Adam Verver, at Fawns, that autumn Sunday, might have been observed to
open the door of the billiard-room with a certain freedom—might have
been observed, that is, had there been a spectator in the field. The
justification of the push he had applied, however, and of the push,
equally sharp, that, to shut himself in, he again applied—the ground
of this energy was precisely that he might here, however briefly, find
himself alone, alone with the handful of letters, newspapers and other
unopened missives, to which, during and since breakfast, he had lacked
opportunity to give an eye. The vast, square, clean apartment was
empty, and its large clear windows looked out into spaces of terrace
and garden, of park and woodland and shining artificial lake, of
richly-condensed horizon, all dark blue upland and church-towered
village and strong cloudshadow, which were, together, a thing to create
the sense, with everyone else at church, of one’s having the world to
one’s self. We share this world, none the less, for the hour, with
Mr. Verver; the very fact of his striking, as he would have said,
for solitude, the fact of his quiet flight, almost on tiptoe, through
tortuous corridors, investing him with an interest that makes our
attention—tender indeed almost to compassion—qualify his achieved
isolation. For it may immediately be mentioned that this amiable man
bethought himself of his personal advantage, in general, only when it
might appear to him that other advantages, those of other persons, had
successfully put in their claim. It may be mentioned also that he always
figured other persons—such was the law of his nature—as a numerous
array, and that, though conscious of but a single near tie, one
affection, one duty deepest-rooted in his life, it had never, for many
minutes together, been his portion not to feel himself surrounded
and committed, never quite been his refreshment to make out where
the many-coloured human appeal, represented by gradations of tint,
diminishing concentric zones of intensity, of importunity, really faded
to the blessed impersonal whiteness for which his vision sometimes
ached. It shaded off, the appeal—he would have admitted that; but he
had as yet noted no point at which it positively stopped.
Thus had grown in him a little habit—his innermost secret, not confided
even to Maggie, though he felt she understood it, as she understood,
to his view, everything—thus had shaped itself the innocent trick of
occasionally making believe that he had no conscience, or at least that
blankness, in the field of duty, did reign for an hour; a small game to
which the few persons near enough to have caught him playing it, and of
whom Mrs. Assingham, for instance, was one, attached indulgently that
idea of quaintness, quite in fact that charm of the pathetic, involved
in the preservation by an adult of one of childhood’s toys. When he took
a rare moment “off,” he did so with the touching, confessing eyes of
a man of forty-seven caught in the act of handling a relic of
infancy—sticking on the head of a broken soldier or trying the lock
of a wooden gun. It was essentially, in him, the IMITATION of
depravity—which, for amusement, as might have been, he practised
“keeping up.” In spite of practice he was still imperfect, for these so
artlessly-artful interludes were condemned, by the nature of the case,
to brevity. He had fatally stamped himself—it was his own fault—a
man who could be interrupted with impunity. The greatest of wonders,
moreover, was exactly in this, that so interrupted a man should ever
have got, as the phrase was, should above all have got so early, to
where he was. It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of
that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward
vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of
a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American
breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made
of the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This
establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which,
at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers,
perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the
scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for
producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge
could not have communicated even with the best intentions.
The essential pulse of the flame, the very action of the cerebral
temperature, brought to the highest point, yet extraordinarily
contained—these facts themselves were the immensity of the result; they
were one with perfection of machinery, they had constituted the kind of
acquisitive power engendered and applied, the necessary triumph of all
operations. A dim explanation of phenomena once vivid must at all events
for the moment suffice us; it being obviously no account of the
matter to throw on our friend’s amiability alone the weight of the
demonstration of his economic history. Amiability, of a truth, is an
aid to success; it has even been known to be the principle of large
accumulations; but the link, for the mind, is none the less fatally
missing between proof, on such a scale, of continuity, if of nothing
more insolent, in one field, and accessibility to distraction in every
other. Variety of imagination—what is that but fatal, in the world of
affairs, unless so disciplined as not to be distinguished from
monotony? Mr. Verver then, for a fresh, full period, a period betraying,
extraordinarily, no wasted year, had been inscrutably monotonous
behind an iridescent cloud. The cloud was his native envelope—the soft
looseness, so to say, of his temper and tone, not directly expressive
enough, no doubt, to figure an amplitude of folds, but of a quality
unmistakable for sensitive feelers. He was still reduced, in fine, to
getting his rare moments with himself by feigning a cynicism. His real
inability to maintain the pretence, however, had perhaps not often been
better instanced than by his acceptance of the inevitable to-day—his
acceptance of it on the arrival, at the end of a quarter-of-an hour, of
that element of obligation with which he had all the while known he must
reckon. A quarter-of-an-hour of egoism was about as much as he,
taking one situation with another, usually got. Mrs. Rance opened the
door—more tentatively indeed than he himself had just done; but on
the other hand, as if to make up for this, she pushed forward even more
briskly on seeing him than he had been moved to do on seeing nobody.
Then, with force, it came home to him that he had, definitely, a week
before, established a precedent. He did her at least that justice—it
was a kind of justice he was always doing someone. He had on the
previous Sunday liked to stop at home, and he had exposed himself
thereby to be caught in the act. To make this possible, that is, Mrs.
Rance had only had to like to do the same—the trick was so easily
played. It had not occurred to him to plan in any way for her
absence—which would have destroyed, somehow, in principle, the
propriety of his own presence. If persons under his roof hadn’t a right
not to go to church, what became, for a fair mind, of his own right?
His subtlest manoeuvre had been simply to change from the library to
the billiard-room, it being in the library that his guest, or his
daughter’s, or the guest of the Miss Lutches—he scarce knew in which
light to regard her—had then, and not unnaturally, of course, joined
him. It was urged on him by his memory of the duration of the visit she
had that time, as it were, paid him, that the law of recurrence would
already have got itself enacted. She had spent the whole morning with
him, was still there, in the library, when the others came back—thanks
to her having been tepid about their taking, Mr. Verver and she, a
turn outside. It had been as if she looked on that as a kind of
subterfuge—almost as a form of disloyalty. Yet what was it she had in
mind, what did she wish to make of him beyond what she had already made,
a patient, punctilious host, mindful that she had originally arrived
much as a stranger, arrived not at all deliberately or yearningly
invited?—so that one positively had her possible susceptibilities the
MORE on one’s conscience. The Miss Lutches, the sisters from the middle
West, were there as friends of Maggie’s, friends of the earlier time;
but Mrs. Rance was there—or at least had primarily appeared—only as a
friend of the Miss Lutches.
This lady herself was not of the middle West—she rather insisted on
it—but of New Jersey, Rhode Island or Delaware, one of the smallest and
most intimate States: he couldn’t remember which, though she insisted
too on that. It was not in him—we may say it for him—to go so far as
to wonder if their group were next to be recruited by some friend of
her own; and this partly because she had struck him, verily, rather
as wanting to get the Miss Lutches themselves away than to extend the
actual circle, and partly, as well as more essentially, because such
connection as he enjoyed with the ironic question in general resided
substantially less in a personal use of it than in the habit of seeing
it as easy to others. He was so framed by nature as to be able to keep
his inconveniences separate from his resentments; though indeed if
the sum of these latter had at the most always been small, that was
doubtless in some degree a consequence of the fewness of the former. His
greatest inconvenience, he would have admitted, had he analyzed, was in
finding it so taken for granted that, as he had money, he had force.
It pressed upon him hard, and all round, assuredly, this attribution of
power. Everyone had need of one’s power, whereas one’s own need, at the
best, would have seemed to be but some trick for not communicating it.
The effect of a reserve so merely, so meanly defensive would in most
cases, beyond question, sufficiently discredit the cause; wherefore,
though it was complicating to be perpetually treated as an infinite
agent, the outrage was not the greatest of which a brave man might
complain. Complaint, besides, was a luxury, and he dreaded the
imputation of greed. The other, the constant imputation, that of
being able to “do,” would have no ground if he hadn’t been, to start
with—this was the point—provably luxurious. His lips, somehow, were
closed—and by a spring connected moreover with the action of his eyes
themselves. The latter showed him what he had done, showed him where he
had come out; quite at the top of his hill of difficulty, the tall sharp
spiral round which he had begun to wind his ascent at the age of twenty,
and the apex of which was a platform looking down, if one would, on
the kingdoms of the earth and with standing-room for but half-a-dozen
others.
His eyes, in any case, now saw Mrs. Rance approach with an instant
failure to attach to the fact any grossness of avidity of Mrs. Rance’s
own—or at least to descry any triumphant use even for the luridest
impression of her intensity. What was virtually supreme would be her
vision of his having attempted, by his desertion of the library, to
mislead her—which in point of fact barely escaped being what he had
designed. It was not easy for him, in spite of accumulations fondly and
funnily regarded as of systematic practice, not now to be ashamed; the
one thing comparatively easy would be to gloss over his course. The
billiard-room was NOT, at the particular crisis, either a natural or a
graceful place for the nominally main occupant of so large a house to
retire to—and this without prejudice, either, to the fact that his
visitor wouldn’t, as he apprehended, explicitly make him a scene. Should
she frankly denounce him for a sneak he would simply go to pieces; but
he was, after an instant, not afraid of that. Wouldn’t she rather, as
emphasising their communion, accept and in a manner exploit the anomaly,
treat it perhaps as romantic or possibly even as comic?—show at least
that they needn’t mind even though the vast table, draped in brown
holland, thrust itself between them as an expanse of desert sand. She
couldn’t cross the desert, but she could, and did, beautifully get round
it; so that for him to convert it into an obstacle he would have had
to cause himself, as in some childish game or unbecoming romp, to be
pursued, to be genially hunted. This last was a turn he was well aware
the occasion should on no account take; and there loomed before him—for
the mere moment—the prospect of her fairly proposing that they should
knock about the balls. That danger certainly, it struck him, he should
manage in some way to deal with. Why too, for that matter, had he need
of defences, material or other?—how was it a question of dangers really
to be called such? The deep danger, the only one that made him, as
an idea, positively turn cold, would have been the possibility of her
seeking him in marriage, of her bringing up between them that terrible
issue. Here, fortunately, she was powerless, it being apparently so
provable against her that she had a husband in undiminished existence.
She had him, it was true, only in America, only in Texas, in Nebraska,
in Arizona or somewhere—somewhere that, at old Fawns House, in the
county of Kent, scarcely counted as a definite place at all; it showed
somehow, from afar, as so lost, so indistinct and illusory, in the great
alkali desert of cheap Divorce. She had him even in bondage, poor man,
had him in contempt, had him in remembrance so imperfect as barely to
assert itself, but she had him, none the less, in existence unimpeached:
the Miss Lutches had seen him in the flesh—as they had appeared
eager to mention; though when they were separately questioned their
descriptions failed to tally. He would be at the worst, should it come
to the worst, Mrs. Rance’s difficulty, and he served therefore quite
enough as the stout bulwark of anyone else. This was in truth logic
without a flaw, yet it gave Mr. Verver less comfort than it ought. He
feared not only danger—he feared the idea of danger, or in other words
feared, hauntedly, himself. It was above all as a symbol that Mrs. Rance
actually rose before him—a symbol of the supreme effort that he should
have sooner or later, as he felt, to make. This effort would be to say
No—he lived in terror of having to. He should be proposed to at a given
moment—it was only a question of time—and then he should have to do
a thing that would be extremely disagreeable. He almost wished, on
occasion, that he wasn’t so sure he WOULD do it. He knew himself,
however, well enough not to doubt: he knew coldly, quite bleakly, where
he would, at the crisis, draw the line. It was Maggie’s marriage and
Maggie’s finer happiness—happy as he had supposed her before—that had
made the difference; he hadn’t in the other time, it now seemed to him,
had to think of such things. They hadn’t come up for him, and it was as
if she, positively, had herself kept them down. She had only been his
child—which she was indeed as much as ever; but there were sides on
which she had protected him as if she were more than a daughter. She had
done for him more than he knew—much, and blissfully, as he always HAD
known. If she did at present more than ever, through having what she
called the change in his life to make up to him for, his situation
still, all the same, kept pace with her activity—his situation being
simply that there was more than ever to be done.
There had not yet been quite so much, on all the showing, as since their
return from their twenty months in America, as since their settlement
again in England, experimental though it was, and the consequent sense,
now quite established for him, of a domestic air that had cleared and
lightened, producing the effect, for their common personal life,
of wider perspectives and large waiting spaces. It was as if his
son-in-law’s presence, even from before his becoming his son-in-law,
had somehow filled the scene and blocked the future—very richly and
handsomely, when all was said, not at all inconveniently or in ways not
to have been desired: inasmuch as though the Prince, his measure now
practically taken, was still pretty much the same “big fact,” the sky
had lifted, the horizon receded, the very foreground itself expanded,
quite to match him, quite to keep everything in comfortable scale. At
first, certainly, their decent little old-time union, Maggie’s and his
own, had resembled a good deal some pleasant public square, in the heart
of an old city, into which a great Palladian church, say—something with
a grand architectural front—had suddenly been dropped; so that the rest
of the place, the space in front, the way round, outside, to the east
end, the margin of street and passage, the quantity of over-arching
heaven, had been temporarily compromised. Not even then, of a truth, in
a manner disconcerting—given, that is, for the critical, or at least
the intelligent, eye, the great style of the facade and its high place
in its class. The phenomenon that had since occurred, whether originally
to have been pronounced calculable or not, had not, naturally, been the
miracle of a night, but had taken place so gradually, quietly, easily,
that from this vantage of wide, wooded Fawns, with its eighty rooms, as
they said, with its spreading park, with its acres and acres of garden
and its majesty of artificial lake—though that, for a person
so familiar with the “great” ones, might be rather ridiculous—no
visibility of transition showed, no violence of adjustment, in
retrospect, emerged. The Palladian church was always there, but the
piazza took care of itself. The sun stared down in his fulness, the air
circulated, and the public not less; the limit stood off, the way round
was easy, the east end was as fine, in its fashion, as the west,
and there were also side doors for entrance, between the two—large,
monumental, ornamental, in their style—as for all proper great
churches. By some such process, in fine, had the Prince, for his
father-in-law, while remaining solidly a feature, ceased to be, at all
ominously, a block.
Mr. Verver, it may further be mentioned, had taken at no moment
sufficient alarm to have kept in detail the record of his reassurance;
but he would none the less not have been unable, not really have been
indisposed, to impart in confidence to the right person his notion of
the history of the matter. The right person—it is equally distinct—had
not, for this illumination, been wanting, but had been encountered in
the form of Fanny Assingham, not for the first time indeed admitted to
his counsels, and who would have doubtless at present, in any case, from
plenitude of interest and with equal guarantees, repeated his secret.
It all came then, the great clearance, from the one prime fact that
the Prince, by good fortune, hadn’t proved angular. He clung to that
description of his daughter’s husband as he often did to terms and
phrases, in the human, the social connection, that he had found for
himself: it was his way to have times of using these constantly, as if
they just then lighted the world, or his own path in it, for him—even
when for some of his interlocutors they covered less ground. It was true
that with Mrs. Assingham he never felt quite sure of the ground anything
covered; she disputed with him so little, agreed with him so much,
surrounded him with such systematic consideration, such predetermined
tenderness, that it was almost—which he had once told her in irritation
as if she were nursing a sick baby. He had accused her of not taking
him seriously, and she had replied—as from her it couldn’t frighten
him—that she took him religiously, adoringly. She had laughed again,
as she had laughed before, on his producing for her that good right word
about the happy issue of his connection with the Prince—with an effect
the more odd perhaps as she had not contested its value. She couldn’t of
course, however, be, at the best, as much in love with his discovery as
he was himself. He was so much so that he fairly worked it—to his own
comfort; came in fact sometimes near publicly pointing the moral of what
might have occurred if friction, so to speak, had occurred. He pointed
it frankly one day to the personage in question, mentioned to the Prince
the particular justice he did him, was even explicit as to the danger
that, in their remarkable relation, they had thus escaped. Oh, if he
HAD been angular!—who could say what might THEN have happened? He
spoke—and it was the way he had spoken to Mrs. Assingham too—as if he
grasped the facts, without exception, for which angularity stood.
It figured for him, clearly, as a final idea, a conception of the last
vividness. He might have been signifying by it the sharp corners and
hard edges, all the stony pointedness, the grand right geometry of his
spreading Palladian church. Just so, he was insensible to no feature of
the felicity of a contact that, beguilingly, almost confoundingly, was a
contact but with practically yielding lines and curved surfaces.
“You’re round, my boy,” he had said—“you’re ALL, you’re variously
and inexhaustibly round, when you might, by all the chances, have been
abominably square. I’m not sure, for that matter,” he had added, “that
you’re not square in the general mass—whether abominably or not. The
abomination isn’t a question, for you’re inveterately round—that’s
what I mean—in the detail. It’s the sort of thing, in you, that one
feels—or at least I do—with one’s hand. Say you had been formed, all
over, in a lot of little pyramidal lozenges like that wonderful side of
the Ducal Palace in Venice—so lovely in a building, but so damnable,
for rubbing against, in a man, and especially in a near relation. I can
see them all from here—each of them sticking out by itself—all the
architectural cut diamonds that would have scratched one’s softer sides.
One would have been scratched by diamonds—doubtless the neatest way
if one was to be scratched at all—but one would have been more or less
reduced to a hash. As it is, for living with, you’re a pure and perfect
crystal. I give you my idea—I think you ought to have it—just as it
has come to me.” The Prince had taken the idea, in his way, for he was
well accustomed, by this time, to taking; and nothing perhaps even could
more have confirmed Mr. Verver’s account of his surface than the manner
in which these golden drops evenly flowed over it. They caught in
no interstice, they gathered in no concavity; the uniform smoothness
betrayed the dew but by showing for the moment a richer tone. The young
man, in other words, unconfusedly smiled—though indeed as if assenting,
from principle and habit, to more than he understood. He liked all signs
that things were well, but he cared rather less WHY they were.
In regard to the people among whom he had since his marriage been
living, the reasons they so frequently gave—so much oftener than he had
ever heard reasons given before—remained on the whole the element by
which he most differed from them; and his father-in-law and his wife
were, after all, only first among the people among whom he had been
living. He was never even yet sure of how, at this, that or the other
point, he would strike them; they felt remarkably, so often, things he
hadn’t meant, and missed not less remarkably, and not less often, things
he had. He had fallen back on his general explanation—“We haven’t the
same values;” by which he understood the same measure of importance. His
“curves” apparently were important because they had been unexpected,
or, still more, unconceived; whereas when one had always, as in his
relegated old world, taken curves, and in much greater quantities too,
for granted, one was no more surprised at the resulting feasibility of
intercourse than one was surprised at being upstairs in a house that had
a staircase. He had in fact on this occasion disposed alertly enough of
the subject of Mr. Verver’s approbation. The promptitude of his answer,
we may in fact well surmise, had sprung not a little from a particular
kindled remembrance; this had given his acknowledgment its easiest
turn. “Oh, if I’m a crystal I’m delighted that I’m a perfect one, for I
believe that they sometimes have cracks and flaws—in which case they’re
to be had very cheap!” He had stopped short of the emphasis it would
have given his joke to add that there had been certainly no having
HIM cheap; and it was doubtless a mark of the good taste practically
reigning between them that Mr. Verver had not, on his side either,
taken up the opportunity. It is the latter’s relation to such aspects,
however, that now most concerns us, and the bearing of his pleased view
of this absence of friction upon Amerigo’s character as a representative
precious object. Representative precious objects, great ancient pictures
and other works of art, fine eminent “pieces” in gold, in silver, in
enamel, majolica, ivory, bronze, had for a number of years so multiplied
themselves round him and, as a general challenge to acquisition and
appreciation, so engaged all the faculties of his mind, that the
instinct, the particular sharpened appetite of the collector, had fairly
served as a basis for his acceptance of the Prince’s suit.
Over and above the signal fact of the impression made on Maggie herself,
the aspirant to his daughter’s hand showed somehow the great marks and
signs, stood before him with the high authenticities, he had learned to
look for in pieces of the first order. Adam Verver knew, by this time,
knew thoroughly; no man in Europe or in America, he privately believed,
was less capable, in such estimates, of vulgar mistakes. He had never
spoken of himself as infallible—it was not his way; but, apart from the
natural affections, he had acquainted himself with no greater joy, of
the intimately personal type, than the joy of his originally coming
to feel, and all so unexpectedly, that he had in him the spirit of
the connoisseur. He had, like many other persons, in the course of
his reading, been struck with Keats’s sonnet about stout Cortez in the
presence of the Pacific; but few persons, probably, had so devoutly
fitted the poet’s grand image to a fact of experience. It consorted so
with Mr. Verver’s consciousness of the way in which, at a given moment,
he had stared at HIS Pacific, that a couple of perusals of the immortal
lines had sufficed to stamp them in his memory. His “peak in Darien”
was the sudden hour that had transformed his life, the hour of his
perceiving with a mute inward gasp akin to the low moan of apprehensive
passion, that a world was left him to conquer and that he might conquer
it if he tried. It had been a turning of the page of the book of
life—as if a leaf long inert had moved at a touch and, eagerly
reversed, had made such a stir of the air as sent up into his face the
very breath of the Golden Isles. To rifle the Golden Isles had, on
the spot, become the business of his future, and with the sweetness of
it—what was most wondrous of all—still more even in the thought than
in the act. The thought was that of the affinity of Genius, or at least
of Taste, with something in himself—with the dormant intelligence of
which he had thus almost violently become aware and that affected him as
changing by a mere revolution of the screw his whole intellectual
plane. He was equal, somehow, with the great seers, the invokers and
encouragers of beauty—and he didn’t after all perhaps dangle so far
below the great producers and creators. He had been nothing of that kind
before-too decidedly, too dreadfully not; but now he saw why he had been
what he had, why he had failed and fallen short even in huge success;
now he read into his career, in one single magnificent night, the
immense meaning it had waited for.
It was during his first visit to Europe after the death of his wife,
when his daughter was ten years old, that the light, in his mind, had
so broken—and he had even made out at that time why, on an earlier
occasion, the journey of his honeymoon year, it had still been closely
covered. He had “bought” then, so far as he had been able, but he had
bought almost wholly for the frail, fluttered creature at his side, who
had had her fancies, decidedly, but all for the art, then wonderful
to both of them, of the Rue de la Paix, the costly authenticities of
dressmakers and jewellers. Her flutter—pale disconcerted ghost as she
actually was, a broken white flower tied round, almost grotesquely for
his present sense, with a huge satin “bow” of the Boulevard—her flutter
had been mainly that of ribbons, frills and fine fabrics; all funny,
pathetic evidence, for memory, of the bewilderments overtaking them as a
bridal pair confronted with opportunity. He could wince, fairly, still,
as he remembered the sense in which the poor girl’s pressure had, under
his fond encouragement indeed, been exerted in favour of purchase and
curiosity. These were wandering images, out of the earlier dusk, that
threw her back, for his pity, into a past more remote than he liked
their common past, their young affection, to appear. It would have had
to be admitted, to an insistent criticism, that Maggie’s mother, all too
strangely, had not so much failed of faith as of the right application
of it; since she had exercised it eagerly and restlessly, made it a
pretext for innocent perversities in respect to which philosophic time
was at, last to reduce all groans to gentleness. And they had loved each
other so that his own intelligence, on the higher line, had temporarily
paid for it. The futilities, the enormities, the depravities, of
decoration and ingenuity, that, before his sense was unsealed, she had
made him think lovely! Musing, reconsidering little man that he was, and
addicted to silent pleasures—as he was accessible to silent pains—he
even sometimes wondered what would have become of his intelligence, in
the sphere in which it was to learn more and more exclusively to play,
if his wife’s influence upon it had not been, in the strange scheme of
things, so promptly removed. Would she have led him altogether, attached
as he was to her, into the wilderness of mere mistakes? Would she have
prevented him from ever scaling his vertiginous Peak?—or would she,
otherwise, have been able to accompany him to that eminence, where
he might have pointed out to her, as Cortez to HIS companions, the
revelation vouchsafed? No companion of Cortez had presumably been a real
lady: Mr. Verver allowed that historic fact to determine his inference.