The Reverberator: A Novel

by Henry James

  The young man was professionally so occupied with other people’s affairs that it should doubtless be mentioned to his praise that he still managed to have affairs—or at least an affair—of his own. That affair was Francie Dosson, and he was pleased to perceive how little she cared what had become of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenheim and Master Samuel and Miss Cora. He counted all the things she didn’t care about—her soft inadvertent eyes helped him to do that; and they footed up so, as he would have said, that they gave him a pleasant sense of a free field. If she had so few interests there was the greater possibility that a young man of bold conceptions and cheerful manners might become one. She had usually the air of waiting for something, with a sort of amused resignation, while tender, shy, indefinite little fancies hummed in her brain; so that she would perhaps recognise in him the reward of patience. George Flack was aware that he exposed his friends to considerable fatigue; he brought them back pale and taciturn from suburban excursions and from wanderings often rather aimless and casual among the boulevards and avenues of the town. He regarded them at such moments with complacency, however, for these were hours of diminished resistance: he had an idea that he should be able eventually to circumvent Delia if he could only watch for some time when she was tired. He liked to make them all feel helpless and dependent, and this was not difficult with people who were so modest and artless, so unconscious of the boundless power of wealth. Sentiment, in our young man, was not a scruple nor a source of weakness; but he thought it really touching, the little these good people knew of what they could do with their money. They had in their hands a weapon of infinite range and yet they were incapable of firing a shot for themselves. They had a kind of social humility; it appeared never to have occurred to them that, added to their amiability, their money gave them a value. This used to strike George Flack on certain occasions when he came back to find them in the places where he had dropped them while he rushed off to give a turn to one of his screws. They never played him false, never wearied of waiting; always sat patient and submissive, usually at a café to which he had introduced them or in a row of chairs on the boulevard, or in the Tuileries or the Champs Elysées.

  He introduced them to many cafés, in different parts of Paris, being careful to choose those which (in his view) young ladies might frequent with propriety, and there were two or three in the neighbourhood of their hotel where they became frequent and familiar figures. As the late spring days grew warmer and brighter they usually sat outside on the “terrace”—the little expanse of small tables at the door of the establishment, where Mr. Flack, on the return, could descry them from afar at their post in exactly the same position to which he had committed them. They complained of no satiety in watching the many-coloured movement of the Parisian streets; and if some of the features in the panorama were base they were only so in a version which the imagination of our friends was incapable of supplying. George Flack considered that he was rendering a positive service to Mr. Dosson: wouldn’t the old gentleman have sat all day in the court anyway? and wasn’t the boulevard better than the court? It was his theory, too, that he flattered and caressed Miss Francie’s father, for there was no one to whom he had furnished more copious details about the affairs, the projects and prospects, of the Reverberator. He had left no doubt in the old gentleman’s mind as to the race he himself intended to run, and Mr. Dosson used to say to him every day, the first thing, “Well, where have you got to now?” as if he took a real interest. George Flack narrated his interviews, to which Delia and Francie gave attention only in case they knew something of the persons on whom the young emissary of the Reverberator had conferred this distinction; whereas Mr. Dosson listened, with his tolerant interposition of “Is that so?” and “Well, that’s good,” just as submissively when he heard of the celebrity in question for the first time.

  In conversation with his daughters Mr. Flack was frequently the theme, though introduced much more by the young ladies than by himself, and especially by Delia, who announced at an early period that she knew what he wanted and that it wasn’t in the least what she wanted. She amplified this statement very soon—at least as regards her interpretation of Mr. Flack’s designs: a certain mystery still hung about her own, which, as she intimated, had much more to recommend them. Delia’s vision of the danger as well as the advantage of being a pretty girl was closely connected (and this was natural) with the idea of an “engagement”: this idea was in a manner complete in itself—her imagination failed in the oddest way to carry it into the next stage. She wanted her sister to be engaged but she wanted her not at all to be married, and she had not clearly made up her mind as to how Francie was to enjoy both the promotion and the arrest. It was a secret source of humiliation to her that there had as yet to her knowledge been no one with whom her sister had exchanged vows: if her conviction on this subject could have expressed itself intelligibly it would have given you a glimpse of a droll state of mind—a dim theory that a bright girl ought to be able to try successive aspirants. Delia’s conception of what such a trial might consist of was strangely innocent: it was made up of calls and walks and buggy-drives and above all of being spoken of as engaged; and it never occurred to her that a repetition of lovers rubs off a young lady’s delicacy. She felt herself a born old maid and never dreamed of a lover of her own—he would have been dreadfully in her way; but she dreamed of love as something in its nature very delicate. All the same she discriminated; it did lead to something after all, and she desired that for Francie it should not lead to a union with Mr. Flack. She looked at such a union in the light of that other view which she kept as yet to herself but which she was ready to produce so soon as the right occasion should come up; and she told her sister that she would never speak to her again if she should let this young man suppose—And here she always paused, plunging again into impressive reticence.

  “Suppose what?” Francie asked, as if she were totally unacquainted (which indeed she really was) with the suppositions of young men.

  “Well, you’ll see, when he begins to say things you won’t like.” This sounded ominous on Delia’s part, but she had in reality very little apprehension; otherwise she would have risen against the custom adopted by Mr. Flack of perpetually coming round: she would have given her attention (though it struggled in general unsuccessfully with all this side of their life) to some prompt means of getting away from Paris. She told her father what in her view the correspondent of the Reverberator was “after”; but it must be added that she did not make him feel very strongly on the matter. This however was not of importance, with her inner sense that Francie would never really do anything—that is would never really like anything—they didn’t like.

  Her sister’s docility was a great comfort to her, especially as it was addressed in the first instance to herself. She liked and disliked certain things much more than the younger girl did either; and Francie was glad to take advantage of her reasons, having so few of her own. They served—Delia’s reasons—for Mr. Dosson as well, so that Francie was not guilty of any particular irreverence in regarding her sister rather than her father as the controller of her fate. A fate was rather a cumbersome and formidable possession, which it relieved her that some kind person should undertake the keeping of. Delia had somehow got hold of hers first—before even her father, and ever so much before Mr. Flack; and it lay with Delia to make any change. She could not have accepted any gentleman as a husband without reference to Delia, any more than she could have done up her hair without a glass. The only action taken by Mr. Dosson in consequence of his elder daughter’s revelations was to embrace the idea as a subject of daily pleasantry. He was fond, in his intercourse with his children, of some small usual joke, some humorous refrain; and what could have been more in the line of true domestic sport than a little gentle but unintermitted raillery upon Francie’s conquest? Mr. Flack’s attributive intentions became a theme of indulgent parental chaff, and the girl was neither dazzled nor annoyed by such familiar references to them. “Well,
he has told us about half we know,” she used often to reply.

  Among the things he told them was that this was the very best time in the young lady’s life to have her portrait painted and the best place in the world to have it done well; also that he knew a “lovely artist,” a young American of extraordinary talent, who would be delighted to undertake the work. He conducted them to this gentleman’s studio, where they saw several pictures by which they were considerably mystified. Francie protested that she didn’t want to be done that way, and Delia declared that she would as soon have her sister shown up in a magic lantern. They had had the fortune not to find Mr. Waterlow at home, so that they were free to express themselves and the pictures were shown them by his servant. They looked at them as they looked at bonnets and confections when they went to expensive shops; as if it were a question, among so many specimens, of the style and colour they would choose. Mr. Waterlow’s productions struck them for the most part in the same manner as those garments which ladies classify as frights, and they went away with a very low opinion of the young American master. George Flack told them, however, that they couldn’t get out of it, inasmuch as he had already written home to the Reverberator that Francie was to sit. They accepted this somehow as a kind of supernatural sign that she would have to; for they believed everything that they heard quoted from a newspaper. Moreover Mr. Flack explained to them that it would be idiotic to miss such an opportunity to get something at once precious and cheap; for it was well known that Impressionism was going to be the art of the future, and Charles Waterlow was a rising Impressionist. It was a new system altogether and the latest improvement in art. They didn’t want to go back, they wanted to go forward, and he would give them an article that would fetch five times the money in a couple of years. They were not in search of a bargain, but they allowed themselves to be inoculated with any reason which they thought would be characteristic of earnest people; and he even convinced them, after a little, that when once they had got used to Impressionism they would never look at anything else. Mr. Waterlow was the man, among the young, and he had no interest in praising him, because he was not a personal friend; his reputation was advancing with strides, and any one with any sense would want to secure something before the rush.

  III

  THE YOUNG LADIES CONSENTED TO RETURN TO the Avenue de Villiers, and this time they found the celebrity of the future. He was smoking cigarettes with a friend, while coffee was served to the two gentlemen (it was just after luncheon), on a vast divan, covered with scrappy oriental rugs and cushions; it looked, Francie thought, as if the artist had set up a carpet-shop in a corner. She thought him very pleasant; and it may be mentioned without circumlocution that the young lady ushered in by the vulgar American reporter, whom he didn’t like and who had already come too often to his studio to pick up “glimpses” (the painter wondered how in the world he had picked her up), this charming candidate for portraiture struck Charles Waterlow on the spot as an adorable model. She made, it may further be declared, quite the same impression on the gentleman who was with him and who never took his eyes off her while her own rested, afresh, on several finished and unfinished canvases. This gentleman asked of his friend, at the end of five minutes, the favour of an introduction to her; in consequence of which Francie learned that his name (she thought it singular) was Gaston Probert. Mr. Probert was a kind-eyed, smiling youth, who fingered the points of his moustache; he was represented by Mr. Waterlow as an American, but he pronounced the American language (so at least it seemed to Francie) as if it had been French.

  After Francie had quitted the studio with Delia and Mr. Flack (her father, on this occasion, was not of the party), the two young men, falling back upon their divan, broke into expressions of aesthetic rapture, declared that the girl had qualities—oh, but qualities, and a charm of line! They remained there for an hour, contemplating these rare properties in the smoke of their cigarettes. You would have gathered from their conversation (though, as regards much of it, only perhaps with the aid of a grammar and dictionary) that the young lady possessed plastic treasures of the highest order, of which she was evidently quite unconscious. Before this however Mr. Waterlow had come to an understanding with his visitors—it had been settled that Miss Francina should sit for him at his first hour of leisure. Unfortunately that hour presented itself as still remote and he was unable to make a definite appointment. He had sitters on his hands—he had at least three portraits to finish before going to Spain. And he adverted with bitterness to the journey to Spain—a little excursion laid out precisely with his friend Probert for the last weeks of the spring, the first of the southern summer, the time of the long days and the real light. Gaston Probert re-echoed his regrets, for though he had no business with Miss Francina (he liked her name), he also wanted to see her again. They half agreed to give up Spain (they had, after all, been there before), so that Waterlow might take the girl in hand without delay, the moment he had knocked off his present work. This amendment did not hold however, for other considerations came up and the artist resigned himself to the arrangement on which the Miss Dossons had quitted him: he thought it so characteristic of their nationality that they should settle a matter of that sort for themselves. This was simply that they should come back in the autumn, when he should be comparatively free: then there would be a margin and they might all take their time. At present, before long (by the time he should be ready), the question of Miss Francina’s leaving Paris for the summer would be sure to come up, and that would be a tiresome interruption. She liked Paris, she had no plans for the autumn and only wanted a reason to come back about the twentieth of September. Mr. Waterlow remarked humorously that she evidently bossed the shop. Meanwhile, before starting for Spain, he would see her as often as possible—his eye would take possession of her.

  His companion envied him his eye; he intimated that he was jealous of his eye. It was perhaps as a step towards establishing his right to be jealous that Mr. Probert left a card upon the Miss Dossons at the Hôtel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham, having first ascertained that such a proceeding would not, by the young American sisters, be regarded as an unwarrantable liberty. Gaston Probert was an American who had never been in America, and he was obliged to take counsel on such an emergency as that. He knew that in Paris young men did not call at hotels on honourable damsels; but he also knew that honourable damsels did not visit young men in studios; and he had no guide, no light that he could trust, save the wisdom of his friend Waterlow, which, however, was for the most part communicated to him in a derisive and misleading form. Waterlow, who was after all himself an ornament of the French and the very French school, jeered at his want of national instinct, at the way he never knew by which end to take hold of a compatriot. Poor Probert was obliged to confess that he had had terribly little practice, and in the great medley of aliens and brothers (and even more of sisters), he couldn’t tell which was which. He would have had a country and countrymen, to say nothing of countrywomen, if he could; but that matter had not been settled for him and there is a difficulty in settling it for one’s self. Born in Paris, he had been brought up altogether on French lines, in a family which French society had irrecoverably absorbed. His father, a Carolinian and a Catholic, was a Gallomaniac of the old American type. His three sisters had married Frenchmen, and one of them lived in Brittany and the others much of the time in Touraine. His only brother had fallen, during the terrible year, in defence of their adoptive country. Yet Gaston, though he had had an old Legitimist marquis for his godfather, was not legally one of its children: his mother had, on her deathbed, extorted from him the promise that he would not take service in its armies; she considered, after the death of her elder son (Gaston, in 1870, was a boy of ten), that the family had been patriotic enough for courtesy.

  The young man therefore, between two stools, had no clear sitting-place: he wanted to be as American as he could and yet not less French than he was; he was afraid to give up the little that he was and find that what
he might be was less—he shrank from a flying leap which might drop him in the middle of the sea. At the same time he was aware that the only way to know how it feels to be an American is to try it, and he had many a purpose of making the westward journey. His family, however, had been so completely Gallicised that the affairs of each member of it were the affairs of all the rest, and his father, his sisters and his brothers-in-law had not yet sufficiently made this scheme their own for him to feel that it was really his. It was a family in which there was no individual but only a collective property. Meanwhile he tried, as I say, by safer enterprises, and especially by going a good deal to see Charles Waterlow in the Avenue de Villiers, whom he believed to be his dearest friend, formed for his affection by Monsieur Carolus. He had an idea that in this manner he kept himself in touch with his countrymen; and he thought he tried especially when he left that card on the Misses Dosson. He was in search of freshness, but he need not have gone far: he need only have turned his lantern upon his own young breast to find a considerable store of it. Like many unoccupied young men at the present hour he gave much attention to art, lived as much as possible in that alternative world, where leisure and vagueness are so mercifully relieved of their crudity. To make up for his want of talent he espoused the talent of others (that is, of several), and was as sensitive and conscientious about them as he might have been about himself. He defended certain of Waterlow’s purples and greens as he would have defended his own honour; and in regard to two or three other painters had convictions which belonged almost to the undiscussable part of life. He had not in general a high sense of success, but what kept it down particularly was his indocile hand, the fact that, such as they were, Waterlow’s purples and greens, for instance, were far beyond him. If he had not failed there other failures would not have mattered, not even that of not having a country; and it was on the occasion of his friend’s agreement to paint that strange, lovely girl, whom he liked so much and whose companions he failed to like, that he felt supremely without a vocation. Freshness was there at least, if he had only had the method. He prayed earnestly, in relation to methods, for a providential reinforcement of Waterlow’s sense of this quality. If Waterlow had a fault it was that he was sometimes a little stale.