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

“Oh!” he almost too loudly protested.

“You won’t do it,” she went on.

“I SAY!”—he made a joke of it.

“You won’t do it,” she repeated.

It was as if he couldn’t at last but show himself really struck; yet what he exclaimed on was what might in truth most have impressed him. “You ARE magnificent, really!”

“Mr. Mitchett!” the butler, appearing at the door, almost familiarly dropped; after which Vanderbank turned straight to the person announced.

Mr. Mitchett was there, and, anticipating Mrs. Brook in receiving him, her companion passed it straighten. “She’s magnificent!”

Mitchy was already all interest. “Rather! But what’s her last?”

It had been, though so great, so subtle, as they said in Buckingham Crescent, that Vanderbank scarce knew how to put it. “Well, she’s so thoroughly superior.”

“Oh to whom do you say it?” Mitchy cried as he greeted her.

The subject of this eulogy had meanwhile returned to her sofa, where she received the homage of her new visitor. “It’s not I who am magnificent a bit—it’s dear Mr. Longdon. I’ve just had from Van the most wonderful piece of news about him—his announcement of his wish to make it worth somebody’s while to marry my child.”

“‘Make it’?”—Mitchy stared. “But ISN’T it?”

“My dear friend, you must ask Van. Of course you’ve always thought so. But I must tell you all the same,” Mrs. Brook went on, “that I’m delighted.”

Mitchy had seated himself, but Vanderbank remained erect and became perhaps even slightly stiff. He was not angry—no member of the inner circle at Buckingham Crescent was ever angry—but he looked grave and rather troubled. “Even if it IS decidedly fine”—he addressed his hostess straight—“I can’t make out quite why you’re doing THIS—I mean immediately making it known.”

“Ah but what do we keep from Mitchy?” Mrs. Brook asked.

“What CAN you keep? It comes to the same thing,” Mitchy said. “Besides, here we are together, share and share alike—one beautiful intelligence. Mr. Longdon’s ‘somebody’ is of course Van. Don’t try to treat me as an outsider.”

Vanderbank looked a little foolishly, though it was but the shade of a shade, from one of them to the other. “I think I’ve been rather an ass!”

“What then by the terms of our friendship—just as Mitchy says—can he and I have a better right to know and to feel with you about? You’ll want, Mitchy, won’t you?” Mrs. Brook went on, “to hear all about THAT?”

“Oh I only mean,” Vanderbank explained, “in having just now blurted my tale out to you. However, I of course do know,” he pursued to Mitchy, “that whatever’s really between us will remain between us. Let me then tell you myself exactly what’s the matter.” The length of his pause after these words showed at last that he had stopped short; on which his companions, as they waited, exchanged a sympathetic look. They waited another minute, and then he dropped into a chair where, leaning forward, his elbows on the arms and his gaze attached to the carpet, he drew out the silence. Finally he looked at Mrs. Brook. “YOU make it clear.”

The appeal called up for some reason her most infantine manner. “I don’t think I CAN, dear Van—really CLEAR. You know however yourself,” she continued to Mitchy, “enough by this time about Mr. Longdon and mamma.”

“Oh rather!” Mitchy laughed.

“And about mamma and Nanda.”

“Oh perfectly: the way Nanda reminds him, and the ‘beautiful loyalty’ that has made him take such a fancy to her. But I’ve already embraced the facts—you needn’t dot any i’s.” With another glance at his fellow visitor Mitchy jumped up and stood there florid. “He has offered you money to marry her.” He said this to Vanderbank as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Oh NO” Mrs. Brook interposed with promptitude: “he has simply let him know before any one else that the money’s there FOR Nanda, and that therefore—!”

“First come first served?” Mitchy had already taken her up. “I see, I see. Then to make her sure of the money,” he put to Vanderbank, “you MUST marry her?”

“If it depends upon that she’ll never get it,” Mrs. Brook returned. “Dear Van will think conscientiously a lot about it, but he won’t do it.”

“Won’t you, Van, really?” Mitchy asked from the hearth-rug.

“Never, never. We shall be very kind to him, we shall help him, hope and pray for him, but we shall be at the end,” said Mrs. Brook, “just where we are now. Dear Van will have done his best, and we shall have done ours. Mr. Longdon will have done his—poor Nanda even will have done hers. But it will all have been in vain. However,” Mrs. Brook continued to expound, “she’ll probably have the money. Mr. Longdon will surely consider that she’ll want it if she doesn’t marry still more than if she does. So we shall be SO much at least,” she wound up—“I mean Edward and I and the child will be—to the good.”

Mitchy, for an equal certainty, required but an instant’s thought. “Oh there can be no doubt about THAT. The things about which your mind may now be at ease—!” he cheerfully exclaimed.

“It does make a great difference!” Mrs. Brook comfortably sighed. Then in a different tone: “What dear Van will find at the end that he can’t face will be, don’t you see? just this fact of appearing to have accepted a bribe. He won’t want, on the one hand—out of kindness for Nanda—to have the money suppressed; and yet he won’t want to have the pecuniary question mixed up with the matter: to look in short as if he had had to be paid. He’s like you, you know—he’s proud; and it will be there we shall break down.”

Mitchy had been watching his friend, who, a few minutes before perceptibly embarrassed, had quite recovered himself and, at his ease, though still perhaps with a smile a trifle strained, leaned back and let his eyes play everywhere but over the faces of the others. Vanderbank evidently wished now to show a good-humoured detachment.

“See here,” Mitchy said to him: “I remember your once submitting to me a case of some delicacy.”

“Oh he’ll submit it to you—he’ll submit it even to ME” Mrs. Brook broke in. “He’ll be charming, touching, confiding—above all he’ll be awfully INTERESTING about it. But he’ll make up his mind in his own way, and his own way won’t be to accommodate Mr. Longdon.”

Mitchy continued to study their companion in the light of these remarks, then turned upon his hostess his sociable glare. “Splendid, isn’t it, the old boy’s infatuation with him?”

Mrs. Brook just delayed. “From the point of view of the immense interest it—just now, for instance—makes for you and me? Oh yes, it’s one of our best things yet. It places him a little with Lady Fanny—‘He will, he won’t; he won’t, he will!’ Only, to be perfect, it lacks, as I say, the element of real suspense.”

Mitchy frankly wondered. “It does, you think? Not for me—not wholly.” He turned again quite pleadingly to their friend. “I hope it doesn’t for yourself totally either?”

Vanderbank, cultivating his detachment, made at first no more reply than if he had not heard, and the others meanwhile showed faces that testified perhaps less than their respective speeches had done to the absence of anxiety. The only token he immediately gave was to get up and approach Mitchy, before whom he stood a minute laughing kindly enough, though not altogether gaily. As if then for a better proof of gaiety he presently seized him by the shoulders and, still without speaking, pushed him backward into the chair he himself had just quitted. Mrs. Brook’s eyes, from the sofa, while this went on, attached themselves to her visitors. It took Vanderbank, as he moved about and his companions waited, a minute longer to produce what he had in mind. “What IS splendid, as we call it, is this extraordinary freedom and good humour of our intercourse and the fact that we do care—so independently of our personal interests, with so little selfishness or other vulgarity—to get at the idea of things. The beautiful specimen Mrs. Brook had just given me of that,” he continued to Mitchy, “was what made me break out to you about her when you came in.” He spoke to one friend, but he looked at the other. “What’s really ‘superior’ in her is that, though I suddenly show her an interference with a favourite plan, her personal resentment’s nothing—all she wants is to see what may really happen, to take in the truth of the case and make the best of that. She offers me the truth, as she sees it, about myself, and with no nasty elation if it does chance to be the truth that suits her best. It was a charming, charming stroke.”

Mitchy’s appreciation was no bar to his amusement. “You’re wonderfully right about us. But still it was a stroke.”

If Mrs. Brook was less diverted she followed perhaps more closely. “If you do me so much justice then, why did you put to me such a cold cruel question?—I mean when you so oddly challenged me on my handing on your news to Mitchy. If the principal beauty of our effort to live together is—and quite according to your own eloquence—in our sincerity, I simply obeyed the impulse to do the sincere thing. If we’re not sincere we’re nothing.”

“Nothing!”—it was Mitchy who first responded. “But we ARE sincere.”

“Yes, we ARE sincere,” Vanderbank presently said. “It’s a great chance for us not to fall below ourselves: no doubt therefore we shall continue to soar and sing. We pay for it, people who don’t like us say, in our self-consciousness—”

“But people who don’t like us,” Mitchy broke in, “don’t matter. Besides, how can we be properly conscious of each other—?”

“That’s it!”—Vanderbank completed his idea: “without my finding myself for instance in you and Mrs. Brook? We see ourselves reflected—we’re conscious of the charming whole. I thank you,” he pursued after an instant to Mrs. Brook—“I thank you for your sincerity.”

It was a business sometimes really to hold her eyes, but they had, it must be said for her, their steady moments. She exchanged with Vanderbank a somewhat remarkable look, then, with an art of her own, broke short off without appearing to drop him. “The thing is, don’t you think?”—she appealed to Mitchy—“for us not to be so awfully clever as to make it believed that we can never be simple. We mustn’t see TOO tremendous things—even in each other.” She quite lost patience with the danger she glanced at. “We CAN be simple!”

“We CAN, by God!” Mitchy laughed.

“Well, we are now—and it’s a great comfort to have it settled,” said Vanderbank.

“Then you see,” Mrs. Brook returned, “what a mistake you’d make to see abysses of subtlety in my having been merely natural.”

“We CAN be natural,” Mitchy declared.

“We can, by God!” Vanderbank laughed.

Mrs. Brook had turned to Mitchy. “I just wanted you to know. So I spoke. It’s not more complicated than that. As for WHY I wanted you to know—!”

“What better reason could there be,” Mitchy interrupted, “than your being filled to the finger-tips with the sense of how I would want it myself, and of the misery, the absolute pathos, of my being left out? Fancy, my dear chap”—he had only to put it to Van—“my NOT knowing!”.

Vanderbank evidently couldn’t fancy it, but he said quietly enough: “I should have told you