Books: The Reverberator
H >>
Henry James >> The Reverberator
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 | 11 |
12
The morning after Francie had passed with such an air from Gaston's
sight and left him planted in the salon--he had remained ten minutes, to
see if she would reappear, and then had marched out of the hotel--she
received by the first post a letter from him, written the evening
before. It conveyed his deep regret that their meeting that day should
have been of so painful, so unnatural a character, and the hope that she
didn't consider, as her strange behaviour had seemed to suggest, that
SHE had anything to complain of. There was too much he wanted to say,
and above all too much he wanted to ask, for him to consent to the
indefinite postponement of a necessary interview. There were
explanations, assurances, de part et d'autre, with which it was
manifestly impossible that either of them should dispense. He would
therefore propose that she should see him again, and not be wanting in
patience to that end, late on the morrow. He didn't propose an earlier
moment because his hands were terribly full at home. Frankly speaking,
the state of things there was of the worst. Jane and her husband had
just arrived and had made him a violent, an unexpected scene. Two of the
French newspapers had got hold of the article and had given the most
perfidious extracts. His father hadn't stirred out of the house, hadn't
put his foot inside a club, for more than a week. Marguerite and Maxime
were immediately to start for England on an indefinite absence. They
couldn't face their life in Paris. For himself he was in the breach,
fighting hard and making, on her behalf, asseverations it was impossible
for him to believe, in spite of the dreadful defiant confession she had
appeared to throw at him in the morning, that she wouldn't virtually
confirm. He would come in as soon after nine as possible; the day up to
that time would be stiff in the Cours la Reine, and he begged her in the
meantime not to doubt of his perfect tenderness. So far from her having
caused it at all to shrink, he had never yet felt her to have, in his
affection, such a treasure of indulgence to draw upon.
A couple of hours after the receipt of this manifesto Francie lay on one
of the satin sofas with her eyes closed and her hand clinched upon it in
her pocket. Delia sat hard by with a needle in her fingers, certain
morsels of silk and ribbon in her lap, several pins in her mouth, and
her attention turning constantly from her work to her sister's face. The
weather was now so completely vernal that Mr. Dosson was able to haunt
the court, and he had lately resumed this practice, in which he was
presumably at the present moment absorbed. Delia had lowered her needle
and was making sure if her companion were awake--she had been perfectly
still for so long--when her glance was drawn to the door, which she
heard pushed open. Mr. Flack stood there, looking from one to the other
of the young ladies as to see which would be most agreeably surprised by
his visit.
"I saw your father downstairs--he says it's all right," said the
journalist, advancing with a brave grin. "He told me to come straight
up--I had quite a talk with him."
"All right--ALL RIGHT?" Delia Dosson repeated, springing up. "Yes
indeed--I should say so!" Then she checked herself, asking in another
manner: "Is that so? poppa sent you up?" And then in still another:
"Well, have you had a good time at Nice?"
"You'd better all come right down and see. It's lovely down there. If
you'll come down I'll go right back. I guess you want a change," Mr.
Flack went on. He spoke to Delia but he looked at Francie, who showed
she had not been asleep by the quick consciousness with which she raised
herself on her sofa. She gazed at the visitor with parted lips, but
uttered no word. He barely faltered, coming toward her with his
conscious grimace and his hand out. His knowing eyes were more knowing
than ever, but had an odd appearance of being smaller, like penetrating
points. "Your father has told me all about it. Did you ever hear of
anything so cheap?"
"All about what?--all about what?" said Delia, whose attempt to
represent happy ignorance was menaced by an intromission of ferocity.
She might succeed in appearing ignorant, but could scarcely succeed in
appearing kind. Francie had risen to her feet and had suffered Mr. Flack
to possess himself for a moment of her hand, but neither of them had
asked the young man to sit down. "I thought you were going to stay a
month at Nice?" Delia continued.
"Well, I was, but your father's letter started me up."
"Father's letter?"
"He wrote me about the row--didn't you know it? Then I broke. You didn't
suppose I was going to stay down there when there were such times up
here."
"Gracious!" Delia panted.
"Is it pleasant at Nice? Is it very gay? Isn't it very hot now?" Francie
rather limply asked.
"Oh it's all right. But I haven't come up here to crow about Nice, have
I?"
"Why not, if we want you to?"--Delia spoke up.
Mr. Flack looked at her for a moment very hard, in the whites of the
eyes; then he replied, turning back to her sister: "Anything YOU like,
Miss Francie. With you one subject's as good as another. Can't we sit
down? Can't we be comfortable?" he added.
"Comfortable? of course we can!" cried Delia, but she remained erect
while Francie sank upon the sofa again and their companion took
possession of the nearest chair.
"Do you remember what I told you once, that the people WILL have the
plums?" George Flack asked with a hard buoyancy of the younger girl.
She looked an instant as if she were trying to recollect what he had
told her; and then said, more remotely, "DID father write to you?"
"Of course he did. That's why I'm here."
"Poor father, sometimes he doesn't know WHAT to do!" Delia threw in with
violence.
"He told me the Reverberator has raised a breeze. I guessed that for
myself when I saw the way the papers here were after it. That thing will
go the rounds, you'll see. What brought me was learning from him that
they HAVE got their backs up."
"What on earth are you talking about?" Delia Dosson rang out.
Mr. Flack turned his eyes on her own as he had done a moment before;
Francie sat there serious, looking hard at the carpet. "What game are
you trying, Miss Delia? It ain't true YOU care what I wrote, is it?" he
pursued, addressing himself again to Francie.
After a moment she raised her eyes. "Did you write it yourself?"
"What do you care what he wrote--or what does any one care?" Delia again
interposed.
"It has done the paper more good than anything--every one's so
interested," said Mr. Flack in the tone of reasonable explanation. "And
you don't feel you've anything to complain of, do you?" he added to
Francie kindly.
"Do you mean because I told you?"
"Why certainly. Didn't it all spring out of that lovely drive and that
walk up in the Bois we had--when you took me up to see your portrait?
Didn't you understand that I wanted you to know that the public would
appreciate a column or two about Mr. Waterlow's new picture, and about
you as the subject of it, and about your being engaged to a member of
the grand old monde, and about what was going on in the grand old monde,
which would naturally attract attention through that? Why Miss Francie,"
Mr. Flack ever so blandly pursued, "you regularly TALKED as if you did."
"Did I talk a great deal?" asked Francie.
"Why most freely--it was too lovely. We had a real grand old jaw. Don't
you remember when we sat there in the Bois?"
"Oh rubbish!" Delia panted.
"Yes, and Mme. de Cliche passed."
"And you told me she was scandalised. And we had to laugh," he reminded
her--"it struck us as so idiotic. I said it was a high old POSE, and I
knew what to think of it. Your father tells me she's scandalised now--
she and all the rest of them--at the sight of their names at last in a
REAL newspaper. Well now, if you want to know, it's a bigger pose than
ever, and, as I said just now, it's too damned cheap. It's THIN--that's
what it is; and if it were genuine it wouldn't count. They pretend to be
shocked because it looks exclusive, but in point of fact they like it
first-rate."
"Are you talking about that old piece in the paper? Mercy, wasn't that
dead and buried days and days ago?" Delia quavered afresh. She hovered
there in dismay as well as in displeasure, upset by the news that her
father had summoned Mr. Flack to Paris, which struck her almost as a
treachery, since it seemed to denote a plan. A plan, and an
uncommunicated plan, on Mr. Dosson's part was unnatural and alarming;
and there was further provocation in his appearing to shirk the
responsibility of it by not having come up at such a moment with his
accomplice. Delia was impatient to know what he wanted anyway. Did he
want to drag them down again to such commonness--ah she felt the
commonness now!--even though it COULD hustle? Did he want to put Mr.
Flack forward, with a feeble flourish that didn't answer one of their
questions, as a substitute for the alienated Gaston? If she hadn't been
afraid that something still more uncanny than anything that had happened
yet might come to pass between her two companions in case of her leaving
them together she would have darted down to the court to appease her
conjectures, to challenge her father and tell him how particularly
pleased she should be if he wouldn't put in his oar. She felt liberated,
however, the next moment, for something occurred that struck her as a
sure proof of the state of her sister's spirit.
"Do you know the view I take of the matter, according to what your
father has told me?" Mr. Flack enquired. "I don't mean it was he gave me
the tip; I guess I've seen enough over here by this time to have worked
it out. They're scandalised all right--they're blue with horror and
have never heard of anything so dreadful. Miss Francie," her visitor
roared, "that ain't good enough for you and me. They know what's in the
papers every day of their lives and they know how it got there. They
ain't like the fellow in the story--who was he?--who couldn't think how
the apples got into the dumplings. They're just grabbing a pretext to
break because--because, well, they don't think you're blue blood.
They're delighted to strike a pretext they can work, and they're all
cackling over the egg it has taken so many hens of 'em to lay. That's MY
diagnosis if you want to know."
"Oh--how can you say such a thing?" Francie returned with a tremor in
her voice that struck her sister. Her eyes met Delia's at the same
moment, and this young woman's heart bounded with the sense that she was
safe. Mr. Flack's power to hustle presumed too far--though Mr. Dosson
had crude notions about the licence of the press she felt, even as an
untutored woman, what a false step he was now taking--and it seemed to
her that Francie, who was not impressed (the particular light in her
eyes now showed it) could be trusted to allow him no benefit.
"What does it matter what he says, my dear?" she interposed. "Do make
him drop the subject--he's talking very wild. I'm going down to see what
poppa means--I never heard of anything so flat!" At the door she paused
a moment to add mutely, by mere facial force: "Now just wipe him out,
mind!" It was the same injunction she had launched at her from afar that
day, a year before, when they all dined at Saint-Germain, and she could
remember how effective it had then been. The next moment she flirted
out.
As soon as she had gone Mr. Flack moved nearer to Francie. "Now look
here, you're not going back on me, are you?"
"Going back on you--what do you mean?"
"Ain't we together in this thing? WHY sure! We're CLOSE together, Miss
Francie!"
"Together--together?" Francie repeated with charming wan but not at all
tender eyes on him.
"Don't you remember what I said to you--just as straight as my course
always is--before we went up there, before our lovely drive? I stated to
you that I felt--that I always feel--my great hearty hungry public
behind me."
"Oh yes, I understood--it was all for you to work it up. I told them so.
I never denied it," Francie brought forth.
"You told them so?"
"When they were all crying and going on. I told them I knew it--I told
them I gave you the tip as you call it."
She felt Mr. Flack fix her all alarmingly as she spoke these words; then
he was still nearer to her--he had taken her hand. "Ah you're too
sweet!" She disengaged her hand and in the effort she sprang up; but he,
rising too, seemed to press always nearer--she had a sense (it was
disagreeable) that he was demonstrative--so that she retreated a little
before him. "They were all there roaring and raging, trying to make you
believe you had outraged them?"
"All but young Mr. Probert. Certainly they don't like it," she said at
her distance.
"The cowards!" George Flack after a moment remarked. "And where was
young Mr. Probert?" he then demanded.
"He was away--I've told you--in America."
"Ah yes, your father told me. But now he's back doesn't he like it
either?"
"I don't know, Mr. Flack," Francie answered with impatience.
"Well I do then. He's a coward too--he'll do what his poppa tells him,
and the countess and the duchess and his French brothers-in-law from
whom he takes lessons: he'll just back down, he'll give you up."
"I can't talk with you about that," said Francie.
"Why not? why is he such a sacred subject, when we ARE together? You
can't alter that," her visitor insisted. "It was too lovely your
standing up for me--your not denying me!"
"You put in things I never said. It seems to me it was very different,"
she freely contended.
"Everything IS different when it's printed. What else would be the good
of the papers? Besides, it wasn't I; it was a lady who helps me here--
you've heard me speak of her: Miss Topping. She wants so much to know
you--she wants to talk with you."
"And will she publish THAT?" Francie asked with unstudied effect.
Mr. Flack stared a moment. "Lord, how they've worked on you! And do YOU
think it's bad?"
"Do I think what's bad?"
"Why the letter we're talking about."
"Well--I didn't see the point of so much."
He waited a little, interestedly. "Do you think I took any advantage?"
She made no answer at first, but after a moment said in a tone he had
never heard from her: "Why do you come here this way? Why do you ask me
such questions?"
He hesitated; after which he broke out: "Because I love you. Don't you
know that?"
"Oh PLEASE don't!" she almost moaned, turning away.
But he was launched now and he let himself go. "Why won't you understand
it--why won't you understand the rest? Don't you see how it has worked
round--the heartless brutes they've turned into, and the way OUR life,
yours and mine, is bound to be the same? Don't you see the damned
sneaking scorn with which they treat you and that _I_ only want to do
anything in the world for you?"
Francie's white face, very quiet now, let all this pass without a sign
of satisfaction. Her only response was presently to say: "Why did you
ask me so many questions that day?"
"Because I always ask questions--it's my nature and my business to ask
them. Haven't you always seen me ask you and ask every one all I could?
Don't you know they're the very foundation of my work? I thought you
sympathised with my work so much--you used to tell me you did."
"Well, I did," she allowed.
"You put it in the dead past, I see. You don't then any more?"
If this remark was on her visitor's part the sign of a rare assurance
the girl's cold mildness was still unruffled by it. She considered, she
even smiled; then she replied: "Oh yes I do--only not so much."
"They HAVE worked on you; but I should have thought they'd have
disgusted you. I don't care--even a little sympathy will do: whatever
you've got left." He paused, looking at her, but it was a speech she had
nothing for; so he went on: "There was no obligation for you to answer
my questions--you might have shut me up that day with a word."
"Really?" she asked with all her grave good faith in her face. "I
thought I HAD to--for fear I should appear ungrateful."
"Ungrateful?"
"Why to you--after what you had done. Don't you remember that it was you
who introduced us--?" And she paused with a fatigued delicacy.
"Not to those snobs who are screaming like frightened peacocks. I beg
your pardon--I haven't THAT on my conscience!" Mr. Flack quite grandly
declared.
"Well, you introduced us to Mr. Waterlow and he introduced us to--to
his friends," she explained, colouring, as if it were a fault for the
inexactness caused by her magnanimity. "That's why I thought I ought to
tell you what you'd like."
"Why, do you suppose if I'd known where that first visit of ours to
Waterlow was going to bring you out I'd have taken you within fifty
miles--?" He stopped suddenly; then in another tone: "Jerusalem, there's
no one like you! And you told them it was all YOU?"
"Never mind what I told them."
"Miss Francie," said George Flack, "if you'll marry me I'll never ask a
question again. I'll go into some other business."
"Then you didn't do it on purpose?" Francie asked.
"On purpose?"
"To get me into a quarrel with them--so that I might be free again."
"Well, of all the blamed ideas--!" the young man gasped. "YOUR pure mind
never gave birth to that--it was your sister's."
"Wasn't it natural it should occur to me, since if, as you say, you'd
never consciously have been the means--"
"Ah but I WAS the means!" Mr. Flack interrupted. "We must go, after all,
by what DID happen."
"Well, I thanked you when I drove with you and let you draw me out. So
we're square, aren't we?" The term Francie used was a colloquialism
generally associated with levity, but her face, as she spoke, was none
the less deeply seriou--serious even to pain.
"We're square?" he repeated.
"I don't think you ought to ask for anything more. Good-bye."
"Good-bye? Never!" cried George Flack, who flushed with his defeat to a
degree that spoke strangely of his hopes.
Something in the way she repeated her "Goodbye!" betrayed her impression
of this, and not a little withal that so much confidence left her
unflattered. "Do go away!" she broke out.
"Well, I'll come back very soon"--and he took up his hat.
"Please don't--I don't like it." She had now contrived to put a wide
space between them.
"Oh you tormentress!" he groaned. He went toward the door, but before he
reached it turned round.
"Will you tell me this anyway? ARE you going to marry the lot--after
this?"
"Do you want to put that in the paper?"
"Of course I do--and say you said it!" Mr. Flack held up his head.
They stood looking at each other across the large room. "Well then--I
ain't. There!"
"That's all right," he said as he went out.
XIV
When Gaston Probert came that evening he was received by Dosson and
Delia, and when he asked where Francie might be was told by the latter
that she would show herself in half an hour. Francie had instructed her
sister that as their friend would have, first of all, information to
give their father about the business he had transacted in America he
wouldn't care for a lot of women in the room. When Delia reported this
speech to Mr. Dosson that gentleman protested that he wasn't in any
hurry for the business; what he wanted to find out most was whether Mr.
Probert had a good time--whether he had liked it over there. Gaston
might have liked it, but he didn't look as if he had had a very good
time. His face told of reverses, of suffering; and Delia declared to him
that if she hadn't received his assurance to the contrary she would have
believed he was right down sick. He allowed that he had been very sick
at sea and was still feeling the effect of it, but insisted that there
was nothing the matter with him now. He sat for some time with Mr.
Dosson and Delia, and never once alluded to the cloud that hung over
their relations. The girl had schooled her father to a waiting attitude
on this point, and the manner in which she had descended on him in the
morning, after Mr. Flack had come upstairs, was a lesson he wasn't
likely soon to forget. It had been impressed on him that she was indeed
wiser than he could pretend to be, and he was now mindful that he
mustn't speak of the "piece in the paper" unless young Probert should
speak of it first. When Delia rushed down to him in the court she began
by asking him categorically whom he had wished to do good to by sending
Mr. Flack up to their parlour. To Francie or to her? Why the way they
felt then, they detested his very name. To Mr. Flack himself? Why he had
simply exposed him to the biggest snub he had ever got in his life.
"Well, hanged if I understand!" poor Mr. Dosson had said. "I thought you
liked the piece--you think it's so queer THEY don't like it." "They," in
the parlance of the Dossons, now never meant anything but the Proberts
in congress assembled.
"I don't think anything's queer but you!" Delia had retorted; and she
had let her father know that she had left Francie in the very act of
"handling" Mr. Flack.
"Is that so?" the old gentleman had quavered in an impotence that made
him wince with a sense of meanness--meanness to his bold initiator of so
many Parisian hours.
Francie's visitor came down a few minutes later and passed through the
court and out of the hotel without looking at them. Mr. Dosson had been
going to call after him, but Delia checked him with a violent pinch. The
unsociable manner of the young journalist's departure deepened Mr.
Dosson's dull ache over the mystery of things. I think this may be said
to have been the only incident in the whole business that gave him a
personal pang. He remembered how many of his cigars he had smoked with
Mr. Flack and how universal a participant he had made him. This
haughtiness struck him as the failure of friendship--not the publication
of details about the Proberts. Interwoven with Mr. Dosson's nature was
the view that if these people had done bad things they ought to be
ashamed of themselves and he couldn't pity them, and that if they hadn't
done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people's
knowing. It was therefore, in spite of the young man's rough exit, still
in the tone of American condonation that he had observed to Delia: "He
says that's what they like over there and that it stands to reason that
if you start a paper you've got to give them what they like. If you want
the people with you, you've got to be with the people."
"Well, there are a good many people in the world. I don't think the
Proberts are with us much."
"Oh he doesn't mean them," said Mr. Dosson.
"Well, I do!" cried Delia.
At one of the ormolu tables, near a lamp with a pink shade, Gaston
insisted on making at least a partial statement. He didn't say that he
might never have another chance, but Delia felt with despair that this
idea was in his mind. He was very gentle, very polite, but distinctly
cold, she thought; he was intensely depressed and for half an hour
uttered not the least little pleasantry. There was no particular
occasion for that when he talked about "preferred bonds" with her
father. This was a language Delia couldn't translate, though she had
heard it from childhood. He had a great many papers to show Mr. Dosson,
records of the mission of which he had acquitted himself, but Mr. Dosson
pushed them into the drawer of the ormolu table with the remark that he
guessed they were all right. Now, after the fact, he appeared to attach
but little importance to Gaston's achievements--an attitude which Delia
perceived to be slightly disconcerting to their visitor. Delia
understood it: she had an instinctive sense that her father knew a great
deal more than Gaston could tell him even about the work he had
committed to him, and also that there was in such punctual settlements
an eagerness, a literalism, totally foreign to Mr. Dosson's domestic
habits and to which he would even have imputed a certain pettifogging
provinciality--treatable however with dry humour. If Gaston had cooled
off he wanted at least to be able to say that he had rendered them
services in America; but now her father, for the moment at least,
scarcely appeared to think his services worth speaking of: an incident
that left him with more of the responsibility for his cooling. What Mr.
Dosson wanted to know was how everything had struck him over there,
especially the Pickett Building and the parlour-cars and Niagara and the
hotels he had instructed him to go to, giving him an introduction in two
or three cases to the gentleman in charge of the office. It was in
relation to these themes that Gaston was guilty of a want of spring, as
the girl phrased it to herself; that he could produce no appreciative
expression. He declared however, repeatedly, that it was a most
extraordinary country--most extraordinary and far beyond anything he had
had any conception of. "Of course I didn't like EVERYTHING" he said,"
any more than I like everything anywhere."
"Well, what didn't you like?" Mr. Dosson enquired, at this, after a
short silence.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 | 11 |
12