The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  Mrs. Brook’s sympathy passed, however, with no great ease from Aggie’s pearls to her other charms; fixing the former indeed so markedly that Harold had a quick word about it for Lady Fanny. “When poor mummy thinks, you know, that Nanda might have had them—!”

  Lady Fanny’s attention, for that matter, had resisted them as little. “Well, I dare say that if I had wanted I might!”

  “Lord—COULD you have stood him?” the young man returned. “But I believe women can stand anything!” he profoundly concluded. His mother meanwhile, recovering herself, had begun to ejaculate on the prints in Aggie’s arms, and he was then diverted from the sense of what he “personally,” as he would have said, couldn’t have stood, by a glance at Lord Petherton’s trophy, for which he made a prompt grab. “The bone of contention?” Lord Petherton had let it go and Harold remained arrested by the cover. “Why blest if it hasn’t Van’s name!”

  “Van’s?”—his mother was near enough to effect her own snatch, after which she swiftly faced the proprietor of the volume. “Dear man, it’s the last thing you lent me! But I don’t think,” she added, turning to Tishy, “that I ever passed such a production on to YOU.”

  “It was just seeing Mr. Van’s hand,” Aggie conscientiously explained, “that made me think one was free—!”

  “But it isn’t Mr. Van’s hand!”—Mrs. Brook quite smiled at the error. She thrust the book straight at Mr. Longdon. “IS that Mr. Van’s hand?”

  Holding the disputed object, which he had put on his nippers to glance at, he presently, without speaking, looked over these aids straight at Nanda, who looked as straight back at him. “It was I who wrote Mr. Van’s name.” The girl’s eyes were on Mr. Longdon, but her words as for the company. “I brought the book here from Buckingham Crescent and left it by accident in the other room.”

  “By accident, my dear,” her mother replied, “I do quite hope. But what on earth did you bring it for? It’s too hideous.”

  Nanda seemed to wonder. “Is it?” she murmured.

  “Then you haven’t read it?”

  She just hesitated. “One hardly knows now, I think, what is and what isn’t.”

  “She brought it only for ME to read,” Tishy gravely interposed.

  Mrs. Brook looked strange. “Nanda RECOMMENDED it?”

  “Oh no—the contrary.” Tishy, as if scared by so much publicity, floundered a little. “She only told me—”

  “The awful subject?” Mrs. Brook wailed.

  There was so deepening an echo of the drollery of this last passage that it was a minute before Vanderbank could be heard saying: “The responsibility’s wholly mine for setting the beastly thing in motion. Still,” he added good-humouredly and as to minimise if not the cause at least the consequence, “I think I agree with Nanda that it’s no worse than anything else.”

  Mrs. Brook had recovered the volume from Mr. Longdon’s relaxed hand and now, without another glance at it, held it behind her with an unusual air of firmness. “Oh how can you say that, my dear man, of anything so revolting?”

  The discussion kept them for the instant well face to face. “Then did YOU read it?”

  She debated, jerking the book into the nearest empty chair, where Mr. Cashmore quickly pounced on it. “Wasn’t it for that you brought it me?” she demanded. Yet before he could answer she again challenged her child. “Have you read this work, Nanda?”

  “Yes mamma.”

  “Oh I say!” cried Mr. Cashmore, hilarious and turning the leaves.

  Mr. Longdon had by this time ceremoniously approached Tishy. “Good-night.”

  BOOK NINTH

  VANDERBANK

  I

  “I think you had better wait,” Mrs. Brook said, “till I see if he has gone;” and on the arrival the next moment of the servants with the tea she was able to put her question. “Is Mr. Cashmore still with Miss Brookenham?”

  “No, ma’am,” the footman replied. “I let Mr. Cashmore out five minutes ago.”

  Vanderbank showed for the next short time by his behaviour what he felt at not yet being free to act on this; moving pointlessly about the room while the servants arranged the tea-table and taking no trouble to make, for appearance, any other talk. Mrs. Brook, on her side, took so little that the silence—which their temporary companions had all the effect of keeping up by conscious dawdling—became precisely one of those precious lights for the circle belowstairs which people fondly fancy they have not kindled when they have not spoken. But Vanderbank spoke again as soon as the door was closed. “Does he run in and out that way without even speaking to YOU?”

  Mrs. Brook turned away from the fire that, late in May, was the only charm of the crude cold afternoon. “One would like to draw the curtains, wouldn’t one? and gossip in the glow of the hearth.”

  “Oh ‘gossip’!” Vanderbank wearily said as he came to her pretty table.

  In the act of serving him she checked herself. “You wouldn’t rather have it with HER?”

  He balanced a moment. “Does she have a tea of her own?”

  “Do you mean to say you don’t know?”—Mrs. Brook asked it with surprise. “Such ignorance of what I do for her does tell, I think, the tale of how you’ve lately treated us.”

  “In not coming for so long?”

  “For more weeks, for more months than I can count. Scarcely since—when was it?—the end of January, that night of Tishy’s dinner.”

  “Yes, that awful night.”

  “Awful, you call it?”

  “Awful.”

  “Well, the time without you,” Mrs. Brook returned, “has been so bad that I’m afraid I’ve lost the impression of anything before.” Then she offered the tea to his choice. “WILL you have it upstairs?”

  He received the cup. “Yes, and here too.” After which he said nothing again till, first pouring in milk to cool it, he had drunk his tea down. “That’s not literally true, you know. I HAVE been in.”

  “Yes, but always with other people—you managed it somehow; the wrong ones. It hasn’t counted.”

  “Ah in one way and another I think everything counts. And you forget I’ve dined.”

  “Oh—for once!”

  “The once you asked me. So don’t spoil the beauty of your own behaviour by mistimed reflexions. You’ve been, as usual, superior.”

  “Ah but there has been no beauty in it. There has been nothing,” Mrs. Brook went on, “but bare bleak recognition, the curse of my hideous intelligence. We’ve fallen to pieces, and at least I’m not such a fool as not to have felt it in time. From the moment one did feel it why should one insist on vain forms? If YOU felt it, and were so ready to drop them, my part was what it has always been—to accept the inevitable. We shall never grow together again. The smash was too great.”

  Vanderbank for a little said nothing; then at last: “You ought to know how great!”

  Whatever had happened her lovely look here survived it. “I?”

  “The smash,” he replied, “was indeed as complete, I think, as your intention. Each of the ‘pieces’ testifies to your success. Five minutes did it.”

  She appeared to wonder where he was going. “But surely not MY minutes. Where have you discovered that I made Mitchy’s marriage?”

  “Mitchy’s marriage has nothing to do with it.”

  “I see.” She had the old interest at least still at their service. “You think we might have survived that.” A new thought of it seemed to glimmer. “I’m bound to say Mitchy’s marriage promises elements.”

  “You did it that night at Mrs. Grendon’s.” He spoke as if he had not heard her. “It was a wonderful performance. You pulled us down—just closing with each of the great columns in its turn—as Samson pulled down the temple. I was at the time more or less bruised and buried and didn’t in the agitation and confusion fully understand what had happened. But I understand now.”

  “Are you very sure?” Mrs. Brook earnestly asked.

  “Well, I’m stupid compared with yo
u, but you see I’ve taken my time. I’ve puzzled it out. I’ve lain awake on it: all the more that I’ve had to do it all myself—with the Mitchys in Italy and Greece. I’ve missed his aid.”

  “You’ll have it now,” Mrs. Brook kindly said. “They’re coming back.”

  “And when do they arrive?”

  “Any day, I believe.”

  “Has he written you?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Brook—”there it is. That’s just the way we’ve fallen to pieces. But you’ll of course have heard something.”

  “Never a word.”

  “Ah then it’s complete.”

  Vanderbank thought a moment. “Not quite, is it?—I mean it won’t be altogether unless he hasn’t written to Nanda.”

  “Then HAS he?”—she was keen again.

  “Oh I’m assuming. Don’t YOU know?”

  “How should I?”

  This too he turned over. “Just as a consequence of your having, at Tishy’s, so abruptly and wonderfully tackled the question that a few days later, as I afterwards gathered, was to be crowned with a measure of success not yet exhausted. Why, in other words—if it was to know so little about her and to get no nearer to her—did you bring about Nanda’s return?”

  There was a clear reason, her face said, if she could only remember it. “Why did I—?” Then as catching a light: “Fancy your asking me—at this time of day!”

  “Ah you HAVE noticed that I haven’t asked before? However,” Van promptly added, “I know well enough what you notice. Nanda hasn’t mentioned to you whether or no she has heard?”

  “Absolutely not. But you don’t suppose, I take it, that it was to pry into her affairs I called her in.”

  Vanderbank, on this, lighted for the first time with a laugh. “‘Called her in’? How I like your expressions!”

  “I do then, in spite of all,” she eagerly asked, “remind you a little of the bon temps? Ah,” she sighed, “I don’t say anything good now. But of course I see Jane—though not so often either. It’s from Jane I’ve heard of what she calls her ‘young things.’ It seems so odd to think of Mitchy as a young thing. He’s as old as all time, and his wife, who the other day was about six, is now practically about forty. And I also saw Petherton,” Mrs. Brook added, “on his return.”

  “His return from where?”

  “Why he was with them at Corfu, Malta, Cyprus—I don’t know where; yachting, spending Mitchy’s money, ‘larking,’ he called it—I don’t know what. He was with them for weeks.”

  “Till Jane, you mean, called him in?”

  “I think it must have been that.”

  “Well, that’s better,” said Van, “than if Mitchy had had to call him out.”

  “Oh Mitchy—!” Mrs. Brook comprehensively sounded.

  Her visitor quite assented. “Isn’t he amazing?”

  “Unique.”

  He had a short pause. “But what’s she up to?”

  It was apparently for Mrs. Brook a question of such variety of application that she brought out experimentally: “Jane?”

  “Dear no. I think we’ve fathomed ‘Jane,’ haven’t we?”

  “Well,” mused Mrs. Brook, “I’m by no means sure I have. Just of late I’ve had a new sense!”

  “Yes, of what now?” Van amusedly put it as she held the note.

  “Oh of depths below depths. But poor Jane—of course after all she’s human. She’s beside herself with one thing and another, but she can’t in any consistency show it. She took her stand so on having with Petherton’s aid formed Aggie for a femme charmante—”

  “That it’s too late to cry out that Petherton’s aid can now be dispensed with? Do you mean then that he IS such a brute that after all Mitchy has done for him—?” Vanderbank, at the rising image, pulled up in easy disgust.

  “I think him quite capable of considering with a magnificent insolence of selfishness that what Mitchy has MOST done will have been to make Aggie accessible in a way that—for decency and delicacy of course, things on which Petherton highly prides himself—she could naturally not be as a girl. Her marriage has simplified it.”

  Vanderbank took it all in. “‘Accessible’ is good!”

  “Then—which was what I intended just now—Aggie has already become so—?”

  Mrs. Brook, however, could as yet in fairness only wonder. “That’s just what I’m dying to see.”

  Her companion smiled at it. “‘Even in our ashes live their wonted fires’! But what do you make, in such a box, of poor Mitchy himself? His marriage can scarcely to such an extent have simplified HIM.”

  It was something, none the less, that Mrs. Brook had to weigh. “I don’t know. I give it up. The thing was of a strangeness!”

  Her friend also paused, and it was as if for a little, on either side of a gate on which they might have had their elbows, they remained looking at each other over it and over what was unsaid between them. “It WAS ‘rum’!” he at last merely dropped.

  It was scarce for Mrs. Brook, all the same—she seemed to feel after a moment—to surround the matter with an excess of silence.

  “He did what a man does—especially in that business—when he doesn’t do what he wants.”

  “Do you mean what somebody else wanted?”

  “Well, what he himself DIDN’T. And if he’s unhappy,” she went on, “he’ll know whom to pitch into.”

  “Ah,” said Vanderbank, “even if he is he won’t be the man to what you might call ‘vent’ it on her. He’ll seek compensations elsewhere and won’t mind any ridicule—!”

  “Whom are you speaking of as ‘her’?” Mrs. Brook asked as on feeling that something in her face had made him stop. “I wasn’t referring,” she explained, “to his wife.”

  “Oh!” said Vanderbank.

  “Aggie doesn’t matter,” she went on.

  “Oh!” he repeated. “You meant the Duchess?” he then threw off.

  “Don’t be silly!” she rejoined. “He MAY not become unhappy—God grant NOT!” she developed. “But if he does he’ll take it out of Nanda.”

  Van appeared to challenge this. “‘Take it out’ of her?”

  “Well, want to know, as some American asked me the other day of somebody, what she’s ‘going to do’ about it.”

  Vanderbank, who had remained on his feet, stood still at this for a longer time than at anything yet. “But what CAN she ‘do’—?”

  “That’s again just what I’m curious to see.” Mrs. Brook then spoke with a glance at the clock. “But if you don’t go up to her—!”

  “My notion of seeing her alone may be defeated by her coming down on learning that I’m here?” He had taken out his watch. “I’ll go in a moment. But, as a light on that danger, would YOU, in the circumstances, come down?”

  Mrs. Brook, however, could for light only look darkness. “Oh you don’t love ME!”

  Vanderbank, still with his watch, stared then as an alternative at the fire. “You haven’t yet told me you know, if Mr. Cashmore now comes EVERY day.”

  “My dear man, how can I say? You’ve just your occasion to find out.”

  “From HER, you mean?”

  Mrs. Brook hesitated. “Unless you prefer the footman. Must I again remind you that, with her own sitting-room and one of the men, in addition to her maid, wholly at her orders, her independence is ideal?”

  Vanderbank, who appeared to have been timing himself, put up his watch. “I’m bound to say then that with separations so established I understand less than ever your unforgettable explosion.”

  “Ah you come back to that?” she wearily asked. “And you find it, with all you’ve to think about, unforgettable?”

  “Oh but there was a wild light in your eye—!”