by Henry James
Francie made no immediate response to this appeal, but after a moment she began: “Why did you ask me so many questions that day?”
“Because I always ask questions—it’s 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 are 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,” said Francie.
“You put it in the 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 gentleness was still unruffled by it. She hesitated, 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 would have disgusted you. I don’t care—even a little sympathy will do—whatever you’ve got left.” He paused, looking at her, but she remained silent; 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?” Francie asked, with all her sweet 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 that introduced us—?” And she paused, with a kind of weary delicacy.
“Not to those snobs that are screaming like frightened peacocks. I beg your pardon—I haven’t that on my conscience!”
“Well, you introduced us to Mr. Waterlow and he introduced us to—to his friends,” Francie explained, blushing, as if it were a fault, for the inexactness engendered 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, “Lord, 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 ideas—!” the young man exclaimed, staring. “Your mind never produced that—it was your sister’s.”
“Wasn’t it natural it should occur to me, since if, as you say, you would 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 serious—serious even to pain.
“We’re square?” Mr. Flack repeated.
“I don’t think you ought to ask for anything more. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye? Never!” cried the young man.
He had an air of flushing with disappointment which really showed that he had come with a certain confidence of success.
Something in the way Francie repeated her “Goodbye!” indicated that she perceived this and that in the vision of such a confidence there was little to please her. “Do go away!” she broke out.
“Well, I’ll come back very soon,” said Mr. Flack, taking 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 he turned round. “Will you tell me this, anyway? Are you going to marry Mr. Probert—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,” said Mr. Flack, going out.
XIV
WHEN GASTON PROBERT CAME IN THAT EVENING he was received by Mr. Dosson and Delia, and when he asked where Francie was he was told by Delia that she would show herself half an hour later. Francie had instructed her sister that as Gaston 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 made this speech before Mr. Dosson the old man protested that he was not in any hurry for the business; what he wanted to find out most was whether he had a good time—whether he liked it over there. Gaston might have liked it, but he did not 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 had not received his assurance to the contrary she would have believed he was right down sick. He confessed 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 reticence on this point, and the manner in which she had descended upon him in the morning, after Mr. Flack had come up stairs, was a lesson he was not likely soon to forget. It had been impressed upon him that she was indeed wiser than he could pretend to be, and he was now mindful that he must not 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 is 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 asked, helplessly.
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 added to Mr. Dosson’s sense of 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 struck him as the failure of friendship, and not the publication of details about the Proberts. Deep in Mr. Dosson’s spirit was a sense that if these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn’t pity them, and if they hadn’t done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people 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 did not 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 could not 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 the young man. 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. 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: a circumstance 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 evinced no superficial joy. 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 genially inquired.
Gaston Probert hesitated. “Well, the light for instance.”
“The light—the electric?”
“No, the solar! I thought it rather hard, too much like the scratching of a slate-pencil.” As Mr. Dosson looked vague at this, as if the reference were to some enterprise (a great lamp-company) of which he had not heard—conveying a suggestion that he was perhaps staying away too long, Gaston immediately added: “I really think Francie might come in. I wrote to her that I wanted particularly to see her.”
“I will go and call her—I’ll make her come,” said Delia, going out. She left her companions together and Gaston returned to the subject of Mr. Munster, Mr. Dosson’s former partner, to whom he had taken a letter and who had shown him every sort of civility. Mr. Dosson was pleased at this; nevertheless he broke out, suddenly—
“Look here, you know; if you’ve got anything to say that you don’t think very acceptable you had better say it to me.” Gaston coloured, but his reply was checked by Delia’s quick return. She announced that her sister would be obliged if he would go into the little dining-room—he would find her there. She had something to communicate to him that she could mention only in private. It was very comfortable; there was a lamp and a fire. “Well, I guess she can take care of herself!” Mr. Dosson, at this, commented, laughing. “What does she want to say to him?” he demanded, when Gaston had passed out.
“Gracious knows! She won’t tell me. But it’s too flat, at his age, to live in such terror.”
“In such terror?”
“Why, of your father. You’ve got to choose.”
“How, to choose?”
“Why, if there’s a person you like and he doesn’t like.”
“You mean you can’t choose your father,” said Mr. Dosson, thoughtfully.
“Of course you can’t.”
“Well then, please don’t like any one. But perhaps I should like him,” added Mr. Dosson, faithful to his cheerful tradition.
“I guess you’d have to!” said Delia.
In the small salle-à-manger, when Gaston went in, Francie was standing by the empty table, and as soon as she saw him she said—“You can’t say I didn’t tell you that I should do something. I did nothing else, from the first. So you were warned again and again; you knew what to expect.”
“Ah, don’t say that again; if you knew how it acts on my nerves!” the young man groaned. “You speak as if you had done it on purpose—to carry out your absurd threat.”
“Well, what does it matter, when it’s all over?”
“It’s not all over. Would to God it were!”
The girl stared. “Don’t you know what I sent for you to come in here for? To bid you good-bye.”
“Francie, what has got into you?” he said. “What deviltry, what poison?” It would have been a singular sight to an observer, the opposition of these young figures, so fresh, so candid, so meant for confidence, but now standing apart and looking at each other in a wan defiance which hardened their faces.
“Don’t they despise me—don’t they hate me? You do yourself! Certainly you’ll be glad for me to break off and spare you such a difficulty, such a responsibility.”
“I don’t understand; it’s like some hideous dream!” Gaston Probert cried. “You act as if you were doing something for a wager, and you talk so. I don’t believe it—I don’t believe a word of it.”
“What don’t you believe?”
“That you told him—that you told him knowingly. If you’ll take that back (it’s too monstrous!) if you’ll deny it and declare you were practised upon and surprised, everything can still be arranged.”
“Do you want me to lie?” asked Francie Dosson. “I thought you would like it.”
“Oh, Francie, Francie!” moaned the wretched youth, with tears in his eyes.
“What can be arranged? What do you mean by everything?” she went on.
“Why, they’ll accept it; they’ll ask for nothing more. It’s your participation they can’t forgive.”
“They can’t? Why do you talk to me about them? I’m not engaged to them.”
“Oh, Francie, I am! And it’s they who are buried beneath that filthy rubbish!”
She flushed at this characterisation of Mr. Flack’s epistle; then she said, in a softer voice: “I’m very sorry—very sorry indeed. But evidently I’m not delicate.”
He looked at her, helpless and bitter. “It’s not the newspapers, in your country, that would have made you so. Lord, they’re too incredible! And the ladies have them on their tables.”
“You told me we couldn’t here—that the Paris ones are too bad,” said Francie.
“Bad they are, God knows; but they have never published anything like that—poured forth such a flood of impudence on decent, quiet people who only want to be left alone.”
Francie sank into a chair by the table, as if she were too tired to stand longer, and with her arms spread out on the lamp-lit plush she looked up at him. “Was it there you saw it?”
“Yes, a few days before I sailed. I hated them from the moment I got there—I looked at them very little. But that was a chance. I opened the paper in the hall of an hotel (there was a big marble floor and spittoons!) and my eyes fell upon that horror. It made me ill.”
“Did you think it was me?”
“About as soon as I supposed it was my father. But I was too mystified, too tormented.”
“Then why didn’t you write to me, if you didn’t think it was me?”
“Write to you? I wrote to you every three days.”
“Not after that.”
“Well, I may have omitted a post at the last—I thought it might be Delia,” Gaston added in a moment.
“Oh, she didn’t want me to do it—the day I went with him, the day I told him. She tried to prevent me.”
“Would to God then she had!”
“Haven’t you told them she’s delicate too?” Francie asked, in her strange tone.
Gaston made no answer to this; but he broke out—“What power, in heaven’s name, has he got over you? What spell has he worked?”
“He’s an old friend—he helped us ever so much when we were first in Paris.”
&nbs
p; “But, my dearest child, what friends—what a man to know!”
“If we hadn’t known him we shouldn’t have known you. Remember that it was Mr. Flack who brought us that day to Mr. Waterlow’s.”
“Oh, you would have come some other way,” said Gaston.
“Not in the least. We knew nothing about any other way. He helped us in everything—he showed us everything. That was why I told him—when he asked me. I liked him for what he had done.”
Gaston, who had now also seated himself, listened to this attentively. “I see. It was a kind of delicacy.”
“Oh, a kind!” She smiled.
He remained a little with his eyes on her face. “Was it for me?”
“Of course it was for you.”
“Ah, how strange you are!” he exclaimed, tenderly. “Such contradictions—on s’y perd. I wish you would say that to them, that way. Everything would be right.”
“Never, never!” said the girl. “I have wronged them, and nothing will ever be the same again. It was fatal. If I felt as they do I too would loathe the person who should have done such a thing. It doesn’t seem to me so bad—the thing in the paper; but you know best. You must go back to them. You know best,” she repeated.
“They were the last, the last people in France, to do it to. The sense of excruciation—of pollution,” Gaston rejoined, making his reflections audibly.
“Oh, you needn’t tell me—I saw them all there!” Francie exclaimed.
“It must have been a dreadful scene. But you didn’t brave them, did you?”
“Brave them—what are you talking about? To you that idea is incredible!”
“No, it isn’t,” he said, gently.
“Well, go back to them—go back,” she repeated. At this he half threw himself across the table, to seize her hands; but she drew away and, as he came nearer, pushed her chair back, springing up. “You know you didn’t come here to tell me you are ready to give them up.”
He rose to his feet, slowly. “To give them up? I have been battling with them till I’m ready to drop. You don’t know how they feel—how they must feel.”