by Henry James
“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 decisions and troubles impossible to you.”
“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 make it worse by your talk. I don’t believe it—I don’t believe a word of it.”
“What don’t you believe?” she asked.
“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 give me your assurance that you were practised upon and surprised, everything can still be arranged.”
“Do you want me to lie?” asked Francie Dosson. “I thought you’d like pleasant words.”
“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 of ‘them’? I’m not engaged to ‘them’!” she said with a shrill little laugh.
“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, but returned as with more gravity: “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’ve 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 to a chair by the table as if she were too tired to stand longer, and with her arms spread out on the lamplit plush she looked up at him. “Was it there you saw it?”
He was on his feet opposite, and she made at this moment the odd reflexion that she had never “realised” he had such fine lovely uplifted eyebrows. “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 on that horror. It made me ill.”
“Did you think it was me?” she patiently gaped.
“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,” he cried.
“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,” Francie insisted.
“Would to God then she had!” he wailed.
“Haven’t you told them she’s delicate too?” she asked in her strange tone.
He made no answer to this; he only continued: “What power, in heaven’s name, has he got over you? What spell has he worked?”
“He’s a gay old friend—he helped us ever so much when we were first in Paris.”
“But, my dearest child, what ‘gaieties,’ what friends—what a man to know!”
“If we hadn’t known him we shouldn’t have known YOU. Remember it was Mr. Flack who brought us that day to Mr. Waterlow’s.”
“Oh you’d have come some other way,” said Gaston, who made nothing of that.
“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 desperately 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 cried with tenderness. “Such contradictions—on s’y perd. I wish you’d say that to THEM, that way. Everything would be right.”
“Never, never!” said the girl. “I’ve 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 desecration, of pollution, you see”—he explained as if for conscience.
“Oh you needn’t tell me—I saw them all there!” she answered.
“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’s incredible!” she then hopelessly sighed.
But he wouldn’t have this. “No, no—I can imagine cases.” He clearly had SOME vision of independence, though he looked awful about it.
“But this isn’t a case, hey?” she demanded. “Well then 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’re ready to give them up.”
“To give them up?” He only echoed it with all his woe at first. “I’ve been battling with them till I’m ready to drop. You don’t know how they feel—how they MUST feel.”
“Oh yes I do. All this has made me older, every hour.”
“It has made you—so extraordinarily!—more beautiful,” said Gaston Probert.
“I don’t care. Nothing will induce me to consent to any sacrifice.”
“Some sacrifice there must be. Give me time—give me time, I’ll manage it. I only wish they hadn’t seen you there in the Bois.”
“In the Bois?”
“That Marguerite hadn’t seen you—with that lying blackguard. That’s the image they can’t get over.”
Well, it was as if it had been the thing she had got herself most prepared for—so that she must speak accordingly. “I see you can’t either, Gaston. Anyhow I WAS there and I felt it all right. That’s all I can say. You must take me as I am,” said Francie Dosson.
“Don’t—don’t; you infuriate me!” he pleaded, frowning.
She had seemed to soften, but she was in a sudden flame again. “Of course I do, and I shall do it again. We’re too terribly different. Everything makes you so. You CAN’T give them up—ever, ever. Good-bye— good-bye! That’s all I wanted to tell you.”
“I’ll go and throttle him!” the young man almost howled.
“Very well, go! Good-bye.” She had stepped quickly to the door and had already opened it, vanishing as she had done the other time.
“Francie, Francie!” he supplicated, following her into the passage. The door was not the one that led to the salon; it communicated with the other apartments. The girl had plunged into these—he already heard her push a sharp bolt. Presently he went away without taking leave of Mr. Dosson and Delia.
“Why he acts just like Mr. Flack,” said the old man when they discovered that the interview in the dining-room had come to an end.
The next day was a bad one for Charles Waterlow, his work in the Avenue de Villiers being terribly interrupted. Gaston Probert invited himself to breakfast at noon and remained till the time at which the artist usually went out—an extravagance partly justified by the previous separation of several weeks. During these three or four hours Gaston walked up and down the studio while Waterlow either sat or stood before his easel. He put his host vastly out and acted on his nerves,
but this easy genius was patient with him by reason of much pity, feeling the occasion indeed more of a crisis in the history of the troubled youth than the settlement of one question would make it. Waterlow’s compassion was slightly tinged with contempt, for there was being settled above all, it seemed to him, and, alas, in the wrong sense, the question of his poor friend’s character. Gaston was in a fever; he broke out into passionate pleas—he relapsed into gloomy silences. He roamed about continually, his hands in his pockets and his hair in a tangle; he could take neither a decision nor a momentary rest. It struck his companion more than ever before that he was after all essentially a foreigner; he had the foreign sensibility, the sentimental candour, the need for sympathy, the communicative despair. A true young Anglo-Saxon would have buttoned himself up in his embarrassment and been dry and awkward and capable, and, however conscious of a pressure, unconscious of a drama; whereas Gaston was effusive and appealing and ridiculous and graceful— natural above all and egotistical. Indeed a true young Anglo-Saxon wouldn’t have known the particular acuteness of such a quandary, for he wouldn’t have parted to such an extent with his freedom of spirit. It was the fact of this surrender on his visitor’s part that excited Waterlow’s secret scorn: family feeling was all very well, but to see it triumph as a superstition calling for the blood-sacrifice made him feel he would as soon be a blackamoor on his knees before a fetish. He now measured for the first time the root it had taken in Gaston’s nature. To act like a man the hope of the Proberts must pull up the root, even if the operation should be terribly painful, should be attended with cries and tears and contortions, with baffling scruples and a sense of sacrilege, the sense of siding with strangers against his own flesh and blood. Now and again he broke out: “And if you should see her as she looks just now—she’s too lovely, too touching!—you’d see how right I was originally, when I found her such a revelation of that rare type, the French Renaissance, you know, the one we talked about.” But he reverted with at least equal frequency to the oppression he seemed unable to throw off, the idea of something done of cruel purpose and malice, with a refinement of outrage: such an accident to THEM, of all people on earth, the very last, the least thinkable, those who, he verily believed, would feel it more than any family in the world. When Waterlow asked what made them of so exceptionally fine a fibre he could only answer that they just happened to be—not enviably, if one would; it was his father’s influence and example, his very genius, the worship of privacy and good manners, a hatred of all the new familiarities and profanations. The artist sought to know further, at last and rather wearily, what in two words was the practical question his friend desired he should consider. Whether he should be justified in throwing the girl over—was that the issue?
“Gracious goodness, no! For what sort of sneak do you take me? She made a mistake, but any innocent young creature might do that. It’s whether it strikes you I should be justified in throwing THEM over.”
“It depends upon the sense you attach to justification.”
“I mean should I be miserably unhappy? Would it be in their power to make me so?”
“To try—certainly, if they’re capable of anything so nasty. The only fair play for them is to let you alone,” Waterlow wound up.
“Ah, they won’t do that—they like me too much!” Gaston ingenuously cried.
“It’s an odd way of liking! The best way to show their love will be to let you marry where your affections, and so many other charming things, are involved.”
“Certainly—only they question the charming things. They feel she represents, poor little dear, such dangers, such vulgarities, such possibilities of doing other dreadful things, that it’s upon THEM—I mean on those things—my happiness would be shattered.”
“Well,” the elder man rather dryly said, “if you yourself have no secrets for persuading them of the contrary I’m afraid I can’t teach you one.”
“Yes, I ought to do it myself,” Gaston allowed in the candour of his meditations. Then he went on in his torment of hesitation: “They never believed in her from the first. My father was perfectly definite about it. At heart they never accepted her; they only pretended to do so because I guaranteed her INSTINCTS—that’s what I did, heaven help me! and that she was incapable of doing a thing that could ever displease them. Then no sooner was my back turned than she perpetrated that!”
“That was your folly,” Waterlow remarked, painting away.
“My folly—to turn my back?”
“No, no—to guarantee.”
“My dear fellow, wouldn’t you?”—and Gaston stared.
“Never in the world.”
“You’d have thought her capable—?”
“Capabilissima! And I shouldn’t have cared.”
“Do you think her then capable of breaking out again in some new way that’s as bad?”
“I shouldn’t care if she was. That’s the least of all questions.”
“The least?”
“Ah don’t you see, wretched youth,” cried the artist, pausing from his work and looking up—”don’t you see that the question of her possibilities is as nothing compared to that of yours? She’s the sweetest young thing I ever saw; but even if she happened not to be I should still urge you to marry her, in simple self-preservation.”
Gaston kept echoing. “In self-preservation?”
“To save from destruction the last scrap of your independence. That’s a much more important matter even than not treating her shabbily. They’re doing their best to kill you morally—to render you incapable of individual life.”
Gaston was immensely struck. “They are—they are!” he declared with enthusiasm.
“Well then, if you believe it, for heaven’s sake go and marry her to- morrow!” Waterlow threw down his implements and added: “And come out of this—into the air.”
Gaston, however, was planted in his path on the way to the door. “And if she goes again and does the very same?”
“The very same—?” Waterlow thought.
“I mean something else as barbarous and as hard to bear.”
“Well,” said Waterlow, “you’ll at least have got rid of your family.”
“Yes, if she lets me in again I shall be glad they’re not there! They’re right, pourtant, they’re right,” Gaston went on, passing out of the studio with his friend.
“They’re right?”
“It was unimaginable that she should.”
“Yes, thank heaven! It was the finger of providence—providence taking you off your guard to give you your chance.” This was ingenious, but, though he could glow for a moment in response to it, Francie’s lover—if lover he may in his so infirm aspect be called—looked as if he mistrusted it, thought it slightly sophistical. What really shook him however was his companion’s saying to him in the vestibule, when they had taken their hats and sticks and were on the point of going out: “Lord, man, how can you be so impenetrably dense? Don’t you see that she’s really of the softest finest material that breathes, that she’s a perfect flower of plasticity, that everything you may have an apprehension about will drop away from her like the dead leaves from a rose and that you may make of her any perfect and enchanting thing you yourself have the wit to conceive?”
“Ah my dear friend!”—and poor Gaston, with another of his revulsions, panted for gratitude.
“The limit will be yours, not hers,” Waterlow added.
“No, no, I’ve done with limits,” his friend ecstatically cried.
That evening at ten o’clock Gaston presented himself at the Hotel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham and requested the German waiter to introduce him into the dining-room attached to Mr. Dosson’s apartments and then go and tell Miss Francina he awaited her there.
“Oh you’ll be better there than in the zalon—they’ve villed it with their luccatch,” said the man, who always addressed him in an intention of English and wasn’t ignorant of the tie that united the visitor to the amiable American family, o
r perhaps even of the modifications it had lately undergone.
“With their luggage?”
“They leave to-morrow morning—ach I don’t think they themselves know for where, sir.”
“Please then say to Miss Francina that I’ve called on the most urgent business and am extraordinarily pressed.”
The special ardour possessing Gaston at that moment belonged to the order of the communicative, but perhaps the vividness with which the waiter placed this exhibition of it before the young lady is better explained by the fact that her lover slipped a five-franc piece into his hand. She at any rate entered his place of patience sooner than Gaston had ventured to hope, though she corrected her promptitude a little by stopping short and drawing back when she saw how pale he was and how he looked as if he had been crying.