by Henry James
“Oh, they’ve a great deal of idea,” said the Prince. And nothing was easier than to mention the quantity. “They think so much of us. They 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 diffused. “That’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. The 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 effect: “They 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 difference. 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. There it is.” She had uttered these statements, one by one, gravely, sadly and responsibly, owing it to her friend to be clear. She paused briefly, 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.” They 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 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 effect 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?” This 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, 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. “The difficulty is, and will always be, that I don’t understand them. I didn’t at first, but I thought I should learn to. That 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 first said nothing—as if from the sense of too much. Then, 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 flare 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 effective for coming in so oddly; with a sincerity visible even through the complicated twist by which any effort 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. These 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. “They’re extraordinarily happy.”
Oh, Charlotte’s measure of it was only too full. “Beatifically.”
“That’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. There 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. There seem at last to be none worth mentioning. I can’t help seeing it—I’m decidedly too different.”
“Yet you’re not”—Charlotte made the important point—”too different from ME.”
“I don’t know—as we’re not married. That brings things out. Perhaps if we were,” he said, “you WOULD find 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. That makes,” she added, “a difficulty for belief; but when once one has taken it in it makes less difficulty 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 difference. 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 fit—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—!”
The 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 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. They were silent at first, 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. They vowed it, gave it out and took it in, drawn, by their intensity, more closely together. Then 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. Their 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.
XIX
He had taken it from her, as we have seen, moreover, that Fanny Assingham didn’t now matter—the “now” he had even himself supplied, as no more than fair to his sense of various earlier stages; and, though his assent remained scarce more than tacit, his behaviour, for the hour, so fell into line that, for many days, he kept postponing the visit he had promised his old friend on the occasion of their talk at the Foreign Office. With regret, none the less, would he have seen it quite extinguished, that theory of their relation as attached pupil and kind instructress in which they had from the first almost equally found a convenience. It had been he, no doubt, who had most put it forward, since his need of knowledge fairly exceeded her mild pretension; but he had again and again repeated to her that he should never, without her, have been where he was, and she had not successfully concealed the pleasure it might give her to believe it, even after the question of where he was had begun to show itself as rather more closed than open to interpretation. It had never indeed, before that evening, come up as during the passage at the official party, and he had for the first time at those moments, a little disappointedly, got the impression of a certain failure, on the dear woman’s part, of something he was aware of having always rather freely taken for granted in her. Of what exactly the failure consisted he would still perhaps have felt it a little harsh to try to say; and if she had in fact, as by Charlotte’s observation, “broken down,” the details of the collapse would be comparatively unimportant. They came to the same thing, all such collapses—the failure of courage, the failure of friendship, or the failure just simply of tact; for didn’t any one of them by itself amount really to the failure of wit?—which was the last thing he had expected of her and which would be but another name for the triumph of stupidity. It had been Charlotte’s remark that they were at last “beyond” her; whereas he had ever enjoyed believing that a certain easy imagination in her would keep up with him to the end. He shrank from affixing a label to Mrs. Assingham’s want of faith; but when he thought, at his ease, of the way persons who were capable really entertained—or at least with any refinement—the passion of personal loyalty, he figured for them a play of fancy neither timorous nor scrupulous. So would his personal loyalty, if need be, have accepted the adventure for the good creature herself; to that definite degree that he had positively almost missed the luxury of some such call from her. That was what it all came back to again with these people among whom he was married—that one found one used one’s imagination mainly for wondering how they contrived so little to appeal to it. He felt at moments as if there were never anything to do for them that was worthy—to call worthy—of the personal relation; never any charming charge to take of any confidence deeply reposed. He might vulgarly have put it that one had never to plot or to lie for them; he might humourously have put it that one had never, as by the higher conformity, to lie in wait with the dagger or to prepare, insidiously, the cup. These were the services that, by all romantic tradition, were consecrated to affection quite as much as to hate. But he could amuse himself with saying—so far as the amusement went—that they were what he had once for all turned his back on.
Fanny was meanwhile frequent, it appeared, in Eaton Square; so much he gathered from the visitor who was not infrequent, least of all at tea-time, during the same period, in Portland Place; though they had little need to talk of her after practically agreeing that they had outlived her. To the scene of these conversations and suppressions Mrs. Assingham herself made, actually, no approach; her latest view of her utility seeming to be that it had found in Eaton Square its most urgent field. It was finding there in fact everything and everyone but the Prince, who mostly, just now, kept away, or who, at all events, on the interspaced occasions of his calling, happened not to encounter the only person from whom he was a little estranged. It would have been all prodigious if he had not already, with Charlotte’s aid, so very considerably lived into it—it would have been all indescribably remarkable, this fact that, with wonderful causes for it so operating on the surface, nobody else, as yet, in the combination, seemed estranged from anybody. If Mrs. Assingham delighted in Maggie she knew by this time how most easily to reach her, and if she was unhappy about Charlotte she knew, by the same reasoning, how most probably to miss that vision of her on which affliction would feed. It might feed of course on finding her so absent from her home—just as this particular phenomenon of her domestic detachment could be, by the anxious mind, best studied there. Fanny was, however, for her reasons, “shy” of Portland Place itself—this was appreciable; so that she might well, after all, have no great light on the question of whether Charlotte’s appearances there were frequent or not, any more than on that of the account they might be keeping of the usual solitude (since it came to this) of the head of that house. There was always, to cover all ambiguities, to constitute a fund of explanation for the divisions of Mrs. Verver’s day, the circumstance that, at the point they had all reached together, Mrs. Verver was definitely and by general acclamation in charge of the “social relations” of the family, literally of those of the two households; as to her genius for representing which in the great world and in the grand style vivid evidence had more and more accumulated. It had been established in the two households at an early stage, and with the highest good-humour, that Charlotte was a, was THE, “social success,” whereas the Princess, though kind, though punctilious, though charming, though in fact the dearest little creature in the world and the Princess into the bargain, was distinctly not, would distinctly never be, and might as well, practically, give it up: whether through being above it or below it, too much outside of it or too much lost in it, too unequipped o
r too indisposed, didn’t especially matter. What sufficed was that the whole thing, call it appetite or call it patience, the act of representation at large and the daily business of intercourse, fell in with Charlotte’s tested facility and, not much less visibly, with her accommodating, her generous, view of her domestic use. She had come, frankly, into the connection, to do and to be what she could, “no questions asked,” and she had taken over, accordingly, as it stood, and in the finest practical spirit, the burden of a visiting-list that Maggie, originally, left to herself, and left even more to the Principino, had suffered to get inordinately out of hand.