The Awkward Age Part 3

"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 p.r.o.nounce. "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?"

"You've plenty of time--the fifteenth of June."

"I'm only too sorry to wait." Laying down the object he had been examining Mr. Longdon took another turn about the room, and his manner was such an appeal to his host to accept his restlessness that as he circulated the latter watched him with encouragement. "I said to you just now that I knew the mothers, but it would have been more to the point to say the grandmothers." He stopped before his young friend, then nodded at the image of Nanda. "I knew HERS. She put it at something less."

Vanderbank rather failed to understand. "The old lady? Put what?"

Mr. Longdon's face showed him as for a moment feeling his way. "I'm speaking of Mrs. Brookenham. She spoke of her daughter as only sixteen."

Vanderbank's amus.e.m.e.nt at the tone of this broke out. "She usually does!

She has done so, I think, for the last year or two."

His visitor dropped upon his sofa as with the weight of something sudden and fresh; then from this place, with a sharp little movement, tossed into the fire the end of a cigarette. Vanderbank offered him another, and as he accepted it and took a light he said: "I don't know what you're doing with me--I never at home smoke so much!" But he puffed away and, seated near, laid his hand on Vanderbank's arm as to help himself to utter something too delicate not to be guarded and yet too important not to be risked. "Now that's the sort of thing I did mean--as one of my impressions." Vanderbank continued at a loss and he went on: "I refer--if you don't mind my saying so--to what you said just now."

Vanderbank was conscious of a deep desire to draw from him whatever might come; so sensible was it somehow that whatever in him was good was also thoroughly personal. But our young friend had to think a minute. "I see, I see. Nothing's more probable than that I've said something nasty; but which of my particular horrors?"

"Well then, your conveying that she makes her daughter out younger--!"

"To make herself out the same?" Vanderbank took him straight up. "It was nasty my doing that? I see, I see. Yes, yes: I rather gave her away, and you're struck by it--as is most delightful you SHOULD be--because you're in every way of a better tradition and, knowing Mrs. Brookenham's my friend, can't conceive of one's playing on a friend a trick so vulgar and odious. It strikes you also probably as the kind of thing we must be constantly doing; it strikes you that right and left, probably, we keep giving each other away. Well, I dare say we do. Yes, 'come to think of it,' as they say in America, we do. But what shall I tell you?

Practically we all know it and allow for it and it's as broad as it's long. What's London life after all? It's t.i.t for tat!"

"Ah but what becomes of friendship?" Mr. Longdon earnestly and pleadingly asked, while he still held Vanderbank's arm as if under the spell of the vivid explanation supplied him.

The young man met his eyes only the more sociably. "Friendship?"

"Friendship." Mr. Longdon maintained the full value of the word.

"Well," his companion risked, "I dare say it isn't in London by any means what it is at Beccles. I quite literally mean that," Vanderbank rea.s.suringly added; "I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies--in great towns and great crowds. It's a plant that takes time and s.p.a.ce and air; and London society is a huge 'squash,' as we elegantly call it--an elbowing pushing perspiring chattering mob."

"Ah I don't say THAT of you!" the visitor murmured with a withdrawal of his hand and a visible scruple for the sweeping concession he had evoked.

"Do say it then--for G.o.d's sake; let some one say it, so that something or other, whatever it may be, may come of it! It's impossible to say too much--it's impossible to say enough. There isn't anything any one can say that I won't agree to."

"That shows you really don't care," the old man returned with acuteness.

"Oh we're past saving, if that's what you mean!" Vanderbank laughed.

"You don't care, you don't care!" his guest repeated, "and--if I may be frank with you--I shouldn't wonder if it were rather a pity."

"A pity I don't care?"

"You ought to, you ought to." And Mr. Longdon paused. "May I say all I think?"

"I a.s.sure you _I_ shall! You're awfully interesting."

"So are you, if you come to that. It's just what I've had in my head.

There's something I seem to make out in you--!" He abruptly dropped this, however, going on in another way. "I remember the rest of you, but why did I never see YOU?"

"I must have been at school--at college. Perhaps you did know my brothers, elder and younger."

"There was a boy with your mother at Malvern. I was near her there for three months in--what WAS the year?"

"Yes, I know," Vanderbank replied while his guest tried to fix the date.

"It was my brother Miles. He was awfully clever, but had no health, poor chap, and we lost him at seventeen. She used to take houses at such places with him--it was supposed to be for his benefit."

Mr. Longdon listened with a visible recovery. "He used to talk to me--I remember he asked me questions I couldn't answer and made me dreadfully ashamed. But I lent him books--partly, upon my honour, to make him think that as I had them I did know something. He read everything and had a lot to say about it. I used to tell your mother he had a great future."

Vanderbank shook his head sadly and kindly. "So he had. And you remember Nancy, who was handsome and who was usually with them?" he went on.

Mr. Longdon looked so uncertain that he explained he meant his other sister; on which his companion said: "Oh her? Yes, she was charming--she evidently had a future too."

"Well, she's in the midst of her future now. She's married."

"And whom did she marry?"

"A fellow called Toovey. A man in the City."

"Oh!" said Mr. Longdon a little blankly. Then as if to retrieve his blankness: "But why do you call her Nancy? Wasn't her name Blanche?"

"Exactly--Blanche Bertha Vanderbank."

Mr. Longdon looked half-mystified and half-distressed. "And now she's Nancy Toovey?"

Vanderbank broke into laughter at his dismay. "That's what every one calls her."

"But why?"

"n.o.body knows. You see you were right about her future."

Mr. Longdon gave another of his soft smothered sighs; he had turned back again to the first photograph, which he looked at for a longer time.

"Well, it wasn't HER way."

"My mother's? No indeed. Oh my mother's way--!" Vanderbank waited, then added gravely: "She was taken in time."