by Henry James
“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 at all events 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 enquired.
“The General Audit. I’m Deputy Chairman.”
“Dear!” Mr. Longdon looked at him as if he had 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?”
Vanderbank’s visitor appeared so to deprecate too faint a picture that he 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 friend, 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 brought out 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 amusement 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 for 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 feel, 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 nippers in place again, fixed on him a gravity that failed to prevent his discovering in the eyes behind them a shy reflexion 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, added.
“And what IS the work?”
The young man had a pause. “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 debated. “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 found amusement 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 and 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 and his suggestion with a suspended judgement. 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,” this informant 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 ever so much 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: “Pardon 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 his visitor 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, your uncorrupted ear. Do have another cigarette. Sunk as I must appear to you it sometimes strikes even 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 enquirer, with his continued restless observation, moving nearer, the young man had laid on his shoulder the lightest of friendly hands. “Don’t you perhaps ask too much? But no,” he added quickly and gaily, “of course you don’t: if I don’t look out I shall have exactly the effect on you 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’ve your rights, and that wouldn’t excuse me. The only thing is that I go to see her every Sunday.”
Mr. Longdon pondered and 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.”
He 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 agreed: “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 seemed all civilly 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”—and the young man caught himself up—”she lives not in what’s behind her, but in what’s before—she lives in her precious little Aggie.”
“Little Aggie?” Mr. Longdon risked 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’s 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.”
II
Mr. Longdon had gone to the place—little Nanda was in glazed white wood. He took her up and held her out; for a moment he said nothing, but presently, over his glasses, rested on his host a look intenser even than his scrutiny of the faded image. “Do they give their portraits now?”
“Little girls—innocent lambs? Surely—to old friends. Didn’t they in your time?”
Mr. Longdon studied the portrait again; after which, with an exhalation of something between superiority and regret, “They never did to me,” he returned.
“Well, you can have all you want now!” Vanderbank laughed.
His friend gave a slow droll headshake. “I don’t want them ‘now’!”
“You could do with them, my dear sir, still,” Vanderbank continued in the same manner, “every bit I do!”
“I’m sure you do nothing you oughtn’t.” Mr. Longdon kept the photograph and continued to look at it. “Her mother told me about her—promised me I should see her next time.”
“You must—she’s a great friend of mine.”
Mr. Longdon was really deep in
it. “Is she clever?”
Vanderbank turned it over. “Well, you’ll tell me if you think so.”
“Ah with a child of seventeen—!” Mr. Longdon murmured it as if in dread of having to pronounce. “This one too IS seventeen?”
Vanderbank again considered. “Eighteen.” He just hung fire once more, then brought out: “Well, call it nearly nineteen. I’ve kept her birthdays,” he laughed.
His companion caught at the idea. “Upon my honour I should like to! When is the next?”