I want the business just glanced at, in the four or five foregoing
lines, to be as ideally right of course as it can possibly be made; want
to squeeze all the effective virtue out of it, in the sense of my
generally intended colour and tone, generally intended production of the
"new" frisson, as artfully as can be managed. Focussing on it a bit I
seem to catch the tip of the tail of the right possibility--though on
further thought indeed I am pulled up a little, not being sure it can't
be bettered. For I was thinking a moment that she _should_, after all,
have herself the direct apprehension, perception or, speaking plainly,
vision; have it in the sense that she exhibits herself to R. at a given
moment as plunged in stupefaction or confusion by having apparently seen
him in double, that is seen him, been sure of him, in a place where, in
the conditions gone into or examined and discussed between them, he
couldn't possibly have been. In other words she has it to tell him--that
to her perception as well, by her experience of it the hour ago or
whatever, he rose before her for certain moments in a reality with which
everything proves in conflict. That, I say, was what a minute since
glimmered upon me--Ralph's having it from _her_ as the form of what I
call in this connection my third big determinant. But no, but no: what
is immeasurably better than that he should have anything of the sort
through herself is that she shall have it all absolutely through him.
Pressing harder and more intelligently, I come back to the image, the so
obviously finest, of her _catching_ him under the squeeze, under the
dire apprehension, of this third occasion--which I seem to see I can
make adequate and operative by her recognising him, just that, after the
right fashion, as doing his damnedest _not_ to show her, not to betray
to her, his intelligence of what he has to infer from, to read into,
seeing it in an awful light, something that has just befallen him. It
seems to me that I get it and give it, for my best interest, by our
having it _all_ in the form in which her taxing him with being in a
state, a state that she divines, yet but only half understands,
determines his at last more or less abjectly confessing to. He breaks
down under the beautiful pity of her divination, the wonder of her so
feeling for him that she virtually knows, or knows enough; and the
question is here of course, isn't it? whether for full lucidity of
interest, full logic of movement, he doesn't let her know all or, in
vulgar fictional parlance, reveal his secret. That's what it comes to,
what it _has_ to come to, very much indeed it would seem; that's what
the situation would seem to mean, would appear to have to give, as who
should say, of finest: their being face to face over all the prodigious
truth--which I think there ought to be a magnificent scène à faire in
illustration of. The beauty, the pathos, the terror of it dwells thus in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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