The Awkward Age Part 41

"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 embarra.s.sed, 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 f.a.n.n.y--'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 amus.e.m.e.nt. "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 princ.i.p.al 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 G.o.d!" 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 G.o.d!" 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 myself."

"Well, what's the difference?"

"Oh there IS a difference," Mrs. Brook loyally said. Then she opened an inch or two, for Vanderbank, the door of her dim radiance. "Only I should have thought it a difference for the better. Of course," she added, "it remains absolutely with us three alone, and don't you already feel from it the fresh charm--with it here between us--of our being together?"

It was as if each of the men had waited for the other to a.s.sent better than he himself could and Mitchy then, as Vanderbank failed, had gracefully, to cover him, changed the subject. "But isn't Nanda, the person most interested, to know?"

Vanderbank gave on this a strange sound of hilarity. "Ah that would finish it off!"

It produced for a few seconds something like a chill, a chill that had for consequence a momentary pause which in its turn added weight to the words next uttered. "It's not I who shall tell her," Mrs. Brook said gently and gravely. "There!--you may be sure. If you want a promise, it's a promise. So that if Mr. Longdon's silent," she went on, "and you are, Mitchy, and I am, how in the world shall she have a suspicion?"

"You mean of course except by Van's deciding to mention it himself."

Van might have been, from the way they looked at him, some beautiful unconscious object; but Mrs. Brook was quite ready to answer. "Oh poor man, HE'LL never breathe."

"I see. So there we are."

To this discussion the subject of it had for the time nothing to contribute, even when Mitchy, rising with the words he had last uttered from the chair in which he had been placed, took sociably as well, on the hearth-rug, a position before their hostess. This move ministered apparently to Vanderbank's mere silence, for it was still without speaking that, after a little, he turned away from his friend and dropped once more into the same seat. "I've shown you already, you of course remember," Vanderbank presently said to him, "that I'm perfectly aware of how much better Mrs. Brook would like YOU for the position."

"He thinks I want him myself," Mrs. Brook blandly explained.

She was indeed, as they always thought her, "wonderful," but she was perhaps not even now so much so as Mitchy found himself able to be. "But how would you lose old Van--even at the worst?" he earnestly asked of her.

She just hesitated. "What do you mean by the worst?"

"Then even at the best," Mitchy smiled. "In the event of his falsifying your prediction; which, by the way, has the danger, hasn't it?--I mean for your intellectual credit--of making him, as we all used to be called by our nursemaids, 'contrairy.'"

"Oh I've thought of that," Mrs. Brook returned. "But he won't do, on the whole, even for the sweetness of spiting me, what he won't want to do.

_I_ haven't said I should lose him," she went on; "that's only the view he himself takes--or, to do him perfect justice, the idea he candidly imputes to me; though without, I imagine--for I don't go so far as that--attributing to me anything so unutterably bete as a feeling of jealousy."

"You wouldn't dream of my supposing anything inept of you," Vanderbank said on this, "if you understood to the full how I keep on admiring you.

Only what stupefies me a little," he continued, "is the extraordinary critical freedom--or we may call it if we like the high intellectual detachment--with which we discuss a question touching you, dear Mrs. Brook, so nearly and engaging so your private and most sacred sentiments. What are we playing with, after all, but the idea of Nanda's happiness?"

"Oh I'm not playing!" Mrs. Brook declared with a little rattle of emotion.

"She's not playing"--Mr. Mitchett gravely confirmed it. "Don't you feel in the very air the vibration of the pa.s.sion that she's simply too charming to shake at the window as the housemaid shakes the tablecloth or the jingo the flag?" Then he took up what Vanderbank had previously said. "Of course, my dear man, I'm 'aware,' as you just now put it, of everything, and I'm not indiscreet, am I, Mrs. Brook? in admitting for you as well as for myself that there WAS an impossibility you and I used sometimes to turn over together. Only--Lord bless us all!--it isn't as if I hadn't long ago seen that there's nothing at all FOR me."

"Ah wait, wait!" Mrs. Brook put in. "She has a theory"--Vanderbank, from his chair, lighted it up for Mitchy, who hovered before them--"that your chance WILL come, later on, after I've given my measure."

"Oh but that's exactly," Mitchy was quick to respond, "what you'll never do! You won't give your measure the least little bit. You'll walk in magnificent mystery 'later on' not a bit less than you do today; you'll continue to have the benefit of everything that our imagination, perpetually engaged, often baffled and never fatigued, will continue to bedeck you with. Nanda, in the same way, to the end of all her time, will simply remain exquisite, or genuine, or generous--whatever we choose to call it. It may make a difference to us, who are comparatively vulgar, but what difference will it make to HER whether you do or you don't decide for her? You can't belong to her more, for herself, than you do already--and that's precisely so much that there's no room for any one else. Where therefore, without that room, do I come in?"

"Nowhere, I see," Vanderbank seemed obligingly to muse.

Mrs. Brook had followed Mitchy with marked admiration, but she gave on this a glance at Van that was like the toss of a blossom from the same branch. "Oh then shall I just go on with you BOTH? That WILL be joy!"

She had, however, the next thing, a sudden drop which shaded the picture. "You're so divine, Mitchy, that how can you not in the long-run break ANY woman down?"

It was not as if Mitchy was struck--it was only that he was courteous.