The Awkward Age

He spoke with pointed levity, but his companion showed him after an instant a face just covered—and a little painfully—with the vision of the possibility brushed away by the joke. “Oh I’m not so bad as that!” Mr. Longdon modestly ejaculated.

“Well, she doesn’t do it always,” Vanderbank laughed, “and it’s nothing moreover to what some people are called. Why, there was a fellow there—” He pulled up, however, and, thinking better of it, selected another instance. “The Duchess—weren’t you introduced to the Duchess?—never calls me anything but ‘Vanderbank’ unless she calls me ‘caro mio.’ It wouldn’t have taken much to make her appeal to YOU with an ‘I say, Longdon!’ I can quite hear her.”

Mr. Longdon, focussing the effect of the sketch, pointed its moral with an indulgent: “Oh well, a FOREIGN duchess!” He could make his distinctions.

“Yes, she’s invidiously, cruelly foreign,” Vanderbank agreed: “I’ve never indeed seen a woman avail herself so cleverly, to make up for the obloquy of that state, of the benefits and immunities it brings with it. She has bloomed in the hot-house of her widowhood—she’s a Neapolitan hatched by an incubator.”

“A Neapolitan?”—Mr. Longdon seemed all civilly to wish he had only known it.

“Her husband was one; but I believe that dukes at Naples are as thick as princes at Petersburg. He’s dead, at any rate, poor man, and she has come back here to live.”

“Gloomily, I should think—after Naples?” Mr. Longdon threw out.

“Oh it would take more than even a Neapolitan past—! However”—and the young man caught himself up—“she lives not in what’s behind her, but in what’s before—she lives in her precious little Aggie.”

“Little Aggie?” Mr. Longdon risked a cautious interest.

“I don’t take a liberty there,” Vanderbank smiled: “I speak only of the young Agnesina, a little girl, the Duchess’s niece, or rather I believe her husband’s, whom she has adopted—in the place of a daughter early lost—and has brought to England to marry.”

“Ah to some great man of course!”

Vanderbank thought. “I don’t know.” He gave a vague but expressive sigh. “She’s rather lovely, little Aggie.”

Mr. Longdon looked conspicuously subtle. “Then perhaps YOU’RE the man!”

“Do I look like a ‘great’ one?” Vanderbank broke in.

His visitor, turning away from him, again embraced the room. “Oh dear, yes!”

“Well then, to show how right you are, there’s the young lady.” He pointed to an object on one of the tables, a small photograph with a very wide border of something that looked like crimson fur.

Mr. Longdon took up the picture; he was serious now. “She’s very beautiful—but she’s not a little girl.”

“At Naples they develop early. She’s only seventeen or eighteen, I suppose; but I never know how old—or at least how young—girls are, and I’m not sure. An aunt, at any rate, has of course nothing to conceal. She IS extremely pretty—with extraordinary red hair and a complexion to match; great rarities I believe, in that race and latitude. She gave me the portrait—frame and all. The frame is Neapolitan enough and little Aggie’s charming.” Then Vanderbank subjoined: “But not so charming as little Nanda.”

“Little Nanda?—have you got HER?” The old man was all eagerness.

“She’s over there beside the lamp—also a present from the original.”

II

Mr. Longdon had gone to the place—little Nanda was in glazed white wood. He took her up and held her out; for a moment he said nothing, but presently, over his glasses, rested on his host a look intenser even than his scrutiny of the faded image. “Do they give their portraits now?”

“Little girls—innocent lambs? Surely—to old friends. Didn’t they in your time?”

Mr. Longdon studied the portrait again; after which, with an exhalation of something between superiority and regret, “They never did to me,” he returned.

“Well, you can have all you want now!” Vanderbank laughed.

His friend gave a slow droll headshake. “I don’t want them ‘now’!”

“You could do with them, my dear sir, still,” Vanderbank continued in the same manner, “every bit I do!”

“I’m sure you do nothing you oughtn’t.” Mr. Longdon kept the photograph and continued to look at it. “Her mother told me about her—promised me I should see her next time.”

“You must—she’s a great friend of mine.”

Mr. Longdon was really deep in it. “Is she clever?”

Vanderbank turned it over. “Well, you’ll tell me if you think so.”

“Ah with a child of seventeen—!” Mr. Longdon murmured it as if in dread of having to pronounce. “This one too IS seventeen?”

Vanderbank again considered. “Eighteen.” He just hung fire once more, then brought out: “Well, call it nearly nineteen. I’ve kept her birthdays,” he laughed.

His companion caught at the idea. “Upon my honour I should like to! When is the next?”

“You’ve plenty of time—the fifteenth of June.”

“I’m only too sorry to wait.” Laying down the object he had been examining Mr. Longdon took another turn about the room, and his manner was such an appeal to his host to accept his restlessness that as he circulated the latter watched him with encouragement. “I said to you just now that I knew the mothers, but it would have been more to the point to say the grandmothers.” He stopped before his young friend, then nodded at the image of Nanda. “I knew HERS. She put it at something less.”

Vanderbank rather failed to understand. “The old lady? Put what?”

Mr. Longdon’s face showed him as for a moment feeling his way. “I’m speaking of Mrs. Brookenham. She spoke of her daughter as only sixteen.”

Vanderbank’s amusement at the tone of this broke out. “She usually does! She has done so, I think, for the last year or two.”

His visitor dropped upon his sofa as with the weight of something sudden and fresh; then from this place, with a sharp little movement, tossed into the fire the end of a cigarette. Vanderbank offered him another, and as he accepted it and took a light he said: “I don’t know what you’re doing with me—I never at home smoke so much!” But he puffed away and, seated near, laid his hand on Vanderbank’s arm as to help himself to utter something too delicate not to be guarded and yet too important not to be risked. “Now that’s the sort of thing I did mean—as one of my impressions.” Vanderbank continued at a loss and he went on: “I refer—if you don’t mind my saying so—to what you said just now.”

Vanderbank was conscious of a deep desire to draw from him whatever might come; so sensible was it somehow that whatever in him was good was also thoroughly personal. But our young friend had to think a minute. “I see, I see. Nothing’s more probable than that I’ve said something nasty; but which of my particular horrors?”

“Well then, your conveying that she makes her daughter out younger—!”

“To make herself out the same?” Vanderbank took him straight up. “It was nasty my doing that? I see, I see. Yes, yes: I rather gave her away, and you’re struck by it—as is most delightful you SHOULD be—because you’re in every way of a better tradition and, knowing Mrs. Brookenham’s my friend, can’t conceive of one’s playing on a friend a trick so vulgar and odious. It strikes you also probably as the kind of thing we must be constantly doing; it strikes you that right and left, probably, we keep giving each other away. Well, I dare say we do. Yes, ‘come to think of it,’ as they say in America, we do. But what shall I tell you? Practically we all know it and allow for it and it’s as broad as it’s long. What’s London life after all? It’s tit for tat!”

“Ah but what becomes of friendship?” Mr. Longdon earnestly and pleadingly asked, while he still held Vanderbank’s arm as if under the spell of the vivid explanation supplied him.

The young man met his eyes only the more sociably. “Friendship?”

“Friendship.” Mr. Longdon maintained the full value of the word.

“Well,” his companion risked, “I dare say it isn’t in London by any means what it is at Beccles. I quite literally mean that,” Vanderbank reassuringly added; “I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies—in great towns and great crowds. It’s a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge ‘squash,’ as we elegantly call it—an elbowing pushing perspiring chattering mob.”

“Ah I don’t say THAT of you!” the visitor murmured with a withdrawal of his hand and a visible scruple for the sweeping concession he had evoked.

“Do say it then—for God’s sake; let some one say it, so that something or other, whatever it may be, may come of it! It’s impossible to say too much—it’s impossible to say enough. There isn’t anything any one can say that I won’t agree to.”

“That shows you really don’t care,” the old man returned with acuteness.