# The Awkward Age (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899)/Book 3/Chapter 11

XI
Whatever she was, it would have seemed, Nanda was not easily abashed, for, though she drew up an instant on failing to find in the room the person whose invitation she had obeyed, she advanced the next moment as if either of the gentlemen before her would answer as well. "How do you do Mr. Mitchy? How do you do Mr. Longdon?" She made no difference for them, speaking to the elder, whom she had not yet seen, as if they were already acquainted. There was, moreover, in the air of that personage at this juncture little to invite such a confidence: he appeared to have been startled, in the oddest manner, into stillness, and, holding out no hand to meet her, only stared rather stiffly and without a smile. An observer disposed to interpret the scene might have fancied him a trifie put off by the girl's familiarity, or even, as by a singular effect of her self-possession, stricken into deeper diffidence. This self-possession, however, took, on her own part, no account of any awkwardness; it seemed the greater from the fact that she was almost unnaturally grave; and it overflowed in the immediate challenge: "Do you mean to say Van isn't here?—I've come without mother—she said I could, to see him," she went on, addressing herself more particularly to Mitchy. "But she didn't say I might do anything of that sort to see you."
If there was something serious in Nanda and something blank in their companion, there was, superficially at least, nothing in Mr. Mitchett but his usual flush of gaiety. "Did she really send you off, this way, alone?" Then while the girl's face met his own with the clear confession of it, "Isn't she too splendid for anything?" he asked with immense enjoyment. "What do you suppose is her idea?" Nanda's eyes had now turned to Mr. ​Longdon, whom she fixed with her mild straightness; which led to Mitchy's carrying on and repeating the appeal. "Isn't Mrs. Brook charming? What do you suppose is her idea?"
It was a bound into the mystery, a bound of which his fellow-visitor stood quite unconscious, only looking at Nanda still with the same coldness of wonder. All expression had, for the minute, been arrested in Mr. Longdon, but he at last began to show that it had merely been retarded. Yet it was almost with solemnity that he put forth his hand. "How do you do?—how do you do? I'm so glad—!"
Nanda shook hands with him as if she had done so already, though it might have been just her look of curiosity that detracted from her air of amusing herself. "Mother has wanted me awfully to see you. She told me to give you her love," she said. Then she added with odd irrelevance: "I didn't come in the carriage, nor in a cab or an omnibus."
"You came on a bicycle?" Mitchy inquired.
"No, I walked." She still spoke without a gleam. "Mother wants me to do everything."
"Even to walk!" Mitchy laughed. "Oh yes, we must, in these times, keep up our walking!" The ingenious observer just now suggested might even have detected in the still higher rise of this visitor's spirits a want of mere inward ease.
She had taken no notice of the effect upon him of her mention of her mother, and she took none, visibly, of Mr. Longdon's manner or of his words. What she did, while the two men, without offering her, either, a seat, practically lost themselves in their deepening vision, was to give her attention to all the place, looking at the books, pictures and other significant objects, and especially at the small table set out for tea, to which the servant who had admitted her now returned with a ​steaming kettle. "Isn't it charming here? Will there be anyone else? Where is Mr. Van? Shall I make tea?" There was just a faint quaver, showing a command of the situation more desired perhaps than achieved, in the very rapid sequence of these ejaculations. The servant meanwhile had placed the hot water above the little silver lamp and left the room.
"Do you suppose there's anything the matter? Oughtn't the man—or do you know our host's room?" Mr. Longdon, addressing Mitchy with solicitude, yet began to show, in a countenance less blank, a return of his sense of relations. It was as if something had happened to him and he were in haste to convert the signs of it into an appearance of care for the proprieties.
"Oh," said Mitchy, "Van's only making himself beautiful"—which account of their absent entertainer drew some point from his appearance at the moment in the doorway furthest removed from the place where the three were gathered.
Vanderbank came in with friendly haste and with something of the look indeed—refreshed, almost rosy, brightly brushed and quickly buttoned—of emerging, out of breath, from pleasant ablutions and renewals. "What a brute to have kept you waiting! I come back from work quite begrimed. How'd'ye do, how'd'ye do, how'd'ye do? What's the matter with you, huddled there as if you were on a street-crossing? I want you to think this a refuge—but not of that kind!" he laughed. "Sit down, for Heaven's sake; lie down—be happy! Of course you've made acquaintance all—except that Mitchy's so modest! Tea, tea!"—and he bustled to the table, where, the next minute, he appeared rather helpless. "Nanda, you blessed child, do you mind making it? How jolly of you!—are you all right?" He seemed, with this, for the first time, to be aware of somebody's absence. "Your mother isn't coming? She let you ​come alone? How jolly of her!" Pulling off her gloves, Nanda had come immediately to his assistance; on which, quitting the table and laying hands on Mr. Longdon's shoulders to push him toward a sofa, he continued to talk, to sound a note of which the humor was the exaggeration of his flurry. "How jolly of you to be willing to come—most awfully kind! I hope she isn't ill? Do, Mitchy, lie down. Down, Mitchy, down!—that's the only way to keep you." He had waited for no account of Mrs. Brookenham's health, and it might have been apparent—still to our sharp spectator—that he found nothing wonderful in her daughter's unsupported arrival.
"I can make tea beautifully," she said from behind her table. "Mother showed me how this morning."
"This morning?"—and Mitchy, who, before the fire and still erect, had declined to be laid low, greeted the simple remark with uproarious mirth. "Dear young lady, you're the most delicious family!"
"She showed me at breakfast about the little things to do. She thought I might have to make it here and told me to offer," the girl went on. "I haven't yet done it this way at home—I usually have my tea upstairs. They bring it up in a cup, all made and very weak, with a piece of bread-and-butter in the saucer. That's because I'm so young. Tishy never lets me touch hers, either; so we had to make up for lost time. That's what mother said"—she followed up her story, and her young distinctness had clearly something to do with a certain pale concentration in Mr. Longdon's face. "Mother isn't ill, but she told me already yesterday she wouldn't come. She said it's really all for me. I'm sure I hope it is!"—with which there flickered in her eyes, dimly but perhaps all the more prettily, the first intimation they had given of the light of laughter. "She told me you would understand, Mr. Van—from something you've ​said to her. It's for my seeing Mr. Longdon without—she thinks—her spoiling it."
"Oh, my dear child, 'spoiling it'!" Vanderbank protested as he took a cup of tea from her to carry to their friend. "When did your mother ever spoil anything? I told her Mr. Longdon wanted to see you, but I didn't say anything of his not yearning also for the rest of the family."
A sound of protest rather formless escaped from the gentleman named, but Nanda continued to carry out her duty. "She told me to ask why he hadn't been again to see her. Mr. Mitchy, sugar?—isn't that the way to say it? Three lumps? You're like me, only that I more often take five." Mitchy had dashed forward for his tea; she gave it to him; then she added, with her eyes on Mr. Longdon's, which she had had no difficulty in catching: "She told me to ask you all sorts of things."
The old man had got up to take his cup from Vanderbank, whose hand, however, dealt with him on the question of sitting down again. Mr. Longdon, resisting, kept erect with a low gasp that his host only was near enough to catch. This suddenly appeared to confirm an impression gathered by Vanderbank in their contact, a strange sense that his visitor was so agitated as to be trembling in every limb. It brought to his lips a kind of ejaculation—"I say!" But even as he spoke, Mr. Longdon's face, still white, but with a smile that was not all pain, seemed to supplicate him not to notice; and he was not a man to require more than this to achieve a divination as deep as it was rapid. "Why, we've all been scattered for Easter, haven't we?" he asked of Nanda. "Mr. Longdon has been at home, your mother and father have been paying visits, I myself have been out of London, Mitchy has been to Paris, and you—oh yes, I know where you've been."
​"Ah, we all know that—there has been such a row made about it!" Mitchy said.
"Yes, I've heard of the feeling there is," Nanda replied. "It's supposed to be awful, my knowing Tishy—quite too awful."
Mr. Longdon, with Vanderbank's covert aid, had begun to appear to have pulled himself together, dropping back upon his sofa and giving some attention to his tea. It might have been with the notion of showing himself at ease that he turned, on this, a benevolent smile to the girl. "But what, my dear, is the objection—?"
She looked gravely from him to Vanderbank and to Mitchy and then back again from one of these to the other. "Do you think I ought to say?"
They both laughed, and they both just appeared uncertain, but Vanderbank spoke first. "I don't imagine, Nanda, that you really know."
"No—as a family, you're perfection!" Mitchy broke out. Before the fire again, with his cup, he addressed his hilarity to Mr. Longdon. "I told you a tremendous lot, didn't I? But I didn't tell you about that."
The old man maintained, yet with a certain vagueness, the attitude of amiable inquiry. "About the—a—family?"
"Well," Mitchy smiled, "about its ramifications. This young lady has a tremendous friendship—and, in short, it's all very complicated."
"My dear Nanda," said Vanderbank, "it's all very simple. Don't believe a word of anything of the sort."
He had spoken as with the intention of a large, light optimism; but there was clearly something in the girl that would always make for lucidity. "Do you mean about Carrie Donner? I don't believe it, and at any rate I don't think it's any one's business. I shouldn't have a very high opinion of a person who would give up a friend." She stopped short, with the sense ​apparently that she was saying more than she meant, though, strangely, as if it had been an effect of her type and of her voice, there was neither pertness nor passion in the profession she had just made. Curiously wanting as she seemed both in timidity and in levity, she was to a certainty not self-conscious—she was extraordinarily simple. Mr. Longdon looked at her now with an evident surrender to his extreme interest, and it might well have perplexed him to see her at once so downright and yet of so fresh and sweet a tenderness of youth.
"That's right, that's right, my dear young lady: never, never give up a friend for anything any one says!" It was Mitchy who rang out with this lively wisdom, the action of which on Mr. Longdon—unless indeed it was the action of something else—was to make that personage, in a manner that held the others watching him in slight suspense, suddenly spring to his feet again, put down his teacup carefully on a table near him and then, without a word, as if no one had been present, quietly wander away and disappear through the door left open on Vanderbank's entrance. It opened into a second, a smaller sitting-room, into which the eyes of his companions followed him.
"What's the matter?" Nanda asked. "Has he been taken ill?"
"He is 'rum,' my dear Van," Mitchy said; "but you're right—of a charm, a distinction! In short just the sort of thing we want."
"The sort of thing we 'want'—I dare say!" Vanderbank laughed. "But it's not the sort of thing that's to be had for the asking—it's a sort we shall be mighty lucky if we can get!"
Mitchy turned with amusement to Nanda. "Van has invented him, and, with the natural greed of the inventor, won't let us have him cheap. Well," he went on, "I'll pay my share of the expense."
​"The difficulty is that he's so much too good for us," Vanderbank explained.
"Ungrateful wretch," his friend cried, "that's just what I've been telling him that you are! Let the return you make not be to deprive me—!"
"Mr. Van's not at all too good for me, if you mean that," Nanda broke in. She had finished her tea-making and leaned back in her chair with her hands folded on the edge of the tray.
Vanderbank only smiled at her in silence, but Mitchy took it up. "There's nobody too good for you, of course; only you're not quite, don't you know? in our set. You're in Mrs. Grendon's. I know what you're going to say—that she hasn't got any set, that she's just a loose little white flower dropped on the indifferent bosom of the world. But you're the small sprig of tender green that, added to her, makes her immediately 'compose'."
Nanda looked at him with her cold kindness. "What nonsense you do talk!"
"Your tone's sweet to me," he returned, "as showing that you don't think me, either, too good for you. No one, remember, will take that for your excuse when the world some day sees me annihilated by your having put an end to our so harmless relations."
The girl appeared to lose herself a moment in the abysmal humanity over which his fairly fascinating ugliness played like the whirl of an eddy. "Martyr!" she gently exclaimed. But there was no smile with it. She turned to Vanderbank, who, during the previous minute, had moved toward the neighboring room, then, hesitating, taking counsel of discretion, had come back a little nervously. "What is the matter?"
"What do you want to get out of him, you wretch?" Mitchy went on as their host for an instant produced no answer.
Vanderbank, whose handsome face had a fine thought ​in it, looked a trifle absently from one of them to the other; but it was to Nanda he spoke. "Do you like him, Nanda?"
She showed surprise at the question. "How can I know so soon?"
"He knows already."
Mitchy, with his eyes on her, became radiant to interpret. "He knows that he's pierced to the heart!"
"The matter with him, as you call it," Vanderbank brought out, "is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen." He looked at her as with a hope that she would understand it. "Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!"
"Precisely," Mitchy continued, "the victim done for by one glance of the goddess!"
Nanda, motionless in her chair, fixed her other friend with clear curiosity. "'Beautiful'? Why beautiful?"
Vanderbank, about to speak, checked himself. "I won't spoil it. Have it from him!"—and, returning to the old man, he this time went out.
Mitchy and Nanda looked at each other. "But isn't it rather awful?" Mitchy demanded.
She got up without answering; she slowly came away from the table. "I think I do know if I like him."
"Well you may," Mitchy exclaimed, "after his putting before you probably, on the whole, the greatest of your triumphs."
"And I also know, I think, Mr. Mitchy, that I like you." She spoke without attention to this hyperbole.
"In spite of my ineffectual attempts to be brilliant? That's a joy," he went on, "if it's not drawn out by the mere clumsiness of my flattery." She had turned away from him, kindly enough, as if time for his talk in the air were always to be allowed him; she took in vaguely Vanderbank's books and prints. "Why didn't your mother come?" Mitchy then inquired.
At this she again looked at him. "Do you mention ​her as a way of alluding to something you guess she must have told me?"
"That I've always supposed I make your flesh creep? Yes," Mitchy admitted; "I see that she must have said to you: 'Be nice to him, to show him it isn't quite so bad as that!' So you are nice—so you always will be nice. But I adore you, all the same, without illusions."
She had opened, at one of the tables, unperceivingly, a big volume, of which she turned the leaves. "Don't 'adore' a girl, Mr. Mitchy—just help her. That's more to the purpose."
"Help you?" he cried. "You bring tears to my eyes!"
"Can't a girl have friends?" she went on. "I never heard of anything so idiotic." Giving him, however, no chance to take her up on this, she made a quick transition. "Mother didn't come because she wants me now, as she says, more to share her own life."
Mitchy looked at it. "But is this the way for her to share yours?"
"Ah, that's another matter—about which you must talk to her. She wants me not, any more, to see only with her eyes. She's throwing me into the world."
Mitchy had listened with the liveliest interest, but he presently broke into a laugh. "What a good thing, then, that I'm there to catch you!"
Without—it might have been seen—having gather the smallest impression of what they enclosed, she carefully drew together again the covers of her folio. There was deliberation in her movements. "I shall always be glad when you're there. But where do you suppose they've gone?" Her eyes were on what was visible of the other room, from which there arrived no sound of voices.
"They are there," said Mitchy, "but simply looking unutterable things about you. The impression's too ​deep. Let them look, and tell me meanwhile if Mrs. Donner gave you my message."
"Oh yes, she told me some humbug."
"The humbug then was in the tone my perfectly sincere speech took from herself. She gives things, I recognize, rather that sound. It's her weakness," he continued, "and perhaps even, one may say, her danger. All the more reason you should help her, as I believe you're supposed to be doing, aren't you? I hope you feel that you are," he earnestly added.
He had spoken this time gravely enough, and with magnificent gravity Nanda replied. "I have helped her. Tishy is sure I have. That's what Tishy wants me for. She says that to be with some nice girl is really the best thing for her."
Poor Mitchy's face, hereupon, would have been interesting, would have been distinctly touching, to other eyes; but Nanda's were not heedful of it. "Oh," he returned after an instant and without profane mirth, "that seems to me the best thing for any one."
Vanderbank, however, might have caught his expression, for Vanderbank now reappeared, smiling on the pair as if struck by their intimacy. "How you are keeping it up!" Then to Nanda, persuasively: "Do you mind going to him in there? I want him so really to see you. It's quite, you know, what he came for."
Nanda seemed to wonder. "What will he do to me? Anything dreadful?"
"He'll tell you what I meant just now."
"Oh," said Nanda, "if he's a person who can tell me sometimes what you mean—!" With which she went quickly off.
"And can't I hear?" Mitchy asked of his host while they looked after her.
"Yes, but only from me." Vanderbank had pushed ​him to a seat again, and was casting about for cigarettes. "Be quiet and smoke, and I'll tell you."
Mitchy, on the sofa, received, with meditation, a light. "Will she understand? She has everything in the world but one," he added. "But that's half."
Vanderbank, before him, lighted for himself. "What is it?"
"A sense of humor."
"Oh yes, she's serious."
Mitchy smoked a little. "She's tragic."
His friend, at the fire, watched a moment the empty portion of the other room, then walked across to give the door a light push that all but closed it. "It's rather odd," he remarked as he came back—"that's quite what I just said to him. But he won't treat her to comedy."