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 the waters in which he now floated, tinted them as by the action of some essence, poured from a gold-topped phial, for making one’s bath aromatic. No one before him, never—not even the infamous Pope—had so sat up to his neck in such a bath. It showed, for that matter, how little one of his race could escape, after all, from history. What was it but history, and of THEIR kind very much, to have the assurance of the enjoyment of more money than the palace-builder himself could have dreamed of? This was the element that bore him up and into which Maggie scattered, on occasion, her exquisite colouring drops. They were of the colour—of what on earth? of what but the extraordinary American good faith? They were of the colour of her innocence, and yet at the same time of her imagination, with which their relation, his and these people’s, was all suffused. What he had further said on the occasion of which we thus represent him as catching the echoes from his own thoughts while he loitered—what he had further said came back to him, for it had been the voice itself of his luck, the soothing sound that was always with him. “You Americans are almost incredibly romantic.”

“Of course we are. That’s just what makes everything so nice for us.”

“Everything?” He had wondered.

“Well, everything that’s nice at all. The world, the beautiful, world—or everything in it that is beautiful. I mean we see so much.”

He had looked at her a moment—and he well knew how she had struck him, in respect to the beautiful world, as one of the beautiful, the most beautiful things. But what he had answered was: “You see too much—that’s what may sometimes make you difficulties. When you don’t, at least,” he had amended with a further thought, “see too little.” But he had quite granted that he knew what she meant, and his warning perhaps was needless.

He had seen the follies of the romantic disposition, but there seemed somehow no follies in theirs—nothing, one was obliged to recognise, but innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties. Their enjoyment was a tribute to others without being a loss to themselves. Only the funny thing, he had respectfully submitted, was that her father, though older and wiser, and a man into the bargain, was as bad—that is as good—as herself.

“Oh, he’s better,” the girl had freely declared “that is he’s worse. His relation to the things he cares for—and I think it beautiful—is absolutely romantic. So is his whole life over here—it’s the most romantic thing I know.”

“You mean his idea for his native place?”

“Yes—the collection, the Museum with which he wishes to endow it, and of which he thinks more, as you know, than of anything in the world. It’s the work of his life and the motive of everything he does.”

The young man, in his actual mood, could have smiled again—smiled delicately, as he had then smiled at her. “Has it been his motive in letting me have you?”

“Yes, my dear, positively—or in a manner,” she had said.

“American City isn’t, by the way, his native town, for, though he’s not old, it’s a young thing compared with him—a younger one. He started there, he has a feeling about it, and the place has grown, as he says, like the programme of a charity performance. You’re at any rate a part of his collection,” she had explained—“one of the things that can only be got over here. You’re a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price. You’re not perhaps absolutely unique, but you’re so curious and eminent that there are very few others like you—you belong to a class about which everything is known. You’re what they call a morceau de musee.”

“I see. I have the great sign of it,” he had risked—“that I cost a lot of money.”

“I haven’t the least idea,” she had gravely answered, “what you cost”—and he had quite adored, for the moment, her way of saying it. He had felt even, for the moment, vulgar. But he had made the best of that. “Wouldn’t you find out if it were a question of parting with me? My value would in that case be estimated.”

She had looked at him with her charming eyes, as if his value were well before her. “Yes, if you mean that I’d pay rather than lose you.”

And then there came again what this had made him say. “Don’t talk about ME—it’s you who are not of this age. You’re a creature of a braver and finer one, and the cinquecento, at its most golden hour, wouldn’t have been ashamed of you. It would of me, and if I didn’t know some of the pieces your father has acquired, I should rather fear, for American City, the criticism of experts. Would it at all events be your idea,” he had then just ruefully asked, “to send me there for safety?”

“Well, we may have to come to it.”

“I’ll go anywhere you want.”

“We must see first—it will be only if we have to come to it. There are things,” she had gone on, “that father puts away—the bigger and more cumbrous of course, which he stores, has already stored in masses, here and in Paris, in Italy, in Spain, in warehouses, vaults, banks, safes, wonderful secret places. We’ve been like a pair of pirates—positively stage pirates, the sort who wink at each other and say ‘Ha-ha!’ when they come to where their treasure is buried. Ours is buried pretty well everywhere—except what we like to see, what we travel with and have about us. These, the smaller pieces, are the things we take out and arrange as we can, to make the hotels we stay at and the houses we hire a little less ugly. Of course it’s a danger, and we have to keep watch. But father loves a fine piece, loves, as he says, the good of it, and it’s for the company of some of his things that he’s willing to run his risks. And we’ve had extraordinary luck”—Maggie had made that point; “we’ve never lost anything yet. And the finest objects are often the smallest. Values, in lots of cases, you must know, have nothing to do with size. But there’s nothing, however tiny,” she had wound up, “that we’ve missed.”

“I like the class,” he had laughed for this, “in which you place me! I shall be one of the little pieces that you unpack at the hotels, or at the worst in the hired houses, like this wonderful one, and put out with the family photographs and the new magazines. But it’s something not to be so big that I have to be buried.”

“Oh,” she had returned, “you shall not be buried, my dear, till you’re dead. Unless indeed you call it burial to go to American City.”