The Awkward Age

Very different was Mrs. Brook’s welcome of the restored wanderer to whom, in a brief space, she addressed every expression of surprise and delight, though marking indeed at last, as a qualification of these things, her regret that he declined to partake of her tea or to allow her to make him what she called “snug for a talk” in his customary corner of her sofa. He pleaded frankly agitation and embarrassment, reminded her even that he was awfully shy and that after separations, complications, whatever might at any time happen, he was conscious of the dust that had settled on intercourse and that he couldn’t blow away in a single breath. She was only, according to her nature, to indulge him if, while he walked about and changed his place, he came to the surface but in patches and pieces. There was so much he wanted to know that—well, as they had arrived only the night before, she could judge. There was knowledge, it became clear, that Mrs. Brook almost equally craved, so that it even looked at first as if, on either side, confidence might be choked by curiosity. This disaster was finally barred by the fact that the spirit of enquiry found for Mitchy material that was comparatively plastic. That was after all apparent enough when at the end of a few vain passes he brought out sociably: “Well, has he done it?”

Still indeed there was something in Mrs. Brook’s face that seemed to reply “Oh come—don’t rush it, you know!” and something in the movement with which she turned away that described the state of their question as by no means so simple as that. On his refusal of tea she had rung for the removal of the table, and the bell was at this moment answered by the two men. Little ensued then, for some minutes, while the servants were present; she spoke only as the butler was about to close the door. “If Mr. Longdon presently comes show him into Mr. Brookenham’s room if Mr. Brookenham isn’t there. If he is show him into the dining-room and in either case let me immediately know.”

The man waited expressionless. “And in case of his asking for Miss Brookenham—?”

“He won’t!” she replied with a sharpness before which her interlocutor retired. “He will!” she then added in quite another tone to Mitchy. “That is, you know, he perfectly MAY. But oh the subtlety of servants!” she sighed.

Mitchy was now all there. “Mr. Longdon’s in town then?”

“For the first time since you went away. He’s to call this afternoon.”

“And you want to see him alone?”

Mrs. Brook thought. “I don’t think I want to see him at all.”

“Then your keeping him below—?”

“Is so that he shan’t burst in till I know. It’s YOU, my dear, I want to see.”

Mitchy glared about. “Well, don’t take it ill if, in return for that, I say I myself want to see every one. I could have done even just now with a little more of Edward.”

Mrs. Brook, in her own manner and with a slow headshake, looked lovely. “I couldn’t.” Then she puzzled it out with a pause. “It even does come over me that if you don’t mind—!”

“What, my dear woman,” said Mitchy encouragingly, “did I EVER mind? I assure you,” he laughed, “I haven’t come back to begin!”

At this, suddenly dropping everything else, she laid her hand on him. “Mitchy love, ARE you happy?”

So for a moment they stood confronted. “Not perhaps as YOU would have tried to make me.”

“Well, you’ve still GOT me, you know.”

“Oh,” said Mitchy, “I’ve got a great deal. How, if I really look at it, can a man of my peculiar nature—it IS, you know, awfully peculiar—NOT be happy? Think, if one is driven to it for instance, of the breadth of my sympathies.”

Mrs. Brook, as a result of thinking, appeared for a little to demur. “Yes—but one mustn’t be too much driven to it. It’s by one’s sympathies that one suffers. If you should do that I couldn’t bear it.”

She clearly evoked for Mitchy a definite image. “It WOULD be funny, wouldn’t it? But you wouldn’t have to. I’d go off and do it alone somewhere—in a dark room, I think, or on a desert island; at any rate where nobody should see. Where’s the harm moreover,” he went on, “of any suffering that doesn’t bore one, as I’m sure, however much its outer aspect might amuse some others, mine wouldn’t bore me? What I should do in my desert island or my dark room, I feel, would be just to dance about with the thrill of it—which is exactly the exhibition of ludicrous gambols that I would fain have arranged to spare you. I assure you, dear Mrs. Brook,” he wound up, “that I’m not in the least bored now. Everything’s so interesting.”

“You’re beautiful!” she vaguely interposed.

But he pursued without heeding: “Was perhaps what you had in your head that I should see him—?”

She came back but slowly, however, to the moment. “Mr. Longdon? Well, yes. You know he can’t bear ME—”

“Yes, yes”—Mitchy was almost eager.

It had already sent her off again. “You’re too lovely. You HAVE come back the same. It seemed to me,” she after an instant explained, “that I wanted him to be seen—”

“Without inconvenience, as it were, either to himself or to you? Then,” said Mitchy, who visibly felt that he had taken her up successfully, “it strikes me that I’m absolutely your man. It’s delicious to come back to a use.”

But she was much more dim about it. “Oh what you’ve come back to—!”

“It’s just what I’m trying to get at. Van is still then where I left him?”

She was just silent. “Did you really believe he would move?”

Mitchy took a few turns, speaking almost with his back presented. “Well, with all the reasons—!” After which, while she watched him, he was before her again with a question. “It’s utterly off?”

“When was it ever really on?”

“Oh I know your view, and that, I think,” said Mitchy, “is the most extraordinary part of it. I can tell you it would have put ME on.”

“My view?” Mrs. Brook thought. “Have you forgotten that I had for you too a view that didn’t?”

“Ah but we didn’t differ, you and I. It wasn’t a defiance and a prophecy. You wanted ME.”

“I did indeed!” Mrs. Brook said simply.

“And you didn’t want him. For HER, I mean. So you risked showing it.”

She looked surprised. “DID I?”

Again they were face to face. “Your candour’s divine!”

She wondered. “Do you mean it was even then?”

Mitchy smiled at her till he was red. “It’s exquisite now.”

“Well,” she presently returned, “I knew my Van!”

“I thought I knew ‘yours’ too,” Mitchy said. Their eyes met a minute and he added: “But I didn’t.” Then he exclaimed: “How you’ve worked it!”

She looked barely conscious. “‘Worked it’?” After which, with a slightly sharper note: “How do you know—while you’ve been amusing yourself in places that I’d give my head to see again but never shall—what I’ve been doing?”

“Well, I saw, you know, that night at Tishy’s, just before we left England, your wonderful start. I got a look at your attitude, as it were, and your system.”

Her eyes were now far away, and she spoke after an instant without moving them. “And didn’t I by the same token get a look at yours?”

“Mine?” Mitchy thought, but seemed to doubt. “My dear child, I hadn’t any then.”

“You mean that it has formed itself—your system—since?”

He shook his head with decision. “I assure you I’m quite at sea. I’ve never had, and I have as little as ever now, anything but my general philosophy, which I won’t attempt at present to go into and of which moreover I think you’ve had first and last your glimpses. What I made out in you that night was a perfect policy.”

Mrs. Brook had another of her infantine stares. “Every one that night seems to have made out something! All I can say is at any rate,” she went on, “that in that case you were all far deeper than I was.”

“It was just a blind instinct, without a programme or a scheme? Perhaps then, since it has so perfectly succeeded, the name doesn’t matter. I’m lost, as I tell you,” Mitchy declared, “in admiration of its success.”

She looked, as before, so young, yet so grave. “What do you call its success?”