The Golden Bowl - Henry James [22]
‘I like the class,’ he had laughed for this, ‘in which you place me! I shall be one of the little pieces that you unpack at the hotels, or at the worst in the hired houses, like this wonderful one, and put out with the family photographs and the new magazines. But it’s something not to be so big that I have to be buried.’
‘Oh,’ she had returned, ‘you shall not be buried, my dear, till you’re dead. Unless indeed you call it burial to go to American City.’
‘Before I pronounce I should like to see my tomb.’ So he had had, after his fashion, the last word in their interchange, save for the result of an observation that had risen to his lips at the beginning, which he had then checked, and which now came back to him. ‘Good, bad or indifferent, I hope there’s one thing you believe about me.’
He had sounded solemn even to himself, but she had taken it gaily. ‘Ah don’t fix me down to “one”! I believe things enough about you, my dear, to have a few left if most of them even go to smash. I’ve taken care of that. I’ve divided my faith into water-tight compartments. We must manage not to sink.’
‘You do believe I’m not a hypocrite? You recognise that I don’t lie nor dissemble nor deceive? Is that water-tight?’
The question, to which he had given a certain intensity, had made her, he remembered, stare an instant, her colour rising as if it had sounded to her still stranger than he had intended. He had perceived on the spot that any serious discussion of veracity, of loyalty, or rather of the want of them, practically took her unprepared, as if it were quite new to her. He had noticed it before: it was the English, the American sign that duplicity, like ‘love’, had to be joked about. It couldn’t be ‘gone into’. So the note of his enquiry was – well, to call it nothing else – premature; a mistake worth making, however, for the almost overdone drollery in which her answer instinctively sought refuge.
‘Water-tight – the biggest compartment of all? Why it’s the best cabin and the main deck and the engine-room and the steward’s pantry! It’s the ship itself – it’s the whole line. It’s the captain’s table and all one’s luggage – one’s reading for the trip.’ She had images, like that, that were drawn from steamers and trains, from a familiarity with ‘lines’, a command of ‘own’ cars,9 from an experience of continents and seas, that he was unable as yet to emulate; from vast modern machineries and facilities whose acquaintance he had still to make, but as to which it was part of the interest of his situation as it stood that he could, quite without wincing, feel his future likely to bristle with them.
It was in fact, content as he was with his engagement and charming as he thought his affianced bride, his view of that furniture that mainly constituted our young man’s ‘romance’ – and to an extent that made of his inward state a contrast that he was intelligent enough to feel. He was intelligent enough to feel quite humble, to wish not to be in the least hard or voracious, not to insist on his own side of the bargain, to warn himself in short against arrogance and greed. Odd enough, of a truth, was his sense of this last danger – which may illustrate moreover his general attitude toward dangers from within. Personally, he considered, he hadn’t the vices in question – and that was so much to the good. His race, on the other hand, had had them handsomely enough, and he was somehow full of his race. Its presence in him was like the consciousness of some inexpugnable scent in which his clothes, his whole person, his hands and the hair of his head, might have been