"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 it 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.