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e Golden Bowl
evidence—the same deep intimacy as the commercial, the
nancial association founded, far down, on a community of
interest. And the correspondence, for the Prince, carried itself
out in identities of character the vision of which, fortunately,
rather tended to amuse than to—as might have happened—
irritate him. ose people—and his free synthesis lumped
together capitalists and bankers, retired men of business,
illustrious collectors, American fathers-in-law, American
fathers, little American daughters, little American wives—
those people were of the same large lucky group, as one
might say; they were all, at least, of the same general species
and had the same general instincts; they hung together,
they passed each other the word, they spoke each other’s
language, they did each other “turns.” In this last connection
it of course came up for our young man at a given moment
that Maggie’s relation with HIM was also, on the perceived
basis, taken care of. Which was in fact the real upshot of
the matter. It was a “funny” situation—that is it was funny
just as it stood. eir married life was in question, but the
solution was, not less strikingly, before them. It was all right
for himself, because Mr. Verver worked it so for Maggie’s
comfort; and it was all right for Maggie, because he worked
it so for her husband’s.
e fact that time, however, was not, as we have said,
wholly on the Prince’s side might have shown for particularly
true one dark day on which, by an odd but not unprecedented
chance, the reections just noted oered themselves as his
main recreation. ey alone, it appeared, had been appointed
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to ll the hours for him, and even to ll the great square
house in Portland Place, where the scale of one of the smaller
saloons tted them but loosely. He had looked into this
room on the chance that he might nd the Princess at tea;
but though the reside service of the repast was shiningly
present the mistress of the table was not, and he had waited
for her, if waiting it could be called, while he measured again
and again the stretch of polished oor. He could have named
to himself no pressing reason for seeing her at this moment,
and her not coming in, as the half-hour elapsed, became in
fact quite positively, however perversely, the circumstance
that kept him on the spot. Just there, he might have been
feeling, just there he could best take his note. is observation
was certainly by itself meagre amusement for a dreary little
crisis; but his walk to and fro, and in particular his repeated
pause at one of the high front windows, gave each of the
ebbing minutes, none the less, after a time, a little more of
the quality of a quickened throb of the spirit. ese throbs
scarce expressed, however, the impatience of desire, any more
than they stood for sharp disappointment: the series together
resembled perhaps more than anything else those ne waves
of clearness through which, for a watcher of the east, dawn
at last trembles into rosy day. e illumination indeed was all
for the mind, the prospect revealed by it a mere immensity
of the world of thought; the material outlook was all the
while a dierent matter. e March afternoon, judged at
the window, had blundered back into autumn; it had been
raining for hours, and the colour of the rain, the colour of
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the air, of the mud, of the opposite houses, of life altogether,
in so grim a joke, so idiotic a masquerade, was an unutterable
dirty brown. ere was at rst even, for the young man,
no faint ush in the fact of the direction taken, while he
happened to look out, by a slow-jogging four-wheeled cab
which, awkwardly deecting from the middle course, at the
apparent instance of a person within, began to make for the
left-hand pavement and so at last, under further instructions,
oundered to a full stop before the Prince’s windows. e
person within, alighting with an easier motion, proved to
be a lady who left the vehicle to wait and, putting up no
umbrella, quickly crossed the wet interval that separated
her from the house. She but itted and disappeared; yet the
Prince, from his standpoint, had had time to recognise her,
and the recognition kept him for some minutes motionless.
Charlotte Stant, at such an hour, in a shabby four-wheeler
and a waterproof, Charlotte Stant turning up for him at the
very climax of his special inner vision, was an apparition
charged with a congruity at which he stared almost as if it
had been a violence. e eect of her coming to see him,
him only, had, while he stood waiting, a singular intensity—
though after some minutes had passed the certainty of this
began to drop. Perhaps she had NOT come, or had come
only for Maggie; perhaps, on learning below that the Princess
had not returned, she was merely leaving a message, writing
a word on a card. He should see, at any rate; and meanwhile,
controlling himself, would do nothing. is thought of
not interfering took on a sudden force for him; she would
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doubtless hear he was at home, but he would let her visit to
him be all of her own choosing. And his view of a reason for
leaving her free was the more remarkable that, though taking
no step, he yet intensely hoped. e harmony of her breaking
into sight while the supercial conditions were so against her
was a harmony with conditions that were far from supercial
and that gave, for his imagination, an extraordinary value
to her presence. e value deepened strangely, moreover,
with the rigour of his own attitude—with the fact too that,
listening hard, he neither heard the house-door close again
nor saw her go back to her cab; and it had risen to a climax
by the time he had become aware, with his quickened sense,
that she had followed the butler up to the landing from
which his room opened. If anything could further then have
added to it, the renewed pause outside, as if she had said
to the man “Wait a moment!” would have constituted this
touch. Yet when the man had shown her in, had advanced to
the tea-table to light the lamp under the kettle and had then
busied himself, all deliberately, with the re, she made it easy
for her host to drop straight from any height of tension and
to meet her, provisionally, on the question of Maggie. While
the butler remained it was Maggie that she had come to see
and Maggie that—in spite of this attendant’s high blankness
on the subject of all possibilities on that lady’s part—she
would cheerfully, by the re, wait for. As soon as they were
alone together, however, she mounted, as with the whizz and
the red light of a rocket, from the form to the fact, saying
straight out, as she stood and looked at him: “What else, my
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dear, what in the world else can we do?”
It was as if he then knew, on the spot, why he had been
feeling, for hours, as he had felt—as if he in fact knew,
within the minute, things he had not known even while
she was panting, as from the eect of the staircase, at the
door of the room. He knew at the same time, none the less,
that she knew still more than he—in the sense, that is, of
all the signs and portents that might count for them; and
his vision of alternative—she could scarce say what to call
them, solutions, satisfactions—opened out, altogether, with
this tangible truth of her attitude by the chimney-place, the
way she looked at him as through the gained advantage of
it; her right hand resting on the marble and her left keeping
her skirt from the re while she held out a foot to dry. He
couldn’t have told what particular links and gaps had at
the end of a few minutes found themselves renewed and
bridged; for he remembered no occasion, in Rome, from
which the picture could have been so exactly copied. He
remembered, that is, none of her coming to see him in the
rain while a muddy four-wheeler waited, and while, though
having left her waterproof downstairs, she was yet invested
with the odd eloquence—the positive picturesqueness, yes,
given all the rest of the matter—of a dull dress and a black
Bowdlerised hat that seemed to make a point of insisting on
their time of life and their moral intention, the hat’s and the
frock’s own, as well as on the irony of indierence to them
practically playing in her so handsome rain-freshened face.
e sense of the past revived for him nevertheless as it had
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not yet done: it made that other time somehow meet the
future close, interlocking with it, before his watching eyes,
as in a long embrace of arms and lips, and so handling and
hustling the present that this poor quantity scarce retained
substance enough, scarce remained suciently THERE, to
be wounded or shocked.
What had happened, in short, was that Charlotte and he
had, by a single turn of the wrist of fate—”led up” to indeed,
no doubt, by steps and stages that conscious computation
had missed—been placed face to face in a freedom that
partook, extraordinarily, of ideal perfection, since the magic
web had spun itself without their toil, almost without their
touch. Above all, on this occasion, once more, there sounded
through their safety, as an undertone, the very voice he had
listened to on the eve of his marriage with such another sort
of unrest. Dimly, again and again, from that period on, he
had seemed to hear it tell him why it kept recurring; but it
phrased the large music now in a way that lled the room.
e reason was—into which he had lived, quite intimately,
by the end of a quarter-of-an-hour—that just this truth of
their safety oered it now a kind of unexampled receptacle,
letting it spread and spread, but at the same time elastically
enclosing it, banking it in, for softness, as with billows of
eiderdown. On that morning; in the Park there had been,
however dissimulated, doubt and danger, whereas the tale
this afternoon was taken up with a highly emphasised
condence. e emphasis, for their general comfort, was
what Charlotte had come to apply; inasmuch as, though
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it was not what she denitely began with, it had soon
irrepressibly shaped itself. It was the meaning of the question
she had put to him as soon as they were alone—even though
indeed, as from not quite understanding, he had not then
directly replied; it was the meaning of everything else, down
to the conscious quaintness of her ricketty “growler” and the
conscious humility of her dress. It had helped him a little, the
question of these eccentricities, to let her immediate appeal
pass without an answer. He could ask her instead what had
become of her carriage and why, above all, she was not using
it in such weather.
“It’s just because of the weather,” she explained. “It’s my
little idea. It makes me feel as I used to—when I could do as
I liked.”
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XVIII
is came out so straight that he saw at once how much
truth it expressed; yet it was truth that still a little puzzled him.
“But did you ever like knocking about in such discomfort?”
“It seems to me now that I then liked everything. It’s the
charm, at any rate,” she said from her place at the re, “of
trying again the old feelings. ey come back—they come
back. Everything,” she went on, “comes back. Besides,” she
wound up, “you know for yourself.”
He stood near her, his hands in his pockets; but not
looking at her, looking hard at the tea-table. “Ah, I haven’t
your courage. Moreover,” he laughed, “it seems to me that, so
far as that goes, I do live in hansoms. But you must awfully
want your tea,” he quickly added; “so let me give you a good
sti cup.”
He busied himself with this care, and she sat down, on his
pushing up a low seat, where she had been standing; so that,
while she talked, he could bring her what she further desired.
He moved to and fro before her, he helped himself; and her
visit, as the moments passed, had more and more the eect
of a signal communication that she had come, all responsibly
and deliberately, as on the clear show of the clock-face of
their situation, to make. e whole demonstration, none the
less, presented itself as taking place at a very high level of
debate—in the cool upper air of the ner discrimination,
the deeper sincerity, the larger philosophy. No matter what
were the facts invoked and arrayed, it was only a question,
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as yet, of their seeing their way together: to which indeed,
exactly, the present occasion appeared to have so much to
contribute. “It’s not that you haven’t my courage,” Charlotte
said, “but that you haven’t, I rather think, my imagination.
Unless indeed it should turn out after all,” she added, “that
you haven’t even my intelligence. However, I shall not be
afraid of that till you’ve given me more proof.” And she made
again, but more clearly, her point of a moment before. “You
knew, besides, you knew to-day, I would come. And if you
knew that you know everything.” So she pursued, and if he
didn’t meanwhile, if he didn’t even at this, take her up, it
might be that she was so positively tting him again with
the fair face of temporising kindness that he had given her,
to keep her eyes on, at the other important juncture, and
the sense of which she might ever since have been carrying
about with her like a precious medal—not exactly blessed
by the Pope suspended round her neck. She had come back,
however this might be, to her immediate account of herself,
and no mention of their great previous passage was to rise
to the lips of either. “Above all,” she said, “there has been the
personal romance of it.”
“Of tea with me over the re? Ah, so far as that goes I
don’t think even my intelligence fails me.”
“Oh, it’s further than that goes; and if I’ve had a better
day than you it’s perhaps, when I come to think of it, that I
AM braver. You bore yourself, you see. But I don’t. I don’t, I
don’t,” she repeated.
“It’s precisely boring one’s self without relief,” he
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protested, “that takes courage.”
“Passive then—not active. My romance is that, if you
want to know, I’ve been all day on the town. Literally on the
town—isn’t that what they call it? I know how it feels.” After
which, as if breaking o, “And you, have you never been out?”
she asked.
He still stood there with his hands in his pockets. “What
should I have gone out for?”
“Oh, what should people in our case do anything for? But
you’re wonderful, all of YOU—you know how to live. We’re
clumsy brutes, we other’s, beside you—we must always be
‘doing’ something. However,” Charlotte pursued, “if you had
gone out you might have missed the chance of me—which
I’m sure, though you won’t confess it, was what you didn’t
want; and might have missed, above all, the satisfaction that,
look blank about it as you will, I’ve come to congratulate you
on. at’s really what I can at last do. You can’t not know at
least, on such a day as this—you can’t not know,” she said,
“where you are.” She waited as for him either to grant that
he knew or to pretend that he didn’t; but he only drew a
long deep breath which came out like a moan of impatience.
It brushed aside the question of where he was or what he
knew; it seemed to keep the ground clear for the question of
his visitor herself, that of Charlotte Verver exactly as she sat
there. So, for some moments, with their long look, they but
treated the matter in silence; with the eect indeed, by the
end of the time, of having considerably brought it on. is
was suciently marked in what Charlotte next said. “ere it
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