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e Golden Bowl
all is—extraordinary beyond words. It makes such a relation
for us as, I verily believe, was never before in the world thrust
upon two well-meaning creatures. Haven’t we therefore to
take things as we nd them?” She put the question still more
directly than that of a moment before, but to this one, as
well, he returned no immediate answer. Noticing only that
she had nished her tea, he relieved her of her cup, carried
it back to the table, asked her what more she would have;
and then, on her “Nothing, thanks,” returned to the re and
restored a displaced log to position by a small but almost too
eectual kick. She had meanwhile got up again, and it was
on her feet that she repeated the words she had rst frankly
spoken. “What else can we do, what in all the world else?”
He took them up, however, no more than at rst. “Where
then have you been?” he asked as from mere interest in her
adventure.
“Everywhere I could think of—except to see people. I
didn’t want people—I wanted too much to think. But I’ve
been back at intervals—three times; and then come away
again. My cabman must think me crazy—it’s very amusing; I
shall owe him, when we come to settle, more money than he
has ever seen. I’ve been, my dear,” she went on, “to the British
Museum—which, you know, I always adore. And I’ve been to
the National Gallery, and to a dozen old booksellers’, coming
across treasures, and I’ve lunched, on some strange nastiness,
at a cookshop in Holborn. I wanted to go to the Tower, but it
was too far—my old man urged that; and I would have gone
to the Zoo if it hadn’t been too wet—which he also begged
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me to observe. But you wouldn’t believe—I did put in St.
Paul’s. Such days,” she wound up, “are expensive; for, besides
the cab, I’ve bought quantities of books.” She immediately
passed, at any rate, to another point: “I can’t help wondering
when you must last have laid eyes on them.” And then as it
had apparently for her companion an eect of abruptness:
“Maggie, I mean, and the child. For I suppose you know he’s
with her.”
“Oh yes, I know he’s with her. I saw them this morning.”
“And did they then announce their programme?”
“She told me she was taking him, as usual, da nonno.”
“And for the whole day?”
He hesitated, but it was as if his attitude had slowly
shifted.
“She didn’t say. And I didn’t ask.”
“Well,” she went on, “it can’t have been later than halfpast ten—I mean when you saw them. ey had got to Eaton
Square before eleven. You know we don’t formally breakfast,
Adam and I; we have tea in our rooms—at least I have; but
luncheon is early, and I saw my husband, this morning, by
twelve; he was showing the child a picture-book. Maggie
had been there with them, had left them settled together.
en she had gone out—taking the carriage for something
he had been intending but that she oered to do instead.”
e Prince appeared to confess, at this, to his interest.
“Taking, you mean, YOUR carriage?”
“I don’t know which, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not a
question,” she smiled, “of a carriage the more or the less.
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It’s not a question even, if you come to that, of a cab. It’s
so beautiful,” she said, “that it’s not a question of anything
vulgar or horrid.” Which she gave him time to agree about;
and though he was silent it was, rather remarkably, as if he
fell in. “I went out—I wanted to. I had my idea. It seemed
to me important. It has BEEN—it IS important. I know as
I haven’t known before the way they feel. I couldn’t in any
other way have made so sure of it.”
“ey feel a condence,” the Prince observed.
He had indeed said it for her. “ey feel a condence.”
And she proceeded, with lucidity, to the fuller illustration
of it; speaking again of the three dierent moments that, in
the course of her wild ramble, had witnessed her return—
for curiosity, and even really a little from anxiety—to Eaton
Square. She was possessed of a latch-key, rarely used: it had
always irritated Adam—one of the few things that did—to
nd servants standing up so inhumanly straight when they
came home, in the small hours, after parties. “So I had but to
slip in, each time, with my cab at the door, and make out for
myself, without their knowing it, that Maggie was still there.
I came, I went—without their so much as dreaming. What
do they really suppose,” she asked, “becomes of one?—not so
much sentimentally or morally, so to call it, and since that
doesn’t matter; but even just physically, materially, as a mere
wandering woman: as a decent harmless wife, after all; as
the best stepmother, after all, that really ever was; or at the
least simply as a maitresse de maison not quite without a
conscience. ey must even in their odd way,” she declared,
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“have SOME idea.”
“Oh, they’ve a great deal of idea,” said the Prince. And
nothing was easier than to mention the quantity. “ey think
so much of us. ey think in particular so much of you.”
“Ah, don’t put it all on ‘me’!” she smiled.
But he was putting it now where she had admirably
prepared the place. “It’s a matter of your known character.”
“Ah, thank you for ‘known’!” she still smiled.
“It’s a matter of your wonderful cleverness and wonderful
charm. It’s a matter of what those things have done for you
in the world—I mean in THIS world and this place. You’re a
Personage for them—and Personages do go and come.”
“Oh no, my dear; there you’re quite wrong.” And she
laughed now in the happier light they had diused. “at’s
exactly what Personages don’t do: they live in state and under
constant consideration; they haven’t latch-keys, but drums
and trumpets announce them; and when they go out in
growlers it makes a greater noise still. It’s you, caro mio,” she
said, “who, so far as that goes, are the Personage.”
“Ah,” he in turn protested, “don’t put it all on me! What,
at any rate, when you get home,” he added, “shall you say that
you’ve been doing?”
“I shall say, beautifully, that I’ve been here.”
“All day?”
“Yes—all day. Keeping you company in your solitude.
How can we understand anything,” she went on, “without
really seeing that this is what they must like to think I do
for you?—just as, quite as comfortably, you do it for me. e
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thing is for us to learn to take them as they are.”
He considered this a while, in his restless way, but with his
eyes not turning from her; after which, rather disconnectedly,
though very vehemently, he brought out: “How can I not
feel more than anything else how they adore together my
boy?” And then, further, as if, slightly disconcerted, she had
nothing to meet this and he quickly perceived the eect:
“ey would have done the same for one of yours.”
“Ah, if I could have had one—! I hoped and I believed,”
said Charlotte, “that that would happen. It would have been
better. It would have made perhaps some dierence. He
thought so too, poor duck—that it might have been. I’m sure
he hoped and intended so. It’s not, at any rate,” she went on,
“my fault. ere it is.” She had uttered these statements, one
by one, gravely, sadly and responsibly, owing it to her friend
to be clear. She paused briey, but, as if once for all, she made
her clearness complete. “And now I’m too sure. It will never
be.”
He waited for a moment. “Never?”
“Never.” ey treated the matter not exactly with
solemnity, but with a certain decency, even perhaps urgency, of
distinctness. “It would probably have been better,” Charlotte
added. “But things turn out—! And it leaves us”—she made
the point—”more alone.”
He seemed to wonder. “It leaves you more alone.”
“Oh,” she again returned, “don’t put it all on me! Maggie
would have given herself to his child, I’m sure, scarcely less
than he gives himself to yours. It would have taken more than
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any child of mine,” she explained—”it would have taken more
than ten children of mine, could I have had them—to keep
our sposi apart.” She smiled as for the breadth of the image,
but, as he seemed to take it, in spite of this, for important,
she then spoke gravely enough. “It’s as strange as you like,
but we’re immensely alone.” He kept vaguely moving, but
there were moments when, again, with an awkward ease and
his hands in his pockets, he was more directly before her.
He stood there at these last words, which had the eect of
making him for a little throw back his head and, as thinking
something out, stare up at the ceiling. “What will you say,”
she meanwhile asked, “that you’ve been doing?” is brought
his consciousness and his eyes back to her, and she pointed
her question. “I mean when she comes in—for I suppose she
WILL, some time, come in. It seems to me we must say the
same thing.”
Well, he thought again. “Yet I can scarce pretend to have
had what I haven’t.”
“Ah, WHAT haven’t you had?—what aren’t you having?”
Her question rang out as they lingered face to face, and
he still took it, before he answered, from her eyes. “We must
at least then, not to be absurd together, do the same thing.
We must act, it would really seem, in concert.”
“It would really seem!” Her eyebrows, her shoulders went
up, quite in gaiety, as for the relief this brought her. “It’s all in
the world I pretend. We must act in concert. Heaven knows,”
she said, “THEY do!”
So it was that he evidently saw and that, by his admission,
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the case, could fairly be put. But what he evidently saw
appeared to come over him, at the same time, as too much
for him, so that he fell back suddenly to ground where she
was not awaiting him. “e diculty is, and will always be,
that I don’t understand them. I didn’t at rst, but I thought I
should learn to. at was what I hoped, and it appeared then
that Fanny Assingham might help me.”
“Oh, Fanny Assingham!” said Charlotte Verver.
He stared a moment at her tone. “She would do anything
for us.”
To which Charlotte at rst said nothing—as if from the
sense of too much. en, indulgently enough, she shook her
head. “We’re beyond her.”
He thought a moment—as of where this placed them.
“She’d do anything then for THEM.”
“Well, so would we—so that doesn’t help us. She has
broken down. She doesn’t understand us. And really, my
dear,” Charlotte added, “Fanny Assingham doesn’t matter.”
He wondered again. “Unless as taking care of THEM.”
“Ah,” Charlotte instantly said, “isn’t it for us, only, to do
that?” She spoke as with a are of pride for their privilege
and their duty. “I think we want no one’s aid.”
She spoke indeed with a nobleness not the less eective
for coming in so oddly; with a sincerity visible even through
the complicated twist by which any eort to protect the
father and the daughter seemed necessarily conditioned for
them. It moved him, in any case, as if some spring of his
own, a weaker one, had suddenly been broken by it. ese
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things, all the while, the privilege, the duty, the opportunity,
had been the substance of his own vision; they formed the
note he had been keeping back to show her that he was
not, in their so special situation, without a responsible view.
A conception that he could name, and could act on, was
something that now, at last, not to be too eminent a fool, he
was required by all the graces to produce, and the luminous
idea she had herself uttered would have been his expression
of it. She had anticipated him, but, as her expression left, for
positive beauty, nothing to be desired, he felt rather righted
than wronged. A large response, as he looked at her, came
into his face, a light of excited perception all his own, in the
glory of which—as it almost might be called—what he gave
her back had the value of what she had, given him. “ey’re
extraordinarily happy.”
Oh, Charlotte’s measure of it was only too full.
“Beatically.”
“at’s the great thing,” he went on; “so that it doesn’t
matter, really, that one doesn’t understand. Besides, you do—
enough.”
“I understand my husband perhaps,” she after an instant
conceded. “I don’t understand your wife.”
“You’re of the same race, at any rate—more or less; of
the same general tradition and education, of the same moral
paste. ere are things you have in common with them. But
I, on my side, as I’ve gone on trying to see if I haven’t some of
these things too—I, on my side, have more and more failed.
ere seem at last to be none worth mentioning. I can’t help
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seeing it—I’m decidedly too dierent.”
“Yet you’re not”—Charlotte made the important point—
”too dierent from ME.”
“I don’t know—as we’re not married. at brings things
out. Perhaps if we were,” he said, “you WOULD nd some
abyss of divergence.”
“Since it depends on that then,” she smiled, “I’m safe—as
you are anyhow. Moreover, as one has so often had occasion
to feel, and even to remark, they’re very, very simple. at
makes,” she added, “a diculty for belief; but when once one
has taken it in it makes less diculty for action. I HAVE at
last, for myself, I think, taken it in. I’m not afraid.”
He wondered a moment. “Not afraid of what?”
“Well, generally, of some beastly mistake. Especially of
any mistake founded on one’s idea of their dierence. For
that idea,” Charlotte developed, “positively makes one so
tender.”
“Ah, but rather!”
“Well then, there it is. I can’t put myself into Maggie’s
skin—I can’t, as I say. It’s not my t—I shouldn’t be able, as I
see it, to breathe in it. But I can feel that I’d do anything—to
shield it from a bruise. Tender as I am for her too,” she went
on, “I think I’m still more so for my husband. HE’S in truth
of a sweet simplicity—!”
e Prince turned over a while the sweet simplicity of
Mr. Verver. “Well, I don’t know that I can choose. At night
all cats are grey. I only see how, for so many reasons, we ought
to stand toward them—and how, to do ourselves justice, we
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do. It represents for us a conscious care—”
“Of every hour, literally,” said Charlotte. She could rise
to the highest measure of the facts. “And for which we must
trust each other—!”
“Oh, as we trust the saints in glory. Fortunately,” the
Prince hastened to add, “we can.” With which, as for the full
assurance and the pledge it involved, their hands instinctively
found their hands. “It’s all too wonderful.”
Firmly and gravely she kept his hand. “It’s too beautiful.”
And so for a minute they stood together, as strongly held
and as closely confronted as any hour of their easier past
even had seen them. ey were silent at rst, only facing and
faced, only grasping and grasped, only meeting and met. “It’s
sacred,” he said at last.
“It’s sacred,” she breathed back to him. ey vowed it, gave
it out and took it in, drawn, by their intensity, more closely
together. en of a sudden, through this tightened circle, as
at the issue of a narrow strait into the sea beyond, everything
broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled. eir
lips sought their lips, their pressure their response and their
response their pressure; with a violence that had sighed itself
the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses
they passionately sealed their pledge.
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