The Golden Bowl - Henry James [55]
Her friend again, for propriety, followed the argument. ‘Oh I don’t know. May not one’s affection for her do something more for one’s decency, as you call it, than her own generosity – her own affection, her “decency” – has the unfortunate virtue to undo?’
‘Ah of course it must be all in that.’
But she had made her question, all the same, interesting to him. ‘What it comes to – one can see what you mean – is the way she believes in one. That is if she believes at all.’
‘Yes, that’s what it comes to,’ said Charlotte Stant.
‘And why,’ he asked almost soothingly, ‘should it be terrible?’ He couldn’t at the worst see that.
‘Because it’s always so – the idea of having to pity people.’
‘Not when there’s also with it the idea of helping them.’
‘Yes, but if we can’t help them?’
‘We can – we always can. That is,’ he competently added, ‘if we care for them. And that’s what we’re talking about.’
‘Yes’ – she on the whole assented. ‘It comes back then to our absolutely refusing to be spoiled.’
‘Certainly. But everything,’ the Prince laughed as they went on – ‘all your “decency”, I mean – comes back to that.’
She walked beside him a moment. ‘It’s just what I meant,’ she then reasonably said.
6
The man in the little shop in which, well after this, they lingered longest, the small but interesting dealer in the Bloomsbury street who was remarkable for an insistence not importunate, inasmuch as it was mainly mute, but singularly, intensely coercive – this personage fixed on his visitors an extraordinary pair of eyes and looked from one to the other while they considered the object with which he appeared mainly to hope to tempt them. They had come to him last, for their time was nearly up; an hour of it at least, from the moment of their getting into a hansom1 at the Marble Arch, having yielded no better result than the amusement invoked from the first. The amusement of course was to have consisted in seeking, but it had also involved the idea of finding; which latter necessity would have been obtrusive only if they had found too soon. The question at present was if they were finding, and they put it to each other, in the Bloomsbury shop, while they enjoyed the undiverted attention of the shopman. He was clearly the master and devoted to his business – the essence of which, in his conception, might precisely have been this particular secret that he possessed for worrying the customer so little that it fairly threw over their relation a sort of solemnity. He hadn’t many things, none of the redundancy of ‘rot’2 they had elsewhere seen, and our friends had, on entering, even had the sense of a muster so scant that, as high values obviously wouldn’t reign, the effect might be almost pitiful. Then their impression had changed; for, though the show was of small pieces, several taken from the little window and others extracted from a cupboard behind the counter – dusky, in the rather low-browed place, despite its glass doors – each bid for their attention spoke, however modestly, for itself, and the pitch of their entertainer’s pretensions was promptly enough given. His array was heterogeneous and not at all imposing; still it differed agreeably from what they had hitherto seen.
Charlotte, after the incident, was to be full of impressions, of several of which, later on, she gave her companion – always in the interest of their amusement – the benefit; and one of the impressions had been that the man himself was the greatest curiosity they had looked at. The Prince was to reply to this that he himself hadn’t looked at him; as, precisely, in the general connexion, Charlotte had more than once, from other days, noted, for his advantage, her consciousness of how, below a certain social plane, he never saw. One kind of shopman was just like another to him – which was oddly inconsequent on the part of a mind that where it did notice noticed so much. He took throughout always the meaner sort for granted – the night of their meanness, or whatever name one might give it for him, made all his cats grey.3 He didn’t, no doubt, want