The Golden Bowl - Henry James [180]
It was a worked-out scheme for their not wounding her, for their behaving to her quite nobly; to which each had in some winning way induced the other to contribute, and which therefore, so far as that went, proved she had become with them a subject of intimate study. Quickly, quickly, on a certain alarm taken, eagerly and anxiously, before they should, without knowing it, wound her, they had signalled from house to house their clever idea, the idea by which for all these days her own idea had been profiting. They had built her in with their purpose – which was why, above her, a vault seemed more heavily to arch; so that she sat there in the solid chamber of her helplessness as in a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her, over the brim of which she could but just manage to see by stretching her neck. Baths of benevolence were very well, but at least, unless one were a patient of some sort, a nervous eccentric or a lost child, one usually wasn’t so immersed save by one’s request. It wasn’t in the least what she had requested. She had flapped her little wings as a symbol of desired flight, not merely as a plea for a more gilded cage and an extra allowance of lumps of sugar. Above all she hadn’t complained, not by the quaver of a syllable – so what wound in particular had she shown her fear of receiving? What wound had she received – as to which she had exchanged the least word with them? If she had ever whined or moped they might have had some reason; but she would be hanged – she conversed with herself in strong language – if she had been from beginning to end anything but pliable and mild. It all came back in consequence to some required process of their own, a process operating quite positively as a precaution and a policy. They had got her into the bath and, for consistency with themselves – which was with each other – must keep her there. In that condition she wouldn’t interfere with the policy, which was established, which was arranged. Her thought over this arrived at a great intensity – had indeed its pauses and timidities, but always to take afterwards a further and lighter spring. The ground was well-nigh covered by the time she had made out her husband and his colleague as directly interested in preventing her freedom of movement. Policy or no policy, it was they themselves who were arranged. She must be kept in position so as not to disarrange them. It fitted immensely together, the whole thing, as soon as she could give them a motive; for, strangely as it had by this time begun to appear to herself, she hadn’t hitherto imagined them sustained by an ideal distinguishably different from her own. Of course they were arranged – all four arranged; but what had the basis of their life been precisely but that they were arranged together? Ah! Amerigo and Charlotte were arranged together, but she – to confine the matter only to herself – was arranged apart. It rushed over her, the full sense of all this, with quite another rush from that of the breaking wave of ten days before; and as her father himself seemed not to meet the vaguely-clutching hand with which, during the first shock of complete perception, she tried to steady herself, so she felt very much alone.
3
There had been from far back – that is from the Christmas-time on – a plan that the parent and the child should ‘do something lovely’ together, and they had recurred to it on occasion, nursed it and brought it up theoretically,