The main interest of these hours for us, however, will have been in
the way the Prince continued to know, during a particular succession of
others, separated from the evening in Eaton Square by a short interval,
a certain persistent aftertaste. This was the lingering savour of a
cup presented to him by Fanny Assingham’s hand after dinner, while the
clustered quartette kept their ranged companions, in the music-room,
moved if one would, but conveniently motionless. Mrs. Assingham
contrived, after a couple of pieces, to convey to her friend that, for
her part, she was moved—by the genius of Brahms—beyond what she could
bear; so that, without apparent deliberation, she had presently floated
away, at the young man’s side, to such a distance as permitted them
to converse without the effect of disdain. It was the twenty minutes
enjoyed with her, during the rest of the concert, in the less associated
electric glare of one of the empty rooms—it was their achieved and, as
he would have said, successful, most pleasantly successful, talk on one
of the sequestered sofas, it was this that was substantially to underlie
his consciousness of the later occasion. The later occasion, then mere
matter of discussion, had formed her ground for desiring—in a light
undertone into which his quick ear read indeed some nervousness—these
independent words with him: she had sounded, covertly but distinctly, by
the time they were seated together, the great question of what it might
involve. It had come out for him before anything else, and so abruptly
that this almost needed an explanation. Then the abruptness itself
had appeared to explain—which had introduced, in turn, a slight
awkwardness. “Do you know that they’re not, after all, going to Matcham;
so that, if they don’t—if, at least, Maggie doesn’t—you won’t, I
suppose, go by yourself?” It was, as I say, at Matcham, where the event
had placed him, it was at Matcham during the Easter days, that it most
befell him, oddly enough, to live over, inwardly, for its wealth of
special significance, this passage by which the event had been really
a good deal determined. He had paid, first and last, many an English
country visit; he had learned, even from of old, to do the English
things, and to do them, all sufficiently, in the English way; if he
didn’t always enjoy them madly he enjoyed them at any rate as much,
to an appearance, as the good people who had, in the night of time,
unanimously invented them, and who still, in the prolonged afternoon of
their good faith, unanimously, even if a trifle automatically, practised
them; yet, with it all, he had never so much as during such sojourns the
trick of a certain detached, the amusement of a certain inward critical,
life; the determined need, which apparently all participant, of
returning upon itself, of backing noiselessly in, far in again, and
rejoining there, as it were, that part of his mind that was not engaged
at the front. His body, very constantly, was engaged at the front—in
shooting, in riding, in golfing, in walking, over the fine diagonals
of meadow-paths or round the pocketed corners of billiard-tables; it
sufficiently, on the whole, in fact, bore the brunt of bridge-playing,
of breakfasting, lunching, tea-drinking, dining, and of the nightly
climax over the bottigliera, as he called it, of the bristling tray; it
met, finally, to the extent of the limited tax on lip, on gesture,
on wit, most of the current demands of conversation and expression.
Therefore something of him, he often felt at these times, was left
out; it was much more when he was alone, or when he was with his own
people—or when he was, say, with Mrs. Verver and nobody else—that he
moved, that he talked, that he listened, that he felt, as a congruous
whole.
“English society,” as he would have said, cut him, accordingly, in
two, and he reminded himself often, in his relations with it, of a
man possessed of a shining star, a decoration, an order of some sort,
something so ornamental as to make his identity not complete, ideally,
without it, yet who, finding no other such object generally worn, should
be perpetually, and the least bit ruefully, unpinning it from his breast
to transfer it to his pocket. The Prince’s shining star may, no doubt,
having been nothing more precious than his private subtlety; but
whatever the object was he just now fingered it a good deal, out of
sight—amounting as it mainly did for him to a restless play of memory
and a fine embroidery of thought. Something had rather momentously
occurred, in Eaton Square, during his enjoyed minutes with his old
friend: his present perspective made definitely clear to him that she
had plumped out for him her first little lie. That took on—and he could
scarce have said why—a sharpness of importance: she had never lied
to him before—if only because it had never come up for her, properly,
intelligibly, morally, that she must. As soon as she had put to him the
question of what he would do—by which she meant of what Charlotte would
also do—in that event of Maggie’s and Mr. Verver’s not embracing the
proposal they had appeared for a day or two resignedly to entertain; as
soon as she had betrayed her curiosity as to the line the other pair, so
left to themselves, might take, a desire to avoid the appearance of
at all too directly prying had become marked in her. Betrayed by the
solicitude of which she had, already, three weeks before, given him a
view, she had been obliged, on a second thought, to name, intelligibly,
a reason for her appeal; while the Prince, on his side, had had, not
without mercy, his glimpse of her momentarily groping for one and yet
remaining unprovided. Not without mercy because, absolutely, he had on
the spot, in his friendliness, invented one for her use, presenting it
to her with a look no more significant than if he had picked up, to hand
back to her, a dropped flower. “You ask if I’m likely also to back
out then, because it may make a difference in what you and the Colonel
decide?”—he had gone as far as that for her, fairly inviting her
to assent, though not having had his impression, from any indication
offered him by Charlotte, that the Assinghams were really in question
for the large Matcham party. The wonderful thing, after this, was that
the active couple had, in the interval, managed to inscribe themselves
on the golden roll; an exertion of a sort that, to do her justice,
he had never before observed Fanny to make. This last passage of the
chapter but proved, after all, with what success she could work when she
would.
Once launched, himself, at any rate, as he had been directed by all the
terms of the intercourse between Portland Place and Eaton Square, once
steeped, at Matcham, in the enjoyment of a splendid hospitality, he
found everything, for his interpretation, for his convenience, fall
easily enough into place; and all the more that Mrs. Verver was at hand
to exchange ideas and impressions with. The great house was full of
people, of possible new combinations, of the quickened play of possible
propinquity, and no appearance, of course, was less to be cultivated
than that of his having sought an opportunity to foregather with his
friend at a safe distance from their respective sposi. There was a happy
boldness, at the best, in their mingling thus, each unaccompanied,
in the same sustained sociability—just exactly a touch of that
eccentricity of associated freedom which sat so lightly on the
imagination of the relatives left behind. They were exposed as much
as one would to its being pronounced funny that they should, at such a
rate, go about together—though, on the other hand, this consideration
drew relief from the fact that, in their high conditions and with
the easy tradition, the almost inspiring allowances, of the house in
question, no individual line, however freely marked, was pronounced
anything more than funny. Both our friends felt afresh, as they had felt
before, the convenience of a society so placed that it had only its own
sensibility to consider—looking as it did well over the heads of all
lower growths; and that moreover treated its own sensibility quite as
the easiest, friendliest, most informal and domesticated party to the
general alliance. What anyone “thought” of anyone else—above all of
anyone else with anyone else—was a matter incurring in these lulls so
little awkward formulation that hovering judgment, the spirit with the
scales, might perfectly have been imaged there as some rather snubbed
and subdued, but quite trained and tactful poor relation, of equal, of
the properest, lineage, only of aspect a little dingy, doubtless from
too limited a change of dress, for whose tacit and abstemious presence,
never betrayed by a rattle of her rusty machine, a room in the attic and
a plate at the side-table were decently usual. It was amusing, in such
lightness of air, that the Prince should again present himself only to
speak for the Princess, so unfortunately unable, again, to leave home;
and that Mrs. Verver should as regularly figure as an embodied, a
beautifully deprecating apology for her husband, who was all geniality
and humility among his own treasures, but as to whom the legend had
grown up that he couldn’t bear, with the height of his standards and the
tone of the company, in the way of sofas and cabinets, habitually kept
by him, the irritation and depression to which promiscuous visiting,
even at pompous houses, had been found to expose him. That was all
right, the noted working harmony of the clever son-in-law and the
charming stepmother, so long as the relation was, for the effect in
question, maintained at the proper point between sufficiency and excess.
What with the noble fairness of the place, meanwhile, the generous mood
of the sunny, gusty, lusty English April, all panting and heaving with
impatience, or kicking and crying, even, at moments, like some infant
Hercules who wouldn’t be dressed; what with these things and the bravery
of youth and beauty, the insolence of fortune and appetite so diffused
among his fellow-guests that the poor Assinghams, in their comparatively
marked maturity and their comparatively small splendour, were the only
approach to a false note in the concert, the stir of the air was
such, for going, in a degree, to one’s head, that, as a mere matter of
exposure, almost grotesque in its flagrancy, his situation resembled
some elaborate practical joke carried out at his expense. Every voice in
the great bright house was a call to the ingenuities and impunities
of pleasure; every echo was a defiance of difficulty, doubt or danger;
every aspect of the picture, a glowing plea for the immediate, and as
with plenty more to come, was another phase of the spell. For a world so
constituted was governed by a spell, that of the smile of the gods and
the favour of the powers; the only handsome, the only gallant, in fact
the only intelligent acceptance of which was a faith in its guarantees
and a high spirit for its chances. Its demand—to that the thing came
back—was above all for courage and good-humour; and the value of
this as a general assurance—that is for seeing one through at the
worst—had not even in the easiest hours of his old Roman life struck
the Prince so convincingly. His old Roman life had had more poetry, no
doubt, but as he looked back upon it now it seemed to hang in the air
of mere iridescent horizons, to have been loose and vague and thin, with
large languorous unaccountable blanks. The present order, as it spread
about him, had somehow the ground under its feet, and a trumpet in its
ears, and a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns—which
was much to the point—in its hand. Courage and good-humour therefore
were the breath of the day; though for ourselves at least it would have
been also much to the point that, with Amerigo, really, the innermost
effect of all this perceptive ease was perhaps a strange final
irritation. He compared the lucid result with the extraordinary
substitute for perception that presided, in the bosom of his wife, at
so contented a view of his conduct and course—a state of mind that was
positively like a vicarious good conscience, cultivated ingeniously on
his behalf, a perversity of pressure innocently persisted in; and this
wonder of irony became on occasion too intense to be kept wholly to
himself. It wasn’t that, at Matcham, anything particular, anything
monstrous, anything that had to be noticed permitted itself, as they
said, to “happen”; there were only odd moments when the breath of the
day, as it has been called, struck him so full in the face that he broke
out with all the hilarity of “What indeed would THEY have made of it?”
“They” were of course Maggie and her father, moping—so far as they
ever consented to mope in monotonous Eaton Square, but placid too in the
belief that they knew beautifully what their expert companions were
in for. They knew, it might have appeared in these lights, absolutely
nothing on earth worth speaking of—whether beautifully or cynically;
and they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying if they would
only once for all peacefully admit that knowledge wasn’t one of their
needs and that they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it.
They were good children, bless their hearts, and the children of good
children; so that, verily, the Principino himself, as less consistently
of that descent, might figure to the fancy as the ripest genius of the
trio.
The difficulty was, for the nerves of daily intercourse with Maggie in
particular, that her imagination was clearly never ruffled by the sense
of any anomaly. The great anomaly would have been that her husband, or
even that her father’s wife, should prove to have been made, for the
long run, after the pattern set from so far back to the Ververs. If one
was so made one had certainly no business, on any terms, at Matcham;
whereas if one wasn’t one had no business there on the particular
terms—terms of conformity with the principles of Eaton Square—under
which one had been so absurdly dedicated. Deep at the heart of that
resurgent unrest in our young man which we have had to content ourselves
with calling his irritation—deep in the bosom of this falsity of
position glowed the red spark of his inextinguishable sense of a higher
and braver propriety. There were situations that were ridiculous, but
that one couldn’t yet help, as for instance when one’s wife chose, in
the most usual way, to make one so. Precisely here, however, was the
difference; it had taken poor Maggie to invent a way so extremely
unusual—yet to which, none the less, it would be too absurd that he
should merely lend himself. Being thrust, systematically, with another
woman, and a woman one happened, by the same token, exceedingly to
like, and being so thrust that the theory of it seemed to publish one
as idiotic or incapable—this WAS a predicament of which the dignity
depended all on one’s own handling. What was supremely grotesque, in
fact, was the essential opposition of theories—as if a galantuomo, as
HE at least constitutionally conceived galantuomini, could do anything
BUT blush to “go about” at such a rate with such a person as Mrs. Verver
in a state of childlike innocence, the state of our primitive parents
before the Fall. The grotesque theory, as he would have called it, was
perhaps an odd one to resent with violence, and he did it—also as a man
of the world—all merciful justice; but, assuredly, none the less, there
was but one way REALLY to mark, and for his companion as much as for
himself, the commiseration in which they held it. Adequate comment on it
could only be private, but it could also at least be active, and of rich
and effectual comment Charlotte and he were fortunately alike capable.
Wasn’t this consensus literally their only way not to be ungracious? It
was positively as if the measure of their escape from that danger were
given by the growth between them, during their auspicious visit, of an
exquisite sense of complicity.