The Awkward Age by Henry James (simple ebook reader txt) 📖

in which, from one day to another, there may be something that people will get hold of. Fancy a man,” he robustly reflected while the three took in more completely the subject of Mrs. Brookenham’s attention—“fancy a man with THAT odd piece on his hands! The beauty of it is that the two women seem never to have broken off. Blest if they don’t still keep seeing each other!”

The Duchess, as on everything else, passed succinctly on this. “Ah how can hatreds comfortably flourish without the nourishment of such regular ‘seeing’ as what you call here bosom friendship alone supplies? What are parties given for in London but—that enemies may meet? I grant you it’s inconceivable that the husband of a superb creature like your sister should find his requirements better met by an object comme cette petite, who looks like a pen-wiper—an actress’s idea of one—made up for a theatrical bazaar. At the same time, if you’ll allow me to say so, it scarcely strikes one that your sister’s prudence is such as to have placed all the cards in her hands. She’s the most beautiful woman in England, but her esprit de conduite isn’t quite on a level. One can’t have everything!” she philosophically sighed.

Lord Petherton met her comfortably enough on this assumption of his detachments. “If you mean by that her being the biggest fool alive I’m quite ready to agree with you. It’s exactly what makes me afraid. Yet how can I decently say in especial,” he asked, “of what?”

The Duchess still perched on her critical height. “Of what but one of your amazing English periodical public washings of dirty linen? There’s not the least necessity to ‘say’!” she laughed. “If there’s anything more remarkable than these purifications it’s the domestic comfort with which, when all has come and gone, you sport the articles purified.”

“It comes back, in all that sphere,” Mr. Mitchett instructively opined, “to our national, our fatal want of style. We can never, dear Duchess, take too many lessons, and there’s probably at the present time no more useful function to be performed among us than that dissemination of neater methods to which you’re so good as to contribute.”

He had had another idea, but before he reached it his companion had gaily broken in. “Awfully good one for you, Duchess—and I’m bound to say that, for a clever woman, you exposed yourself! I’ve at any rate a sense of comfort,” Lord Petherton pursued, “in the good relations now more and more established between poor Fanny and Mrs. Brook. Mrs. Brook’s awfully kind to her and awfully sharp, and Fanny will take things from her that she won’t take from me. I keep saying to Mrs. Brook—don’t you know?—‘Do keep hold of her and let her have it strong.’ She hasn’t, upon my honour, any one in the world but me.”

“And we know the extent of THAT resource!” the Duchess freely commented.

“That’s exactly what Fanny says—that SHE knows it,” Petherton good-humouredly agreed. “She says my beastly hypocrisy makes her sick. There are people,” he pleasantly rambled on, “who are awfully free with their advice, but it’s mostly fearful rot. Mrs. Brook’s isn’t, upon my word— I’ve tried some myself!”

“You talk as if it were something nasty and homemade—gooseberry wine!” the Duchess laughed; “but one can’t know the dear soul, of course, without knowing that she has set up, for the convenience of her friends, a little office for consultations. She listens to the case, she strokes her chin and prescribes—”

“And the beauty of it is,” cried Lord Petherton, “that she makes no charge whatever!”

“She doesn’t take a guinea at the time, but you may still get your account,” the Duchess returned. “Of course we know that the great business she does is in husbands and wives.”

“This then seems the day of the wives!” Mr. Mitchett interposed as he became aware, the first, of the illustration the Duchess’s image was in the act of receiving. “Lady Fanny Cashmore!”—the butler was already in the field, and the company, with the exception of Mrs. Donner, who remained seated, was apparently conscious of a vibration that brought it afresh, but still more nimbly than on Aggie’s advent, to its feet.

VI

“Go to her straight—be nice to her: you must have plenty to say. YOU stay with me—we have our affair.” The latter of these commands the Duchess addressed to Mr. Mitchett, while their companion, in obedience to the former and affected, as it seemed, by an unrepressed familiar accent that stirred a fresh flicker of Mitchy’s grin, met the new arrival in the middle of the room before Mrs. Brookenham had had time to reach her. The Duchess, quickly reseated, watched an instant the inexpressive concussion of the tall brother and sister; then while Mitchy again subsided into his place, “You’re not, as a race, clever, you’re not delicate, you’re not sane, but you’re capable of extraordinary good looks,” she resumed. “Vous avez parfois la grande beaute.”

Mitchy was much amused. “Do you really think Petherton has?”

The Duchess withstood it. “They’ve got, both outside and in, the same great general things, only turned, in each, rather different ways, a way safer for him as a man, and more triumphant for her as—whatever you choose to call her! What CAN a woman do,” she richly mused, “with such beauty as that—?”

“Except come desperately to advise with Mrs. Brook”—Mitchy undertook to complete her question—“as to the highest use to make of it? But see,” he immediately added, “how perfectly competent to instruct her our friend now looks.” Their hostess had advanced to Lady Fanny with an outstretched hand but with an eagerness of greeting merged a little in the sweet predominance of wonder as well as in the habit, at such moments most perceptible, of the languid lily-bend. Nothing in general could have been less conventionally poor than the kind of reception given in Mrs. Brookenham’s drawing-room to the particular element—the element of physical splendour void of those disparities that make the question of others tiresome—comprised in Lady Fanny’s presence. It was a place in which, at all times, before interesting objects, the unanimous occupants, almost more concerned for each other’s vibrations than for anything else, were apt rather more to exchange sharp and silent searchings than to fix their eyes on the object itself. In the case of Lady Fanny, however, the object itself—and quite by the same law that had worked, though less profoundly, on the entrance of little Aggie—superseded the usual rapt communion very much in the manner of some beautiful tame tigress who might really coerce attention. There was in Mrs. Brookenham’s way of looking up at her a dim despairing abandonment of the idea of any common personal ground. Lady Fanny, magnificent, simple, stupid, had almost the stature of her brother, a forehead unsurpassably low and an air of sombre concentration just sufficiently corrected by something in her movements that failed to give it a point. Her blue eyes were heavy in spite of being perhaps a couple of shades too clear, and the wealth of her black hair, the disposition of the massive coils of which was all her own, had possibly a satin sheen depreciated by the current fashion. But the great thing in her was that she was, with unconscious heroism, thoroughly herself; and what were Mrs. Brook and Mrs. Brook’s intimates after all, in their free surrender to the play of perception, but a happy association for keeping her so? The Duchess was moved to the liveliest admiration by the grand simple sweetness of her encounter with Mrs. Donner, a combination indeed in which it was a question if she or Mrs. Brook appeared to the higher advantage. It was poor Mrs. Donner—not, like Mrs. Brook, subtle in sufficiency, nor, like Lady Fanny, almost too simple—who made the poorest show. The Duchess immediately marked it to Mitchy as infinitely characteristic that their hostess, instead of letting one of her visitors go, kept them together by some sweet ingenuity and while Lord Petherton, dropping his sister, joined Edward and Aggie in the other angle, sat there between them as if, in pursuance of some awfully clever line of her own, she were holding a hand of each. Mr. Mitchett of course did justice all round, or at least, as would have seemed from an enquiry he presently made, wished not to fail of it. “Is it your real impression then that Lady Fanny has serious grounds—”

“For jealousy of that preposterous little person? My dear Mitchett,” the Duchess resumed after a moment’s reflexion, “if you’re so rash as to ask me in any of these connexions for my ‘real’ impression you deserve whatever you may get.” The penalty Mitchy had incurred was apparently grave enough to make his companion just falter in the infliction of it; which gave him the opportunity of replying that the little person was perhaps not more preposterous than any one else, that there was something in her he rather liked, and that there were many different ways in which a woman could be interesting. This further levity it was therefore that laid him fully open. “Do you mean to say you’ve been living with Petherton so long without becoming aware that he’s shockingly worried?”

“My dear Duchess,” Mitchy smiled, “Petherton carries his worries with a bravery! They’re so many that I’ve long since ceased to count them; and in general I’ve been disposed to let those pass that I can’t help him to meet. YOU’VE made, I judge,” he went on, “a better use of opportunities perhaps not so good—such as at any rate enables you to see further than I into the meaning of the impatience he just now expressed.”

The Duchess was admirable, in conversation, for neglecting everything not essential to her present plausibility. “A woman like Lady Fanny can have no ‘grounds’ for anything—for any indignation, I mean, or for any revenge worth twopence. In this particular case at all events they’ve been sacrificed with such extravagance that, as an injured wife, she hasn’t had the gumption to keep back an inch or two to stand on. She can do absolutely nothing.”

“Then you take the view—?” Mitchy, who had, after all, his delicacies, pulled up as at sight of a name.

“I take the view,” said the Duchess, “and I know exactly why. Elle se les passe—her little fancies! She’s a phenomenon, poor dear. And all with—what shall I call it?—the absence of haunting remorse of a good house-mother who makes the family accounts balance. She looks—and it’s what they love her for here when they say ‘Watch her now!’—like an angry saint; but she’s neither a saint nor, to be perfectly fair to her, really angry at all. She has only just enough reflexion to make out that it may some day be a little better for her that her husband shall, on his side too, have committed himself; and she’s only, in secret, too pleased to be sure whom it has been with. All the same I must tell you,” the Duchess still more crisply added, “that our little friend Nanda is of the opinion—which I gather her to be quite ready to defend—that Lady Fanny’s wrong.”

Poor Mitchy found himself staring. “But what has our little friend Nanda to do with it?”

“What indeed, bless her heart? If you WILL ask questions, however, you must take, as I say, your risks. There are days when between you all you stupefy me. One of them was when I happened about a month ago to make some allusion to the charming example of Mr. Cashmore’s fine taste that we have there before us: what was my surprise at the tone taken by Mrs. Brook to deny on this little lady’s behalf the soft impeachment? It was quite a mistake that anything had happened—Mrs. Donner had pulled through