THE GOLDEN BOWL 105 9 page

They had no occasion thus, the conjoined worshippers, to talk of what the Prince might be or might do for his son - the sum of service, in his absence, so completely filled itself out. It was not in the least,

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moreover, that there was doubt of him, for he was conspicuously addicted to the manipulation of the child, in the frank Italian way, at such moments as he judged discreet in respect to other claims: conspicuously, indeed, that is, for Maggie, who had more occasion, on the whole, to speak to her husband of the extravagance of her father than to speak to her father of the extravagance of her husband. Adam Verver had, all round, in this connection, his own serenity. He was sure of his son-in-law's auxiliary admiration - admiration, he meant, of his grandson; since, to begin with, what else had been at work but the instinct - or it might fairly have been the tradition - of the latter's making the child so solidly beautiful as to have to be admired? What contributed most to harmony in this play of relations, however, was the way the young man seemed to leave it to be gathered that, tradition for tradition, the grandpapa's own was not, in any estimate, to go for nothing. A tradition, or whatever it was, that had flowered prelusively in the Princess herself - well, Amerigo's very discretions were his way of taking account of it. His discriminations in respect to his heir were, in fine, not more angular than any others to be observed in him; and Mr Verver received perhaps from no source so distinct an impression of being for him an odd and important phenomenon as he received from this impunity of appropriation, these unchallenged nursery hours. It was as if the grandpapa's special show of the character were but another side for the observer to study, another item for him to note. It came back, this latter personage knew, to his own previous perception - that of the Prince's inability, in any matter in which he was concerned, to conclude. The idiosyncrasy, for him, at each stage, had to be demonstrated - on which, however, he admirably accepted it. This last was, after all, the point; he really worked, poor young man, for acceptance, since he worked so constantly for comprehension. And how, when you came to that, could you know that a horse wouldn't shy at a brass band, in a country road, because it didn't shy at a traction-engine? It might have been brought up to traction-engines without having been brought up to brass bands. Little by little, thus, from month to month, the Prince was learning what his wife's father had been brought up to; and now it could be checked off - he had been brought up to the romantic view of principini. Who would have thought it, and where would it all stop? The only fear somewhat sharp for Mr Verver was a certain fear of disappointing him for strangeness. He felt that the evidence he offered, thus viewed, was too much on the positive side. He didn't know - he was learning, and it was funny for him - to how many things he had been brought up. If

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the Prince could only strike something to which he hadn't! This wouldn't, it seemed to him, ruffle the smoothness, and yet might, a little, add to the interest.

What was now clear, at all events, for the father and the daughter, was their simply knowing they wanted, for the time, to be together -at any cost, as it were; and their necessity so worked in them as to bear them out of the house, in a quarter hidden from that in which their friends were gathered, and cause them to wander, unseen, unfollowed, along a covered walk in the 'old' garden, as it was called, old with an antiquity of formal things, high box and shaped yew and expanses of brick wall that had turned at once to purple and to pink. They went out of a door in the wall, a door that had a slab with a date set above it, 1713, but in the old multiplied lettering, and then had before them a small white gate, intensely white and clean amid all the greenness, through which they gradually passed to where some of the grandest trees spaciously clustered and where they would find one of the quietest places. A bench had been placed, long ago, beneath a great oak that helped to crown a mild eminence, and the ground sank away below it, to rise again, opposite, at a distance sufficient to enclose the solitude and figure a bosky horizon. Summer, blissfully, was with them yet, and the low sun made a splash of light where it pierced the looser shade; Maggie, coming down to go out, had brought a parasol, which, as, over her charming bare head, she now handled it, gave, with the big straw hat that her father in these days always wore a good deal tipped back, definite intention to their walk. They knew the bench; it was 'sequestered' - they had praised it for that together, before, and liked the word; and after they had begun to linger there they could have smiled (if they hadn't been really too serious, and if the question hadn't so soon ceased to matter), over the probable wonder of the others as to what would have become of them.

The extent to which they enjoyed their indifference to any judgment of their want of ceremony, what did that of itself speak but for the way that, as a rule, they almost equally had others on their mind? They each knew that both were full of the superstition of not 'hurting,' but might precisely have been asking themselves, asking in fact each other, at this moment, whether that was to be, after all, the last word of their conscientious development. Certain it was, at all events, that, in addition to the Assinghams and the Lutches and Mrs Ranee, the attendance at tea, just in the right place on the west terrace, might perfectly comprise the four or five persons - among them the very pretty, the typically Irish Miss Maddock, vaunted, announced and now brought - from the couple of other houses near

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enough, one of these the minor residence of their proprietor, established, thriftily, while he hired out his ancestral home, within sight and sense of his profit. It was not less certain, either, that, for once in a way, the group in question must all take the case as they found it. Fanny Assingham, at any time, for that matter, might perfectly be trusted to see Mr Verver and his daughter, to see their reputation for a decent friendliness, through any momentary danger; might be trusted even to carry off their absence for Amerigo, for Amerigo's possible funny Italian anxiety; Amerigo always being, as the Princess was well aware, conveniently amenable to this friend's explanations, beguilements, reassurances, and perhaps in fact rather more than less dependent on them as his new life - since that was his own name for it - opened out. It was no secret to Maggie - it was indeed positively a public joke for her - that she couldn't explain as Mrs Assingham did, and that, the Prince liking explanations, liking them almost as if he collected them, in the manner of book-plates or postage-stamps, for themselves, his requisition of this luxury had to be met. He didn't seem to want them as yet for use - rather for ornament and amusement, innocent amusement of the kind he most fancied and that was so characteristic of his blessed, beautiful, general, slightly indolent lack of more dissipated, or even just of more sophisticated, tastes.

However that might be, the dear woman had come to be frankly and gaily recognised - and not least by herself - as filling in the intimate little circle an office that was not always a sinecure. It was almost as if she had taken, with her kind, melancholy Colonel at her heels, a responsible engagement; to be within call, as it were, for all those appeals that sprang out of talk, that sprang not a little, doubtless too, out of leisure. It naturally led, her position in the household, as she called it, to considerable frequency of presence, to visits, from the good couple, freely repeated and prolonged, and not so much as under form of protest. She was there to keep him quiet - it was Amerigo's own description of her influence; and it would only have needed a more visible disposition to unrest in him to make the account perfectly fit. Fanny herself limited, indeed she minimised, her office; you didn't need a jailer, she contended, for a domesticated lamb tied up with pink ribbon. This was not an animal to be controlled - it was an animal to be, at the most, educated. She admitted accordingly that she was educative - which Maggie was so aware that she herself, inevitably, wasn't; so it came round to being true that what she was most in charge of was his mere intelligence. This left, goodness knew, plenty of different calls for Maggie to meet - in a case in which so much pink

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ribbon, as it might be symbolically named, was lavished on the creature. What it all amounted to, at any rate, was that Mrs Assingham would be keeping him quiet now, while his wife and his father-in-law carried out their own little frugal picnic; quite moreover, doubtless, not much less neededly in respect to the members of the circle that were with diem there than in respect to the pair they were missing almost for the first time. It was present to Maggie that the Prince could bear, when he was with his wife, almost any queerness on die part of people, strange English types, who bored him, beyond convenience, by being so litde as he himself was; for this was one of the ways in which a wife was practically sustaining. But she was as positively aware that she hadn't yet learned to see him as meeting such exposure in her absence. How did he move and talk, how above all did he, or how would he, look - he who, with his so nobly handsome face, could look such wonderful things - in case of being left alone with some of the subjects of his wonder? There were subjects for wonder among these very neighbours; only Maggie herself had her own odd way - which didn't moreover the least irritate him - of really liking them in proportion as they could strike her as strange. It came out in her by heredity, he amused himself with declaring, this love of chinoiseries;⁵⁴ but she actually this evening didn't mind - he might deal with her Chinese as he could.

Maggie indeed would always have had for such moments, had they oftener occurred, the impression made on her by a word of Mrs Assingham's, a word referring precisely to that appetite in Amerigo for the explanatory which we have just found in our path. It wasn't that the Princess could be indebted to another person, even to so clever a one as diis friend, for seeing anything in her husband that she mightn't see unaided; but she had ever, hitherto, been of a nature to accept with modest gratitude any better description of a felt truth than her little limits - terribly marked, she knew, in die direction of saying the right things - enabled her to make. Thus it was, at any rate, that she was able to live more or less in the light of die fact expressed so lucidly by their common comforter - the fact that the Prince was saving up, for some very mysterious but very fine eventual purpose, all die wisdom, all die answers to his questions, all the impressions and generalisations, he gathered; putting them away and packing them down because he wanted his great gun to be loaded to the brim on the day he should decide to let it off. He wanted first to make sure of the whole of the subject that was unrolling itself before him; after which the innumerable facts he had collected would find their use. He knew what he was about - trust

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him at last therefore to make, and to some effect, his big noise. And Mrs Assingham had repeated that he knew what he was about. It was the happy form of this assurance that had remained with Maggie; it could always come in for her that Amerigo knew what he was about. He might at moments seem vague, seem absent, seem even bored: this when, away from her father, with whom it was impossible for him to appear anything but respectfully occupied, he let his native gaiety go in outbreaks of song, or even of quite whimsical senseless sound, either expressive of intimate relaxation or else fantastically plaintive. He might at times reflect with the frankest lucidity on the circumstance that the case was for a good while yet absolutely settled in regard to what he still had left, at home, of his very own; in regard to the main seat of his affection, the house in Rome, the big black palace, the Palazzo Nero, as he was fond of naming it, and also on the question of the villa in the Sabine hills,⁵⁵ which she had, at the time of their engagement, seen and yearned over, and the Castello⁵⁶ proper, described by him always as the 'perched' place, that had, as she knew, formerly stood up, on the pedestal of its mountain-slope, showing beautifully blue from afar, as the head and front of the princedom. He might rejoice in certain moods over the so long-estranged state of these properties, not indeed all irreclaimably alienated, but encumbered with unending leases and charges, with obstinate occupants, with impossibilities of use - all without counting the cloud of mortgages that had, from far back, buried them beneath the ashes of rage and remorse, a shroud as thick as the layer once resting on the towns at the foot of Vesuvius,⁵⁷ and actually making of any present restorative effort a process much akin to slow excavation. Just so he might with another turn of his humour almost wail for these brightest spots of his lost paradise, declaring that he was an idiot not to be able to bring himself to face the sacrifices - sacrifices resting, if definitely anywhere, with Mr Verver - necessary for winning them back.

One of the most comfortable things between the husband and the wife meanwhile - one of those easy certitudes they could be merely gay about - was that she never admired him so much, or so found him heart-breakingly handsome, clever, irresistible, in the very degree in which he had originally and fatally dawned upon her, as when she saw other women reduced to the same passive pulp that had then begun, once for all to constitute her substance. There was really nothing they had talked of together with more intimate and familiar pleasantry than of the license and privilege, the boundless happy margin, thus established for each: she going so far as to put it that,

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even should he some day get drunk and beat her, the spectacle of him with hated rivals would, after no matter what extremity, always, for the sovereign charm of it, charm of it in itself and as the exhibition of him that most deeply moved her, suffice to bring her round. What would therefore be more open to him than to keep her in love with him? He agreed, with all his heart, at these light moments, that his course wouldn't then be difficult, inasmuch as, so simply constituted as he was on all the precious question - and why should he be ashamed of it? - he knew but one way with the fair. They had to be fair - and he was fastidious and particular, his standard was high; but when once this was the case what relation with them was conceivable, what relation was decent, rudimentary, properly human, but that of a plain interest in the fairness? His interest, she always answered, happened not to be 'plain,' and plainness, all round, had little to do with the matter, which was marked, on the contrary, by the richest variety of colour; but the working basis, at all events, had been settled - the Miss Maddocks of life been assured of their importance for him. How conveniently assured Maggie - to take him too into the joke -had more than once gone so far as to mention to her father; since it fell in easily with the tenderness of her disposition to remember she might occasionally make him happy by an intimate confidence. This was one of her rules - full as she was of little rules, considerations, provisions. There were things she of course couldn't tell him, in so many words, about Amerigo and herself, and about their happiness and their union and their deepest depths - and there were other things she needn't; but there were also those that were both true and amusing, both communicable and real, and of these, with her so conscious, so delicately-cultivated scheme of conduct as a daughter, she could make her profit at will.

A pleasant hush, for that matter, had fallen on most of the elements while she lingered apart with her companion; it involved, this serenity, innumerable complete assumptions: since so ordered and so splendid a rest, all the tokens, spreading about them, of confidence solidly supported, might have suggested for persons of poorer pitch the very insolence of facility. Still, they weren't insolent - they weren't, our pair could reflect; they were only blissful and grateful and personally modest, not ashamed of knowing, with competence, when great things were great, when good things were good, and when safe things were safe, and not, therefore, placed below their fortune by timidity - which would have been as bad as being below it by impudence. Worthy of it as they were, and as each appears, under our last possible analysis, to have wished to make the other feel that

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they were, what they most finally exhaled into the evening air as their eyes mildly met may well have been a kind of helplessness in their felicity. Their rightness, the justification of everything - something they so felt the pulse of - sat there with them; but they might have been asking themselves a little blankly to what further use they could put anything so perfect. They had created and nursed and established it; they had housed it here in dignity and crowned it with comfort; but mightn't the moment possibly count for them - or count at least for us while we watch them with their fate all before them - as the dawn of the discovery that it doesn't always meet all contingencies to be right? Otherwise why should Maggie have found a word of definite doubt - the expression of the fine pang determined in her a few hours before - rise after a time to her lips? She took so for granted moreover her companion's intelligence of her doubt that the mere vagueness of her question could say it all. 'What is it, after all, that they want to do to you?' 'They' were for the Princess too the hovering forces of which Mrs Ranee was the symbol, and her father, only smiling back now, at his ease, took no trouble to appear not to know what she meant. What she meant - when once she had spoken - could come out well enough; though indeed it was nothing, after they had come to the point, that could serve as ground for a great defensive campaign. The waters of talk spread a little, and Maggie presently contributed an idea in saying: 'What has really happened is that the proportions, for us, are altered.' He accepted equally, for the time, this somewhat cryptic remark; he still failed to challenge her even when she added that it wouldn't so much matter if he hadn't been so terribly young. He uttered a sound of protest only when she went to declare that she ought as a daughter, in common decency, to have waited. Yet by that time she was already herself admitting that she should have had to wait long - if she waited, that is, till he was old. But there was a way. 'Since you are an irresistible youth, we've got to face it. That, somehow, is what that woman has made me feel. There'll be others.'

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Chapter 10

To talk of it thus appeared at last a positive relief to him.

'Yes, there'll be others. But you'll see me through.'

She hesitated. 'Do you mean if you give in?'

'Oh no. Through my holding out.'

Maggie waited again, but when she spoke it had an effect of abruptness. 'Why should you hold out for ever?'

He gave, none the less, no start - and this as from the habit of taking anything, taking everything, from her as harmonious. But it was quite written upon him too for that matter, that holding out wouldn't be, so very completely, his natural, or at any rate his acquired, form. His appearance would have testified that he might have to do so a long time - for a man so greatly beset. This appearance, that is, spoke but little, as yet, of short remainders and simplified senses - and all in spite of his being a small, spare, slightly stale person, deprived of the general prerogative of presence. It was not by mass or weight or vulgar immediate quantity that he would in the future, any more than he had done in the past, insist or resist or prevail. There was even something in him that made his position, on any occasion, made his relation to any scene or to any group, a matter of the back of the stage, of an almost visibly conscious want of affinity with the footlights. He would have figured less than anything the stage-manager or the author of the play, who most occupy the foreground; he might be, at the best, the financial 'backer,' watching his interests from the wing, but in rather confessed ignorance of the mysteries of mimicry. Barely taller than his daughter, he pressed at no point on the presumed propriety of his greater stoutness. He had lost early in life much of his crisp, closely-curling hair, the fineness of which was repeated in a small neat beard, too compact to be called 'full,' though worn equally, as for a mark where other marks were wanting, on lip and cheek and chin. His neat, colourless face, provided with the merely indispensable features, suggested immedi­ately, for a description, that it was clear, and in this manner somewhat resembled a small decent room, clean-swept and unencumbered with furniture, but drawing a particular advantage, as might presently be noted, from the outlook of a pair of ample and uncurtained windows. There was something in Adam Verver's eyes that both admitted the

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morning and the evening in unusual quantities and gave the modest area the outward extension of a view that was 'big' even when restricted to the stars. Deeply and changeably blue, though not romantically large, they were yet youthfully, almost strangely beauti­ful, with their ambiguity of your scarce knowing if they most carried their possessor's vision out or most opened themselves to your own. Whatever you might feel, they stamped the place with their importance, as the house-agents say; so that, on one side or the other, you were never out of their range, were moving about, for possible community, opportunity, the sight of you scarce knew what, either before them or behind them. If other importances, not to extend the question, kept themselves down, they were in no direction less obtruded than in that of our friend's dress, adopted once for all as with a sort of sumptuary scruple. He wore every day of the year, whatever the occasion, the same little black 'cut away' coat, of the fashion of his younger time; he wore the same cool-looking trousers, chequered in black and white - the proper harmony with which, he inveterately considered, was a sprigged blue satin necktie; and, over his concave little stomach, quaintly indifferent to climates and seasons, a white duck waistcoat. 'Should you really,' he now asked, 'like me to marry?' He spoke as if, coming from his daughter herself, it might be an idea; which, for that matter, he would be ready to carry out should she definitely say so.

Definite, however, just yet, she was not prepared to be, though it seemed to come to her with force, as she thought, that there was a truth, in the connection, to utter. 'What I feel is that there is somehow something that used to be right and that I've made wrong. It used to be right that you hadn't married, and that you didn't seem to want to. It used also' - she continued to make out - 'to seem easy for the question not to come up. That's what I've made different. It does come up. It will come up.'

'You don't think I can keep it down?' Mr Verver's tone was cheerfully pensive.

'Well, I've given you, by my move, all the trouble of having to.'

He liked the tenderness of her idea, and it made him, as she sat near him, pass his arm about her. 'I guess I don't feel as if you had "moved" very far. You've only moved next door.'

'Well,' she continued, 'I don't feel as if it were fair for me just to have given you a push and left you so. If I've made the difference for you, I must think of the difference.'

'Then what, darling,' he indulgently asked, 'do you think?'

'That's just what I don't yet know. But I must find out. We must

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think together - as we've always thought. What I mean,' she went on after a moment, 'is that it strikes me that I ought to at least offer you some alternative. I ought to have worked one out for you.'

'An alternative to what?'

'Well, to your simply missing what you've lost - without anything being done about it.'

'But what have I lost?'

She thought a minute, as if it were difficult to say, yet as if she more and more saw it. 'Well, whatever it was that, before, kept us from thinking, and kept you, really, as you might say, in the market. It was as if you couldn't be in the market when you were married to me. Or rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you. Now that I'm married to someone else you're, as in conse­quence, married to nobody. Therefore you may be married to anybody, to everybody. People don't see why you shouldn't be married to them,'

'Isn't it enough of a reason,' he mildly inquired, 'that I don't want to be?'

'It's enough of a reason, yes. But to be enough of a reason it has to be too much of a trouble. I mean for you. It has to be too much of a fight. You ask me what you've lost,' Maggie continued to explain. 'The not having to take the trouble and to make the fight - that's what you've lost. The advantage, the happiness of being just as you were - because I was just as I was - that's what you miss.'

'So that you think,' her father presently said, 'that I had better get married just in order to be as I was before?'

The detached tone of it - detached as if innocently to amuse her by showing his desire to accommodate - was so far successful as to draw from her gravity a short, light laugh. 'Well, what I don't want you to feel is that if you were to I shouldn't understand. I should understand. That's all,' said the Princess gently.

Her companion turned it pleasantly over. 'You don't go so far as to wish me to take somebody I don't like?'

'Ah, father,' she sighed, 'you know how far I go - how far / could go. But I only wish that if you ever should like anybody, you may never doubt of my feeling how I've brought you to it. You'll always know that I know that it's my fault.'

'You mean,' he went on in his contemplative way, 'that it will be you who'll take the consequences?'

Maggie just considered. 'I'll leave you all the good ones, but I'll take the bad.'

'Well, that's handsome.' He emphasised his sense of it by drawing

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her closer and holding her more tenderly. 'It's about all I could expect of you. So far as you've wronged me, therefore, we'll call it square. I'll let you know in time if I see a prospect of your having to take it up. But am I to understand meanwhile,' he soon went on, 'that, ready as you are to see me through my collapse, you're not ready, or not as ready, to see me through my resistance? I've got to be a regular martyr before you'll be inspired?'

She demurred at his way of putting it. 'Why, if you like it, you know, it won't be a collapse.'

'Then why talk about seeing me through at all? I shall only collapse if I do like it. But what I seem to feel is that I don't want to like it. That is,' he amended, 'unless I feel surer I do than appears very probable. I don't want to have to think I like it in a case when I really shan't. I've had to do that in some cases,' he confessed - 'when it has been a question of other things. I don't want,' he wound up, 'to be made to make a mistake.'

'Ah, but it's too dreadful,' she returned, 'that you should even have to fear - or just nervously to dream - that you may be. What does that show, after all,' she asked, 'but that you do really, well within, feel a want? What does it show but that you're truly susceptible?'

'Well, it may show that' - he defended himself against nothing. 'But it shows also I think that charming women are, in the kind of life we're leading now, numerous and formidable.'

Maggie entertained for a moment the proposition; under cover of which, however, she passed quickly from the general to the particu­lar. 'Do you feel Mrs Ranee to be charming?'

'Well, I feel her to be formidable. When they cast a spell it comes to the same thing. I think she'd do anything.'

'Oh well, I'd help you,' the Princess said with decision, 'as against her - if that's all you require. It's too funny,' she went on before he again spoke, 'that Mrs Ranee should be here at all. But if you talk of the life we lead, much of it is, altogether, I'm bound to say, too funny. The thing is,' Maggie developed under this impression, 'that I don't think we lead, as regards other people, any life at all. We don't at any rate, it seems to me, lead half the life we might. And so it seems, I think, to Amerigo. So it seems also, I'm sure, to Fanny Assingham.'

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 595