Генри Джеймс
The Reverberator
“We sometimes see the Reverberator. You’ve some fine pieces,” Francie humanely replied.
“Sometimes only? Don’t they send it to the old gentleman—the weekly edition? I thought I had fixed that,” said George Flack.
“I don’t know; it’s usually lying round. But Delia reads it more than I; she reads pieces aloud. I like to read books; I read as many as I can.”
“Well, it’s all literature,” said Mr. Flack; “it’s all the press, the great institution of our time. Some of the finest books have come out first in the papers. It’s the history of the age.”
“I see you’ve got the same aspirations,” Francie remarked kindly.
“The same aspirations?”
“Those you told me about that day at Saint-Germain.”
“Oh I keep forgetting that I ever broke out to you that way. Everything’s so changed.”
“Are you the proprietor of the paper now?” the girl went on, determined not to catch this sentimental echo.
“What do you care? It wouldn’t even be delicate in me to tell you; for I DO remember the way you said you’d try and get your father to help me. Don’t say you’ve forgotten it, because you almost made me cry. Anyway, that isn’t the sort of help I want now and it wasn’t the sort of help I meant to ask you for then. I want sympathy and interest; I want some one to say to me once in a while ‘Keep up your old heart, Mr. Flack; you’ll come out all right.’ You see I’m a working-man and I don’t pretend to be anything else,” Francie’s companion went on. “I don’t live on the accumulations of my ancestors. What I have I earn—what I am I’ve fought for: I’m a real old travailleur, as they say here. I rejoice in it, but there’s one dark spot in it all the same.”
“And what’s that?” Francie decided not quite at once to ask.
“That it makes you ashamed of me.”
“Oh how can you say?” And she got up as if a sense of oppression, of vague discomfort, had come over her. Her visitor troubled such peace as she had lately arrived at.
“You wouldn’t be ashamed to go round with me?”
“Round where?”
“Well, anywhere: just to have one more walk. The very last.” George Flack had got up too and stood there looking at her with his bright eyes, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. As she hesitated he continued: “Then I’m not such a friend after all.”
She rested her eyes a moment on the carpet; then raising them: “Where would you like to go?”
“You could render me a service—a real service—without any inconvenience probably to yourself. Isn’t your portrait finished?”
“Yes, but he won’t give it up.”
“Who won’t give it up?”
“Why Mr. Waterlow. He wants to keep it near him to look at it in case he should take a fancy to change it. But I hope he won’t change it—it’s so lovely as it is!” Francie made a mild joke of saying.
“I hear it’s magnificent and I want to see it,” said George Flack.
“Then why don’t you go?”
“I’ll go if you’ll take me; that’s the service you can render me.”
“Why I thought you went everywhere—into the palaces of kings!” Francie cried.
“I go where I’m welcome, not where I ain’t. I don’t want to push into that studio alone; he doesn’t want me round. Oh you needn’t protest,” the young man went on; “if a fellow’s made sensitive he has got to stay so. I feel those things in the shade of a tone of voice. He doesn’t like newspaper-men. Some people don’t, you know. I ought to tell you that frankly.”
Francie considered again, but looking this time at her visitor. “Why if it hadn’t been for you “—I’m afraid she said “hadn’t have been”—“I’d never have sat to him.”
Mr. Flack smiled at her in silence for a little. “If it hadn’t been for me I think you’d never have met your future husband.”
“Perhaps not,” said Francie; and suddenly she blushed red, rather to her companion’s surprise.
“I only say that to remind you that after all I’ve a right to ask you to show me this one little favour. Let me drive with you to-morrow, or next day or any day, to the Avenue de Villiers, and I shall regard myself as amply repaid. With you I shan’t be afraid to go in, for you’ve a right to take any one you like to see your picture. That’s the rule here.”
“Oh the day you’re afraid, Mr. Flack—!” Francie laughed without fear. She had been much struck by his reminder of what they all owed him; for he truly had been their initiator, the instrument, under providence, that had opened a great new interest to them, and as she was more listless about almost anything than at the sight of a person wronged she winced at his describing himself as disavowed or made light of after the prize was gained. Her mind had not lingered on her personal indebtedness to him, for it was not in the nature of her mind to linger; but at present she was glad to spring quickly, at the first word, into the attitude of acknowledgement. It had the effect of simplification after too multiplied an appeal—it brought up her spirits.
“Of course I must be quite square with you,” the young man said in a tone that struck her as “higher,” somehow, than any she had ever heard him use. “If I want to see the picture it’s because I want to write about it. The whole thing will go bang into the Reverberator. You must understand that in advance. I wouldn’t write about it without seeing it. We don’t DO that”—and Mr. Flack appeared to speak proudly again for his organ.
“J’espere bien!” said Francie, who was getting on famously with her French. “Of course if you praise him Mr. Waterlow will like it.”
“I don’t know that he cares for my praise and I don’t care much whether HE likes it or not. For you to like it’s the principal thing—we must do with that.”
“Oh I shall be awfully proud.”
“I shall speak of you personally—I shall say you’re the prettiest girl that has ever come over.”
“You may say what you like,” Francie returned. “It will be immense fun to be in the newspapers. Come for me at this hour day after to-morrow.”
“You’re too kind,” said George Flack, taking up his hat. He smoothed it down a moment with his glove; then he said: “I wonder if you’ll mind our going alone?”
“Alone?”
“I mean just you and me.”
“Oh don’t you be afraid! Father and Delia have seen it about thirty times.”
“That’ll be first-rate. And it will help me to feel, more than anything else could make me do, that we’re still old friends. I couldn’t bear the end of THAT. I’ll come at 3.15,” Mr. Flack went on, but without even yet taking his departure. He asked two or three questions about the hotel, whether it were as good as last year and there were many people in it and they could keep their rooms warm; then pursued suddenly, on a different plane and scarcely waiting for the girl’s answer: “And now for instance are they very bigoted? That’s one of the things I should like to know.”
“Very bigoted?”
“Ain’t they tremendous Catholics—always talking about the Holy Father; what they call here the throne and the altar? And don’t they want the throne too? I mean Mr. Probert, the old gentleman,” Mr. Flack added. “And those grand ladies and all the rest of them.”
“They’re very religious,” said Francie. “They’re the most religious people I ever saw. They just adore the Holy Father. They know him personally quite well. They’re always going down to Rome.”
“And do they mean to introduce you to him?”
“How do you mean, to introduce me?”
“Why to make you a Catholic, to take you also down to Rome.”
“Oh we’re going to Rome for our voyage de noces!” said Francie gaily. “Just for a peep.”
“And won’t you have to have a Catholic marriage if They won’t consent to a Protestant one.”
“We’re going to have a lovely one, just like one that Mme. de Brecourt took me to see at the Madeleine.”
“And will it be at the Madeleine, too?”
“Yes, unless we have it at Notre Dame.”
“And how will your father and sister like that?”
“Our having it at Notre Dame?”
“Yes, or at the Madeleine. Your not having it at the American church.”
“Oh Delia wants it at the best place,” said Francie simply. Then she added: “And you know poppa ain’t much on religion.”
“Well now that’s what I call a genuine fact, the sort I was talking about,” Mr. Flack replied. Whereupon he at last took himself off, repeating that he would come in two days later, at 3.15 sharp.
Francie gave an account of his visit to her sister, on the return of the latter young lady, and mentioned the agreement they had come to in relation to the drive. Delia brooded on it a while like a sitting hen, so little did she know that it was right (“as” it was right Delia usually said) that Francie should be so intimate with other gentlemen after she was engaged.
“Intimate? You wouldn’t think it’s very intimate if you were to see me!” Francie cried with amusement.
“I’m sure I don’t want to see you,” Delia declared—the sharpness of which made her sister suddenly strenuous.
“Delia Dosson, do you realise that if it hadn’t been for Mr. Flack we would never have had that picture, and that if it hadn’t been for that picture I should never have got engaged?”
“It would have been better if you hadn’t, if that’s the way you’re going to behave. Nothing would induce me to go with you.”
This was what suited Francie, but she was nevertheless struck by Delia’s rigour. “I’m only going to take him to see Mr. Waterlow.”
“Has he become all of a sudden too shy to go alone?”
“Well, you know Mr. Waterlow has a prejudice against him and has made him feel it. You know Gaston told us so.”
“He told us HE couldn’t bear him; that’s what he told us,” said Delia.
“All the more reason I should be kind to him. Why Delia, do realise,” Francie went on.
“That’s just what I do,” returned the elder girl; “but things that are very different from those you want me to. You have queer reasons.”
“I’ve others too that you may like better. He wants to put a piece in the paper about it.”
“About your picture?”
“Yes, and about me. All about the whole thing.”
Delia stared a moment. “Well, I hope it will be a good one!” she said with a groan of oppression as from the crushing majesty of their fate.
X
When Francie, two days later, passed with Mr. Flack into Charles Waterlow’s studio she found Mme. de Cliche before the great canvas. She enjoyed every positive sign that the Proberts took an interest in her, and this was a considerable symptom, Gaston’s second sister’s coming all that way—she lived over by the Invalides—to look at the portrait once more. Francie knew she had seen it at an earlier stage; the work had excited curiosity and discussion among the Proberts from the first of their making her acquaintance, when they went into considerations about it which had not occurred to the original and her companions—frequently as, to our knowledge, these good people had conversed on the subject. Gaston had told her that opinions differed much in the family as to the merit of the work, and that Margaret, precisely, had gone so far as to say that it might be a masterpiece of tone but didn’t make her look like a lady. His father on the other hand had no objection to offer to the character in which it represented her, but he didn’t think it well painted. “Regardez-moi ca, et ca, et ca, je vous demande!” he had exclaimed, making little dashes at the canvas with his glove, toward mystifying spots, on occasions when the artist was not at hand. The Proberts always fell into French when they spoke on a question of art. “Poor dear papa, he only understands le vieux jeu!” Gaston had explained, and he had still further to expound what he meant by the old game. The brand-newness of Charles Waterlow’s game had already been a bewilderment to Mr. Probert.
Francie remembered now—she had forgotten it—Margaret de Cliche’s having told her she meant to come again. She hoped the marquise thought by this time that, on canvas at least, she looked a little more like a lady. Mme. de Cliche smiled at her at any rate and kissed her, as if in fact there could be no mistake. She smiled also at Mr. Flack, on Francie’s introducing him, and only looked grave when, after she had asked where the others were—the papa and the grande soeur—the girl replied that she hadn’t the least idea: her party consisted only of herself and Mr. Flack. Then Mme. de Cliche’s grace stiffened, taking on a shade that brought back Francie’s sense that she was the individual, among all Gaston’s belongings, who had pleased her least from the first. Mme. de Douves was superficially more formidable, but with her the second impression was comparatively comforting. It was just this second impression of the marquise that was not. There were perhaps others behind it, but the girl hadn’t yet arrived at them. Mr. Waterlow mightn’t have been very much prepossessed with Mr. Flack, but he was none the less perfectly civil to him and took much trouble to show him the work he had in hand, dragging out canvases, changing lights, moving him off to see things at the other end of the great room. While the two gentlemen were at a distance Mme. de Cliche expressed to Francie the conviction that she would allow her to see her home: on which Francie replied that she was not going home, but was going somewhere else with Mr. Flack. And she explained, as if it simplified the matter, that this gentleman was a big editor. Her sister-in-law that was to be echoed the term and Francie developed her explanation. He was not the only big editor, but one of the many big editors, of an enormous American paper. He was going to publish an article—as big, as enormous, as all the rest of the business—about her portrait. Gaston knew him perfectly: it was Mr. Flack who had been the cause of Gaston’s being presented to her. Mme. de Cliche looked across at him as if the inadequacy of the cause projected an unfavourable light upon an effect hitherto perhaps not exactly measured; she appealed as to whether Francie thought Gaston would like her to drive about Paris alone with one of ces messieurs. “I’m sure I don’t know. I never asked him!” said Francie. “He ought to want me to be polite to a person who did so much for us.” Soon after this Mme. de Cliche retired with no fresh sign of any sense of the existence of Mr. Flack, though he stood in her path as she approached the door. She didn’t kiss our young lady again, and the girl observed that her leave-taking consisted of the simple words “Adieu mademoiselle.” She had already noted that in proportion as the Proberts became majestic they became articulately French. She and Mr. Flack remained in the studio but a short time longer, and when they were seated in the carriage again, at the door—they had come in Mr. Dosson’s open landau—her companion said “And now where shall we go?” He spoke as if on their way from the hotel he hadn’t touched upon the pleasant vision of a little turn in the Bois. He had insisted then that the day was made on purpose, the air full of spring. At present he seemed to wish to give himself the pleasure of making his companion choose that particular alternative. But she only answered rather impatiently:
“Wherever you like, wherever you like!” And she sat there swaying her parasol, looking about her, giving no order.
“Au Bois,” said George Flack to the coachman, leaning back on the soft cushions. For a few moments after the carriage had taken its easy elastic start they were silent; but he soon began again. “Was that lady one of your new relatives?”
“Do you mean one of Mr. Probert’s old ones? She’s his sister.”
“Is there any particular reason in that why she shouldn’t say good-morning to me?”
“She didn’t want you to remain with me. She doesn’t like you to go round with me. She wanted to carry me off.”
“What has she got against me?” Mr. Flack asked with a kind of portentous calm.
Francie seemed to consider a little. “Oh it’s these funny French ideas.”
“Funny? Some of them are very base,” said George Flack.
His companion made no answer; she only turned her eyes to right and left, admiring the splendid day and shining city. The great architectural vista was fair: the tall houses, with their polished shop-fronts, their balconies, their signs with accented letters, seemed to make a glitter of gilt and crystal as they rose in the sunny air. The colour of everything was cool and pretty and the sound of everything gay; the sense of a costly spectacle was everywhere. “Well, I like Paris anyway!” Francie exhaled at last with her little harmonising flatness.
“It’s lucky for you, since you’ve got to live here.”
“I haven’t got to; there’s no obligation. We haven’t settled anything about that.”
“Hasn’t that lady settled it for you?”
“Yes, very likely she has,” said Francie placidly enough. “I don’t like her so well as the others.”
“You like the others very much?”
“Of course I do. So would you if they had made so much of you.”
“That one at the studio didn’t make much of me, certainly,” Mr. Flack declared.
“Yes, she’s the most haughty,” Francie allowed.
“Well, what is it all about?” her friend demanded. “Who are they anyway?”
“Oh it would take me three hours to tell you,” the girl cheerfully sighed. “They go back a thousand years.”
“Well, we’ve GOT a thousand years—I mean three hours.” And George Flack settled himself more on his cushions and inhaled the pleasant air. “I AM getting something out of this drive, Miss Francie,” he went on. “It’s many a day since I’ve been to the old Bois. I don’t fool round much in woods.”
Francie replied candidly that for her too the occasion was most agreeable, and Mr. Flack pursued, looking round him with his hard smile, irrelevantly but sociably: “Yes, these French ideas! I don’t see how you can stand them. Those they have about young ladies are horrid.”
“Well, they tell me you like them better after you’re married.”
“Why after they’re married they’re worse—I mean the ideas. Every one knows that.”
“Well, they can make you like anything, the way they talk,” Francie said.
“And do they talk a great deal?”
“Well, I should think so. They don’t do much else, and all about the queerest things—things I never heard of.”
“Ah THAT I’ll bet my life on!” Mr. Flack returned with understanding.
“Of course,” his companion obligingly proceeded, “‘ve had most conversation with Mr. Probert.”
“The old gentleman?”
“No, very little with him. I mean with Gaston. But it’s not he that has told me most—it’s Mme. de Brecourt. She’s great on life, on THEIR life—it’s very interesting. She has told me all their histories, all their troubles and complications.”
“Complications?” Mr. Flack threw off. “That’s what she calls them. It seems very different from America. It’s just like a beautiful story—they have such strange feelings. But there are things you can see—without being told.”
“What sort of things?”
“Well, like Mme. de Cliche’s—” But Francie paused as if for a word.
Her friend was prompt with assistance. “Do you mean her complications?”
“Yes, and her husband’s. She has terrible ones. That’s why one must forgive her if she’s rather peculiar. She’s very unhappy.”
“Do you mean through her husband?”
“Yes, he likes other ladies better. He flirts with Mme. de Brives.”
Mr. Flack’s hand closed over it. “Mme. de Brives?”
“Yes, she’s lovely,” said Francie. “She ain’t very young, but she’s fearfully attractive. And he used to go every day to have tea with Mme. de Villepreux. Mme. de Cliche can’t bear Mme. de Villepreux.”
“Well, he seems a kind of MEAN man,” George Flack moralised.
“Oh his mother was very bad. That was one thing they had against the marriage.”
“Who had?—against what marriage?”
“When Maggie Probert became engaged.”
“Is that what they call her—Maggie?”
“Her brother does; but every one else calls her Margot. Old Mme. de Cliche had a horrid reputation. Every one hated her.”
“Except those, I suppose, who liked her too much!” Mr. Flack permitted himself to guess. “And who’s Mme. de Villepreux?” he proceeded.
“She’s the daughter of Mme. de Marignac.”
“And who’s THAT old sinner?” the young man asked.
“Oh I guess she’s dead,” said Francie. “She used to be a great friend of Mr. Probert—of Gaston’s father.”
“He used to go to tea with her?”
“Almost every day. Susan says he has never been the same since her death.”
“The way they do come out with ‘em!” Mr. Flack chuckled. “And who the mischief’s Susan?”
“Why Mme. de Brecourt. Mr. Probert just loved Mme. de Marignac. Mme. de Villepreux isn’t so nice as her mother. She was brought up with the Proberts, like a sister, and now she carries on with Maxime.”
“With Maxime?”
“That’s M. de Cliche.”
“Oh I see—I see!” and George Flack engulfed it. They had reached the top of the Champs Elysees and were passing below the wondrous arch to which that gentle eminence forms a pedestal and which looks down even on splendid Paris from its immensity and across at the vain mask of the Tuileries and the river-moated Louvre and the twin towers of Notre Dame painted blue by the distance. The confluence of carriages—a sounding stream in which our friends became engaged—rolled into the large avenue leading to the Bois de Boulogne. Mr. Flack evidently enjoyed the scene; he gazed about him at their neighbours, at the villas and gardens on either hand; he took in the prospect of the far-stretching brown boskages and smooth alleys of the wood, of the hour they had yet to spend there, of the rest of Francie’s pleasant prattle, of the place near the lake where they could alight and walk a little; even of the bench where they might sit down. “I see, I see,” he repeated with appreciation. “You make me feel quite as if I were in the grand old monde.”
