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Daughter of Today

<h2 id="id00352" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER XI.</h2> Individually a large number of Royal Academicians pronounced John Kendal's work impertinent, if not insulting, meaningless, affected, or flippant. Collectively, with a corporate opinion that might be discussed but could not be identified, they received it and hung it, smothering a distressful doubt, where it would be least likely to excite either the censure of the right-minded or the admiration of the unorthodox. The Grosvenor gave him a discreet appreciation, and the New received him with joy and thanksgiving. If he had gone to any of the Private Views, which temptation he firmly resisted, he would have heard the British public —for after all the British public is always well represented at a Private View—say discontentedly how much better it would like his pictures if they were only a little more finished. He might even have had the cruel luck to hear one patron of the arts, who began by designing the pictorial advertisements for his own furniture-polish, state that he would buy that twilight effect with the empty fields, if only the trees in the foreground weren't so blurred. Other things, too, he might have heard that would have amused him more as being less commonplace, but pleased him no better, said by people who cast furtive glances over their shoulders to see if anybody that might be the artist was within reach of their discriminating admiration; and here and there, if he had listened well, a vigorous word that meant recognition and reward. It was not that he did not long for the tritest word of comment from the oracle before which he had chosen to lay the fruit of his labors; indeed, he was so conscious of his desire to know this opinion, not over clever as he believed it, that he ran away on the evening of varnishing-day. If he staid he felt that he would inevitably compromise his dignity, so he hid himself with some amiable people in Hampshire, who could be relied upon not to worry him, for a week. He did not deny himself the papers, however. They reached him in stacks, with the damp chill of the afternoon post upon them; and in their solid paragraphs he read the verdict of the British public written out in words of proper length and much the same phrases that had done duty for Eastlake and Sir Martin Shee. Fortunately, the amiable people included some very young people, so young that they could properly compel Kendal to go into the fields with them and make cowslip balls, and some robust girls of eighteen and twenty, who mutely demanded the pleasure of beating him at tennis every afternoon. He was able in this way to work off the depression that visited him daily with the damp odor of London art, criticism, quite independently of its bias toward himself. He told himself that he had been let off fairly easily, though he winced considerably under the adulation of the Daily Mercury, and found himself breathing most freely when least was said about him. The day of his triumph in the Mercury he made monstrous cowslip balls, and thought that the world had never been sufficiently congratulated upon possessing the ideal simplicity of children. Thereafter for two days nothing came, and he began to grow restless. Then the Decade made its weekly slovenly appearance, without a wrapper. He opened it with the accumulated interest of forty-eight hours, turned to "Fine Arts," and girded himself to receive the Decade's ideas. He read the first sentence twice—the article opened curiously, for the Decade. He looked at the cover to see whether he had not been mistaken. Then he sat down beside the open window, where a fine rain came in and smote upon the page, and read it through, straining his eyes in the gathering darkness over the last paragraph. After that he walked up and down the room among the shadows for half an hour, not ringing for lights, because the scented darkness of the garden, where the rain was dripping, and the half outlines of the things in the room were so much more grateful to his imagination as the Decade's critic had stimulated it with the young, mocking, brilliant voice that spoke in the department of "Fine Arts." It stirred him all through. In the pleasure it gave him he refused to reflect how often it dismissed with contempt where it should have considered with respect, how it was sometimes inconsistent, sometimes exaggerated and obscure. He was rapt in the delicacy and truth with which the critic translated into words the recognizable souls of a certain few pictures—it could not displease him that they were very few, since three of his were among them. When it spoke of these the voice was strong and gentle, with an uplifted tenderness, and all the suppressed suggestion that good pictures themselves have. It made their quality felt in the lines, and it spoke with a personal joy. "A new note!" Kendal thought aloud. "A voice crying in the wilderness, by Jove! Wolff might have done it if it had been in French, but Wolff would have been fairer and more technical and less sympathetic." A fine energy crept all through him and burned at his finger-ends. The desire to work seized him deliciously with the thrill of being understood, a longing to accomplish to the utmost of his limitations—he must reasonably suppose his limitations. Sometimes they were close and real; at this moment they were far off and vague, and almost dissolved by the force of his joyous intention. He threw himself mentally upon half-finished canvas that stood against the wall in Bryanston Street, and spent ten exalted minutes in finishing it. When it was done he found it ravishing, and raged because he could not decently leave for town before four o'clock next day. He worked off the time before dinner by putting his things together, and the amiable people had never found him so delightful as he was that evening. After amusing one of the robust young ladies for half an hour at prodigious cost, he found himself comparing their conversation with the talk he might have had in the time with Elfrida Bell, and a fresh sense of injury visited him at having been high-handedly debarred from that pleasure for so many weeks. It staid with him and pricked him all the way to town next day. He was a fool, he thought, to have missed the chance of meeting her upon the opening days of the London exhibitions; she was sure to have gone, if it were only to scoff, and her scoffing would have been so amusing to listen to. He thought gloomily of the impossibility of finding her in London if she didn't wish to be found, and he concluded that he really wanted to see her, that he must see her soon—to show her that article. The desire had not passed from him three days later, when the boy from below-stairs brought him up a card. Kendal was in his shirt-sleeves, and had just established a relation of great intimacy with an entirely new subject. Before the boy reached him he recognized with annoyance that it was a lady's card, and he took it between his thumb and his palette with the most brutal impatience. "You are to say—" he began, and stopped. "Show the lady up," he said in substitution, while his face cleared with a puzzled amusement, and he looked at the card again. It read "Miss Elfrida Bell," but the odd thing was down in one corner, where ran the statement, in small square type, "The Illustrated Age." There was a sweet glory of May sunlight in the streets outside, and she seemed to bring some of it in with her, as well as the actual perfume of the bunch of violets which she wore in her belt. Her eyes, under the queerest of hats, were bright and soft, there was a faint color in her cheeks. Her shapely hands were in gray gloves with long gauntlets, and in one of them she carried a business-like little black notebook. She came in with a shy hesitation that became her very well, and as she approached, their old understanding immediately arranged itself between them. "I should be perfectly justified in sulking," he declared gaily, disencumbering a chair of a battered tin box of empty twisted tubes for her, "and asking you to what I might attribute the honor of this visit." He put up his eye-glass and stared through it with an absurd affectation of dignified astonishment. "But I'll magnanimously admit that I'm delighted to see you. I'll even lay aside my wounded sensibilities enough to ask you where you've been." "I!" faltered Elfrida softly, with her wide-eyed smile. "Oh! as if that were of any consequence!" She stepped back a pace or two to look at an unpacked canvas, and her expression changed. "Ah!" she said gravely, "how good it is to see that! I wish I could remember by myself so much, half so much, of the sunlight of that country. In three days of these fogs I had forgotten it. I mean the reality of it Only a pale theory staid with me. Now it comes back." "Then you have been in London?" he probed, while she looked wistfully at the fringe of a wood in Brittany that stood upon his canvas. Her eyes left the picture and wandered around the room. "I!" she said again. "In London? Yes, I have been in London. How splendidly different you are!" she said, looking straight at him as if she stated a falling of the thermometer or a quotation from the Stock Exchange. "But are you sure, perfectly sure," she went on, with dainty emphasis, "that you can stay different? Aren't you the least bit afraid that in the end your work may become—pardon me—commercial, like the rest? Is there no danger?" "I wish you would sit down," Kendal said ruefully. "I shouldn't feel it so much, perhaps, if you sat down. And pending my acknowledgment of a Londoner's sin in painting in London, it seems to me that you have put yourself under pretty much the same condemnation." "I have not come to paint," Elfrida answered quickly. "I have put away the insanity of thinking I ever could. I told you that, I think, in a letter. But there are—other things. You may remember that you thought there were." She spoke with so much repressed feeling that Kendal reproached himself with not having thought carefully enough about it to take her at her letter's word. He took up the card that announced her, and looked again at the lower left-hand corner. "I do remember, but I don't understand. Is this one of them?" he asked. Something, something absolutely unintentional and of the slightest quality, in his voice operated to lower her estimate of the announcement on the card, and she flushed a little. "It's—it's a way," she said. "But it was stupid —bourgeois—of me to send up a card—such a card. With most of these people it is necessary; with you, of course, it was hideous! Give it to me, please," and she proceeded to tear it slowly into little bits. "You must pardon me," she went on, "but I thought, you know—we are not in Paris now—and there might be people here. And then, after all, it explains me." "Then I should like another," Kendal interrupted. "I'm going to do a descriptive article for the Age; the editor wants to call it 'Through the Studios,' or something of that sort—about the artists over here and their ways of working, and their places, and their ideas, and all that, and I thought, if you didn't mind, I should like to begin with you. Though it's rather like taking an advantage." "But are you going in for this sort of thing seriously? Have you ever done anything of the sort before? Isn't it an uncommon grind?" Kendal asked, with hearty interest. "What made you think of it? Of course you may say any mortal thing you want to about me—though I call it treachery, your going over to the critics. And I'm afraid you won't find anything very picturesque here. As you say, we're not in Paris." "Oh yes, I shall," she replied sweetly, ignoring his questions. "I like pipes and cobwebs and old coats hanging on a nail, and plenty of litter and dust and confusion. It's much better for work than tapestries and old armour and wood-carvings." Miss Bell did not open her little black notebook to record these things, however. Instead, she picked up a number of the London Magazine and looked at the title of an article pencil-marked on the pale green cover. It was Janet Cardiff's article, and Lady Halifax had marked it. Elfrida had read it before. It was a fanciful recreation of the conditions of verse-making when Herrick wrote, very pleasurably ironical in its bearing upon more modern poetry-making. It had quite deserved the praise she gave it in the corner which the Age reserved for magazines. "I want you to understand," she said slowly, "that it is only a way. I shall not be content to stick at this—ordinary—kind of journalistic work. I shall aim at something better—something perhaps even as good as that," she held up the marked article. "I wonder if she realizes how fortunate she is—to appear between the same covers as Swinburne!" "It is not fortune altogether," Kendal answered; "she works hard." "Do you know her? Do you see her often? Will you tell her that there is somebody who takes a special delight in every word she writes?" asked Elfrida impulsively. "But no, of course not! Why should she care—she must hear such things so often. Tell me, though, what is she like, and particularly how old is she?" Kendal had begun to paint again; it was a compliment he was able to pay only to a very few people. "I shall certainly repeat it to her," he said. "She can't hear such things often enough—nobody can. How shall I tell you what she is like! She is tall, about as tall as you are, and rather thin. She has a good color, and nice hair and eyes." "What colored eyes?" "Brown, I think. No—I don't know, but not blue. And good eyebrows. Particularly good eyebrows." "She must be plain," Elfrida thought, "if he has to dwell upon her eyebrows. And how old?" she asked again. "Much over thirty?" "Oh dear, no! Not thirty. Twenty-four, I should say." Elfrida's face fell perceptibly. "Twenty-four!" she exclaimed. "And I am already twenty! I shall never catch up to her in four years. Oh, you have made me so unhappy! I thought she must be quite old—forty perhaps. I was prepared to venerate her. But twenty-four and good eyebrows! It is too much." Kendal laughed. "Oh, I say!" he exclaimed, jumping up and bringing a journal from the other side of the room, "if you're going in for art criticism, here's something! Do you see the Decade? The Decade's article on the pictures in last week's number fairly brought me back to town." He held his brush between his teeth and found the place for her. "There! I don't know who did it, and it was the first thing Miss Cardiff asked me when I put in my appearance there yesterday, so she doesn't either, though she writes a good deal for the Decade." Kendal had gone back to work, and did not see that Elfrida was making an effort of self-control, with a curious exaltation in her eyes. "I—I have seen this," she said presently. "Capital, isn't it!" "Miss Cardiff asked you who wrote it?" she repeated hungrily. "Yes; she commissioned me to find out, and if he was respectable to bring him there. Her father said I was to bring him anyway. So I don't propose to find out. The Cardiffs have burned their fingers once or twice already handling obscure genius, and I won't take the responsibility. But it's adorably savage, isn't it?" "Do you really like it!" she asked. It was her first taste of success, and the savor was very sweet. But she was in an agony of desire to tell him, to tell him immediately, but gracefully, delicately, that she wrote it. How could she say it, and yet seem uneager, indifferent? But the occasion must not slip. It was a miserable moment. "Immensely," he replied. "Then," she said, with just a little more significance in her voice than she intended, "you would rather not find out?" He turned and met her shining eyes. She smiled, and he had an instant of conviction. "You," he exclaimed—"you did it! Really?" She nodded, and he swiftly reflected upon what he had said. "Now criticise!" she begged impatiently. "I can only advise you to follow your own example," he said gravely. "It's rather exuberantly cruel in places." "Adorably savage, you said!" "I wasn't criticising then. And I suppose," he went on, with a shade of awkwardness, "I ought to thank you for all the charming things you put in about me." "Ah!" she returned, with a contemptuous pout and shrug, "don't say that—it's like the others. But," she clinched it notwithstanding, and rather quickly, "will you take me to see Miss Cardiff? I mean," she added, noting his look of consternation, "will you ask her if I may come? I forget—we are in London." At this moment the boy from below-stairs knocked with tea and cakes, little Italian cakes in iced jackets and paper boats. "Yes, certainly—yes, I will," said Kendal, staring at the tray, and trying to remember when he had ordered it; "but it's your plain duty to make us both some tea, and to eat as many of these pink-and-white things as you possibly can. They seem to have come down from heaven for you." They ate and drank and talked and were merry for quite twenty minutes. Elfrida opened her notebook and threatened absurdities of detail for publication in the Age; he defied her, tilted his chair back, put his feet on a packing-box, and smoked a cigarette. He placed all the studies he had made after she left Paris before her, and as she finished the last but one of the Italian cakes, they discussed these in the few words from which they both drew such large and satisfying meanings as do not lie at all in the vocabulary of outsiders. Elfrida felt the keenest pleasure of her whole life in the knowledge that Kendal was talking to her more seriously, more carefully, because of that piece of work in the Decade; the consciousness of it was like wine to her, freeing her thoughts and her lips. Kendal felt, too, that the plane of their relations was somehow altered. He was not sure that he liked the alteration. Already she had grown less amusing, and the real camaraderie which she constantly suggested her desire for he could not, at the bottom of his heart, truly tolerate with a woman. He was an artist, but he was also an Englishman, and he told himself that he must not let her get into the way of coming there. He felt an obscure inward irritation, which he did not analyze, that she should talk so well and be so charming personally at the same time. Elfrida, still in the flush of her elation, was putting on her gloves to go, when the room resounded to a masterful double rap. The door almost simultaneously opened far enough to disclose a substantial gloved hand upon the outer handle, and in the tones of confident aggression which habit has given to many middle-aged ladies, a feminine voice said, "May we come in?" It is not probable that Lady Halifax had ever been so silently, surely, and swiftly damned before. In the fraction of an instant that followed Kendal glanced at the dismantled tray and felt that the situation was atrocious. He had just time to put his foot upon his half-smoked cigarette, and to force a pretence of unconcern into his "Come in! Come in!" when the lady and her daughter entered with something of unceremoniousness. "Those are appalling stairs—" Lady Halifax observed Elfrida, and came to an instant's astonished halt—"of yours, Mr. Kendal, appalling!" Then as Kendal shook hands with Miss Halifax she faced round upon him in a manner which said definitely, "Explain!" and behind her sharp good-natured little eyes Kendal read, "If it is possible!" He looked at Elfrida in the silent hope that she would go, but she appeared to have no such intention. He was pushed to a momentary wish that she had got into the cupboard, which he dismissed, turning a deeper brick color as it came and went. Elfrida was looking up with calm inquiry, buttoning a last glove-button. "Lady Halifax," he said, seeing nothing else for it, "this is Miss Bell, from America, a fellow-student in Paris. Miss Bell has deserted art for literature, though," he went on bravely, noting an immediate change in his visitor's expression, and the fact that her acknowledgment was quite as polite as was necessary. "She has done me the honor to look me up this afternoon in the formidable character of a representative of the press." Lady Halifax looked as if the explanation was quite acceptable, though she reserved the right of criticism. Elfrida took the first word, smiling prettily straight into Lady Halifax's face. "Mr. Kendal pretends to be very much frightened," she said, with pleasant, modest coolness, and looked at Kendal. "From America," Lady Halifax repeated, as if for the comfort of the assurance. "I am sure it is a great advantage nowadays to have been brought up in America." This was quite as delicately as Lady Halifax could possibly manage to inform Kendal that she understood the situation. Miss Halifax was looking absorbedly at Elfrida. "Are you really a journalist?" Miss Halifax asked. "How nice! I didn't know there were any ladies on the London press, except, of course, the fashion-papers, but that isn't quite the same, is it?" When Miss Halifax said "How nice!" it indicated a strong degree of interest. The threads of Miss Halifax's imagination were perpetually twisting themselves about incidents that had the least unusualness, and here was a most unusual incident, with beauty and genius thrown in! Whether she could approve it or not in connection with Kendal, Miss Halifax would decide afterward. She told herself that she ought to be sufficiently devoted to Kendal to be magnanimous about his friends. Her six years of seniority gave her the candor to confess that she was devoted to Kendal—to his artistic personality, that is, and to his pictures. While Kendal turned a still uncomfortable back upon them, showing Lady Halifax what he had done since she had been there last—she was always pitiless in her demands for results—Elfrida talked a little about "the press" to Miss Halifax. Very lightly and gracefully she talked about it, so lightly and gracefully that Miss Halifax obtained an impression which she has never lost, that journalism for a woman had ideal attractions, and privately resolved if ever she were thrown upon the bleak world to take it up. As the others turned toward them again Elfrida noticed the conscience-stricken glance which Kendal gave to the tea-tray. "Oh," she said, with a slight enhancement of her pretty Parisian gurgle, "I am very guilty—you must allow me to say that I am very guilty indeed! Mr. Kendal did not expect to see me to-day, and in his surprise he permitted me to eat up all the cakes! I am so sorry! Are there no more—anywhere?" she asked Kendal, with such a gay pretence of tragic grief that they all laughed together. She went away then, and while they waited for a fresh supply of tea, Kendal did his best to satisfy the curiosity of the Halifaxes about her. He was so more than thankful she had convinced them that she was a person about whom it was proper to be curious. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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