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e Golden Bowl
his attention was vagueness again, and the refuge of his
vagueness was a gasp. “Poor dear little girl!”
“Ah no—don’t pity her!”
is did, however, pull him up. “We mayn’t even be sorry
for her?”
“Not now—or at least not yet. It’s too soon—that is if it
isn’t very much too late. is will depend,” Mrs. Assingham
went on; “at any rate we shall see. We might have pitied her
before—for all the good it would then have done her; we
might have begun some time ago. Now, however, she has
begun to live. And the way it comes to me, the way it comes
to me—” But again she projected her vision.
“e way it comes to you can scarcely be that she’ll like
it!”
“e way it comes to me is that she will live. e way it
comes to me is that she’ll triumph.”
She said this with so sudden a prophetic are that it fairly
cheered her husband. “Ah then, we must back her!”
“No—we mustn’t touch her. We mayn’t touch any of
them. We must keep our hands o; we must go on tiptoe.
We must simply watch and wait. And meanwhile,” said Mrs.
Assingham, “we must bear it as we can. at’s where we
are—and serves us right. We’re in presence.”
And so, moving about the room as in communion with
shadowy portents, she left it till he questioned again. “In
presence of what?”
“Well, of something possibly beautiful. Beautiful as it
MAY come o.”
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She had paused there before him while he wondered.
“You mean she’ll get the Prince back?”
She raised her hand in quick impatience: the suggestion
might have been almost abject. “It isn’t a question of recovery.
It won’t be a question of any vulgar struggle. To ‘get him back’
she must have lost him, and to have lost him she must have
had him.” With which Fanny shook her head. “What I take
her to be waking up to is the truth that, all the while, she
really HASN’T had him. Never.”
“Ah, my dear—!” the poor Colonel panted.
“Never!” his wife repeated. And she went on without
pity. “Do you remember what I said to you long ago—that
evening, just before their marriage, when Charlotte had so
suddenly turned up?”
e smile with which he met this appeal was not, it was
to be feared, robust. “What haven’t you, love, said in your
time?”
“So many things, no doubt, that they make a chance for
my having once or twice spoken the truth. I never spoke it
more, at all events, than when I put it to you, that evening, that
Maggie was the person in the world to whom a wrong thing
could least be communicated. It was as if her imagination had
been closed to it, her sense altogether sealed, at therefore,”
Fanny continued, “is what will now HAVE to happen. Her
sense will have to open.”
“I see.” He nodded. “To the wrong.” He nodded again,
almost cheerfully—as if he had been keeping the peace with
a baby or a lunatic. “To the very, very wrong.”
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But his wife’s spirit, after its eort of wing, was able to
remain higher. “To what’s called Evil—with a very big E: for
the rst time in her life. To the discover y of it, to the knowledge
of it, to the crude experience of it.” And she gave, for the
possibility, the largest measure. “To the harsh, bewildering
brush, the daily chilling breath of it. Unless indeed”—and
here Mrs. Assingham noted a limit “unless indeed, as yet (so
far as she has come, and if she comes no further), simply to
the suspicion and the dread. What we shall see is whether
that mere dose of alarm will prove enough.”
He considered. “But enough for what then, dear—if not
enough to break her heart?”
“Enough to give her a shaking!” Mrs. Assingham rather
oddly replied. “To give her, I mean, the right one. e right
one won’t break her heart. It will make her,” she explained—
”well, it will make her, by way of a change, understand one or
two things in the world.”
“But isn’t it a pity,” the Colonel asked, “that they should
happen to be the one or two that will be the most disagreeable
to her?”
“Oh, ‘disagreeable’—? ey’ll have had to be
disagreeable—to show her a little where she is. ey’ll have
HAD to be disagreeable to make her sit up. ey’ll have had
to be disagreeable to make her decide to live.”
Bob Assingham was now at the window, while his
companion slowly revolved; he had lighted a cigarette, for
nal patience, and he seemed vaguely to “time” her as she
moved to and fro. He had at the same time to do justice to
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the lucidity she had at last attained, and it was doubtless by
way of expression of this teachability that he let his eyes, for a
minute, roll, as from the force of feeling, over the upper dusk
of the room. He had thought of the response his wife’s words
ideally implied.
“Decide to live—ah yes!—for her child.”
“Oh, bother her child!”—and he had never felt so snubbed,
for an exemplary view, as when Fanny now stopped short.
“To live, you poor dear, for her father—which is another pair
of sleeves!”
And Mrs. Assingham’s whole ample, ornamented person
irradiated, with this, the truth that had begun, under so
much handling, to glow. “Any idiot can do things for her
child. She’ll have a motive more original, and we shall see
how it will work her. She’ll have to save HIM.”
“To ‘save’ him—?”
“To keep her father from her own knowledge. THAT”—
and she seemed to see it, before her, in her husband’s very
eyes—”will be work cut out!” With which, as at the highest
conceivable climax, she wound up their colloquy. “Good
night!”
ere was something in her manner, however—or in the
eect, at least, of this supreme demonstration that had fairly,
and by a single touch, lifted him to her side; so that, after she
had turned her back to regain the landing and the staircase,
he overtook her, before she had begun to mount, with the
ring of excited perception. “Ah, but, you know, that’s rather
jolly!”
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“Jolly’—?” she turned upon it, again, at the foot of the
staircase.
“I mean it’s rather charming.”
“’Charming’—?” It had still to be their law, a little, that
she was tragic when he was comic.
“I mean it’s rather beautiful. You just said, yourself, it
would be. Only,” he pursued promptly, with the impetus of
this idea, and as if it had suddenly touched with light for
him connections hitherto dim—”only I don’t quite see why
that very care for him which has carried her to such other
lengths, precisely, as aect one as so ‘rum,’ hasn’t also, by the
same stroke, made her notice a little more what has been
going on.”
“Ah, there you are! It’s the question that I’ve all along
been asking myself.” She had rested her eyes on the carpet,
but she raised them as she pursued—she let him have it
straight. “And it’s the question of an idiot.”
“An idiot—?”
“Well, the idiot that I’VE been, in all sorts of ways—so
often, of late, have I asked it. You’re excusable, since you ask
it but now. e answer, I saw to-day, has all the while been
staring me in the face.”
“en what in the world is it?”
“Why, the very intensity of her conscience about him—
the very passion of her brave little piety. at’s the way it has
worked,” Mrs. Assingham explained “and I admit it to have
been as ‘rum’ a way as possible. But it has been working from
a rum start. From the moment the dear man married to ease
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his daughter o, and it then happened, by an extraordinary
perversity, that the very opposite eect was produced—!”
With the renewed vision of this fatality, however, she could
give but a desperate shrug.
“I see,” the Colonel sympathetically mused. “at WAS
a rum start.”
But his very response, as she again ung up her arms,
seemed to make her sense, for a moment, intolerable. “Yes—
there I am! I was really at the bottom of it,” she declared;
“I don’t know what possessed me—but I planned for him,
I goaded him on.” With which, however, the next moment,
she took herself up. “Or, rather, I DO know what possessed
me—for wasn’t he beset with ravening women, right and left,
and didn’t he, quite pathetically, appeal for protection, didn’t
he, quite charmingly, show one how he needed and desired
it? Maggie,” she thus lucidly continued, “couldn’t, with a new
life of her own, give herself up to doing for him in the future
all she had done in the past—to fencing him in, to keeping
him safe and keeping THEM o. One perceived this,” she
went on—”out of the abundance of one’s aection and one’s
sympathy.” It all blessedly came back to her—when it wasn’t
all, for the ftieth time, obscured, in face of the present
facts, by anxiety and compunction. “One was no doubt a
meddlesome fool; one always IS, to think one sees people’s
lives for them better than they see them for themselves.
But one’s excuse here,” she insisted, “was that these people
clearly DIDN’T see them for themselves—didn’t see them
at all. It struck one for very pity—that they were making a
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mess of such charming material; that they were but wasting
it and letting it go. ey didn’t know HOW to live—and
somehow one couldn’t, if one took an interest in them at
all, simply stand and see it. at’s what I pay for”—and the
poor woman, in straighter communion with her companion’s
intelligence at this moment, she appeared to feel, than she
had ever been before, let him have the whole of the burden
of her consciousness. “I always pay for it, sooner or later, my
sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest. Nothing
of course would suit me but that it should x itself also on
Charlotte—Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge
of our lives, when not beautifully, and a trie mysteriously,
itting across them, and who was a piece of waste and a piece
of threatened failure, just as, for any possible good to the
WORLD, Mr. Verver and Maggie were. It began to come
over me, in the watches of the night, that Charlotte was a
person who COULD keep o ravening women—without
being one herself, either, in the vulgar way of the others; and
that this service to Mr. Verver would be a sweet employment
for her future. ere was something, of course, that might
have stopped me: you know, you know what I mean—it
looks at me,” she veritably moaned, “out of your face! But all I
can say is that it didn’t; the reason largely being—once I had
fallen in love with the beautiful symmetry of my plan—that I
seemed to feel sure Maggie would accept Charlotte, whereas
I didn’t quite make out either what other woman, or what
other KIND of woman, one could think of her accepting.”
“I see—I see.” She had paused, meeting all the while his
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listening look, and the fever of her retrospect had so risen
with her talk that the desire was visibly strong in him to
meet her, on his side, but with cooling breath. “One quite
understands, my dear.”
It only, however, kept her there sombre. “I naturally see,
love, what you understand; which sits again, perfectly, in your
eyes. You see that I saw that Maggie would accept her in
helpless ignorance. Yes, dearest”—and the grimness of her
dreariness suddenly once more possessed her: “you’ve only
to tell me that that knowledge was my reason for what I
did. How, when you do, can I stand up to you? You see,”
she said with an ineable headshake, “that I don’t stand up!
I’m down, down, down,” she declared; “yet” she as quickly
added—”there’s just one little thing that helps to save my
life.” And she kept him waiting but an instant. “ey might
easily—they would perhaps even certainly—have done
something worse.”
He thought. “Worse than that Charlotte—?”
“Ah, don’t tell me,” she cried, “that there COULD have
been nothing worse. ere might, as they were, have been
many things. Charlotte, in her way, is extraordinary.”
He was almost simultaneous. “Extraordinary!”
“She observes the forms,” said Fanny Assingham.
He hesitated. “With the Prince—?”
“FOR the Prince. And with the others,” she went on.
“With Mr. Verver—wonderfully. But above all with Maggie.
And the forms”—she had to do even THEM justice—”are
two-thirds of conduct. Say he had married a woman who
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would have made a hash of them.”
But he jerked back. “Ah, my dear, I wouldn’t say it for the
world!”
“Say,” she none the less pursued, “he had married a
woman the Prince would really have cared for.”
“You mean then he doesn’t care for Charlotte—?” is
was still a new view to jump to, and the Colonel, perceptibly,
wished to make sure of the necessity of the eort. For that,
while he stared, his wife allowed him time; at the end of
which she simply said: “No!”
“en what on earth are they up to?” Still, however, she
only looked at him; so that, standing there before her with his
hands in his pockets, he had time, further, to risk, soothingly,
another question. “Are the ‘forms’ you speak of—that are
two-thirds of conduct—what will be keeping her now, by
your hypothesis, from coming home with him till morning?”
“Yes—absolutely. THEIR forms.”
“’eirs’—?”
“Maggie’s and Mr. Verver’s—those they IMPOSE on
Charlotte and the Prince. ose,” she developed, “that, so
perversely, as I say, have succeeded in setting themselves up
as the right ones.”
He considered—but only now, at last, really to relapse
into woe. “Your ‘perversity,’ my dear, is exactly what I don’t
understand. e state of things existing hasn’t grown, like
a eld of mushrooms, in a night. Whatever they, all round,
may be in for now is at least the consequence of what they’ve
DONE. Are they mere helpless victims of fate?”
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Well, Fanny at last had the courage of it, “Yes—they are.
To be so abjectly innocent—that IS to be victims of fate.”
“And Charlotte and the Prince are abjectly innocent—?”
It took her another minute, but she rose to the full
height. “Yes. at is they WERE—as much so in their way
as the others. ere were beautiful intentions all round. e
Prince’s and Charlotte’s were beautiful—of THAT I had
my faith. ey WERE—I’d go to the stake. Otherwise,” she
added, “I should have been a wretch. And I’ve not been a
wretch. I’ve only been a double-dyed donkey.”
“Ah then,” he asked, “what does our muddle make
THEM to have been?”
“Well, too much taken up with considering each other.
You may call such a mistake as that by what ever name you
please; it at any rate means, all round, their case. It illustrates
the misfortune,” said Mrs. Assingham gravely, “of being too,
too charming.”
is was another matter that took some following, but
the Colonel again did his best. “Yes, but to whom?—doesn’t
it rather depend on that? To whom have the Prince and
Charlotte then been too charming?”
“To each other, in the rst place—obviously. And then
both of them together to Maggie.”
“To Maggie?” he wonderingly echoed.
“To Maggie.” She was now crystalline. “By having
accepted, from the rst, so guilelessly—yes, so guilelessly,
themselves—her guileless idea of still having her father, of
keeping him fast, in her life.”
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