The Reverberator. Генри Джеймс

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ way in the court. It wanted but a quarter of an hour to dinner—THAT historic fact was not beyond his measure—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, mingling sociability and languor, on the subject of what they had seen and done—a question into which he felt as yet the delicacy of enquiring. 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 to which everything appeared to minister.

      “Well, that’s a handsome offer,” George Flack replied while Delia put it on record 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’hote’s on time.”

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

      “Why, don’t you like that?”—and Francie’s candour of appeal to their comrade’s taste was celestial.

      “Well, it isn’t what you must build on when you come to Paris. Too many flowerpots 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.” Mr. Flack’s tone was ever that of keeping the poor gentleman mildly but firmly in his place.

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

      “Well, you’ll see how I could do it!” He towered over her in the pride of this feat.

      “He has got an interest in some place,” Delia declared. “He has taken us to ever so many stores where 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 profuse attentions. What he mainly made clear to them was that it was really most kind of a young man who had so many big things on his mind to find sympathy for questions, for issues, he used to call them, that could occupy 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. It 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 had vaguely supposed themselves rather strong. He had in fact great knowledge, which 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 Hotel 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 trick 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 find their little party 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 reunions 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 hunted game had “left for” Biarritz even as the Rosenheims for Brussels. “We know plenty of people if we could only come across them,” Delia had more than once observed: 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 an address and superscribed with some mocking dash of the pencil—“So sorry to miss you!” or “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. The young man was professionally so occupied with other people’s affairs that it should doubtless be mentioned to his praise that he still managed to have affairs—or at least an affair—of his own. That affair was Francie Dosson, and he was pleased to perceive how little SHE cared what had become of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenheim and Master Samuel and Miss Cora. He counted all the things she didn’t care about—her soft inadvertent eyes helped him to do that; and they footed up so, as he would have said, that they gave him the rich sense of a free field. If she had so few interests there was the greater possibility that a young man of bold conceptions and cheerful manners might become one. She had usually the air of waiting for something, with a pretty listlessness or an amused resignation, while tender shy indefinite little fancies hummed in her brain. Thus she would perhaps recognise in him the reward of patience. George Flack was aware that he exposed his friends to considerable fatigue: he brought them back pale and taciturn from suburban excursions and from wanderings often rather aimless and casual among the boulevards and avenues of the town. He regarded them at such times with complacency however, for these were hours of diminished resistance: he had an idea that he should be able eventually to circumvent Delia if he only could catch her some day sufficiently, that is physically, prostrate. He liked to make them all feel helpless and dependent, and this was not difficult with people who were so modest and artless, so unconscious of the boundless power of wealth. Sentiment, in our young man, was not a scruple nor a source of weakness; but he thought it really touching, the little these good people knew of what they could do with their money. They had in their hands a weapon of infinite range and yet were incapable of firing a shot for themselves. They had a sort of social humility; it appeared never to have occurred to them that, added to their loveliness, their money gave them a value. This used to strike George Flack on certain occasions when he came back to find them in the places where he had dropped them while he rushed off to give a turn to one of his screws. They never played him false, never wearied of waiting; always sat patient and submissive, usually at a cafe to which he had introduced them or in a row of chairs on the boulevard, on the level expanse of the Tuileries or in the Champs Elysees.

      He СКАЧАТЬ