I
The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was
one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image
of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber.
Brought up on the legend of the City to which the world paid tribute, he
recognised in the present London much more than in contemporary Rome the
real dimensions of such a case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he
said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the
sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a
fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. It was not indeed to either
of those places that these grounds of his predilection, after all
sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concerned with him, guided
his steps; he had strayed, simply enough, into Bond Street, where his
imagination, working at comparatively short range, caused him now and
then to stop before a window in which objects massive and lumpish, in
silver and gold, in the forms to which precious stones contribute, or
in leather, steel, brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as
tumbled together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been
the loot of far-off victories. The young man’s movements, however,
betrayed no consistency of attention—not even, for that matter, when
one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces shaded,
as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more
delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held at
perverse angles in waiting victorias. And the Prince’s undirected
thought was not a little symptomatic, since, though the turn of
the season had come and the flush of the streets begun to fade, the
possibilities of faces, on the August afternoon, were still one of the
notes of the scene. He was too restless—that was the fact—for any
concentration, and the last idea that would just now have occurred to
him in any connection was the idea of pursuit.
He had been pursuing for six months as never in his life before, and
what had actually unsteadied him, as we join him, was the sense of how
he had been justified. Capture had crowned the pursuit—or success,
as he would otherwise have put it, had rewarded virtue; whereby the
consciousness of these things made him, for the hour, rather serious
than gay. A sobriety that might have consorted with failure sat in his
handsome face, constructively regular and grave, yet at the same time
oddly and, as might be, functionally almost radiant, with its dark
blue eyes, its dark brown moustache and its expression no more sharply
“foreign” to an English view than to have caused it sometimes to be
observed of him with a shallow felicity that he looked like a “refined”
Irishman. What had happened was that shortly before, at three o’clock,
his fate had practically been sealed, and that even when one pretended
to no quarrel with it the moment had something of the grimness of a
crunched key in the strongest lock that could be made. There was nothing
to do as yet, further, but feel what one had done, and our personage
felt it while he aimlessly wandered. It was already as if he were
married, so definitely had the solicitors, at three o’clock, enabled the
date to be fixed, and by so few days was that date now distant. He was
to dine at half-past eight o’clock with the young lady on whose behalf,
and on whose father’s, the London lawyers had reached an inspired
harmony with his own man of business, poor Calderoni, fresh from Rome
and now apparently in the wondrous situation of being “shown London,”
before promptly leaving it again, by Mr. Verver himself, Mr. Verver
whose easy way with his millions had taxed to such small purpose, in the
arrangements, the principle of reciprocity. The reciprocity with which
the Prince was during these minutes most struck was that of Calderoni’s
bestowal of his company for a view of the lions. If there was one thing
in the world the young man, at this juncture, clearly intended, it was
to be much more decent as a son-in-law than lots of fellows he could
think of had shown themselves in that character. He thought of these
fellows, from whom he was so to differ, in English; he used, mentally,
the English term to describe his difference, for, familiar with the
tongue from his earliest years, so that no note of strangeness remained
with him either for lip or for ear, he found it convenient, in life, for
the greatest number of relations. He found it convenient, oddly, even
for his relation with himself—though not unmindful that there might
still, as time went on, be others, including a more intimate degree of
that one, that would seek, possibly with violence, the larger or the
finer issue—which was it?—of the vernacular. Miss Verver had told him
he spoke English too well—it was his only fault, and he had not been
able to speak worse even to oblige her. “When I speak worse, you see,
I speak French,” he had said; intimating thus that there were
discriminations, doubtless of the invidious kind, for which that
language was the most apt. The girl had taken this, she let him know,
as a reflection on her own French, which she had always so dreamed of
making good, of making better; to say nothing of his evident feeling
that the idiom supposed a cleverness she was not a person to rise to.
The Prince’s answer to such remarks—genial, charming, like every answer
the parties to his new arrangement had yet had from him—was that he was
practising his American in order to converse properly, on equal terms as
it were, with Mr. Verver. His prospective father-in-law had a command of
it, he said, that put him at a disadvantage in any discussion; besides
which—well, besides which he had made to the girl the observation that
positively, of all his observations yet, had most finely touched her.
“You know I think he’s a REAL galantuomo—‘and no mistake.’ There are
plenty of sham ones about. He seems to me simply the best man I’ve ever
seen in my life.”
“Well, my dear, why shouldn’t he be?” the girl had gaily inquired.
It was this, precisely, that had set the Prince to think. The things, or
many of them, that had made Mr. Verver what he was seemed practically
to bring a charge of waste against the other things that, with the other
people known to the young man, had failed of such a result. “Why, his
‘form,’” he had returned, “might have made one doubt.”
“Father’s form?” She hadn’t seen it. “It strikes me he hasn’t got any.”
“He hasn’t got mine—he hasn’t even got yours.”
“Thank you for ‘even’!” the girl had laughed at him. “Oh, yours, my
dear, is tremendous. But your father has his own. I’ve made that out. So
don’t doubt it. It’s where it has brought him out—that’s the point.”
“It’s his goodness that has brought him out,” our young woman had, at
this, objected.
“Ah, darling, goodness, I think, never brought anyone out. Goodness,
when it’s real, precisely, rather keeps people in.” He had been
interested in his discrimination, which amused him. “No, it’s his WAY.
It belongs to him.”
But she had wondered still. “It’s the American way. That’s all.”
“Exactly—it’s all. It’s all, I say! It fits him—so it must be good for
something.”
“Do you think it would be good for you?” Maggie Verver had smilingly
asked.
To which his reply had been just of the happiest. “I don’t feel, my
dear, if you really want to know, that anything much can now either hurt
me or help me. Such as I am—but you’ll see for yourself. Say, however,
I am a galantuomo—which I devoutly hope: I’m like a chicken, at best,
chopped up and smothered in sauce; cooked down as a creme de volaille,
with half the parts left out. Your father’s the natural fowl running
about the bassecour. His feathers, movements, his sounds—those are the
parts that, with me, are left out.”
“All, as a matter of course—since you can’t eat a chicken alive!”
The Prince had not been annoyed at this, but he had been positive.
“Well, I’m eating your father alive—which is the only way to taste him.
I want to continue, and as it’s when he talks American that he is most
alive, so I must also cultivate it, to get my pleasure. He couldn’t make
one like him so much in any other language.”
It mattered little that the girl had continued to demur—it was the mere
play of her joy. “I think he could make you like him in Chinese.”
“It would be an unnecessary trouble. What I mean is that he’s a kind
of result of his inevitable tone. My liking is accordingly FOR the
tone—which has made him possible.”
“Oh, you’ll hear enough of it,” she laughed, “before you’ve done with
us.”
Only this, in truth, had made him frown a little.
“What do you mean, please, by my having ‘done’ with you?”
“Why, found out about us all there is to find.”
He had been able to take it indeed easily as a joke. “Ah, love, I
began with that. I know enough, I feel, never to be surprised. It’s you
yourselves meanwhile,” he continued, “who really know nothing. There are
two parts of me”—yes, he had been moved to go on. “One is made up of
the history, the doings, the marriages, the crimes, the follies, the
boundless betises of other people—especially of their infamous waste
of money that might have come to me. Those things are written—literally
in rows of volumes, in libraries; are as public as they’re abominable.
Everybody can get at them, and you’ve, both of you, wonderfully, looked
them in the face. But there’s another part, very much smaller
doubtless, which, such as it is, represents my single self, the unknown,
unimportant, unimportant—unimportant save to YOU—personal quantity.
About this you’ve found out nothing.”
“Luckily, my dear,” the girl had bravely said; “for what then would
become, please, of the promised occupation of my future?”
The young man remembered even now how extraordinarily CLEAR—he couldn’t
call it anything else—she had looked, in her prettiness, as she had
said it. He also remembered what he had been moved to reply. “The
happiest reigns, we are taught, you know, are the reigns without any
history.”
“Oh, I’m not afraid of history!” She had been sure of that. “Call it the
bad part, if you like—yours certainly sticks out of you. What was it
else,” Maggie Verver had also said, “that made me originally think of
you? It wasn’t—as I should suppose you must have seen—what you call
your unknown quantity, your particular self. It was the generations
behind you, the follies and the crimes, the plunder and the waste—the
wicked Pope, the monster most of all, whom so many of the volumes in
your family library are all about. If I’ve read but two or three yet, I
shall give myself up but the more—as soon as I have time—to the rest.
Where, therefore”—she had put it to him again—“without your archives,
annals, infamies, would you have been?”
He recalled what, to this, he had gravely returned. “I might have been
in a somewhat better pecuniary situation.” But his actual situation
under the head in question positively so little mattered to them that,
having by that time lived deep into the sense of his advantage, he had
kept no impression of the girl’s rejoinder. It had but sweetened the
waters in which he now floated, tinted them as by the action of
some essence, poured from a gold-topped phial, for making one’s bath
aromatic. No one before him, never—not even the infamous Pope—had
so sat up to his neck in such a bath. It showed, for that matter, how
little one of his race could escape, after all, from history. What was
it but history, and of THEIR kind very much, to have the assurance of
the enjoyment of more money than the palace-builder himself could have
dreamed of? This was the element that bore him up and into which Maggie
scattered, on occasion, her exquisite colouring drops. They were of the
colour—of what on earth? of what but the extraordinary American good
faith? They were of the colour of her innocence, and yet at the same
time of her imagination, with which their relation, his and these
people’s, was all suffused. What he had further said on the occasion of
which we thus represent him as catching the echoes from his own thoughts
while he loitered—what he had further said came back to him, for it had
been the voice itself of his luck, the soothing sound that was always
with him. “You Americans are almost incredibly romantic.”
“Of course we are. That’s just what makes everything so nice for us.”
“Everything?” He had wondered.
“Well, everything that’s nice at all. The world, the beautiful,
world—or everything in it that is beautiful. I mean we see so much.”
He had looked at her a moment—and he well knew how she had struck him,
in respect to the beautiful world, as one of the beautiful, the
most beautiful things. But what he had answered was: “You see too
much—that’s what may sometimes make you difficulties. When you don’t,
at least,” he had amended with a further thought, “see too little.”
But he had quite granted that he knew what she meant, and his warning
perhaps was needless.
He had seen the follies of the romantic disposition, but there seemed
somehow no follies in theirs—nothing, one was obliged to recognise, but
innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties. Their enjoyment was
a tribute to others without being a loss to themselves. Only the funny
thing, he had respectfully submitted, was that her father, though older
and wiser, and a man into the bargain, was as bad—that is as good—as
herself.
“Oh, he’s better,” the girl had freely declared “that is he’s worse.
His relation to the things he cares for—and I think it beautiful—is
absolutely romantic. So is his whole life over here—it’s the most
romantic thing I know.”
“You mean his idea for his native place?”
“Yes—the collection, the Museum with which he wishes to endow it, and
of which he thinks more, as you know, than of anything in the world.
It’s the work of his life and the motive of everything he does.”
The young man, in his actual mood, could have smiled again—smiled
delicately, as he had then smiled at her. “Has it been his motive in
letting me have you?”
“Yes, my dear, positively—or in a manner,” she had said.
“American City isn’t, by the way, his native town, for, though he’s not
old, it’s a young thing compared with him—a younger one. He started
there, he has a feeling about it, and the place has grown, as he says,
like the programme of a charity performance. You’re at any rate a part
of his collection,” she had explained—“one of the things that can only
be got over here. You’re a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of
price. You’re not perhaps absolutely unique, but you’re so curious and
eminent that there are very few others like you—you belong to a class
about which everything is known. You’re what they call a morceau de
musee.”
“I see. I have the great sign of it,” he had risked—“that I cost a lot
of money.”
“I haven’t the least idea,” she had gravely answered, “what you
cost”—and he had quite adored, for the moment, her way of saying it. He
had felt even, for the moment, vulgar. But he had made the best of that.
“Wouldn’t you find out if it were a question of parting with me? My
value would in that case be estimated.”
She had looked at him with her charming eyes, as if his value were well
before her. “Yes, if you mean that I’d pay rather than lose you.”
And then there came again what this had made him say. “Don’t talk about
ME—it’s you who are not of this age. You’re a creature of a braver and
finer one, and the cinquecento, at its most golden hour, wouldn’t have
been ashamed of you. It would of me, and if I didn’t know some of the
pieces your father has acquired, I should rather fear, for American
City, the criticism of experts. Would it at all events be your idea,” he
had then just ruefully asked, “to send me there for safety?”
“Well, we may have to come to it.”
“I’ll go anywhere you want.”
“We must see first—it will be only if we have to come to it. There are
things,” she had gone on, “that father puts away—the bigger and more
cumbrous of course, which he stores, has already stored in masses, here
and in Paris, in Italy, in Spain, in warehouses, vaults, banks, safes,
wonderful secret places. We’ve been like a pair of pirates—positively
stage pirates, the sort who wink at each other and say ‘Ha-ha!’ when
they come to where their treasure is buried. Ours is buried pretty well
everywhere—except what we like to see, what we travel with and have
about us. These, the smaller pieces, are the things we take out and
arrange as we can, to make the hotels we stay at and the houses we hire
a little less ugly. Of course it’s a danger, and we have to keep watch.
But father loves a fine piece, loves, as he says, the good of it, and
it’s for the company of some of his things that he’s willing to run his
risks. And we’ve had extraordinary luck”—Maggie had made that point;
“we’ve never lost anything yet. And the finest objects are often the
smallest. Values, in lots of cases, you must know, have nothing to do
with size. But there’s nothing, however tiny,” she had wound up, “that
we’ve missed.”
“I like the class,” he had laughed for this, “in which you place me! I
shall be one of the little pieces that you unpack at the hotels, or at
the worst in the hired houses, like this wonderful one, and put out with
the family photographs and the new magazines. But it’s something not to
be so big that I have to be buried.”
“Oh,” she had returned, “you shall not be buried, my dear, till you’re
dead. Unless indeed you call it burial to go to American City.”
“Before I pronounce I should like to see my tomb.” So he had had, after
his fashion, the last word in their interchange, save for the result of
an observation that had risen to his lips at the beginning, which he had
then checked, and which now came back to him. “Good, bad or indifferent,
I hope there’s one thing you believe about me.”
He had sounded solemn, even to himself, but she had taken it gaily. “Ah,
don’t fix me down to ‘one’! I believe things enough about you, my dear,
to have a few left if most of them, even, go to smash. I’ve taken care
of THAT. I’ve divided my faith into water-tight compartments. We must
manage not to sink.”
“You do believe I’m not a hypocrite? You recognise that I don’t lie or
dissemble or deceive? Is THAT water-tight?”
The question, to which he had given a certain intensity, had made her,
he remembered, stare an instant, her colour rising as if it had sounded
to her still stranger than he had intended. He had perceived on the spot
that any SERIOUS discussion of veracity, of loyalty, or rather of the
want of them, practically took her unprepared, as if it were quite new
to her. He had noticed it before: it was the English, the American sign
that duplicity, like “love,” had to be joked about. It couldn’t be “gone
into.” So the note of his inquiry was—well, to call it nothing else—
premature; a mistake worth making, however, for the almost overdone
drollery in which her answer instinctively sought refuge.
“Water-tight—the biggest compartment of all? Why, it’s the best cabin
and the main deck and the engine-room and the steward’s pantry! It’s the
ship itself—it’s the whole line. It’s the captain’s table and all one’s
luggage—one’s reading for the trip.” She had images, like that, that
were drawn from steamers and trains, from a familiarity with “lines,” a
command of “own” cars, from an experience of continents and seas,
that he was unable as yet to emulate; from vast modern machineries and
facilities whose acquaintance he had still to make, but as to which it
was part of the interest of his situation as it stood that he could,
quite without wincing, feel his future likely to bristle with them.
It was in fact, content as he was with his engagement and charming as
he thought his affianced bride, his view of THAT furniture that mainly
constituted our young man’s “romance”—and to an extent that made of his
inward state a contrast that he was intelligent enough to feel. He was
intelligent enough to feel quite humble, to wish not to be in the least
hard or voracious, not to insist on his own side of the bargain, to warn
himself in short against arrogance and greed. Odd enough, of a truth,
was his sense of this last danger—which may illustrate moreover his
general attitude toward dangers from within. Personally, he considered,
he hadn’t the vices in question—and that was so much to the good. His
race, on the other hand, had had them handsomely enough, and he was
somehow full of his race. Its presence in him was like the consciousness
of some inexpugnable scent in which his clothes, his whole person,
his hands and the hair of his head, might have been steeped as in some
chemical bath: the effect was nowhere in particular, yet he constantly
felt himself at the mercy of the cause. He knew his antenatal history,
knew it in every detail, and it was a thing to keep causes well before
him. What was his frank judgment of so much of its ugliness, he asked
himself, but a part of the cultivation of humility? What was this so
important step he had just taken but the desire for some new history
that should, so far as possible, contradict, and even if need be flatly
dishonour, the old? If what had come to him wouldn’t do he must
MAKE something different. He perfectly recognised—always in his
humility—that the material for the making had to be Mr. Verver’s
millions. There was nothing else for him on earth to make it with; he
had tried before—had had to look about and see the truth. Humble as he
was, at the same time, he was not so humble as if he had known himself
frivolous or stupid. He had an idea—which may amuse his historian—that
when you were stupid enough to be mistaken about such a matter you did
know it. Therefore he wasn’t mistaken—his future might be MIGHT be
scientific. There was nothing in himself, at all events, to prevent it.
He was allying himself to science, for what was science but the absence
of prejudice backed by the presence of money? His life would be full
of machinery, which was the antidote to superstition, which was in
its turn, too much, the consequence, or at least the exhalation, of
archives. He thought of these—of his not being at all events futile,
and of his absolute acceptance of the developments of the coming age to
redress the balance of his being so differently considered. The moments
when he most winced were those at which he found himself believing that,
really, futility would have been forgiven him. Even WITH it, in that
absurd view, he would have been good enough. Such was the laxity, in the
Ververs, of the romantic spirit. They didn’t, indeed, poor dears, know
what, in that line—the line of futility—the real thing meant. HE did—
having seen it, having tried it, having taken its measure. This was a
memory in fact simply to screen out—much as, just in front of him while
he walked, the iron shutter of a shop, closing early to the stale summer
day, rattled down at the turn of some crank. There was machinery again,
just as the plate glass, all about him, was money, was power, the power
of the rich peoples. Well, he was OF them now, of the rich peoples; he
was on their side—if it wasn’t rather the pleasanter way of putting it
that they were on his.
Something of this sort was in any case the moral and the murmur of his
walk. It would have been ridiculous—such a moral from such a source—if
it hadn’t all somehow fitted to the gravity of the hour, that gravity
the oppression of which I began by recording. Another feature was the
immediate nearness of the arrival of the contingent from home. He was to
meet them at Charing Cross on the morrow: his younger brother, who had
married before him, but whose wife, of Hebrew race, with a portion that
had gilded the pill, was not in a condition to travel; his sister and
her husband, the most anglicised of Milanesi, his maternal uncle, the
most shelved of diplomatists, and his Roman cousin, Don Ottavio, the
most disponible of ex-deputies and of relatives—a scant handful of the
consanguineous who, in spite of Maggie’s plea for hymeneal reserve,
were to accompany him to the altar. It was no great array, yet it was
apparently to be a more numerous muster than any possible to the bride
herself, having no wealth of kinship to choose from and making it up,
on the other hand, by loose invitations. He had been interested in the
girl’s attitude on the matter and had wholly deferred to it, giving him,
as it did, a glimpse, distinctly pleasing, of the kind of ruminations
she would in general be governed by—which were quite such as fell in
with his own taste. They hadn’t natural relations, she and her
father, she had explained; so they wouldn’t try to supply the place
by artificial, by make-believe ones, by any searching of highways and
hedges. Oh yes, they had acquaintances enough—but a marriage was an
intimate thing. You asked acquaintances when you HAD your kith and
kin—you asked them over and above. But you didn’t ask them alone, to
cover your nudity and look like what they weren’t. She knew what she
meant and what she liked, and he was all ready to take from her, finding
a good omen in both of the facts. He expected her, desired her, to have
character; his wife SHOULD have it, and he wasn’t afraid of her having
much. He had had, in his earlier time, to deal with plenty of people who
had had it; notably with the three four ecclesiastics, his great-uncle,
the Cardinal, above all, who had taken a hand and played a part in his
education: the effect of all of which had never been to upset him. He
was thus fairly on the look-out for the characteristic in this most
intimate, as she was to come, of his associates. He encouraged it when
it appeared.
He felt therefore, just at present, as if his papers were in order, as
if his accounts so balanced as they had never done in his life before
and he might close the portfolio with a snap. It would open again,
doubtless, of itself, with the arrival of the Romans; it would even
perhaps open with his dining to-night in Portland Place, where Mr.
Verver had pitched a tent suggesting that of Alexander furnished with
the spoils of Darius. But what meanwhile marked his crisis, as I have
said, was his sense of the immediate two or three hours. He paused
on corners, at crossings; there kept rising for him, in waves, that
consciousness, sharp as to its source while vague as to its end, which I
began by speaking of—the consciousness of an appeal to do something
or other, before it was too late, for himself. By any friend to whom
he might have mentioned it the appeal could have been turned to frank
derision. For what, for whom indeed but himself and the high advantages
attached, was he about to marry an extraordinarily charming girl, whose
“prospects,” of the solid sort, were as guaranteed as her amiability?
He wasn’t to do it, assuredly, all for her. The Prince, as happened,
however, was so free to feel and yet not to formulate that there rose
before him after a little, definitely, the image of a friend whom he had
often found ironic. He withheld the tribute of attention from passing
faces only to let his impulse accumulate. Youth and beauty made him
scarcely turn, but the image of Mrs. Assingham made him presently stop a
hansom. HER youth, her beauty were things more or less of the past,
but to find her at home, as he possibly might, would be “doing” what
he still had time for, would put something of a reason into his
restlessness and thereby probably soothe it. To recognise the propriety
of this particular pilgrimage—she lived far enough off, in long Cadogan
Place—was already in fact to work it off a little. A perception of the
propriety of formally thanking her, and of timing the act just as he
happened to be doing—this, he made out as he went, was obviously all
that had been the matter with him. It was true that he had mistaken the
mood of the moment, misread it rather, superficially, as an impulse
to look the other way—the other way from where his pledges had
accumulated. Mrs. Assingham, precisely, represented, embodied his
pledges—was, in her pleasant person, the force that had set them
successively in motion. She had MADE his marriage, quite as truly as his
papal ancestor had made his family—though he could scarce see what she
had made it for unless because she too was perversely romantic. He had
neither bribed nor persuaded her, had given her nothing—scarce
even till now articulate thanks; so that her profit-to think of it
vulgarly—must have all had to come from the Ververs.
Yet he was far, he could still remind himself, from supposing that she
had been grossly remunerated. He was wholly sure she hadn’t; for if
there were people who took presents and people who didn’t she would be
quite on the right side and of the proud class. Only then, on the other
hand, her disinterestedness was rather awful—it implied, that is,
such abysses of confidence. She was admirably attached to Maggie—whose
possession of such a friend might moreover quite rank as one of her
“assets”; but the great proof of her affection had been in bringing
them, with her design, together. Meeting him during a winter in Rome,
meeting him afterwards in Paris, and “liking” him, as she had in time
frankly let him know from the first, she had marked him for her young
friend’s own and had then, unmistakably, presented him in a light. But
the interest in Maggie—that was the point—would have achieved
but little without her interest in HIM. On what did that sentiment,
unsolicited and unrecompensed, rest? what good, again—for it was much
like his question about Mr. Verver—should he ever have done her? The
Prince’s notion of a recompense to women—similar in this to his notion
of an appeal—was more or less to make love to them. Now he hadn’t, as
he believed, made love the least little bit to Mrs. Assingham—nor did
he think she had for a moment supposed it. He liked in these days, to
mark them off, the women to whom he hadn’t made love: it represented—
and that was what pleased him in it—a different stage of existence
from the time at which he liked to mark off the women to whom he
had. Neither, with all this, had Mrs. Assingham herself been either
aggressive or resentful. On what occasion, ever, had she appeared
to find him wanting? These things, the motives of such people, were
obscure—a little alarmingly so; they contributed to that element of
the impenetrable which alone slightly qualified his sense of his good
fortune. He remembered to have read, as a boy, a wonderful tale by Allan
Poe, his prospective wife’s countryman-which was a thing to show, by the
way, what imagination Americans COULD have: the story of the shipwrecked
Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North
Pole—or was it the South?—than anyone had ever done, found at a given
moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling
curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of
milk or of snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon
some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs.
Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had
never known curtains but as purple even to blackness—but as producing
where they hung a darkness intended and ominous. When they were so
disposed as to shelter surprises the surprises were apt to be shocks.
Shocks, however, from these quite different depths, were not what he saw
reason to apprehend; what he rather seemed to himself not yet to have
measured was something that, seeking a name for it, he would have called
the quantity of confidence reposed in him. He had stood still, at many
a moment of the previous month, with the thought, freshly determined or
renewed, of the general expectation—to define it roughly—of which he
was the subject. What was singular was that it seemed not so much
an expectation of anything in particular as a large, bland, blank
assumption of merits almost beyond notation, of essential quality and
value. It was as if he had been some old embossed coin, of a purity of
gold no longer used, stamped with glorious arms, mediaeval, wonderful,
of which the “worth” in mere modern change, sovereigns and half crowns,
would be great enough, but as to which, since there were finer ways of
using it, such taking to pieces was superfluous. That was the image for
the security in which it was open to him to rest; he was to constitute a
possession, yet was to escape being reduced to his component parts.
What would this mean but that, practically, he was never to be tried or
tested? What would it mean but that, if they didn’t “change” him,
they really wouldn’t know—he wouldn’t know himself—how many pounds,
shillings and pence he had to give? These at any rate, for the present,
were unanswerable questions; all that was before him was that he was
invested with attributes. He was taken seriously. Lost there in the
white mist was the seriousness in them that made them so take him.
It was even in Mrs. Assingham, in spite of her having, as she had
frequently shown, a more mocking spirit. All he could say as yet was
that he had done nothing, so far as to break any charm. What should
he do if he were to ask her frankly this afternoon what was, morally
speaking, behind their veil. It would come to asking what they expected
him to do. She would answer him probably: “Oh, you know, it’s what we
expect you to be!” on which he would have no resource but to deny his
knowledge. Would that break the spell, his saying he had no idea? What
idea in fact could he have? He also took himself seriously—made a
point of it; but it wasn’t simply a question of fancy and pretension.
His own estimate he saw ways, at one time and another, of dealing with:
but theirs, sooner or later, say what they might, would put him to the
practical proof. As the practical proof, accordingly, would naturally be
proportionate to the cluster of his attributes, one arrived at a scale
that he was not, honestly, the man to calculate. Who but a billionaire
could say what was fair exchange for a billion? That measure was the
shrouded object, but he felt really, as his cab stopped in Cadogan
Place, a little nearer the shroud. He promised himself, virtually, to
give the latter a twitch.