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

in a freedom that partook, extraordinarily, of ideal perfection, since the magic web had spun itself without their toil, almost without their touch. Above all, on this occasion, once more, there sounded through their safety, as an undertone, the very voice he had listened to on the eve of his marriage with such another sort of unrest. Dimly, again and again, from that period on, he had seemed to hear it tell him why it kept recurring; but it phrased the large music now in a way that filled the room. The reason was⁠—into which he had lived, quite intimately, by the end of a quarter-of-an-hour⁠—that just this truth of their safety offered it now a kind of unexampled receptacle, letting it spread and spread, but at the same time elastically enclosing it, banking it in, for softness, as with billows of eiderdown. On that morning; in the Park there had been, however dissimulated, doubt and danger, whereas the tale this afternoon was taken up with a highly emphasised confidence. The emphasis, for their general comfort, was what Charlotte had come to apply; inasmuch as, though it was not what she definitely began with, it had soon irrepressibly shaped itself. It was the meaning of the question she had put to him as soon as they were alone⁠—even though indeed, as from not quite understanding, he had not then directly replied; it was the meaning of everything else, down to the conscious quaintness of her rickety “growler” and the conscious humility of her dress. It had helped him a little, the question of these eccentricities, to let her immediate appeal pass without an answer. He could ask her instead what had become of her carriage and why, above all, she was not using it in such weather.

“It’s just because of the weather,” she explained. “It’s my little idea. It makes me feel as I used to⁠—when I could do as I liked.”

XVIII

This came out so straight that he saw at once how much truth it expressed; yet it was truth that still a little puzzled him. “But did you ever like knocking about in such discomfort?”

“It seems to me now that I then liked everything. It’s the charm, at any rate,” she said from her place at the fire, “of trying again the old feelings. They come back⁠—they come back. Everything,” she went on, “comes back. Besides,” she wound up, “you know for yourself.”

He stood near her, his hands in his pockets; but not looking at her, looking hard at the tea-table. “Ah, I haven’t your courage. Moreover,” he laughed, “it seems to me that, so far as that goes, I do live in hansoms. But you must awfully want your tea,” he quickly added; “so let me give you a good stiff cup.”

He busied himself with this care, and she sat down, on his pushing up a low seat, where she had been standing; so that, while she talked, he could bring her what she further desired. He moved to and fro before her, he helped himself; and her visit, as the moments passed, had more and more the effect of a signal communication that she had come, all responsibly and deliberately, as on the clear show of the clock-face of their situation, to make. The whole demonstration, none the less, presented itself as taking place at a very high level of debate⁠—in the cool upper air of the finer discrimination, the deeper sincerity, the larger philosophy. No matter what were the facts invoked and arrayed, it was only a question, as yet, of their seeing their way together: to which indeed, exactly, the present occasion appeared to have so much to contribute. “It’s not that you haven’t my courage,” Charlotte said, “but that you haven’t, I rather think, my imagination. Unless indeed it should turn out after all,” she added, “that you haven’t even my intelligence. However, I shall not be afraid of that till you’ve given me more proof.” And she made again, but more clearly, her point of a moment before. “You knew, besides, you knew today, I would come. And if you knew that you know everything.” So she pursued, and if he didn’t meanwhile, if he didn’t even at this, take her up, it might be that she was so positively fitting him again with the fair face of temporising kindness that he had given her, to keep her eyes on, at the other important juncture, and the sense of which she might ever since have been carrying about with her like a precious medal⁠—not exactly blessed by the Pope suspended round her neck. She had come back, however this might be, to her immediate account of herself, and no mention of their great previous passage was to rise to the lips of either. “Above all,” she said, “there has been the personal romance of it.”

“Of tea with me over the fire? Ah, so far as that goes I don’t think even my intelligence fails me.”

“Oh, it’s further than that goes; and if I’ve had a better day than you it’s perhaps, when I come to think of it, that I am braver. You bore yourself, you see. But I don’t. I don’t, I don’t,” she repeated.

“It’s precisely boring one’s self without relief,” he protested, “that takes courage.”

“Passive then⁠—not active. My romance is that, if you want to know, I’ve been all day on the town. Literally on the town⁠—isn’t that what they call it? I know how it feels.” After which, as if breaking off, “And you, have you never been out?” she asked.

He still stood there with his hands in his pockets. “What should I have gone out for?”

“Oh, what should people in our case do anything for? But you’re wonderful, all of you⁠—you know how to live. We’re clumsy brutes, we other’s, beside you⁠—we must always be ‘doing’ something. However,” Charlotte pursued, “if you had gone out you might have missed the chance of me⁠—which I’m sure,