The Reverberator by Henry James Read Free Book Online Page A

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 ofnational 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 memberof 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