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e Golden Bowl
how do you make out,” she asked, “that you were keeping it
FROM me?”
“I don’t—now. How shall I ever keep anything—some
day when I shall wish to?”
“Ah, for things I mayn’t want to know, I promise you
shall nd me stupid.” ey had reached their door, where she
herself paused to explain. “ese days, yesterday, last night,
this morning, I’ve wanted everything.”
Well, it was all right. “You shall have everything.”
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XXIII
Fanny, on her arrival in town, carried out her second
idea, despatching the Colonel to his club for luncheon and
packing her maid into a cab, for Cadogan Place, with the
variety of their eects. e result of this for each of the pair
was a state of occupation so unbroken that the day practically
passed without fresh contact between them. ey dined
out together, but it was both in going to their dinner and
in coming back that they appeared, on either side, to have
least to communicate. Fanny was wrapped in her thoughts
still more closely than in the lemon-coloured mantle that
protected her bare shoulders, and her husband, with her
silence to deal with, showed himself not less disposed than
usual, when so challenged, to hold up, as he would have
said, his end of it. ey had, in general, in these days, longer
pauses and more abrupt transitions; in one of which latter
they found themselves, for a climax, launched at midnight.
Mrs. Assingham, rather wearily housed again, ascended to
the rst oor, there to sink, overburdened, on the landing
outside the drawing-room, into a great gilded Venetian
chair—of which at rst, however, she but made, with her
brooding face, a sort of throne of meditation. She would thus
have recalled a little, with her so free orientalism of type,
the immemorially speechless Sphinx about at last to become
articulate. e Colonel, not unlike, on his side, some old
pilgrim of the desert camping at the foot of that monument,
went, by way of reconnoissance, into the drawing-room.
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He visited, according to his wont, the windows and their
fastenings; he cast round the place the eye, all at once, of the
master and the manager, the commandant and the rate-payer;
then he came back to his wife, before whom, for a moment,
he stood waiting. But she herself, for a time, continued to
wait, only looking up at him inscrutably. ere was in these
minor manoeuvres and conscious patiences something of a
suspension of their old custom of divergent discussion, that
intercourse by misunderstanding which had grown so clumsy
now. is familiar pleasantry seemed to desire to show it
could yield, on occasion, to any clear trouble; though it was
also sensibly, and just incoherently, in the air that no trouble
was at present to be vulgarly recognised as clear.
ere might, for that matter, even have been in Mr.
Assingham’s face a mild perception of some ner sense—a
sense for his wife’s situation, and the very situation she was,
oddly enough, about to repudiate—that she had fairly caused
to grow in him. But it was a ower to breathe upon gently,
and this was very much what she nally did. She knew he
needed no telling that she had given herself, all the afternoon,
to her friends in Eaton Square, and that her doing so would
have been but the prompt result of impressions gathered, in
quantities, in brimming baskets, like the purple grapes of the
vintage, at Matcham; a process surrounded by him, while it so
unmistakably went on, with abstentions and discretions that
might almost have counted as solemnities. e solemnities, at
the same time, had committed him to nothing—to nothing
beyond this confession itself of a consciousness of deep
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waters. She had been out on these waters, for him, visibly;
and his tribute to the fact had been his keeping her, even if
without a word, well in sight. He had not quitted for an hour,
during her adventure, the shore of the mystic lake; he had
on the contrary stationed himself where she could signal to
him at need. Her need would have arisen if the planks of her
bark had parted—THEN some sort of plunge would have
become his immediate duty. His present position, clearly, was
that of seeing her in the centre of her sheet of dark water, and
of wondering if her actual mute gaze at him didn’t perhaps
mean that her planks WERE now parting. He held himself
so ready that it was quite as if the inward man had pulled
o coat and waistcoat. Before he had plunged, however—
that is before he had uttered a question—he perceived, not
without relief, that she was making for land. He watched her
steadily paddle, always a little nearer, and at last he felt her
boat bump. e bump was distinct, and in fact she stepped
ashore. “We were all wrong. ere’s nothing.”
“Nothing—?” It was like giving her his hand up the bank.
“Between Charlotte Verver and the Prince. I was
uneasy—but I’m satised now. I was in fact quite mistaken.
ere’s nothing.”
“But I thought,” said Bob Assingham, “that that was just
what you did persistently asseverate. You’ve guaranteed their
straightness from the rst.”
“No—I’ve never till now guaranteed anything but my
own disposition to worry. I’ve never till now,” Fanny went
on gravely from her chair, “had such a chance to see and to
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judge. I had it at that place—if I had, in my infatuation and
my folly,” she added with expression, “nothing else. So I did
see—I HAVE seen. And now I know.” Her emphasis, as she
repeated the word, made her head, in her seat of infallibility,
rise higher. “I know.”
e Colonel took it—but took it at rst in silence. “Do
you mean they’ve TOLD you—?”
“No—I mean nothing so absurd. For in the rst place I
haven’t asked them, and in the second their word in such a
matter wouldn’t count.”
“Oh,” said the Colonel with all his oddity, “they’d tell
US.”
It made her face him an instant as with her old impatience
of his short cuts, always across her nest ower-beds; but she
felt, none the less, that she kept her irony down. “en when
they’ve told you, you’ll be perhaps so good as to let me know.”
He jerked up his chin, testing the growth of his beard
with the back of his hand while he xed her with a single
eye. “Ah, I don’t say that they’d necessarily tell me that they
ARE over the traces.”
“ey’ll necessarily, whatever happens, hold their
tongues, I hope, and I’m talking of them now as I take them
for myself only. THAT’S enough for me—it’s all I have to
regard.” With which, after an instant, “ey’re wonderful,”
said Fanny Assingham.
“Indeed,” her husband concurred, “I really think they are.”
“You’d think it still more if you knew. But you don’t
know—because you don’t see. eir situation”—this was
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what he didn’t see—”is too extraordinary.”
“’Too’?” He was willing to try.
“Too extraordinary to be believed, I mean, if one didn’t
see. But just that, in a way, is what saves them. ey take it
seriously.”
He followed at his own pace. “eir situation?”
“e incredible side of it. ey make it credible.”
“Credible then—you do say—to YOU?”
She looked at him again for an interval. “ey believe in
it themselves. ey take it for what it is. And that,” she said,
“saves them.”
“But if what it ‘is’ is just their chance—?”
“It’s their chance for what I told you when Charlotte rst
turned up. It’s their chance for the idea that I was then sure
she had.”
e Colonel showed his eort to recall. “Oh, your idea,
at dierent moments, of any one of THEIR ideas!” is dim
procession, visibly, mustered before him, and, with the best
will in the world, he could but watch its immensity. “Are you
speaking now of something to which you can comfortably
settle down?”
Again, for a little, she only glowered at him. “I’ve come
back to my belief, and that I have done so—”
“Well?” he asked as she paused.
“Well, shows that I’m right—for I assure you I had
wandered far. Now I’m at home again, and I mean,” said
Fanny Assingham, “to stay here. ey’re beautiful,” she
declared.
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“e Prince and Charlotte?”
“e Prince and Charlotte. THAT’S how they’re so
remarkable. And the beauty,” she explained, “is that they’re
afraid for them. Afraid, I mean, for the others.”
“For Mr. Verver and Maggie?” It did take some following.
“Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of themselves.”
e Colonel wondered. “Of THEMSELVES? Of Mr.
Verver’s and Maggie’s selves?”
Mrs. Assingham remained patient as well as lucid. “Yes—
of SUCH blindness too. But most of all of their own danger.”
He turned it over. “at danger BEING the blindness—?”
“at danger being their position. What their position
contains—of all the elements—I needn’t at this time of
day attempt to tell you. It contains, luckily—for that’s the
mercy—everything BUT blindness: I mean on their part.
e blindness,” said Fanny, “is primarily her husband’s.”
He stood for a moment; he WOULD have it straight.
“Whose husband’s?”
“Mr. Verver’s,” she went on. “e blindness is most of all
his. at they feel—that they see. But it’s also his wife’s.”
“Whose wife’s?” he asked as she continued to gloom at
him in a manner at variance with the comparative cheer of her
contention. And then as she only gloomed: “e Prince’s?”
“Maggie’s own—Maggie’s very own,” she pursued as for
herself.
He had a pause. “Do you think Maggie so blind?”
“e question isn’t of what I think. e question’s of the
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conviction that guides the Prince and Charlotte—who have
better opportunities than I for judging.”
e Colonel again wondered. “Are you so very sure their
opportunities are better?”
“Well,” his wife asked, “what is their whole so
extraordinary situation, their extraordinary relation, but an
opportunity?”
“Ah, my dear, you have that opportunity—of their
extraordinary situation and relation—as much as they.”
“With the dierence, darling,” she returned with some
spirit, “that neither of those matters are, if you please, mine.
I see the boat they’re in, but I’m not, thank God, in it myself.
To-day, however,” Mrs. Assingham added, “to-day in Eaton
Square I did see.”
“Well then, what?”
But she mused over it still. “Oh, many things. More,
somehow, than ever before. It was as if, God help me, I
was seeing FOR them—I mean for the others. It was as if
something had happened—I don’t know what, except some
eect of these days with them at that place—that had either
made things come out or had cleared my own eyes.” ese
eyes indeed of the poor lady’s rested on her companion’s,
meanwhile, with the lustre not so much of intenser insight as
of a particular portent that he had at various other times had
occasion to recognise. She desired, obviously, to reassure him,
but it apparently took a couple of large, candid, gathering,
glittering tears to emphasise the fact. ey had immediately,
for him, their usual direct action: she must reassure him,
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he was made to feel, absolutely in her own way. He would
adopt it and conform to it as soon as he should be able to
make it out. e only thing was that it took such incalculable
twists and turns. e twist seemed remarkable for instance
as she developed her indication of what had come out in the
afternoon. “It was as if I knew better than ever what makes
them—”
“What makes them?”—he pressed her as she tfully
dropped.
“Well, makes the Prince and Charlotte take it all as they
do. It might well have been dicult to know HOW to take
it; and they may even say for themselves that they were a
long time trying to see. As I say, to-day,” she went on, “it was
as if I were suddenly, with a kind of horrible push, seeing
through their eyes.” On which, as to shake o her perversity,
Fanny Assingham sprang up. But she remained there, under
the dim illumination, and while the Colonel, with his high,
dry, spare look of “type,” to which a certain conformity to
the whiteness of inaccessible snows in his necktie, shirt-front
and waistcoat gave a rigour of accent, waited, watching her,
they might, at the late hour and in the still house, have been
a pair of specious worldly adventurers, driven for relief, under
sudden stress, to some grim midnight reckoning in an odd
corner. Her attention moved mechanically over the objects
of ornament disposed too freely on the walls of staircase and
landing, as to which recognition, for the time, had lost both
fondness and compunction. “I can imagine the way it works,”
she said; “it’s so easy to understand. Yet I don’t want to be
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wrong,” she the next moment broke out “I don’t, I don’t want
to be wrong!”
“To make a mistake, you mean?”
Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort; she knew but
too well what she meant. “I don’t make mistakes. But I
perpetrate—in thought—crimes.” And she spoke with all
intensity. “I’m a most dreadful person. ere are times when
I seem not to mind a bit what I’ve done, or what I think or
imagine or fear or accept; when I feel that I’d do it again—
feel that I’d do things myself.”
“Ah, my dear!” the Colonel remarked in the coolness of
debate.
“Yes, if you had driven me back on my ‘nature.’ Luckily
for you you never have. You’ve done every thing else, but
you’ve never done that. But what I really don’t a bit want,”
she declared, “is to abet them or to protect them.”
Her companion turned this over. “What is there to
protect them from?—if, by your now so settled faith, they’ve
done nothing that justly exposes them.”
And it in fact half pulled her up. “Well, from a sudden
scare. From the alarm, I mean, of what Maggie MAY think.”
“Yet if your whole idea is that Maggie thinks nothing—?”
She waited again. “It isn’t my ‘whole’ idea. Nothing is my
‘whole’ idea—for I felt to-day, as I tell you, that there’s so
much in the air.”
“Oh, in the air—!” the Colonel dryly breathed.
“Well, what’s in the air always HAS—hasn’t it?—to
come down to the earth. And Maggie,” Mrs. Assingham
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