The Awkward Age

Mr. Longdon thought on; then raising his eyes: “I don’t quite see why you won’t suffer me to tell you—!”

“The detail of your intention? I do then. You’ve said quite enough. If my visit must commit me,” Vanderbank pursued, “I’m afraid I can’t come.”

Mr. Longdon, who had passed into the corridor, gave a dry sad little laugh. “Come then—as the ladies say—‘as you are’!”

On which, rather softly closing the door, the young man remained alone in the great emptily lighted billiard-room.

BOOK SIXTH. MRS. BROOK

Presenting himself at Buckingham Crescent three days after the Sunday spent at Mertle, Vanderbank found Lady Fanny Cashmore in the act of taking leave of Mrs. Brook and found Mrs. Brook herself in the state of muffled exaltation that was the mark of all her intercourse—and most of all perhaps of her farewells—with Lady Fanny. This splendid creature gave out, as it were, so little that Vanderbank was freshly struck with all Mrs. Brook could take in, though nothing, for that matter, in Buckingham Crescent, had been more fully formulated on behalf of the famous beauty than the imperturbable grandeur of her almost total absence of articulation. Every aspect of the phenomenon had been freely discussed there and endless ingenuity lavished on the question of how exactly it was that so much of what the world would in another case have called complete stupidity could be kept by a mere wonderful face from boring one to death. It was Mrs. Brook who, in this relation as in many others, had arrived at the supreme expression of the law, had thrown off, happily enough, to whomever it might have concerned: “My dear thing, it all comes back, as everything always does, simply to personal pluck. It’s only a question, no matter when or where, of having enough. Lady Fanny has the courage of all her silence—so much therefore that it sees her completely through and is what really makes her interesting. Not to be afraid of what may happen to you when you’ve no more to say for yourself than a steamer without a light—that truly is the highest heroism, and Lady Fanny’s greatness is that she’s never afraid. She takes the risk every time she goes out—takes, as you may say, her life in her hand. She just turns that glorious mask upon you and practically says: ‘No, I won’t open my lips—to call it really open—for the forty minutes I shall stay; but I calmly defy you, all the same, to kill me for it.’ And we don’t kill her—we delight in her; though when either of us watches her in a circle of others it’s like seeing a very large blind person in the middle of Oxford Street. One fairly looks about for the police.” Vanderbank, before his fellow visitor withdrew it, had the benefit of the glorious mask and could scarce have failed to be amused at the manner in which Mrs. Brook alone showed the stress of thought. Lady Fanny, in the other scale, sat aloft and Olympian, so that though visibly much had happened between the two ladies it had all happened only to the hostess. The sense in the air in short was just of Lady Fanny herself, who came to an end like a banquet or a procession. Mrs. Brook left the room with her and, on coming back, was full of it. “She’ll go, she’ll go!”

“Go where?” Vanderbank appeared to have for the question less attention than usual.

“Well, to the place her companion will propose. Probably—like Anna Karenine—to one of the smaller Italian towns.”

“Anna Karenine? She isn’t a bit like Anna.”

“Of course she isn’t so clever,” said Mrs. Brook. “But that would spoil her. So it’s all right.”

“I’m glad it’s all right,” Vanderbank laughed. “But I dare say we shall still have her with us a while.”

“We shall do that, I trust, whatever happens. She’ll come up again—she’ll remain, I feel, one of those enormous things that fate seems somehow to have given me as the occupation of my odd moments. I don’t see,” Mrs. Brook added, “what still keeps her on the edge, which isn’t an inch wide.”

Vanderbank looked this time as if he only tried to wonder. “Isn’t it YOU?”

Mrs. Brook mused more deeply. “Sometimes I think so. But I don’t know.”

“Yes, how CAN you of course know, since she can’t tell you?”

“Oh if I depended on her telling—!” Mrs. Brook shook out with this a sofa-cushion or two and sank into the corner she had arranged. The August afternoon was hot and the London air heavy; the room moreover, though agreeably bedimmed, gave out the staleness of the season’s end. “If you hadn’t come to-day,” she went on, “you’d have missed me till I don’t know when, for we’ve let the Hovel again—wretchedly, but still we’ve let it—and I go down on Friday to see that it isn’t too filthy. Edward, who’s furious at what I’ve taken for it, had his idea that we should go there this year ourselves.”

“And now”—Vanderbank took her up—“that fond fancy has become simply the ghost of a dead thought, a ghost that, in company with a thousand predecessors, haunts the house in the twilight and pops at you out of odd corners.”

“Oh Edward’s dead thoughts are indeed a cheerful company and worthy of the perpetual mental mourning we seem to go about in. They’re worse than the relations we’re always losing without seeming to have any fewer, and I expect every day to hear that the Morning Post regrets to have to announce in that line too some new bereavement. The apparitions following the deaths of so many thoughts ARE particularly awful in the twilight, so that at this season, while the day drags and drags, I’m glad to have any one with me who may keep them at a distance.”

Vanderbank had not sat down; slowly, familiarly he turned about. “And where’s Nanda?”

“Oh SHE doesn’t help—she attracts rather the worst of the bogies. Edward and Nanda and Harold and I seated together are fairly a case for that—what do you call it?—investigating Society. Deprived of the sweet resource of the Hovel,” Mrs. Brook continued, “we shall each, from about the tenth on, forage somehow or other for ourselves. Mitchy perhaps,” she added, “will insist on taking us to Baireuth.”

“That will be the form, you mean, of his own forage?”

Mrs. Brook just hesitated. “Unless you should prefer to take it as the form of yours.”

Vanderbank appeared for a moment obligingly enough to turn this over, but with the effect of noting an objection. “Oh I’m afraid I shall have to grind straight through the month and that by the time I’m free every Ring at Baireuth will certainly have been rung. Is it your idea to take Nanda?” he asked.

She reached out for another cushion. “If it’s impossible for you to manage what I suggest why should that question interest you?”

“My dear woman”—and her visitor dropped into a chair—“do you suppose my interest depends on such poverties as what I can ‘manage’? You know well enough,” he went on in another tone, “why I care for Nanda and enquire about her.”

She was perfectly ready. “I know it, but only as a bad reason. Don’t be too sure!”

For a moment they looked at each other. “Don’t be so sure, you mean, that the elation of it may go to my head? Are you really warning me against vanity?”

“Your ‘reallys,’ my dear Van, are a little formidable, but it strikes me that before I tell you there’s something I’ve a right to ask. Are you ‘really’ what they call thinking of my daughter?”

“Your asking,” Vanderbank returned, “exactly shows the state of your knowledge of the matter. I don’t quite see moreover why you speak as if I were paying an abrupt and unnatural attention. What have I done the last three months but talk to you about her? What have you done but talk to ME about her? From the moment you first spoke to me—‘monstrously,’ I remember you called it—of the difference made in your social life by her finally established, her perpetual, her inexorable participation: from that moment what have we both done but put our heads together over the question of keeping the place tidy, as you called it—or as I called it, was it?—for the young female mind?”

Mrs. Brook faced serenely enough the directness of this challenge. “Well, what are you coming to? I spoke of the change in my life of course; I happen to be so constituted that my life has something to do with my mind and my mind something to do with my talk. Good talk: you know—no one, dear Van, should know better—what part for me that plays. Therefore when one has deliberately to make one’s talk bad—!”

“‘Bad’?” Vanderbank, in his amusement, fell back in his chair. “Dear Mrs. Brook, you’re too delightful!”

“You know what I mean—stupid, flat, fourth-rate. When one has to haul in sail to that degree—and for a perfectly outside reason—there’s nothing strange in one’s taking a friend sometimes into the confidence of one’s irritation.”

“Ah,” Vanderbank protested, “you do yourself injustice. Irritation hasn’t been for you the only consequence of the affair.”

Mrs. Brook gloomily thought. “No, no—I’ve had my calmness: the calmness of deep despair. I’ve seemed to see everything go.”

“Oh how can you say that,” her visitor demanded, “when just what we’ve most been agreed upon so often is the practical impossibility of making any change? Hasn’t it seemed as if we really can’t overcome conversational habits so thoroughly formed?”

Again Mrs. Brook reflected. “As if our way of looking at things were too serious to be trifled with? I don’t know—I think it’s only you who have denied our sacrifices, our compromises and concessions. I myself have constantly felt smothered in them. But there it is,” she impatiently went on. “What I don’t admit is that you’ve given me ground to take for a proof of your ‘intentions’—to use the odious term—your association with me on behalf of the preposterous fiction, as it after all is, of Nanda’s blankness of mind.”

Vanderbank’s head, in his chair, was thrown back; his eyes ranged over the top of the room. “There never has been any mystery about my thinking her—all in her own way—the nicest girl in London. She IS.”

His companion was silent a little. “She is, by all means. Well,” she then added, “so far as I may have been alive to the fact of any one’s thinking her so, it’s not out of place I should mention to you the difference made in my appreciation of it by our delightful little stay at Mertle. My views for Nanda,” said Mrs. Brook, “have somehow gone up.”

Vanderbank was prompt to show how he could understand it. “So that you wouldn’t consider even Mitchy now?”

But his friend took no notice of the question. “The way Mr. Longdon distinguishes her is quite the sort of thing that gives a girl, as Harold says, a ‘leg up.’ It’s awfully curious and has made me think: he isn’t anything whatever, as London estimates go, in himself—so that what is it, pray, that makes him, when ‘added on’ to her, so double Nanda’s value? I somehow or other see, through his being known to back her and through the pretty story of his loyalty to mamma and all the rest of it (oh if one chose to WORK that!) ever so much more of a chance for her.”

Vanderbank’s eyes were on the ceiling. “It IS curious, isn’t it?—though I think he’s rather more ‘in himself,’ even for the London estimate, than you quite understand.” He appeared to give her time to take this up, but as she said nothing he pursued: “I dare say that if even I now WERE to enter myself it would strike you as too late.”

Her attention to this was but indirect. “It’s awfully vulgar to be talking about it, but I can’t help feeling that something possibly rather big will come of Mr. Longdon.”

“Ah we’ve touched on that before,” said Vanderbank, “and you know you did think something might come even for me.”

She continued however, as if she scarce heard him, to work out her own vision. “It’s very true that up to now—”

“Well, up to now?” he asked as she faltered.

She faltered still a little. “I do say the most hideous things. But we HAVE said worse, haven’t we? Up to now, I mean, he hasn’t given her anything. Unless indeed,” she mused, “she may have had something without telling me.”

Vanderbank went much straighter. “What sort of thing have you in mind? Are you thinking of money?”

“Yes. Isn’t it awful?”

“That you should think of it?”

“That I should talk this way.” Her friend was apparently not prepared with an assent, and she quickly enough pursued: “If he HAD given her any it would come out somehow in her expenditure. She has tremendous liberty and is very secretive, but still it would come out.”