The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  She was silent a little. “The exhibition you’re making,” she seriously sighed at last, “of your inconstancy and superficiality! All the relics of you that I’ve treasured and that I supposed at the time to have meant something!”

  “The ‘relics’? Have you a lock of my hair?” Then as her meaning came to him: “Oh little Christmas things? Have you really kept them?”

  “Laid away in a drawer of their own—done up in pink paper.”

  “I know what you’re coming to,” Vanderbank said. “You’ve given ME things, and you’re trying to convict me of having lost the sweet sense of them. But you can’t do it. Where my heart’s concerned I’m a walking reliquary. Pink paper? I use gold paper—and the finest of all, the gold paper of the mind.” He gave a flip with a fingernail to his cigarette and looked at its quickened fire; after which he pursued very familiarly, but with a kindness that of itself qualified the mere humour of the thing: “Don’t talk, my dear child, as if you didn’t really know me for the best friend you have in the world.” As soon as he had spoken he pulled out his watch, so that if his words had led to something of a pause this movement offered a pretext for breaking it. Nanda asked the hour and, on his replying “Five-fifteen,” remarked that there would now be tea on the terrace with every one gathered at it. “Then shall we go and join them?” her companion demanded.

  He had made, however, no other motion, and when after hesitating she said “Yes, with pleasure” it was also without a change of position. “I like this,” she inconsequently added.

  “So do I awfully. Tea on the terrace,” Vanderbank went on, “isn’t ‘in’ it. But who’s here?”

  “Oh every one. All your set.”

  “Mine? Have I still a set—with the universal vagabondism you accuse me of?”

  “Well then Mitchy’s—whoever they are.”

  “And nobody of yours?”

  “Oh yes,” Nanda said, “all mine. He must at least have arrived by this time. My set’s Mr. Longdon,” she explained. “He’s all of it now.”

  “Then where in the world am I?”

  “Oh you’re an extra. There are always extras.”

  “A complete set and one over?” Vanderbank laughed. “Where then’s Tishy?”

  Charming and grave, the girl thought a moment. “She’s in Paris with her mother—on their way to Aix-les-Bains.” Then with impatience she continued: “Do you know that’s a great deal to say—what you said just now? I mean about your being the best friend I have.”

  “Of course I do, and that’s exactly why I said it. You see I’m not in the least delicate or graceful or shy about it—I just come out with it and defy you to contradict me. Who, if I’m not the best, is a better one?”

  “Well,” Nanda replied, “I feel since I’ve known Mr. Longdon that I’ve almost the sort of friend who makes every one else not count.”

  “Then at the end of three months he has arrived at a value for you that I haven’t reached in all these years?”

  “Yes,” she returned—”the value of my not being afraid of him.”

  Vanderbank, on the bench, shifted his position, turning more to her and throwing an arm over the back. “And you’re afraid of ME?”

  “Horribly—hideously.”

  “Then our long, our happy relations—?”

  “They’re just what makes my terror,” she broke in, “particularly abject. Happy relations don’t matter. I always think of you with fear.”

  His elbow rested on the back and his hand supported his head. “How awfully curious—if it be true!”

  She had been looking away to the sweet English distance, but at this she made a movement. “Oh Mr. Van, I’m ‘true’!”

  As Mr. Van himself couldn’t have expressed at any subsequent time to any interested friend the particular effect upon him of the tone of these words his chronicler takes advantage of the fact not to pretend to a greater intelligence—to limit himself on the contrary to the simple statement that they produced in Mr. Van’s cheek a flush just discernible. “Fear of what?”

  “I don’t know. Fear is fear.”

  “Yes, yes—I see.” He took out another cigarette and occupied a moment in lighting it. “Well, kindness is kindness too—that’s all one can say.”

  He had smoked again a while before she turned to him. “Have I wounded you by saying that?”

  A certain effect of his flush was still in his smile. “It seems to me I should like you to wound me. I did what I wanted a moment ago,” he continued with some precipitation: “I brought you out handsomely on the subject of Mr. Longdon. That was my idea—just to draw you.”

  “Well,” said Nanda, looking away again, “he has come into my life.”

  “He couldn’t have come into a place where it gives me more pleasure to see him.”

  “But he didn’t like, the other day when I used it to him, that expression,” the girl returned. “He called it ‘mannered modern slang’ and came back again to the extraordinary difference between my speech and my grandmother’s.”

  “Of course,” the young man understandingly assented. “But I rather like your speech. Hasn’t he by this time, with you,” he pursued, “crossed the gulf? He has with me.”

  “Ah with you there was no gulf. He liked you from the first.”

  Vanderbank wondered. “You mean I managed him so well?”

  “I don’t know how you managed him, but liking me has been for him a painful gradual process. I think he does now,” Nanda declared. “He accepts me at last as different—he’s trying with me on that basis. He has ended by understanding that when he talks to me of Granny I can’t even imagine her.”

  Vanderbank puffed away. “I can.”

  “That’s what Mitchy says too. But you’ve both probably got her wrong.”

  “I don’t know,” said Vanderbank—”I’ve gone into it a good deal. But it’s too late. We can’t be Greeks if we would.”

  Even for this Nanda had no laugh, though she had a quick attention. “Do you call Granny a Greek?”

  Her companion slowly rose. “Yes—to finish her off handsomely and have done with her.” He looked again at his watch. “Shall we go? I want to see if my man and my things have turned up.”

  She kept her seat; there was something to revert to. “My fear of you isn’t superficial. I mean it isn’t immediate—not of you just as you stand,” she explained. “It’s of some dreadfully possible future you.”

  “Well,” said the young man, smiling down at her, “don’t forget that if there’s to be such a monster there’ll also be a future you, proportionately developed, to deal with him.”

  She had closed her parasol in the shade and her eyes attached themselves to the small hole she had dug in the ground with its point. “We shall both have moved, you mean?”

  “It’s charming to feel we shall probably have moved together.”

  “Ah if moving’s changing,” she returned, “there won’t be much for me in that. I shall never change—I shall be always just the same. The same old mannered modern slangy hack,” she continued quite gravely. “Mr. Longdon has made me feel that.”

  Vanderbank laughed aloud, and it was especially at her seriousness. “Well, upon my soul!”

  “Yes,” she pursued, “what I am I must remain. I haven’t what’s called a principle of growth.” Making marks in the earth with her umbrella she appeared to cipher it out. “I’m about as good as I can be—and about as bad. If Mr. Longdon can’t make me different nobody can.”

  Vanderbank could only speak in the tone of high amusement. “And he has given up the hope?”

  “Yes—though not ME altogether. He has given up the hope he originally had.”

  “He gives up quickly—in three months!”

  “Oh these three months,” she answered, “have been a long time: the fullest, the most important, for what has happened in them, of my life.” She still poked at the ground; then she added: “And all thanks to YOU.”

  “To me?”—Vanderbank
couldn’t fancy!

  “Why, for what we were speaking of just now—my being to-day so in everything and squeezing up and down no matter whose staircase. Isn’t it one crowded hour of glorious life?” she asked. “What preceded it was an age, no doubt—but an age without a name.”

  Vanderbank watched her a little in silence, then spoke quite beside the question. “It’s astonishing how at moments you remind me of your mother!”

  At this she got up. “Ah there it is! It’s what I shall never shake off. That, I imagine, is what Mr. Longdon feels.”

  Both on their feet now, as if ready for the others, they yet—and even a trifle awkwardly—lingered. It might in fact have appeared to a spectator that some climax had come, on the young man’s part, to some state of irresolution about the utterance of something. What were the words so repeatedly on his lips, yet so repeatedly not sounded? It would have struck our observer that they were probably not those his lips even now actually formed. “Doesn’t he perhaps talk to you too much about yourself?”

  Nanda gave him a dim smile, and he might indeed then have exclaimed on a certain resemblance, a resemblance of expression that had nothing to do with form. It wouldn’t have been diminished for him moreover by her successful suppression of every sign that she felt his question a little of a snub. The recall he had previously mentioned could, however, as she answered him, only have been brushed away by a supervening sense of his roughness. “It probably isn’t so much that as my own way of going on.” She spoke with a mildness that could scarce have been so full without being an effort. “Between his patience and my egotism anything’s possible. It isn’t his talking—it’s his listening.” She gave up the point, at any rate, as if from softness to her actual companion. “Wasn’t it you who spoke to mamma about my sitting with her? That’s what I mean by my debt to you. It’s through you that I’m always there—through you and perhaps a little through Mitchy.”

  “Oh through Mitchy—it MUST have been—more than through me.” Vanderbank spoke with the manner of humouring her about a trifle. “Mitchy, delightful man, felt on the subject of your eternal exile, I think, still more strongly.”

  They quitted their place together and at the end of a few steps became aware of the approach of one of the others, a figure but a few yards off, arriving from the quarter from which Nanda had come. “Ah Mr. Longdon!”—she spoke with eagerness now.

  Vanderbank instantly waved his hat. “Dear old boy!”

  “Between you all, at any rate,” she said more gaily, “you’ve brought me down.”

  Vanderbank made no answer till they met their friend, when, by way of greeting, he simply echoed her words. “Between us all, you’ll be glad to know, we’ve brought her down.”

  Mr. Longdon looked from one of them to the other. “Where have you been together?”

  Nanda was the first to respond. “Only talking—on a bench.”

  “Well, I want to talk on a bench!” Their friend showed a spirit.

  “With me, of course?”—Vanderbank met it with encouragement.

  The girl said nothing, but Mr. Longdon sought her eyes. “No—with Nanda. You must mingle in the crowd.”

  “Ah,” the their companion laughed, “you two are the crowd!”

  “Well—have your tea first.”

  Vanderbank on this, giving it up with the air of amused accommodation that was never—certainly for these two—at fault in him, offered to Mr. Longdon before departing the handshake of greeting he had omitted; a demonstration really the warmer for the tone of the joke that went with it. “Intrigant!”

  II

  Nanda praised to the satellite so fantastically described the charming spot she had quitted, with the effect that they presently took fresh possession of it, finding the beauty of the view deepened as the afternoon grew old and the shadows long. They were of a comfortable agreement on these matters, by which moreover they were but little delayed, one of the pair at least being too conscious, for the hour, of still other phenomena than the natural and peaceful process that filled the air. “Well, you must tell me about these things,” Mr. Longdon sociably said: he had joined his young friend with a budget of impressions rapidly gathered at the house; as to which his appeal to her for a light or two may be taken as the measure of the confidence now ruling their relations. He had come to feel at last, he mentioned, that he could allow for most differences; yet in such a situation as the present bewilderment could only come back. There were no differences in the world—so it had all ended for him—but those that marked at every turn the manners he had for three months been observing in good society. The general wide deviation of this body occupied his mind to the exclusion of almost everything else, and he had finally been brought to believe that even in his slow-paced prime he must have hung behind his contemporaries. He had not supposed at the moment—in the fifties and the sixties—that he passed for old-fashioned, but life couldn’t have left him so far in the rear had the start between them originally been fair. This was the way he had more than once put the matter to the girl; which gives a sufficient hint, it is hoped, of the range of some of their talk. It had always wound up indeed, their talk, with some assumption of the growth of his actual understanding; but it was just these pauses in the fray that seemed to lead from time to time to a sharper clash. It was apt to be when he felt as if he had exhausted surprises that he really received his greatest shocks. There were no such queer-tasting draughts as some of those yielded by the bucket that had repeatedly, as he imagined, touched the bottom of the well. “Now this sudden invasion of somebody’s—heaven knows whose—house, and our dropping down on it like a swarm of locusts: I dare say it isn’t civil to criticise it when one’s going too, so almost culpably, with the stream; but what are people made of that they consent, just for money, to the violation of their homes?”

  Nanda wondered; she cultivated the sense of his making her intensely reflect, “But haven’t people in England always let their places?”

  “If we’re a nation of shopkeepers, you mean, it can’t date, on the scale on which we show it, only from last week? No doubt, no doubt, and the more one thinks of it the more one seems to see that society—for we’re IN society, aren’t we, and that’s our horizon?—can never have been anything but increasingly vulgar. The point is that in the twilight of time—and I belong, you see, to the twilight—it had made out much less how vulgar it COULD be. It did its best very probably, but there were too many superstitions it had to get rid of. It has been throwing them overboard one by one, so that now the ship sails uncommonly light. That’s the way”—and with his eyes on the golden distance he ingeniously followed it out—”I come to feel so the lurching and pitching. If I weren’t a pretty fair sailor—well, as it is, my dear,” he interrupted himself with a laugh, “I show you often enough what grabs I make for support.” He gave a faint gasp, half amusement, half anguish, then abruptly relieved himself by a question. “To whom in point of fact does the place belong?”

  “I’m awfully ashamed, but I’m afraid I don’t know. That just came up here,” the girl went on, “for Mr. Van.”

  Mr. Longdon seemed to think an instant. “Oh it came up, did it? And Mr. Van couldn’t tell?”

  “He has quite forgotten—though he has been here before. Of course it may have been with other people,” she added in extenuation. “I mean it mayn’t have been theirs then any more than it’s Mitchy’s.”

  “I see. They too had just bundled in.”

  Nanda completed the simple history. “To-day it’s Mitchy who bundles, and I believe that really he bundled only yesterday. He turned in his people and here we are.”

  “Here we are, here we are!” her friend more gravely echoed. “Well, it’s splendid!”

  As if at a note in his voice her eyes, while his own still strayed away, just fixed him. “Don’t you think it’s really rather exciting? Everything’s ready, the feast all spread, and with nothing to blunt our curiosity but the general knowledge that there will be people and
things—with nothing but that we comfortably take our places.” He answered nothing, though her picture apparently reached him. “There ARE people, there ARE things, and all in a plenty. Had every one, when you came away, turned up?” she asked as he was still silent.

  “I dare say. There were some ladies and gentlemen on the terrace whom I didn’t know. But I looked only for you and came this way on an indication of your mother’s.”

  “And did she ask that if you should find me with Mr. Van you’d make him come to her?”

  Mr. Longdon replied to this with some delay and without movement. “How could she have supposed he was here?”

  “Since he had not yet been to the house? Oh it has always been a wonder to me, the things that mamma supposes! I see she asked you,” Nanda insisted.