Генри Джеймс
The Awkward Age
“What’s the matter?” Nanda asked. “Has he been taken ill?”
“He IS ‘rum,’ my dear Van,” Mitchy said; “but you’re right—of a charm, a distinction! In short just the sort of thing we want.”
“The sort of thing we ‘want’—I dare say!” Vanderbank laughed. “But it’s not the sort of thing that’s to be had for the asking—it’s a sort we shall be mighty lucky if we can get!”
Mitchy turned with amusement to Nanda. “Van has invented him and, with the natural greed of the inventor, won’t let us have him cheap. Well,” he went on, “I’ll ‘stand’ my share.”
“The difficulty is that he’s so much too good for us,” Vanderbank explained.
“Ungrateful wretch,” his friend cried, “that’s just what I’ve been telling him that YOU are! Let the return you make not be to deprive me—!”
“Mr. Van’s not at all too good for ME, if you mean that,” Nanda broke in. She had finished her tea-making and leaned back in her chair with her hands folded on the edge of the tray.
Vanderbank only smiled at her in silence, but Mitchy took it up. “There’s nobody too good for you, of course; only you’re not quite, don’t you know? IN our set. You’re in Mrs. Grendon’s. I know what you’re going to say—that she hasn’t got any set, that she’s just a loose little white flower dropped on the indifferent bosom of the world. But you’re the small sprig of tender green that, added to her, makes her immediately ‘compose.’”
Nanda looked at him with her cold kindness. “What nonsense you do talk!”
“Your tone’s sweet to me,” he returned, “as showing that you don’t think ME, either, too good for you. No one, remember, will take that for your excuse when the world some day sees me annihilated by your having put an end to our so harmless relations.”
The girl appeared to lose herself a moment in the—abysmal humanity over which his fairly fascinating ugliness played like the whirl of an eddy. “Martyr!” she gently exclaimed. But there was no smile with it. She turned to Vanderbank, who, during the previous minute, had moved toward the neighbouring room, then faltering, taking counsel of discretion, had come back on a scruple. “What IS the matter?”
“What do you want to get out of him, you wretch?” Mitchy went on as their host for an instant said nothing.
Vanderbank, whose handsome face had a fine thought in it, looked a trifle absently from one of them to the other; but it was to Nanda he spoke. “Do you like him, Nanda?”
She showed surprise at the question. “How can I know so soon?”
“HE knows already.”
Mitchy, with his eyes on her, became radiant to interpret. “He knows that he’s pierced to the heart!”
“The matter with him, as you call it,” Vanderbank brought out, “is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.” He looked at her as with a hope she’d understand. “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!”
“Precisely,” Mitchy continued; “the victim done for by one glance of the goddess!”
Nanda, motionless in her chair, fixed her other friend with clear curiosity. “‘Beautiful’? Why beautiful?”
Vanderbank, about to speak, checked himself.
“I won’t spoil it. Have it from HIM!”—and, returning to their friend, he this time went out.
Mitchy and Nanda looked at each other. “But isn’t it rather awful?” Mitchy demanded.
She got up without answering; she slowly came away from the table. “I think I do know if I like him.”
“Well you may,” Mitchy exclaimed, “after his putting before you probably, on the whole, the greatest of your triumphs.”
“And I also know, I think, Mr. Mitchy, that I like YOU.” She spoke without attention to this hyperbole.
“In spite of my ineffectual attempts to be brilliant? That’s a joy,” he went on, “if it’s not drawn out by the mere clumsiness of my flattery.” She had turned away from him, kindly enough, as if time for his talk in the air were always to be allowed him: she took in vaguely Vanderbank’s books and prints. “Why didn’t your mother come?” Mitchy then enquired.
At this she again looked at him. “Do you mention her as a way of alluding to something you guess she must have told me?”
“That I’ve always supposed I make your flesh creep? Yes,” Mitchy admitted; “I see she must have said to you: ‘Be nice to him, to show him it isn’t quite so bad as that!’ So you ARE nice—so you always WILL be nice. But I adore you, all the same, without illusions.”
She had opened at one of the tables, unperceivingly, a big volume of which she turned the leaves. “Don’t ‘adore’ a girl, Mr. Mitchy—just help her. That’s more to the purpose.”
“Help you?” he cried. “You bring tears to my eyes!”
“Can’t a girl have friends?” she went on. “I never heard of anything so idiotic.” Giving him, however, no chance to take her up on this, she made a quick transition. “Mother didn’t come because she wants me now, as she says, more to share her own life.”
Mitchy looked at it. “But is this the way for her to share yours?”
“Ah that’s another matter—about which you must talk to HER. She wants me no longer to keep seeing only with her eyes. She’s throwing me into the world.”
Mitchy had listened with the liveliest interest, but he presently broke into a laugh. “What a good thing then that I’m there to catch you!”
Without—it might have been seen—having gathered the smallest impression of what they enclosed, she carefully drew together again the covers of her folio. There was deliberation in her movements. “I shall always be glad when you’re there. But where do you suppose they’ve gone?” Her eyes were on what was visible of the other room, from which there arrived no sound of voices.
“They’re off there,” said Mitchy, “but just looking unutterable things about you. The impression’s too deep. Let them look, and tell me meanwhile if Mrs. Donner gave you my message.”
“Oh yes, she told me some humbug.”
“The humbug then was in the tone my perfectly sincere speech took from herself. She gives things, I recognise, rather that sound. It’s her weakness,” he continued, “and perhaps even one may say her danger. All the more reason you should help her, as I believe you’re supposed to be doing, aren’t you? I hope you feel you are,” he earnestly added.
He had spoken this time gravely enough, and with magnificent gravity Nanda replied. “I HAVE helped her. Tishy’s sure I have. That’s what Tishy wants me for. She says that to be with some nice girl’s really the best thing for her.”
Poor Mitchy’s face hereupon would have been interesting, would have been distinctly touching to other eyes; but Nanda’s were not heedful of it. “Oh,” he returned after an instant and without profane mirth, “that seems to me the best thing for any one.”
Vanderbank, however, might have caught his expression, for Vanderbank now reappeared, smiling on the pair as if struck by their intimacy. “How you ARE keeping it up!” Then to Nanda persuasively: “Do you mind going to him in there? I want him so really to see you. It’s quite, you know, what he came for.”
Nanda seemed to wonder. “What will he do to me? Anything dreadful?”
“He’ll tell you what I meant just now.”
“Oh,” said Nanda, “if he’s a person who can tell me sometimes what you mean—!” With which she went quickly off.
“And can’t I hear?” Mitchy asked of his host while they looked after her.
“Yes, but only from me.” Vanderbank had pushed him to a seat again and was casting about for cigarettes. “Be quiet and smoke, and I’ll tell you.”
Mitchy, on the sofa, received with meditation a light. “Will she understand? She has everything in the world but one,” he added. “But that’s half.”
Vanderbank, before him, lighted for himself. “What is it?”
“A sense of humour.”
“Oh yes, she’s serious.”
Mitchy smoked a little. “She’s tragic.”
His friend, at the fire, watched a moment the empty portion of the other room, then walked across to give the door a light push that all but closed it. “It’s rather odd,” he remarked as he came back—“that’s quite what I just said to him. But he won’t treat her to comedy.”
III
“Is it the shock of the resemblance to her grandmother?” Vanderbank had asked of Mr. Longdon on rejoining him in his retreat. This victim of memory, with his back turned, was gazing out of the window, and when in answer he showed his face there were tears in his eyes. His answer in fact was just these tears, the significance of which Vanderbank immediately recognised. “It’s still greater then than you gathered from her photograph?”
“It’s the most extraordinary thing in the world. I’m too absurd to be so upset”—Mr. Longdon smiled through his tears—“but if you had known Lady Julia you’d understand. It’s SHE again, as I first knew her, to the life; and not only in feature, in stature, in colour, in movement, but in every bodily mark and sign, in every look of the eyes above all—oh to a degree!—in the sound, in the charm of the voice.” He spoke low and confidentially, but with an intensity that now relieved him—he was as restless as with a discovery. He moved about as with a sacred awe—he might a few steps away have been in the very presence. “She’s ALL Lady Julia. There isn’t a touch of her mother. It’s unique—an absolute revival. I see nothing of her father, I see nothing of any one else. Isn’t it thought wonderful by every one?” he went on. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“To have prepared you a little?”—Vanderbank felt almost guilty. “I see—I should have liked to make more of it; though,” he added all lucidly, “I might so, by putting you on your guard, have caused myself to lose what, if you’ll allow me to say it, strikes me as one of the most touching tributes I’ve ever seen rendered to a woman. In fact, however, how could I know? I never saw Lady Julia, and you had in advance all the evidence I could have: the portrait—pretty bad, in the taste of the time, I admit—and the three or four photographs you must have noticed with it at Mrs. Brook’s. These things must have compared themselves for you with my photograph in there of the granddaughter. The similarity of course we had all observed, but it has taken your wonderful memory and your happy vision to put into it all the detail.”
Mr. Longdon thought a moment, giving a dab with his pocket-handkerchief. “Very true—you’re quite right. It’s far beyond any identity in the pictures. But why did you tell me,” he added more sharply, “that she isn’t beautiful?”
“You’ve deprived me,” Vanderbank laughed, “of the power of expressing civilly any surprise at your finding her so. But I said to you, please remember, nothing that qualified a jot my sense of the special stamp of her face. I’ve always positively found in it a recall of the type of the period you must be thinking of. It isn’t a bit modern. It’s a face of Sir Thomas Lawrence—”
“It’s a face of Gainsborough!” Mr. Longdon returned with spirit. “Lady Julia herself harked back.”
Vanderbank, clearly, was equally touched and amused. “Let us say at once that it’s a face of Raphael.”
His old friend’s hand was instantly on his arm. “That’s exactly what I often said to myself of Lady Julia’s.”
“The forehead’s a little too high,” said Vanderbank.
“But it’s just that excess that, with the exquisite eyes and the particular disposition round it of the fair hair, makes the individual grace, makes the beauty of the resemblance.”
Released by Lady Julia’s lover, the young man in turn grasped him as an encouragement to confidence. “It’s a face that should have the long side-ringlets of 1830. It should have the rest of the personal arrangement, the pelisse, the shape of bonnet, the sprigged muslin dress and the cross-laced sandals. It should have arrived in a pea-green ‘tilbury’ and be a reader of Mrs. Radcliffe. And all this to complete the Raphael!”
Mr. Longdon, who, his discovery proclaimed, had begun, as might have been said, to live with it, looked hard a moment at his companion. “How you’ve observed her!”
Vanderbank met it without confusion. “Whom haven’t I observed? Do you like her?” he then rather oddly and abruptly asked.
The old man broke away again. “How can I tell—with such disparities?”
“The manner must be different,” Vanderbank suggested. “And the things she says.”
His visitor was before him again. “I don’t know what to make of them. They don’t go with the rest of her. Lady Julia,” said Mr. Longdon, “was rather shy.”
On this too his host could meet him. “She must have been. And Nanda—yes, certainly—doesn’t give that impression.”
“On the contrary. But Lady Julia was gay!” he added with an eagerness that made Vanderbank smile.
“I can also see that. Nanda doesn’t joke. And yet,” Vanderbank continued with his exemplary candour, “we mustn’t speak of her, must we? as if she were bold and grim.”
Mr. Longdon fixed him. “Do you think she’s sad?”
They had preserved their lowered tone and might, with their heads together, have been conferring as the party “out” in some game with the couple in the other room. “Yes. Sad.” But Vanderbank broke off. “I’ll send her to you.” Thus it was he had come back to her.
Nanda, on joining the elder man, went straight to the point. “He says it’s so beautiful—what you feel on seeing me: if that IS what he meant.” Mr. Longdon kept silent again at first, only smiling at her, but less strangely now, and then appeared to look about him for some place where she could sit near him. There was a sofa in this room too, on which, observing it, she quickly sank down, so that they were presently together, placed a little sideways and face to face. She had shown perhaps that she supposed him to have wished to take her hand, but he forbore to touch her, though letting her feel all the kindness of his eyes and their long backward vision. These things she evidently felt soon enough; she went on before he had spoken. “I know how well you knew my grandmother. Mother has told me—and I’m so glad. She told me to say to you that she wants YOU to tell me.” Just a shade, at this, might have appeared to drop over his face, but who was there to know if the girl observed it? It didn’t prevent at any rate her completing her statement. “That’s why she wished me to-day to come alone. She said she wished you to have me all to yourself.”
No, decidedly, she wasn’t shy: that mute reflexion was in the air an instant. “That, no doubt, is the best way. I thank her very much. I called, after having had the honour of dining—I called, I think, three times,” he went on with a sudden displacement of the question; “but I had the misfortune each time to miss her.”
She kept looking at him with her crude young clearness. “I didn’t know about that. Mother thinks she’s more at home than almost any one. She does it on purpose: she knows what it is,” Nanda pursued with her perfect gravity, “for people to be disappointed of finding her.”
“Oh I shall find her yet,” said Mr. Longdon. “And then I hope I shall also find YOU.”
She appeared simply to consider the possibility and after an instant to think well of it. “I dare say you will now, for now I shall be down.”
Her companion just blinked. “In the drawing-room, you mean—always?”
It was quite what she meant. “Always. I shall see all the people who come. It will be a great thing for me. I want to hear all the talk. Mr. Mitchett says I ought to—that it helps to form the young mind. I hoped, for that reason,” she went on with the directness that made her honesty almost violent—“I hoped there would be more people here to-day.”
“I’m very glad there are not!”—the old man rang equally clear. “Mr. Vanderbank kindly arranged the matter for me just this way. I met him at dinner, at your mother’s, three weeks ago, and he brought me home here that night, when, as knowing you so differently, we took the liberty of talking you all over. It naturally had the effect of making me want to begin with you afresh—only that seemed difficult too without further help. This he good-naturedly offered me; he said”—and Mr. Longdon recovered his spirits to repeat it—“‘Hang it, I’ll have ‘em here for you!’”
“I see—he knew we’d come.” Then she caught herself up. “But we haven’t come, have we?”
“Oh it’s all right—it’s all right. To me the occasion’s brilliant and the affluence great. I’ve had such talk with those young men—”
“I see”—she was again prompt, but beyond any young person he had ever met she might have struck him as literal. “You’re not used to such talk. Neither am I. It’s rather wonderful, isn’t it? They’re thought awfully clever, Mr. Van and Mr. Mitchy. Do you like them?” she pushed on.
Mr. Longdon, who, as compared with her, might have struck a spectator as infernally subtle, took an instant to think. “I’ve never met Mr. Mitchett before.”
“Well, he always thinks one doesn’t like him,” Nanda explained. “But one does. One ought to,” she added.
Her companion had another pause. “He likes YOU.”
Oh Mr. Longdon needn’t have hesitated! “I know he does. He has told mother. He has told lots of people.”
“He has told even you,” Mr. Longdon smiled.
“Yes—but that isn’t the same. I don’t think he’s a bit dreadful,” she pursued. Still, there was a greater interest. “Do you like Mr. Van?”
This time her interlocutor indeed hung fire. “How can I tell? He dazzles me.”
“But don’t you like that?” Then before he could really say: “You’re afraid he may be false?”
At this he fairly laughed. “You go to the point!” She just coloured to have amused him so, but he quickly went on: “I think one has a little natural nervousness at being carried off one’s feet. I’m afraid I’ve always liked too much to see where I’m going.”
“And you don’t with him?” She spoke with her curious hard interest. “I understand. But I think I like to be dazzled.”
“Oh you’ve got time—you can come round again; you’ve a margin for accidents, for disappointments and recoveries: you can take one thing with another. But I’ve only my last little scrap.”
“And you want to make no mistakes—I see.”
“Well, I’m too easily upset.”
“Ah so am I,” said Nanda. “I assure you that in spite of what you say I want to make no mistakes either. I’ve seen a great many—though you mightn’t think it,” she persisted; “I really know what they may be. Do you like ME?” she brought forth. But even on this she spared him too; a look appeared to have been enough for her. “How can you say, of course, already?—if you can’t say for Mr. Van. I mean as you’ve seen him so much. When he asked me just now if I liked YOU I told him it was too soon. But it isn’t now; you see it goes fast. I DO like you.” She gave him no time to acknowledge this tribute, but—as if it were a matter of course—tried him quickly with something else. “Can you say if you like mother?”
He could meet it pretty well now. “There are immense reasons why I should.”
“Yes—I know about them, as I mentioned: mother has told me.” But what she had to put to him kept up his surprise. “Have reasons anything to do with it? I don’t believe you like her!” she exclaimed. “SHE doesn’t think so,” she added.
The old man’s face at last, partly bewildered, partly reassured, showed something finer still in the effect she produced. “Into what mysteries you plunge!”
“Oh we do; that’s what every one says of us. We discuss everything and every one—we’re always discussing each other. I think we must be rather celebrated for it, and it’s a kind of trick—isn’t it?—that’s catching. But don’t you think it’s the most interesting sort of talk? Mother says we haven’t any prejudices. YOU have, probably, quantities—and beautiful ones: so perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you. But you’ll find out for yourself.”
“Yes—I’m rather slow; but I generally end by finding out. And I’ve got, thank heaven,” said Mr. Longdon, “quite prejudices enough.”
“Then I hope you’ll tell me some of them,” Nanda replied in a tone evidently marking how much he pleased her.
“Ah you must do as I do—you must find out for yourself. Your resemblance to your grandmother is quite prodigious,” he immediately added.
“That’s what I wish you’d tell me about—your recollection of her and your wonderful feeling about her. Mother has told me things, but that I should have something straight from you is exactly what she also wants. My grandmother must have been awfully nice,” the girl rambled on, “and I somehow don’t see myself at all as the same sort of person.”
“Oh I don’t say you’re in the least the same sort: all I allude to,” Mr. Longdon returned, “is the miracle of the physical heredity. Nothing could be less like her than your manner and your talk.”
Nanda looked at him with all her honesty. “They’re not so good, you must think.”
He hung fire an instant, but was as honest as she. “You’re separated from her by a gulf—and not only of time. Personally, you see, you breathe a different air.”
She thought—she quite took it in. “Of course. And you breathe the same—the same old one, I mean, as my grandmother.”
“The same old one,” Mr. Longdon smiled, “as much as possible. Some day I’ll tell you more of what you’re curious of. I can’t go into it now.”
“Because I’ve upset you so?” Nanda frankly asked.
“That’s one of the reasons.”
“I think I can see another too,” she observed after a moment. “You’re not sure how much I shall understand. But I shall understand,” she went on, “more, perhaps, than you think. In fact,” she said earnestly, “I PROMISE to understand. I’ve some imagination. Had my grandmother?” she asked. Her actual sequences were not rapid, but she had already anticipated him. “I’ve thought of that before, because I put the same question to mother.”
“And what did your mother say?”
“‘Imagination—dear mamma? Not a grain!’”
The old man showed a faint flush. “Your mother then has a supply that makes up for it.”
The girl fixed him on this with a deeper attention. “You don’t like her having said that.”
His colour came stronger, though a slightly strained smile did what it could to diffuse coolness. “I don’t care a single scrap, my dear, in respect to the friend I’m speaking of, for any judgement but my own.”
“Not even for her daughter’s?”
“Not even for her daughter’s.” Mr. Longdon had not spoken loud, but he rang as clear as a bell.
Nanda, for admiration of it, broke almost for the first time into the semblance of a smile. “You feel as if my grandmother were quite YOUR property!”
“Oh quite.”
“I say—that’s splendid!”
“I’m glad you like it,” he answered kindly.
The very kindness pulled her up. “Pardon my speaking so, but I’m sure you know what I mean. You mustn’t think,” she eagerly continued, “that mother won’t also want to hear you.”
“On the subject of Lady Julia?” He gently, but very effectively, shook his head. “Your mother shall never hear me.”
Nanda appeared to wonder at it an instant, and it made her completely grave again. “It will be all for ME?”
“Whatever there may be of it, my dear.”
“Oh I shall get it all out of you,” she returned without hesitation. Her mixture of free familiarity and of the vividness of evocation of something, whatever it was, sharply opposed—the little worry of this contradiction, not altogether unpleasant, continued to fill his consciousness more discernibly than anything else. It was really reflected in his quick brown eyes that she alternately drew him on and warned him off, but also that what they were beginning more and more to make out was an emotion of her own trembling there beneath her tension. His glimpse of it widened—his glimpse of it fairly triumphed when suddenly, after this last declaration, she threw off with quite the same accent but quite another effect: “I’m glad to be like any one the thought of whom makes you so good! You ARE good,” she continued; “I see already how I shall feel it.” She stared at him with tears, the sight of which brought his own straight back; so that thus for a moment they sat there together.
“My dear child!” he at last simply murmured. But he laid his hand on her now, and her own immediately met it.
“You’ll get used to me,” she said with the same gentleness that the response of her touch had tried to express; “and I shall be so careful with you that—well, you’ll see!” She broke short off with a quaver and the next instant she turned—there was some one at the door. Vanderbank, still not quite at his ease, had come back to smile upon them. Detaching herself from Mr. Longdon she got straight up to meet him. “You were right, Mr. Van. It’s beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!”
