The Golden Bowl by Henry James (free ebook reader for android TXT) 📕

“That’s the way we shall help her.”

“By looking like fools?”

She threw up her hands. “She only wants, herself, to look like a bigger! So there we are!” With which she brushed it away⁠—his conformity was promised. Something, however, still held her; it broke, to her own vision, as a last wave of clearness. “Moreover now,” she said, “I see! I mean,” she added⁠—“what you were asking me: how I knew today, in Eaton Square, that Maggie’s awake.” And she had indeed visibly got it. “It was by seeing them together.”

“Seeing her with her father?” He fell behind again. “But you’ve seen her often enough before.”

“Never with my present eyes. For nothing like such a test⁠—that of this length of the others’ absence together⁠—has hitherto occurred.”

“Possibly! But if she and Mr. Verver insisted upon it⁠—?”

“Why is it such a test? Because it has become one without their intending it. It has spoiled, so to speak, on their hands.”

“It has soured, eh?” the Colonel said.

“The word’s horrible⁠—say rather it has ‘changed.’ Perhaps,” Fanny went on, “she did wish to see how much she can bear. In that case she has seen. Only it was she alone who⁠—about the visit⁠—insisted. Her father insists on nothing. And she watches him do it.”

Her husband looked impressed. “Watches him?”

“For the first faint sign. I mean of his noticing. It doesn’t, as I tell you, come. But she’s there for it to see. And I felt,” she continued, “how she’s there; I caught her, as it were, in the fact. She couldn’t keep it from me⁠—though she left her post on purpose⁠—came home with me to throw dust in my eyes. I took it all⁠—her dust; but it was what showed me.” With which supreme lucidity she reached the door of her room. “Luckily it showed me also how she has succeeded. Nothing⁠—from him⁠—has come.”

“You’re so awfully sure?”

“Sure. Nothing will. Good night,” she said. “She’ll die first.”

It was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to accept the idea of having done, a little, something she was not always doing, or indeed that of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active; of the sense, above all, that she had made, at a particular hour, made by the mere touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long present to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it⁠—that was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow: looking up, all the while, at the fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she wished. She had not wished till now⁠—such was the odd case; and what was doubtless equally odd, besides, was that, though her raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve, from within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level. The great decorated surface had remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable. At present, however, to her considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly to stare and wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in that of lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly near. The thing might have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a Muhammadan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty; there so hung about it the vision of one’s putting off one’s shoes to enter, and even, verily, of one’s paying with one’s life if found there as an interloper. She had not, certainly, arrived at the conception of paying with her life for anything she might do; but it was nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain plates. She had knocked, in short⁠—though she could scarce have said whether for admission or for what; she had applied her hand to a cool smooth spot and had waited to see what would happen. Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted.

If this image, however, may represent our young woman’s consciousness of a recent change in her life⁠—a change now but a few days old⁠—it must at the same time be observed that she both sought and found in renewed circulation, as I have called it, a measure of relief from the idea of having perhaps to answer for what she had done. The pagoda in her blooming garden figured the arrangement⁠—how otherwise was it to be named?⁠—by which, so strikingly, she had been able to marry without breaking, as she liked to put it, with the past. She had surrendered herself to her husband without the shadow of a reserve or a condition, and yet she had not, all the while, given up her father⁠—the least little inch. She had compassed the high city of seeing the two men beautifully take to each other, and nothing in her marriage had marked it as more happy than this fact of its having