by Henry James
“Oh I know she is,” Nanda said. “It’s YOU—”
“Who may be only the flashing meteor?” He sat and smiled at her. “I promise you then that your words have stayed me in my course. You’ve made me stand as still as Joshua made the sun.” With which he got straight up. “‘Young,’ you say she is?”—for as if to make up for it he all the more sociably continued. “It’s not like anything else. She’s youth. She’s MY youth—she WAS mine. And if you ever have a chance,” he wound up, “do put in for me that if she wants REALLY to know she’s booked for my old age. She’s clever enough, you know”—and Vanderbank, laughing, went over for his hat—”to understand what you tell her.”
Nanda took this in with due attention; she was also now on her feet. “And then she’s so lovely.”
“Awfully pretty!”
“I don’t say it, as they say, you know,” the girl continued, “BECAUSE she’s mother, but I often think when we’re out that wherever she is—!”
“There’s no one that all round really touches her?” Vanderbank took it up with zeal. “Oh so every one thinks, and in fact one’s appreciation of the charming things in that way so intensely her own can scarcely breathe on them all lightly enough. And then, hang it, she has perceptions—which are not things that run about the streets. She has surprises.” He almost broke down for vividness. “She has little ways.”
“Well, I’m glad you do like her,” Nanda gravely replied.
At this again he fairly faced her, his momentary silence making it still more direct. “I like, you know, about as well as I ever liked anything, this wonderful idea of yours of putting in a plea for her solitude and her youth. Don’t think I do it injustice if I say—which is saying much —that it’s quite as charming as it’s amusing. And now good-bye.”
He had put out his hand, but Nanda hesitated. “You won’t wait for tea?”
“My dear child, I can’t.” He seemed to feel, however, that something more must be said. “We shall meet again. But it’s getting on, isn’t it, toward the general scatter?”
“Yes, and I hope that this year,” she answered, “you’ll have a good holiday.”
“Oh we shall meet before that. I shall do what I can, but upon my word I feel, you know,” he laughed, “that such a tuning-up as YOU’VE given me will last me a long time. It’s like the high Alps.” Then with his hand out again he added: “Have you any plans yourself?”
So many, it might have seemed, that she had no time to take for thinking of them. “I dare say I shall be away a good deal.”
He candidly wondered. “With Mr. Longdon?”
“Yes—with him most.”
He had another pause. “Really for a long time?”
“A long long one, I hope.”
“Your mother’s willing again?”
“Oh perfectly. And you see that’s why.”
“Why?” She had said nothing more, and he failed to understand.
“Why you mustn’t too much leave her alone. DON’T!” Nanda brought out.
“I won’t. But,” he presently added, “there are one or two things.”
“Well, what are they?”
He produced in some seriousness the first. “Won’t she after all see the Mitchys?”
“Not so much either. That of course is now very different.”
Vanderbank demurred. “But not for YOU, I gather—is it? Don’t you expect to see them?”
“Oh yes—I hope they’ll come down.”
He moved away a little—not straight to the door. “To Beccles? Funny place for them, a little though, isn’t it?”
He had put the question as if for amusement, but Nanda took it literally. “Ah not when they’re invited so very very charmingly. Not when he wants them so.”
“Mr. Longdon? Then that keeps up?”
“‘That’?”—she was at a loss.
“I mean his intimacy—with Mitchy.”
“So far as it IS an intimacy.”
“But didn’t you, by the way”—and he looked again at his watch—”tell me they’re just about to turn up together?”
“Oh not so very particularly together.”
“Mitchy first alone?” Vanderbank asked.
She had a smile that was dim, that was slightly strange. “Unless you’ll stay for company.”
“Thanks—impossible. And then Mr. Longdon alone?”
“Unless Mitchy stays.”
He had another pause. “You haven’t after all told me about the ‘evolution’—or the evolutions—of his wife.”
“How can I if you don’t give me time?”
“I see—of course not.” He seemed to feel for an instant the return of his curiosity. “Yet it won’t do, will it? to have her out before HIM? No, I must go.” He came back to her and at present she gave him a hand. “But if you do see Mr. Longdon alone will you do me a service? I mean indeed not simply today, but with all other good chances?”
She waited. “Any service whatever. But which first?”
“Well,” he returned in a moment, “let us call it a bargain. I look after your mother—”
“And I—?” She had had to wait again.
“Look after my good name. I mean for common decency to HIM. He has been of a kindness to me that, when I think of my failure to return it, makes me blush from head to foot. I’ve odiously neglected him—by a complication of accidents. There are things I ought to have done that I haven’t. There’s one in particular—but it doesn’t matter. And I haven’t even explained about THAT. I’ve been a brute and I didn’t mean it and I couldn’t help it. But there it is. Say a good word for me. Make out somehow or other that I’m NOT a beast. In short,” the young man said, quite flushed once more with the intensity of his thought, “let us have it that you may quite trust ME if you’ll let me a little—just for my character as a gentleman—trust YOU.”
“Ah you may trust me,” Nanda replied with her handshake.
“Good-bye then!” he called from the door.
“Good-bye,” she said after he had closed it.
III
It was half-past five when Mitchy turned up; and her relapse had in the mean time known no arrest but the arrival of tea, which, however, she had left unnoticed. He expressed on entering the fear that he failed of exactitude, to which she replied by the assurance that he was on the contrary remarkably near it and by the mention of all the aid to patience she had drawn from the pleasure of half an hour with Mr. Van— an allusion that of course immediately provoked on Mitchy’s part the liveliest interest.
“He HAS risked it at last then? How tremendously exciting! And your mother?” he went on; after which, as she said nothing: “Did SHE see him, I mean, and is he perhaps with her now?”
“No; she won’t have come in—unless you asked.”
“I didn’t ask. I asked only for you.”
Nanda thought an instant. “But you’ll still sometimes come to see her, won’t you? I mean you won’t ever give her up?”
Mitchy at this laughed out. “My dear child, you’re an adorable family!”
She took it placidly enough. “That’s what Mr. Van said. He said I’m trying to make a career for her.”
“Did he?” Her visitor, though without prejudice to his amusement, appeared struck. “You must have got in with him rather deep.”
She again considered. “Well, I think I did rather. He was awfully beautiful and kind.”
“Oh,” Mitchy concurred, “trust him always for that!”
“He wrote me, on my note,” Nanda pursued, “a tremendously good answer.”
Mitchy was struck afresh. “Your note? What note?”
“To ask him to come. I wrote at the beginning of the week.”
“Oh—I see” Mitchy observed as if this were rather different. “He couldn’t then of course have done less than come.”
Yet his companion again thought. “I don’t know.”
“Oh come—I say: You do know,” Mitchy laughed. “I should like to s
ee him—or you either!” There would have been for a continuous spectator of these episodes an odd resemblance between the manner and all the movements that had followed his entrance and those that had accompanied the installation of his predecessor. He laid his hat, as Vanderbank had done, in three places in succession and appeared to question scarcely less the safety, somewhere, of his umbrella and the grace of retaining in his hand his gloves. He postponed the final selection of a seat and he looked at the objects about him while he spoke of other matters. Quite in the same fashion indeed at last these objects impressed him. “How charming you’ve made your room and what a lot of nice things you’ve got!”
“That’s just what Mr. Van said too. He seemed immensely struck.”
But Mitchy hereupon once more had a drop to extravagance. “Can I do nothing then but repeat him? I came, you know, to be original.”
“It would be original for you,” Nanda promptly returned, “to be at all like him. But you won’t,” she went back, “not sometimes come for mother only? You’ll have plenty of chances.”
This he took up with more gravity. “What do you mean by chances? That you’re going away? That WILL add to the attraction!” he exclaimed as she kept silence.
“I shall have to wait,” she answered at last, “to tell you definitely what I’m to do. It’s all in the air—yet I think I shall know to-day. I’m to see Mr. Longdon.”
Mitchy wondered. “To-day?”
“He’s coming at half-past six.”
“And then you’ll know?”
“Well—HE will.”
“Mr. Longdon?”
“I meant Mr. Longdon,” she said after a moment.
Mitchy had his watch out. “Then shall I interfere?”
“There are quantities of time. You must have your tea. You see at any rate,” the girl continued, “what I mean by your chances.”
She had made him his tea, which he had taken. “You do squeeze us in!”
“Well, it’s an accident your coming together—except of course that you’re NOT together. I simply took the time that you each independently proposed. But it would have been all right even if you HAD met.
“That is, I mean,” she explained, “even if you and Mr. Longdon do. Mr. Van, I confess, I did want alone.”
Mitchy had been glaring at her over his tea. “You’re more and more remarkable!”
“Well then if I improve so give me your promise.”
Mitchy, as he partook of refreshment, kept up his thoughtful gaze. “I shall presently want some more, please. But do you mind my asking if Van knew—”
“That Mr. Longdon’s to come? Oh yes, I told him, and he left with me a message for him.”
“A message? How awfully interesting!”
Nanda thought. “It WILL be awfully—to Mr. Longdon.”
“Some more NOW, please,” said Mitchy while she took his cup. “And to Mr. Longdon only, eh? Is that a way of saying that it’s none of MY business?”
The fact of her attending—and with a happy show of particular care—to his immediate material want added somehow, as she replied, to her effect of sincerity. “Ah, Mr. Mitchy, the business of mine that has not by this time ever so naturally become a business of yours—well, I can’t think of any just now, and I wouldn’t, you know, if I could!”
“I can promise you then that there’s none of mine,” Mitchy declared, “that hasn’t made by the same token quite the same shift. Keep it well before you, please, that if ever a young woman had a grave lookout—!”
“What do you mean,” she interrupted, “by a grave lookout?”
“Well, the certainty of finding herself saddled for all time to come with the affairs of a gentleman whom she can never get rid of on the specious plea that he’s only her husband or her lover or her father or her son or her brother or her uncle or her cousin. There, as none of these characters, he just stands.”
“Yes,” Nanda kindly mused, “he’s simply her Mitchy.”
“Precisely. And a Mitchy, you see, is—what do you call it?—simply indissoluble. He’s moreover inordinately inquisitive. He goes to the length of wondering whether Van also learned that you were expecting ME.”
“Oh yes—I told him everything.”
Mitchy smiled. “Everything?”
“I told him—I told him,” she replied with impatience.
Mitchy hesitated. “And did he then leave me also a message?”
“No, nothing. What I’m to do for him with Mr. Longdon,” she immediately explained, “is to make practically a kind of apology.”
“Ah and for me”—Mitchy quickly took it up—”there can be no question of anything of that kind. I see. He has done me no wrong.”
Nanda, with her eyes now on the window, turned it over. “I don’t much think he would know even if he had.”
“I see, I see. And we wouldn’t tell him.”
She turned with some abruptness from the outer view. “We wouldn’t tell him. But he was beautiful all round,” she went on. “No one could have been nicer about having for so long, for instance, come so little to the house. As if he hadn’t only too many other things to do! He didn’t even make them out nearly the good reasons he might. But fancy, with his important duties—all the great affairs on his hands—our making vulgar little rows about being ‘neglected’! He actually made so little of what he might easily plead—speaking so, I mean, as if he were all in the wrong—that one had almost positively to SHOW him his excuses. As if” —she really kept it up—”he hasn’t plenty!”
“It’s only people like me,” Mitchy threw out, “who have none?”
“Yes—people like you. People of no use, of no occupation and no importance. Like you, you know,” she pursued, “there are so many.” Then it was with no transition of tone that she added: “If you’re bad, Mitchy, I won’t tell you anything.”
“And if I’m good what will you tell me? What I want really most to KNOW is why he should be, as you said just now, ‘apologetic’ to Mr. Longdon. What’s the wrong he allows he has done HIM?”
“Oh he has ‘neglected’ him—if that’s any comfort to us—quite as much.”
“Hasn’t looked him up and that sort of thing?”
“Yes—and he mentioned some other matter.”
Mitchy wondered. “‘Mentioned’ it?”
“In which,” said Nanda, “he hasn’t pleased him.”
Mitchy after an instant risked it. “But what other matter?”
“Oh he says that when I speak to him Mr. Longdon will know.”
Mitchy gravely took this in. “And shall you speak to him?”
“For Mr. Van?” How, she seemed to ask, could he doubt it? “Why the very first thing.”
“And then will Mr. Longdon tell you?”
“What Mr. Van means?” Nanda thought. “Well—I hope not.”
Mitchy followed it up. “You ‘hope’—?”
“Why if it’s anything that could possibly make any one like him any less. I mean I shan’t in that case in the least want to hear it.”
Mitchy looked as if he could understand that and yet could also imagine something of a conflict. “But if Mr. Longdon insists—?”
“On making me know? I shan’t let him insist. Would YOU?” she put to him.