The Golden Bowl, Henry James [best books to read for young adults .TXT] 📗

“Oh, ‘disagreeable’⁠—? They’ll have had to be disagreeable⁠—to show her a little where she is. They’ll have had to be disagreeable to make her sit up. They’ll have had to be disagreeable to make her decide to live.”

Bob Assingham was now at the window, while his companion slowly revolved; he had lighted a cigarette, for final patience, and he seemed vaguely to “time” her as she moved to and fro. He had at the same time to do justice to the lucidity she had at last attained, and it was doubtless by way of expression of this teachability that he let his eyes, for a minute, roll, as from the force of feeling, over the upper dusk of the room. He had thought of the response his wife’s words ideally implied.

“Decide to live⁠—ah yes!⁠—for her child.”

“Oh, bother her child!”⁠—and he had never felt so snubbed, for an exemplary view, as when Fanny now stopped short. “To live, you poor dear, for her father⁠—which is another pair of sleeves!”

And Mrs. Assingham’s whole ample, ornamented person irradiated, with this, the truth that had begun, under so much handling, to glow. “Any idiot can do things for her child. She’ll have a motive more original, and we shall see how it will work her. She’ll have to save him.”

“To ‘save’ him⁠—?”

“To keep her father from her own knowledge. That”⁠—and she seemed to see it, before her, in her husband’s very eyes⁠—“will be work cut out!” With which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she wound up their colloquy. “Good night!”

There was something in her manner, however⁠—or in the effect, at least, of this supreme demonstration that had fairly, and by a single touch, lifted him to her side; so that, after she had turned her back to regain the landing and the staircase, he overtook her, before she had begun to mount, with the ring of excited perception. “Ah, but, you know, that’s rather jolly!”

“ ‘Jolly’⁠—?” she turned upon it, again, at the foot of the staircase.

“I mean it’s rather charming.”

“ ‘Charming’⁠—?” It had still to be their law, a little, that she was tragic when he was comic.

“I mean it’s rather beautiful. You just said, yourself, it would be. Only,” he pursued promptly, with the impetus of this idea, and as if it had suddenly touched with light for him connections hitherto dim⁠—“only I don’t quite see why that very care for him which has carried her to such other lengths, precisely, as affect one as so ‘rum,’ hasn’t also, by the same stroke, made her notice a little more what has been going on.”

“Ah, there you are! It’s the question that I’ve all along been asking myself.” She had rested her eyes on the carpet, but she raised them as she pursued⁠—she let him have it straight. “And it’s the question of an idiot.”

“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 today, 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