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Daughter of Today

<h2 id="id00430" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER XIII.</h2> Janet Cardiff, running downstairs to the drawing-room from the top story of the house in Kensington Square with the knowledge that a new American girl, who wrote very clever things about pictures, awaited her there, tried to remember just what sort of description John Kendal had given of her visitor. Her recollection was vague as to detail; she could not anticipate a single point with certainty, perhaps because she had not paid particular attention at the time. She had been given a distinct impression that she might expect to be interested, however, which accounted for her running downstairs. Nothing hastened Janet Cardiff's footsteps more than the prospect of anybody interesting. She and her father declared that it was their great misfortune to be thoroughly respectable, it cut them off from so much. It was in particular the girl's complaint against their life that humanity as they knew it was rather a neutral-tinted, carefully woven fabric too largely "machine-made," as she told herself, with a discontent that the various Fellows of the Royal Society and members of the Athenaeum Club, with whom the Cardiffs were in the habit of dining, could hardly have thought themselves capable of inspiring. It seemed to Janet that nobody crossed their path until his or her reputation was made, and that by the time people had made their reputations they succumbed to them, and became uninteresting. She told herself at once that nothing Kendal could have said would have prepared her for this American, and that certainly nothing she had seen or read of other Americans did. Elfrida was standing beside the open window looking out. As Janet came in a breeze wavered through and lifted the fluffy hair about her visitor's forehead, and the scent of the growing things in the little square came with it into the room. She turned slowly, with grave wide eyes and a plaintive indrawing of her pretty underlip, and held out three full-blown gracious Marechal Neil roses on long slender stems. "I have brought you these," she said, with a charming effect of simplicity, "to make me welcome. There was no reason, none whatever, why I should be welcome, so I made one. You will not be angry—perhaps?" Janet banished her conventional "Very glad to see you" instantly. She took the roses with a quick thrill of pleasure. Afterward she told herself that she was not touched, not in the least, she did not quite know why; but she freely acknowledged that she was more than amused. "How charming of you!" she said. "But I have to thank you for coming as well. Now let us shake hands, or we shan't feel properly acquainted." Janet detected a half-tone of patronage in her voice, and fell into a rage with herself because of it. She looked at Elfrida sharply to note a possible resentment, but there was none. If she had looked a trifle more sharply she might have observed a subtler patronage in the little smile her visitor received this commonplace with; but, like the other, she was too much occupied in considering her personal effect. She had become suddenly desirous that it should be a good one. Elfrida went on in the personal key. "I suppose you are very tired of hearing such things," she said, "but I owe you so much." This was not quite justifiable, for Miss Cardiff was only a successful writer in the magazines, whose name was very familiar to other people who wrote in them, and had a pleasant association for the reading public. It was by no means fame; she would have been the first to laugh at the magniloquence of the word in any personal connection. For her father she would accept a measure of it, and only deplored that the lack of public interest in Persian made the measure small. She had never confessed to a soul how largely she herself was unacquainted with his books, and how considerably her knowledge of her father's specialty was covered by the opinion that Persian was a very decorative character. She could not let Elfrida suppose that she thought this anything but a politeness. "Oh, thanks—impossible!" she cried gaily. "Indeed, I assure you it is months since I heard anything so agreeable," which was also a departure from the strictest verity. "But truly! I'm afraid I am very clumsy," Elfrida added, with a pretty dignity, "but I should like to assure you of that." "If you have allowed me to amuse you now and then for half an hour it has been very good of you," Janet returned, looking at Miss Bell with rather more curious interest than she thought it polite to show. It began to seem to her, however, that the conventional side of the occasion was not obvious from any point of view. "You are an American, aren't you?" she asked. "Mr. Kendal told me so. I suppose one oughtn't to say that one would like to be an American. But you have such a pull! I know I should like living there." Elfrida gave herself the effect of considering the matter earnestly. It flitted, really, over the surface of her mind, which was engaged in absorbing Janet and the room, and the situation. "Perhaps it is better to be born in America than in—most places," she said, with a half glance at the prim square outside. "It gives you a point of view that is—splendid." In hesitating this way before her adjectives, she always made her listeners doubly attentive to what she had to say. "And having been deprived of so much that you have over here, we like it better, of course, when we get it, than you do. But nobody would live in constant deprivation. No, you wouldn't like living there. Except in New York, and, oh, I should say Santa Barbara, and New Orleans perhaps, the life over there is—infernal." "You are like a shower-bath," said Janet to herself; but the shower-bath had no palpable effect upon her. "What have we that is so important that you haven't got?" she asked. "Quantities of things." Elfrida hesitated, not absolutely sure of the wisdom of her example. Then she ventured it. "The picturesqueness of society—your duchesses and your women in the green-grocers' shops." It was not wise, she saw instantly. "Really? It is so difficult to understand that duchesses are interesting—out of novels; and the green-grocers' wives are a good deal alike, too, aren't they?" "It's the contrast; you see our duchesses were green-grocers' wives the day before yesterday, and our green-grocers' wives subscribe to the magazines. It's all mixed up, and there are no high lights anywhere. You move before us in a sort of panoramic pageant," Elfrida went on, determined to redeem her point, "with your Queen and Empress of India—she ought to be riding on an elephant, oughtn't she?—in front, and all your princes and nobles with their swords drawn to protect her. Then your Upper Classes and your Upper Middle Classes walking stiffly two and two; and then your Lower Middle Classes with large families, dropping their h's; and then your hideous people from the slums. And besides," she added, with prettily repressed enthusiasm, "there is the shadowy procession of all the people that have gone before, and we can see that you are a good deal like them, though they are more interesting still. It is very pictorial." She stopped suddenly and consciously, as if she had said too much, and Janet felt that she was suggestively apologized to. "Doesn't the phenomenal squash make up for all that?" she asked. "It would to me. I'm dying to see the phenomenal squash, and the prodigious water-melon, and—" "And the falls of Niagara?" Elfrida put in, with the faintest turning down of the corners of her mouth. "I'm afraid our wonders are chiefly natural, and largely vegetable, as you say." "But they are wonders. Everything here has been measured so many times. Besides, haven't you got the elevated railway, and a statue of Liberty, and the 'Jeanne d'Arc,' and W. D. Howells! To say nothing of a whole string of poets—good gray poets that wear beards and laurels, and fanciful young ones that dance in garlands on the back pages of the Century. Oh, I know them all, the dear things! And I'm quite sure their ideas are indigenous to the soil." Elfrida let her eyes tell her appreciation, and also the fact that she would take courage now, she was gaining confidence. "I'm glad you like them," she said. "Howells would do if he would stop writing about virtuous sewing-girls, and give us some real romans psychologiques. But he is too much afraid of soiling his hands, that monsieur; his betes humaines are always conventionalized, and generally come out at the end wearing the halo of the redeemed. He always reminds me of Cruikshank's picture of the ghost being put out by the extinguisher in the 'Christmas Carol.' His genius is the ghost, and conventionality is the extinguisher. But it is genius, so it's a pity." "It seems to me that Howells deals honestly with his materials," Janet said, instinctively stilling the jar of Elfrida's regardless note. She was so pretty, this new creature, and she had such original ways. Janet must let her talk about romans psychologiques, or worse things, if she wanted to. "To me he has a tremendous appearance of sincerity, psychological and other. But do you know, I don't think the English or American people are exactly calculated to reward the sort of vivisection you mean. The bete is too conscious of his moral fibre when he's respectable, and when he isn't respectable he doesn't commit picturesque crimes, he steals and boozes. I dare say he's bestial enough, but pure unrelieved filth can't be transmuted into literature, and as a people we're perfectly devoid of that extraordinary artistic nature that it makes such a foil for in the Latins. That is really the only excuse the naturalists have." "Excuse!" Elfrida repeated, with a bewildered look. "You had Wainwright," she added hastily. "Nous nous en felicitons! We've got him still—in Madame Tussaud's," cried Janet "He poisoned for money in cold blood—not exactly an artistic vice! Oh, he won't do!"—she laughed triumphantly—"if he did write charming things about the Renaissance! Besides, he illustrates my case; among us he was a phenomenon, like the elephant-headed man. Phenomena are for the scientists. You don't mean to tell me that any literature that pretends to call itself artistic has a right to touch them." By this time they had absolutely forgotten that up to twenty minutes ago they had never seen each other before. Already they had mutely and unconsciously begun to rejoice that they had come together; already each of them promised herself the exploration of the other's nature, with the preliminary idea that it would be a satisfying, at least an interesting process. The impulse made Elfrida almost natural, and Janet perceived this with quick self-congratulation. Already she had made up her mind that this manner was a pretty mask which it would be her business to remove. "But—but you're not in it!" Elfrida returned. "Pardon me, but you're not there, you know. Art has no ideal but truth, and to conventionalize truth is to damn it In the most commonplace material there is always truth, but here they conventionalize it out of all—" "Oh," cried Janet, "we're a conventional people, I assure you, Miss Bell, and so are you, for how could you change your spots in a hundred years? The material here is conventional. Daudet couldn't have written of us. Our wicked women are too inglorious. Now Sapho—" Miss Cardiff stopped at the ringing of the door-bell. "Oh," she said, "here is my father. You will let me give you a cup of tea now, won't you?" The maid was bringing in the tray. "I should like you to meet my father." Lawrence Cardiff's grasp was on the door-handle almost as she spoke. Seeing Elfrida, he involuntarily put up his hand to settle the back of his coat collar—these little middle-aged ways were growing upon him—and shook hands with her as Janet introduced them, with that courtly impenetrable agreeableness that always provoked curiosity about him in strangers, and often led to his being taken for somebody more important than he was, usually somebody in politics. Elfrida saw that he was quite different from her conception of a university professor with a reputation in Persian and a clever daughter of twenty-four. He was straight and slender for one thing; he had gay inquiring eyes, and fair hair just beginning to show gray where the ends were brushed back; and Elfrida immediately became aware that his features were as modern and as mobile as possible. She had a moment of indecision and surprise —indecision as to the most effective way of presenting herself, and surprise that it should be necessary to decide upon a way. It had never occurred to her that a gentleman who had won scientific celebrity by digging about Arabic roots, and who had contributed a daughter like Janet to the popular magazines, could claim anything of her beyond a highly respectful consideration. In moments when she hoped to know the Cardiffs well she had pictured herself doing little graceful acts of politeness toward this paternal person—acts connected with his spectacles, his Athenian, his foot-stool But apparently she had to meet a knight and not a pawn. She was hardly aware of taking counsel with herself; and the way she abandoned her hesitations, and what Janet was inwardly calling her Burne-Jonesisms, had all the effect of an access of unconsciousness. Janet Cardiff watched it with delight. "But why," she asked herself in wonder, "should she have been so affected—if it was affectation—with me?" She would decide whether it was or was not afterward, she thought. Meanwhile she was glad her father had thought of saying something nice about the art criticism in the Decade; he was putting it so much better than she could, and it would do for both of them. "You paint yourself, I fancy?" Mr. Cardiff was saying lightly. There was no answer for an instant, or perhaps three. Elfrida was looking down. Presently she raised her eyes, and they were larger than ever, and wet. "No," she said, a little tensely. "I have tried" —"trr-hied," she pronounced it—"but—but I cannot." Lawrence Cardiff looked at his teaspoon in a considering way, and Janet reflected, not without indignation, that this was the manner in which people who cared for them might be expected to speak of the dead. But Elfrida cut short the reflection by turning to her brightly. "When Mr. Cardiff came in," she said, "you were telling me why a Daudet could not write about the English. It was something about Sapho—" Mr. Cardiff looked up curiously, and Janet, glancing in her father's direction, reddened. Did this strange young woman not realize that it was impossible to discuss beings like "Sapho" with one's father in the room? Apparently not, for she went on: "It seems to me it is the exception in that class, as in all classes, that rewards interest—" That rewards interest? What might she not say next! "Yes," interrupted Janet desperately, "but then my father came in and changed the subject of our conversation. Where are you living, Miss Bell?" "Near Fleet Street," said Elfrida, rising. "I find the locality most interesting, when I can see it. I can patronize the Roman baths, and lunch at Dr. Johnson's pet tavern, and attend service in the church of the real Templars if I like. It is delightful. I did go to the Temple Church a fortnight ago," she added, "and I saw such a horrible thing that I am not sure that I will go again. There is a beautiful old Crusader lying there in stone, and on his feet a man who sat near had hung his silk hat. And nobody interfered. Why do you laugh?" When she had fairly gone Lawrence and Janet Cardiff looked at each other and smiled. "Well!" cried Janet, "it's a find, isn't it, daddy?" Her father shrugged his shoulders. His manner said that he was not pleased, but Janet found a tone in his voice that told her the impression of Elfrida had not been altogether distasteful. "Fin de siecle," he said. "Perhaps," Janet answered, looking out of the window, "a little fin de siecle." "Did you notice," asked Lawrence Cardiff, "that she didn't tell you where she was living?" "Didn't she? Neither she did. But we can easily find out from John Kendal." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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