The Awkward Age Part 30

Vanderbank made no answer till they met their friend, when, by way of greeting, he simply echoed her words. "Between us all, you'll be glad to know, we've brought her down."

Mr. Longdon looked from one of them to the other. "Where have you been together?"

Nanda was the first to respond. "Only talking--on a bench."

"Well, _I_ want to talk on a bench!" Their friend showed a spirit.

"With me, of course?"--Vanderbank met it with encouragement.

The girl said nothing, but Mr. Longdon sought her eyes. "No--with Nanda.

You must mingle in the crowd."

"Ah," the their companion laughed, "you two are the crowd!"

"Well--have your tea first."

Vanderbank on this, giving it up with the air of amused accommodation that was never--certainly for these two--at fault in him, offered to Mr. Longdon before departing the handshake of greeting he had omitted; a demonstration really the warmer for the tone of the joke that went with it. "Intrigant!"

II

Nanda praised to the satellite so fantastically described the charming spot she had quitted, with the effect that they presently took fresh possession of it, finding the beauty of the view deepened as the afternoon grew old and the shadows long. They were of a comfortable agreement on these matters, by which moreover they were but little delayed, one of the pair at least being too conscious, for the hour, of still other phenomena than the natural and peaceful process that filled the air. "Well, you must tell me about these things," Mr. Longdon sociably said: he had joined his young friend with a budget of impressions rapidly gathered at the house; as to which his appeal to her for a light or two may be taken as the measure of the confidence now ruling their relations. He had come to feel at last, he mentioned, that he could allow for most differences; yet in such a situation as the present bewilderment could only come back. There were no differences in the world--so it had all ended for him--but those that marked at every turn the manners he had for three months been observing in good society.

The general wide deviation of this body occupied his mind to the exclusion of almost everything else, and he had finally been brought to believe that even in his slow-paced prime he must have hung behind his contemporaries. He had not supposed at the moment--in the fifties and the sixties--that he pa.s.sed for old-fas.h.i.+oned, but life couldn't have left him so far in the rear had the start between them originally been fair. This was the way he had more than once put the matter to the girl; which gives a sufficient hint, it is hoped, of the range of some of their talk. It had always wound up indeed, their talk, with some a.s.sumption of the growth of his actual understanding; but it was just these pauses in the fray that seemed to lead from time to time to a sharper clash. It was apt to be when he felt as if he had exhausted surprises that he really received his greatest shocks. There were no such queer-tasting draughts as some of those yielded by the bucket that had repeatedly, as he imagined, touched the bottom of the well. "Now this sudden invasion of somebody's--heaven knows whose--house, and our dropping down on it like a swarm of locusts: I dare say it isn't civil to criticise it when one's going too, so almost culpably, with the stream; but what are people made of that they consent, just for money, to the violation of their homes?"

Nanda wondered; she cultivated the sense of his making her intensely reflect, "But haven't people in England always let their places?"

"If we're a nation of shopkeepers, you mean, it can't date, on the scale on which we show it, only from last week? No doubt, no doubt, and the more one thinks of it the more one seems to see that society--for we're IN society, aren't we, and that's our horizon?--can never have been anything but increasingly vulgar. The point is that in the twilight of time--and I belong, you see, to the twilight--it had made out much less how vulgar it COULD be. It did its best very probably, but there were too many superst.i.tions it had to get rid of. It has been throwing them overboard one by one, so that now the s.h.i.+p sails uncommonly light.

That's the way"--and with his eyes on the golden distance he ingeniously followed it out--"I come to feel so the lurching and pitching. If I weren't a pretty fair sailor--well, as it is, my dear," he interrupted himself with a laugh, "I show you often enough what grabs I make for support." He gave a faint gasp, half amus.e.m.e.nt, half anguish, then abruptly relieved himself by a question. "To whom in point of fact does the place belong?"

"I'm awfully ashamed, but I'm afraid I don't know. That just came up here," the girl went on, "for Mr. Van."

Mr. Longdon seemed to think an instant. "Oh it came up, did it? And Mr.

Van couldn't tell?"

"He has quite forgotten--though he has been here before. Of course it may have been with other people," she added in extenuation. "I mean it mayn't have been theirs then any more than it's Mitchy's."

"I see. They too had just bundled in."

Nanda completed the simple history. "To-day it's Mitchy who bundles, and I believe that really he bundled only yesterday. He turned in his people and here we are."

"Here we are, here we are!" her friend more gravely echoed. "Well, it's splendid!"

As if at a note in his voice her eyes, while his own still strayed away, just fixed him. "Don't you think it's really rather exciting?

Everything's ready, the feast all spread, and with nothing to blunt our curiosity but the general knowledge that there will be people and things--with nothing but that we comfortably take our places." He answered nothing, though her picture apparently reached him. "There ARE people, there ARE things, and all in a plenty. Had every one, when you came away, turned up?" she asked as he was still silent.

"I dare say. There were some ladies and gentlemen on the terrace whom I didn't know. But I looked only for you and came this way on an indication of your mother's."

"And did she ask that if you should find me with Mr. Van you'd make him come to her?"

Mr. Longdon replied to this with some delay and without movement. "How could she have supposed he was here?"

"Since he had not yet been to the house? Oh it has always been a wonder to me, the things that mamma supposes! I see she asked you," Nanda insisted.

At this her old friend turned to her. "But it wasn't because of that I got rid of him."

She had a pause. "No--you don't mind everything mamma says."

"I don't mind 'everything' anybody says: not even, my dear, when the person's you."

Again she waited an instant. "Not even when it's Mr. Van?"

Mr. Longdon candidly considered. "Oh I take him up on all sorts of things."

"That shows then the importance they have for you. Is HE like his grandmother?" the girl pursued. Then as her companion looked vague: "Wasn't it his grandmother too you knew?"

He had an extraordinary smile. "His mother."

She exclaimed, colouring, on her mistake, and he added: "I'm not so bad as that. But you're none of you like them."

"Wasn't she pretty?" Nanda asked.

"Very handsome. But it makes no difference. She herself to-day wouldn't know him."

She gave a small gasp. "His own mother wouldn't--?"

His headshake just failed of sharpness. "No, nor he her. There's a link missing." Then as if after all she might take him too seriously, "Of course it's I," he more gently moralised, "who have lost the link in my sleep. I've slept half the century--I'm Rip Van Winkle." He went back after a moment to her question. "He's not at any rate like his mother."

She turned it over. "Perhaps you wouldn't think so much of her now."

"Perhaps not. At all events my s.n.a.t.c.hing you from Mr. Vanderbank was my own idea."

"I wasn't thinking," Nanda said, "of your s.n.a.t.c.hing me. I was thinking of your s.n.a.t.c.hing yourself."

"I might have sent YOU to the house? Well," Mr. Longdon replied, "I find I take more and more the economical view of my pleasures. I run them less and less together. I get all I can out of each."

"So now you're getting all you can out of ME?"

"All I can, my dear--all I can." He watched a little the flushed distance, then mildly broke out: "It IS, as you said just now, exciting!

But it makes me"--and he became abrupt again--"want you, as I've already told you, to come to MY place. Not, however, that we may be still more mad together."

The girl shared from the bench his contemplation. "Do you call THIS madness?"

Well, he rather stuck to it. "You spoke of it yourself as excitement.

You'll make of course one of your fine distinctions, but I take it in my rough way as a whirl. We're going round and round." In a minute he had folded his arms with the same closeness Vanderbank had used--in a minute he too was nervously shaking his foot. "Steady, steady; if we sit close we shall see it through. But come down to Suffolk for sanity."

"You do mean then that I may come alone?"

"I won't receive you, I a.s.sure you, on any other terms. I want to show you," he continued, "what life CAN give. Not of course," he subjoined, "of this sort of thing."