The Golden Bowl - Henry James [122]
‘Of tea with me over the fire? Ah so far as that goes. I don’t think even my intelligence fails me.’
‘Oh it’s further than that goes; and if I’ve had a better day than you it’s perhaps, when I come to think of it, that I am braver. You bore yourself, you see. But I don’t. I don’t, I don’t,’ she repeated.
‘It’s precisely boring one’s self without relief,’ he protested, ‘that takes courage.’
‘Passive then – not active. My romance is that, if you want to know, I’ve been all day on the town. Literally on the town – isn’t that what they call it? I know how it feels.’ After which, as if breaking off, ‘And you, have you never been out?’ she asked.
He still stood there with his hands in his pockets. ‘What should I have gone out for?’
‘Oh what should people in our case do anything for? But you’re wonderful, all of you – you know how to live. We’re clumsy brutes, we others, beside you – we must always be “doing” something. However,’ Charlotte pursued, ‘if you had gone out you might have missed the chance of me – which I’m sure, though you won’t confess it, was what you didn’t want; and might have missed above all the satisfaction that, look blank about it as you will, I’ve come to congratulate you on. That’s really what I can at last do. You can’t not know at least, on such a day as this – you can’t not know,’ she said, ‘where you are.’ She waited as for him either to grant he knew or pretend he didn’t; but he only drew a long deep breath which came out like a moan of impatience. It brushed aside the question of where he was or what he knew; it seemed to keep the ground clear for the question of his visitor herself, that of Charlotte Verver exactly as she sat there. So for some moments, with their long look, they but treated the matter in silence; with the effect indeed, by the end of the time, of having considerably brought it on. This was sufficiently marked in what Charlotte next said. ‘There it all is – extraordinary beyond words. It makes such a relation for us as, I verily believe, was never before in the world thrust upon two well-meaning creatures. Haven’t we therefore to take things as we find them?’ She put the question still more directly than that of a moment before, but to this one as well he returned no immediate answer. Noticing only that she had finished her tea he relieved her of her cup, carried it back to the table, asked her what more she would have; and then, on her ‘Nothing, thanks,’ returned to the fire and restored a displaced log to position by a small but almost too effectual kick. She had meanwhile got up again, and it was on her feet that she repeated the words she had first frankly spoken. ‘What else can we do, what in all the world else?’
He took them up however no more than at first. ‘Where then have you been?’ he asked as from mere interest in her adventure.
‘Everywhere I could think of – except to see people. I didn’t want people – I wanted too much to think. But I’ve been back at intervals – three times; and then come away again. My cabman must think me crazy – it’s very amusing; I shall owe him, when we come to settle, more money than he has ever seen. I’ve been, my dear,’ she went on, ‘to the British Museum – which you know I always adore. And I’ve been to the National Gallery and to a dozen old booksellers’, coming across treasures, and I’ve lunched, on some strange nastiness, at a cookshop in Holborn. I wanted to go to the Tower, but it was too far