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THE GOLDEN BOWL - VOLUME II

HENRY JAMES

BOOK SECOND: THE PRINCESS

PART FOURTH

XXV

It was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to
accept the idea of having done a little something she was not
always doing or indeed that of having listened to any inward
voice that spoke in a new tone. Yet these instinctive
postponements of reflection were the fruit positively of
recognitions and perceptions already active; of the sense above
all that she had made at a particular hour made by the mere
touch of her hand a difference in the situation so long present
to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been
occupying for months and months the very centre of the garden
of her life but it had reared itself there like some strange
tall tower of ivory or perhaps rather some wonderful beautiful
but outlandish pagoda a structure plated with hard bright
porcelain coloured and figured and adorned at the overhanging
eaves with silver bells that tinkled ever so charmingly when
stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it--that
was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space
left her for circulation a space that sometimes seemed ample and
sometimes narrow: looking up all the while at the fair
structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high but never
quite making out as yet where she might have entered had she
wished. She had not wished till now--such was the odd case; and
what was doubtless equally odd besides was that though her
raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve from
within and especially far aloft as apertures and outlooks no
door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level.
The great decorated surface had remained consistently
impenetrable and inscrutable. At present however to her
considering mind it was as if she had ceased merely to circle
and to scan the elevation ceased so vaguely so quite helplessly
to stare and wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act
of pausing then in that of lingering and finally in that of
stepping unprecedentedly near. The thing might have been by the
distance at which it kept her a Mahometan mosque with which no
base heretic could take a liberty; there so hung about it the
vision of one's putting off one's shoes to enter and even
verily of one's paying with one's life if found there as an
interloper. She had not certainly arrived at the conception of
paying with her life for anything she might do; but it was
nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of
the rare porcelain plates. She had knocked in short--though she
could scarce have said whether for admission or for what; she had
applied her hand to a cool smooth spot and had waited to see what
would happen. Something had happened; it was as if a sound at
her touch after a little had come back to her from within; a
sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted.

If this image however may represent our young woman's
consciousness of a recent change in her life--a change now but a
few days old--it must at the same time be observed that she both
sought and found in renewed circulation as I have called it a
measure of relief from the idea of having perhaps to answer for
what she had done. The pagoda in her blooming garden figured the
arrangement--how otherwise was it to be named?--by which so
strikingly she had been able to marry without breaking as she
liked to put it with the past. She had surrendered herself to
her husband without the shadow of a reserve or a condition and
yet she had not all the while given up her father--the least
little inch. She had compassed the high city of seeing the two
men beautifully take to each other and nothing in her marriage
had marked it as more happy than this fact of its having
practically given the elder the lonelier a new friend. What had
moreover all the while enriched the whole aspect of success was
that the latter's marriage had been no more meassurably paid for
than her own. His having taken the same great step in the same
free way had not in the least involved the relegation of his
daughter. That it was remarkable they should have been able at
once so to separate and so to keep together had never for a
moment from however far back been equivocal to her; that it was
remarkable had in fact quite counted at first and always and
for each of them equally as part of their inspiration and their
support. There were plenty of singular things they were NOT
enamoured of--flights of brilliancy of audacity of originality
that speaking at least for the dear man and herself were not at
all in their line; but they liked to think they had given their
life this unusual extension and this liberal form which many
families many couples and still more many pairs of couples
would not have found workable. That last truth had been
distinctly brought home to them by the bright testimony the
quite explicit envy of most of their friends who had remarked
to them again and again that they must on all the showing to
keep on such terms be people of the highest amiability--equally
including in the praise of course Amerigo and Charlotte. It had
given them pleasure--as how should it not?--to find themselves
shed such a glamour; it had certainly that is given pleasure to
her father and herself both of them distinguishably of a nature
so slow to presume that they would scarce have been sure of their
triumph without this pretty reflection of it. So it was that
their felicity had fructified; so it was that the ivory tower
visible and admirable doubtless from any point of the social
field had risen stage by stage. Maggie's actual reluctance to
ask herself with proportionate sharpness why she had ceased to
take comfort in the sight of it represented accordingly a lapse
from that ideal consistency on which her moral comfort almost at
any time depended. To remain consistent she had always been
capable of cutting down more or less her prior term.

Moving for the first time in her life as in the darkening shadow
of a false position she reflected that she should either not
have ceased to be right--that is to be confident--or have
recognised that she was wrong; though she tried to deal with
herself for a space only as a silken-coated spaniel who has
scrambled out of a pond and who rattles the water from his ears.
Her shake of her head again and again as she went was much of
that order and she had the resource to which save for the rude
equivalent of his generalising bark the spaniel would have been
a stranger of humming to herself hard as a sign that nothing had
happened to her. She had not so to speak fallen in; she had had
no accident and had not got wet; this at any rate was her
pretension until after she began a little to wonder if she
mightn't with or without exposure have taken cold. She could at
all events remember no time at which she had felt so excited and
certainly none--which was another special point--that so brought
with it as well the necessity for concealing excitement. This
birth of a new eagerness became a high pastime in her view
precisely by reason of the ingenuity required for keeping the
thing born out of sight. The ingenuity was thus a private and
absorbing exercise in the light of which might I so far
multiply my metaphors I should compare her to the frightened but
clinging young mother of an unlawful child. The idea that had
possession of her would be by our new analogy the proof of her
misadventure but likewise all the while only another sign of a
relation that was more to her than anything on earth. She had
...

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