The Awkward Age

“On the contrary—very much. But he doesn’t do everything he wants,” said Nanda.

Mrs. Brook seemed to wonder. “You mean you’ve also to want it?”

“Oh no—THAT isn’t enough. What I suppose I mean,” Nanda continued, “is that he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want. But he does quite enough,” she added.

“And who then was at Tishy’s?”

“Oh poor old Tish herself, naturally, and Carrie Donner.”

“And no one else?”

The girl just waited. “Yes, Mr. Cashmore came in.”

Her mother gave a groan of impatience. “Ah AGAIN?”

Nanda thought an instant. “How do you mean, ‘again’? He just lives there as much as he ever did, and Tishy can’t prevent him.”

“I was thinking of Mr. Longdon—of THEIR meeting. When he met him here that time he liked it so little. Did he like it any more to-day?” Mrs. Brook quavered.

“Oh no, he hated it.”

“But hadn’t he—if he should go in—known he WOULD?”

“Yes, perfectly. But he wanted to see.”

“To see—?” Mrs. Brook just threw out.

“Well, where I go so much. And he knew I wished it.”

“I don’t quite see why,” Mrs. Brook mildly observed. And then as her daughter said nothing to help her: “At any rate he did loathe it?”

Nanda, for a reply, simply after an instant put a question. “Well, how can he understand?”

“You mean, like me, why you do go there so much? How can he indeed?”

“I don’t mean that,” the girl returned—“it’s just that he understands perfectly, because he saw them all, in such an extraordinary way—well, what can I ever call it?—clutch me and cling to me.”

Mrs. Brook, with full gravity, considered this picture. “And was Mr. Cashmore to-day so ridiculous?”

“Ah he’s not ridiculous, mamma—he’s very unhappy. He thinks now Lady Fanny probably won’t go, but he feels that may be after all only the worse for him.”

“She WILL go,” Mrs. Brook answered with one of her roundabout approaches to decision. “He IS too great an idiot. She was here an hour ago, and if ever a woman was packed—!”

“Well,” Nanda objected, “but doesn’t she spend her time in packing and unpacking?”

This enquiry, however, scarce pulled up her mother. “No—though she HAS, no doubt, hitherto wasted plenty of labour. She has now a dozen boxes—I could see them there in her wonderful eyes—just waiting to be called for. So if you’re counting on her not going, my dear—!” Mrs. Brook gave a head-shake that was the warning of wisdom.

“Oh I don’t care what she does!” Nanda replied. “What I meant just now was that Mr. Longdon couldn’t understand why, with so much to make them so, they couldn’t be decently happy.”

“And did he wish you to explain?”

“I tried to, but I didn’t make it any better. He doesn’t like them. He doesn’t even care for Tish.”

“He told you so—right out?”

“Oh,” Nanda said, “of course I asked him. I didn’t press him, because I never do—!”

“You never do?” Mrs. Brook broke in as with the glimpse of a new light.

The girl showed an indulgence for this interest that was for a moment almost elderly. “I enjoy awfully with him seeing just how to take him.”

Her tone and her face evidently put forth for her companion at this juncture something freshly, even quite supremely suggestive; and yet the effect of them on Mrs. Brook’s part was only a question so off-hand that it might already often have been asked. The mother’s eyes, to ask it, we may none the less add, attached themselves closely to the daughter’s, and her face just glowed. “You like him so very awfully?”

It was as if the next instant Nanda felt herself on her guard. Yet she spoke with a certain surrender. “Well, it’s rather intoxicating to be one’s self—!” She had only a drop over the choice of her term.

“So tremendously made up to, you mean—even by a little fussy ancient man? But DOESN’T he, my dear,” Mrs. Brook continued with encouragement, “make up to you?”

A supposititious spectator would certainly on this have imagined in the girl’s face the delicate dawn of a sense that her mother had suddenly become vulgar, together with a general consciousness that the way to meet vulgarity was always to be frank and simple and above all to ignore. “He makes one enjoy being liked so much—liked better, I do think, than I’ve ever been liked by any one.”

If Mrs. Brook hesitated it was, however, clearly not because she had noticed. “Not better surely than by dear Mitchy? Or even if you come to that by Tishy herself.”

Nanda’s simplicity maintained itself. “Oh Mr. Longdon’s different from Tishy.”

Her mother again hesitated. “You mean of course he knows more?”

The girl considered it. “He doesn’t know MORE. But he knows other things. And he’s pleasanter than Mitchy.”

“You mean because he doesn’t want to marry you?”

It was as if she had not heard that Nanda continued: “Well, he’s more beautiful.”

“O-oh!” cried Mrs. Brook, with a drawn-out extravagance of comment that amounted to an impugnment of her taste even by herself.

It contributed to Nanda’s quietness. “He’s one of the most beautiful people in the world.”

Her companion at this, with a quick wonder, fixed her. “DOES he, my dear, want to marry you?”

“Yes—to all sorts of ridiculous people.”

“But I mean—would you take HIM?”

Nanda, rising, met the question with a short ironic “Yes!” that showed her first impatience. “It’s so charming being liked without being approved.”

But Mrs. Brook only wanted to know. “He doesn’t approve—?”

“No, but it makes no difference. It’s all exactly right—it doesn’t matter.”

Mrs. Brook seemed to wonder, however, exactly how these things could be. “He doesn’t want you to give up anything?” She looked as if swiftly thinking what Nanda MIGHT give up.

“Oh yes, everything.”

It was as if for an instant she found her daughter inscrutable; then she had a strange smile. “Me?”

The girl was perfectly prompt. “Everything. But he wouldn’t like me nearly so much if I really did.”

Her mother had a further pause. “Does he want to ADOPT you?” Then more quickly and sadly, though also a little as if lacking nerve to push the research: “We couldn’t give you up, Nanda.”

“Thank you so much, mamma. But we shan’t be very much tried,” Nanda said, “because what it comes to seems to be that I’m really what you may call adopting HIM. I mean I’m little by little changing him—gradually showing him that, as I couldn’t possibly have been different, and as also of course one can’t keep giving up, the only way is for him not to mind, and to take me just as I am. That, don’t you see? is what he would never have expected to do.”

Mrs. Brook recognised in a manner the explanation, but still had her wistfulness. “But—a—to take you, ‘as you are,’ WHERE?”

“Well, to the South Kensington Museum.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Brook. Then, however, in a more exemplary tone: “Do you enjoy so very much your long hours with him?”

Nanda appeared for an instant to think how to express it. “Well, we’re great friends.”

“And always talking about Granny?”

“Oh no—really almost never now.”

“He doesn’t think so awfully much of her?” There was an oddity of eagerness in the question—a hope, a kind of dash, for something that might have been in Nanda’s interest.

The girl met these things only with obliging gravity. “I think he’s losing any sense of my likeness. He’s too used to it—or too many things that are too different now cover it up.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Brook as she took this in, “I think it’s awfully clever of you to get only the good of him and have none of the worry.”

Nanda wondered. “The worry?”

“You leave that all to ME,” her mother went on, but quite forgivingly. “I hope at any rate that the good, for you, will be real.”

“Real?” the girl, remaining vague, again echoed.

Mrs. Brook showed for this not perhaps an irritation, but a flicker of austerity. “You must remember we’ve a great many things to think about. There are things we must take for granted in each other—we must all help in our way to pull the coach. That’s what I mean by worry, and if you don’t have any so much the better for you. For me it’s in the day’s work. Your father and I have most to think about always at this time, as you perfectly know—when we have to turn things round and manage somehow or other to get out of town, have to provide and pinch, to meet all the necessities, with money, money, money at every turn running away like water. The children this year seem to fit into nothing, into nowhere, and Harold’s more dreadful than he has ever been, doing nothing at all for himself and requiring everything to be done for him. He talks about his American girl, with millions, who’s so awfully taken with him, but I can’t find out anything about her: the only one, just now, that people seem to have heard of is the one Booby Manger’s engaged to. The Mangers literally snap up everything,” Mrs. Brook quite wailingly now continued: “the Jew man, so gigantically rich—who is he? Baron Schack or Schmack—who has just taken Cumberland House and who has the awful stammer—or what is it? no roof to his mouth—is to give that horrid little Algie, to do his conversation for him, four hundred a year, which Harold pretended to me that, of all the rush of young men—dozens!—HE was most in the running for. Your father’s settled gloom is terrible, and I bear all the brunt of it; we get literally nothing this year for the Hovel, yet have to spend on it heaven knows what; and everybody, for the next three months, in Scotland and everywhere, has asked us for the wrong time and nobody for the right: so that I assure you I don’t know where to turn—which doesn’t however in the least prevent every one coming to me with their own selfish troubles.” It was as if Mrs. Brook had found the cup of her secret sorrows suddenly jostled by some touch of which the perversity, though not completely noted at the moment, proved, as she a little let herself go, sufficient to make it flow over; but she drew, the next thing, from her daughter’s stillness a reflexion of the vanity of such heat and speedily recovered herself as if in order with more dignity to point the moral. “I can carry my burden and shall do so to the end; but we must each remember that we shall fall to pieces if we don’t manage to keep hold of some little idea of responsibility. I positively can’t arrange without knowing when it is you go to him.”

“To Mr. Longdon? Oh whenever I like,” Nanda replied very gently and simply.

“And when shall you be so good as to like?”

“Well, he goes himself on Saturday, and if I want I can go a few days later.”

“And what day can you go if I want?” Mrs. Brook spoke as with a small sharpness—just softened indeed in time—produced by the sight of a freedom in her daughter’s life that suddenly loomed larger than any freedom of her own. It was still a part of the unsteadiness of the vessel of her anxieties; but she never after all remained publicly long subject to the influence she often comprehensively designated to others as well as to herself as “nastiness.” “What I mean is that you might go the same day, mightn’t you?”

“With him—in the train? I should think so if you wish it.”

“But would HE wish it? I mean would he hate it?”

“I don’t think so at all, but I can easily ask him.”

Mrs. Brook’s head inclined to the chimney and her eyes to the window. “Easily?”

Nanda looked for a moment mystified by her mother’s insistence. “I can at any rate perfectly try it.”

“Remembering even that mamma would never have pushed so?”

Nanda’s face seemed to concede even that condition. “Well,” she at all events serenely replied, “I really think we’re good friends enough for anything.”

It might have been, for the light it quickly produced, exactly what her mother had been working to make her say. “What do you call that then, I should like to know, but his adopting you?”

“Ah I don’t know that it matters much what it’s called.”

“So long as it brings with it, you mean,” Mrs. Brook asked, “all the advantages?”

“Well yes,” said Nanda, who had now begun dimly to smile—“call them advantages.”

Mrs. Brook had a pause. “One would be quite ready to do that if one only knew a little more exactly what they’re to consist of.”

“Oh the great advantage, I feel, is doing something for HIM.”

Nanda’s companion, at this, hesitated afresh. “But doesn’t that, my dear, put the extravagance of your surrender to him on rather an odd footing? Charity, love, begins at home, and if it’s a question of merely GIVING, you’ve objects enough for your bounty without going so far.”

The girl, as her stare showed, was held a moment by her surprise, which presently broke out. “Why, I thought you wanted me so to be nice to him!”

“Well, I hope you won’t think me very vulgar,” said Mrs. Brook, “if I tell you that I want you still more to have some idea of what you’ll get by it. I’ve no wish,” she added, “to keep on boring you with Mitchy—”

“Don’t, don’t!” Nanda pleaded.

Her mother stopped as short as if there had been something in her tone to set the limit the more utterly for being unstudied. Yet poor Mrs. Brook couldn’t leave it there. “Then what do you get instead?”

“Instead of Mitchy? Oh,” said Nanda, “I shall never marry.”

Mrs. Brook at this turned away, moving over to the window with quickened weariness. Nanda, on her side, as if their talk had ended, went across to the sofa to take up her parasol before leaving the room, an impulse rather favoured than arrested by the arrival of her brother Harold, who came in at the moment both his relatives had turned a back to the door and who gave his sister, as she faced him, a greeting that made their mother look round. “Hallo, Nan—you ARE lovely! Ain’t she lovely, mother?”

“No!” Mrs. Brook answered, not, however, otherwise noticing him. Her domestic despair centred at this instant all in her daughter. “Well then, we shall consider—your father and I—that he must take the consequence.”

Nanda had now her hand on the door, while Harold had dropped on the sofa. “‘He’?” she just sounded.

“I mean Mr. Longdon.”

“And what do you mean by the consequence?”

“Well, it will do for the beginning of it that you’ll please go down WITH him.”

“On Saturday then? Thanks, mamma,” the girl returned.

She was instantly gone, on which Mrs. Brook had more attention for her son. This, after an instant, as she approached the sofa and raised her eyes from the little table beside it, came straight out. “Where in the world is that five-pound note?”

Harold looked vacantly about him. “What five-pound note?”

BOOK SEVENTH. MITCHY

Mr. Longdon’s garden took in three acres and, full of charming features, had for its greatest wonder the extent and colour of its old brick wall, in which the pink and purple surface was the fruit of the mild ages and the protective function, for a visitor strolling, sitting, talking, reading, that of a nurse of reverie. The air of the place, in the August time, thrilled all the while with the bliss of birds, the hum of little lives unseen and the flicker of white butterflies. It was on the large flat enclosed lawn that Nanda spoke to Vanderbank of the three weeks she would have completed there on the morrow—weeks that had been—she made no secret of it—the happiest she had yet spent anywhere. The greyish day was soft and still and the sky faintly marbled, while the more newly arrived of the visitors from London, who had come late on the Friday afternoon, lounged away the morning in an attitude every relaxed line of which referred to the holiday he had, as it were—at first merely looking about and victualling—sat down in front of as a captain before a city. There were sitting-places, just there, out of the full light, cushioned benches in the thick wide spread of old mulberry-boughs. A large book of facts lay in the young man’s lap, and Nanda had come out to him, half an hour before luncheon, somewhat as Beatrice came out to Benedick: not to call him immediately indeed to the meal, but mentioning promptly that she had come at a bidding. Mr. Longdon had rebuked her, it appeared, for her want of attention to their guest, showing her in this way, to her pleasure, how far he had gone toward taking her, as he called it, into the house.

“You’ve been thinking of yourself,” Vanderbank asked, “as a mere clerk at a salary, and you now find that you’re a partner and have a share in the concern?”

“It seems to be something like that. But doesn’t a partner put in something? What have I put in?”

“Well—ME, for one thing. Isn’t it your being here that has brought me down?”

“Do you mean you wouldn’t have come for him alone? Then don’t you make anything of his attraction? You ought to,” said Nanda, “when he likes you so.”

Vanderbank, longing for a river, was in white flannels, and he took her question with a happy laugh, a handsome face of good humour that completed the effect of his long, cool fairness. “Do you mind my just sitting still, do you mind letting me smoke and staying with me a while? Perhaps after a little we’ll walk about—shan’t we? But face to face with this dear old house, in this jolly old nook, one’s too contented to move, lest raising a finger even should break the spell. What WILL be perfect will be your just sitting down—DO sit down—and scolding me a little. That, my dear Nanda, will deepen the peace.” Some minutes later, while, near him but in another chair, she fingered the impossible book, as she pronounced it, that she had taken from him, he came back to what she had last said. “Has he talked to you much about his ‘liking’ me?”

Nanda waited a minute, turning over the book. “No.”

“Then how are you just now so struck with it?”

“I’m not struck only with what I’m talked to about. I don’t know,” she went on, “only what people tell me.”

“Ah no—you’re too much your mother’s daughter for that!” Vanderbank leaned back and smoked, and though all his air seemed to say that when one was so at ease for gossip almost any subject would do, he kept jogging his foot with the same small nervous motion as during the half-hour at Mertle that this record has commemorated. “You’re too much one of us all,” he continued. “We’ve tremendous perceptions,” he laughed. “Of course I SHOULD have come for him. But after all,” he added, as if all sorts of nonsense would equally serve, “he mightn’t, except for you, you know, have asked me.”

Nanda so far accepted this view as to reply: “That’s awfully weak. He’s so modest that he might have been afraid of your boring yourself.”

“That’s just what I mean.”

“Well, if you do,” Nanda returned, “the explanation’s a little conceited.”

“Oh I only made it,” Vanderbank said, “in reference to his modesty.” Beyond the lawn the house was before him, old, square, red-roofed, well assured of its right to the place it took up in the world. This was a considerable space—in the little world at least of Suffolk—and the look of possession had everywhere mixed with it, in the form of old windows and doors, the tone of old red surfaces, the style of old white facings, the age of old high creepers, the long confirmation of time. Suggestive of panelled rooms, of precious mahogany, of portraits of women dead, of coloured china glimmering through glass doors and delicate silver reflected on bared tables, the thing was one of those impressions of a particular period that it takes two centuries to produce. “Fancy,” the young man incoherently exclaimed, “his caring to leave anything so loveable as all this to come up and live with US!”

The girl also for a little lost herself. “Oh you don’t know what it is—the charm comes out so as one stays. Little by little it grows and grows. There are old things everywhere that are too delightful. He lets me explore so—he lets me rummage and rifle. Every day I make discoveries.”

Vanderbank wondered as he smoked. “You mean he lets you take things—?”

“Oh yes—up to my room, to study or to copy. There are old patterns that are too dear for anything. It’s when you live with them, you see, that you know. Everything in the place is such good company.”

“Your mother ought to be here,” Vanderbank presently suggested. “She’s so fond of good company.” Then as Nanda answered nothing he went on: “Was your grandmother ever?”

“Never,” the girl promptly said. “Never,” she repeated in a tone quite different. After which she added: “I’m the only one.”

“Oh, and I ‘me and you,’ as they say,” her companion amended.

“Yes, and Mr. Mitchy, who’s to come down—please don’t forget—this afternoon.”

Vanderbank had another of his contemplative pauses. “Thank you for reminding me. I shall spread myself as much as possible before he comes—try to produce so much of my effect that I shall be safe. But what did Mr. Longdon ask him for?”

“Ah,” said Nanda gaily, “what did he ask YOU for?”

“Why, for the reason you just now mentioned—that his interest in me is so uncontrollable.”

“Then isn’t his interest in Mitchy—”

“Of the same general order?” Vanderbank broke in. “Not in the least.” He seemed to look for a way to express the distinction—which suddenly occurred to him. “He wasn’t in love with Mitchy’s mother.”

“No”—Nanda turned it over. “Mitchy’s mother, it appears, was awful. Mr. Cashmore knew her.”

Vanderbank’s smoke-puffs were profuse and his pauses frequent. “Awful to Mr. Cashmore? I’m glad to hear it—he must have deserved it. But I believe in her all the same. Mitchy’s often awful himself,” the young man rambled on. “Just so I believe in HIM.”

“So do I,” said Nanda—“and that’s why I asked him.”

“YOU asked him, my dear child? Have you the inviting?”

“Oh yes.”

The eyes he turned on her seemed really to try if she jested or were serious. “So you arranged for me too?”

She turned over again a few leaves of his book and, closing it with something of a clap, transferred it to the bench beside him—a movement in which, as if through a drop into thought, he rendered her no assistance. “What I mean is that I proposed it to Mr. Longdon, I suggested he should be asked. I’ve a reason for seeing him—I want to talk to him. And do you know,” the girl went on, “what Mr. Longdon said?”

“Something splendid of course.”

“He asked if you wouldn’t perhaps dislike his being here with you.”

Vanderbank, throwing back his head, laughed, smoked, jogged his foot more than ever. “Awfully nice. Dear old Mitch! How little afraid of him you are!”

Nanda wondered. “Of Mitch?”

“Yes, of the tremendous pull he really has. It’s all very well to talk—he HAS it. But of course I don’t mean I don’t know”—and as with the effect of his nervous sociability he shifted his position. “I perfectly see that you’re NOT afraid. I perfectly know what you have in your head. I should never in the least dream of accusing you—as far as HE is concerned—of the least disposition to flirt; any more indeed,” Vanderbank pleasantly pursued, “than even of any general tendency of that sort. No, my dear Nanda”—he kindly kept it up—“I WILL say for you that, though a girl, thank heaven, and awfully MUCH a girl, you’re really not on the whole more of a flirt than a respectable social ideal prescribes.”

“Thank you most tremendously,” his companion quietly replied.

Something in the tone of it made him laugh out, and the particular sound went well with all the rest, with the August day and the charming spot and the young man’s lounging figure and Nanda’s own little hovering hospitality. “Of course I strike you as patronising you with unconscious sublimity. Well, that’s all right, for what’s the most natural thing to do in these conditions but the most luxurious? Won’t Mitchy be wonderful for feeling and enjoying them? I assure you I’m delighted he’s coming.” Then in a different tone a moment later, “Do you expect to be here long?” he asked.

It took Nanda some time to say. “As long as Mr. Longdon will keep me, I suppose—if that doesn’t sound very horrible.”

“Oh he’ll keep you! Only won’t he himself,” Vanderbank went on, “be coming up to town in the course of the autumn?”

“Well, in that case I’d perfectly stay here without him.”

“And leave him in London without YOU? Ah that’s not what we want: he wouldn’t be at all the same thing without you. Least of all for himself!” Vanderbank declared.

Nanda again thought. “Yes, that’s what makes him funny, I suppose—his curious infatuation. I set him off—what do you call it?—show him off: by his going round and round me as the acrobat on the horse in the circus goes round the clown. He has said a great deal to me of your mother,” she irrelevantly added.