The Golden Bowl - Henry James [157]
She had paused there before him while he wondered. ‘You mean she’ll get the Prince back?’
She raised her hand in quick impatience: the suggestion might have been almost abject. ‘It isn’t a question of recovery. It won’t be a question of any vulgar struggle. To “get him back” she must have lost him, and to have lost him she must have had him.’ With which Fanny shook her head. ‘What I take her to be waking up to is the truth that all the while she really hasn’t had him. Never.’
‘Ah my dear –!’ the poor Colonel panted.
‘Never!’ his wife inexorably repeated. And she went on without pity. ‘Do you remember what I said to you long ago – that evening, just before their marriage, when Charlotte had so suddenly turned up?’
The smile with which he met this appeal wasn’t, it was to be feared, robust. ‘What haven’t you, love, said in your time?’
‘So many things, no doubt that they make a chance for my having once or twice spoken the truth. I never spoke it more, at all events, than when I declared, on that occasion, that Maggie was the creature in the world to whom a wrong thing could least be communicated. It was as if her imagination had been closed to it, her sense altogether sealed. That therefore,’ Fanny continued, ‘is what will now have to happen. Her sense will have to open.’
‘I see.’ He nodded. ‘To the wrong.’ He nodded again almost cheerfully – as if he had been keeping the peace with a baby or a lunatic. ‘To the very, very wrong.’
But his wife’s spirit, after its effort of wing, was able to remain higher. ‘To what’s called Evil – with a very big E: for the first time in her life. To the discovery of it, to the knowledge of it, to the crude experience of it.’ And she gave, for the possibility, the largest measure. ‘To the harsh bewildering brush, the daily chilling breath of it. Unless indeed’ – and here Mrs Assingham noted a limit – ‘unless indeed, as yet (so far as she has come, and if she comes no further), simply to the suspicion and the dread. What we shall see is whether that mere dose of alarm will prove enough.’
He considered. ‘But enough for what then, dear – if not enough to break her heart?’
‘Enough to give her a shaking!’ Mrs Assingham rather oddly replied. ‘To give her, I mean, the right one. The right one won’t break her heart. It will make her,’ she explained – ‘well, it will make her, by way of a change, understand one or two things in the world.’
‘But isn’t it a pity,’ the Colonel asked, ‘that they should happen to be the one or two that will be the most disagreeable to her?’
‘Oh “disagreeable” –? They’ll have had to be disagreeable – to show her a little where she is. They’ll have had to be disagreeable to make her sit up. They’ll have had to be disagreeable to make her decide to live.’
Bob Assingham was now at the window, while his companion slowly revolved; he had lighted a cigarette, for final patience, and he seemed vaguely to ‘time’ her as she moved to and fro. He had at the same time to do justice to the lucidity she had at last attained, and it was doubtless by way of expression of this teachability that he let his eyes roll, for a minute, as from the force of feeling, over the upper dusk of the room. He had thought of the response his wife’s words ideally implied. ‘Decide to live – ah yes! – for her child.’
‘Oh bother her child!’ – and he had never felt so snubbed, for an exemplary view, as when Fanny now stopped short. ‘To live, you poor dear, for her father – which is another pair of sleeves!’ And Mrs Assingham’s whole ample ornamented person irradiated, with this, the truth that had begun, under so much handling, to glow. ‘Any idiot can do things for her child. She’ll have a motive more original, and we shall see how it will work her. She’ll have to save him.’
‘To “save” him –?’
‘To keep her father from her own knowledge. That’ – and she seemed to see it, before her, in her husband’s very eyes – ‘will be work cut out!’ With which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she wound up their colloquy. ‘Good-night!’
There was something in her manner, however – or in the effect