



Produced by Eve Sobol





THE GOLDEN BOWL

Volumes I and II, Complete

By Henry James


1904





BOOK FIRST: THE PRINCE




PART FIRST

                             I

The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was
one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image
of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber.
Brought up on the legend of the City to which the world paid tribute, he
recognised in the present London much more than in contemporary Rome the
real dimensions of such a case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he
said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the
sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a
fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. It was not indeed to either
of those places that these grounds of his predilection, after all
sufficiently vague, had, at the moment we are concerned with him, guided
his steps; he had strayed, simply enough, into Bond Street, where his
imagination, working at comparatively short range, caused him now and
then to stop before a window in which objects massive and lumpish, in
silver and gold, in the forms to which precious stones contribute, or
in leather, steel, brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as
tumbled together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been
the loot of far-off victories. The young man's movements, however,
betrayed no consistency of attention--not even, for that matter, when
one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces shaded,
as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more
delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held at
perverse angles in waiting victorias. And the Prince's undirected
thought was not a little symptomatic, since, though the turn of
the season had come and the flush of the streets begun to fade, the
possibilities of faces, on the August afternoon, were still one of the
notes of the scene. He was too restless--that was the fact--for any
concentration, and the last idea that would just now have occurred to
him in any connection was the idea of pursuit.

He had been pursuing for six months as never in his life before, and
what had actually unsteadied him, as we join him, was the sense of how
he had been justified. Capture had crowned the pursuit--or success,
as he would otherwise have put it, had rewarded virtue; whereby the
consciousness of these things made him, for the hour, rather serious
than gay. A sobriety that might have consorted with failure sat in his
handsome face, constructively regular and grave, yet at the same time
oddly and, as might be, functionally almost radiant, with its dark
blue eyes, its dark brown moustache and its expression no more sharply
"foreign" to an English view than to have caused it sometimes to be
observed of him with a shallow felicity that he looked like a "refined"
Irishman. What had happened was that shortly before, at three o'clock,
his fate had practically been sealed, and that even when one pretended
to no quarrel with it the moment had something of the grimness of a
crunched key in the strongest lock that could be made. There was nothing
to do as yet, further, but feel what one had done, and our personage
felt it while he aimlessly wandered. It was already as if he were
married, so definitely had the solicitors, at three o'clock, enabled the
date to be fixed, and by so few days was that date now distant. He was
to dine at half-past eight o'clock with the young lady on whose behalf,
and on whose father's, the London lawyers had reached an inspired
harmony with his own man of business, poor Calderoni, fresh from Rome
and now apparently in the wondrous situation of being "shown London,"
before promptly leaving it again, by Mr. Verver himself, Mr. Verver
whose easy way with his millions had taxed to such small purpose, in the
arrangements, the principle of reciprocity. The reciprocity with which
the Prince was during these minutes most struck was that of Calderoni's
bestowal of his company for a view of the lions. If there was one thing
in the world the young man, at this juncture, clearly intended, it was
to be much more decent as a son-in-law than lots of fellows he could
think of had shown themselves in that character. He thought of these
fellows, from whom he was so to differ, in English; he used, mentally,
the English term to describe his difference, for, familiar with the
tongue from his earliest years, so that no note of strangeness remained
with him either for lip or for ear, he found it convenient, in life, for
the greatest number of relations. He found it convenient, oddly, even
for his relation with himself--though not unmindful that there might
still, as time went on, be others, including a more intimate degree of
that one, that would seek, possibly with violence, the larger or the
finer issue--which was it?--of the vernacular. Miss Verver had told him
he spoke English too well--it was his only fault, and he had not been
able to speak worse even to oblige her. "When I speak worse, you see,
I speak French," he had said; intimating thus that there were
discriminations, doubtless of the invidious kind, for which that
language was the most apt. The girl had taken this, she let him know,
as a reflection on her own French, which she had always so dreamed of
making good, of making better; to say nothing of his evident feeling
that the idiom supposed a cleverness she was not a person to rise to.
The Prince's answer to such remarks--genial, charming, like every answer
the parties to his new arrangement had yet had from him--was that he was
practising his American in order to converse properly, on equal terms as
it were, with Mr. Verver. His prospective father-in-law had a command of
it, he said, that put him at a disadvantage in any discussion; besides
which--well, besides which he had made to the girl the observation that
positively, of all his observations yet, had most finely touched her.

"You know I think he's a REAL galantuomo--'and no mistake.' There are
plenty of sham ones about. He seems to me simply the best man I've ever
seen in my life."

"Well, my dear, why shouldn't he be?" the girl had gaily inquired.

It was this, precisely, that had set the Prince to think. The things, or
many of them, that had made Mr. Verver what he was seemed practically
to bring a charge of waste against the other things that, with the other
people known to the young man, had failed of such a result. "Why, his
'form,'" he had returned, "might have made one doubt."

"Father's form?" She hadn't seen it. "It strikes me he hasn't got any."

"He hasn't got mine--he hasn't even got yours."

"Thank you for 'even'!" the girl had laughed at him. "Oh, yours, my
dear, is tremendous. But your father has his own. I've made that out. So
don't doubt it. It's where it has brought him out--that's the point."

"It's his goodness that has brought him out," our young woman had, at
this, objected.

"Ah, darling, goodness, I think, never brought anyone out. Goodness,
when it's real, precisely, rather keeps people in." He had been
interested in his discrimination, which amused him. "No, it's his WAY.
It belongs to him."

But she had wondered still. "It's the American way. That's all."

"Exactly--it's all. It's all, I say! It fits him--so it must be good for
something."

"Do you think it would be good for you?" Maggie Verver had smilingly
asked.

To which his reply had been just of the happiest. "I don't feel, my
dear, if you really want to know, that anything much can now either hurt
me or help me. Such as I am--but you'll see for yourself. Say, however,
I am a galantuomo--which I devoutly hope: I'm like a chicken, at best,
chopped up and smothered in sauce; cooked down as a creme de volaille,
with half the parts left out. Your father's the natural fowl running
about the bassecour. His feathers, movements, his sounds--those are the
parts that, with me, are left out."

"All, as a matter of course--since you can't eat a chicken alive!"

The Prince had not been annoyed at this, but he had been positive.
"Well, I'm eating your father alive--which is the only way to taste him.
I want to continue, and as it's when he talks American that he is most
alive, so I must also cultivate it, to get my pleasure. He couldn't make
one like him so much in any other language."

It mattered little that the girl had continued to demur--it was the mere
play of her joy. "I think he could make you like him in Chinese."

"It would be an unnecessary trouble. What I mean is that he's a kind
of result of his inevitable tone. My liking is accordingly FOR the
tone--which has made him possible."

"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 betises 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--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 thoughts
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 in it that is beautiful. I mean we see so much."

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
musee."

"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 looked at 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, 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