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

“To me?”—Vanderbank couldn’t fancy!

“Why, for what we were speaking of just now—my being to-day so in everything and squeezing up and down no matter whose staircase. Isn’t it one crowded hour of glorious life?” she asked. “What preceded it was an age, no doubt—but an age without a name.”

Vanderbank watched her a little in silence, then spoke quite beside the question. “It’s astonishing how at moments you remind me of your mother!”

At this she got up. “Ah there it is! It’s what I shall never shake off. That, I imagine, is what Mr. Longdon feels.”

Both on their feet now, as if ready for the others, they yet—and even a trifle awkwardly—lingered. It might in fact have appeared to a spectator that some climax had come, on the young man’s part, to some state of irresolution about the utterance of something. What were the words so repeatedly on his lips, yet so repeatedly not sounded? It would have struck our observer that they were probably not those his lips even now actually formed. “Doesn’t he perhaps talk to you too much about yourself?”

Nanda gave him a dim smile, and he might indeed then have exclaimed on a certain resemblance, a resemblance of expression that had nothing to do with form. It wouldn’t have been diminished for him moreover by her successful suppression of every sign that she felt his question a little of a snub. The recall he had previously mentioned could, however, as she answered him, only have been brushed away by a supervening sense of his roughness. “It probably isn’t so much that as my own way of going on.” She spoke with a mildness that could scarce have been so full without being an effort. “Between his patience and my egotism anything’s possible. It isn’t his talking—it’s his listening.” She gave up the point, at any rate, as if from softness to her actual companion. “Wasn’t it you who spoke to mamma about my sitting with her? That’s what I mean by my debt to you. It’s through you that I’m always there—through you and perhaps a little through Mitchy.”

“Oh through Mitchy—it MUST have been—more than through me.” Vanderbank spoke with the manner of humouring her about a trifle. “Mitchy, delightful man, felt on the subject of your eternal exile, I think, still more strongly.”

They quitted their place together and at the end of a few steps became aware of the approach of one of the others, a figure but a few yards off, arriving from the quarter from which Nanda had come. “Ah Mr. Longdon!”—she spoke with eagerness now.

Vanderbank instantly waved his hat. “Dear old boy!”

“Between you all, at any rate,” she said more gaily, “you’ve brought me down.”

Vanderbank made no answer till they met their friend, when, by way of greeting, he simply echoed her words. “Between us all, you’ll be glad to know, we’ve brought her down.”

Mr. Longdon looked from one of them to the other. “Where have you been together?”

Nanda was the first to respond. “Only talking—on a bench.”

“Well, I want to talk on a bench!” Their friend showed a spirit.

“With me, of course?”—Vanderbank met it with encouragement.

The girl said nothing, but Mr. Longdon sought her eyes. “No—with Nanda. You must mingle in the crowd.”

“Ah,” the their companion laughed, “you two are the crowd!”

“Well—have your tea first.”

Vanderbank on this, giving it up with the air of amused accommodation that was never—certainly for these two—at fault in him, offered to Mr. Longdon before departing the handshake of greeting he had omitted; a demonstration really the warmer for the tone of the joke that went with it. “Intrigant!”

Nanda praised to the satellite so fantastically described the charming spot she had quitted, with the effect that they presently took fresh possession of it, finding the beauty of the view deepened as the afternoon grew old and the shadows long. They were of a comfortable agreement on these matters, by which moreover they were but little delayed, one of the pair at least being too conscious, for the hour, of still other phenomena than the natural and peaceful process that filled the air. “Well, you must tell me about these things,” Mr. Longdon sociably said: he had joined his young friend with a budget of impressions rapidly gathered at the house; as to which his appeal to her for a light or two may be taken as the measure of the confidence now ruling their relations. He had come to feel at last, he mentioned, that he could allow for most differences; yet in such a situation as the present bewilderment could only come back. There were no differences in the world—so it had all ended for him—but those that marked at every turn the manners he had for three months been observing in good society. The general wide deviation of this body occupied his mind to the exclusion of almost everything else, and he had finally been brought to believe that even in his slow-paced prime he must have hung behind his contemporaries. He had not supposed at the moment—in the fifties and the sixties—that he passed for old-fashioned, but life couldn’t have left him so far in the rear had the start between them originally been fair. This was the way he had more than once put the matter to the girl; which gives a sufficient hint, it is hoped, of the range of some of their talk. It had always wound up indeed, their talk, with some assumption of the growth of his actual understanding; but it was just these pauses in the fray that seemed to lead from time to time to a sharper clash. It was apt to be when he felt as if he had exhausted surprises that he really received his greatest shocks. There were no such queer-tasting draughts as some of those yielded by the bucket that had repeatedly, as he imagined, touched the bottom of the well. “Now this sudden invasion of somebody’s—heaven knows whose—house, and our dropping down on it like a swarm of locusts: I dare say it isn’t civil to criticise it when one’s going too, so almost culpably, with the stream; but what are people made of that they consent, just for money, to the violation of their homes?”

Nanda wondered; she cultivated the sense of his making her intensely reflect, “But haven’t people in England always let their places?”

“If we’re a nation of shopkeepers, you mean, it can’t date, on the scale on which we show it, only from last week? No doubt, no doubt, and the more one thinks of it the more one seems to see that society—for we’re IN society, aren’t we, and that’s our horizon?—can never have been anything but increasingly vulgar. The point is that in the twilight of time—and I belong, you see, to the twilight—it had made out much less how vulgar it COULD be. It did its best very probably, but there were too many superstitions it had to get rid of. It has been throwing them overboard one by one, so that now the ship sails uncommonly light. That’s the way”—and with his eyes on the golden distance he ingeniously followed it out—“I come to feel so the lurching and pitching. If I weren’t a pretty fair sailor—well, as it is, my dear,” he interrupted himself with a laugh, “I show you often enough what grabs I make for support.” He gave a faint gasp, half amusement, half anguish, then abruptly relieved himself by a question. “To whom in point of fact does the place belong?”

“I’m awfully ashamed, but I’m afraid I don’t know. That just came up here,” the girl went on, “for Mr. Van.”

Mr. Longdon seemed to think an instant. “Oh it came up, did it? And Mr. Van couldn’t tell?”

“He has quite forgotten—though he has been here before. Of course it may have been with other people,” she added in extenuation. “I mean it mayn’t have been theirs then any more than it’s Mitchy’s.”

“I see. They too had just bundled in.”

Nanda completed the simple history. “To-day it’s Mitchy who bundles, and I believe that really he bundled only yesterday. He turned in his people and here we are.”

“Here we are, here we are!” her friend more gravely echoed. “Well, it’s splendid!”

As if at a note in his voice her eyes, while his own still strayed away, just fixed him. “Don’t you think it’s really rather exciting? Everything’s ready, the feast all spread, and with nothing to blunt our curiosity but the general knowledge that there will be people and things—with nothing but that we comfortably take our places.” He answered nothing, though her picture apparently reached him. “There ARE people, there ARE things, and all in a plenty. Had every one, when you came away, turned up?” she asked as he was still silent.

“I dare say. There were some ladies and gentlemen on the terrace whom I didn’t know. But I looked only for you and came this way on an indication of your mother’s.”

“And did she ask that if you should find me with Mr. Van you’d make him come to her?”

Mr. Longdon replied to this with some delay and without movement. “How could she have supposed he was here?”

“Since he had not yet been to the house? Oh it has always been a wonder to me, the things that mamma supposes! I see she asked you,” Nanda insisted.

At this her old friend turned to her. “But it wasn’t because of that I got rid of him.”

She had a pause. “No—you don’t mind everything mamma says.”

“I don’t mind ‘everything’ anybody says: not even, my dear, when the person’s you.”

Again she waited an instant. “Not even when it’s Mr. Van?”

Mr. Longdon candidly considered. “Oh I take him up on all sorts of things.”

“That shows then the importance they have for you. Is HE like his grandmother?” the girl pursued. Then as her companion looked vague: “Wasn’t it his grandmother too you knew?”

He had an extraordinary smile. “His mother.”

She exclaimed, colouring, on her mistake, and he added: “I’m not so bad as that. But you’re none of you like them.”

“Wasn’t she pretty?” Nanda asked.

“Very handsome. But it makes no difference. She herself to-day wouldn’t know him.”

She gave a small gasp. “His own mother wouldn’t—?”

His headshake just failed of sharpness. “No, nor he her. There’s a link missing.” Then as if after all she might take him too seriously, “Of course it’s I,” he more gently moralised, “who have lost the link in my sleep. I’ve slept half the century—I’m Rip Van Winkle.” He went back after a moment to her question. “He’s not at any rate like his mother.”

She turned it over. “Perhaps you wouldn’t think so much of her now.”

“Perhaps not. At all events my snatching you from Mr. Vanderbank was my own idea.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” Nanda said, “of your snatching me. I was thinking of your snatching yourself.”

“I might have sent YOU to the house? Well,” Mr. Longdon replied, “I find I take more and more the economical view of my pleasures. I run them less and less together. I get all I can out of each.”

“So now you’re getting all you can out of ME?”

“All I can, my dear—all I can.” He watched a little the flushed distance, then mildly broke out: “It IS, as you said just now, exciting! But it makes me”—and he became abrupt again—“want you, as I’ve already told you, to come to MY place. Not, however, that we may be still more mad