The Reverberator: A Novel

  If it be objected to all this that when Francie Dosson at last came in she addressed him as if she easily placed him, the answer is that she had been notified by her father—more punctually than was indicated by the manner of her response. “Well, the way you do turn up,” she said, smiling and holding out her left hand to him: in the other hand, or the hollow of her right arm, she had a largeish parcel. Though she had made him wait she was evidently very glad to see him there; and she as evidently required and enjoyed a great deal of that sort of indulgence. Her sister’s attitude would have told you so even if her own appearance had not. There was that in her manner to the young man—a perceptible but indefinable shade—which seemed to legitimate the oddity of his having asked in particular for her, as if he wished to see her to the exclusion of her father and sister: a kind of special pleasure which had the air of pointing to a special relation. And yet a spectator, looking from Mr. George Flack to Miss Francie Dosson, would have been much at a loss to guess what special relation could exist between them. The girl was exceedingly, extraordinarily pretty, and without discoverable resemblance to her sister; and there was a brightness in her—a kind of still radiance—which was quite distinct from what is called animation. Rather tall than short, slim, delicate and evidently as light of hand and of foot as it was possible to be, she yet gave no impression of quick movement, of abundant chatter, of excitable nerves and irrepressible life—no hint of being of the most usual (which is perhaps also the most graceful) American type. She was brilliantly but quietly pretty, and your suspicion that she was a little stiff was corrected only by your perception that she was extremely soft. There was nothing in her to confirm the implication that she had rushed about the deck of a Cunarder with a newspaperman. She was as straight as a wand and as fine as a gem; her neck was long and her gray eyes had colour; and from the ripple of her dark brown hair to the curve of her unaffirmative chin every line in her face was happy and pure. She had an unformed voice and very little knowledge.

  Delia got up, and they came out of the little reading-room—this young lady remarking to her sister that she hoped she had got all the things. “Well, I had a fiendish hunt for them, we have got so many,” Francie replied, with a curious soft drawl. “There were a few dozens of the pocket-handkerchiefs I couldn’t find; but I guess I’ve got most of them, and most of the gloves.”

  “Well, what are you carting them about for?” George Flack inquired, taking the parcel from her. “You had better let me handle them. Do you buy pocket-handkerchiefs by the hundred?”

  “Well, it only makes fifty apiece,” said Francie, smiling. “They ain’t nice—we’re going to change them.”

  “Oh, I won’t be mixed up with that—you can’t work that game on these Frenchmen!” the young man exclaimed.

  “Oh, with Francie they will take anything back,” Delia Dosson declared. “They just love her, all over.”

  “Well, they’re like me then,” said Mr. Flack, with friendly hilarity. “I’ll take her back, if she’ll come.”

  “Well, I don’t think I am ready quite yet,” the girl replied. “But I hope very much we shall cross with you again.”

  “Talk about crossing—it’s on these boulevards we want a life-preserver!” Delia remarked. They had passed out of the hotel and the wide vista of the Rue de la Paix stretched up and down. There were many vehicles.

  “Won’t this thing do? I’ll tie it to either of you,” George Flack said, holding out his bundle. “I suppose they won’t kill you if they love you,” he went on, to the younger girl.

  “Well, you’ve got to know me first,” she answered, laughing and looking for a chance, while they waited to pass over.

  “I didn’t know you when I was struck.” He applied his disengaged hand to her elbow and propelled her across the street. She took no notice of his observation, and Delia asked her, on the other side, whether their father had given her that money. She replied that he had given her loads—she felt as if he had made his will; which led George Flack to say that he wished the old gentleman was his father.

  “Why, you don’t mean to say you want to be our brother!” Francie exclaimed, as they went down the Rue de la Paix.

  “I should like to be Miss Delia’s, if you can make that out,” said the young man.

  “Well, then, suppose you prove it by calling me a cab,” Miss Delia returned. “I presume you and Francie don’t think this is the deck.”

  “Don’t she feel rich?” George Flack demanded of Francie. “But we do require a cart for our goods;” and he hailed a little yellow carriage, which presently drew up beside the pavement. The three got into it and, still emitting innocent pleasantries, proceeded on their way, while at the Hôtel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham Mr. Dosson wandered down into the court again and took his place in his customary chair.

  II

  THE COURT WAS ROOFED WITH GLASS; THE APRIL air was mild; the cry of women selling violets came in from the street and, mingling with the rich hum of Paris, seemed to bring with it faintly the odour of the flowers. There were other odours in the place, warm, succulent and Parisian, which ranged from fried fish to burnt sugar; and there were many things besides: little tables for the post-prandial coffee; piles of luggage inscribed (after the initials, or frequently the name, R. P. Scudamore or D. Jackson Hatch), Philadelphia, Pa., or St. Louis, Mo.; rattles of unregarded bells, flittings of tray-bearing waiters, conversations with the second-floor windows of admonitory landladies, arrivals of young women with coffinlike bandboxes covered with black oilcloth and depending from a strap, sallyings forth of persons staying and arrivals, just afterwards, of other persons to see them; together with vague prostrations on benches of tired heads of American families. It was to this last element that Mr. Dosson himself in some degree contributed, but it must be added that he had not the extremely bereft and exhausted appearance of certain of his fellows. There was an air of meditative patience, of habitual accommodation in him; but you would have guessed that he was enjoying a holiday rather than panting for a truce, and he was not so enfeebled but that he was able to get up from time to time and stroll through the porte cochère to have a look at the street.

  He gazed up and down for five minutes, with his hands in his pockets, and then came back; that appeared to content him; he asked for very little—had no restlessness that these small excursions would not assuage. He looked at the heaped-up luggage, at the tinkling bells, at the young woman from the lingère, at the repudiated visitors, at everything but the other American parents. Something in his breast told him that he knew all about these. It is not upon each other that the animals in the same cage, in a zoological collection, most turn their eyes. There was a silent sociability in him and a superficial fineness of grain that helped to account for his daughter Francie’s various delicacies. He was fair and spare and had no figure; you would have seen in a moment that the question of how he should hold himself had never in his life occurred to him. He never held himself at all; providence held him rather (and very loosely), by an invisible string, at the end of which he seemed gently to dangle and waver. His face was so smooth that his thin light whiskers, which grew only far back, scarcely seemed native to his cheeks: they might have been attached there for some harmless purpose of comedy or disguise. He looked for the most part as if he were thinking over, without exactly understanding it, something rather droll which had just occurred; if his eyes wandered his attention rested, and hurried, quite as little. His feet were remarkably small, and his clothes, in which light colours predominated, were visibly the work of a French tailor: he was an American who still held the tradition that it is in Paris a man dresses himself best. His hat would have looked odd in Bond Street or the Fifth Avenue, and his necktie was loose and flowing.

  Mr. Dosson, it may further be mentioned, was a man of the simplest composition, a character as cipherable as a sum of two figures. He had a native financial faculty of the finest order, a gift as direct as a beautiful tenor voice, which had enabled him, with
out the aid of particular strength of will or keenness of ambition, to build up a large fortune while he was still of middle age. He had a genius for happy speculation, the quick, unerring instinct of a “good thing;” and as he sat there idle, amused, contented, on the edge of the Parisian street, he might very well have passed for some rare performer who had sung his song or played his trick and had nothing to do till the next call. And he had grown rich not because he was ravenous or hard, but simply because he had an ear, or a nose. He could make out the tune in the discord of the market-place; he could smell success far up the wind. The second factor in his little addition was that he was an unassuming father. He had no tastes, no acquirements nor curiosities, and his daughters represented society for him. He thought much more and much oftener of these young ladies than of his bank-shares and railway-stock; they refreshed much more his sense of ownership, of accumulation. He never compared them with other girls; he only compared his present self to what he would have been without them. His view of them was perfectly simple. Delia had a more unfathomable profundity and Francie a wider acquaintance with literature and art. Mr. Dosson had not perhaps a full perception of his younger daughter’s beauty: he would scarcely have pretended to judge of that, more than he would of a valuable picture or vase, but he believed she was cultivated up to the eyes. He had a recollection of tremendous school-bills and, in later days, during their travels, of the way she was always leaving books behind her. Moreover was not her French so good that he could not understand it?

  The two girls, at any rate, were the wind in his sail and the only directing, determining force he knew; they converted accident into purpose; without them, as he felt, he would have been the tail without the kite. The wind rose and fell, of course; there were lulls and there were gales; there were intervals during which he simply floated in quiet waters—cast anchor and waited. This appeared to be one of them now; but he could be patient, knowing that he should soon again inhale the brine and feel the dip of his prow. When his daughters were out the determining process gathered force, and their being out with a brilliant young man only deepened the pleasant calm. That belonged to their superior life, and Mr. Dosson never doubted that George M. Flack was brilliant. He represented the newspaper, and the newspaper for this man of genial assumptions represented Mind—it was the great shining presence of our time. To know that Delia and Francie were out with an editor or a correspondent was really to see them dancing in the central glow. This is doubtless why Mr. Dosson had slightly more than usual his air of recovering slowly from a pleasant surprise. The vision to which I allude hung before him, at a convenient distance, and melted into other bright confused aspects: reminiscences of Mr. Flack in other relations—on the ship, on the deck, at the hotel at Liverpool, and in the cars. Whitney Dosson was a loyal father, but he would have thought himself simple had he not had two or three strong convictions: one of which was that the children should never go out with a gentleman they had not seen before. The sense of their having, and his having, seen Mr. Flack before was comfortable to him now: it made it mere placidity for him personally to forego the young man’s society in favour of Delia and Francie. He had not hitherto been perfectly satisfied that the streets and shops, the general immensity of Paris, were just the right place for young ladies alone. But the company of a pleasant gentleman made them right—a gentleman who was pleasant through being up to everything, as one connected with that paper (he remembered its name now, it was celebrated) would have to be. To Mr. Dosson, in the absence of such happy accidents, his girls somehow seemed lonely; which was not the way he struck himself. They were his company but he was scarcely theirs; it was as if he had them more than they had him.

  They were out a long time, but he felt no anxiety, as he reflected that Mr. Flack’s very profession was a prevision of everything that could possibly happen. The bright French afternoon waned without bringing them back, but Mr. Dosson still revolved about the court, till he might have been taken for a valet de place hoping to pick up custom. The landlady smiled at him sometimes, as she passed and re-passed, and even ventured to remark disinterestedly that it was a pity to waste such a lovely day indoors—not to take a turn and see what was going on in Paris. But Mr. Dosson had no sense of waste: that came to him much more when he was confronted with historical monuments, or beauties of nature or art, which he didn’t understand nor care for: then he felt a little ashamed and uncomfortable—but never when he lounged in that simplifying way in the court. It wanted but a quarter of an hour to dinner (that he could understand) when Delia and Francie at last met his view, still accompanied by Mr. Flack and sauntering in, at a little distance from each other, with a jaded air which was not in the least a tribute to his possible solicitude. They dropped into chairs and joked with each other, with a mixture of sociability and languor, on the subject of what they had seen and done—a question into which he felt as yet a delicacy as to inquiring. But they had evidently done a good deal and had a good time: an impression sufficient to rescue Mr. Dosson personally from the consciousness of failure.

  “Won’t you just step in and take dinner with us?” he asked of the young man, with a friendliness begotten of the circumstances.

  “Well, that’s a handsome offer,” George Flack replied, while Delia remarked that they had each eaten about thirty cakes.

  “Well, I wondered what you were doing so long. But never mind your cakes. It’s twenty minutes past six, and the table d’hôte is on time.”

  “You don’t mean to say you dine at the table d’hôte!” Mr. Flack ejaculated.

  “Why, don’t you like that?” Francie drawled sweetly.

  “Well, it isn’t what you most build on when you come to Paris. Too many flower-pots and chickens’ legs.”

  “Well, would you like one of these restaurants?” asked Mr. Dosson. “I don’t care, if you show us a good one.”

  “Oh, I’ll show you a good one—don’t you worry.”

  “Well, you’ve got to order the dinner then,” said Francie.

  “Well, you’ll see how I could do it!” And the young man looked at her very hard, with an intention of softness.

  “He has got an interest in some place,” Delia declared. “He has taken us to ever so many stores, and he gets his commission.”

  “Well, I’d pay you to take them round,” said Mr. Dosson; and with much agreeable trifling of this kind it was agreed that they should sally forth for the evening meal under Mr. Flack’s guidance.

  If he had easily convinced them on this occasion that that was a more original proceeding than worrying those old bones, as he called it, at the hotel, he convinced them of other things besides in the course of the following month and by the aid of repeated visits. What he mainly made clear to them was that it was really most kind of a young man who had so many great public questions on his mind to find sympathy for problems which could fill the telegraph and the press so little as theirs. He came every day to set them in the right path, pointing out its charms to them in a way that made them feel how much they had been in the wrong. He made them feel indeed that they didn’t know anything about anything, even about such a matter as ordering shoes—an art in which they vaguely supposed themselves rather strong. He had in fact great knowledge, and it was wonderfully various, and he knew as many people as they knew few. He had appointments—very often with celebrities—for every hour of the day, and memoranda, sometimes in shorthand, on tablets with elastic straps, with which he dazzled the simple folk at the Hôtel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham, whose social life, of narrow range, consisted mainly in reading the lists of Americans who “registered” at the bankers’ and at Galignani’s. Delia Dosson, in particular, had a way of poring solemnly over these records which exasperated Mr. Flack, who skimmed them and found what he wanted in the flash of an eye: she kept the others waiting while she satisfied herself that Mr. and Mrs. D. S. Rosenheim and Miss Cora Rosenheim and Master Samuel Rosenheim had “left for Brussels.”

  Mr. Flack was wonderful on
all occasions in finding what he wanted (which, as we know, was what he believed the public wanted), and Delia was the only one of the party with whom he was sometimes a little sharp. He had embraced from the first the idea that she was his enemy, and he alluded to it with almost tiresome frequency, though always in a humorous, fearless strain. Even more than by her fashion of hanging over the registers she provoked him by appearing to think that their little party was not sufficient to itself; by wishing, as he expressed it, to work in new stuff. He might have been easy, however, for he had sufficient chance to observe how it was always the fate of the Dossons to miss their friends. They were continually looking out for meetings and combinations that never came off, hearing that people had been in Paris only after they had gone away, or feeling convinced that they were there but not to be found through their not having registered, or wondering whether they should overtake them if they should go to Dresden, and then making up their minds to start for Dresden, only to learn, at the eleventh hour, through some accident, that the elusive party had gone to Biarritz. “We know plenty of people if we could only come across them,” Delia had said more than once: she scanned the continent with a wondering, baffled gaze and talked of the unsatisfactory way in which friends at home would “write out” that other friends were “somewhere in Europe.” She expressed the wish that such correspondents as that might be in a place that was not at all vague. Two or three times people had called at the hotel when they were out and had left cards for them, without any address, superscribed with a mocking clash of the pencil, “Off to-morrow!” The girl sat looking at these cards, handling them and turning them over for a quarter of an hour at a time; she produced them days afterwards, brooding upon them afresh as if they were a mystic clue. George Flack generally knew where they were, the people who were “somewhere in Europe.” Such knowledge came to him by a kind of intuition, by the voices of the air, by indefinable and unteachable processes. But he held his peace on purpose; he didn’t want any outsiders; he thought their little party just right. Mr. Dosson’s place in the scheme of providence was to go with Delia while he himself went with Francie, and nothing would have induced George Flack to disfigure that equation.