The Awkward Age

“Yes, how awful?” He had kindled, as he paused, with his new eagerness.

“Well, one’s knowledge may be. It doesn’t shock in you a single hereditary prejudice.”

“Oh ‘hereditary’—!” Mitchy ecstatically murmured.

“You even rather like me the better for it; so that one of the reasons why you couldn’t have told me—though not of course, I know, the only one—is that you would have been literally almost ashamed. Because, you know,” she went on, “it IS strange.”

“My lack of hereditary—?”

“Yes, discomfort in presence of the fact I speak of. There’s a kind of sense you don’t possess.”

His appreciation again fairly goggled at her. “Oh you do know everything!”

“You’re so good that nothing shocks you,” she lucidly persisted. “There’s a kind of delicacy you haven’t got.”

He was more and more struck. “I’ve only that—as it were—of the skin and the fingers?” he appealed.

“Oh and that of the mind. And that of the soul. And some other kinds certainly. But not THE kind.”

“Yes”—he wondered—“I suppose that’s the only way one can name it.” It appeared to rise there before him. “THE kind!”

“The kind that would make me painful to you. Or rather not me perhaps,” she added as if to create between them the fullest possible light; “but my situation, my exposure—all the results of them I show. Doesn’t one become a sort of a little drain-pipe with everything flowing through?”

“Why don’t you call it more gracefully,” Mitchy asked, freshly struck, “a little aeolian-harp set in the drawing-room window and vibrating in the breeze of conversation?”

“Oh because the harp gives out a sound, and WE—at least we try to—give out none.”

“What you take, you mean, you keep?”

“Well, it sticks to us. And that’s what you don’t mind!”

Their eyes met long on it. “Yes—I see. I DON’T mind. I’ve the most extraordinary lacunae.”

“Oh I don’t know about others,” Nanda replied; “I haven’t noticed them. But you’ve that one, and it’s enough.”

He continued to face her with his queer mixture of assent and speculation. “Enough for what, my dear? To have made me impossible for you because the only man you could, as they say, have ‘respected’ would be a man who WOULD have minded?” Then as under the cool soft pressure of the question she looked at last away from him: “The man with ‘THE kind,’ as you call it, happens to be just the type you CAN love? But what’s the use,” he persisted as she answered nothing, “in loving a person with the prejudice—hereditary or other—to which you’re precisely obnoxious? Do you positively LIKE to love in vain?”

It was a question, the way she turned back to him seemed to say, that deserved a responsible answer. “Yes.”

But she had moved off after speaking, and Mitchy’s eyes followed her to different parts of the room as, with small pretexts of present attention to it, small bestowed touches for symmetry, she slowly measured it. “What’s extraordinary then is your idea of my finding any charm in Aggie’s ignorance.”

She immediately put down an old snuff-box. “Why—it’s the one sort of thing you don’t know. You can’t imagine,” she said as she returned to him, “the effect it will produce on you. You must get really near it and see it all come out to feel all its beauty. You’ll like it, Mitchy”—and Nanda’s gravity was wonderful—“better than anything you HAVE known.”

The clear sincerity of this, even had there been nothing else, imposed a consideration that Mitchy now flagrantly could give, and the deference of his suggestion of difficulty only grew more deep. “I’m to do then, with this happy condition of hers, what you say YOU’VE done—to ‘try’ it?” And then as her assent, so directly challenged, failed an instant: “But won’t my approach to it, however cautious, be just what will break it up and spoil it?”

Nanda thought. “Why so—if mine wasn’t?”

“Oh you’re not me!”

“But I’m just as bad.”

“Thank you, my dear!” Mitchy rang out.

“Without,” Nanda pursued, “being as good.” She had on this, in a different key, her own sudden explosion. “Don’t you see, Mitchy dear—for the very heart of it all—how good I BELIEVE you?”

She had spoken as with a flare of impatience at some justice he failed to do her, and this brought him after a startled instant close enough to her to take up her hand. She let him have it, and in mute solemn reassurance he raised it to his lips, saying to her thus more things than he could say in any other way; which yet just after, when he had released it and a motionless pause had ensued, didn’t prevent his adding three words. “Oh Nanda, Nanda!”

The tone of them made her again extraordinarily gentle. “Don’t ‘try’ anything then. Take everything for granted.”

He had turned away from her and walked mechanically, with his air of blind emotion, to the window, where for a minute he looked out. “It has stopped raining,” he said at last; “it’s going to brighten.”

The place had three windows, and Nanda went to the next. “Not quite yet—but I think it will.”

Mitchy soon faced back into the room, where after a brief hesitation he moved, as quietly, almost as cautiously, as if on tiptoe, to the seat occupied by his companion at the beginning of their talk. Here he sank down watching the girl, who stood a while longer with her eyes on the garden. “You want me, you say, to take her out of the Duchess’s life; but where am I myself, if we come to that, but even more IN the Duchess’s life than Aggie is? I’m in it by my contacts, my associations, my indifferences—all my acceptances, knowledges, amusements. I’m in it by my cynicisms—those that circumstances somehow from the first, when I began for myself to look at life and the world, committed me to and steeped me in; I’m in it by a kind of desperation that I shouldn’t have felt perhaps if you had got hold of me sooner with just this touch with which you’ve got hold of me to-day; and I’m in it more than all—you’ll yourself admit—by the very fact that her aunt desires, as you know, much more even than you do, to bring the thing about. Then we SHOULD be—the Duchess and I—shoulder to shoulder!”

Nanda heard him motionless to the end, taking also another minute to turn over what he had said. “What is it you like so in Lord Petherton?” she asked as she came to him.

“My dear child, if you only could tell me! It would be, wouldn’t it?—it must have been—the subject of some fairy-tale, if fairy-tales were made now, or better still of some Christmas pantomime: ‘The Gnome and the Giant.’”

Nanda appeared to try—not with much success—to see it. “Do you find Lord Petherton a Gnome?”

Mitchy at first, for all reward, only glared at her. “Charming, Nanda—charming!”

“A man’s giant enough for Lord Petherton,” she went on, “when his fortune’s gigantic. He preys upon you.”

His hands in his pockets and his legs much apart, Mitchy sat there as in a posture adapted to her simplicity. “You’re adorable. YOU don’t. But it IS rather horrid, isn’t it?” he presently went on.

Her momentary silence would have been by itself enough of an answer. “Nothing—of all you speak of,” she nevertheless returned, “will matter then. She’ll so simplify your life.” He remained just as he was, only with his eyes on her; and meanwhile she had turned again to her window, through which a faint sun-streak began to glimmer and play. At sight of it she opened the casement to let in the warm freshness. “The rain HAS stopped.”

“You say you want me to save her. But what you really mean,” Mitchy resumed from the sofa, “isn’t at all exactly that.”

Nanda, without heeding the remark, took in the sunshine. “It will be charming now in the garden.”

Her friend got up, found his wonderful crossbarred cap, after a glance, on a neighbouring chair, and with it came toward her. “Your hope is that—as I’m good enough to be worth it—she’ll save ME.”

Nanda looked at him now. “She will, Mitchy—she WILL!”

They stood a moment in the recovered brightness; after which he mechanically—as with the pressure of quite another consciousness—put on his cap. “Well then, shall that hope between us be the thing—?”

“The thing?”—she just wondered.

“Why that will have drawn us together—to hold us so, you know—this afternoon. I mean the secret we spoke of.”

She put out to him on this the hand he had taken a few minutes before, and he clasped it now only with the firmness it seemed to give and to ask for. “Oh it will do for that!” she said as they went out together.

III

It had been understood that he was to take his leave on the morrow, though Vanderbank was to stay another day. Mr. Longdon had for the Sunday dinner invited three or four of his neighbours to “meet” the two gentlemen from town, so that it was not till the company had departed, or in other words till near bedtime, that our four friends could again have become aware, as between themselves, of that directness of mutual relation which forms the subject of our picture. It had not, however, prevented Nanda’s slipping upstairs as soon as the doctor and his wife had gone, and the manner indeed in which, on the stroke of eleven, Mr. Longdon conformed to his tradition of appropriating a particular candle was as positive an expression of it as any other. Nothing in him was more amiable than the terms maintained between the rigour of his personal habits and his free imagination of the habits of others. He deprecated as regards the former, it might have been seen, most signs of likeness, and no one had ever dared to learn how he would have handled a show of imitation. “The way to flatter him,” Mitchy threw off five minutes later, “is not to make him think you resemble or agree with him, but to let him see how different you perceive he can bear to think you. I mean of course without hating you.”

“But what interest have YOU,” Vanderbank asked, “in the way to flatter him?”

“My dear fellow, more interest than you. I haven’t been here all day without arriving at conclusions on the credit he has opened to you—!”

“Do you mean the amount he’ll settle?”

“You have it in your power,” said Mitchy, “to make it anything you like.”

“And is he then—so bloated?”

Mitchy was on his feet in the apartment in which their host had left them, and he had at first for this question but an expressive motion of the shoulders in respect to everything in the room. “See, judge, guess, feel!”

But it was as if Vanderbank, before the fire, consciously controlled his own attention. “Oh I don’t care a hang!”

This passage took place in the library and as a consequence of their having confessed, as their friend faced them with his bedroom light, that a brief discreet vigil and a box of cigars would fix better than anything else the fine impression of the day. Mitchy might at that moment, on the evidence of the eyes Mr. Longdon turned to them and of which his innocent candle-flame betrayed the secret, have found matter for a measure of the almost extreme allowances he wanted them to want of him. They had only to see that the greater window was fast and to turn out the library lamp. It might really have amused them to stand a moment at the open door that, apart from this, was to testify to his conception of those who were not, in the smaller hours, as HE was. He had in fact by his retreat—and but too sensibly—left them there with a deal of midnight company. If one of these presences was the mystery he had himself mixed the manner of our young men showed a due expectation of the others. Mitchy, on hearing how little Vanderbank “cared,” only kept up a while longer that observant revolution in which he had spent much of his day, to which any fresh sense of any exhibition always promptly committed him, and which, had it not been controlled by infinite tact, might have affected the nerves of those in whom enjoyment was less rotary. He was silent long enough to suggest his fearing that almost anything he might say would appear too allusive; then at last once more he took his risk. “Awfully jolly old place!”

“It is indeed,” Van only said; but his posture in the large chair he had pushed toward the open window was of itself almost an opinion. The August night was hot and the air that came in charged and sweet. Vanderbank smoked with his face to the dusky garden and the dim stars; at the end of a few moments more of which he glanced round. “Don’t you think it rather stuffy with that big lamp? As those candles on the chimney are going we might put it out.”

“Like this?” The amiable Mitchy had straightway obliged his companion and he as promptly took in the effect of the diminished light on the character of the room, which he commended as if the depth of shadow produced were all this companion had sought. He might freshly have brought home to Vanderbank that a man sensitive to so many different things, and thereby always sure of something or other, could never really be incommoded; though that personage presently indeed showed himself occupied with another thought.

“I think I ought to mention to you that I’ve told him how you and Mrs. Brook now both know. I did so this afternoon on our way back from church—I hadn’t done it before. He took me a walk round to show me more of the place, and that gave me my chance. But he doesn’t mind,” Vanderbank continued. “The only thing is that I’ve thought it may possibly make him speak to you, so that it’s better you should know he knows. But he told me definitely Nanda doesn’t.”

Mitchy took this in with an attention that spoke of his already recognising how the less tempered darkness favoured talk. “And is that all that passed between you?”

“Well, practically; except of course that I made him understand, I think, how it happened that I haven’t kept my own counsel.”

“Oh but you HAVE—didn’t he at least feel?—or perhaps even have done better, when you’ve two such excellent persons to keep it FOR you. Can’t he easily believe how we feel with you?”

Vanderbank appeared for a minute to leave this appeal unheeded; he continued to stare into the garden while he smoked and swung the long leg he had thrown over the arm of the chair. When he at last spoke, however, it was with some emphasis—perhaps even with some vulgarity. “Oh rot!”

Mitchy hovered without an arrest. “You mean he CAN’T feel?”

“I mean it isn’t true. I’ve no illusions about you. I know how you’re both affected, though I of course perfectly trust you.”

Mitchy had a short silence. “Trust us not to speak?”

“Not to speak to Nanda herself—though of course too if you spoke to others,” Vanderbank went on, “they’d immediately rush and tell her.”

“I’ve spoken to no one,” said Mitchy. “I’m sure of it. And neither has Mrs. Brook.”

“I’m glad you’re sure of that also,” Mitchy returned, “for it’s only doing her justice.”

“Oh I’m quite confident of it,” said Vanderbank. “And without asking her?”

“Perfectly.”

“And you’re equally sure, without asking, that I haven’t betrayed you?” After which, while, as if to let the question lie there in its folly, Vanderbank said nothing, his friend pursued: “I came, I must tell you, terribly near it to-day.”

“Why must you tell me? Your coming ‘near’ doesn’t concern me, and I take it you don’t suppose I’m watching or sounding you. Mrs. Brook will have come terribly near,” Vanderbank continued as if to make the matter free; “but she won’t have done it either. She’ll have been distinctly tempted—!”

“But she won’t have fallen?” Mitchy broke in. “Exactly—there we are. I was distinctly tempted and I didn’t fall. I think your certainty about Mrs. Brook,” he added, “shows you do know her. She’s incapable of anything deliberately nasty.”

“Oh of anything nasty in any way,” Vanderbank said musingly and kindly.

“Yes; one knows on the whole what she WON’T do.” After which, for a period, Mitchy roamed and reflected. “But in spite of the assurance given you by Mr. Longdon—or perhaps indeed just because of your having taken it—I think I ought to mention to you my belief that Nanda does know of his offer to you. I mean by having guessed it.”

“Oh!” said Vanderbank.

“There’s in fact more still,” his companion pursued—“that I feel I should like to mention to you.”

“Oh!” Vanderbank at first only repeated. But after a moment he said: “My dear fellow, I’m much obliged.”

“The thing I speak of is something I should at any rate have said, and I should have looked out for some chance if we had not had this one.” Mitchy spoke as if his friend’s last words were not of consequence, and he continued as Vanderbank got up and, moving rather aimlessly, came and stood with his back to the chimney. “My only hesitation would have been caused by its entailing our going down into things in a way that, face to face—given the private nature of the things—I dare say most men don’t particularly enjoy. But if you don’t mind—!”

“Oh I don’t mind. In fact, as I tell you, I recognise an obligation to you.” Vanderbank, with his shoulders against the high mantel, uttered this without a direct look; he smoked and smoked, then considered the tip of his cigar. “You feel convinced she knows?” he threw out.

“Well, it’s my impression.”

“Ah any impression of yours—of that sort—is sure to be right. If you think I ought to have it from you I’m really grateful. Is that—a—what you wanted to say to me?” Vanderbank after a slight pause demanded.

Mitchy, watching him more than he watched Mitchy, shook a mildly decisive head. “No.”

Vanderbank, his eyes on his smoke-puffs, seemed to wonder. “What you wanted is—something else?”

“Something else.”

“Oh!” said Vanderbank for the third time.

The ejaculation had been vague, but the movement that followed it was definite; the young man, turning away, found himself again near the chair he had quitted, and resumed possession of it as a sign of being at his friend’s service. This friend, however, not only hung fire but finally went back to take a shot from a quarter they might have been supposed to have left. “It strikes me as odd his imagining—awfully acute as he is—that she has NOT guessed. One wouldn’t have thought he could live with her here in such an intimacy—seeing her every day and pretty much all day—and make such a mistake.”

Vanderbank, his great length all of a lounge again, turned it over. “And yet I do thoroughly feel the mistake’s not yours.”

Mitchy had a new serenity of affirmation. “Oh it’s not mine.”

“Perhaps then”—it occurred to his friend—“he doesn’t really believe it.”

“And only says so to make you feel more easy?”

“So that one may—in fairness to one’s self—keep one’s head, as it were, and decide quite on one’s own grounds.”

“Then you HAVE still to decide?”

Vanderbank took time to answer. “I’ve still to decide.” Mitchy became again on this, in the sociable dusk, a slow-circling vaguely-agitated element, and his companion continued: “Is your idea very generously and handsomely to help that by letting me know—?”

“That I do definitely renounce”—Mitchy took him up—“any pretension and any hope? Well, I’m ready with a proof of it. I’ve passed my word that I’ll apply elsewhere.”

Vanderbank turned more round to him. “Apply to the Duchess for her niece?”

“It’s practically settled.”

“But since when?”

Mitchy barely faltered. “Since this afternoon.”

“Ah then not with the Duchess herself.”

“With Nanda—whose plan from the first, you won’t have forgotten, the thing has so charmingly been.”

Vanderbank could show that his not having in the least forgotten was yet not a bar to his being now mystified. “But, my dear man, what can Nanda ‘settle’?”

“My fate,” Mitchy said, pausing well before him.

Vanderbank sat now a minute with raised eyes, catching the indistinctness of the other’s strange expression. “You’re both beyond me!” he exclaimed at last. “I don’t see what you in particular gain.”

“I didn’t either till she made it all out to me. One sees then, in such a matter, for one’s self. And as everything’s gain that isn’t loss, there was nothing I COULD lose. It gets me,” Mitchy further explained, “out of the way.”

“Out of the way of what?”

This, Mitchy frankly showed, was more difficult to say, but he in time brought it out. “Well, of appearing to suggest to you that my existence, in a prolonged state of singleness, may ever represent for her any real alternative.”

“But alternative to what?”

“Why to being YOUR wife, damn you!” Mitchy, on these words turned away again, and his companion, in the presence of his renewed dim gyrations, sat for a minute dumb. Before Van had spoken indeed he was back again. “Excuse my violence, but of course you really see.”

“I’m not pretending anything,” Vanderbank said—“but a man MUST understand. What I catch hold of is that you offer me—in the fact that you’re thus at any rate disposed of—a proof that I, by the same token, shan’t, if I hesitate to ‘go in,’ have a pretext for saying to myself that I MAY deprive her—!”

“Yes, precisely,” Mitchy now urbanely assented: “of something—in the shape of a man with MY amount of money—that she may live to regret and to languish for. My amount of money, don’t you see?” he very simply added, “is nothing to her.”

“And you want me to be sure that—so far as I may ever have had a scruple—she has had her chance and got rid of it.”

“Completely,” Mitchy smiled.

“Because”—Vanderbank with the aid of his cigar thoughtfully pieced it out—“that may possibly bring me to the point.”

“Possibly!” Mitchy laughed.

He had stood a moment longer, almost as if to see the possibility develop before his eyes, and had even started at the next sound of his friend’s voice. What Vanderbank in fact brought out, however, only made him turn his back. “Do you like so very much little Aggie?”

“Well,” said Mitchy, “Nanda does. And I like Nanda.”

“You’re too amazing,” Vanderbank mused. His musing had presently the effect of making him rise; meditation indeed beset him after he was on his feet. “I can’t help its coming over me then that on such an extraordinary system you must also rather like ME.”

“What will you have, my dear Van?” Mitchy frankly asked. “It’s the sort of thing you must be most used to. For at the present moment—look!—aren’t we all at you at once?”

It was as if his dear Van had managed to appear to wonder. “‘All’?”

“Nanda, Mrs. Brook, Mr. Longdon—!”

“And you. I see.”

“Names of distinction. And all the others,” Mitchy pursued, “that I don’t count.”

“Oh you’re the best.”

“I?”

“You’re the best,” Vanderbank simply repeated. “It’s at all events most extraordinary,” he declared. “But I make you out on the whole better than I do Mr. Longdon.”

“Ah aren’t we very much the same—simple lovers of life? That is of that finer essence of it which appeals to the consciousness—”

“The consciousness?”—his companion took up his hesitation.

“Well, enlarged and improved.”

The words had made on Mitchy’s lips an image by which his friend appeared for a moment held. “One doesn’t really know quite what to say or to do.”

“Oh you must take it all quietly. You’re of a special class; one of those who, as we said the other day—don’t you remember?—are a source of the sacred terror. People made in such a way must take the consequences; just as people must take them,” Mitchy went on, “who are made as I am. So cheer up!”

Mitchy, uttering this incitement, had moved to the empty chair by the window, in which he presently was sunk; and it might have been in emulation of his previous strolling and straying that Vanderbank himself now began to revolve. The meditation he next threw out, however, showed a certain resistance to Mitchy’s advice. “I’m glad at any rate I don’t deprive her of a fortune.”

“You don’t deprive her of mine of course,” Mitchy answered from the chair; “but isn’t her enjoyment of Mr. Longdon’s at least a good deal staked after all on your action?”

Vanderbank stopped short. “It’s his idea to settle it ALL?”

Mitchy gave out his glare. “I thought you didn’t ‘care a hang.’ I haven’t been here so long,” he went on as his companion at first retorted nothing, “without making up my mind for myself about his means. He IS distinctly bloated.”

It sent Vanderbank off again. “Oh well, she’ll no more get all in the one event than she’ll get nothing in the other. She’ll only get a sort of provision. But she’ll get that whatever happens.”

“Oh if you’re sure—!” Mitchy simply commented.

“I’m not sure, confound it!” Then—for his voice had been irritated—Van spoke more quietly. “Only I see her here—though on his wish of course—handling things quite as if they were her own and paying him a visit without, apparently, any calculable end. What’s that on HIS part but a pledge?”