Books: The Reverberator
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Henry James >> The Reverberator
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But Francie was looking at her sister as if her attention had been
arrested. "How do you mean--'a deep one'?"
"Why he wanted to break it off, the fiend!"
Francie stared; then a deeper flush leapt to her face, already mottled
as with the fine footprints of the Proberts, dancing for pain. "To break
off my engagement?"
"Yes, just that. But I'll be hanged if he shall. Poppa, will you allow
that?"
"Allow what?"
"Why Mr. Flack's vile interference. You won't let him do as he likes
with us, I suppose, will you?"
"It's all done--it's all done!" said Francie. The tears had suddenly
started into her eyes again.
"Well, he's so smart that it IS likely he's too smart," her father
allowed. "But what did they want you to do about it?--that's what _I_
want to know?"
"They wanted me to say I knew nothing about it--but I couldn't."
"But you didn't and you don't--if you haven't even read it!" Delia
almost yelled.
"Where IS the d---d thing?" their companion asked, looking helplessly
about him.
"On the boulevard, at the very first of those kiosks you come to. That
old woman has it--the one who speaks English--she always has it. Do go
and get it--DO!" And Delia pushed him, looked for his hat for him.
"I knew he wanted to print something and I can't say I didn't!" Francie
said. "I thought he'd crack up my portrait and that Mr. Waterlow would
like that, and Gaston and every one. And he talked to me about the
paper--he's always doing that and always was--and I didn't see the harm.
But even just knowing him--they think that's vile."
"Well, I should hope we can know whom we like!"--and Delia bounced
fairly round as from the force of her high spirit.
Mr. Dosson had put on his hat--he was going out for the paper. "Why he
kept us alive last year," he uttered in tribute.
"Well, he seems to have killed us now," Delia cried.
"Well, don't give up an old friend," her father urged with his hand on
the door. "And don't back down on anything you've done."
"Lord, what a fuss about an old newspaper!" Delia went on in her
exasperation. "It must be about two weeks old anyway. Didn't they ever
see a society-paper before?"
"They can't have seen much," said Mr. Dosson. He paused still with his
hand on the door. "Don't you worry--Gaston will make it all right."
"Gaston?--it will kill Gaston!"
"Is that what they say?" Delia demanded.
"Gaston will never look at me again."
"Well then he'll have to look at ME," said Mr. Dosson.
"Do you mean that he'll give you up--he'll be so CRAWLING?" Delia went
on.
"They say he's just the one who'll feel it most. But I'm the one who
does that," said Francie with a strange smile.
"They're stuffing you with lies--because THEY don't like it. He'll be
tender and true," Delia glared.
"When THEY hate me?--Never!" And Francie shook her head slowly, still
with her smile of softness. "That's what he cared for most--to make
them like me."
"And isn't he a gentleman, I should like to know?" asked Delia.
"Yes, and that's why I won't marry him--if I've injured him."
"Shucks! he has seen the papers over there. You wait till he comes," Mr.
Dosson enjoined, passing out of the room.
The girls remained there together and after a moment Delia resumed.
"Well, he has got to fix it--that's one thing I can tell you."
"Who has got to fix it?"
"Why that villainous man. He has got to publish another piece saying
it's all false or all a mistake."
"Yes, you'd better make him," said Francie with a weak laugh. "You'd
better go after him--down to Nice."
"You don't mean to say he's gone down to Nice?"
"Didn't he say he was going there as soon as he came back from London--
going right through without stopping?"
"I don't know but he did," said Delia. Then she added: "The mean
coward!"
"Why do you say that? He can't hide at Nice--they can find him there."
"Are they going after him?"
"They want to shoot him--to stab him, I don't know what--those men."
"Well, I wish they would," said Delia.
"They'd better shoot me. I shall defend him. I shall protect him,"
Francie went on.
"How can you protect him? You shall never speak to him again!" her
sister engaged.
Francie had a pause. "I can protect him without speaking to him. I can
tell the simple truth--that he didn't print a word but what I told him."
"I'd like to see him not!" Delia fairly hooted. "When did he grow so
particular? He fixed it up," she said with assurance. "They always do in
the papers--they'd be ashamed if they didn't. Well now he has got to
bring out a piece praising them up--praising them to the skies: that's
what he has got to do!" she wound up with decision.
"Praising them up? They'll hate that worse," Francie returned musingly.
Delia stared. "What on earth then do they want?"
Francie had sunk to the sofa; her eyes were fixed on the carpet. She
gave no reply to this question but presently said: "We had better go to-
morrow, the first hour that's possible."
"Go where? Do you mean to Nice?"
"I don't care where. Anywhere to get away."
"Before Gaston comes--without seeing him?"
"I don't want to see him. When they were all ranting and raving at me
just now I wished he was there--I told them so. But now I don't feel
like that--I can never see him again."
"I don't suppose YOU'RE crazy, are you?" Delia returned.
"I can't tell him it wasn't me--I can't, I can't!" her companion went
on.
Delia planted herself in front of her. "Francie Dosson, if you're going
to tell him you've done anything wrong you might as well stop before you
begin. Didn't you hear how poppa put it?"
"I'm sure I don't know," Francie said listlessly.
"'Don't give up an old friend--there's nothing on earth so mean.' Now
isn't Gaston Probert an old friend?"
"It will be very simple--he'll give me up."
"Then he'll be worse than a worm."
"Not in the least--he'll give me up as he took me. He'd never have asked
me to marry him if he hadn't been able to get THEM to accept me: he
thinks everything in life of THEM. If they cast me off now he'll do just
the same. He'll have to choose between us, and when it comes to that
he'll never choose me."
"He'll never choose Mr. Flack, if that's what you mean--if you're going
to identify yourself so with HIM!"
"Oh I wish he'd never been born!" Francie wailed; after which she
suddenly shivered. And then she added that she was sick--she was going
to bed, and her sister took her off to her room.
Mr. Dosson that afternoon, sitting by his younger daughter's bedside,
read the dreadful "piece" out to both his children from the copy of the
Reverberator he had secured on the boulevard. It is a remarkable fact
that as a family they were rather disappointed in this composition, in
which their curiosity found less to repay it than it had expected, their
resentment against Mr. Flack less to stimulate it, their fluttering
effort to take the point of view of the Proberts less to sustain it, and
their acceptance of the promulgation of Francie's innocent remarks as a
natural incident of the life of the day less to make them reconsider it.
The letter from Paris appeared lively, "chatty," highly calculated to
please, and so far as the personalities contained in it were concerned
Mr. Dosson wanted to know if they weren't aware over here of the charges
brought every day against the most prominent men in Boston. "If there
was anything in that style they might talk," he said; and he scanned the
effusion afresh with a certain surprise at not finding in it some
imputation of pecuniary malversation. The effect of an acquaintance with
the text was to depress Delia, who didn't exactly see what there was in
it to take back or explain away. However, she was aware there were some
points they didn't understand, and doubtless these were the scandalous
places--the things that had so worked up the Proberts. But why should
they have minded if other people didn't understand the allusions (these
were peculiar, but peculiarly incomprehensible) any better than she did?
The whole thing struck Francie herself as infinitely less lurid than
Mme. de Brecourt's account of it, and the part about her own situation
and her beautiful picture seemed to make even less of the subject than
it easily might have done. It was scanty, it was "skimpy," and if Mr.
Waterlow was offended it wouldn't be because they had published too much
about him. It was nevertheless clear to her that there were a lot of
things SHE hadn't told Mr. Flack, as well as a great many she had:
perhaps those were the things that lady had put in--Florine or Dorine--
the one she had mentioned at Mme. de Brecourt's.
All the same, if the communication in the Reverberator let them down, at
the hotel, more gently than had seemed likely and bristled so much less
than was to have been feared with explanations of the anguish of the
Proberts, this didn't diminish the girl's sense of responsibility nor
make the case a whit less grave. It only showed how sensitive and
fastidious the Proberts were and therefore with what difficulty they
would come round to condonation. Moreover Francie made another reflexion
as she lay there--for Delia kept her in bed nearly three days, feeling
this to be for the moment at any rate an effectual reply to any absurd
heroics about leaving Paris. Perhaps they had got "case-hardened"
Francie said to herself; perhaps they had read so many such bad things
that they had lost the delicacy of their palate, as people were said to
do who lived on food too violently spiced. Then, very weak and vague and
passive as she was now, in the bedimmed room, in the soft Parisian bed
and with Delia treating her as much as possible like a sick person, she
thought of the lively and chatty letters they had always seen in the
papers and wondered if they ALL meant a violation of sanctities, a
convulsion of homes, a burning of smitten faces, a rupture of girls'
engagements. It was present to her as an agreeable negative, I must add,
that her father and sister took no strenuous view of her responsibility
or of their own: they neither brought the matter home to her as a crime
nor made her worse through her feeling them anxiously understate their
blame. There was a pleasant cheerful helplessness in her father on this
head as on every other. There could be no more discussion among them on
such a question than there had ever been, for none was needed to show
that for these candid minds the newspapers and all they contained were a
part of the general fatality of things, of the recurrent freshness of
the universe, coming out like the sun in the morning or the stars at
night or the wind and the weather at all times.
The thing that worried Francie most while Delia kept her in bed was the
apprehension of what her father might do; but this was not a fear of
what he might do to Mr. Flack. He would go round perhaps to Mr.
Probert's or to Mme. de Brecourt's and reprimand them for having made
things so rough to his "chicken." It was true she had scarcely ever seen
him reprimand any one for anything; but on the other hand nothing like
this had ever happened before to her or to Delia. They had made each
other cry once or twice, but no one else had ever made them, and no one
had ever broken out on them that way and frightened them half to death.
Francie wanted her father not to go round; she had a sense that those
other people had somehow stores of comparison, of propriety, of
superiority, in any discussion, which he couldn't command. She wanted
nothing done and no communication to pass--only a proud unbickering
silence on the part of the Dossons. If the Proberts made a noise and
they made none it would be they who would have the best appearance.
Moreover now, with each elapsing day, she felt she did wish to see
Gaston about it. Her desire was to wait, counting the hours, so that she
might just clearly explain, saying two or three things. Perhaps these
things wouldn't make it better--very likely they wouldn't; but at any
rate nothing would have been done in the interval, at least on her part
and her father's and Delia's, to make it worse. She told her father that
she wouldn't, as Delia put it, "want to have him" go round, and was in
some degree relieved at perceiving that he didn't seem very clear as to
what it was open to him to say to their alienated friends. He wasn't
afraid but was uncertain. His relation to almost everything that had
happened to them as a family from a good while back was a sense of the
absence of precedents, and precedents were particularly absent now, for
he had never before seen a lot of people in a rage about a piece in the
paper.
Delia also reassured her; she said she'd see to it that poppa didn't
sneak round. She communicated to her indeed that he hadn't the smallest
doubt that Gaston, in a few days, would blow them up--all THEM down
there--much higher than they had blown her, and that he was very sorry
he had let her go down herself on that sort of summons. It was for her
and the rest to come to Francie and to him, and if they had anything
practical to say they'd arrive in a body yet. If Mr. Dosson had the
sense of his daughter's having been roughly handled he derived some of
the consolation of amusement from his persistent humorous view of the
Proberts as a "body." If they were consistent with their character or
with their complaint they would move en masse upon the hotel, and he
hung about at home a good deal as if to wait for them. Delia intimated
to her sister that this vision cheered them up as they sat, they two, in
the red salon while Francie was in bed. Of course it didn't exhilarate
this young lady, and she even looked for no brighter side now. She knew
almost nothing but her sharp little ache of suspense, her presentiment
of Gaston's horror, which grew all the while. Delia remarked to her once
that he would have seen lots of society-papers over there, he would have
become familiar; but this only suggested to the girl--she had at present
strange new moments and impulses of quick reasoning--that they would
only prepare him to be disgusted, not to be indifferent. His disgust
would be colder than anything she had ever known and would complete her
knowledge of him--make her understand him properly for the first time.
She would just meet it as briefly as possible; it would wind up the
business, close the incident, and all would be over.
He didn't write; that proved it in advance; there had now been two or
three mails without a letter. He had seen the paper in Boston or in New
York and it had simply struck him dumb. It was very well for Delia to
say that of course he didn't write when he was on the ocean: how could
they get his letters even if he did? There had been time before--before
he sailed; though Delia represented that people never wrote then. They
were ever so much too busy at the last and were going to see their
correspondents in a few days anyway. The only missives that came to
Francie were a copy of the Reverberator, addressed in Mr. Flack's hand
and with a great inkmark on the margin of the fatal letter, and three
intense pages from Mme. de Brecourt, received forty-eight hours after
the scene at her house. This lady expressed herself as follows:
MY DEAR FRANCIE--I felt very badly after you had gone yesterday morning,
and I had twenty minds to go and see you. But we've talked it over
conscientiously and it appears to us that we've no right to take any
such step till Gaston arrives. The situation isn't exclusively ours but
belongs to him as well, and we feel we ought to make it over to him in
as simple and compact a form as possible. Therefore, as we regard it, we
had better not touch it (it's so delicate, isn't it, my poor child?) but
leave it just as it is. They think I even exceed my powers in writing
you these simple lines, and that once your participation has been
constatee (which was the only advantage of that dreadful scene)
EVERYTHING should stop. But I've liked you, Francie, I've believed in
you, and I don't wish you to be able to say that in spite of the
thunderbolt you've drawn down on us I've not treated you with
tenderness. It's a thunderbolt indeed, my poor and innocent but
disastrous little friend! We're hearing more of it already--the horrible
Republican papers here have (AS WE KNOW) already got hold of the
unspeakable sheet and are preparing to reproduce the article: that is
such parts of it as they may put forward (with innuendoes and sous-
entendus to eke out the rest) without exposing themselves to a suit for
defamation. Poor Leonie de Villepreux has been with us constantly and
Jeanne and her husband have telegraphed that we may expect them day
after to-morrow. They are evidently immensely emotionnes, for they
almost never telegraph. They wish so to receive Gaston. We have
determined all the same to be intensely QUIET, and that will be sure to
be his view. Alphonse and Maxime now recognise that it's best to leave
Mr. Flack alone, hard as it is to keep one's hands off him. Have you
anything to lui faire dire--to my precious brother when he arrives? But
it's foolish of me to ask you that, for you had much better not answer
this. You will no doubt have an opportunity to say to him--whatever, my
dear Francie, you CAN say! It will matter comparatively little that you
may never be able to say it to your friend with every allowance SUZANNE
DE BRECOURT.
Francie looked at this letter and tossed it away without reading it.
Delia picked it up, read it to her father, who didn't understand it, and
kept it in her possession, poring over it as Mr. Flack had seen her pore
over the cards that were left while she was out or over the registers of
American travellers. They knew of Gaston's arrival by his telegraphing
from Havre (he came back by the French line) and he mentioned the hour--
"about dinner-time"--at which he should reach Paris. Delia, after
dinner, made her father take her to the circus so that Francie should be
left alone to receive her intended, who would be sure to hurry round in
the course of the evening. The girl herself expressed no preference
whatever on this point, and the idea was one of Delia's masterly ones,
her flashes of inspiration. There was never any difficulty about
imposing such conceptions on poppa. But at half-past ten, when they
returned, the young man had not appeared, and Francie remained only long
enough to say "I told you so!" with a white face and march off to her
room with her candle. She locked herself in and her sister couldn't get
at her that night. It was another of Delia's inspirations not to try,
after she had felt that the door was fast. She forbore, in the exercise
of a great discretion, but she herself for the ensuing hours slept no
wink. Nevertheless the next morning, as early as ten o'clock, she had
the energy to drag her father out to the banker's and to keep him out
two hours. It would be inconceivable now that Gaston shouldn't turn up
before dejeuner. He did turn up; about eleven o'clock he came in and
found Francie alone. She noticed, for strangeness, that he was very pale
at the same time that he was sunburnt; also that he didn't for an
instant smile at her. It was very certain there was no bright flicker in
her own face, and they had the most singular, the most unnatural
meeting. He only said as he arrived: "I couldn't come last evening; they
made it impossible; they were all there and we were up till three
o'clock this morning." He looked as if he had been through terrible
things, and it wasn't simply the strain of his attention to so much
business in America. What passed next she couldn't remember afterwards;
it seemed but a few seconds before he said to her slowly, holding her
hand--before this he had pressed his lips to hers silently--"Is it true,
Francie, what they say (and they swear to it!) that YOU told that
blackguard those horrors; that that infamous letter's only a report of
YOUR talk?"
"I told him everything--it's all me, ME, ME!" the girl replied
exaltedly, without pretending to hesitate an instant as to what he might
mean.
Gaston looked at her with deep eyes, then walked straight away to the
window and remained there in silence. She herself said nothing more. At
last the young man went on: "And I who insisted to them that there was
no natural delicacy like yours!"
"Well, you'll never need to insist about anything any more!" she cried.
And with this she dashed out of the room by the nearest door. When Delia
and Mr. Dosson returned the red salon was empty and Francie was again
locked in her room. But this time her sister forced an entrance.
XIII
Mr. Dosson, as we know, was, almost more than anything else, loosely
contemplative, and the present occasion could only minister to that side
of his nature, especially as, so far at least as his observation of his
daughters went, it had not urged him into uncontrollable movement. But
the truth is that the intensity, or rather the continuity, of his
meditations did engender an act not perceived by these young ladies,
though its consequences presently became definite enough. While he
waited for the Proberts to arrive in a phalanx and noted that they
failed to do so he had plenty of time to ask himself--and also to ask
Delia--questions about Mr. Flack. So far as they were addressed to his
daughter they were promptly answered, for Delia had been ready from the
first, as we have seen, to pronounce upon the conduct of the young
journalist. Her view of it was clearer every hour; there was a
difference however in the course of action which she judged this view to
demand. At first he was to have been blown up sky-high for the mess he
had got them into--profitless as the process might be and vain the
satisfaction; he was to have been scourged with the sharpest lashes the
sense of violated confidence could inflict. At present he was not to be
touched with a ten-foot pole, but rather cut dead, cast off and ignored,
let alone to his dying day: Delia quickly caught at this for the right
grand way of showing displeasure. Such was the manner in which she
characterised it in her frequent conversations with her father, if that
can be called conversation which consisted of his serenely smoking while
she poured forth arguments that kept repetition abreast of variety. The
same cause will according to application produce effects without
sameness: as a mark of which truth the catastrophe that made Delia
express freely the hope she might never again see so much as the end of
Mr. Flack's nose had just the opposite action on her parent. The best
balm for his mystification would have been to let his eyes sociably
travel over his young friend's whole person; this would have been to
deal again with quantities and forces he could measure and in terms he
could understand. If indeed the difference had been pushed further the
girl would have kept the field, for she had the advantage of being able
to motive her attitude, to which Mr. Dosson could have opposed but an
indefensible, in fact an inarticulate, laxity. She had touched on her
deepest conviction in saying to Francie that the correspondent of the
Reverberator had played them that trick on purpose to get them into such
trouble with the Proberts that he might see his own hopes bloom again in
the heat of their disaster. This had many of the appearances of a
strained interpretation, but that didn't prevent Delia from placing it
before her father several times an hour. It mattered little that he
should remark in return that he didn't see what good it could do Mr.
Flack that Francie--and he and Delia, for all he could guess--should be
disgusted with him: to Mr. Dosson's mind that was such a queer way of
reasoning. Delia maintained that she understood perfectly, though she
couldn't explain--and at any rate she didn't want the manoeuvring
creature to come flying back from Nice. She didn't want him to know
there had been a scandal, that they had a grievance against him, that
any one had so much as heard of his article or cared what he published
or didn't publish; above all she didn't want him to know that the
Proberts had cooled off. She didn't want him to dream he could have had
such effects. Mixed up with this high rigour on Miss Dosson's part was
the oddest secret complacency of reflexion that in consequence of what
Mr. Flack HAD published the great American community was in a position
to know with what fine folks Francie and she were associated. She hoped
that some of the people who used only to call when they were "off to-
morrow" would take the lesson to heart.
While she glowed with this consolation as well as with the resentment
for which it was required her father quietly addressed a few words by
letter to their young friend in the south. This communication was not of
a minatory order; it expressed on the contrary the loose sociability
which was the essence of the good gentleman's nature. He wanted to see
Mr. Flack, to talk the whole thing over, and the desire to hold him to
an account would play but a small part in the interview. It commended
itself much more to him that the touchiness of the Proberts should be a
sign of a family of cranks--so little did any experience of his own
match it--than that a newspaper-man had misbehaved in trying to turn out
an attractive piece. As the newspaper-man happened to be the person with
whom he had most consorted for some time back he felt drawn to him in
presence of a new problem, and somehow it didn't seem to Mr. Dosson to
disqualify him as a source of comfort that it was just he who had been
the fountain of injury. The injury wouldn't be there if the Proberts
didn't point to it with a thousand ringers. Moreover Mr. Dosson couldn't
turn his back at such short notice on a man who had smoked so many of
his cigars, ordered so many of his dinners and helped him so handsomely
to spend his money: such acts constituted a bond, and when there was a
bond people gave it a little jerk in time of trouble. His letter to Nice
was the little jerk.
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