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

way of it; whereas the Detroit, the Providence party, rebounding so from Providence, from Detroit, was an old and ample one, of which the most could be made and as to which a humorous insistence could be guarded.

Sharp and sudden, moreover, this afternoon, had been their well-nigh confessed desire just to rest together, a little, as from some strain long felt but never named; to rest, as who should say, shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, each pair of eyes so yearningly⁠—and indeed what could it be but so wearily?⁠—closed as to render the collapse safe from detection by the other pair. It was positively as if, in short, the inward felicity of their being once more, perhaps only for half-an-hour, simply daughter and father had glimmered out for them, and they had picked up the pretext that would make it easiest. They were husband and wife⁠—oh, so immensely!⁠—as regards other persons; but after they had dropped again on their old bench, conscious that the party on the terrace, augmented, as in the past, by neighbours, would do beautifully without them, it was wonderfully like their having got together into some boat and paddled off from the shore where husbands and wives, luxuriant complications, made the air too tropical. In the boat they were father and daughter, and poor Dotty and Kitty supplied abundantly, for their situation, the oars or the sail. Why, into the bargain, for that matter⁠—this came to Maggie⁠—couldn’t they always live, so far as they lived together, in a boat? She felt in her face, with the question, the breath of a possibility that soothed her; they needed only know each other, henceforth, in the unmarried relation. That other sweet evening, in the same place, he had been as unmarried as possible⁠—which had kept down, so to speak, the quantity of change in their state. Well then, that other sweet evening was what the present sweet evening would resemble; with the quite calculable effect of an exquisite inward refreshment. They had, after all, whatever happened, always and ever each other; each other⁠—that was the hidden treasure and the saving truth⁠—to do exactly what they would with: a provision full of possibilities. Who could tell, as yet, what, thanks to it, they wouldn’t have done before the end?

They had meanwhile been tracing together, in the golden air that, toward six o’clock of a July afternoon, hung about the massed Kentish woods, several features of the social evolution of her old playmates, still beckoned on, it would seem, by unattainable ideals, still falling back, beyond the sea, to their native seats, for renewals of the moral, financial, conversational⁠—one scarce knew what to call it⁠—outfit, and again and forever reappearing like a tribe of Wandering Jewesses. Our couple had finally exhausted, however, the study of these annals, and Maggie was to take up, after a drop, a different matter, or one at least with which the immediate connection was not at first apparent. “Were you amused at me just now⁠—when I wondered what other people could wish to struggle for? Did you think me,” she asked with some earnestness⁠—“well, fatuous?”

“ ‘Fatuous’?”⁠—he seemed at a loss.

“I mean sublime in our happiness⁠—as if looking down from a height. Or, rather, sublime in our general position⁠—that’s what I mean.” She spoke as from the habit of her anxious conscience something that disposed her frequently to assure herself, for her human commerce, of the state of the “books” of the spirit. “Because I don’t at all want,” she explained, “to be blinded, or made ‘sniffy,’ by any sense of a social situation.” Her father listened to this declaration as if the precautions of her general mercy could still, as they betrayed themselves, have surprises for him⁠—to say nothing of a charm of delicacy and beauty; he might have been wishing to see how far she could go and where she would, all touchingly to him, arrive. But she waited a little⁠—as if made nervous, precisely, by feeling him depend too much on what she said. They were avoiding the serious, standing off, anxiously, from the real, and they fell, again and again, as if to disguise their precaution itself, into the tone of the time that came back to them from their other talk, when they had shared together this same refuge. “Don’t you remember,” she went on, “how, when they were here before, I broke it to you that I wasn’t so very sure we, ourselves had the thing itself?”

He did his best to do so. “Had, you mean a social situation?”

“Yes⁠—after Fanny Assingham had first broken it to me that, at the rate we were going, we should never have one.”

“Which was what put us on Charlotte?” Oh yes, they had had it over quite often enough for him easily to remember.

Maggie had another pause⁠—taking it from him that he now could both affirm and admit without wincing that they had been, at their critical moment, “put on” Charlotte. It was as if this recognition had been threshed out between them as fundamental to the honest view of their success. “Well,” she continued, “I recall how I felt, about Kitty and Dotty, that even if we had already then been more ‘placed,’ or whatever you may call what we are now, it still wouldn’t have been an excuse for wondering why others couldn’t obligingly leave me more exalted by having, themselves, smaller ideas. For those,” she said, “were the feelings we used to have.”

“Oh yes,” he responded philosophically⁠—“I remember the feelings we used to have.”

Maggie appeared to wish to plead for them a little, in tender retrospect⁠—as if they had been also respectable. “It was bad enough, I thought, to have no sympathy in your heart when you had a position. But it was worse to be sublime about it⁠—as I was so afraid, as I’m in fact still afraid of being⁠—when it wasn’t even there to support one.” And she put forth again the earnestness she might have been taking