The Golden Bowl - Henry James [20]
‘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 bêtises6 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 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 thought 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