by Henry James
Five days later (there had been lively work in the meantime; Gaston turned so pale at moments that she feared it would all result in a mortal illness for him and Marguerite shed gallons of tears), Mr. Probert went to see the Dossons with his son. Mme. de Brécourt paid them another visit, a kind of official affair as she deemed it, accompanied by her husband; and the Baron de Douves and his wife, written to by Gaston, by his father and by Margaret and Susan, came up from the country full of tension and responsibility. M. de Douves was the person who took the family, all round, most seriously and most deprecated anything in the nature of crude and precipitate action. He was a very small black gentleman, with thick eyebrows and high heels (in the country, in the mud, he wore sabots with straw in them), who was suspected by his friends of believing that he looked like Louis XIV. It is perhaps a proof that something of the quality of this monarch was really recognised in him that no one had ever ventured to clear up this point by a question. “La famille c’est moi” appeared to be his tacit formula, and he carried his umbrella (he had very bad ones), with a kind of sceptral air. Mme. de Brécourt went so far as to believe that his wife, in confirmation of this, took herself in a manner for Mme. de Maintenon: she had lapsed into a provincial existence as she might have harked back to the seventeenth century; the world she lived in seemed about as far away. She was the largest, heaviest member of the family, and in the Vendée she was thought majestic, in spite of old clothes, of which she was fond and which added to her look of having come down from a remote past or reverted to it. She was at bottom an excellent woman, but she wrote roy and foy like her husband, and the action of her mind was wholly restricted to questions of relationship and alliance. She had an extraordinary patience of research and tenacity of grasp of a clue, and viewed people solely in the light projected upon them by others; that is, not as good or wicked, ugly or handsome, wise or foolish, but as grandsons, nephews, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters-in-law, cousins and second cousins. There was a certain expectation that she would leave memoirs. In Mme. de Brécourt’s eyes this pair were very shabby, they did not payer de mine—they fairly smelt of their province; “but for the reality of the thing,” she often said to herself, “they are worth all of us. We are diluted and they are pure, and any one with an eye would see it. “The thing” was the legitimist principle, the ancient faith and even, a little, the grand air.
The Marquis de Cliché did his duty with his wife, who mopped the decks, as Susan said, for the occasion, and was entertained in the red satin drawing-room by Mr. Dosson, Delia and Francie. Mr. Dosson wanted to go out when he heard of the approach of Gaston’s relations, and the young man had to instruct him that this wouldn’t do. The apartment in question had had a various experience, but it had probably never witnessed stranger doings than these laudable social efforts. Gaston was taught to feel that his family made a great sacrifice for him, but in a very few days he said to himself that he was safe, now they knew the worst. They made the sacrifice, they definitely agreed to it, but they judged it well that he should measure the full extent of it. “Gaston must never, never, never be allowed to forget what we have done for him.” Mme. de Brécourt told him that Marguerite de Cliché had expressed herself in that sense, at one of the family conclaves from which he had been absent. These high commissions sat, for several days, with great frequency, and the young man could feel that if there was help for him in discussion his case was promising. He flattered himself that he showed infinite patience and tact, and his expenditure of the latter quality in particular was in itself his only reward, for it was impossible he should tell Francie what arts he had to practise for her. He liked to think however that he practised them successfully; for he held that it was by such arts the civilised man is distinguished from the savage. What they cost him was made up simply in this—that his private irritation produced a kind of cheerful glow in regard to Mr. Dosson and Delia, whom he could not defend nor lucidly explain nor make people like, but whom he had ended, after so many days of familiar intercourse, by liking extremely himself. The way to get on with them—it was an immense simplification—was just to love them; one could do that even if one couldn’t talk with them. He succeeded in making Mme. de Brécourt seize this nuance; she embraced the idea with her quick inflammability. “Yes,” she said, “we must insist on their positive, not on their negative merits: their infinite generosity, their native delicacy. Their native delicacy, above all; we must work that!” And the brother and sister excited each other magnanimously to this undertaking. Sometimes, it must be added, they exchanged a glance which expressed a sudden slightly alarmed sense of the responsibility they had put on.
On the day Mr. Probert called at the Hôtel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham with his son, the pair walked away together, back to the Cours la Reine, without any immediate conversation. All that was said was some words of Mr. Probert’s, with Gaston’s rejoinder, as they crossed the Place de la Concorde.
“We should have to have them to dinner.”
The young man noted his father’s conditional, as if his acceptance of the Dossons were not yet complete; but he guessed all the same that the sight of them had not made a difference for the worse: they had let the old gentleman down more easily than was to have been feared. The call had not been noisy—a confusion of sounds; which was very happy, for Mr. Probert was particular in this—he could bear French noise but he could not bear American. As for English, he maintained that there was none. Mr. Dosson had scarcely spoken to him and yet had remained perfectly placid, which was exactly what Gaston would have chosen. Francie’s lover knew moreover (though he was a little disappointed that no charmed exclamation should have been dropped as they quitted the hotel), that her spell had worked: it was impossible the old man should not have liked her.
“Ah, do ask them, and let it be very soon,” he replied. “They’ll like it so much.”
“And whom can they meet—who can meet them?”
“Only the family—all of us: au complet. Other people we can have later.”
“All of us, au complet—that makes eight. And the three of them,” said Mr. Probert. Then he added, “Poor creatures!” This exclamation gave Gaston much pleasure; he passed his hand into his father’s arm. It promised well; it denoted a sentiment of tenderness for the dear little Dossons, confronted with a row of fierce French critics, judged by standards that they had never even heard of. The meeting of the two parents had not made the problem of their commerce any more clear; but young Probert was reminded freshly by his father’s ejaculation of that characteristic kindness which was really what he had built upon. The old gentleman, heaven knew, had prejudices, but if they were numerous, and some of them very curious, they were not rigid. He had also such nice inconsistent feelings, such irrepressible indulgences, and they would ease everything off. He was in short an old darling, and with an old darling, in the long run, one was always safe. When they reached the house in the Cours la Reine Mr. Probert said: “I think you told me you are dining out.”
“Yes, with our friends.”
“ ‘Our friends?’ Comme vous y allez! Come in and see me, then, on your return; but not later than half-past ten.”
From this the young man saw that he had swallowed the dose; if he had made up his mind that it wouldn’t do he would have announced the circumstance without more delay. This reflection was most agreeable, for Gaston was perfectly aware of how little he himself would have enjoyed a struggle. He would have carried it through, but he could not bear to think of it, and the sense that he was spared it made him feel at peace with all the world. The dinner at the hotel became a little banquet in honour of this state of things, especially as Francie and Delia raved, as they said, about his papa.
“Well, I expected something nice, but he goes far beyond,” Delia remarked. “That’s my idea of a gentleman.”
“Ah, for that—!” said Gaston.
“He’s so sweet. I’m not a bit afraid of him,” Francie declared.
“Why should
you be?”
“Well, I am of you,” the girl went on.
“Much you show it!” her lover exclaimed.
“Yes, I am,” she insisted, “at the bottom of all.”
“Well, that’s what a lady should be—of her husband.”
“Well, I don’t know; I’m more afraid than that. You’ll see.”
“I wish you were afraid of talking nonsense,” said Gaston Probert.
Mr. Dosson made no observation whatever about their honourable visitor; he listened in genial, unprejudiced silence. It is a sign of his prospective son-in-law’s perfect comprehension of him that Gaston knew this silence not to be in any degree restrictive: it did not mean that he had not been pleased. Mr. Dosson had simply nothing to say; he had not, like Gaston, a sensitive plate in his brain, and the important events of his life had never been personal impressions. His mind had had absolutely no history of that sort, and Mr. Probert’s appearance had not produced a revolution. If the young man had asked him how he liked his father he would have said, at the most, “Oh, I guess he’s all right!” But what was more candid even than this, in Gaston’s view (and it was quite touchingly so), was the attitude of the good gentleman and his daughters toward the others, Mesdames de Douves, de Brécourt and de Cliché and their husbands, who had now all filed before them. They believed that the ladies and the gentlemen alike had covered them with endearments, were candidly, gushingly glad to make their acquaintance. They had not in the least seen what was manner, the minimum of decent profession, and what the subtle resignation of old races who have known a long historical discipline and have conventional forms for their feelings—forms resembling singularly little the feelings themselves. Francie took people at their word when they told her that the whole manière dêtre of her family inspired them with an irresistible sympathy: that was a speech of which Mme. de Cliché had been capable, speaking as if for all the Proberts and for the old noblesse of France. It would not have occurred to the girl that such things need have been said as a mere garniture. Her lover, whose life had been surrounded with garniture and who therefore might have been expected not to notice it, had a fresh sense of it now: he reflected that manner might be a very misleading symbol, might cover pitfalls and bottomless gulfs, when it had attained that perfection and corresponded so little to fact. What he had wanted was that his people should be very civil at the hotel; but with such a high standard of compliment where after all was sincerity? And without sincerity how could people get on together when it came to their settling down to common life? Then the Dossons might have surprises, and the surprises would be painful in proportion as their present innocence was great. As to the high standard itself there was no manner of doubt; it was magnificent in its way.
VIII
WHEN, ON COMING HOME THE EVENING AFTER his father had made the acquaintance of the Dossons, Gaston went into the room in which the old man habitually sat, Mr. Probert said, laying down his book and keeping on his glasses: “Of course you will go on living with me. You must understand that I don’t consent to your going away. You will have to occupy the rooms that Susan and Alphonse had.”
Gaston observed with pleasure the transition from the conditional to the future and also the circumstance that his father was quietly reading, according to his custom when he sat at home of an evening. This proved he was not too much off the hinge. He read a great deal, and very serious books; works about the origin of things—of man, of institutions, of speech, of religion. This habit he had taken up more particularly since the circle of his social life had grown so much smaller. He sat there alone, turning his pages softly, contentedly, with the lamp-light shining on his refined old head and embroidered dressing-gown. Formerly he was out every night in the week—Gaston was perfectly aware that to many dull people he must even have appeared a little frivolous. He was essentially a social animal, and indeed—except perhaps poor Jane, in her damp old castle in Brittany—they were all social animals. That was doubtless part of the reason why the family had acclimatised itself in France. They had affinities with a society of conversation; they liked general talk and old high salons, slightly tarnished and dim, containing precious relics, where there was a circle round the fire and winged words flew about and there was always some clever person before the chimneypiece, holding or challenging the rest. That figure, Gaston knew, especially in the days before he could see for himself, had very often been his father, the lightest and most amiable specimen of the type that liked to take possession of the hearthrug. People left it to him; he was so transparent, like a glass screen, and he never triumphed in argument. His word on most subjects was not felt to be the last (it was usually not more conclusive than a shrugging, inarticulate resignation, an “Ah, you know, what will you have?”); but he had been none the less a part of the essence of some dozen good houses, most of them over the river, in the conservative faubourg, and several to-day emptied receptacles, extinguished fires. They made up Mr. Probert’s world—a world not too small for him and yet not too large, though some of them supposed themselves to be very great institutions. Gaston knew the succession of events that had helped to make a difference, the most salient of which were the death of his brother, the death of his mother and above all perhaps the extinction of Mme. de Marignac, to whom the old gentleman used still to go three or four evenings out of the seven and sometimes even in the morning besides. Gaston was well aware what a place she had held in his father’s life and affection, how they had grown up together (her people had been friends of his grandfather when that fine old Southern worthy came, a widower with a young son and several negroes, to take his pleasure in Paris in the time of Louis Philippe), and how much she had had to do with marrying his sisters. He was not ignorant that her friendship and all its exertions were often mentioned as explaining their position, so remarkable in a society in which they had begun after all as outsiders. But he would have guessed, even if he had not been told, what his father said to that. To offer the Proberts a position was to carry water to the fountain; they had not left their own behind them in Carolina; it had been large enough to stretch across the sea. As to what it was in Carolina there was no need of being explicit. This adoptive Parisian was by nature presupposing, but he was admirably gentle (that was why they let him talk to them before the fire—he was such a sympathising oracle), and after the death of his wife and of Mme. de Marignac, who had been her friend too, he was gentler than before. Gaston had been able to see that it made him care less for everything (except indeed the true faith, to which he drew still closer), and this increase of indifference doubtless helped to explain his collapse in relation to common Americans.
“We shall be thankful for any rooms you will give us,” the young man said. “We shall fill out the house a little, and won’t that be rather an improvement, shrunken as you and I have become?”
“You will fill it out a good deal, I suppose, with Mr. Dosson and the other girl.”
“Ah, Francie won’t give up her father and sister, certainly; and what should you think of her if she did? But they are not intrusive; they are essentially modest people; they won’t put themselves upon us. They have great natural discretion.”
“Do you answer for that? Susan does; she is always assuring one of it,” Mr. Probert said. “The father has so much that he wouldn’t even speak to me.”
“He didn’t know what to say to you.”
“How then shall I know what to say to him?”
“Ah, you always know!” Gaston exclaimed.
“How will that help us if he doesn’t know what to answer?”
“You will draw him out—he is full of bonhomie.”
“Well, I won’t quarrel with your bonhomme (if he’s silent—there are much worse faults), nor even with the fat young lady, though she is evidently vulgar. It is not for ourselves I am afraid; it’s for them. They will be very unhappy.”
“Never, never!” said Gaston. “They are too simple. They are not morbid. And don’t you like Francie? You haven’t
told me so,” he added in a moment.
“She says ‘Parus,’ my dear boy.”
“Ah, to Susan too that seemed the principal obstacle. But she has got over it. I mean Susan has got over the obstacle. We shall make her speak French; she has a capital disposition for it; her French is already almost as good as her English.”
“That oughtn’t to be difficult. What will you have? Of course she is very pretty and I’m sure she is good. But I won’t tell you she is a marvel, because you must remember (you young fellows think your own point of view and your own experience everything), that I have seen beauties without number. I have known the most charming women of our time—women of an order to which Miss Francie, con rispetto parlando, will never begin to belong. I’m difficult about women—how can I help it? Therefore when you pick up a little American girl at an inn and bring her to us as a miracle, I feel how standards alter. J’ai vu mieux que ça, mon cher. However, I accept everything to-day, as you know; when once one has lost one’s enthusiasm everything is the same, and one might as well perish by the sword as by famine.”
“I hoped she would fascinate you on the spot,” Gaston remarked, rather ruefully.
“ ‘Fascinate’—the language you fellows use!”
“Well, she will yet.”
“She will never know at least that she doesn’t: I will promise you that,” said Mr. Probert.
“Ah, be sincere with her, father—she’s worth it!” his son broke out.
When the old gentleman took that tone, the tone of vast experience and a fastidiousness justified by ineffable recollections, Gaston was more provoked than he could say, though he was also considerably amused, for he had a good while since made up his mind that there was an element of stupidity in it. It was fatuous to square one’s self so serenely in the absence of a sense: so far from being fine it was gross not to feel Francie Dosson. He thanked God he did. He didn’t know what old frumps his father might have frequented (the style of 1830, with long curls in front, a vapid simper, a Scotch plaid dress and a body, in a point suggestive of twenty whalebones, coming down to the knees), but he could remember Mme. de Marignac’s Tuesdays and Thursdays and Fridays, with Sundays and other days thrown in, and the taste that prevailed in that milieu: the books they admired, the verses they read and recited, the pictures, great heaven! they thought good, and the three busts of the lady of the house, in different corners (as a Diana, a Druidess and a Croyante: her shoulders were supposed to make up for her head), effigies which to-day—even the least bad, Canova’s—would draw down a public castigation upon their authors.