The Golden Bowl - Henry James [128]
‘Oh they’ve a great deal of idea,’ said the Prince. And nothing was easier than to mention the quantity. ‘They think so much of us. They think in particular so much of you.’
‘Ah don’t put it all on “me”!’ she smiled.
But he was putting it now where she had admirably prepared the place. ‘It’s a matter of your known character.’
‘Ah thank you for “known”!’ she still smiled.
‘It’s a matter of your wonderful cleverness and wonderful charm. It’s a matter of what those things have done for you in the world – I mean in this world and this place. You’re a Personage for them – and Personages do go and come.’
‘Oh no, my dear; there you’re quite wrong.’ And she laughed now in the happier light they had diffused. ‘That’s exactly what Personages don’t do: they live in state and under constant consideration; they haven’t latch-keys, but drums and trumpets announce them; and when they go out in “growlers” it makes a greater noise still. It’s you, caro mio,’ she said, ‘who, so far as that goes, are the Personage.’
‘Ah,’ he in turn protested, ‘don’t put it all on me! What, at any rate, when you get home,’ he added, ‘shall you say that you’ve been doing?’
‘I shall say, beautifully, that I’ve been here.’
‘All day?’
‘Yes – all day. Keeping you company in your solitude. How can we understand anything,’ she went on, ‘without really seeing that this is what they must like to think I do for you? – just as, quite as comfortably, you do it for me. The thing is for us to learn to take them as they are.’
He considered this a while, in his restless way, but with his eyes not turning from her; after which, rather disconnectedly, though very vehemently, he brought out: ‘How can I not feel more than anything else how they adore together my boy?’ And then, further, as if, slightly disconcerted, she had nothing to meet this and he quickly perceived the effect: ‘They’d have done the same for one of yours.’
‘Ah if I could have had one –! I hoped and I believed,’ said Charlotte, ‘that that would happen. It would have been better. It would have made perhaps some difference. He thought so too, poor duck – that it might have been. I’m sure he hoped and intended so. It’s not, at any rate,’ she went on, ‘my fault. There it is.’ She had uttered these statements, one by one, gravely, sadly and responsibly, owing it to her friend to be clear. She paused briefly, but, as if once for all, she made her clearness complete. ‘And now I’m too sure. It will never be.’
He waited for a moment. ‘Never?’
‘Never.’ They treated the matter not exactly with solemnity, but with a certain decency, even perhaps urgency, of distinctness. ‘It would probably have been better,’ Charlotte added. ‘But things turn out –! And it leaves us’ – she made the point – ‘more alone.’
He seemed to wonder. ‘It leaves you more alone.’
‘Oh,’ she again returned, ‘don’t put it all on me! Maggie would have given herself to his child, I’m sure, scarcely less than he gives himself to yours. It would have taken more than any child of mine,’ she explained – ‘it would have taken more than ten children of mine, could I have had them – to keep our sposi apart.’ She smiled as for the breadth of the image, but as he seemed to take it in spite of this for important she then spoke gravely enough. ‘It’s as strange as you like, but we’re immensely alone.’ He kept vaguely moving, but there were moments when again, with an awkward ease and his hands in his pockets, he was more directly before her. He stood there at these last words, which had the effect of making him for a little throw back his head and, as thinking something out, stare up at the ceiling. ‘What will you say,’ she meanwhile asked, ‘that you’ve been doing?’ This brought his consciousness and his eyes back to her, and she pointed her question. ‘I mean when she comes in – for I suppose she will, some time, come in. It seems to me we must say the same thing.’
Well, he thought again. ‘Yet I can scarce pretend