The Golden Bowl - Henry James (top fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

object of it to their wedding, had not thought of proposing to her, for a matter of a couple of hours, an arduous and expensive journey. But she had kept her connected and informed, from week to week, in spite of preparations and absorptions. “Oh, I’ve been writing to Charlotte⁠—I wish you knew her better:” he could still hear, from recent weeks, this record of the fact, just as he could still be conscious, not otherwise than queerly, of the gratuitous element in Maggie’s wish, which he had failed as yet to indicate to her. Older and perhaps more intelligent, at any rate, why shouldn’t Charlotte respond⁠—and be quite free to respond⁠—to such fidelities with something more than mere formal good manners? The relations of women with each other were of the strangest, it was true, and he probably wouldn’t have trusted here a young person of his own race. He was proceeding throughout on the ground of the immense difference⁠—difficult indeed as it might have been to disembroil in this young person her race-quality. Nothing in her definitely placed her; she was a rare, a special product. Her singleness, her solitude, her want of means, that is her want of ramifications and other advantages, contributed to enrich her somehow with an odd, precious neutrality, to constitute for her, so detached yet so aware, a sort of small social capital. It was the only one she had⁠—it was the only one a lonely, gregarious girl could have, since few, surely, had in anything like the same degree arrived at it, and since this one indeed had compassed it but through the play of some gift of nature to which you could scarce give a definite name.

It wasn’t a question of her strange sense for tongues, with which she juggled as a conjuror at a show juggled with balls or hoops or lighted brands⁠—it wasn’t at least entirely that, for he had known people almost as polyglot whom their accomplishment had quite failed to make interesting. He was polyglot himself, for that matter⁠—as was the case too with so many of his friends and relations; for none of whom, more than for himself, was it anything but a common convenience. The point was that in this young woman it was a beauty in itself, and almost a mystery: so, certainly, he had more than once felt in noting, on her lips, that rarest, among the Barbarians, of all civil graces, a perfect felicity in the use of Italian. He had known strangers⁠—a few, and mostly men⁠—who spoke his own language agreeably; but he had known neither man nor woman who showed for it Charlotte’s almost mystifying instinct. He remembered how, from the first of their acquaintance, she had made no display of it, quite as if English, between them, his English so matching with hers, were their inevitable medium. He had perceived all by accident⁠—by hearing her talk before him to somebody else that they had an alternative as good; an alternative in fact as much better as the amusement for him was greater in watching her for the slips that never came. Her account of the mystery didn’t suffice: her recall of her birth in Florence and Florentine childhood; her parents, from the great country, but themselves already of a corrupt generation, demoralised, falsified, polyglot well before her, with the Tuscan balia who was her first remembrance; the servants of the villa, the dear contadini of the poder, the little girls and the other peasants of the next podere, all the rather shabby but still ever so pretty human furniture of her early time, including the good sisters of the poor convent of the Tuscan hills, the convent shabbier than almost anything else, but prettier too, in which she had been kept at school till the subsequent phase, the phase of the much grander institution in Paris at which Maggie was to arrive, terribly frightened, and as a smaller girl, three years before her own ending of her period of five. Such reminiscences, naturally, gave a ground, but they had not prevented him from insisting that some strictly civil ancestor⁠—generations back, and from the Tuscan hills if she would-made himself felt, ineffaceably, in her blood and in her tone. She knew nothing of the ancestor, but she had taken his theory from him, gracefully enough, as one of the little presents that make friendship flourish. These matters, however, all melted together now, though a sense of them was doubtless concerned, not unnaturally, in the next thing, of the nature of a surmise, that his discretion let him articulate. “You haven’t, I rather gather, particularly liked your country?” They would stick, for the time, to their English.

“It doesn’t, I fear, seem particularly mine. And it doesn’t in the least matter, over there, whether one likes it or not⁠—that is to anyone but one’s self. But I didn’t like it,” said Charlotte Stant.

“That’s not encouraging then to me, is it?” the Prince went on.

“Do you mean because you’re going?”

“Oh yes, of course we’re going. I’ve wanted immensely to go.” She hesitated. “But now?⁠—immediately?”

“In a month or two⁠—it seems to be the new idea.” On which there was something in her face⁠—as he imagined⁠—that made him say: “Didn’t Maggie write to you?”

“Not of your going at once. But of course you must go. And of course you must stay”⁠—Charlotte was easily clear⁠—“as long as possible.”

“Is that what you did?” he laughed. “You stayed as long as possible?”

“Well, it seemed to me so⁠—but I hadn’t ‘interests.’ You’ll have them⁠—on a great scale. It’s the country for interests,” said Charlotte. “If I had only had a few I doubtless wouldn’t have left it.”

He waited an instant; they were still on their feet. “Yours then are rather here?”

“Oh, mine!”⁠—the girl smiled. “They take up little room, wherever they are.”

It determined in him, the way this came from her and what it somehow did for her-it determined in him a speech that would have seemed a few