The Awkward Age

Mr. Longdon had by this time come back to him. “Excuse my asking it again—for you take such jumps: what, once more, do you mean by everything?”

“Why naturally her marrying. Above all her marrying early.”

Mr. Longdon stood before the sofa. “What do you mean by early?”

“Well, we do doubtless get up later than at Beccles; but that gives us, you see, shorter days. I mean in a couple of seasons. Soon enough,” Vanderbank developed, “to limit the strain—!” He was moved to higher gaiety by his friend’s expression.

“What do you mean by the strain?”

“Well, the complication of her being there.”

“Being where?”

“You do put one through!” Vanderbank laughed. But he showed himself perfectly prepared. “Out of the school-room and where she is now. In her mother’s drawing-room. At her mother’s fireside.”

Mr. Longdon stared. “But where else should she be?”

“At her husband’s, don’t you see?”

He looked as if he quite saw, yet was nevertheless not to be put off from his original challenge. “Ah certainly; but not as if she had been pushed down the chimney. All in good time.”

“What do you call good time?”

“Why time to make herself loved.”

Vanderbank wondered. “By the men who come to the house?”

Mr. Longdon slightly attenuated this way of putting it. “Yes—and in the home circle. Where’s the ‘strain’ of her being suffered to be a member of it?”

III

Vanderbank at this left his corner of the sofa and, with his hands in his pockets and a manner so amused that it might have passed for excited, took several paces about the room while his interlocutor, watching him, waited for his response. That gentleman, as this response for a minute hung fire, took his turn at sitting down, and then Vanderbank stopped before him with a face in which something had been still more brightly kindled. “You ask me more things than I can tell you. You ask me more than I think you suspect. You must come and see me again—you must let me come and see you. You raise the most interesting questions and we must sooner or later have them all out.”

Mr. Longdon looked happy in such a prospect, but once more took out his watch. “It wants five minutes to midnight. Which means that I must go now.”

“Not in the least. There are satisfactions you too must give.” His host, with an irresistible hand, confirmed him in his position and pressed upon him another cigarette. His resistance rang hollow—it was clearly, he judged, such an occasion for sacrifices. Vanderbank’s view of it meanwhile was quite as marked. “You see there’s ever so much more you must in common kindness tell me.”

Mr. Longdon sat there like a shy singer invited to strike up. “I told you everything at Mrs. Brookenham’s. It comes over me now how I dropped on you.”

“What you told me,” Vanderbank returned, “was excellent so far as it went; but it was only after all that, having caught my name, you had asked of our friend if I belonged to people you had known years before, and then, from what she had said, had—with what you were so good as to call great pleasure—made out that I did. You came round to me on this, after dinner, and gave me a pleasure still greater. But that only takes us part of the way.” Mr. Longdon said nothing, but there was something appreciative in his conscious lapses; they were a tribute to his young friend’s frequent felicity. This personage indeed appeared more and more to take them for that—which was not without its effect on his spirits. At last, with a flight of some freedom, he brought their pause to a close. “You loved Lady Julia.” Then as the attitude of his guest, who serenely met his eyes, was practically a contribution to the subject, he went on with a feeling that he had positively pleased. “You lost her—and you’re unmarried.”

Mr. Longdon’s smile was beautiful—it supplied so many meanings that when presently he spoke he seemed already to have told half his story. “Well, my life took a form. It had to, or I don’t know what would have become of me, and several things that all happened at once helped me out. My father died—I came into the little place in Suffolk. My sister, my only one, who had married and was older than I, lost within a year or two both her husband and her little boy. I offered her, in the country, a home, for her trouble was greater than any trouble of mine. She came, she stayed; it went on and on and we lived there together. We were sorry for each other and it somehow suited us. But she died two years ago.”

Vanderbank took all this in, only wishing to show—wishing by this time quite tenderly—that he even read into it deeply enough all the unsaid. He filled out another of his friend’s gaps. “And here you are.” Then he invited Mr. Longdon himself to make the stride. “Well, you’ll be a great success.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Why, that we shall be so infatuated with you that we shall make your life a burden to you. You’ll see soon enough what I mean by it.”

“Possibly,” the old man said; “to understand you I shall have to. You speak of something that as yet—with my race practically run—I know nothing about. I was no success as a young man. I mean of the sort that would have made most difference. People wouldn’t look at me—”

“Well, WE shall look at you,” Vanderbank declared. Then he added: “What people do you mean?” And before his friend could reply: “Lady Julia?”

Mr. Longdon’s assent was mute. “Ah she was not the worst! I mean that what made it so bad,” he continued, “was that they all really liked me. Your mother, I think—as to THAT, the dreadful consolatory ‘liking’—even more than the others.”

“My mother?”—Vanderbank was surprised. “You mean there was a question—?”

“Oh for but half a minute! It didn’t take her long. It was five years after your father’s death.”

This explanation was very delicately made. “She COULD marry again.”

“And I suppose you know she did,” Vanderbank returned.

“I knew it soon enough!” With this, abruptly, Mr. Longdon pulled himself forward. “Good-night, good-night.”

“Good-night,” said Vanderbank. “But wasn’t that AFTER Lady Julia?”

On the edge of the sofa, his hands supporting him, Mr. Longdon looked straight. “There was nothing after Lady Julia.”

“I see.” His companion smiled. “My mother was earlier.”

“She was extremely good to me. I’m not speaking of that time at Malvern—that came later.”

“Precisely—I understand. You’re speaking of the first years of her widowhood.”

Mr. Longdon just faltered. “I should call them rather the last. Six months later came her second marriage.”

Vanderbank’s interest visibly improved. “Ah it was THEN? That was about my seventh year.” He called things back and pieced them together. “But she must have been older than you.”

“Yes—a little. She was kindness itself to me at all events, then and afterwards. That was the charm of the weeks at Malvern.”

“I see,” the young man laughed. “The charm was that you had recovered.”

“Oh dear, no!” Mr. Longdon, rather to his mystification, exclaimed. “I’m afraid I hadn’t recovered at all—hadn’t, if that’s what you mean, got over my misery and my melancholy. She knew I hadn’t—and that was what was nice of her. She was a person with whom I could talk about her.”

Vanderbank took a moment to clear up the ambiguity. “Oh you mean you could talk about the OTHER. You hadn’t got over Lady Julia.”

Mr. Longdon sadly smiled at him. “I haven’t got over her yet!” Then, however, as if not to look morbid, he took pains to be clear. “The first wound was bad—but from that one always comes round. Your mother, dear woman, had known how to help me. Lady Julia was at that time her intimate friend—it was she who introduced me there. She couldn’t help what happened—she did her best. What I meant just now was that in the aftertime, when opportunity occurred, she was the one person with whom I could always talk and who always understood.” He lost himself an instant in the deep memories to attest which he had survived alone; then he sighed out as if the taste of it all came back to him with a faint sweetness: “I think they must both have been good to me. At the Malvern time, the particular time I just mentioned to you, Lady Julia was already married, and during those first years she had been whirled out of my ken. Then her own life took a quieter turn; we met again; I went for a good while often to her house. I think she rather liked the state to which she had reduced me, though she didn’t, you know, in the least presume on it. The better a woman is—it has often struck me—the more she enjoys in a quiet way some fellow’s having been rather bad, rather dark and desperate, about her—for her. I dare say, I mean, that though Lady Julia insisted I ought to marry she wouldn’t really have liked it much if I had. At any rate it was in those years I saw her daughter just cease to be a child—the little girl who was to be transformed by time into the so different person with whom we dined to-night. That comes back to me when I hear you speak of the growing up, in turn, of that person’s own daughter.”

“I follow you with a sympathy—!” Vanderbank replied. “The situation’s reproduced.”

“Ah partly—not altogether. The things that are unlike—well, are so VERY unlike.” Mr. Longdon for a moment, on this, fixed his companion with eyes that betrayed one of the restless little jumps of his mind. “I told you just now that there’s something I seem to make out in you.”

“Yes, that was meant for better things?”—Vanderbank frankly took him up. “There IS something, I really believe—meant for ever so much better ones. Those are just the sort I like to be supposed to have a real affinity with. Help me to them, Mr. Longdon; help me to them, and I don’t know what I won’t do for you!”

“Then after all”—and his friend made the point with innocent sharpness—“you’re NOT past saving!”

“Well, I individually—how shall I put it to you? If I tell you,” Vanderbank went on, “that I’ve that sort of fulcrum for salvation which consists at least in a deep consciousness and the absence of a rag of illusion, I shall appear to say I’m wholly different from the world I live in and to that extent present myself as superior and fatuous. Try me at any rate. Let me try myself. Don’t abandon me. See what can be done with me. Perhaps I’m after all a case. I shall certainly cling to you.”

“You’re too clever—you’re too clever: that’s what’s the matter with you all!” Mr. Longdon sighed.

“With us ALL?” Vanderbank echoed. “Dear Mr. Longdon, it’s the first time I’ve heard it. If you should say the matter with ME in particular, why there might be something in it. What you mean at any rate—I see where you come out—is that we’re cold and sarcastic and cynical, without the soft human spot. I think you flatter us even while you attempt to warn; but what’s extremely interesting at all events is that, as I gather, we made on you this evening, in a particular way, a collective impression—something in which our trifling varieties are merged.” His visitor’s face, at this, appeared to acknowledge his putting the case in perfection, so that he was encouraged to go on. “There was something particular with which you weren’t altogether pleasantly struck.”

Mr. Longdon, who decidedly changed colour easily, showed in his clear cheek the effect at once of feeling a finger on his fault and of admiring his companion’s insight. But he accepted the situation. “I couldn’t help noticing your tone.”

“Do you mean its being so low?”

He had smiled at first but looked grave now. “Do you really want to know?”

“Just how you were affected? I assure you there’s at this moment nothing I desire nearly so much.”

“I’m no judge then,” Mr. Longdon began; “I’m no critic; I’m no talker myself. I’m old-fashioned and narrow and ignorant. I’ve lived for years in a hole. I’m not a man of the world.”

Vanderbank considered him with a benevolence, a geniality of approval, that he literally had to hold in check for fear of seeming to patronise. “There’s not one of us who can touch you. You’re delightful, you’re wonderful, and I’m intensely curious to hear you,” the young man pursued. “Were we absolutely odious?” Before his guest’s puzzled, finally almost pained face, such an air of appreciating so much candour, yet of looking askance at so much freedom, he could only try to smooth the way and light the subject. “You see we don’t in the least know where we are. We’re lost—and you find us.” Mr. Longdon, as he spoke, had prepared at last really to go, reaching the door with a manner that denoted, however, by no means so much satiety as an attention that felt itself positively too agitated. Vanderbank had helped him on with the Inverness cape and for an instant detained him by it. “Just tell me as a kindness. DO we talk—”

“Too freely?” Mr. Longdon, with his clear eyes so untouched by time, speculatively murmured.

“Too outrageously. I want the truth.”

The truth evidently for Mr. Longdon was difficult to tell. “Well—it was certainly different.”

“From you and Lady Julia? I see. Well, of course with time SOME change is natural, isn’t it? But so different,” Vanderbank pressed, “that you were really shocked?”

His visitor smiled at this, but the smile somehow made the face graver. “I think I was rather frightened. Good-night.”

BOOK SECOND. LITTLE AGGIE

Mrs. Brookenham stopped on the threshold with the sharp surprise of the sight of her son, and there was disappointment, though rather of the afflicted than of the irritated sort, in the question that, slowly advancing, she launched at him. “If you’re still lolling about why did you tell me two hours ago that you were leaving immediately?”

Deep in a large brocaded chair with his little legs stuck out to the fire, he was so much at his ease that he was almost flat on his back. She had evidently roused him from sleep, and it took him a couple of minutes—during which, without again looking at him, she directly approached a beautiful old French secretary, a fine piece of the period of Louis Seize—to justify his presence. “I changed my mind. I couldn’t get off.”

“Do you mean to say you’re not going?”

“Well, I’m thinking it over. What’s a fellow to do?” He sat up a little, staring with conscious solemnity at the fire, and if it had been—as it was not—one of the annoyances she in general expected from him, she might have received the impression that his flush was the heat of liquor.

“He’s to keep out of the way,” she returned—“when he has led one so deeply to hope it.” There had been a bunch of keys dangling from the secretary, of which as she said these words Mrs. Brookenham took possession. Her air on observing them had promptly become that of having been in search of them, and a moment after she had passed across the room they were in her pocket. “If you don’t go what excuse will you give?”

“Do you mean to YOU, mummy?”

She stood before him and now dismally looked at him. “What’s the matter with you? What an extraordinary time to take a nap!”

He had fallen back in the chair, from the depths of which he met her eyes. “Why it’s just THE time, mummy. I did it on purpose. I can always go to sleep when I like. I assure you it sees one through things!”

She turned away with impatience and, glancing about the room, perceived on a small table of the same type as the secretary a somewhat massive book with the label of a circulating library, which she proceeded to pick up as for refuge from the impression made on her by her boy. He watched her do this and watched her then slightly pause at the wide window that, in Buckingham Crescent, commanded the prospect they had ramified rearward to enjoy; a medley of smoky brick and spotty stucco, of other undressed backs, of glass invidiously opaque, of roofs and chimney-pots and stables unnaturally near—one of the private pictures that in London, in select situations, run up, as the phrase is, the rent. There was no indication of value now, however, in the character conferred on the scene by a cold spring rain. The place had moreover a confessed out-of-season vacancy. She appeared to have determined on silence for the present mark of her relation with Harold, yet she soon failed to resist a sufficiently poor reason for breaking it. “Be so good as to get out of my chair.”

“What will you do for me,” he asked, “if I oblige you?”

He never moved—but as if only the more directly and intimately to meet her—and she stood again before the fire and sounded his strange little face. “I don’t know what it is, but you give me sometimes a kind of terror.”

“A terror, mamma?”

She found another place, sinking sadly down and opening her book, and the next moment he got up and came over to kiss her, on which she drew her cheek wearily aside. “You bore me quite to death,” she coldly said, “and I give you up to your fate.”

“What do you call my fate?”

“Oh something dreadful—if only by its being publicly ridiculous.” She turned vaguely the pages of her book. “You’re too selfish—too sickening.”

“Oh dear, dear!” he wonderingly whistled while he wandered back to the hearth-rug, on which, with his hands behind him, he lingered a while. He was small and had a slight stoop which somehow gave him character—character of the insidious sort carried out in the acuteness, difficult to trace to a source, of his smooth fair face, where the lines were all curves and the expression all needles. He had the voice of a man of forty and was dressed—as if markedly not for London—with an air of experience that seemed to match it. He pulled down his waistcoat, smoothing himself, feeling his neat hair and looking at his shoes.

“I took your five pounds. Also two of the sovereigns,” he went on. “I left you two pound ten.” His mother jerked up her head at this, facing him in dismay, and, immediately on her feet, passed back to the secretary. “It’s quite as I say,” he insisted; “you should have locked it BEFORE, don’t you know? It grinned at me there with all its charming brasses, and what was I to do? Darling mummy, I COULDN’T start—that was the truth. I thought I should find something—I had noticed; and I do hope you’ll let me keep it, because if you don’t it’s all up with me. I stopped over on purpose—on purpose, I mean, to tell you what I’ve done. Don’t you call that a sense of honour? And now you only stand and glower at me.”

Mrs. Brookenham was, in her forty-first year, still charmingly pretty, and the nearest approach she made at this moment to meeting her son’s description of her was by looking beautifully desperate. She had about her the pure light of youth—would always have it; her head, her figure, her flexibility, her flickering colour, her lovely silly eyes, her natural quavering tone, all played together toward this effect by some trick that had never yet been exposed. It was at the same time remarkable that—at least in the bosom of her family—she rarely wore an appearance of gaiety less qualified than at the present juncture; she suggested for the most part the luxury, the novelty of woe, the excitement of strange sorrows and the cultivation of fine indifferences. This was her special sign—an innocence dimly tragic. It gave immense effect to her other resources. She opened the secretary with the key she had quickly found, then with the aid of another rattled out a small drawer; after which she pushed the drawer back, closing the whole thing. “You terrify me—you terrify me,” she again said.

“How can you say that when you showed me just now how well you know me? Wasn’t it just on account of what you thought I might do that you took out the keys as soon as you came in?” Harold’s manner had a way of clearing up whenever he could talk of himself.

“You’re too utterly disgusting—I shall speak to your father,” with which, going to the chair he had given up, his mother sank down again with her heavy book. There was no anger, however, in her voice, and not even a harsh plaint; only a detached accepted disenchantment. Mrs. Brookenham’s supreme rebellion against fate was just to show with the last frankness how much she was bored.

“No, darling mummy, you won’t speak to my father—you’ll do anything in the world rather than that,” Harold replied, quite as if he were kindly explaining her to herself. “I thank you immensely for the charming way you take what I’ve done; it was because I had a conviction of that that I waited for you to know it. It was all very well to tell you I’d start on my visit—but how the deuce was I to start without a penny in the world? Don’t you see that if you want me to go about you must really enter into my needs?”

“I wish to heaven you’d leave me—I wish to heaven you’d get out of the house,” Mrs. Brookenham went on without looking up.

Harold took out his watch. “Well, mamma, now I AM ready: I wasn’t in the least before. But it will be going forth, you know, quite to seek my fortune. For do you really think—I must have from you what you do think—that it will be all right for me?”

She fixed him at last with her pretty pathos. “You mean for you to go to Brander?”

“You know,” he answered with his manner as of letting her see her own attitude, “you know you try to make me do things you wouldn’t at all do yourself. At least I hope you wouldn’t. And don’t you see that if I so far oblige you I must at least be paid for it?”

His mother leaned back in her chair, gazed for a moment at the ceiling and then closed her eyes. “You ARE frightful,” she said. “You’re appalling.”

“You’re always wanting to get me out of the house,” he continued; “I think you want to get us ALL out, for you manage to keep Nanda from showing even more than you do me. Don’t you think your children good ENOUGH, mummy dear? At any rate it’s as plain as possible that if you don’t keep us at home you must keep us in other places. One can’t live anywhere for nothing—it’s all bosh that a fellow saves by staying with people. I don’t know how it is for a lady, but a man’s practically let in—”

“Do you know you kill me, Harold?” Mrs. Brookenham woefully interposed. But it was with the same remote melancholy that she asked in the next breath: “It wasn’t an INVITATION—to Brander?”

“It’s as I told you. She said she’d write, fixing a time; but she never did write.”

“But if YOU wrote—”

“It comes to the same thing? DOES it?—that’s the question. If on my note she didn’t write—that’s what I mean. Should one simply take it that one’s wanted? I like to have these things FROM you, mother. I do, I believe, everything you say; but to feel safe and right I must just HAVE them. Any one WOULD want me, eh?”

Mrs. Brookenham had opened her eyes, but she still attached them to the cornice. “If she hadn’t wanted you she’d have written to keep you off. In a great house like that there’s always room.”

The young man watched her a moment. “How you DO like to tuck us in and then sit up yourself! What do you want to do, anyway? What ARE you up to, mummy?”

She rose at this, turning her eyes about the room as if from the extremity of martyrdom or the wistfulness of some deep thought. Yet when she spoke it was with a different expression, an expression that would have served for an observer as a marked illustration of that disconnectedness of her parts which frequently was laughable even to the degree of contributing to her social success. “You’ve spent then more than four pounds in five days. It was on Friday I gave them to you. What in the world do you suppose is going to become of me?”

Harold continued to look at her as if the question demanded some answer really helpful. “Do we live beyond our means?”

She now moved her gaze to the floor. “Will you PLEASE get away?”

“Anything to assist you. Only, if I SHOULD find I’m not wanted—?”

She met his look after an instant, and the wan loveliness and vagueness of her own had never been greater. “BE wanted, and you won’t find it. You’re odious, but you’re not a fool.”

He put his arms about her now for farewell, and she submitted as if it was absolutely indifferent to her to whose bosom she was pressed. “You do, dearest,” he laughed, “say such sweet things!” And with that he reached the door, on opening which he pulled up at a sound from below. “The Duchess! She’s coming up.”

Mrs. Brookenham looked quickly round the room, but she spoke with utter detachment. “Well, let her come.”

“As I’d let her go. I take it as a happy sign SHE won’t be at Brander.” He stood with his hand on the knob; he had another quick appeal. “But after Tuesday?”

Mrs. Brookenham had passed half round the room with the glide that looked languid but that was really a remarkable form of activity, and had given a transforming touch, on sofa and chairs, to three or four crushed cushions. It was all with the hanging head of a broken lily. “You’re to stay till the twelfth.”