by Henry James
"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. The answer, I saw to-day, has all the while been staring me in the face."
"Then what in the world is it?"
"Why, the very intensity of her conscience about him—the very passion of her brave little piety. That'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 his daughter off, and it then happened, by an extraordinary perversity, that the very opposite effect was produced—!" With the renewed vision of this fatality, however, she could give but a desperate shrug.
"I see," the Colonel sympathetically mused. "That WAS a rum start."
But his very response, as she again flung 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 off. One perceived this," she went on—"out of the abundance of one's affection and one's sympathy." It all blessedly came back to her—when it wasn't all, for the fiftieth 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 mess of such charming material; that they were but wasting it and letting it go. They 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. That'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 fix itself also on Charlotte—Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge of our lives, when not beautifully, and a trifle mysteriously, flitting 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 off 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. There 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 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 ineffable 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. "They 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. There 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 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—?" This was still a new view to jump to, and the Colonel, perceptibly, wished to make sure of the necessity of the effort. For that, while he stared, his wife allowed him time; at the end of which she simply said: "No!"
"Then 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."
"'Theirs'—?"
"Maggie's and Mr. Verver's—those they IMPOSE on Charlotte and the Prince. Those," 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. The state of things existing hasn't grown, like a field 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?"
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. That is they WERE—as much so in their way as the others. There were beautiful intentions all round. The Prince's and Charlotte's were beautiful—of THAT I had my faith. They 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."
This 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 first 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 first, so guilelessly—yes, so guilelessly, themselves—her guileless idea of still having her father, of keeping him fast, in her life."
"Then isn't one supposed, in common humanity, and if one hasn't quarrelled with him, and one has the means, and he, on his side, doesn't drink or kick up rows—isn't one supposed to keep one's aged parent in one's life?"
"Certainly�
�when there aren't particular reasons against it. That there may be others than his getting drunk is exactly the moral of what is before us. In the first place Mr. Verver isn't aged."
The Colonel just hung fire—but it came. "Then why the deuce does he—oh, poor dear man!—behave as if he were?"
She took a moment to meet it. "How do you know how he behaves?"
"Well, my own love, we see how Charlotte does!" Again, at this, she faltered; but again she rose. "Ah, isn't my whole point that he's charming to her?"
"Doesn't it depend a bit on what she regards as charming?"
She faced the question as if it were flippant, then with a headshake of dignity she brushed it away. "It's Mr. Verver who's really young—it's Charlotte who's really old. And what I was saying," she added, "isn't affected!"
"You were saying"—he did her the justice—"that they're all guileless."
"That they were. Guileless, all, at first—quite extraordinarily. It's what I mean by their failure to see that the more they took for granted they could work together the more they were really working apart. For I repeat," Fanny went on, "that I really believe Charlotte and the Prince honestly to have made up their minds, originally, that their very esteem for Mr. Verver—which was serious, as well it might be!—would save them."
"I see." The Colonel inclined himself. "And save HIM."
"It comes to the same thing!"
"Then save Maggie."
"That comes," said Mrs. Assingham, "to something a little different. For Maggie has done the most."
He wondered. "What do you call the most?"
"Well, she did it originally—she began the vicious circle. For that—though you make round eyes at my associating her with 'vice'—is simply what it has been. It's their mutual consideration, all round, that has made it the bottomless gulf; and they're really so embroiled but because, in their way, they've been so improbably GOOD."
"In their way—yes!" the Colonel grinned.
"Which was, above all, Maggie's way." No flicker of his ribaldry was anything to her now. "Maggie had in the first place to make up to her father for her having suffered herself to become—poor little dear, as she believed—so intensely married. Then she had to make up to her husband for taking so much of the time they might otherwise have spent together to make this reparation to Mr. Verver perfect. And her way to do this, precisely, was by allowing the Prince the use, the enjoyment, whatever you may call it, of Charlotte to cheer his path—by instalments, as it were—in proportion as she herself, making sure her father was all right, might be missed from his side. By so much, at the same time, however," Mrs. Assingham further explained, "by so much as she took her young stepmother, for this purpose, away from Mr. Verver, by just so much did this too strike her as something again to be made up for. It has saddled her, you will easily see, with a positively new obligation to her father, an obligation created and aggravated by her unfortunate, even if quite heroic, little sense of justice. She began with wanting to show him that his marriage could never, under whatever temptation of her own bliss with the Prince, become for her a pretext for deserting or neglecting HIM. Then that, in its order, entailed her wanting to show the Prince that she recognised how the other desire—this wish to remain, intensely, the same passionate little daughter she had always been—involved in some degree, and just for the present, so to speak, her neglecting and deserting him. I quite hold," Fanny with characteristic amplitude parenthesised, "that a person can mostly feel but one passion—one TENDER passion, that is—at a time. Only, that doesn't hold good for our primary and instinctive attachments, the 'voice of blood,' such as one's feeling for a parent or a brother. Those may be intense and yet not prevent other intensities—as you will recognise, my dear, when you remember how I continued, tout betement, to adore my mother, whom you didn't adore, for years after I had begun to adore you. Well, Maggie"—she kept it up—"is in the same situation as I was, PLUS complications from which I was, thank heaven, exempt: PLUS the complication, above all, of not having in the least begun with the sense for complications that I should have had. Before she knew it, at any rate, her little scruples and her little lucidities, which were really so divinely blind—her feverish little sense of justice, as I say—had brought the two others together as her grossest misconduct couldn't have done. And now she knows something or other has happened—yet hasn't heretofore known what. She has only piled up her remedy, poor child—something that she has earnestly but confusedly seen as her necessary policy; piled it on top of the policy, on top of the remedy, that she at first thought out for herself, and that would really have needed, since then, so much modification. Her only modification has been the growth of her necessity to prevent her father's wondering if all, in their life in common, MAY be so certainly for the best. She has now as never before to keep him unconscious that, peculiar, if he makes a point of it, as their situation is, there's anything in it all uncomfortable or disagreeable, anything morally the least out of the way. She has to keep touching it up to make it, each day, each month, look natural and normal to him; so that—God forgive me the comparison!—she's like an old woman who has taken to 'painting' and who has to lay it on thicker, to carry it off with a greater audacity, with a greater impudence even, the older she grows." And Fanny stood a moment captivated with the image she had thrown off. "I like the idea of Maggie audacious and impudent—learning to be so to gloss things over. She could—she even will, yet, I believe—learn it, for that sacred purpose, consummately, diabolically. For from the moment the dear man should see it's all rouge—!" She paused, staring at the vision.
It imparted itself even to Bob. "Then the fun would begin?" As it but made her look at him hard, however, he amended the form of his inquiry. "You mean that in that case she WILL, charming creature, be lost?"
She was silent a moment more. "As I've told you before, she won't be lost if her father's saved. She'll see that as salvation enough."
The Colonel took it in. "Then she's a little heroine."
"Rather—she's a little heroine. But it's his innocence, above all," Mrs. Assingham added, "that will pull them through."
Her companion, at this, focussed again Mr. Verver's innocence. "It's awfully quaint."
"Of course it's awfully quaint! That it's awfully quaint, that the pair are awfully quaint, quaint with all our dear old quaintness—by which I don't mean yours and mine, but that of my own sweet countrypeople, from whom I've so deplorably degenerated—that," Mrs. Assingham declared, "was originally the head and front of their appeal to me and of my interest in them. And of course I shall feel them quainter still," she rather ruefully subjoined, "before they've done with me!"
This might be, but it wasn't what most stood in the Colonel's way. "You believe so in Mr. Verver's innocence after two years of Charlotte?"
She stared. "But the whole point is just that two years of Charlotte are what he hasn't really—or what you may call undividedly—had."
"Any more than Maggie, by your theory, eh, has 'really or undividedly,' had four of the Prince? It takes all she hasn't had," the Colonel conceded, "to account for the innocence that in her, too, so leaves us in admiration."
So far as it might be ribald again she let this pass. "It takes a great many things to account for Maggie. What is definite, at all events, is that—strange though this be—her effort for her father has, up to now, sufficiently succeeded. She has made him, she makes him, accept the tolerably obvious oddity of their relation, all round, for part of the game. Behind her there, protected and amused and, as it were, exquisitely humbugged—the Principino, in whom he delights, always aiding—he has safely and serenely enough suffered the conditions of his life to pass for those he had sublimely projected. He hadn't worked them out in detail—any more than I had, heaven pity me!—and the queerness has been, exactly, in the detail. This, for him, is what it was to have married Charlotte. And they both," she neatly wound up, "'help.'"
"'Both'—?"
"I mean that if Maggie, always
in the breach, makes it seem to him all so flourishingly to fit, Charlotte does her part not less. And her part is very large. Charlotte," Fanny declared, "works like a horse."
So there it all was, and her husband looked at her a minute across it. "And what does the Prince work like?"
She fixed him in return. "Like a Prince!" Whereupon, breaking short off, to ascend to her room, she presented her highly—decorated back—in which, in odd places, controlling the complications of its aspect, the ruby or the garnet, the turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint symbols of the wit that pinned together the satin patches of her argument.
He watched her as if she left him positively under the impression of her mastery of her subject; yes, as if the real upshot of the drama before them was but that he had, when it came to the tight places of life—as life had shrunk for him now—the most luminous of wives. He turned off, in this view of her majestic retreat, the comparatively faint little electric lamp which had presided over their talk; then he went up as immediately behind her as the billows of her amber train allowed, making out how all the clearness they had conquered was even for herself a relief—how at last the sense of the amplitude of her exposition sustained and floated her. Joining her, however, on the landing above, where she had already touched a metallic point into light, he found she had done perhaps even more to create than to extinguish in him the germ of a curiosity. He held her a minute longer—there was another plum in the pie. "What did you mean some minutes ago by his not caring for Charlotte?"
"The Prince's? By his not 'really' caring?" She recalled, after a little, benevolently enough. "I mean that men don't, when it has all been too easy. That's how, in nine cases out of ten, a woman is treated who has risked her life. You asked me just now how he works," she added; "but you might better perhaps have asked me how he plays."
Well, he made it up. "Like a Prince?"
"Like a Prince. He is, profoundly, a Prince. For that," she said with expression, "he's—beautifully—a case. They're far rarer, even in the 'highest circles,' than they pretend to be—and that's what makes so much of his value. He's perhaps one of the very last—the last of the real ones. So it is we must take him. We must take him all round."