The Awkward Age

“Ah but it wasn’t to go out of my way, don’t you see? He knew you were presently to be here.” Her anxiety that he should understand gave her a rare strained smile. “I mustn’t make—as a request from him—too much of it, and I’ve not a doubt that, rather than that you should think any ill of him for wishing me to say a word, he would gladly be left with whatever bad appearance he may actually happen to have.” She pulled up on these words as with a quick sense of their really, by their mere sound, putting her in deeper; and could only give her friend one of the looks that expressed: “If I could trust you not to assent even more than I want, I should say ‘You know what I mean!’” She allowed him at all events—or tried to allow him—no time for uttered irony before going on: “He was everything you could have wished; quite as beautiful about YOU—”

“As about you?”—Mr. Longdon took her up.

She demurred. “As about mother.” With which she turned away as if it handsomely settled the question.

But it only left him, as she went to the window, sitting there sombre. “I like, you know,” he brought out as his eyes followed her, “your saying you’re not proud! Thank God you ARE, my dear. Yes—it’s better for us.”

At this, after a moment, in her place, she turned round to him. “I’m glad I’m anything—whatever you may call it and though I can’t call it the same—that’s good for YOU.”

He said nothing more for a little, as if by such a speech something in him were simplified and softened. “It would be good for me—by which I mean it would be easier for me—if you didn’t quite so immensely care for him.”

“Oh!” came from Nanda with an accent of attenuation at once so precipitate and so vague that it only made her attitude at first rather awkward. “Oh!” she immediately repeated, but with an increase of the same effect. After which, conscious, she made, as if to save herself, a quick addition. “Dear Mr. Longdon, isn’t it rather yourself most—?”

“It would be easier for me,” he went on, heedless, “if you didn’t, my poor child, so wonderfully love him.”

“Ah but I don’t—please believe me when I assure you I DON’T!” she broke out. It burst from her, flaring up, in a queer quaver that ended in something queerer still—in her abrupt collapse, on the spot, into the nearest chair, where she choked with a torrent of tears. Her buried face could only after a moment give way to the flood, and she sobbed in a passion as sharp and brief as the flurry of a wild thing for an instant uncaged; her old friend meantime keeping his place in the silence broken by her sound and distantly—across the room—closing his eyes to his helplessness and her shame. Thus they sat together while their trouble both conjoined and divided them. She recovered herself, however, with an effort worthy of her fall and was on her feet again as she stammeringly spoke and angrily brushed at her eyes. “What difference in the world does it make—what difference ever?” Then clearly, even with the words, her checked tears suffered her to see how it made the difference that he too had been crying; so that “I don’t know why you mind!” she thereupon wailed with extravagance.

“You don’t know what I would have done for him. You don’t know, you don’t know!” he repeated—while she looked as if she naturally couldn’t—as with a renewal of his dream of beneficence and of the soreness of his personal wound.

“Well, but HE does you justice—he knows. So it shows, so it shows—!”

But in this direction too, unable to say what it showed, she had again broken down and again could only hold herself and let her companion sit there. “Ah Nanda, Nanda!” he deeply murmured; and the depth of the pity was, vainly and blindly, as the depth of a reproach.

“It’s I—it’s I, therefore,” she said as if she must then so look at it with him; “it’s I who am the horrible impossible and who have covered everything else with my own impossibility. For some different person you COULD have done what you speak of, and for some different person you can do it still.”

He stared at her with his barren sorrow. “A person different from him?”

“A person different from ME!”

“And what interest have I in any such person?”

“But your interest in me—you see well enough where THAT lands us.”

Mr. Longdon now got to his feet and somewhat stiffly remained; after which, for all answer, “You say you WILL come then?” he asked. Then as—seemingly with her last thought—she kept silent: “You understand clearly, I take it, that this time it’s never again to leave me—or to BE left.”

“I understand,” she presently replied. “Never again. That,” she continued, “is why I asked you for these days.”

“Well then, since you’ve taken them—”

“Ah but have YOU?” said Nanda. They were close to each other now, and with a tenderness of warning that was helped by their almost equal stature she laid her hand on his shoulder. “What I did more than anything else write to him for,” she had now regained her clearness enough to explain, “was that—with whatever idea you had—you should see for yourself how he could come and go.”

“And what good was that to do me? HADN’T I seen for myself?”

“Well—you’ve seen once more. Here he was. I didn’t care what he thought. Here I brought him. And his reasons remain.”

She kept her eyes on her companion’s face, but his own now and afterwards seemed to wander far. “What do I care for his reasons so long as they’re not mine?”

She thought an instant, still holding him gently and as if for successful argument. “But perhaps you don’t altogether understand them.”

“And why the devil, altogether, SHOULD I?”

“Ah because you distinctly want to,” said Nanda ever so kindly. “You’ve admitted as much when we’ve talked—”

“Oh but when HAVE we talked?” he sharply interrupted.

This time he had challenged her so straight that it was her own look that strayed. “When?”

“When.”

She hesitated. “When HAVEN’T we?”

“Well, YOU may have: if that’s what you call talking—never saying a word. But I haven’t. I’ve only to do at any rate, in the way of reasons, with my own.”

“And yours too then remain? Because, you know,” the girl pursued, “I AM like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like what he thinks.” Then so gravely that it was almost a supplication, “Don’t tell me,” she added, “that you don’t KNOW what he thinks. You do know.”

Their eyes, on that strange ground, could meet at last, and the effect of it was presently for Mr. Longdon. “I do know.”

“Well?”

“Well!” He raised his hands and took her face, which he drew so close to his own that, as she gently let him, he could kiss her with solemnity on the forehead. “Come!” he then very firmly said—quite indeed as if it were a question of their moving on the spot.

It literally made her smile, which, with a certain compunction, she immediately corrected by doing for him in the pressure of her lips to his cheek what he had just done for herself. “To-day?” she more seriously asked.

He looked at his watch. “To-morrow.”

She paused, but clearly for assent. “That’s what I mean by your taking me as I am. It IS, you know, for a girl—extraordinary.”

“Oh I know what it is!” he exclaimed with an odd fatigue in his tenderness.

But she continued, with the shadow of her scruple, to explain. “We’re many of us, we’re most of us—as you long ago saw and showed you felt—extraordinary now. We can’t help it. It isn’t really our fault. There’s so much else that’s extraordinary that if we’re in it all so much we must naturally be.” It was all obviously clearer to her than ever yet, and her sense of it found renewed expression; so that she might have been, as she wound up, a very much older person than her friend. “Everything’s different from what it used to be.”

“Yes, everything,” he returned with an air of final indoctrination. “That’s what he ought to have recognised.”

“As YOU have?” Nanda was once more—and completely now—enthroned in high justice. “Oh he’s more old-fashioned than you.”

“Much more,” said Mr. Longdon with a queer face.

“He tried,” the girl went on—“he did his best. But he couldn’t. And he’s so right—for himself.”

Her visitor, before meeting this, gathered in his hat and stick, which for a minute occupied his attention. “He ought to have married—!”

“Little Aggie? Yes,” said Nanda.

They had gained the door, where Mr. Longdon again met her eyes. “And then Mitchy—!”