The Golden Bowl - Henry James [282]
‘Oh if it’s only that –!’ When she had drawn from him thus then, as she could feel, the thick breath of the definite – which was the intimate, the immediate, the familiar as she hadn’t had them for so long – she turned away again, she put her hand on the knob of the door. But her hand rested at first without a grasp; she had another effort to make, the effort of leaving him, of which everything that had just passed between them, his presence, irresistible, overcharged with it, doubled the difficulty. There was something – she couldn’t have told what; it was as if, shut in together, they had come too far – too far for where they were; so that the mere act of her quitting him was like the attempt to recover the lost and gone. She had taken in with her something that within the ten minutes, and especially within the last three or four, had slipped away from her – which it was vain now, wasn’t it? to try to appear to clutch or to pick up. That consciousness in fact had a pang, and she balanced intensely for the lingering moment and almost with a terror of her endless power of surrender. He had only to press, really, for her to yield inch by inch, and she fairly knew at present, while she looked at him through her cloud, that the confession of this precious secret sat there for him to pluck. The sensation was for the few seconds extraordinary; her weakness, her desire, so long as she was yet not saving herself, flowered in her face like a light or a darkness. She sought for some word that would cover this up; she reverted to the question of tea, speaking as if they shouldn’t meet sooner. ‘Then about five. I count on you.’
On him too however something had descended; as to which that exactly gave him his chance. ‘Ah but I shall see you –! No?’ he said, coming nearer.
She had, with her hand still on the knob, her back against the door, so that her retreat under his approach must be less than a step, and yet she couldn’t for her life with the other hand have pushed him away. He was so near now that she could touch him, taste him, smell him, kiss him, hold him; he almost pressed upon her, and the warmth of his face – frowning, smiling, she mightn’t know which; only beautiful and strange – was bent upon her with the largeness with which objects loom in dreams. She closed her eyes to it, and so the next instant, against her purpose, had put out her hand, which had met his own and which he held. Then it was that from behind her closed eyes the right word came. ‘Wait!’ It was the word of his own distress and entreaty, the word for both of them, all they had left, their plank now on the great sea. Their hands were locked, and thus she said it again. ‘Wait. Wait.’ She kept her eyes shut, but her hand, she knew, helped her meaning – which after a minute she was aware his own had absorbed. He let her go – he turned away with this message, and when she saw him again his back was presented, as he had left her, and his face staring out of the window. She had saved herself and she got off.
3
Later on in the afternoon, before the others arrived, the form of their reunion was at least remarkable: they might in their great eastward drawing-room have been comparing notes or nerves under menace of some stiff official visit. Maggie’s mind, in its restlessness, even played a little with the prospect; the high cool room in its afternoon shade, its old tapestries uncovered, the perfect polish of its wide floor reflecting the bowls of gathered flowers and the silver and linen of the prepared tea-table, drew from her a remark in which this whole effect was mirrored, as well as something else in the Prince’s movement while he slowly paced and turned. ‘We’re distinctly bourgeois!’ she a trifle grimly threw off as an echo of their old community; though to a spectator sufficiently detached they might have been quite the privileged pair they were reputed, granted only they were taken as awaiting the visit of Royalty. They might have been ready, on the word passed up in advance, to repair together to the foot of the staircase