The Golden Bowl - Henry James [191]
‘ “The immorality”?’ she had pleasantly echoed.
‘Well, we’re tremendously moral for ourselves – that is for each other; and I won’t pretend that I know exactly at whose particular personal expense you and I for instance are happy. What it comes to, I dare say, is that there’s something haunting – as if it were a bit uncanny – in such a consciousness of our general comfort and privilege. Unless indeed,’ he had rambled on, ‘it’s only I to whom, fantastically, it says so much. That’s all I mean at any rate – that it’s “sort of” soothing; as if we were sitting about on divans, with pigtails, smoking opium and seeing visions. “Let us then be up and doing” – what is it Longfellow1 says? That seems sometimes to ring out; like the police breaking in – into our opium-den – to give us a shake. But the beauty of it is at the same time that we are doing; we’re doing, that is, after all, what we went in for. We’re working it, our life, our chance, whatever you may call it, as we saw it, as we felt it, from the first. We have worked it, and what more can you do than that? It’s a good deal for me,’ he had wound up, ‘to have made Charlotte so happy – to have so perfectly contented her. You, from a good way back, were a matter of course – I mean your being all right; so I needn’t mind your knowing that my great interest since then has rather inevitably been in making sure of the same success, very much to your advantage as well, for Charlotte. If we’ve worked our life, our idea really, as I say – if at any rate I can sit here and say that I’ve worked my share of it – it has not been what you may call least by our having put Charlotte so at her ease. That has been soothing, all round; that has curled up as the biggest of the blue fumes, or whatever they are, of the opium. Don’t you see what a cropper we would have come if she hadn’t settled down as she has?’ And he had concluded by turning to Maggie as for something she mightn’t really have thought of. ‘You, darling, in that case, I verily believe, would have been the one to hate it most.’
‘To hate it –?’ Maggie had invoked vagueness.
‘To hate our having, with our tremendous intentions, not brought it off. And I dare say I should have hated it for you even more than for myself.’
‘That’s not unlikely perhaps when it was for me, after all, that you did it.’
He had hesitated, but only a moment. ‘I never told you so.’
‘Well, Charlotte herself soon enough told me.’
‘But I never told her,’ her father had answered.
‘Are you very sure?’ she had presently asked.
‘Well, I like to think how thoroughly I was taken with her, and how right I was, and how fortunate, to have that for my basis. I told her all the good I thought of her.’
‘Then that,’ Maggie had returned, ‘was precisely part of the good. I mean it was precisely part of it that she could so beautifully understand.’
‘Yes – understand everything.’
‘Everything – and in particular your reasons. Her telling me – that showed me how she had understood.’
They were face to face again now, and she saw she had made his colour rise; it was as if he were still finding in her eyes the concrete image, the enacted scene, of her passage with Charlotte, which he was actually hearing of for the first time and as to which it would have been natural he should question her further. His forbearance to do so would but mark precisely the complication of his fears. ‘What she does like,’ he finally said, ‘is the way it has succeeded.’
‘Your marriage?’
‘Yes – my whole idea. The way I’ve been justified. That’s the joy I give her. If for her either it had failed –!’ That however wasn’t worth talking about; he had broken off. ‘You think then you could now risk Fawns?’
‘ “Risk” it?’
‘Well, morally – from the point of view I was talking of; that of our sinking deeper into sloth. Our selfishness somehow seems at its biggest down there.’
Maggie had allowed him the amusement of her not taking this up. ‘Is Charlotte,’ she had simply asked,