



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