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

The girl shared from the bench his contemplation. “Do you call THIS madness?”

Well, he rather stuck to it. “You spoke of it yourself as excitement. You’ll make of course one of your fine distinctions, but I take it in my rough way as a whirl. We’re going round and round.” In a minute he had folded his arms with the same closeness Vanderbank had used—in a minute he too was nervously shaking his foot. “Steady, steady; if we sit close we shall see it through. But come down to Suffolk for sanity.”

“You do mean then that I may come alone?”

“I won’t receive you, I assure you, on any other terms. I want to show you,” he continued, “what life CAN give. Not of course,” he subjoined, “of this sort of thing.”

“No—you’ve told me. Of peace.”

“Of peace,” said Mr. Longdon. “Oh you don’t know—you haven’t the least idea. That’s just why I want to show you.”

Nanda looked as if already she saw it in the distance. “But will it be peace if I’m there? I mean for YOU,” she added.

“It isn’t a question of ‘me.’ Everybody’s omelet is made of somebody’s eggs. Besides, I think that when we’re alone together—!”

He had dropped for so long that she wondered. “Well, when we are—?”

“Why, it will be all right,” he simply concluded. “Temples of peace, the ancients used to call them. We’ll set up one, and I shall be at least doorkeeper. You’ll come down whenever you like.”

She gave herself to him in her silence more than she could have done in words. “Have you arranged it with mamma?” she said, however, at last.

“I’ve arranged everything.”

“SHE won’t want to come?”

Her friend’s laugh turned him to her. “Don’t be nervous. There are things as to which your mother trusts me.”

“But others as to which not.”

Their eyes met for some time on this, and it ended in his saying: “Well, you must help me.” Nanda, but without shrinking, looked away again, and Mr. Longdon, as if to consecrate their understanding by the air of ease, passed to another subject. “Mr. Mitchett’s the most princely host.”

“Isn’t he too kind for anything? Do you know what he pretends?” Nanda went on. “He says in the most extraordinary way that he does it all for ME.”

“Takes this great place and fills it with servants and company—?”

“Yes, just so that I may come down for a Sunday or two. Of course he has only taken it for three or four weeks, but even for that time it’s a handsome compliment. He doesn’t care what he does. It’s his way of amusing himself. He amuses himself at our expense,” the girl continued.

“Well, I hope that makes up, my dear, for the rate at which we’re doing so at his!”

“His amusement,” said Nanda, “is to see us believe what he says.”

Mr. Longdon thought a moment. “Really, my child, you’re most acute.”

“Oh I haven’t watched life for nothing! Mitchy doesn’t care,” she repeated.

Her companion seemed divided between a desire to draw and a certain fear to encourage her. “Doesn’t care for what?”

She considered an instant, all coherently, and it might have added to Mr. Longdon’s impression of her depth. “Well, for himself. I mean for his money. For anything any one may think. For Lord Petherton, for instance, really at all. Lord Petherton thinks he has helped him— thinks, that is, that Mitchy thinks he has. But Mitchy’s more amused at HIM than at anybody else. He takes every one in.”

“Every one but you?”

“Oh I like him.”

“My poor child, you’re of a profundity!” Mr. Longdon murmured.

He spoke almost uneasily, but she was not too much alarmed to continue lucid. “And he likes me, and I know just how much—and just how little. He’s the most generous man in the world. It pleases him to feel that he’s indifferent and splendid—there are so many things it makes up to him for.” The old man listened with attention, and his young frien conscious of it, proceeded as on ground of which she knew every inch. “He’s the son, as you know, of a great bootmaker—‘to all the Courts of Europe’—who left him a large fortune, which had been made, I believe, in the most extraordinary way, by building-speculations as well.”

“Oh yes, I know. It’s astonishing!” her companion sighed.

“That he should be of such extraction?”

“Well, everything. That you should be talking as you are—that you should have ‘watched life,’ as you say, to such purpose. That we should any of us be here—most of all that Mr. Mitchett himself should. That your grandmother’s daughter should have brought HER daughter—”

“To stay with a person”—Nanda took it up as, apparently out of delicacy, he fairly failed—“whose father used to take the measure, down on his knees on a little mat, as mamma says, of my grandfather’s remarkably large foot? Yes, we none of us mind. Do you think we should?” Nanda asked.

Mr. Longdon turned it over. “I’ll answer you by a question. Would you marry him?”

“Never.” Then as if to show there was no weakness in her mildness, “Never, never, never,” she repeated.

“And yet I dare say you know—?” But Mr. Longdon once more faltered; his scruple came uppermost. “You don’t mind my speaking of it?”

“Of his thinking he wants to marry me? Not a bit. I positively enjoy telling you there’s nothing in it.”

“Not even for HIM?”

Nanda considered. “Not more than is made up to him by his having found out through talks and things—which mightn’t otherwise have occurred— that I do like him. I wouldn’t have come down here if I hadn’t liked him.”

“Not for any other reason?”—Mr. Longdon put it gravely.

“Not for YOUR being here, do you mean?”

He delayed. “Me and other persons.”

She showed somehow that she wouldn’t flinch. “You weren’t asked till after he had made sure I’d come. We’ve become, you and I,” she smiled, “one of the couples who are invited together.”

These were couples, his speculative eye seemed to show, he didn’t even yet know about, and if he mentally took them up a moment it was all promptly to drop them. “I don’t think you state it quite strongly enough, you know.”

“That Mitchy IS hard hit? He states it so strongly himself that it will surely do for both of us. I’m a part of what I just spoke of—his indifference and magnificence. It’s as if he could only afford to do what’s not vulgar. He might perfectly marry a duke’s daughter, but that WOULD be vulgar—would be the absolute necessity and ideal of nine out of ten of the sons of shoemakers made ambitious by riches. Mitchy says ‘No; I take my own line; I go in for a beggar-maid.’ And it’s only because I’m a beggar-maid that he wants me.”

“But there are plenty of other beggar-maids,” Mr. Longdon objected.

“Oh I admit I’m the one he least dislikes. But if I had any money,” Nanda went on, “or if I were really good-looking—for that to-day, the real thing, will do as well as being a duke’s daughter—he wouldn’t come near me. And I think that ought to settle it. Besides, he must marry Aggie. She’s a beggar-maid too—as well as an angel. So there’s nothing against it.”

Mr. Longdon stared, but even in his surprise seemed to take from the swiftness with which she made him move over the ground a certain agreeable glow. “Does ‘Aggie’ like him?”

“She likes every one. As I say, she’s an angel—but a real, real, real one. The kindest man in the world’s therefore the proper husband for her. If Mitchy wants to do something thoroughly nice,” she declared with the same high competence, “he’ll take her out of her situation, which is awful.”

Mr. Longdon looked graver. “In what way awful?”

“Why, don’t you know?” His eye was now cold enough to give her, in her chill, a flurried sense that she might displease him least by a graceful lightness. “The Duchess and Lord Petherton are like you and me.”

“Is it a conundrum?” He was serious indeed.

“They’re one of the couples who are invited together.” But his face reflected so little success for her levity that it was in another tone she presently added: “Mitchy really oughtn’t.” Her friend, in silence, fixed his eyes on the ground; an attitude in which there was something to make her strike rather wild. “But of course, kind as he is, he can scarcely be called particular. He has his ideas—he thinks nothing matters. He says we’ve all come to a pass that’s the end of everything.”

Mr. Longdon remained mute a while, and when he at last, raised his eyes it was without meeting Nanda’s and with some dryness of manner. “The end of everything? One might easily receive that impression.”

He again became mute, and there was a pause between them of some length, accepted by Nanda with an anxious stillness that it might have touched a spectator to observe. She sat there as if waiting for some further sign, only wanting not to displease her friend, yet unable to pretend to play any part and with something in her really that she couldn’t take back now, something involved in her original assumption that there was to be a kind of intelligence in their relation. “I dare say,” she said at last, “that I make allusions you don’t like. But I keep forgetting.”

He waited a moment longer, then turned to her with a look rendered a trifle strange by the way it happened to reach over his glasses. It was even austerer than before. “Keep forgetting what?”

She gave after an instant a faint feeble smile which seemed to speak of helplessness and which, when at rare moments it played in her face, was expressive from her positive lack of personal, superficial diffidence. “Well—I don’t know.” It was as if appearances became at times so complicated that—so far as helping others to understand was concerned— she could only give up.

“I hope you don’t think I want you to be with me as you wouldn’t be—so to speak—with yourself. I hope you don’t think I don’t want you to be frank. If you were to try to APPEAR to me anything—!” He ended in simple sadness: that, for instance, would be so little what he should like.

“Anything different, you mean, from what I am? That’s just what I’ve thought from the first. One’s just what one IS—isn’t one? I don’t mean so much,” she went on, “in one’s character or temper—for they have, haven’t they? to be what’s called ‘properly controlled’—as in one’s mind and what one sees and feels and the sort of thing one notices.” Nanda paused an instant; then “There you are!” she simply but rather desperately brought out.

Mr. Longdon considered this with visible intensity. “What you suggest is that the things you speak of depend on other people?”

“Well, every one isn’t so beautiful as you.” She had met him with promptitude, yet no sooner had she spoken than she appeared again to encounter a difficulty. “But there it is—my just saying even that. Oh how I always know—as I’ve told you before—whenever I’m different! I can’t ask you to tell me the things Granny WOULD have said, because that’s simply arranging to keep myself back from you, and so being nasty and underhand, which you naturally don’t want, nor I either. Nevertheless when I say the things she wouldn’t, then I put before you too much—too much for your liking it—what I know and see and feel. If we’re both partly the result of other people, HER other people were so different.” The girl’s sensitive boldness kept it up, but there was something in her that pleaded