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

The footman, opening the door, mumbled his name without sincerity, and Vanderbank, passing in, found in fact—for he had caught the symptom— the chairs and tables, the lighted lamps and the flowers alone in possession. He looked at his watch, which exactly marked eight, then turned to speak again to the servant, who had, however, without another sound and as if blushing for the house, already closed him in. There was nothing indeed but Mrs. Grendon’s want of promptness that failed of a welcome: her drawing-room, on the January night, showed its elegance through a suffusion of pink electricity which melted, at the end of the vista, into the faintly golden glow of a retreat still more sacred. Vanderbank walked after a moment into the second room, which also proved empty and which had its little globes of white fire—discreetly limited in number—coated with lemon-coloured silk. The walls, covered with delicate French mouldings, were so fair that they seemed vaguely silvered; the low French chimney had a French fire. There was a lemon-coloured stuff on the sofa and chairs, a wonderful polish on the floor that was largely exposed, and a copy of a French novel in blue paper on one of the spindle-legged tables. Vanderbank looked about him an instant as if generally struck, then gave himself to something that had particularly caught his eye. This was simply his own name written rather large on the cover of the French book and endowed, after he had taken the volume up, with the power to hold his attention the more closely the longer he looked at it. He uttered, for a private satisfaction, before letting the matter pass, a low confused sound; after which, flinging the book down with some emphasis in another place, he moved to the chimney-piece, where his eyes for a little intently fixed the small ashy wood-fire. When he raised them again it was, on the observation that the beautiful clock on the mantel was wrong, to consult once more his watch and then give a glance, in the chimney-glass, at the state of his moustache, the ends of which he twisted for a moment with due care. While so engaged he became aware of something else and, quickly facing about, recognised in the doorway of the room the other figure the glass had just reflected.

“Oh YOU?” he said with a quick handshake. “Mrs. Grendon’s down?” But he had already passed with Nanda, on their greeting, back into the first room, which contained only themselves, and she had mentioned that she believed Tishy to have said 8.15, which meant of course anything people liked.

“Oh then there’ll be nobody till nine. I didn’t, I suppose, sufficiently study my note; which didn’t mention to me, by the way,” Vanderbank added, “that you were to be here.”

“Ah but why SHOULD it?” Nanda spoke again, however, before he could reply. “I dare say that when she wrote to you she didn’t know.”

“Know you’d come bang up to meet me?” Vanderbank laughed. “Jolly at any rate, thanks to my mistake, to have in this way a quiet moment with you. You came on ahead of your mother?”

“Oh no—I’m staying here.”

“Oh!” said Vanderbank.

“Mr. Longdon came up with me—I came here, Friday last, straight.”

“You parted at the door?” he asked with marked gaiety.

She thought a moment—she was more serious. “Yes—but only for a day or two. He’s coming tonight.”

“Good. How delightful!”

“He’ll be glad to see you,” Nanda said, looking at the flowers.

“Awfully kind of him when I’ve been such a brute.”

“How—a brute?”

“Well, I mean not writing—nor going back.”

“Oh I see,” Nanda simply returned.

It was a simplicity that, clearly enough, made her friend a little awkward. “Has he—a—minded? Hut he can’t have complained!” he quickly added.

“Oh he never complains.”

“No, no—it isn’t in him. But it’s just that,” said Vanderbank, “that makes one feel so base. I’ve been ferociously busy.”

“He knows that—he likes it,” Nanda returned. “He delights in your work. And I’ve done what I can for him.”

“Ah,” said her companion, “you’ve evidently brought him round. I mean to this lady.”

“To Tishy? Oh of course I can’t leave her—with nobody.”

“No”—Vanderbank became jocose again—“that’s a London necessity. You can’t leave anybody with nobody—exposed to everybody.”

Mild as it was, however, Nanda missed the pleasantry. “Mr. Grendon’s not here.”

“Where is he then?”

“Yachting—but she doesn’t know.”

“Then she and you are just doing this together?”

“Well,” said Nanda, “she’s dreadfully frightened.”

“Oh she mustn’t allow herself,” he returned, “to be too much carried away by it. But we’re to have your mother?”

“Yes, and papa. It’s really for Mitchy and Aggie,” the girl went on— “before they go abroad.”

“Ah then I see what you’ve come up for! Tishy and I aren’t in it. It’s all for Mitchy.”

“If you mean there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him you’re quite right. He has always been of a kindness to me—!”

“That culminated in marrying your friend?” Vanderbank asked. “It was charming certainly, and I don’t mean to diminish the merit of it. But Aggie herself, I gather, is of a charm now—!”

“Isn’t she?”—Nanda was eager. “Hasn’t she come out?”

“With a bound—into the arena. But when a young person’s out with Mitchy—!”

“Oh you mustn’t say anything against that. I’ve been out with him myself.”

“Ah but my dear child—!” Van frankly argued.

It was not, however, a thing to notice. “I knew it would be just so. It always is when they’ve been like that.”

“Do you mean as she apparently WAS? But doesn’t it make one wonder a little IF she was?”

“Oh she was—I know she was. And we’re also to have Harold,” Nanda continued—“another of Mitchy’s beneficiaries. It WOULD be a banquet, wouldn’t it? if we were to have them all.”

Vanderbank hesitated, and the look he fixed on the door might have suggested a certain open attention to the arrival of their hostess or the announcement of other guests. “If you haven’t got them all, the beneficiaries, you’ve got, in having me, I should suppose, about the biggest.”

“Ah what has he done for you?” Nanda asked.

Again her friend hung fire. “Do you remember something you said to me down there in August?”

She looked vague but quite unembarrassed. “I remember but too well that I chattered.”

“You declared to me that you knew everything.”

“Oh yes—and I said so to Mitchy too.”

“Well, my dear child, you don’t.”

“Because I don’t know—?”

“Yes, what makes ME the victim of his insatiable benevolence.”

“Ah well, if you’ve no doubt of it yourself that’s all that’s required. I’m quite GLAD to hear of something I don’t know,” Nanda pursued. “And we’re to have Harold too,” she repeated.

“As a beneficiary? Then we SHALL fill up! Harold will give us a stamp.”

“Won’t he? I hear of nothing but his success. Mother wrote me that people are frantic for him; and,” said the girl after an instant, “do you know what Cousin Jane wrote me?”

“What WOULD she now? I’m trying to think.”

Nanda relieved him of this effort. “Why that mother has transferred to him all the scruples she felt—‘even to excess’—in MY time, about what we might pick up among you all that wouldn’t be good for us.”

“That’s a neat one for ME!” Vanderbank declared. “And I like your talk about your antediluvian ‘time.’”

“Oh it’s all over.”

“What exactly is it,” Vanderbank presently demanded, “that you describe in that manner?”

“Well, my little hour. And the danger of picking up.”

“There’s none of it here?”

Nanda appeared frankly to judge. “No—because, really, Tishy, don’t you see? is natural. We just talk.”

Vanderbank showed his interest. “Whereas at your mother’s—?”

“Well, you were all afraid.”

Vanderbank laughed straight out. “Do you mind my telling her that?”

“Oh she knows it. I’ve heard her say herself you were.”

“Ah I was,” he concurred. “You know we’ve spoken of that before.”

“I’m speaking now of all of you,” said Nanda. “But it was she who was most so, for she tried—I know she did, she told me so—to control you. And it was when, you were most controlled—!”

Van’s amusement took it up. “That we were most detrimental?”

“Yes, because of course what’s so awfully unutterable is just what we most notice. Tishy knows that,” Nanda wonderfully observed.

As the reflexion of her tone might have been caught by an observer in Vanderbank’s face it was in all probability caught by his interlocutress, who superficially, however, need have recognised there— what was all she showed—but the right manner of waiting for dinner. “The better way then is to dash right in? That’s what our friend here does?”

“Oh you know what she does!” the girl replied as with a sudden drop of interest in the question. She turned at the moment to the opening of the door.

It was Tishy who at last appeared, and her guest had his greeting ready. “We’re talking of the delicate matters as to which you think it’s better to dash right in; but I’m bound to say your inviting a hungry man to dinner doesn’t appear to be one of them.”

The sign of Tishy Grendon—as it had been often called in a society in which variety of reference had brought to high perfection, for usual safety, the sense of signs—was a retarded facial glimmer that, in respect to any subject, closed up the rear of the procession. It had been said of her indeed that when processions were at all rapid she was usually to be found, on a false impression of her whereabouts, mixed up with the next; so that now, for instance, by the time she had reached the point of saying to Vanderbank “Are you REALLY hungry?” Nanda had begun to appeal to him for some praise of their hostess’s appearance. This was of course with soft looks up and down at her clothes. “Isn’t she too nice? Did you ever see anything so lovely?”

“I’m so faint with inanition,” Van replied to Mrs. Grendon, “that—like the traveller in the desert, isn’t it?—I only make out, as an oasis or a mirage, a sweet green rustling blur. I don’t trust