The Golden Bowl - Henry James [42]
This was the way he dealt with his wife, a large proportion of whose meanings he knew he could neglect. He edited for their general economy the play of her mind, just as he edited, savingly, with the stump of a pencil, her redundant telegrams. The thing in the world that was least of a mystery to him was his Club, which he was accepted as perhaps too completely managing, and which he managed on lines of perfect penetration. His connexion with it was really a masterpiece of editing. This was in fact, to come back, very much the process he might have been proposing to apply to Mrs Assingham’s view of what was now before them; that is to their connexion with Charlotte Stant’s possibilities. They wouldn’t lavish on them all their little fortune of curiosity and alarm; certainly they wouldn’t spend their cherished savings so early in the day. He liked Charlotte, moreover, who was a smooth and compact inmate and whom he felt as, with her instincts that made against waste, much more of his own sort than his wife. He could talk with her about Fanny almost better than he could talk with Fanny about Charlotte. However, he made at present the best of the latter necessity, even to the pressing of the question he has been noted as having last uttered. ‘If you can’t think what to be afraid of, wait till you can think. Then you’ll do it much better. Or otherwise, if that’s waiting too long, find out from her. Don’t try to find out from me. Ask her herself.’
Mrs Assingham denied, as we know, that her husband had a play of mind; so that she could, on her side, treat these remarks only as if they had been senseless physical gestures or nervous facial movements. She overlooked them as from habit and kindness; yet there was no one to whom she talked so persistently of such intimate things. ‘It’s her friendship with Maggie that’s the immense complication. Because that,’ she audibly mused, ‘is so natural.’
‘Then why can’t she have come out for it?’
‘She came out,’ Mrs Assingham continued to meditate, ‘because she hates America. There was no place for her there – she didn’t fit in. She wasn’t in sympathy – no more were the people she saw. Then it’s hideously dear; she can’t, on her means, begin to live there. Not at all she can, in a way, here.’
‘In the way, you mean, of living with us?’
‘Of living with any one. She can’t live by visits alone – and she doesn’t want to. She’s too good for it even if she could. But she will – she must, sooner or later – stay with them. Maggie will want her – Maggie will make her. Besides, she’ll want to herself.’
‘Then why won’t that do,’ the Colonel asked, ‘for you to think it’s what she has come for?’
‘How will it do, how?’ – she went on as without hearing him. ‘That’s what one keeps feeling.’
‘Why shouldn’t it do beautifully?’
‘That anything of the past,’ she brooded, ‘should come back now? How will it do, how will it do?’
‘It will do, I dare say, without your wringing your hands over it. When, my dear,’ the Colonel pursued as he smoked, ‘have you ever seen anything of yours – anything that you’ve done – not do?’
‘Ah I didn’t do this!’ It brought her answer straight. ‘I didn’t bring her back.’
‘Did you expect her to stay over there all her days to oblige you?’
‘Not a bit – for I shouldn’t have minded her coming after their marriage. It’s her coming this way before.’ To which she added with inconsequence: ‘I’m too sorry for her – of course she can’t enjoy it. But I don’t see what perversity rides her. She needn’t have looked it all so in the face – as she doesn’t do it, I suppose, simply for discipline. It’s almost – that’s the bore of it – discipline to me.’
‘Perhaps then,’ said Bob Assingham, ‘that’s what has been her idea. Take it, for God’s sake, as discipline to you and have done with it. It will do,’ he added, ‘for discipline to me as well.’
She was far, however, from having