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

Her father again seemed amused at her. “You could be⁠—otherwise?”

“Oh, how can I talk,” she asked, “of otherwise? It isn’t, luckily for me, otherwise. If everything were different”⁠—she further presented her thought⁠—“of course everything would be.” And then again, as if that were but half: “My idea is this, that when you only love a little you’re naturally not jealous⁠—or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn’t matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you are, in the same proportion, jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. When, however, you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all⁠—why then you’re beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down.”

Mr. Verver listened as if he had nothing, on these high lines, to oppose. “And that’s the way you love?”

For a minute she failed to speak, but at last she answered: “It wasn’t to talk about that. I do feel, however, beyond everything⁠—and as a consequence of that, I dare say,” she added with a turn to gaiety, “seem often not to know quite where I am.”

The mere fine pulse of passion in it, the suggestion as of a creature consciously floating and shining in a warm summer sea, some element of dazzling sapphire and silver, a creature cradled upon depths, buoyant among dangers, in which fear or folly, or sinking otherwise than in play, was impossible⁠—something of all this might have been making once more present to him, with his discreet, his half shy assent to it, her probable enjoyment of a rapture that he, in his day, had presumably convinced no great number of persons either of his giving or of his receiving. He sat awhile as if he knew himself hushed, almost admonished, and not for the first time; yet it was an effect that might have brought before him rather what she had gained than what he had missed.

Besides, who but himself really knew what he, after all, hadn’t, or even had, gained? The beauty of her condition was keeping him, at any rate, as he might feel, in sight of the sea, where, though his personal dips were over, the whole thing could shine at him, and the air and the plash and the play become for him too a sensation. That couldn’t be fixed upon him as missing; since if it wasn’t personally floating, if it wasn’t even sitting in the sand, it could yet pass very well for breathing the bliss, in a communicated irresistible way⁠—for tasting the balm. It could pass, further, for knowing⁠—for knowing that without him nothing might have been: which would have been missing least of all.

“I guess I’ve never been jealous,” he finally remarked. And it said more to her, he had occasion next to perceive, than he was intending; for it made her, as by the pressure of a spring, give him a look that seemed to tell of things she couldn’t speak.

But she at last tried for one of them. “Oh, it’s you, father, who are what I call beyond everything. Nothing can pull you down.”

He returned the look as with the sociability of their easy communion, though inevitably throwing in this time a shade of solemnity. He might have been seeing things to say, and others, whether of a type presumptuous or not, doubtless better kept back. So he settled on the merely obvious. “Well then, we make a pair. We’re all right.”

“Oh, we’re all right!” A declaration launched not only with all her discriminating emphasis, but confirmed by her rising with decision and standing there as if the object of their small excursion required accordingly no further pursuit. At this juncture, however⁠—with the act of their crossing the bar, to get, as might be, into port⁠—there occurred the only approach to a betrayal of their having had to beat against the wind. Her father kept his place, and it was as if she had got over first and were pausing for her consort to follow. If they were all right; they were all right; yet he seemed to hesitate and wait for some word beyond. His eyes met her own, suggestively, and it was only after she had contented herself with simply smiling at him, smiling ever so fixedly, that he spoke, for the remaining importance of it, from the bench; where he leaned back, raising his face to her, his legs thrust out a trifle wearily and his hands grasping either side of the seat. They had beaten against the wind, and she was still fresh; they had beaten against the wind, and he, as at the best the more battered vessel, perhaps just vaguely drooped. But the effect of their silence was that she appeared to beckon him on, and he might have been fairly alongside of her when, at the end of another minute, he found their word. “The only thing is that, as for ever putting up again with your pretending that you’re selfish⁠—!”

At this she helped him out with it. “You won’t take it from me?”

“I won’t take it from you.”

“Well, of course you won’t, for that’s your way. It doesn’t matter, and it only proves⁠—! But it doesn’t matter, either, what it proves. I’m at this very moment,” she declared, “frozen stiff with selfishness.”

He faced her awhile longer in the same way; it was, strangely, as if, by this sudden arrest, by their having, in their acceptance of the unsaid, or at least their reference to it, practically given up pretending⁠—it was as if they were “in” for it, for something they had been ineffably avoiding, but the dread of which was itself, in a manner, a seduction, just as any confession of the dread was by so much an allusion. Then she seemed to see him let himself go. “When a person’s of the nature you speak of there are always other persons to suffer. But you’ve just been describing to me what you’d take, if you