The Awkward Age (Chap. 3.1)

If Mitchy arrived exactly at the hour it was quite by design and on a calculation—over and above the prized little pleasure it might give him—of ten minutes clear with his host, whom it rarely befell him to see alone. He had a theory of something special to go into, of a plummet to sink or a feeler to put forth; his state of mind in short was diplomatic and anxious. But his hopes had a drop as he crossed the threshold. His precaution had only assured him the company of a stranger, for the person in the room to whom the servant announced him was not old Van. On the other hand this gentleman would clearly be old—what was it? the fellow Vanderbank had made it a matter of such importance he should "really know." But were they then simply to have tea there together? No; the candidate for Mr. Mitchett's acquaintance, as if quickly guessing his apprehension, mentioned on the spot that their entertainer would be with them: he had just come home in a hurry, fearing he was late, and then had rushed off to make a change. "Fortunately," said the speaker, who offered his explanation as if he had had it on his mind—"fortunately the ladies haven't yet come."

"Oh there ARE to be ladies?"—Mr. Mitchett was all response. His fellow guest, who was shy and apparently nervous, sidled about a little, swinging an eye-glass, yet glancing in a manner a trifle birdlike from object to object. "Mrs. Edward Brookenham I think."

"Oh!" Mitchy himself felt, as soon as this comment had quitted his lips, that it might sound even to a stranger like a sign, such as the votaries of Mrs. Edward Brookenham had fallen into the way of constantly throwing off, that he recognised her hand in the matter. There was, however, something in his entertainer's face that somehow encouraged frankness; it had the sociability of surprise—it hadn't the chill. Mitchy saw at the same time that this friend of old Van's would never really understand him; though that was a thing he at times liked people as much for as he liked them little for it at others. It was in fact when he most liked that he was on the whole most tempted to mystify. "Only Mrs. Brook?—no others?"

"'Mrs. Brook'?" his elder echoed; staring an instant as if literally missing the connexion; but quickly after, to show he was not stupid—and indeed it seemed to show he was delightful—smiling with extravagant intelligence. "Is that the right thing to say?"

Mitchy gave the kindest of laughs. "Well, I dare say I oughtn't to."

"Oh I didn't mean to correct you," his interlocutor hastened to profess; "I meant on the contrary, will it be right for me too?"

Mitchy's great goggle attentively fixed him. "Try it."

"To HER?"

"To every one."

"To her husband?"

"Oh to Edward," Mitchy laughed again, "perfectly!"

"And must I call him 'Edward'?"

"Whatever you do will be right," Mitchy returned—"even though it should happen to be sometimes what I do."

His companion, as if to look at him with a due appreciation of this, stopped swinging the nippers and put them on. "You people here have a pleasant way—!"

"Oh we HAVE!"—Mitchy, taking him up, was gaily emphatic. He began, however, already to perceive the mystification which in this case was to be his happy effect.

"Mr. Vanderbank," his victim remarked with perhaps a shade more of reserve, "has told me a good deal about you." Then as if, in a finer manner, to keep the talk off themselves: "He knows a great many ladies."

"Oh yes, poor chap, he can't help it. He finds a lady wherever he turns."

The stranger took this in, but seemed a little to challenge it. "Well, that's reassuring, if one sometimes fancies there are fewer."

"Fewer than there used to be?—I see what you mean," said Mitchy. "But if it has struck you so, that's awfully interesting." He glared and grinned and mused. "I wonder."

"Well, we shall see." His friend seemed to wish not to dogmatise.

"SHALL we?" Mitchy considered it again in its high suggestive light. "You will—but how shall I?" Then he caught himself up with a blush. "What a beastly thing to say—as if it were mere years that make you see it!"

His companion this time gave way to the joke. "What else can it be—if I've thought so?"

"Why, it's the facts themselves, and the fine taste, and above all something qui ne court pas les rues, an approach to some experience of what a lady IS." The young man's acute reflexion appeared suddenly to flower into a vision of opportunity that swept everything else away. "Excuse my insisting on your time of life—but you HAVE seen some?" The question was of such interest that he had already begun to follow it. "Oh the charm of talk with some one who can fill out one's idea of the really distinguished women of the past! If I could get you," he continued, "to be so awfully valuable as to fill out mine!"

His fellow visitor, on this, made, in a pause, a nearer approach to taking visibly his measure. "Are you sure you've got an idea?" Mr. Mitchett brightly thought. "No. That must be just why I appeal to you. And it can't therefore be for confirmation, can it?" he went on. "It must be for the beautiful primary hint altogether."

His interlocutor began, with a shake of the eyeglass, to shift and sidle again, as if distinctly excited by the subject. But it was as if his very excitement made the poor gentleman a trifle coy. "Are there no nice ones now?"

"Oh yes, there must be lots. In fact I know quantities."

This had the effect of pulling the stranger up. "Ah 'quantities'! There it is."

"Yes," said Mitchy, "fancy the 'lady' in her millions. Have you come up to London, wondering, as you must, about what's happening—for Vanderbank mentioned, I think, that you HAVE come up—in pursuit of her?"

"Ah," laughed the subject of Vanderbank's information, "I'm afraid 'pursuit,' with me, is over."

"Why, you're at the age," Mitchy returned, "of—the most exquisite form of it. Observation."

"Yet it's a form, I seem to see, that you've not waited for my age to cultivate." This was followed by a decisive headshake. "I'm not an observer. I'm a hater."

"That only means," Mitchy explained, "that you keep your observation for your likes—which is more admirable than prudent. But between my fear in the one direction and my desire in the other," he lightly added, "I scarcely know how to present myself. I must study the ground. Meanwhile HAS old Van told you much about me?"

Old Van's possible confidant, instead of immediately answering, again assumed the pince-nez. "Is that what you call him?"

"In general, I think—for shortness."

"And also"—the speaker hesitated—"for esteem?"

Mitchy laughed out. "For veneration! Our disrespects, I think, are all tender, and we wouldn't for the world do to a person we don't like anything so nice as to call him, or even to call her, don't you know—?"

His questioner had quickly looked as if he knew. "Something pleasant and vulgar?"

Mitchy's gaiety deepened. "That discrimination's our only austerity. You must fall in."

"Then what will you call ME?"

"What can we?" After which, sustainingly, "I'm 'Mitchy,'" our friend stated.

His interlocutor looked slightly queer. "I don't think I can quite begin. I'm Mr. Longdon," he almost blushed to articulate.

"Absolutely and essentially—that's exactly what I recognise. I defy any one to see you," Mitchy declared, "as anything else, and on that footing you'll be, among us, unique."

Mr. Longdon appeared to accept his prospect of isolation with a certain gravity. "I gather from you—I've gathered indeed from Mr. Vanderbank—that you're a little sort of a set that hang very much together."

"Oh yes; not a formal association nor a secret society—still less a 'dangerous gang' or an organisation for any definite end. We're simply a collection of natural affinities," Mitchy explained; "meeting perhaps principally in Mrs. Brook's drawing-room—though sometimes also in old Van's, as you see, sometimes even in mine—and governed at any rate everywhere by Mrs. Brook, in our mysterious ebbs and flows, very much as the tides are governed by the moon. As I say," Mitchy pursued, "you must join. But if Van has got hold of you," he added, "or you've got hold of him, you HAVE joined. We're not quite so numerous as I could wish, and we want variety; we want just what I'm sure you'll bring us—a fresh eye, an outside mind."

Mr. Longdon wore for a minute the air of a man knowing but too well what it was to be asked to put down his name. "My friend Vanderbank swaggers so little that it's rather from you than from himself that I seem to catch the idea—!"

"Of his being a great figure among us? I don't know what he may have said to you or have suppressed; but you can take it from me—as between ourselves, you know—that he's very much the best of us. Old Van in fact—if you really want a candid opinion," and Mitchy shone still brighter as he talked, "is formed for a distinctly higher sphere. I should go so far as to say that on our level he's positively wasted."

"And are you very sure you're not?" Mr. Longdon asked with a smile.

"Dear no—I'm in my element. My element's to grovel before Van. You've only to look at me, as you must already have made out, to see I'm everything dreadful that he isn't. But you've seen him for yourself—I needn't tell you!" Mitchy sighed.

Mr. Longdon, as under the coercion of so much confidence, had stood in place longer than for any previous moment, and the spell continued for a minute after Mitchy had paused. Then nervously and abruptly he turned away, his friend watching him rather aimlessly wander. "Our host has spoken of you to me in high terms," he said as he came back. "You'd have no fault to find with them."

Mitchy took it with his highest light. "I know from your taking the trouble to remember that, how much what I've said of him pleases and touches you. We're a little sort of religion then, you and I; we're an organisation of two, at any rate, and we can't help ourselves. There—that's settled." He glanced at the clock on the chimney. "But what's the matter with him?"

"You gentlemen dress so much," said Mr. Longdon.

Mitchy met the explanation quite halfway. "I try to look funny—but why should Apollo in person?"

Mr. Longdon weighed it. "Do you think him like Apollo?"

"The very image. Ask any of the women!"

"But do I know—?"

"How Apollo must look?" Mitchy considered. "Why the way it works is that it's just from Van's appearance they get the tip, and that then, don't you see? they've their term of comparison. Isn't it what you call a vicious circle? I borrow a little their vice."

Mr. Longdon, who had once more been arrested, once more sidled away. Then he spoke from the other side of the expanse of a table covered with books for which the shelves had no space—covered with portfolios, with well-worn leather-cased boxes, with documents in neat piles. The place was a miscellany, yet not a litter, the picture of an admirable order. "If we're a fond association of two, you and I, let me, accepting your idea, do what, this way, under a gentleman's roof and while enjoying his hospitality, I should in ordinary circumstances think perhaps something of a breach."

"Oh strike out!" Mitchy laughed. It possibly chilled his interlocutor, who again hung fire so long that he himself at last adopted his image. "Why doesn't he marry, you mean?"

Mr. Longdon fairly flushed with recognition. "You're very deep, but with what we perceive—why doesn't he?"

Mitchy continued visibly to have his amusement, which might have been, this time and in spite of the amalgamation he had pictured, for what "they" perceived. But he threw off after an instant an answer clearly intended to meet the case. "He thinks he hasn't the means. He has great ideas of what a fellow must offer a woman."

Mr. Longdon's eyes travelled a while over the amenities about him. "He hasn't such a view of himself alone—?"

"As to make him think he's enough as he stands? No," said Mitchy, "I don't fancy he has a very awful view of himself alone. And since we ARE burning this incense under his nose," he added, "it's also my impression that he has no private means. Women in London cost so much."
Mr. Longdon had a pause. "They come very high, I dare say."

"Oh tremendously. They want so much—they want everything. I mean the sort of women he lives with. A modest man—who's also poor—isn't in it. I give you that at any rate as his view. There are lots of them that would—-and only too glad—'love him for himself'; but things are much mixed, and these not necessarily the right ones, and at all events he doesn't see it. The result of which is that he's waiting."

"Waiting to feel himself in love?"

Mitchy just hesitated. "Well, we're talking of marriage. Of course you'll say there are women with money. There ARE"—he seemed for a moment to meditate—"dreadful ones!"

The two men, on this, exchanged a long regard. "He mustn't do that."

Mitchy again hesitated. "He won't."

Mr. Longdon had also a silence, which he presently terminated by one of his jerks into motion. "He shan't!"

Once more Mitchy watched him revolve a little, but now, familiarly yet with a sharp emphasis, he himself resumed their colloquy. "See here, Mr. Longdon. Are you seriously taking him up?"

Yet again, at the tone of this appeal, the old man perceptibly coloured. It was as if his friend had brought to the surface an inward excitement, and he laughed for embarrassment. "You see things with a freedom—"

"Yes, and it's so I express them. I see them, I know, with a raccourci; but time after all rather presses, and at any rate we understand each other. What I want now is just to say"—and Mitchy spoke with a simplicity and a gravity he had not yet used—"that if your interest in him should at any time reach the point of your wishing to do something or other (no matter what, don't you see?) FOR him—!"

Mr. Longdon, as he faltered, appeared to wonder, but emitted a sound of gentleness. "Yes?"

"Why," said the stimulated Mitchy, "do, for God's sake, just let me have a finger in it."

Mr. Longdon's momentary mystification was perhaps partly but the natural effect of constitutional prudence. "A finger?"

"I mean—let me help."

"Oh!" breathed the old man thoughtfully and without meeting his eyes.

Mitchy, as if with more to say, watched him an instant, then before speaking caught himself up. "Look out—here he comes."

Hearing the stir of the door by which he had entered he looked round; but it opened at first only to admit Vanderbank's servant. "Miss Brookenham!" the man announced; on which the two gentlemen in the room were—audibly, almost violently—precipitated into a union of surprise.