The Awkward Age Part 42

"What do you call the long-run? Taking about till I'm eighty?"

"Ah your genius is of a kind to which middle life will be particularly favourable. You'll reap then somehow, one feels, everything you've sown."

Mitchy still accepted the prophecy only to control it. "Do you call eighty middle life? Why, my moral beauty, my dear woman--if that's what you mean by my genius--is precisely my curse. What on earth--is left for a man just rotten with goodness? It renders necessary the kind of liking that renders unnecessary anything else."

"Now that IS cheap paradox!" Vanderbank patiently sighed. "You're down for a fine."

It was with less of the patience perhaps that Mrs. Brook took this up.

"Yes, on that we ARE stiff. Five pounds, please."

Mitchy drew out his pocket-book even though he explained. "What I mean is that I don't give out the great thing." With which he produced a crisp banknote.

"DON'T you?" asked Vanderbank, who, having taken it from him to hand to Mrs. Brook, held it a moment, delicately, to accentuate the doubt.

"The great thing's the sacred terror. It's you who give THAT out."

"Oh!"--and Vanderbank laid the money on the small stand at Mrs. Brook's elbow.

"Ain't I right, Mrs. Brook?--doesn't he, tremendously, and isn't that more than anything else what does it?"

The two again, as if they understood each other, gazed in a unity of interest at their companion, who sustained it with an air clearly intended as the happy mean between embarra.s.sment and triumph. Then Mrs.

Brook showed she liked the phrase. "The sacred terror! Yes, one feels it. It IS that."

"The finest case of it," Mitchy pursued, "that I've ever met. So my moral's sufficiently pointed."

"Oh I don't think it can be said to be that," Vanderbank returned, "till you've put the whole thing into a box by doing for Nanda what she does most want you to do."

Mitchy caught on without a shade of wonder. "Oh by proposing to the d.u.c.h.ess for little Aggie?" He took but an instant to turn it over.

"Well, I WOULD propose--to please Nanda. Only I've never yet quite made out the reason of her wish."

"The reason is largely," his friend answered, "that, being very fond of Aggie and in fact extremely admiring her, she wants to do something good for her and to keep her from anything bad. Don't you know--it's too charming--she regularly believes in her?" Mitchy, with all his recognition, vibrated to the touch. "Isn't it too charming?"

"Well then," Vanderbank went on, "she secures for her friend a phoenix like you, and secures for you a phoenix like her friend. It's hard to say for which of you she desires most to do the handsome thing. She loves you both in short"--he followed it up--"though perhaps when one thinks of it the price she puts on you, Mitchy, in the arrangement, is a little the higher. Awfully fine at any rate--and yet awfully odd too--her feeling for Aggie's type, which is divided by such abysses from her own."

"Ah," laughed Mitchy, "but think then of her feeling for mine!"

Vanderbank, still more at his ease now and with his head back, had his eyes aloft and far. "Oh there are things in Nanda--!" The others exchanged a glance at this, while their companion added: "Little Aggie's really the sort of creature she would have liked to be able to be."

"Well," Mitchy said, "I should have adored her even if she HAD been able."

Mrs. Brook had for some minutes played no audible part, but the acute observer we are constantly taking for granted would perhaps have detected in her, as one of the effects of the special complexion to-day of Vanderbank's presence, a certain smothered irritation. "She couldn't possibly have been able," she now interposed, "with so loose--or rather, to express it more properly, with so perverse--a mother."

"And yet, my dear lady," Mitchy promptly qualified, "how if in little Aggie's case the d.u.c.h.ess hasn't prevented--?"

Mrs. Brook was full of wisdom. "Well, it's a different thing. I'm not, as a mother--am I, Van?--bad ENOUGH. That's what's the matter with me.

Aggie, don't you see? is the d.u.c.h.ess's morality, her virtue; which, by having it that way outside of you, as one may say, you can make a much better thing of. The child has been for Jane, I admit, a capital little subject, but Jane has kept her on hand and finished her like some wonderful piece of st.i.tching. Oh as work it's of a soigne! There it is--to show. A woman like me has to be HERSELF, poor thing, her virtue and her morality. What will you have? It's our lumbering English plan."

"So that her daughter," Mitchy sympathised, "can only, by the arrangement, hope to become at the best her immorality and her vice?"

But Mrs. Brook, without an answer for the question, appeared suddenly to have plunged into a sea of thought. "The only way for Nanda to have been REALLY nice--!"

"Would have been for YOU to be like Jane?"

Mitchy and his hostess seemed for a minute, on this, to gaze together at the tragic truth. Then she shook her head. "We see our mistakes too late." She repeated the movement, but as if to let it all go, and Vanderbank meanwhile, pulling out his watch, had got up with a laugh that showed some inattention and made to Mitchy a remark about their walking away together. Mitchy, engaged for the instant with Mrs. Brook, had a.s.sented only with a nod, but the att.i.tude of the two men had become that of departure. Their friend looked at them as if she would like to keep one of them, and for a purpose connected somehow with the other, but was oddly, almost ludicrously, embarra.s.sed to choose. What was in her face indeed during this short pa.s.sage might prove to have been, should we penetrate, the flicker of a sense that in spite of all intimacy and amiability they could, at bottom and as things commonly turned out, only be united against her. Yet she made at the end a sort of choice in going on to Mitchy: "He hasn't at all told you the real reason of Nanda's idea that you should go in for Aggie."

"Oh I draw the line there," said Vanderbank. "Besides, he understands that too."

Mitchy, on the spot, did himself and every one justice. "Why it just disposes of me, doesn't it?"

It made Vanderbank, restless now and turning about the room, stop with a smile at Mrs. Brook. "We understand too well!"

"Not if he doesn't understand," she replied after a moment while she turned to Mitchy, "that his real 'combination' can in the nature of the case only be--!"

"Oh yes"--Mitchy took her straight up--"with the young thing who is, as you say, positively and helplessly modern and the pious fraud of whose cla.s.sic ident.i.ty with a sheet of white paper has been--ah tacitly of course, but none the less practically!--dropped. You've so often reminded me. I do understand. If I were to go in for Aggie it would only be to oblige. The modern girl, the product of our hard London facts and of her inevitable consciousness of them just as they are--she, wonderful being, IS, I fully recognise, my real affair, and I'm not ashamed to say that when I like the individual I'm not afraid of the type. She knows too much--I don't say; but she doesn't know after all a millionth part of what _I_ do."

"I'm not sure!" Mrs. Brook earnestly exclaimed.

He had rung out and he kept it up with a limpidity unusual. "And product for product, when you come to that, I'm a queerer one myself than any other. The traditions _I_ smas.h.!.+" Mitchy laughed.

Mrs. Brook had got up and Vanderbank had gone again to the window.

"That's exactly why," she returned. "You're a pair of monsters and your monstrosity fits. She does know too much," she added.

"Well," said Mitchy with resolution, "it's all my fault."

"Not ALL--unless," Mrs. Brook returned, "that's only a sweet way of saying that it's mostly mine."

"Oh yours too--immensely; in fact every one's. Even Edward's, I dare say; and certainly, unmistakably, Harold's. Ah and Van's own--rather!"

Mitchy continued; "for all he turns his back and will have nothing to say to it."

It was on the back Vanderbank turned that Mrs. Brook's eyes now rested.

"That's precisely why he shouldn't be afraid of her."

He faced straight about. "Oh I don't deny my part."

He shone at them brightly enough, and Mrs. Brook, thoughtful, wistful, candid, took in for a moment the radiance. "And yet to think that after all it has been mere TALK!"

Something in her tone again made her hearers laugh out; so it was still with the air of good humour that Vanderbank answered: "Mere, mere, mere.

But perhaps it's exactly the 'mere' that has made us range so wide."

Mrs. Brook's intelligence abounded. "You mean that we haven't had the excuse of pa.s.sion?"

Her companions once more gave way to mirth, but "There you are!"

Vanderbank said after an instant less sociably. With it too he held out his hand.

"You ARE afraid," she answered as she gave him her own; on which, as he made no rejoinder, she held him before her. "Do you mean you REALLY don't know if she gets it?"

"The money, if he DOESN'T go in?"--Mitchy broke almost with an air of responsibility into Vanderbank's silence. "Ah but, as we said, surely--!"

It was Mitchy's eyes that Vanderbank met. "Yes, I should suppose she gets it."