by Henry James
“Ah, but what does she call, poor little thing, ‘time’?”
“Well, this summer at Fawns, to begin with. She can live as yet, of course, but from hand to mouth; but she has worked it out for herself, I think, that the very danger of Fawns, superficially looked at, may practically amount to a greater protection. THERE the lovers—if they ARE lovers!—will have to mind. They’ll feel it for themselves, unless things are too utterly far gone with them.”
“And things are NOT too utterly far gone with them?”
She had inevitably, poor woman, her hesitation for this, but she put down her answer as, for the purchase of some absolutely indispensable article, she would have put down her last shilling. “No.”
It made him always grin at her. “Is THAT a lie?”
“Do you think you’re worth lying to? If it weren’t the truth, for me,” she added, “I wouldn’t have accepted for Fawns. I CAN, I believe, keep the wretches quiet.”
“But how—at the worst?”
“Oh, ‘the worst’—don’t talk about the worst! I can keep them quiet at the best, I seem to feel, simply by our being there. It will work, from week to week, of itself. You’ll see.”
He was willing enough to see, but he desired to provide—! “Yet if it doesn’t work?”
“Ah, that’s talking about the worst!”
Well, it might be; but what were they doing, from morning to night, at this crisis, but talk? “Who’ll keep the others?”
“The others—?”
“Who’ll keep THEM quiet? If your couple have had a life together, they can’t have had it completely without witnesses, without the help of persons, however few, who must have some knowledge, some idea about them. They’ve had to meet, secretly, protectedly, they’ve had to arrange; for if they haven’t met, and haven’t arranged, and haven’t thereby, in some quarter or other, had to give themselves away, why are we piling it up so? Therefore if there’s evidence, up and down London—”
“There must be people in possession of it? Ah, it isn’t all,” she always remembered, “up and down London. Some of it must connect them—I mean,” she musingly added, “it naturally WOULD—with other places; with who knows what strange adventures, opportunities, dissimulations? But whatever there may have been, it will also all have been buried on the spot. Oh, they’ve known HOW—too beautifully! But nothing, all the same, is likely to find its way to Maggie of itself.”
“Because every one who may have anything to tell, you hold, will have been so squared?” And then inveterately, before she could say—he enjoyed so much coming to this: “What will have squared Lady Castledean?”
“The consciousness”—she had never lost her promptness—”of having no stones to throw at any one else’s windows. She has enough to do to guard her own glass. That was what she was doing,” Fanny said, “that last morning at Matcham when all of us went off and she kept the Prince and Charlotte over. She helped them simply that she might herself be helped—if it wasn’t perhaps, rather, with her ridiculous Mr. Blint, that HE might be. They put in together, therefore, of course, that day; they got it clear—and quite under her eyes; inasmuch as they didn’t become traceable again, as we know, till late in the evening.” On this historic circumstance Mrs. Assingham was always ready afresh to brood; but she was no less ready, after her brooding, devoutly to add “Only we know nothing whatever else—for which all our stars be thanked!”
The Colonel’s gratitude was apt to be less marked. “What did they do for themselves, all the same, from the moment they got that free hand to the moment (long after dinner-time, haven’t you told me?) of their turning up at their respective homes?”
“Well, it’s none of your business!”
“I don’t speak of it as mine, but it’s only too much theirs. People are always traceable, in England, when tracings are required. Something, sooner or later, happens; somebody, sooner or later, breaks the holy calm. Murder will out.”
“Murder will—but this isn’t murder. Quite the contrary perhaps! I verily believe,” she had her moments of adding, “that, for the amusement of the row, you would prefer an explosion.”
This, however, was a remark he seldom noticed; he wound up, for the most part, after a long, contemplative smoke, with a transition from which no exposed futility in it had succeeded in weaning him. “What I can’t for my life make out is your idea of the old boy.”
“Charlotte’s too inconceivably funny husband? I HAVE no idea.”
“I beg your pardon—you’ve just shown it. You never speak of him but as too inconceivably funny.”
“Well, he is,” she always confessed. “That is he may be, for all I know, too inconceivably great. But that’s not an idea. It represents only my weak necessity of feeling that he’s beyond me—which isn’t an idea either. You see he MAY be stupid too.”
“Precisely—there you are.”
“Yet on the other hand,” she always went on, “he MAY be sublime: sublimer even than Maggie herself. He may in fact have already been. But we shall never know.” With which her tone betrayed perhaps a shade of soreness for the single exemption she didn’t yearningly welcome. “THAT I can see.”
“Oh, I say—!” It came to affect the Colonel himself with a sense of privation.
“I’m not sure, even, that Charlotte will.”
“Oh, my dear, what Charlotte doesn’t know—!”
But she brooded and brooded. “I’m not sure even that the Prince will.” It seemed privation, in short, for them all. “They’ll be mystified, confounded, tormented. But they won’t know—and all their possible putting their heads together won’t make them. That,” said Fanny Assingham, “will be their punishment.” And she ended, ever, when she had come so far, at the same pitch. “It will probably also—if I get off with so little—be mine.”
“And what,” her husband liked to ask, “will be mine?”
“Nothing—you’re not worthy of any. One’s punishment is in what one feels, and what will make ours effective is that we SHALL feel.” She was splendid with her “ours”; she flared up with this prophecy. “It will be Maggie herself who will mete it out.”
“Maggie—?”
“SHE’LL know—about her father; everything. Everything,” she repeated. On the vision of which, each time, Mrs. Assingham, as with the presentiment of an odd despair, turned away from it. “But she’ll never tell us.”
XXXII
If Maggie had not so firmly made up her mind never to say, either to her good friend or to any one else, more than she meant about her father, she might have found herself betrayed into some such overflow during the week spent in London with her husband after the others had adjourned to Fawns for the summer. This was because of the odd element of the unnatural imparted to the so simple fact of their brief separation by the assumptions resident in their course of life hitherto. She was used, herself, certainly, by this time, to dealing with odd elements; but she dropped, instantly, even from such peace as she had patched up, when it was a question of feeling that her unpenetrated parent might be alone with them. She thought of him as alone with them when she thought of him as alone with Charlotte—and this, strangely enough, even while fixing her sense to the full on his wife’s power of preserving, quite of enhancing, every felicitous appearance. Charlotte had done that—under immeasurably fewer difficulties indeed—during the numerous months of their hymeneal absence from England, the period prior to that wonderful reunion of the couples, in the interest of the larger play of all the virtues of each, which was now bearing, for Mrs. Verver’s stepdaughter at least, such remarkable fruit. It was the present so much briefer interval, in a situation, possibly in a relation, so changed—it was the new terms of her problem that would tax Charlotte’s art. The Princess could pull herself up, repeatedly, by remembering that the real “relation” between her father and his wife was a thing that she knew nothing about and that, in strictness, was none of her business; but she none the less failed to keep quiet, as she would have c
alled it, before the projected image of their ostensibly happy isolation. Nothing could have had less of the quality of quietude than a certain queer wish that fitfully flickered up in her, a wish that usurped, perversely, the place of a much more natural one. If Charlotte, while she was about it, could only have been WORSE!— that idea Maggie fell to invoking instead of the idea that she might desirably have been better. For, exceedingly odd as it was to feel in such ways, she believed she mightn’t have worried so much if she didn’t somehow make her stepmother out, under the beautiful trees and among the dear old gardens, as lavish of fifty kinds of confidence and twenty kinds, at least, of gentleness. Gentleness and confidence were certainly the right thing, as from a charming woman to her husband, but the fine tissue of reassurance woven by this lady’s hands and flung over her companion as a light, muffling veil, formed precisely a wrought transparency through which she felt her father’s eyes continually rest on herself. The reach of his gaze came to her straighter from a distance; it showed him as still more conscious, down there alone, of the suspected, the felt elaboration of the process of their not alarming or hurting him. She had herself now, for weeks and weeks, and all unwinkingly, traced the extension of this pious effort; but her perfect success in giving no sign—she did herself THAT credit—would have been an achievement quite wasted if Mrs. Verver should make with him those mistakes of proportion, one set of them too abruptly, too incoherently designed to correct another set, that she had made with his daughter. However, if she HAD been worse, poor woman, who should say that her husband would, to a certainty, have been better?
One groped noiselessly among such questions, and it was actually not even definite for the Princess that her own Amerigo, left alone with her in town, had arrived at the golden mean of non-precautionary gallantry which would tend, by his calculation, to brush private criticism from its last perching-place. The truth was, in this connection, that she had different sorts of terrors, and there were hours when it came to her that these days were a prolonged repetition of that night-drive, of weeks before, from the other house to their own, when he had tried to charm her, by his sovereign personal power, into some collapse that would commit her to a repudiation of consistency. She was never alone with him, it was to be said, without her having sooner or later to ask herself what had already become of her consistency; yet, at the same time, so long as she breathed no charge, she kept hold of a remnant of appearance that could save her from attack. Attack, real attack, from him, as he would conduct it was what she above all dreaded; she was so far from sure that under that experience she mightn’t drop into some depth of weakness, mightn’t show him some shortest way with her that he would know how to use again. Therefore, since she had given him, as yet, no moment’s pretext for pretending to her that she had either lost faith or suffered by a feather’s weight in happiness, she left him, it was easy to reason, with an immense advantage for all waiting and all tension. She wished him, for the present, to “make up” to her for nothing. Who could say to what making-up might lead, into what consenting or pretending or destroying blindness it might plunge her? She loved him too helplessly, still, to dare to open the door, by an inch, to his treating her as if either of them had wronged the other. Something or somebody—and who, at this, which of them all?—would inevitably, would in the gust of momentary selfishness, be sacrificed to that; whereas what she intelligently needed was to know where she was going. Knowledge, knowledge, was a fascination as well as a fear; and a part, precisely, of the strangeness of this juncture was the way her apprehension that he would break out to her with some merely general profession was mixed with her dire need to forgive him, to reassure him, to respond to him, on no ground that she didn’t fully measure. To do these things it must be clear to her what they were FOR; but to act in that light was, by the same effect, to learn, horribly, what the other things had been. He might tell her only what he wanted, only what would work upon her by the beauty of his appeal; and the result of the direct appeal of ANY beauty in him would be her helpless submission to his terms. All her temporary safety, her hand-to- mouth success, accordingly, was in his neither perceiving nor divining this, thanks to such means as she could take to prevent him; take, literally from hour to hour, during these days of more unbroken exposure. From hour to hour she fairly expected some sign of his having decided on a jump. “Ah yes, it HAS been as you think; I’ve strayed away, I’ve fancied myself free, given myself in other quantities, with larger generosities, because I thought you were different—different from what I now see. But it was only, only, because I didn’t know—and you must admit that you gave me scarce reason enough. Reason enough, I mean, to keep clear of my mistake; to which I confess, for which I’ll do exquisite penance, which you can help me now, I too beautifully feel, to get completely over.”
That was what, while she watched herself, she potentially heard him bring out; and while she carried to an end another day, another sequence and yet another of their hours together, without his producing it, she felt herself occupied with him beyond even the intensity of surrender. She was keeping her head, for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her keeping the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. Her greatest danger, or at least her greatest motive for care, was the obsession of the thought that, if he actually did suspect, the fruit of his attention to her couldn’t help being a sense of the growth of her importance. Taking the measure, with him, as she had taken it with her father, of the prescribed reach of her hypocrisy, she saw how it would have to stretch even to her seeking to prove that she was NOT, all the same, important. A single touch from him—oh, she should know it in case of its coming!—any brush of his hand, of his lips, of his voice, inspired by recognition of her probable interest as distinct from pity for her virtual gloom, would hand her over to him bound hand and foot. Therefore to be free, to be free to act, other than abjectly, for her father, she must conceal from him the validity that, like a microscopic insect pushing a grain of sand, she was taking on even for herself. She could keep it up with a change in sight, but she couldn’t keep it up forever; so that, really, one extraordinary effect of their week of untempered confrontation, which bristled with new marks, was to make her reach out, in thought, to their customary companions and calculate the kind of relief that rejoining them would bring. She was learning, almost from minute to minute, to be a mistress of shades since, always, when there were possibilities enough of intimacy, there were also, by that fact, in intercourse, possibilities of iridescence; but she was working against an adversary who was a master of shades too, and on whom, if she didn’t look out, she should presently have imposed a consciousness of the nature of their struggle. To feel him in fact, to think of his feeling himself, her adversary in things of this fineness—to see him at all, in short, brave a name that would represent him as in opposition— was already to be nearly reduced to a visible smothering of her cry of alarm. Should he guess they were having, in their so occult manner, a HIGH fight, and that it was she, all the while, in her supposed stupidity, who had made it high and was keeping it high—in the event of his doing this before they could leave town she should verily be lost.
The possible respite for her at Fawns would come from the fact that observation, in him, there, would inevitably find some of its directness diverted. This would be the case if only because the remarkable strain of her father’s placidity might be thought of as likely to claim some larger part of his attention. Besides which there would be always Charlotte herself to draw him off. Charlotte would help him again, doubtless, to study anything, right or left, that might be symptomatic; but Maggie could see that this very fact might perhaps contribute, in its degree, to protect the secret of her own fermentation. It is not even incredible that she may have discovered the gleam of a comfort that was to broaden in the conceivable effect on the Prince’s spirit, on his nerves, on his finer irritabilit
y, of some of the very airs and aspects, the light graces themselves, of Mrs. Verver’s too perfect competence. What it would most come to, after all, she said to herself, was a renewal for him of the privilege of watching that lady watch her. Very well, then: with the elements after all so mixed in him, how long would he go on enjoying mere spectatorship of that act? For she had by this time made up her mind that in Charlotte’s company he deferred to Charlotte’s easier art of mounting guard. Wouldn’t he get tired— to put it only at that—of seeing her always on the rampart, erect and elegant, with her lace-flounced parasol now folded and now shouldered, march to and fro against a gold-coloured east or west? Maggie had gone far, truly for a view of the question of this particular reaction, and she was not incapable of pulling herself up with the rebuke that she counted her chickens before they were hatched. How sure she should have to be of so many things before she might thus find a weariness in Amerigo’s expression and a logic in his weariness!