The Golden Bowl - Henry James [21]
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 musée.’7
‘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 covered 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,8 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.