do that will really make new tracks altogether. The thing that, before any other, will be wise and right. The thing that will best give her her chance to be magnificent.'

He slowly emitted his smoke. 'And best give you, by the same token, yours to be magnificent with her?'

'I shall be as magnificent, at least, as I can.'

Bob Assingham got up. 'And you call me immoral?'

She hesitated. 'I'll call you stupid if you prefer. But stupidity pushed to a certain point is, you know, immorality. Just so what is morality but high intelligence?' This he was unable to tell her; which left her more definitely to conclude. 'Besides, it's all, at the worst, great fun.'

'Oh, if you simply put it at that - !'

His implication was that in this case they had a common ground; yet even thus he couldn't catch her by it. 'Oh, I don't mean,' she said from the threshold, 'the fun that you mean. Good-night.' In answer to which, as he turned out the electric light, he gave an odd, short groan, almost a grunt. He had apparently meant some particular kind.

Chapter 5

'Well, now I must tell you, for I want to be absolutely honest.' So Charlotte spoke, a little ominously, after they had got into the Park. 'I don't want to pretend, and I can't pretend a moment longer. You may think of me what you will, but I don't care. I knew I shouldn't and I find now how little. I came back for this. Not really for anything else. For this,' she repeated as, under the influence of her tone, the Prince had already come to a pause.

'For "this"?' He spoke as if the particular thing she indicated were vague to him - or were, rather, a quantity that couldn't, at the most, be much.

It would be as much, however, as she should be able to make it. 'To have one hour alone with you.'

It had rained heavily in the night, and though the pavements were now dry, thanks to a cleansing breeze, the August morning, with its

THE GOLDEN BOWL

hovering thick-drifting clouds and freshened air, was cool and grey. The multitudinous green of the Park had been deepened, and a wholesome smell of irrigation, purging the place of dust and of odours less acceptable, rose from the earth. Charlotte had looked about her, with expression, from the first of their coming in, quite as if for a deep greeting, for general recognition: the day was, even in the heart of London, of a rich, low-browed, weather-washed English type. It was as if it had been waiting for her, as if she knew it, placed it, loved it, as if it were in fact a part of what she had come back for. So far as this was the case the impression of course could only be lost on a mere vague Italian; it was one of those for which you had to be, blessedly, an American - as indeed you had to be, blessedly, an American for all sorts of things: so long as you hadn't, blessedly or not, to remain in America. The Prince had, by half-past ten - as also by definite appointment - called in Cadogan Place for Mrs Assingham's visitor, and then, after brief delay, the two had walked together up Sloane Street and got straight into the Park from Knightsbridge. The understanding to this end had taken its place, after a couple of days, as inevitably consequent on the appeal made by the girl during those first moments in Mrs Assingham's drawing-room. It was an appeal the couple of days had done nothing to invalidate - everything, much rather, to place in a light, and as to which, obviously, it wouldn't have fitted that anyone should raise an objection. Who was there, for that matter, to raise one, from the moment Mrs Assingham, informed and apparently not disapproving, didn't intervene? This the young man had asked himself- with a very sufficient sense of what would have made him ridiculous. He wasn't going to begin - that at least was certain - by showing a fear. Even had fear at first been sharp in him, moreover, it would already, not a little, have dropped; so happy, all round, so propitious, he quite might have called it, had been the effect of this rapid interval.

The time had been taken up largely by his active reception of his own wedding-guests and by Maggie's scarce less absorbed entertain­ment of her friend, whom she had kept for hours together in Portland Place; whom she had not, as wouldn't have been conven­ient, invited altogether as yet to migrate, but who had been present, with other persons, his contingent, at luncheon, at tea, at dinner, at perpetual repasts - he had never in his life, it struck him, had to reckon with so much eating - whenever he had looked in. If he had not again, till this hour, save for a minute, seen Charlotte alone, so, positively, all the while, he had not seen even Maggie; and if, therefore, he had not seen even Maggie, nothing was more natural

THE GOLDEN BOWL

than that he shouldn't have seen Charlotte. The exceptional minute, a mere snatch, at the tail of the others, on the huge Portland Place staircase had sufficiently enabled the girl to remind him - so ready she assumed him to be - of what they were to do. Time pressed if they were to do it at all. Everyone had brought gifts; his relations had brought wonders - how did they still have, where did they still find, such treasures? She only had brought nothing, and she was ashamed; yet even by the sight of the rest of the tribute she wouldn't be put off. She would do what she could, and he was, unknown to Maggie, he must remember, to give her his aid. He had prolonged the minute so far as to take time to hesitate, for a reason, and then to risk bringing his reason out. The risk was because he might hurt her - hurt her pride, if she had that particular sort. But she might as well be hurt one way as another; and, besides, that particular sort of pride was just what she hadn't. So his slight resistance, while they lingered, had been just easy enough not to be impossible.

'I hate to encourage you - and for such a purpose, after all - to spend your money.'

She had stood a stair or two below him; where, while she looked up at him beneath the high, domed light of the hall, she rubbed with her palm the polished mahogany of the balustrade, which was mounted on fine ironwork, eighteenth-century English. 'Because you think I must have so little? I've enough, at any rate - enough for us to take our hour. Enough,' she had smiled, 'is as good as a feast! And then,' she had said, 'it isn't of course a question of anything expensive, gorged with treasure as Maggie is; it isn't a question of competing or outshining. What, naturally, in the way of the priceless, hasn't she got? Mine is to be the offering of the poor - something, precisely, that no rich person could ever give her, and that, being herself too rich ever to buy it, she would therefore never have.' Charlotte had spoken as if after so much thought. 'Only, as it can't be fine, it ought to be funny - and that's the sort of thing to hunt for. Hunting in London, besides, is amusing in itself.'

He recalled even how he had been struck with her word. ' "Funny"?'

'Oh, I don't mean a comic toy - I mean some little thing with a charm. But absolutely right, in its comparative cheapness. That's what I call funny,' she had explained. 'You used,' she had also added, 'to help me to get things cheap in Rome. You were splendid for beating down. I have them all still, I needn't say - the little bargains I there owed you. There are bargains in London in August.'

'Ah, but I don't understand your English buying, and I confess I

THE GOLDEN BOWL

find it dull.' So much as that, while they turned to go up together, he had objected. 'I understood my poor dear Romans.'

'It was they who understood you - that was your pull,' she had laughed. 'Our amusement here is just that they don't understand us. We can make it amusing. You'll see.'

If he had hesitated again it was because the point permitted. 'The amusement surely will be to find our present.'

'Certainly - as I say.'

'Well, if they don't come down - ?'

'Then we'll come up. There's always something to be done. Besides, Prince,' she had gone on, 'I'm not, if you come to that, absolutely a pauper. I'm too poor for some things,' she had said - yet, strange as she was, lightly enough; 'but I'm not too poor for others.' And she had paused again at the top. 'I've been saving up.'

He had really challenged it. 'In America?'

'Yes, even there - with my motive. And we oughtn't, you know,' she had wound up, 'to leave it beyond tomorrow.'

That, definitely, with ten words more, was what had passed - he feeling all the while how any sort of begging-off would only magnify it. He might get on with things as they were, but he must do anything rather than magnify. Besides which it was pitiful to make her beg of him. He was making her - she had begged; and this, for a special sensibility in him, didn't at all do. That was accordingly, in fine, how they had come to where they were: he was engaged, as hard as possible, in the policy of not magnifying. He had kept this up even on her making a point - and as if it were almost the whole point - that Maggie of course was not to have an idea. Half the interest of the thing at least would be that she shouldn't suspect; therefore he was completely to keep it from her - as Charlotte on her side would - that they had been anywhere at all together or had so much as seen each other for five minutes alone. The absolute secrecy of their little excursion was in short of the essence; she appealed to his kindness to let her feel that he didn't betray her. There had been something, frankly, a little disconcerting in such an appeal at such an hour, on the very eve of his nuptials: it was one thing to have met the girl casually at Mrs Assingham's and another to arrange with her thus for a morning practically as private as their old mornings in Rome and practically not less intimate. He had immediately told Maggie, the same evening, of the minutes that had passed between them in Cadogan Place - though not mentioning those of Mrs Assingham's absence any more than he mentioned the fact of what their friend had then, with such small delay, proposed. But what had briefly checked

THE GOLDEN BOWL

his assent to any present, to any positive making of mystery - what had made him, while they stood at the top of the stairs, demur just long enough for her to notice it-was the sense of the resemblance of the little plan before him to occasions, of the past, from which he was quite disconnected, from which he could only desire to be. This was like beginning something over, which was the last thing he wanted. The strength, the beauty of his actual position was in its being wholly a fresh start, was that what it began would be new altogether. These items of his consciousness had clustered so quickly that by the time Charlotte read them in his face he was in presence of what they amounted to. She had challenged them as soon as read them, had met them with a 'Do you want then to go and tell her?' that had somehow made them ridiculous. It had made him, promptly, fall back on minimising it - that is on minimising 'fuss.' Apparent scruples were, obviously, fuss, and he had on the spot clutched, in the light of this truth, at the happy principle that would meet every case.

This principle was simply to be, with the girl, always simple - and with the very last simplicity. That would cover everything. It had covered, then and there, certainly, his immediate submission to the sight of what was clearest. This was, really, that what she asked was little compared to what she gave. What she gave touched him, as she faced him, for it was the full tune of her renouncing. She really renounced - renounced everything, and without even insisting now on what it had all been for her. Her only insistence was her insistence on the small matter of their keeping their appointment to them­selves. That, in exchange for 'everything,' everything she gave up, was verily but a trifle. He let himself accordingly be guided; he so soon assented, for enlightened indulgence, to any particular turn she might wish the occasion to take, that the stamp of her preference had been well applied to it even while they were still in the Park. The application in fact presently required that they should sit down a little, really to see where they were; in obedience to which propriety they had some ten minutes, of a quality quite distinct, in a couple of penny-chairs under one of the larger trees. They had taken, for their walk, to the cropped, rain-freshened grass, after finding it already dry; and the chairs, turned away from the broad alley, the main drive and the aspect of Park Lane, looked across the wide reaches of green which seemed in a manner to refine upon their freedom. They helped Charlotte thus to make her position - her temporary position - still more clear, and it was for this purpose, obviously, that, abruptly, on seeing her opportunity, she sat down. He stood for a little before her, as if to mark the importance of not wasting time, the

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 537