The Awkward Age (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899)/Book 1/Chapter 1
THE AWKWARD AGE
BOOK FIRST
LADY JULIA
I
Save when it happened to rain Vanderbank always walked home, but he usually took a hansom when the rain was moderate and adopted the preference of the philosopher when it was heavy. On this occasion he therefore recognized, as the servant opened the door, a congruity between the weather and the "four-wheeler" that, in the empty street, under the glazed radiance, waited and trickled and blackly glittered. The butler mentioned it as, on such a wild night, the only thing they could get, and Vanderbank, having replied that it was exactly what would do best, prepared, in the doorway, to put up his umbrella and dash down to it. At this moment he heard his name pronounced from behind and, on turning, found himself joined by the elderly fellow-guest with whom he had talked after dinner and about whom, later on, upstairs, he had sounded his hostess. It was at present a clear question of how this amiable, this apparently unassertive person should get home—of the possibility of the other cab for which even now one of the footmen, with a whistle to his lips, craned out his head and listened through the storm. Mr. Longdon wondered, to Vanderbank, if their course might by any chance be the same; which led our young friend immediately to express a readiness to see him safely in any direction that should accommodate him. As the footman's whistle spent itself in vain they got together into the four-wheeler, where, at the end of a few moments more, Vanderbank became conscious of having proposed his own rooms as a wind-up to their drive. Wouldn't that be a better finish of the evening than just separating in the wet? He liked his new acquaintance, who struck him as in a manner clinging to him, who was staying at an hotel presumably at that hour dismal, and who, confessing with easy humility to a connection positively timid with a club at which one couldn't have a visitor, accepted, under pressure, his invitation. Vanderbank, when they arrived, was amused at the air of added extravagance with which he said he would keep the cab: he so clearly enjoyed to that extent the sense of making a night of it.
"You young men, I believe, keep them for hours, eh? At least they did in my time," he laughed—"the wild ones! But I think of them as all wild then. I dare say that when one settles in town one learns how to manage; only I'm afraid, you know, that I've got completely out of it. I do feel really quite mouldy. It's a matter of thirty years—!"
"Since you've been in London?"
"For more than a few days at a time, upon my honor. You won't understand that—any more, I dare say, than I myself quite understand how, at the end of all, I've accepted this queer view of the doom of coming back. But I don't doubt I shall ask you, if you'll be so good as to let me, for the help of a hint or two: as to how to do, don't you know? and not to—what do you fellows call it?—be done. How about one of these things—!"
One of these things was the lift in which, at no great pace and with much rumbling and creaking, the porter conveyed the two gentlemen to the alarming eminence, as Mr. Longdon measured their flight, at which Vanderbank perched. The impression made on him by this contrivance showed him as unsophisticated, yet when his companion at the top, ushering him in, gave a touch to the quick light and, in the pleasant, ruddy room, all convenience and character, had, before the fire, another look at him, it was not to catch in him any protrusive angle. Mr. Longdon was slight and neat, delicate of body and both keen and kind of face, with black brows finely marked and thick, smooth hair, in which the silver had deep shadows. He wore neither whisker nor mustache, and seemed to carry in the flicker of his quick brown eyes and the positive sun-play of his smile even more than the equivalent of what might, superficially or stupidly, elsewhere be missed in him; which was mass, substance, presence—what is vulgarly called importance. He had indeed no presence, but he had somehow an effect. He might almost have been a priest, if priests, as it occurred to Vanderbank, were ever such dandies. He had at all events, conclusively, doubled the Cape of the years—he would never again see fifty-five: to the warning light of that bleak headland he presented a back sufficiently conscious. Yet, though, to Vanderbank, he could not look young, he came near—strikingly and amusingly—looking new: this, after a minute, appeared mainly perhaps indeed in the perfection of his evening dress and the special smartness of the sleeveless overcoat he had evidently had made to wear with it and might even actually be wearing for the first time. He had talked to Vanderbank at Mrs. Brookenham's about Beccles and Suffolk; but it was not at Beccles, nor anywhere in the county, that these ornaments had been designed. His action had already been, with however little purpose, to present the region to his interlocutor in a favorable light. Vanderbank, for that matter, had the kind of imagination that liked to place an object, even to the point of losing sight of it in the conditions; he already saw the nice old nook it must have taken to keep a man of intelligence so fresh while suffering him to remain so fine. The product of Beccles accepted at all events a cigarette—still much as a joke and an adventure—and looked about him as if even more pleased than he had expected. Then he broke, through his double eye-glass, into an exclamation that was like a passing pang of envy and regret. "You young men, you young men—!"
"Well, what about us?" Vanderbank's tone encouraged the courtesy of the reference. "I'm not so young, moreover, as that comes to."
"How old are you then, pray?"
"Why, I'm thirty-four."
"What do you call that? I'm a hundred and three!" Mr. Longdon took out his watch. "It's only a quarter past eleven." Then with a quick change of interest, "What did you say is your public office?" he inquired.
"The General Audit. I'm Deputy Chairman."
"Dear!" Mr. Longdon looked at him as if he had fifty windows. "What a head you must have!"
"Oh yes—our head's Sir Digby Dence."
"And what do we do for you?"
"Well, you gild the pill—though not perhaps very thick. But it's a decent berth."
"A thing a good many fellows would give a pound of their flesh for?"
The old man appeared so to deprecate too faint a picture that his companion dropped all scruples. "I'm the most envied man I know—so that if I were a shade less amiable I should be one of the most hated."
Mr. Longdon laughed, yet not quite as if they were joking. "I see. Your pleasant way carries it off."
Vanderbank was, however, not serious. "Wouldn't it carry off anything?"
Again his visitor, through the pince-nez, appeared to crown him with a Whitehall cornice. "I think I ought to let you know I'm studying you. It's really fair to tell you," he continued, with an earnestness not discomposed by the indulgence in Vanderbank's face. "It's all right—all right!" he reassuringly added, having meanwhile stopped before a photograph suspended on the wall. "That's your mother!" he exclaimed with something of the elation of a child making a discovery or guessing a riddle. "I don't make you out in her yet—in my recollection of her, which, as I told you, is perfect; but I dare say I soon shall."
Vanderbank was more and more aware that the kind of hilarity he excited would never in the least be a bar to affection. "Please take all your time."
Mr. Longdon looked at his watch again. "Do you think I had better keep it?"
"The cab?" Vanderbank liked him so, found in him such a promise of pleasant things, that he was almost tempted to say: "Dear and delightful sir, don't weigh that question; I'll pay, myself, for the man's whole night!" His approval at all events was complete. "Most certainly. That's the only way not to think of it."
"Oh, you young men, you young men!" his guest again murmured. He had passed on to the photograph—Vanderbank had many, too many photographs—of some other relation, and stood wiping the gold-mounted glasses through which he had been darting admirations and catching side-lights of shocks. "Don't talk nonsense," he continued as his friend attempted once more to throw in a protest; "I belong to a different period of history. There have been things this evening that have made me feel as if I had been disinterred— literally dug up from a long sleep. I assure you there have!"—he really pressed the point.
Vanderbank wondered a moment what things in particular these might be; he found himself wanting to get at everything his visitor represented, to enter into his consciousness and be, as it were, on his side. He glanced, with an intention freely sarcastic, at an easy possibility. "The extraordinary vitality of Brookenham?"
Mr. Longdon, with the nippers in place again, fixed on him a gravity that failed to prevent his discovering in the eyes behind them a shy reflection of his irony. "Oh, Brookenham! You must tell me all about Brookenham."
"I see that's not what you mean."
Mr. Longdon forbore to deny it. "I wonder if you'll understand what I mean." Vanderbank bristled with the wish to be put to the test, but was checked before he could say so. "And what's his place—Brookenham's?"
"Oh, Rivers and Lakes—an awfully good thing. He got it last year."
Mr. Longdon—but not too grossly—wondered. "How did he get it?"
Vanderbank laughed. "Well, she got it."
His friend remained grave. "And about how much now—?"
"Oh, twelve hundred—and lots of allowances and boats and things. To do the work," Vanderbank, still with a certain levity, exclaimed.
"And what is the work?"
The young man hesitated. "Ask him. He'll like to tell you."
"Yet he seemed to have but little to say." Mr. Longdon exactly measured it again.
"Ah, not about that. Try him."
He looked more sharply at his host, as if vaguely suspicious of a trap; then, not less vaguely, he sighed. "Well, it's what I came up for—to try you all. But do they live on that?" he continued.
Vanderbank once more just faltered. "One doesn't quite know what they live on. But they've means—for it was just that fact, I remember, that showed Brookenham's getting the place wasn't a job. It was given, I mean, not to his mere domestic need, but to his notorious efficiency. He has a property—an ugly little place in Gloucestershire—which they sometimes let. His elder brother has the better one, but they make up an income."
Mr. Longdon, for an instant, lost himself. "Yes, I remember—one heard of those things at the time. And she must have had something."
"Yes, indeed, she had something—and she always has her intense cleverness. She knows thoroughly how. They do it tremendously well."
"Tremendously well," Mr. Longdon intelligently echoed. "But a house in Buckingham Crescent, with the way they seem to have built through to all sorts of other places—"
"Oh, they're all right," Vanderbank soothingly dropped.
"One likes to feel that of people with whom one has dined. There are four children?" his friend went on.
"The older boy, whom you saw, and who, in his way, is a wonder, the older girl, whom you must see, and two youngsters, male and female, whom you mustn't."
There might by this time, in the growing interest of their talk, have been almost nothing too uncanny for Mr. Longdon to fear it. "You mean the youngsters are—unfortunate?"
"No—they're only, like all the modern young, I think, mysteries, terrible little baffling mysteries." Vanderbank had broken into mirth again—it flickered so from his friend's face that, really at moments to the point of alarm, his explanations deepened darkness. Then, with more interest, he harked back. "I know the thing you just mentioned—the thing that strikes you as odd." He produced his knowledge quite with elation. "The talk." Mr. Longdon, on this, only looked at him, in silence, harder, but he went on with assurance: "Yes, the talk—for we do talk, I think." Still his guest left him without relief, only fixing him, on his suggestion, with a sort of suspended eloquence. Whatever the old man was on the point of saying, however, he disposed of in a curtailed murmur; he had already turned afresh to the series of portraits, and as he glanced at another Vanderbank spoke afresh. "It was very interesting to me to hear from you there, when the ladies had left us, how many old threads you were prepared to pick up."
Mr. Longdon had paused. "I'm an old boy who remembers the mothers," he at last replied.
"Yes, you told me how well you remember Mrs. Brookenham's."
"Oh, oh!"—and he arrived at a new subject. "This must be your sister Mary."
"Yes; it's very bad, but as she's dead—"
"Dead? Dear, dear!"
"Oh, long ago"—Vanderbank eased him off. "It's delightful of you," he went on, "to have known also such a lot of my people."
Mr. Longdon turned from his contemplation with a visible effort. "I feel obliged to you for taking it so; it mightn't—one never knows—have amused you. As I told you there, the first thing I did was to ask Fernanda about the company; and when she mentioned your name I immediately said: "Would he like me to speak to him?"
"And what did Fernanda say?"
Mr. Longdon stared. "Do you call her Fernanda?"
Vanderbank felt positively more guilty than he would have expected. "You think it too much in the manner we just mentioned?"
His friend hesitated. Then with a smile a trifle strange: "Excuse me; I didn't mention—"
"No, you didn't; and your scruple was magnificent. In point of fact," Vanderbank pursued, "I don't call Mrs. Brookenham by her Christian name."
Mr. Longdon's clear eyes were searching. "Unless in speaking of her to others?" He seemed really to wish to know.
Vanderbank was but too ready to satisfy him. "I dare say we seem to you a vulgar lot of people. That's not the way, I can see, you speak of ladies at Beccles."
"Oh, if you laugh at me—!" And the old man turned off.
"Don't threaten me," said Vanderbank, "or I will send away the cab. Of course I know what you mean. It will be tremendously interesting to hear how the sort of thing we've fallen into—oh, we have fallen in!—strikes your fresh ear. Do have another cigarette. Sunk as I must appear to you, it sometimes strikes mine. But I'm not sure, as regards Mrs. Brookenham, whom I've known a long time—"
Mr. Longdon again took him up. "What do you people call a long time?"
Vanderbank considered. "Ah, there you are—! And now we're 'we people'! That's right; give it to us. I'm sure that in one way or another it's all earned. Well, I've known her ten years. But awfully well."
"What do you call awfully well?"
"We people?" Vanderbank's inquirer, with his continued restless observation, moving nearer, the young man had laid on his shoulder the most considerate of hands. "Don't you perhaps ask too much? But no," he added, quickly and gayly, "of course you don't: if I don't look out I shall have, on you, exactly the effect I don't want. I dare say I don't know how well I know Mrs. Brookenham. Mustn't that sort of thing be put, in a manner, to the proof? What I meant to say just now was that I wouldn't—at least I hope I shouldn't—have named her as I did save to an old friend."
Mr. Longdon looked promptly satisfied and reassured. "You probably heard me address her myself."
"I did, but you have your rights, and that wouldn't excuse me. The only thing is that I go to see her every Sunday."
Mr. Longdon pondered; then, a little to Vanderbank's surprise, at any rate to his deeper amusement, candidly asked: "Only Fernanda? No other lady?"
"Oh yes, several other ladies."
Mr. Longdon appeared to hear this with pleasure. "You're quite right. We don't make enough of Sunday at Beccles."
"Oh, we make plenty of it in London!" Vanderbank said. "And I think it's rather in my interest I should mention that Mrs. Brookenham calls me—"
His visitor covered him now with an attention that just operated as a check. "By your Christian name?" Before Vanderbank could in any degree attenuate, "What is your Christian name?" Mr. Longdon asked.
Vanderbank felt, of a sudden, almost guilty—as if his answer could only impute extravagance to the lady. "My Christian name"—he blushed it out—"is Gustavus."
His friend took a droll, conscious leap. "And she calls you Gussy?"
"No, not even Gussy. But I scarcely think I ought to tell you," he pursued, "if she herself gave you no glimpse of the fact. Any implication that she consciously avoided it might make you see deeper depths."
Vanderbank spoke with pointed levity, but his companion showed him, after an instant, a face just covered—and a little painfully—with the vision of the possibility brushed away by the joke. "Oh, I'm not so bad as that!" Mr. Longdon modestly ejaculated.
"Well, she doesn't do it always," Vanderbank laughed, "and it's nothing, moreover, to what some people are called. Why, there was a fellow there—" He pulled up, however, and, thinking better of it, selected another instance. "The Duchess—weren't you introduced to the Duchess?—never calls me anything but 'Vanderbank' unless she calls me 'caro mio.' It wouldn't have taken much to make her appeal to you with an 'I say, Longdon!' I can quite hear her."
Mr. Longdon, focussing the effect of the sketch, pointed its moral with an indulgent: "Oh well, a foreign duchess!" He could make his distinctions.
"Yes, she's invidiously, cruelly foreign," Vanderbank concurred: "I've never indeed seen a woman avail herself so cleverly, to make up for the obloquy of that state, of the benefits and immunities it brings with it. She has bloomed in the hot-house of her widowhood—she's a Neapolitan hatched by an incubator."
"A Neapolitan?"—Mr. Longdon, civilly, seemed to wish he had only known it.
"Her husband was one; but I believe that dukes at Naples are as thick as princes at Petersburg. He's dead, at any rate, poor man, and she has come back here to live."
"Gloomily, I should think—after Naples?" Mr. Longdon threw out.
"Oh, it would take more than even a Neapolitan past—! However," the young man added, catching himself up, "she lives not in what is behind her, but in what is before—she lives in her precious little Aggie."
"Little Aggie?" Mr. Longdon took a cautious interest.
"I don't take a liberty there," Vanderbank smiled. "I speak only of the young Agnesina, a little girl, the Duchess's niece, or rather, I believe, her husband's, whom she has adopted—in the place of a daughter early lost—and has brought to England to marry."
"Ah, to some great man of course."
Vanderbank thought. "I don't know." He gave a vague but expressive sigh. "She's rather lovely, little Aggie."
Mr. Longdon looked conspicuously subtle. "Then perhaps you're the man—"
"Do I look like a great one?" Vanderbank broke in.
His visitor, turning away from him, again embraced the room. "Oh dear, yes!"
"Well then, to show how right you are, there's the young lady." He pointed to an object on one of the tables, a small photograph with a very wide border of something that looked like crimson fur.
Mr. Longdon took up the picture; he was serious now. "She's very beautiful—but she's not a little girl."
"At Naples they develop early. She's only seventeen or eighteen, I suppose; but I never know how old—or at least how young—girls are, and I'm not sure. An aunt, at any rate, has of course nothing to conceal. She is extremely pretty—with extraordinary red hair and a complexion to match; great rarities, I believe, in that race and latitude. She gave me the portrait—frame and all. The frame is Neapolitan enough, and little Aggie is charming." Then Vanderbank subjoined: "But not so charming as little Nanda."
"Little Nanda?—have you got her? The old man was all eagerness.
"She's over there beside the lamp—also a present from the original."