The Awkward Age by Henry James (best novel books to read .TXT) 📕

The lower windows of the great white house, which stood high and square, opened to a wide flagged terrace, the parapet of which, an old balustrade of stone, was broken in the middle of its course by a flight of stone steps that descended to a wonderful garden. The terrace had the afternoon shade and fairly hung over the prospect that dropped away and circled it—the prospect, beyond the series of gardens, of scattered splendid trees and green glades, an horizon mainly of woods. Nanda Brookenham, one day at the end of July, coming out to find the place unoccupied as yet by other visitors, stood there a while with an air of happy possession. She moved from end to end of the terrace, pausing, gazing about her, taking in with a face that showed the pleasure of a brief independence the combination of delightful things—of old rooms with old decorations that gleamed and gloomed through the high windows, of old gardens that squared themselves in the wide angles of old walls, of wood-walks rustling in the afternoon breeze and stretching away to further reaches of solitude and summer. The scene had an expectant stillness that she was too charmed to desire to break; she watched it, listened to it, followed with her eyes the white butterflies among the flowers below her, then gave a start as the cry of a peacock came to her from an unseen alley. It set her after a minute into less difficult motion; she passed slowly down the steps, wandering further, looking back at the big bright house but pleased again to see no one else appear. If the sun was still high enough she had a pink parasol. She went through the gardens one by one, skirting the high walls that were so like “collections” and thinking how, later on, the nectarines and plums would flush there. She exchanged a friendly greeting with a man at work, passed through an open door and, turning this way and that, finally found herself in the park, at some distance from the house. It was a point she had had to take another rise to reach, a place marked by an old green bench for a larger sweep of the view, which, in the distance where the woods stopped, showed in the most English way in the world the colour-spot of an old red village and the tower of an old grey church. She had sunk down upon the bench almost with a sense of adventure, yet not too fluttered to wonder if it wouldn’t have been happy to bring a book; the charm of which precisely would have been in feeling everything about her too beautiful to let her read.

The sense of adventure grew in her, presently becoming aware of a stir in the thicket below, followed by the coming into sight, on a path that, mounting, passed near her seat, of a wanderer whom, had his particular, his exceptional identity not quickly appeared, it might have disappointed her a trifle to have to recognise as a friend. He saw her immediately, stopped, laughed, waved his hat, then bounded up the slope and, brushing his forehead with his handkerchief, confessing as to a red face, was rejoicingly there before her. Her own ejaculation on first seeing him—“Why, Mr. Van!”—had had an ambiguous sharpness that was rather for herself than for her visitor. She made room for him on the bench, where in a moment he was cooling off and they were both explaining. The great thing was that he had walked from the station to stretch his legs, coming far round, for the lovely hour and the pleasure of it, by a way he had learnt on some previous occasion of being at Mertle.

“You’ve already stayed here then?” Nanda, who had arrived but half an hour before, spoke as if she had lost the chance to give him a new impression.

“I’ve stayed here—yes, but not with Mitchy; with some people or other— who the deuce can they have been?—who had the place for a few months a year or two ago.”

“Don’t you even remember?”

Vanderbank wondered and laughed. “It will come to me. But it’s a charming sign of London relations, isn’t it?—that one CAN come down to people this way and be awfully well ‘done for’ and all that, and then go away and lose the whole thing, quite forget to whom one has been beholden. It’s a queer life.”

Nanda seemed for an instant to wish to say that one might deny the queerness, but she said something else instead. “I suppose a man like you doesn’t quite feel that he IS beholden. It’s awfully good of him— it’s doing a great deal for anybody—that he should come down at all; so that it would add immensely to his burden if anybody had to be remembered for it.”

“I don’t know what you mean by a man ‘like me,’” Vanderbank returned. “I’m not any particular kind of a man.” She had been looking at him, but she looked away on this, and he continued good-humoured and explanatory. “If you mean that I go about such a lot, how do you know it but by the fact that you’re everywhere now yourself?—so that, whatever I am, in short, you’re just as bad.”

“You admit then that you ARE everywhere. I may be just as bad,” the girl went on, “but the point is that I’m not nearly so good. Girls are such natural hacks—they can’t be anything else.”

“And pray what are fellows who are in the beastly grind of fearfully busy offices? There isn’t an old cabhorse in London that’s kept at it, I assure you, as I am. Besides,” the young man added, “if I’m out every night and off somewhere like this for Sunday, can’t you understand, my dear child, the fundamental reason of it?”

Nanda, with her eyes on him again, studied an instant this mystery. “Am I to infer with delight that it’s the sweet hope of meeting ME? It isn’t,” she continued in a moment, “as if there were any necessity for your