The Golden Bowl — Complete

She had never, never treated them in any such way—not even just now, when she had plied her art upon the Matcham band; her present manner was an intenser exclusion, and the air was charged with their silence while she talked with her other companion as if she had nothing but him to consider. He had given her the note amazingly, by his allusion to the pleasantness—that of such an occasion as his successful dinner—which might figure as their bribe for renouncing; so that it was all as if they were speaking selfishly, counting on a repetition of just such extensions of experience. Maggie achieved accordingly an act of unprecedented energy, threw herself into her father’s presence as by the absolute consistency with which she held his eyes; saying to herself, at the same time that she smiled and talked and inaugurated her system, “What does he mean by it? That’s the question—what does he mean?” but studying again all the signs in him that recent anxiety had made familiar and counting the stricken minutes on the part of the others. It was in their silence that the others loomed, as she felt; she had had no measure, she afterwards knew, of this duration, but it drew out and out—really to what would have been called in simpler conditions awkwardness—as if she herself were stretching the cord. Ten minutes later, however, in the homeward carriage, to which her husband, cutting delay short, had proceeded at the first announcement, ten minutes later she was to stretch it almost to breaking. The Prince had permitted her to linger much less, before his move to the door, than they usually lingered at the gossiping close of such evenings; which she, all responsive, took for a sign of his impatience to modify for her the odd effect of his not having, and of Charlotte’s not having, instantly acclaimed the issue of the question debated, or more exactly, settled, before them. He had had time to become aware of this possible impression in her, and his virtually urging her into the carriage was connected with his feeling that he must take action on the new ground. A certain ambiguity in her would absolutely have tormented him; but he had already found something to soothe and correct—as to which she had, on her side, a shrewd notion of what it would be. She was herself, for that matter, prepared, and she was, of a truth, as she took her seat in the brougham, amazed at her preparation. It allowed her scarce an interval; she brought it straight out.

“I was certain that was what father would say if I should leave him alone. I HAVE been leaving him alone, and you see the effect. He hates now to move—he likes too much to be with us. But if you see the effect”—she felt herself magnificently keeping it up—“perhaps you don’t see the cause. The cause, my dear, is too lovely.”

Her husband, on taking his place beside her, had, during a minute or two, for her watching sense, neither said nor done anything; he had been, for that sense, as if thinking, waiting, deciding: yet it was still before he spoke that he, as she felt it to be, definitely acted. He put his arm round her and drew her close—indulged in the demonstration, the long, firm embrace by his single arm, the infinite pressure of her whole person to his own, that such opportunities had so often suggested and prescribed. Held, accordingly, and, as she could but too intimately feel, exquisitely solicited, she had said the thing she was intending and desiring to say, and as to which she felt, even more than she felt anything else, that whatever he might do she mustn’t be irresponsible. Yes, she was in his exerted grasp, and she knew what that was; but she was at the same time in the grasp of her conceived responsibility, and the extraordinary thing was that, of the two intensities, the second was presently to become the sharper. He took his time for it meanwhile, but he met her speech after a fashion.

“The cause of your father’s deciding not to go?”

“Yes, and of my having wanted to let it act for him quietly—I mean without my insistence.” She had, in her compressed state, another pause, and it made her feel as if she were immensely resisting. Strange enough was this sense for her, and altogether new, the sense of possessing, by miraculous help, some advantage that, absolutely then and there, in the carriage, as they rolled, she might either give up or keep. Strange, inexpressibly strange—so distinctly she saw that if she did give it up she should somehow give up everything for ever. And what her husband’s grasp really meant, as her very bones registered, was that she SHOULD give it up: it was exactly for this that he had resorted to unfailing magic. He KNEW HOW to resort to it—he could be, on occasion, as she had lately more than ever learned, so munificent a lover: all of which was, precisely, a part of the character she had never ceased to regard in him as princely, a part of his large and beautiful ease, his genius for charm, for intercourse, for expression, for life. She should have but to lay her head back on his shoulder with a certain movement to make it definite for him that she didn’t resist. To this, as they went, every throb of her consciousness prompted her—every throb, that is, but one, the throb of her deeper need to know where she “really” was. By the time she had uttered the rest of her idea, therefore, she was still keeping her head and intending to keep it; though she was also staring out of the carriage-window with eyes into which the tears of suffered pain had risen, indistinguishable, perhaps, happily, in the dusk. She was making an effort that horribly hurt her, and, as she couldn’t cry out, her eyes swam in her silence. With them, all the same, through the square opening beside her, through the grey panorama of the London night, she achieved the feat of not losing sight of what she wanted; and her lips helped and protected her by being able to be gay. “It’s not to leave YOU, my dear—for that he’ll give up anything; just as he would go off anywhere, I think, you know, if you would go with him. I mean you and he alone,” Maggie pursued with her gaze out of her window.

For which Amerigo’s answer again took him a moment. “Ah, the dear old boy! You would like me to propose him something—?”

“Well, if you think you could bear it.”

“And leave,” the Prince asked, “you and Charlotte alone?”

“Why not?” Maggie had also to wait a minute, but when she spoke it came clear. “Why shouldn’t Charlotte be just one of MY reasons—my not liking to leave her? She has always been so good, so perfect, to me—but never so wonderfully as just now. We have somehow been more together—thinking, for the time, almost only of each other; it has been quite as in old days.” And she proceeded consummately, for she felt it as consummate: “It’s as if we had been missing each other, had got a little apart—though going on so side by side. But the good moments, if one only waits for them,” she hastened to add, “come round of themselves. Moreover you’ve seen for yourself, since you’ve made it up so to father; feeling, for yourself, in your beautiful way, every difference, every air that blows; not having to be told or pushed, only being perfect to live with, through your habit of kindness and your exquisite instincts. But of course you’ve seen, all the while, that both he and I have deeply felt how you’ve managed; managed that he hasn’t been too much alone and that I, on my side, haven’t appeared, to—what you might call—neglect him. This is always,” she continued, “what I can never bless you enough for; of all the good things you’ve done for me you’ve never done anything better.” She went on explaining as for the pleasure of explaining—even though knowing he must recognise, as a part of his easy way too, her description of his large liberality. “Your taking the child down yourself, those days, and your coming, each time, to bring him away—nothing in the world, nothing you could have invented, would have kept father more under the charm. Besides, you know how you’ve always suited him, and how you’ve always so beautifully let it seem to him that he suits you. Only it has been, these last weeks, as if you wished—just in order to please him—to remind him of it afresh. So there it is,” she wound up; “it’s your doing. You’ve produced your effect—that of his wanting not to be, even for a month or two, where you’re not. He doesn’t want to bother or bore you—THAT, I think, you know, he never has done; and if you’ll only give me time I’ll come round again to making it my care, as always, that he shan’t. But he can’t bear you out of his sight.”

She had kept it up and up, filling it out, crowding it in; and all, really, without difficulty, for it was, every word of it, thanks to a long evolution of feeling, what she had been primed to the brim with. She made the picture, forced it upon him, hung it before him; remembering, happily, how he had gone so far, one day, supported by the Principino, as to propose the Zoo in Eaton Square, to carry with him there, on the spot, under this pleasant inspiration, both his elder and his younger companion, with the latter of whom he had taken the tone that they were introducing Granddaddy, Granddaddy nervous and rather funking it, to lions and tigers more or less at large. Touch by touch she thus dropped into her husband’s silence the truth about his good nature and his good manners; and it was this demonstration of his virtue, precisely, that added to the strangeness, even for herself, of her failing as yet to yield to him. It would be a question but of the most trivial act of surrender, the vibration of a nerve, the mere movement of a muscle; but the act grew important between them just through her doing perceptibly nothing, nothing but talk in the very tone that would naturally have swept her into tenderness. She knew more and more—every lapsing minute taught her—how he might by a single rightness make her cease to watch him; that rightness, a million miles removed from the queer actual, falling so short, which would consist of his breaking out to her diviningly, indulgently, with the last happy inconsequence. “Come away with me, somewhere, YOU—and then we needn’t think, we needn’t even talk, of anything, of anyone else:” five words like that would answer her, would break her utterly down. But they were the only ones that would so serve. She waited for them, and there was a supreme instant when, by the testimony of all the rest of him, she seemed to feel them in his heart and on his lips; only they didn’t sound, and as that made her wait again so it made her more intensely watch. This in turn showed her that he too watched and waited, and how much he had expected something that he now felt wouldn’t come. Yes, it wouldn’t come if he didn’t answer her, if he but said the wrong things instead of the right. If he could say the right everything would come—it hung by a hair that everything might crystallise for their recovered happiness at his touch. This possibility glowed at her, however, for fifty seconds, only then to turn cold, and as it fell away from her she felt the chill of reality and knew again, all but pressed to his heart and with his breath upon her cheek, the slim rigour of her attitude, a rigour beyond that of her natural being. They had silences, at last, that were almost crudities of mutual resistance—silences that persisted through his felt effort to treat her recurrence to the part he had lately played, to interpret all the sweetness of her so talking to him, as a manner of making love to him. Ah, it was no such manner, heaven knew, for Maggie; she could make love, if this had been in question, better than that! On top of which it came to her presently to say, keeping in with what she had already spoken: “Except of course that, for the question of going off somewhere, he’d go readily, quite delightedly, with you. I verily believe he’d like to have you for a while to himself.”

“Do you mean he thinks of proposing it?” the Prince after a moment sounded.

“Oh no—he doesn’t ask, as you must so often have seen. But I believe he’d go ‘like a shot,’ as you say, if you were to suggest it.”

It had the air, she knew, of a kind of condition made, and she had asked herself while she spoke if it wouldn’t cause his arm to let her go. The fact that it didn’t suggested to her that she had made him, of a sudden, still more intensely think, think with such concentration that he could do but one thing at once. And it was precisely as if the concentration had the next moment been proved in him. He took a turn inconsistent with the superficial impression—a jump that made light of their approach to gravity and represented for her the need in him to gain time. That she made out, was his drawback—that the warning from her had come to him, and had come to Charlotte, after all, too suddenly. That they were in face of it rearranging, that they had to rearrange, was all before her again; yet to do as they would like they must enjoy a snatch, longer or shorter, of recovered independence. Amerigo, for the instant, was but doing as he didn’t like, and it was as if she were watching his effort without disguise. “What’s your father’s idea, this year, then, about Fawns? Will he go at Whitsuntide, and will he then stay on?”

Maggie went through the form of thought. “He will really do, I imagine, as he has, in so many ways, so often done before; do whatever may seem most agreeable to yourself. And there’s of course always Charlotte to be considered. Only their going early to Fawns, if they do go,” she said, “needn’t in the least entail your and my going.”

“Ah,” Amerigo echoed, “it needn’t in the least entail your and my going?”

“We can do as we like. What they may do needn’t trouble us, since they’re by good fortune perfectly happy together.”

“Oh,” the Prince returned, “your father’s never so happy as with you near him to enjoy his being so.”

“Well, I may enjoy it,” said Maggie, “but I’m not the cause of it.”

“You’re the cause,” her husband declared, “of the greater part of everything that’s good among us.” But she received this tribute in silence, and the next moment he pursued: “If Mrs. Verver has arrears of time with you to make up, as you say, she’ll scarcely do it—or you scarcely will—by our cutting, your and my cutting, too loose.”

“I see what you mean,” Maggie mused.

He let her for a little to give her attention to it; after which, “Shall I just quite, of a sudden,” he asked, “propose him a journey?”

Maggie hesitated, but she brought forth the fruit of reflection. “It would have the merit that Charlotte then would be with me—with me, I mean, so much more. Also that I shouldn’t, by choosing such a time for going away, seem unconscious and ungrateful, seem not to respond, seem in fact rather to wish to shake her off. I should respond, on the contrary, very markedly—by being here alone with her for a month.”

“And would you like to be here alone with her for a month?”

“I could do with it beautifully. Or we might even,” she said quite gaily, “go together down to Fawns.”

“You could be so very content without me?” the Prince presently inquired.

“Yes, my own dear—if you could be content for a while with father. That would keep me up. I might, for the time,” she went on, “go to stay there with Charlotte; or, better still, she might come to Portland Place.”

“Oho!” said the Prince with cheerful vagueness.

“I should feel, you see,” she continued, “that the two of us were showing the same sort of kindness.”

Amerigo thought. “The two of us? Charlotte and I?”

Maggie again hesitated. “You and I, darling.”

“I see, I see”—he promptly took it in. “And what reason shall I give—give, I mean, your father?”

“For asking him to go off? Why, the very simplest—if you conscientiously can. The desire,” said Maggie, “to be agreeable to him. Just that only.”

Something in this reply made her husband again reflect. “‘Conscientiously?’ Why shouldn’t I conscientiously? It wouldn’t, by your own contention,” he developed, “represent any surprise for him. I must strike him sufficiently as, at the worst, the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him.”

Ah, there it was again, for Maggie—the note already sounded, the note of the felt need of not working harm! Why this precautionary view, she asked herself afresh, when her father had complained, at the very least, as little as herself? With their stillness together so perfect, what had suggested so, around them, the attitude of sparing them? Her inner vision fixed it once more, this attitude, saw it, in the others, as vivid and concrete, extended it straight from her companion to Charlotte. Before she was well aware, accordingly, she had echoed in this intensity of thought Amerigo’s last words. “You’re the last person in the world to wish to do anything to hurt him.”

She heard herself, heard her tone, after she had spoken, and heard it the more that, for a minute after, she felt her husband’s eyes on her face, very close, too close for her to see him. He was looking at her because he was struck, and looking hard—though his answer, when it came, was straight enough. “Why, isn’t that just what we have been talking about—that I’ve affected you as fairly studying his comfort and his pleasure? He might show his sense of it,” the Prince went on, “by proposing to ME an excursion.”

“And you would go with him?” Maggie immediately asked.

He hung fire but an instant. “Per Dio!”

She also had her pause, but she broke it—since gaiety was in the air—with an intense smile. “You can say that safely, because the proposal’s one that, of his own motion, he won’t make.”

She couldn’t have narrated afterwards—and in fact was at a loss to tell herself—by what transition, what rather marked abruptness of change in their personal relation, their drive came to its end with a kind of interval established, almost confessed to, between them. She felt it in the tone with which he repeated, after her, “‘Safely’—?”

“Safely as regards being thrown with him perhaps after all, in such a case, too long. He’s a person to think you might easily feel yourself to be. So it won’t,” Maggie said, “come from father. He’s too modest.”

Their eyes continued to meet on it, from corner to corner of the brougham. “Oh your modesty, between you—!” But he still smiled for it. “So that unless I insist—?”

“We shall simply go on as we are.”

“Well, we’re going on beautifully,” he answered—though by no means with the effect it would have had if their mute transaction, that of attempted capture and achieved escape, had not taken place. As Maggie said nothing, none the less, to gainsay his remark, it was open to him to find himself the next moment conscious of still another idea. “I wonder if it would do. I mean for me to break in.”

“‘To break in’—?”

“Between your father and his wife. But there would be a way,” he said—“we can make Charlotte ask him.” And then as Maggie herself now wondered, echoing it again: “We can suggest to her to suggest to him that he shall let me take him off.”

“Oh!” said Maggie.

“Then if he asks her why I so suddenly break out she’ll be able to tell him the reason.”

They were stopping, and the footman, who had alighted, had rung at the house-door. “That you think it would be so charming?”

“That I think it would be so charming. That we’ve persuaded HER will be convincing.”

“I see,” Maggie went on while the footman came back to let them out. “I see,” she said again; though she felt a little disconcerted. What she really saw, of a sudden, was that her stepmother might report her as above all concerned for the proposal, and this brought her back her need that her father shouldn’t think her concerned in any degree for anything. She alighted the next instant with a slight sense of defeat; her husband, to let her out, had passed before her, and, a little in advance, he awaited her on the edge of the low terrace, a step high, that preceded their open entrance, on either side of which one of their servants stood. The sense of a life tremendously ordered and fixed rose before her, and there was something in Amerigo’s very face, while his eyes again met her own through the dusky lamplight, that was like a conscious reminder of it. He had answered her, just before, distinctly, and it appeared to leave her nothing to say. It was almost as if, having planned for the last word, she saw him himself enjoying it. It was almost as if—in the strangest way in the world—he were paying her back, by the production of a small pang, that of a new uneasiness, for the way she had slipped from him during their drive.

XXVIII

Maggie’s new uneasiness might have had time to drop, inasmuch as she not only was conscious, during several days that followed, of no fresh indication for it to feed on, but was even struck, in quite another way, with an augmentation of the symptoms of that difference she had taken it into her head to work for. She recognised by the end of a week that if she had been in a manner caught up her father had been not less so—with the effect of her husband’s and his wife’s closing in, together, round them, and of their all having suddenly begun, as a party of four, to lead a life gregarious, and from that reason almost hilarious, so far as the easy sound of it went, as never before. It might have been an accident and a mere coincidence—so at least she said to herself at first; but a dozen chances that furthered the whole appearance had risen to the surface, pleasant pretexts, oh certainly pleasant, as pleasant as Amerigo in particular could make them, for associated undertakings, quite for shared adventures, for its always turning out, amusingly, that they wanted to do very much the same thing at the same time and in the same way. Funny all this was, to some extent, in the light of the fact that the father and daughter, for so long, had expressed so few positive desires; yet it would be sufficiently natural that if Amerigo and Charlotte HAD at last got a little tired of each other’s company they should find their relief not so much in sinking to the rather low level of their companions as in wishing to pull the latter into the train in which they so constantly moved. “We’re in the train,” Maggie mutely reflected after the dinner in Eaton Square with Lady Castledean; “we’ve suddenly waked up in it and found ourselves rushing along, very much as if we had been put in during sleep—shoved, like a pair of labelled boxes, into the van. And since I wanted to ‘go’ I’m certainly going,” she might have added; “I’m moving without trouble—they’re doing it all for us: it’s wonderful how they understand and how perfectly it succeeds.” For that was the thing she had most immediately to acknowledge: it seemed as easy for them to make a quartette as it had formerly so long appeared for them to make a pair of couples—this latter being thus a discovery too absurdly belated. The only point at which, day after day, the success appeared at all qualified was represented, as might have been said, by her irresistible impulse to give her father a clutch when the train indulged in one of its occasional lurches. Then—there was no denying it—his eyes and her own met; so that they were themselves doing active violence, as against the others, to that very spirit of union, or at least to that very achievement of change, which she had taken the field to invoke.

The maximum of change was reached, no doubt, the day the Matcham party dined in Portland Place; the day, really perhaps, of Maggie’s maximum of social glory, in the sense of its showing for her own occasion, her very own, with every one else extravagantly rallying and falling in, absolutely conspiring to make her its heroine. It was as if her father himself, always with more initiative as a guest than as a host, had dabbled too in the conspiracy; and the impression was not diminished by the presence of the Assinghams, likewise very much caught-up, now, after something of a lull, by the side-wind of all the rest of the motion, and giving our young woman, so far at least as Fanny was concerned, the sense of some special intention of encouragement and applause. Fanny, who had not been present at the other dinner, thanks to a preference entertained and expressed by Charlotte, made a splendid show at this one, in new orange-coloured velvet with multiplied turquoises, and with a confidence, furthermore, as different as possible, her hostess inferred, from her too-marked betrayal of a belittled state at Matcham. Maggie was not indifferent to her own opportunity to redress this balance—which seemed, for the hour, part of a general rectification; she liked making out for herself that on the high level of Portland Place, a spot exempt, on all sorts of grounds, from jealous jurisdictions, her friend could feel as “good” as any one, and could in fact at moments almost appear to take the lead in recognition and celebration, so far as the evening might conduce to intensify the lustre of the little Princess. Mrs. Assingham produced on her the impression of giving her constantly her cue for this; and it was in truth partly by her help, intelligently, quite gratefully accepted, that the little Princess, in Maggie, was drawn out and emphasised. She couldn’t definitely have said how it happened, but she felt herself, for the first time in her career, living up to the public and popular notion of such a personage, as it pressed upon her from all round; rather wondering, inwardly too, while she did so, at that strange mixture in things through which the popular notion could be evidenced for her by such supposedly great ones of the earth as the Castledeans and their kind. Fanny Assingham might really have been there, at all events, like one of the assistants in the ring at the circus, to keep up the pace of the sleek revolving animal on whose back the lady in short spangled skirts should brilliantly caper and posture. That was all, doubtless Maggie had forgotten, had neglected, had declined, to be the little Princess on anything like the scale open to her; but now that the collective hand had been held out to her with such alacrity, so that she might skip up into the light, even, as seemed to her modest mind, with such a show of pink stocking and such an abbreviation of white petticoat, she could strike herself as perceiving, under arched eyebrows, where her mistake had been. She had invited for the later hours, after her dinner, a fresh contingent, the whole list of her apparent London acquaintance—which was again a thing in the manner of little princesses for whom the princely art was a matter of course. That was what she was learning to do, to fill out as a matter of course her appointed, her expected, her imposed character; and, though there were latent considerations that somewhat interfered with the lesson, she was having to-night an inordinate quantity of practice, none of it so successful as when, quite wittingly, she directed it at Lady Castledean, who was reduced by it at last to an unprecedented state of passivity. The perception of this high result caused Mrs. Assingham fairly to flush with responsive joy; she glittered at her young friend, from moment to moment, quite feverishly; it was positively as if her young friend had, in some marvellous, sudden, supersubtle way, become a source of succour to herself, become beautifully, divinely retributive. The intensity of the taste of these registered phenomena was in fact that somehow, by a process and through a connexion not again to be traced, she so practised, at the same time, on Amerigo and Charlotte—with only the drawback, her constant check and second-thought, that she concomitantly practised perhaps still more on her father.