by Henry James
“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. “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 embarrassment 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 Duchess 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 Duchess 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 Duchess’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 stitching. 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 assented only with a nod, but the attitude 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, embarrassed to choose. What was in her face indeed during this short passage 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 classic identity 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 smash!” 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 passion?”
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.”
“Perhaps then, as a compensation, she’ll even get MORE—!”
“If I don’t go in? Oh!” said Vanderbank. And he changed colour.
He was by this time off, but Mrs. Brook kept Mitchy a moment. “Now—by that suggestion—he has something to show. He won’t go in.”
III
Her visitors had been gone half an hour, but she was still in the drawing-room when Nanda came back. The girl found her, on the sofa, in a posture that might have represented restful oblivion, but that, after a glance, our young lady appeared to interpret as mere intensity of thought. It was a condition from which at all events Mrs. Brook was quickly roused by her daughter’s presence: she opened her eyes and put down her feet, so that the two were confronted as closely as persons may be when it is only one of them who looks at the other. Nanda, gazing vaguely about and not seeking a seat, slowly drew off her gloves while her mother’s sad eyes considered her from top to toe. “Tea’s gone,” Mrs. Brook then said as if there were something in the loss peculiarly irretrievable. “But I suppose,” she added, “he gave you all you want.”
“Oh dear yes, thank you—I’ve had lots.”
Nanda hovered there slim and charming, feathered and ribboned, dressed in thin fresh fabrics and faint colours, with something in the effect of it all to which the sweeter deeper melancholy in her mother’s eyes seemed happily to testify. “Just turn round, dear.” The girl immediately obeyed, and Mrs. Brook once more took everything in. “The back’s best— only she didn’t do what she said she would. How they do lie!” she gently quavered.
“Yes, but we lie so to THEM.” Nanda had swung round again, producing evidently on her mother’s part, by the admirable “hang” of her light skirts, a still deeper peace. “Do you mean the middle fold?—I knew she wouldn’t. I don’t want my back to be best—I don’t walk backward.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Brook resignedly mused; “you dress for yourself.”
“Oh how can you say that,” the girl asked, “when I never stick in a pin but what I think of YOU!”
“Well,” Mrs. Brook moralised, “one must always, I consider, think, as a sort of point de repere, of some one good person. Only it’s best if it’s a person one’s afraid of. You do very well, but I’m not enough. What one really requires is a kind of salutary terror. I never stick in a pin without thinking of your Cousin Jane. What is it that some one quotes somewhere about some one’s having said that ‘Our antagonist is our helper—he prevents our being superficial’? The extent to which with my poor clothes the Duchess prevents ME—!” It was a measure Mrs. Brook could give only by the general soft wail of her submission to fate.
“Yes, the Duchess isn’t a woman, is she? She’s a standard.”
The speech had for Nanda’s companion, however, no effect of pleasantry or irony, and it was a mark of the special intercourse of these good friends that though they showed each other, in manner and tone, such sustained consideration as might almost have given it the stamp of diplomacy, there was yet in it also something of that economy of expression which is the result of a common experience. The recurrence of opportunity to observe them together would have taught a spectator that —on Mrs. Brook’s side doubtless more particularly—their relation was governed by two or three remarkably established and, as might have been said, refined laws, the spirit of which was to guard against the vulgarity so often coming to the surface between parent and child. That they WERE as good friends as if Nanda had not been her daughter was a truth that no passage between them might fail in one way or another to illustrate. Nanda had gathered up, for that matter, early in life, a flower of maternal wisdom: “People talk about conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you’re nice to the second housemaid.” Mrs. Brook was as “nice” to Nanda as she was to Sarah Curd— which involved, as may easily be imagined, the happiest conditions for Sarah. “Well,” she resumed, reverting to the Duchess on a final appraisement of the girl’s air, “I really think I do well by you and that Jane wouldn’t have anything to say to-day. You look awfully like mamma,” she then threw off as if for the first time of mentioning it.
“Oh Cousin Jane doesn’t care for that,” Nanda returned. “What I don’t look like is Aggie, for all I try.”
“Ah you shouldn’t try—you can do nothing with it. One must be what one is.”
Mrs. Brook was almost sententious, but Nanda, with civility, let it pass. “No one in London touches her. She’s quite by herself. When one sees her one feels her to be the real thing.”
Mrs. Brook, without harshness, wondered. “What do you mean by the real thing?”
Even Nanda, however, had to think a moment.
“Well, the real young one. That’s what Lord Petherton calls her,” she mildly joked—“‘the young ‘un’”
Her mother’s echo was not for the joke, but for something else. “I know what you mean. What’s the use of being good?”
“Oh I didn’t mean that,” said Nanda. “Besides, isn’t Aggie of a goodness—?”
“I wasn’t talking of her. I was asking myself what’s the use of MY being.”
“Well, you can’t help it any more than the Duchess can help—!”
“Ah but she could if she would!” Mrs. Brook broke in with a sharper ring than she had yet given. “We can’t help being good perhaps, if that burden’s laid on us—but there are lengths in other directions we’re not absolutely obliged to go. And what I think of when I stick in the pins,” she went on, “is that Jane seems to me really never to have had to pay.” She appeared for a minute to brood on this till she could no longer bear it; after which she jerked out: “Why she has never had to pay for ANYthing!”
Nanda had by this time seated herself, taking her place, under the interest of their talk, on her mother’s sofa, where, except for the removal of her long soft gloves, which one of her hands again and again drew caressingly through the other, she remained very much as if she were some friendly yet circumspect young visitor to whom Mrs. Brook had on some occasion dropped “DO come.” But there was something perhaps more expressly conciliatory in the way she had kept everything on: as if, in particular serenity a
nd to confirm kindly Mrs. Brook’s sense of what had been done for her, she had neither taken off her great feathered hat nor laid down her parasol of pale green silk, the “match” of hat and ribbons and which had an expensive precious knob. Our spectator would possibly have found too much earnestness in her face to be sure if there was also candour. “And do you mean that YOU have had to pay—?”
“Oh yes—all the while.” With this Mrs. Brook was a little short, and also as she added as if to banish a slight awkwardness: “But don’t let it discourage you.”