The Reverberator (6 page)

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.

He avenged himself for the artist’s bewildering treatment of his first attempt to approach Miss Francie by indulging, at the end of another week, in a second. He went about six o’clock, when he supposed she would have returned from her day’s wanderings, and his prudence was rewarded by the sight of the young lady sitting in the court of the hotel with her father and sister. Mr. Dosson was new to Gaston Probert, but the visitor’s intelligence embraced him. The little party was as usual expecting Mr. Flack at any moment, and they had collected down stairs, so that he might pick them up easily. They had, on the first floor, an expensive parlour, decorated in white and gold, with sofas of crimson damask; but there was something lonely in that grandeur and the place had become mainly a receptacle for their tall trunks, with a half-emptied paper of chocolates or
marrons glacés
on every table. After young Probert’s first call his name was often on the lips of the simple trio, and Mr. Dosson grew still more jocose, making nothing of a secret of his perception that Francie hit the bull’s-eye “every time.” Mr. Waterlow had returned their visit, but that was rather a matter of course, because it was they who had gone after him. They had not gone after the other one; it was he who had come after them. When he entered the hotel, as they sat there, this pursuit and its probable motive became startlingly vivid.

Delia had taken the matter much more gravely than
her father; she said there was a great deal she wanted to find out. She mused upon these mysteries visibly, but without advancing much, and she appealed for assistance to George Flack, with a candour which he appreciated and returned. If he knew anything he ought to know who Mr. Probert was; and she spoke as if it would be in the natural course that he should elicit the revelation by an interview. Mr. Flack promised to “nose round”; he said the best plan would be that the results should “come back” to her in the
Reverberator
; he appeared to think that the people could be persuaded that they wanted about a column on Mr. Probert. His researches, however, were fruitless, for in spite of the one fact the girl was able to give him as a starting-point, the fact that their new acquaintance had spent his whole life in Paris, the young journalist couldn’t scare up a single person who had even heard of him. He had questioned up and down and all over the place, from the Rue Scribe to the far end of Chaillot, and he knew people who knew others who knew every member of the American colony; that select body which haunted poor Delia’s imagination, glittered and re-echoed there in a hundred tormenting roundabout glimpses. That was where she wanted to get Francie, as she said to herself; she wanted to get her right in there. She believed the members of this society to constitute a little kingdom of the blest; and she used to drive through the Avenue Gabriel, the Rue de Marignan and the wide vistas which radiate from the Arch of Triumph and are always changing their names, on purpose to send up wistful glances to the windows (she had learned that all this was the happy quarter) of the enviable but unapproachable colonists. She saw these privileged mortals, as she supposed, in almost every
victoria that made a languid lady with a pretty head flash past her, and she had no idea how little honour this theory sometimes did her expatriated countrywomen. Her plan was already made to be on the field again the next winter and take it up seriously, this question of getting Francie in.

When Mr. Flack said to her that young Probert’s set couldn’t be either the rose or anything near it, since the oldest inhabitant had never heard of them, Delia had a flash of inspiration, an intellectual flight that she herself did not measure at the time. She asked if that did not perhaps prove on the contrary quite the opposite—that they were just
the
cream and beyond all others. Was there not a kind of inner circle, and were they not somewhere about the centre of that? George Flack almost quivered at this pregnant suggestion from so unusual a quarter, for he guessed on the spot that Delia Dosson had divined. “Why, do you mean one of those families that have worked down so far you can’t find where they went in?” that was the phrase in which he recognised the truth of the girl’s idea. Delia’s fixed eyes assented, and after a moment of cogitation George Flack broke out—“That’s the kind of family we want a sketch of!”

“Well, perhaps they don’t want to be sketched. You had better find out,” Delia had rejoined.

The chance to find out might have seemed to present itself when Mr. Probert walked in that confiding way into the hotel; for his arrival was followed, a quarter of an hour later, by that of the representative of the
Reverberator
. Gaston liked the way they treated him; though demonstrative it was not artificial. Mr. Dosson said they had been hoping he would come round again and Delia remarked that she supposed he had had quite a journey—Paris was so big;
and she urged his acceptance of a glass of wine or a cup of tea. She added that that wasn’t the place where they usually received (she liked to hear herself talk of “receiving”), and led the party up to her white and gold saloon, where they should be so much more private: she liked also to hear herself talk of privacy. They sat on the red silk chairs and she hoped Mr. Probert would at least taste a sugared chestnut or a chocolate; and when he declined, pleading the imminence of the dinner-hour, she murmured, “Well, I suppose you’re so used to them—living so long over here.” The allusion to the dinner-hour led Mr. Dosson to express the wish that he would go round and dine with them without ceremony; they were expecting a friend—he generally settled it for them—who was coming to take them round.

“And then we are going to the circus,” Francie said, speaking for the first time.