The Awkward Age

His companion was silent a little. “She is, by all means. Well,” she then added, “so far as I may have been alive to the fact of any one’s thinking her so, it’s not out of place I should mention to you the difference made in my appreciation of it by our delightful little stay at Mertle. My views for Nanda,” said Mrs. Brook, “have somehow gone up.”

Vanderbank was prompt to show how he could understand it. “So that you wouldn’t consider even Mitchy now?”

But his friend took no notice of the question. “The way Mr. Longdon distinguishes her is quite the sort of thing that gives a girl, as Harold says, a ‘leg up.’ It’s awfully curious and has made me think: he isn’t anything whatever, as London estimates go, in himself—so that what is it, pray, that makes him, when ‘added on’ to her, so double Nanda’s value? I somehow or other see, through his being known to back her and through the pretty story of his loyalty to mamma and all the rest of it (oh if one chose to WORK that!) ever so much more of a chance for her.”

Vanderbank’s eyes were on the ceiling. “It IS curious, isn’t it?—though I think he’s rather more ‘in himself,’ even for the London estimate, than you quite understand.” He appeared to give her time to take this up, but as she said nothing he pursued: “I dare say that if even I now WERE to enter myself it would strike you as too late.”

Her attention to this was but indirect. “It’s awfully vulgar to be talking about it, but I can’t help feeling that something possibly rather big will come of Mr. Longdon.”

“Ah we’ve touched on that before,” said Vanderbank, “and you know you did think something might come even for me.”

She continued however, as if she scarce heard him, to work out her own vision. “It’s very true that up to now—”

“Well, up to now?” he asked as she faltered.

She faltered still a little. “I do say the most hideous things. But we HAVE said worse, haven’t we? Up to now, I mean, he hasn’t given her anything. Unless indeed,” she mused, “she may have had something without telling me.”

Vanderbank went much straighter. “What sort of thing have you in mind? Are you thinking of money?”

“Yes. Isn’t it awful?”

“That you should think of it?”

“That I should talk this way.” Her friend was apparently not prepared with an assent, and she quickly enough pursued: “If he HAD given her any it would come out somehow in her expenditure. She has tremendous liberty and is very secretive, but still it would come out.”

“He wouldn’t give her any without letting you know. Nor would she, without doing so,” Vanderbank added, “take it.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Brook quietly said, “she hates me enough for anything.”

“That’s only your romantic theory.”

Once more she appeared not to hear him; she gave the discussion another turn. “Has he given YOU anything?”

Her visitor smiled. “Not so much as a cigarette. I’ve always my pockets full of them, and HE never: so he only takes mine. Oh Mrs. Brook,” he continued, “with me too—though I’ve also tremendous liberty!—it would come out.”

“I think you’d let me know,” she returned.

“Yes, I’d let you know.”

Silence, upon this, fell between them a little; which she was the first to break. “She has gone with him this afternoon—by solemn appointment—to the South Kensington Museum.”

There was something in Mrs. Brook’s dolorous drop that yet presented the news as a portent so great that he was moved again to mirth. “Ah that’s where she is? Then I confess she has scored. He has never taken ME to the South Kensington Museum.”

“You were asking what we’re going to do,” she went on. “What I meant was—about Baireuth—that the question for Nanda’s simplified. He has pressed her so to pay him a visit.”

Vanderbank’s assent was marked. “I see: so that if you do go abroad she’ll be provided for by that engagement.”

“And by lots of other invitations.”

These were such things as, for the most part, the young man could turn over. “Do you mean you’d let her go alone—?”

“To wherever she’s asked?” said Mrs. Brook. “Why not? Don’t talk like the Duchess.”

Vanderbank seemed for a moment to try not to. “Couldn’t Mr. Longdon take her? Why not?”

His friend looked really struck with it. “That WOULD be working him. But to a beautiful end!” she meditated. “The only thing would be to get him also asked.”

“Ah but there you are, don’t you see? Fancy ‘getting’ Mr. Longdon anything or anywhere whatever! Don’t you feel,” Vanderbank threw out, “how the impossibility of exerting that sort of patronage for him immediately places him?”

Mrs. Brook gave her companion one of those fitful glances of almost grateful appreciation with which their intercourse was even at its darkest hours frequently illumined. “As if he were the Primate or the French Ambassador? Yes, you’re right—one couldn’t do it; though it’s very odd and one doesn’t quite see why. It does place him. But he becomes thereby exactly the very sort of person with whom it would be most of an advantage for her to go about. What a pity,” Mrs. Brook sighed, “he doesn’t know more people!”

“Ah well, we ARE, in our way, bringing that to pass. Only we mustn’t rush it. Leave it to Nanda herself,” Vanderbank presently added; on which his companion so manifestly left it that she touched after a moment’s silence on quite a different matter. “I dare say he’d tell YOU—wouldn’t he?—if he were to give her any considerable sum.”

She had only obeyed his injunction, but he stared at the length of her jump. “He might attempt to do so, but I shouldn’t at all like it.” He was moved immediately to dismiss this branch of the subject and, apparently to help himself, take up another. “Do you mean she understands he has asked her down for a regular long stay?”

Mrs. Brook barely hesitated. “She understands, I think, that what I expect of her is to make it as long as possible.”

Vanderbank laughed out—as it was even after ten years still possible to laugh—at the childlike innocence with which her voice could invest the hardest teachings of life; then with something a trifle nervous in the whole sound and manner he sprang up from his chair. “What a blessing he is to us all!”

“Yes, but think what we must be to HIM.”

“An immense interest, no doubt.” He took a few aimless steps and, stooping over a basket of flowers, inhaled it with violence, almost buried his face. “I dare say we ARE interesting.” He had spoken rather vaguely, but Mrs. Brook knew exactly why. “We render him no end of a service. We keep him in touch with old memories.”

Vanderbank had reached one of the windows, shaded from without by a great striped sun-blind beneath which and between the flower-pots of the balcony he could see a stretch of hot relaxed street. He looked a minute at these things. “I do so like your phrases!”

She had a pause that challenged his tone. “Do you call mamma a ‘phrase’?”

He went off again, quite with extravagance, but quickly, leaving the window, pulled himself up. “I dare say we MUST put things for him—he does it, cares or is able to do it, so little himself.”

“Precisely. He just quietly acts. That’s his nature, dear thing. We must LET him act.”

Vanderbank seemed to stifle again too vivid a sense of her particular emphasis. “Yes, yes—we must let him.”

“Though it won’t prevent Nanda, I imagine,” his hostess pursued, “from finding the fun of a whole month at Beccles—or whatever she puts in—not exactly fast and furious.”

Vanderbank had the look of measuring what the girl might “put in.” “The place will be quiet, of course, but when a person’s so fond of a person—!”

“As she is of him, you mean?”

He hesitated. “Yes. Then it’s all right.”

“She IS fond of him, thank God!” said Mrs. Brook.

He was before her now with the air of a man who had suddenly determined on a great blind leap. “Do you know what he has done? He wants me so to marry her that he has proposed a definite basis.”

Mrs. Brook got straight up. “‘Proposed’? To HER?”

“No, I don’t think he has said a word to Nanda—in fact I’m sure that, very properly, he doesn’t mean to. But he spoke to me on Sunday night at Mertle—I had a big talk with him there alone, very late, in the smoking-room.” Mrs. Brook’s stare was serious, and Vanderbank now went on as if the sound of his voice helped him to meet it. “We had things out very much and his kindness was extraordinary—he’s the most beautiful old boy that ever lived. I don’t know, now that I come to think of it, if I’m within my rights in telling you—and of course I shall immediately let him know that I HAVE told you; but I feel I can’t arrive at any respectable sort of attitude in the matter without taking you into my confidence. Which is really what I came here to-day to do, though till this moment I’ve funked it.”

It was either, as her friends chose to think it, an advantage or a drawback of intercourse with Mrs. Brook that, her face being at any moment charged with the woe of the world, it was unavoidable to remain rather in the dark as to the effect there of particular strokes. Something in Vanderbank’s present study of the signs accordingly showed he had had to learn to feel his way and had more or less mastered the trick. That she had turned a little pale was really the one fresh mark. “‘Funked’ it? Why in the world—?” His own colour deepened at her accent, which was a sufficient light on his having been stupid. “Do you mean you’ve declined the arrangement?”

He only, with a smile somewhat strained, continued for a moment to look at her; clearly, however, at last feeling, and not much caring, that he got in still deeper. “You’re magnificent. You’re magnificent.”

Her lovely gaze widened out. “Comment donc? Where—why? You HAVE declined her?” she went on. After which, as he replied only with a slow head-shake that seemed to say it was not for the moment all so simple as that, she had one of the inspirations to which she was constitutionally subject. “Do you imagine I want you myself?”

“Dear Mrs. Brook, you’re so admirable,” he returned with gaiety, “that if by any chance you did, upon my honour, I don’t see how I should be able not to say ‘All right.’” But he spoke too more responsibly. “I was shy of really bringing out to you what has happened to me, for a reason that I’ve of course to look in the face. Whatever you want yourself, for Nanda you want Mitchy.”

“I see, I see.” She did full justice to his explanation. “And what did you say about a ‘basis’? The blessed man offers to settle—?”

“You’re a real prodigy,” her visitor answered, “and your imagination takes its fences in a way that, when I’m out with you, quite puts mine to shame. When he mentioned it to me I was quite surprised.”

“And I,” Mrs. Brook asked, “am not surprised a bit? Isn’t it only,” she modestly suggested, “because I’ve taken him in more than you? Didn’t you know he WOULD?” she quavered.

Vanderbank thought or at least pretended to. “Make ME the condition? How could I be sure of it?”

But the point of his question was lost for her in the growing light. “Oh then the condition’s ‘you’ only—?”

“That, at any rate, is all I have to do with. He’s ready to settle if I’m ready to do the rest.”

“To propose to her straight, you mean?” She waited, but as he said nothing she went on: “And you’re not ready. Is that it?”

“I’m taking my time.”

“Of course you know,” said Mrs. Brook, “that she’d jump at you.”

He turned away from her now, but after some steps came back. “Then you do admit it.”

She hesitated. “To YOU.”

He had a strange faint smile. “Well, as I don’t speak of it—!”

“No—only to me. What is it he settles?” Mrs. Brook demanded.

“I can’t tell you.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“On the contrary I stopped him off.”

“Oh then,” Mrs. Brook exclaimed, “that’s what I call declining.”

The words appeared for an instant to strike her companion. “Is it? Is it?” he almost musingly repeated. But he shook himself the next moment free of his wonder, was more what would have been called in Buckingham Crescent on the spot. “Isn’t there rather something in my having thus thought it my duty to warn you that I’m definitely his candidate?”

Mrs. Brook turned impatiently away. “You’ve certainly—with your talk about ‘warning’—the happiest expressions!” She put her face into the flowers as he had done just before; then as she raised it: “What kind of a monster are you trying to make me out?”

“My dear lady”—Vanderbank was prompt—“I really don’t think I say anything but what’s fair. Isn’t it just my loyalty to you in fact that has in this case positively strained my discretion?”

She shook her head in mere mild despair. “‘Loyalty’ again is exquisite. The tact of men has a charm quite its own. And you’re rather good,” she continued, “as men go.”

His laugh was now a little awkward, as if she had already succeeded in making him uncomfortable. “I always become aware with you sooner or later that they don’t go at all—in your sense: but how am I, after all, so far out if you HAVE put your money on another man?”

“You keep coming back to that?” she wearily sighed.

He thought a little. “No, then. You’ve only to tell me not to, and I’ll never speak of it again.”

“You’ll be in an odd position for speaking of it if you do really go in. You deny that you’ve declined,” said Mrs. Brook; “which means then that you’ve allowed our friend to hope.”

Vanderbank met it bravely. “Yes, I think he hopes.”

“And communicates his hope to my child?”

This arrested the young man, but only for a moment. “I’ve the most perfect faith in his wisdom with her. I trust his particular delicacy. He cares more for her,” he presently added, “even than we do.”

Mrs. Brook gazed away at the infinite of space. “‘We,’ my dear Van,” she at last returned, “is one of your own real, wonderful touches. But there’s something in what you say: I HAVE, as between ourselves—between me and him—been backing Mitchy. That is I’ve been saying to him ‘Wait, wait: don’t at any rate do anything else.’ Only it’s just from the depth of my thought for my daughter’s happiness that I’ve clung to this resource. He would so absolutely, so unreservedly do anything for her.” She had reached now, with her extraordinary self-control, the pitch of quiet bland demonstration. “I want the poor thing, que diable, to have another string to her bow and another loaf, for her desolate old age, on the shelf. When everything else is gone Mitchy will still be there. Then it will be at least her own fault—!” Mrs. Brook continued. “What can relieve me of the primary duty of taking precautions,” she wound up, “when I know as well as that I stand here and look at you—”

“Yes, what?” he asked as she just paused.

“Why that so far as they count on you they count, my dear Van, on a blank.” Holding him a minute as with the soft low voice of his fate, she sadly but firmly shook her head. “You won’t do it.”

“Oh!” he almost too loudly protested.

“You won’t do it,” she went on.

“I SAY!”—he made a joke of it.

“You won’t do it,” she repeated.

It was as if he couldn’t at last but show himself really struck; yet what he exclaimed on was what might in truth most have impressed him. “You ARE magnificent, really!”

“Mr. Mitchett!” the butler, appearing at the door, almost familiarly dropped; after which Vanderbank turned straight to the person announced.

Mr. Mitchett was there, and, anticipating Mrs. Brook in receiving him, her companion passed it straighten. “She’s magnificent!”

Mitchy was already all interest. “Rather! But what’s her last?”

It had been, though so great, so subtle, as they said in Buckingham Crescent, that Vanderbank scarce knew how to put it. “Well, she’s so thoroughly superior.”

“Oh to whom do you say it?” Mitchy cried as he greeted her.

II

The subject of this eulogy had meanwhile returned to her sofa, where she received the homage of her new visitor. “It’s not I who am magnificent a bit—it’s dear Mr. Longdon. I’ve just had from Van the most wonderful piece of news about him—his announcement of his wish to make it worth somebody’s while to marry my child.”

“‘Make it’?”—Mitchy stared. “But ISN’T it?”

“My dear friend, you must ask Van. Of course you’ve always thought so. But I must tell you all the same,” Mrs. Brook went on, “that I’m delighted.”

Mitchy had seated himself, but Vanderbank remained erect and became perhaps even slightly stiff. He was not angry—no member of the inner circle at Buckingham Crescent was ever angry—but he looked grave and rather troubled. “Even if it IS decidedly fine”—he addressed his hostess straight—“I can’t make out quite why you’re doing THIS—I mean immediately making it known.”

“Ah but what do we keep from Mitchy?” Mrs. Brook asked.

“What CAN you keep? It comes to the same thing,” Mitchy said. “Besides, here we are together, share and share alike—one beautiful intelligence. Mr. Longdon’s ‘somebody’ is of course Van. Don’t try to treat me as an outsider.”

Vanderbank looked a little foolishly, though it was but the shade of a shade, from one of them to the other. “I think I’ve been rather an ass!”

“What then by the terms of our friendship—just as Mitchy says—can he and I have a better right to know and to feel with you about? You’ll want, Mitchy, won’t you?” Mrs. Brook went on, “to hear all about THAT?”

“Oh I only mean,” Vanderbank explained, “in having just now blurted my tale out to you. However, I of course do know,” he pursued to Mitchy, “that whatever’s really between us will remain between us. Let me then tell you myself exactly what’s the matter.” The length of his pause after these words showed at last that he had stopped short; on which his companions, as they waited, exchanged a sympathetic look. They waited another minute, and then he dropped into a chair where, leaning forward, his elbows on the arms and his gaze attached to the carpet, he drew out the silence. Finally he looked at Mrs. Brook. “YOU make it clear.”

The appeal called up for some reason her most infantine manner. “I don’t think I CAN, dear Van—really CLEAR. You know however yourself,” she continued to Mitchy, “enough by this time about Mr. Longdon and mamma.”

“Oh rather!” Mitchy laughed.

“And about mamma and Nanda.”

“Oh perfectly: the way Nanda reminds him, and the ‘beautiful loyalty’ that has made him take such a fancy to her. But I’ve already embraced the facts—you needn’t dot any i’s.” With another glance at his fellow visitor Mitchy jumped up and stood there florid. “He has offered you money to marry her.” He said this to Vanderbank as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Oh NO” Mrs. Brook interposed with promptitude: “he has simply let him know before any one else that the money’s there FOR Nanda, and that therefore—!”

“First come first served?” Mitchy had already taken her up. “I see, I see. Then to make her sure of the money,” he put to Vanderbank, “you MUST marry her?”

“If it depends upon that she’ll never get it,” Mrs. Brook returned. “Dear Van will think conscientiously a lot about it, but he won’t do it.”

“Won’t you, Van, really?” Mitchy asked from the hearth-rug.

“Never, never. We shall be very kind to him, we shall help him, hope and pray for him, but we shall be at the end,” said Mrs. Brook, “just where we are now. Dear Van will have done his best, and we shall have done ours. Mr. Longdon will have done his—poor Nanda even will have done hers. But it will all have been in vain. However,” Mrs. Brook continued to expound, “she’ll probably have the money. Mr. Longdon will surely consider that she’ll want it if she doesn’t marry still more than if she does. So we shall be SO much at least,” she wound up—“I mean Edward and I and the child will be—to the good.”

Mitchy, for an equal certainty, required but an instant’s thought. “Oh there can be no doubt about THAT. The things about which your mind may now be at ease—!” he cheerfully exclaimed.

“It does make a great difference!” Mrs. Brook comfortably sighed. Then in a different tone: “What dear Van will find at the end that he can’t face will be, don’t you see? just this fact of appearing to have accepted a bribe. He won’t want, on the one hand—out of kindness for Nanda—to have the money suppressed; and yet he won’t want to have the pecuniary question mixed up with the matter: to look in short as if he had had to be paid. He’s like you, you know—he’s proud; and it will be there we shall break down.”

Mitchy had been watching his friend, who, a few minutes before perceptibly embarrassed, had quite recovered himself and, at his ease, though still perhaps with a smile a trifle strained, leaned back and let his eyes play everywhere but over the faces of the others. Vanderbank evidently wished now to show a good-humoured detachment.

“See here,” Mitchy said to him: “I remember your once submitting to me a case of some delicacy.”

“Oh he’ll submit it to you—he’ll submit it even to ME” Mrs. Brook broke in. “He’ll be charming, touching, confiding—above all he’ll be awfully INTERESTING about it. But he’ll make up his mind in his own way, and his own way won’t be to accommodate Mr. Longdon.”

Mitchy continued to study their companion in the light of these remarks, then turned upon his hostess his sociable glare. “Splendid, isn’t it, the old boy’s infatuation with him?”

Mrs. Brook just delayed. “From the point of view of the immense interest it—just now, for instance—makes for you and me? Oh yes, it’s one of our best things yet. It places him a little with Lady Fanny—‘He will, he won’t; he won’t, he will!’ Only, to be perfect, it lacks, as I say, the element of real suspense.”

Mitchy frankly wondered. “It does, you think? Not for me—not wholly.” He turned again quite pleadingly to their friend. “I hope it doesn’t for yourself totally either?”

Vanderbank, cultivating his detachment, made at first no more reply than if he had not heard, and the others meanwhile showed faces that testified perhaps less than their respective speeches had done to the absence of anxiety. The only token he immediately gave was to get up and approach Mitchy, before whom he stood a minute laughing kindly enough, though not altogether gaily. As if then for a better proof of gaiety he presently seized him by the shoulders and, still without speaking, pushed him backward into the chair he himself had just quitted. Mrs. Brook’s eyes, from the sofa, while this went on, attached themselves to her visitors. It took Vanderbank, as he moved about and his companions waited, a minute longer to produce what he had in mind. “What IS splendid, as we call it, is this extraordinary freedom and good humour of our intercourse and the fact that we do care—so independently of our personal interests, with so little selfishness or other vulgarity—to get at the idea of things. The beautiful specimen Mrs. Brook had just given me of that,” he continued to Mitchy, “was what made me break out to you about her when you came in.” He spoke to one friend, but he looked at the other. “What’s really ‘superior’ in her is that, though I suddenly show her an interference with a favourite plan, her personal resentment’s nothing—all she wants is to see what may really happen, to take in the truth of the case and make the best of that. She offers me the truth, as she sees it, about myself, and with no nasty elation if it does chance to be the truth that suits her best. It was a charming, charming stroke.”

Mitchy’s appreciation was no bar to his amusement. “You’re wonderfully right about us. But still it was a stroke.”

If Mrs. Brook was less diverted she followed perhaps more closely. “If you do me so much justice then, why did you put to me such a cold cruel question?—I mean when you so oddly challenged me on my handing on your news to Mitchy. If the principal beauty of our effort to live together is—and quite according to your own eloquence—in our sincerity, I simply obeyed the impulse to do the sincere thing. If we’re not sincere we’re nothing.”

“Nothing!”—it was Mitchy who first responded. “But we ARE sincere.”

“Yes, we ARE sincere,” Vanderbank presently said. “It’s a great chance for us not to fall below ourselves: no doubt therefore we shall continue to soar and sing. We pay for it, people who don’t like us say, in our self-consciousness—”

“But people who don’t like us,” Mitchy broke in, “don’t matter. Besides, how can we be properly conscious of each other—?”

“That’s it!”—Vanderbank completed his idea: “without my finding myself for instance in you and Mrs. Brook? We see ourselves reflected—we’re conscious of the charming whole. I thank you,” he pursued after an instant to Mrs. Brook—“I thank you for your sincerity.”