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

his hands in his pockets and his manner perhaps a little awkward. “The way you young things talk of it!”

“Harold talks of it—but I don’t think I do. I’m not a bit expensive— ask mother, or even ask father. I do with awfully little—for clothes and things, and I could easily do with still less. Harold’s a born consumer, as Mitchy says; he says also he’s one of those people who will never really want.”

“Ah for that, Mitchy himself will never let him.”

“Well then, with every one helping us all round, aren’t we a lovely family? I don’t speak of it to tell tales, but when you mention hearing from Harold all sorts of things immediately come over me. We seem to be all living more or less on other people, all immensely ‘beholden.’ You can easily say of course that I’m worst of all. The children and their people, at Bognor, are in borrowed quarters—mother got them lent her—as to which, no doubt, I’m perfectly aware that I ought to be there sharing them, taking care of my little brother and sister, instead of sitting here at Mr. Longdon’s expense to expose everything and criticise. Father and mother, in Scotland, are on a grand campaign. Well”—she pulled herself up—“I’m not in THAT at any rate. Say you’ve lent Harold only five shillings,” she went on.

Vanderbank stood smiling. “Well, say I have. I never lend any one whatever more.”

“It only adds to my conviction,” Nanda explained, “that he writes to Mr. Longdon.”

“But if Mr. Longdon doesn’t say so—?” Vanderbank objected.

“Oh that proves nothing.” She got up as she spoke. “Harold also works Granny.” He only laughed out at first for this, while she went on: “You’ll think I make myself out fearfully deep—I mean in the way of knowing everything without having to be told. That IS, as you say, mamma’s great accomplishment, so it must be hereditary. Besides, there seem to me only too many things one IS told. Only Mr. Longdon has in fact said nothing.”

She had looked about responsibly—not to leave in disorder the garden-nook they had occupied; picking up a newspaper and changing the place of a cushion. “I do think that with him you’re remarkable,” Vanderbank observed—“putting on one side all you seem to know and on the other all he holds his tongue about. What then DOES he say?” the young man asked after a slight pause and perhaps even with a slight irritation.

Nanda glanced round again—she was folding, rather carefully, her paper. Presently her glance met their friend, who, having come out of one of the long windows that opened to the lawn, had stopped there to watch them. “He says just now that luncheon’s ready.”

II

“I’ve made him,” she said in the drawing-room to Mitchy, “make Mr. Van go with him.”

Mr. Longdon, in the rain, which had come on since the morning, had betaken himself to church, and his other guest, with sufficiently marked good humour, had borne him company. The windows of the drawing-room looked at the wet garden, all vivid and rich in the summer shower, and Mitchy, after seeing Vanderbank turn up his trousers and fling back a last answer to the not quite sincere chaff his submission had engendered, adopted freely and familiarly the prospect not only of a grateful freshened lawn, but of a good hour in the very pick, as he called it, of his actual happy conditions. The favouring rain, the dear old place, the charming serious house, the large inimitable room, the absence of the others, the present vision of what his young friend had given him to count on—the sense of these delights was expressed in his fixed generous glare. He was at first too pleased even to sit down; he measured the great space from end to end, admiring again everything he had admired before and protesting afresh that no modern ingenuity—not even his own, to which he did justice—could create effects of such purity. The final touch in the picture before them was just the composer’s ignorance. Mr. Longdon had not made his house, he had simply lived it, and the “taste” of the place—Mitchy in certain connexions abominated the word—was just nothing more than the beauty of his life. Everything on every side had dropped straight from heaven, with nowhere a bargaining thumb-mark, a single sign of the shop. All this would have been a wonderful theme for discourse in Buckingham Crescent—so happy an exercise for the votaries of that temple of analysis that he repeatedly spoke of their experience of it as crying aloud for Mrs. Brook. The questions it set in motion for the perceptive mind were exactly those that, as he said, most made them feel themselves. Vanderbank’s plea for his morning had been a pile of letters to work off, and Mitchy—then coming down, as he announced from the first, ready for anything—had gone to church with Mr. Longdon and Nanda in the finest spirit of curiosity. He now—after the girl’s remark—turned away from his view of the rain, which he found different somehow from other rain, as everything else was different, and replied that he knew well enough what she could make Mr. Longdon do, but only wondered at Mr. Longdon’s secret for acting on their friend. He was there before her with his hands in his pockets and appreciation winking from every yellow spot in his red necktie. “Afternoon service of a wet Sunday in a small country town is a large order. Does Van do everything the governor wants?”

“He may perhaps have had a suspicion of what I want,” Nanda explained. “If I want particularly to talk to you—!”

“He has got out of the way to give me a chance? Well then he’s as usual simply magnificent. How can I express the bliss of finding myself enclosed with you in this sweet old security, this really unimagined sanctity? Nothing’s more charming than suddenly to come across something sharp and fresh after we’ve thought there was nothing more that could draw from us a groan. We’ve supposed we’ve had it all, have squeezed the last impression out of the last disappointment, penetrated to the last familiarity in the last surprise; then some fine day we find that we haven’t done justice to life. There are little things that pop up and make us feel again. What MAY happen is after all incalculable. There’s just a little chuck of the dice, and for three minutes we win. These, my dear young lady, are my three minutes. You wouldn’t believe the amusement I get from them, and how can I possibly tell you? There’s a faint divine old fragrance here in the room—or doesn’t it perhaps reach you? I shan’t have lived without it, but I see now I had been afraid I should. You, on your side, won’t have lived without some touch of greatness. This moment’s great and you’ve produced it. You were great when you felt all you COULD produce. Therefore,” Mitchy went on, pausing once more, as he walked, before a picture, “I won’t pull the whole thing down by the vulgarity of wishing I too only had a first-rate Cotman.”

“Have you given up some VERY big thing to come?” Nanda replied to this.

“What in the world is very big, my child, but the beauty of this hour? I haven’t the least idea WHAT, when I got Mr. Longdon’s note, I gave up. Don’t ask me for an account of anything; everything went—became imperceptible. I WILL say that for myself: I shed my badness, I do forget people, with a facility that makes me, for bits, for little patches, so far as they’re concerned, cease to BE; so that my life is spotted all over with momentary states in which I’m as the dead of whom nothing’s said but good.” He had strolled toward her again while she smiled at him. “I’ve died for this, Nanda.”

“The only difficulty I see,” she presently replied, “is that you ought to marry a woman really clever and that I’m not quite sure what there may be of that in Aggie.”

“In Aggie?” her friend echoed very gently. “Is THAT what you’ve sent for me for—to talk about Aggie?”

“Didn’t it occur to you it might be?”

“That it couldn’t possibly, you mean, be anything else?” He looked about for the place in which it would express the deepest surrender to the scene to sit—then sank down with a beautiful prompt submission. “I’ve no idea of what occurred to me—nothing at least but the sense that I had occurred to YOU. The occurrence is clay in the hands of the potter. Do with me what you will.”

“You appreciate everything so wonderfully,” Nanda said, “that it oughtn’t to be hard for you to appreciate HER. I do dream so you may save her. That’s why I haven’t waited.”

“The only thing that remains to me in life,” he answered, “is a certain accessibility to the thought of what I may still do to figure a little in your eye; but that’s precisely a thought you may assist to become clearer. You may for instance give me some pledge or sign that if I do figure—prance and caracole and sufficiently kick up the dust—your eye won’t suffer itself to be distracted from me. I think there’s no adventure I’m not ready to undertake for you; yet my passion—chastened, through all this, purified, austere—is still enough of this world not wholly to have renounced the fancy of some small reward.”

“How small?” the girl asked.

She spoke as if feeling she must take from him in common kindness at least as much as she would make him take, and the serious anxious patience such a consciousness gave her tone was met by Mitchy with a charmed reasonableness that his habit of hyperbole did nothing to misrepresent. He glowed at her with the fullest recognition that there was something he was there to discuss with her, but with the assurance in every soft sound of him that no height to which she might lift the discussion would be too great for him to reach. His every cadence and every motion was an implication, as from one to the other, of the exquisite. Oh he could sustain it! “Well, I mean the establishment of something between us. I mean your arranging somehow that we shall be drawn more together—know together something nobody else knows. I should like so terrifically to have a RELATION that is a secret, with you.”

“Oh if that’s all you want you can be easily gratified. Rien de plus facile, as mamma says. I’m full of secrets—I think I’m really most secretive. I’ll share almost any one of them with you—if it’s only a good one.”

Mitchy debated. “You mean you’ll choose it yourself? You won’t let it be one of mine?”

Nanda wondered. “But what’s the difference?”

Her companion jumped up again and for a moment pervaded the place. “When you say such things as that, you’re of a beauty—! MAY it,” he asked as he stopped before her, “be one of mine—a perfectly awful one?”

She showed her clearest interest. “As I suppose the most awful secrets are the best—yes, certainly.”

“I’m hideously tempted.” But he hung fire; then dropping into his chair again: “It would be too bad. I’m afraid I can’t.”

“Then why won’t THIS do, just as it is?”

“‘This’?” He looked over the big bland room. “Which?”

“Why what you’re here for?”

“My dear child I’m here—most of all—to love you more than ever; and there’s an absence of favouring mystery about THAT—!” She looked at him as if seeing what he meant and only asking to remedy it. “There’s a certain amount of mystery we can now MAKE—that it strikes me in fact we MUST make. Dear Mitchy,” she continued almost