A Daughter of To-Day Part 12

A moment later she returned to it of her own accord, however. "It is absurd to try to exact pledges from people," she said, "but I should really be happier --_much_ happier--if you would promise me something."

"'By Heaven, I will promise _any_ thing!'" Kendal quoted, laughing, from a poet much in vogue.

"Only this--I hope I am not selfish--" she hesitated; "but I think--yes, I think I must be selfish here. It is that you will never read the _Age_."

"I never do," leapt to his lips, but he stopped it in time. "And why!" he asked instead.

"Ah, you know why! It is because you might recognize my work in it--by accident you might--and that would be so painful to me. It is _not_ my best--please believe it is not my best!"

"On one condition I promise," he said: "that when you do your best you will tell me where to find it"

She looked at him gravely and considered. As she did so it seemed to Kendal that she was regarding his whole moral, mental, and material nature. He could almost see it reflected in the gla.s.s of her great dark eyes.

"Certainly, yes. That is fair--if you really and truly care to see it. And I don't know," she added, looking up at him from her soup, "that it matters whether you do or not, so long as you carefully and accurately pretend that you do. When my best, my real best, sees the light of common--"

"Type," he suggested.

"Type," she repeated unsmilingly, "I shall be so insatiate for criticism--I ought to say praise--that I shall even go so far as to send you a marked copy, very plainly marked, with blue pencil. Already," she smiled with a charming effect of a.s.sertiveness, "I have bought the blue pencil."

"Will it come soon?" Kendal asked seriously.

"_Cher ami_," Elfrida said, drawing her handsome brows together a little, "it will come sooner than you expect That is what I want," she went on deliberately, "more than anything else in the whole world, to do things --_good_ things, you understand--and to have them appreciated and paid for in the admiration of people who feel and see and know. For me life has nothing else, except the things that other people do, better and worse than mine."

"Better and worse than yours," Kendal repeated. "Can't you think of them apart?"

"No, I can't," Elfrida interrupted; "I've tried, and I can _not_. I know it's a weakness--at least I'm half persuaded that it is--but I must have the personal standard in everything."

"But you are a hero-wors.h.i.+pper; often I have seen you at it."

"Yes," she said cynically, while the white-capped maid who handed Kendal asparagus stared at her with a curiosity few of the Hyacinth's lady diners inspired, "and when I look into that I find it is because of a secret consciousness that tells me that I, in the hero's place, should have done just the same thing. Or else it is because of the gratification my vanity finds in my sympathy with his work, whatever it is. Oh, it is no special virtue, my kind of hero-wors.h.i.+p." The girl looked across at Kendal and laughed a bright, frank laugh, in which was no discontent with what she had been telling him.

"You are candid," Kendal said.

"Oh yes, I'm candid. I don't mind lying for a n.o.ble end, but it isn't a n.o.ble end to deceive one's self."

"'Oh, purblind race of miserable men--'" Kendal began lightly, but she stopped him.

"Don't!" she cried. "Nothing spoils conversation like quotations. Besides, that's such a trite one; I learned it at school."

But Kendal's offence was clearly in his manner. It seemed to Elfrida that he would never sincerely consider what she had to say about herself. She went on softly, holding him with her eyes: "You may find me a simple creature--"

"_A propos_," laughed Kendal easily, "what is this particular n.o.ble end?"

"Bah!" she said, "you are right It was a lie, and it had no end at all. I am complex enough, I dare say. But this is true, that my egotism is like a little flame within me. All the best things feed it, and it is so clear that I see everything in its light. To me it is most dear and valuable, it simplifies things so. I a.s.sure you I wouldn't be one of the sloppy, unselfish people the world is full of for anything."

"As a source of gratification isn't it rather limited?"

Kendal asked. He was thinking of the extra drop of nervous fluid in Americans that he had been reading about in the afternoon, and wondering if it often had this development.

"I don't quite know what you mean," Elfrida returned.

"It isn't a source of gratification, it's a channel. And it intensifies everything so that I don't care how little comes that way. If there's anything of me left when I die it will be that little fierce flame. And when I do the tiniest thing, write the shortest sentence that rings _true_, see a beauty or a joy which the common herd pa.s.s by, I have my whole life in the flame, and it becomes my soul--I'm sure I have no other!

"When you say that there is no real pleasure in the world that does not come through art," Elfrida went on again, widening her eyes seriously, "don't you feel as if you were uttering something religious--part of a creed--as the Mussulman feels when he says there is no G.o.d but one G.o.d, and Mohammed is his prophet? I do."

"I never say it," Kendal returned, with a smile. "Does that make me out a Philistine, or a Hindu, or what?"

"_You_ a Philistine!" Elfrida cried, as they rose from the little table. "You are saying a thing that is absolutely wicked."

Her quasi-conventional mood had vanished completely, and as they drove together in a hansom through the mysterious movement of the lamp-lit London streets, toward her lodgings, she plunged enjoyingly into certain theories of her religion, which embraced Arnold and Aristotle and did not exclude Mr. Whistler, and made wide, ineffectual, and presumptuous grasps to include all beauty and all faith. She threw handfuls of the foam of these things at Kendal, who watched them vanish into the air with pleasure, and asked if he might smoke. At which she reflected, deciding that for the present he might not, but when they reached her lodgings she would permit him to renew his acquaintance with Buddha, and give him a cigarette.

During the hour they smoked and talked together Elfrida was wholly delightful, and only one thing occurred to mar the enjoyment of the evening as Kendal remembered it. That was Mr. Golightly Ticke, who came up and smoked too, and seemed to have an extraordinary familiarity, for such an utterly impossible person, with Miss Bell's literary engagements. On his way home Kendal reflected that it was doubtless a question of time; she would take to the customs of civilization by degrees, and the sooner the better.

CHAPTER XV.

Shortly afterward Elfrida read Mr. Pater's "Marius," with what she herself called, somewhat extravagantly, a "hungry and hopeless" delight. I cannot say that this Oxonian's tender cla.s.sical recreation had any critical effect upon her; she probably found it much too limpid and untroubled to move her in the least. I mention it by way of saying that Lawrence Cardiff lent it to her, with a smile of half-indulgent, half-contemptuous a.s.sent to some of her ideas, which was altered, when she returned the volumes, by the active necessity of defending his own. Elfrida had been accepted at the Cardiffs, with the ready tolerance which they had for types that were remarkable to them, and not entirely disagreeable; though Janet was always telling her father that it was impossible that Elfrida should be a type--she was an exception of the most exceptionable sort. "I'll admit her to be abnormal, if you like," Cardiff would return, "but only from an insular point of view. I dare say they grow that way in Illinois."

But that was in the early stages of their acquaintance with Miss Bell, which ripened with unprecedented rapidity for an acquaintance in Kensington Square. It was before Janet had taken to walking across the gardens with Elfrida in the half-hour between tea-time and dressing for dinner, when the two young women, sometimes under dripping umbrellas, would let the right omnibus follow the wrong one toward Fleet Street twice and thrice in their disinclination to postpone what they had to say to each other. It was also before Elfrida's invasion of the library and fee-simple of the books, and before she had said there many things that were original, some that were impertinent, and a few that were true. The Cardiffs discussed her less freely as the weeks went on--a sure sign that she was becoming better liked, accepted less as a phenomenon, and more as a friend. There grew up in Janet the beginnings of the strong affection which she felt for a very few people, an affection which invariably mingled itself with a lively desire to bestir herself on their account, to be fully informed as to their circ.u.mstances, and above all to possess relations of absolute directness with them. She had an imperious successful strain which insisted upon all this. She was a capable creature of much perception for twenty-four, and she had a sense of injury when for any reason she was not allowed to use her faculties for the benefit of any one she liked in a way which excited the desire to do it. Janet had to reproach herself, when she thought of it, that this sort of liking seldom came by entirely approved channels, and hardly ever found an object in her visiting-list. Its first and almost its only essential, to speak boldly, was an artistic susceptibility with some sort of relation to her own, which her visiting-list did not often supply, though it might have been said to overflow with more widely recognized virtues. For that Miss Cardiff was known to be willing to sacrifice the Thirty-nine Articles, respectable antecedents, the possession of a dress-coat. Her willingness was the more widely known because in the circle which fate had drawn around her--ironically, she sometimes thought--it was not usual to sacrifice these things. As for Janet's own artistic susceptibility, it was a very private atmosphere of her soul. She breathed it, one might say, only occasionally, and with a kind of delicious shame. She was incapable of sharing her caught-up felicity there with any one, but it was indispensable that she should see it sometimes in the eyes of others less contained, less conscious, whose sense of humor might be more slender perhaps. Her own nature was practical and managing in its ordinary aspect, and she had a degree of tact that was always interfering with her love of honesty. Having established a friends.h.i.+p by the arbitrary law of sympathy, it must be admitted that she had an instinctive way of trying to strengthen it by voluntary benefits, for affection was a great need with her.

It was only about this time and very gradually that she began to realize how much more she cared for John Kendal than for other people. Since it seemed to be obvious that Kendal gave her only a share of the affectionate interest he had for humanity at large, the realization was not wholly agreeable, and Janet doubtless found Elfrida, on this account, even a more valuable distraction than she otherwise would. One of the matters Miss Bell was in the habit of discussing with some vivacity was the s.e.xlessness of artistic sympathy. Upon this subject Janet found her quite inspired. She made a valiant effort to illumine her thoughts of Kendal by the light Elfrida threw upon such matters, and although she had to confess that the future was still hid in embarra.s.sed darkness, she did manage to construct a theory by which it was possible to grope along for the present. She also cherished a hope that this trouble would leave her, as a fever abates in the night, that she would awake some morning, if she only had patience, strong and well. In other things Miss Cardiff, was sometimes jarred rather than shocked by the American girl's mental att.i.tudes, which, she began to find, were not so posed as her physical ones. Elfrida often left her repelled and dissenting. The dissent she showed vigorously; the repulsion she concealed, sore with herself because of the concealment. But she could not lose Elfrida, she told herself; and besides, it was only a matter of a little tolerance--time and life would change her, tone her inner self down into the something altogether exquisite and perfect that she was, to look at, now.

Elfrida called the Cardiffs' house the oasis of Kensington, and valued her privileges there more than she valued anything else in the circ.u.mstances about her, except, perhaps, the privilege she had enjoyed in making the single contribution, to the _Decade_ of which we know.

That was an event l.u.s.trous in her memory, the more l.u.s.trous because it remained solitary and when the editor's check made its tardy appearance she longed to keep it as a glorious archive--glorious that is to say, in suggestion, if not particularly impressive intrinsically. In the end she fought the temptation of giving herself a dinner a day for a fortnight out of it, and bought a slender gold bangle with the money, which she slipped upon her wrist with a resolution to keep it there always. It must be believed that her personal decoration did not enter materially into this design; the bangle was an emblem of one success and an earnest of others. She wore it as she might have worn a medal, except that a medal was a public voice, and the little gold hoop spoke only to her.

After the triumph that the bangle signified Elfrida felt most satisfaction in what was constantly present to her mind as her conquest of the Cardiffs. She measured its importance by their value. Her admiration for Janet's work in the beginning had been as sincere as her emulation of its degree of excellence had been pa.s.sionate, and neither feeling had diminished with their intimacy. In Lawrence Cardiff she felt vaguely the qualities that made him a marked man among his fellows, his intellectual breadth and keenness, his poise of brain, if one might call it so, and the _habilete_ with which, without permitting it to be part of his character, he sometimes allowed himself to charm even people of whom he disapproved.

These things were indeterminately present to her, and led her often to speculate as to how it was that Mr.

Cardiff's work expressed him so little. It seemed to her that the one purpose of a personality like his was its expression--otherwise one might as well be of the ruck.

"You write with your intellectual faculties," she said to him once; "your soul is curiously dumb." But that was later.

The plane of Elfrida's relations with Janet altered gradually, one might say, from the inclined, with Elfrida on her knees at the lower end, to the horizontal. It changed insensibly enough, through the freemasonry of confessed and unconfessed ideals, through growing attraction, through the feeling they shared, though only Janet voiced it, that there was nothing but the opportunities and the experience of four years between them, that in the end Elfrida would do better, stronger, more original work than she. Elfrida was so much more original a person, Janet declared to herself, so--and when she hesitated for this word she usually said "enigmatical." The answer to the enigma, Janet was sure, would be written large in publishers' advertis.e.m.e.nts one day. In the meantime, it was a vast satisfaction to Janet to be, as it were, behind the enigma, to consider it with the privileges of intimacy. These young women felt their friends.h.i.+p deeply, in their several ways. It held for them all sacredness and honor and obligation. For Elfrida it had an intrinsic beauty and interest, like a curio --she had half a dozen such curios in the museum of her friends--and for Janet it added something to existence that was not there before, more delightful and important than a mere opportunity of expansion. The time came speedily when it would have been a positive pain to either of them to hear the other discussed, however favorably.

CHAPTER XVI.

Lady Halifax and her daughter had met Miss Bell several times at the Cardiffs', in a casual way, before it occurred to either of them to take any sort of advantage of the acquaintance. The younger lady had a s.h.i.+vering and frightened delight in occasionally wading ankle-deep in unconventionality, but she had-lively recollections, in connection with the Cardiffs, of having been very nearly taken off her feet. They had since decided that it was more discreet to ignore Janet's enthusiasms, which were sometimes quite impossible in their verdict, and always improbable. The literary ladies and gentlemen whom the ghost of the departed Sir William brought more or less unwillingly to Lady Halifax's drawing-rooms were all of unexceptionable _cachet_; the Halifaxes were constantly seeing paragraphs about them in the "Literary Gossip"

department of the _Athenian_, mentioning their state of health, their retirement from scientific appointments, or the fact that their most recent work of fiction had reached its fourth edition. Lady Halifax always read the _Athenian_, even the publishers' announcements; she liked to keep "in touch," she said, with the literary activities of the day, and it gave her a special gratification to notice the prosperity of her writing friends indicated in tall figures. Miss Halifax read it too, but she liked the "Art Notes" best; it was a matter of complaint with her that the house was not more open to artists--new, original artists like John Kendal. In answer to this Lady Halifax had a habit of stating that she did not see what more they could possibly want than the president of the Royal Academy and the one or two others that came already. As for John Kendal, he was certainly new and original, but he was respectable notwithstanding; they could be certain that he was not putting his originality on--with a hearth-brush, for the sake of advertis.e.m.e.nt.

Lady Halifax was not so sure of Elfrida's originality, of which she had been given a glimpse or two at first, and which the girl's intimacy with the Cardiffs would have presupposed in any case. But presently, and somewhat to Lady Halifax's perplexity, Miss Bell's originality disappeared. It seemed to melt into the azure of perfect good-breeding, flecked by little clouds of gay sayings and politenesses, whenever chance brought her under Lady Halifax's observation. A not unreasonable solution of the problem might have been found in Elfrida's instinctive objection to casting her pearls where they are proverbially unappreciated, and the necessity in her nature of pleasing herself by one form of agreeable behavior if not by another. Lady Halifax, however, ascribed it to the improving influence of insular inst.i.tutions, and finally concluded that it ought to be followed up.

Elfrida wore amber and white the evening on which Lady Halifax followed it up--a Parisian modification of a design carried, out originally by the Sparta dressmaker, with a degree of hysteria, under Miss Bell's direction.

She wore it with a touch of unusual color in her cheeks and, an added light in her dark eyes that gave a winsomeness to her beauty which it had not always. A cunningly bound spray of yellow-stamened lilies followed the curving line of her low-necked dress, ending in a cl.u.s.ter in her bosom; the glossy little leaves of the smilax the florist had wreathed in with them stood sharply against the whiteness of her neck. Her hair was ma.s.sed at the back of her head simply and girlishly enough, and its fluffiness about her forehead made a sweet shadow above her eyes. She had a little fever of expectation, Janet had talked so much about this reception. Janet had told her that the real thing, the real English literary thing in numberless volumes, would be on view at Lady Halifax's. Miss Cardiff had mentioned this in their discussion of the Arcadia Club, at which inst.i.tution she had scoffed so unbearably that Elfrida, while she cherished the memory of Georgiadi, had not mentioned it since. Perhaps, after all, she reflected, Janet was just a trifle blind where people were not hall-marked. It did not occur to her to consider how far she herself ill.u.s.trated this theory.

But as she went down Mrs. Jordan's narrow flights of stairs covered with worn oil-cloth, she kissed her own soft arm for pure pleasure.

"You are ravis.h.i.+ng to-night," she told herself.

Golightly Ticke's door was open, and he was standing in it, picturesquely smoking a cigarette with the candle burning behind him--"Just to see you pa.s.s," he said.