A Daughter of To-Day by Sara Jeannette Duncan (best affordable ebook reader .TXT) 📖

and shone dangerously in the telegraphic columns of the London _World_.

"De Pommitz isn't in it this time," he said. "I'll tell you what I _might_ do, Miss Elfrida. How long have you got for this--experiment?"

"Less than a week."

"Well, go home and write me an article--something locally descriptive. Make it as bright as you can, and take a familiar subject. Let me have it in three days, and I'll see if I can get it into _Raffini_ for you. Of course, you know, I can't promise that they'll look at it."

"You are very good," Elfrida returned hastily, seeing his real anxiety to be off. "Something locally descriptive. I've often thought the atelier would make a good subject."

"Capital, capital! Only be very careful about personalities and so forth. _Raffini_ hates giving offence. Good-bye! Here you, _cocher!_ Boulevard Haussmann!"


CHAPTER V.

John Kendal had only one theory that was not received with respect by the men at Lucien's. They quoted it as often as other things he said, but always in a spirit of derision, while Kendal's ideas as a rule got themselves discussed seriously, now and then furiously. This young man had been working in the atelier for three years with marked success almost from the beginning. The first things he did had a character and an importance that brought Lucien himself to admit a degree of soundness in the young fellow's earlier training, which was equal to great praise. Since then he had found the line in the most interesting room in the Palais d'Industrie, the _cours_ had twice medalled him, and Albert Wolff was beginning to talk about his _coloration delicieuse_. Also it was known that he had condescended for none of these things. His success in Paris added piquancy to his preposterous notion that an Englishman should go home and paint England and hang his work in the Academy, and made it even more unreasonable than if he had failed.

"For me," remarked Andre Vambery, with a finely curled lip, "I never see an English landscape without thinking of what it would bring _par hectare_. It is _trop arrangee_, that country, all laid out in a pattern of hedges and clumps, for the pleasure of the milords. And every milord has the taste of every other milord. He will go home to perpetuate that!"

"_Si, si! Mais c'est pour sa patrie._"

Nadie defended him. Women always did.

"Bah!" returned her lover. "_Pour nous autres artists la France est la patrie, et la France seule!_ Every day he is in England he will lose--lose--lose. Enfin, he will paint the portraits of the wives and daughters of Sir Brown and Sir Smith, and he will do it as Sir Brown and Sir Smith advise. _Avec son talent unique, distinctive! Oh, je suis a bout de patience!_"

When Kendal's opinion materialized and it became known that he meant to go back in February, and would send nothing to the Salon that year, the studio tore its hair and hugged its content. All but the master, who attempted to dissuade his pupil with literal tears, of which he did not seem in the least ashamed and which annoyed Kendal very much. In fact, it was a dramatic splash of Lucien's which happened to fall upon his coat-sleeve that decided Kendal finally about the impossibility of living always in Paris. He could not take life seriously where the emotions lent themselves so easily. And Kendal thought that he ought to take life seriously, because his natural tendency was otherwise. Kendal was an Englishman with a temperament which multiplied his individuality. If his father, who was once in the Indian Staff Corps, had lived, Kendal would probably have gone into the Indian Staff Corps too. And if his mother, who was of clerical stock, had not died about the same time, it is more than likely that she would have persuaded him to the bar. With his parents the obligation to be anything in particular seemed to Kendal to have been removed, however, and he followed his inclination in the matter instead, which made him an artist. He would have found life too interesting to confine his observation of it within the scope of any profession, but of course he could have chosen none which presents it with greater fascination. To speak quite baldly about him, his intelligence and his sympathies had a wider range than is represented by any one power of expression, even the catholic brush. He had the analytical turn of the age, though it had been denied him to demonstrate what he saw except through an art which is synthetic. With a more comprehensive conception of modern tendencies and a subtler descriptive vocabulary, Kendal might have divided his allegiance between Lucien and the magazines, and ended a light-handed fiction-maker of the more refined order of realists. As it was, he made his studies for his own pleasure, and if the people he met ministered to him further than they knew, nothing came of it more than that. What he liked best to achieve was an intimate knowledge of his fellow-beings from an outside point of view. Where intimate knowledge came of intimate association he found that it usually compromised his independence of criticism, which in the Quartier Latin was a serious matter. So he rather cold-bloodedly aimed at keeping his own personality independent of his observation of other people's, and as a rule he succeeded.

That Paris had neither made Kendal nor marred him may be gathered for the first part from his contentment to go back to paint in his native land, for the second from the fact that he had a relation with Elfrida Bell which at no point verged toward the sentimental. He would have found it difficult to explain in which direction it did verge--in fact, he would have been very much surprised to know that he sustained any relation at all toward Miss Bell important enough to repay examination. The red-armed, white-capped proprietress of a _cremerie_ had effected their introduction by regretting to them jointly that she had only one helping of _compote de cerises_ left, and leaving them to arrange its consumption between them. And it is safer than it would be in most similar cases to say that neither Elfrida's heavy-lidded beauty nor the smile that gave its instant attraction to Kendal's delicately eager face had much to do with the establishment of their acquaintance, such as it was. Kendal, though his virtue was not of the heroic order, would have turned a contemptuous heel upon any imputation of the sort, and Elfrida would have stared it calmly out of countenance.

To Elfrida it soon became a definite and agreeable fact that she and the flower of Lucien's had things to say to each other--things of the rare temperamental sort that say themselves seldom. Within a fortnight she had made a niche for him in that private place where she kept the images of those toward whom she sustained this peculiarly sacred obligation, and to meet him had become one of those pleasures which were in Sparta so notably unattainable. I cannot say that considerations which from the temperamental point of view might be described as ulterior had never suggested themselves to Miss Bell. She had thought of them, with a little smile, as a possible development on Kendal's part that might be amusing. And then she had invariably checked the smile, and told herself that she would be sorry, very sorry. Instinctively she separated the artist and the man. For the artist she had an admiration none the less sincere for its exaggerations, and a sympathy which she thought the best of herself; for the man, nothing, except the half-contemptuous reflection that he was probably as other men.

If Elfrida stamped herself less importantly upon the surface of Kendal's mind than he did upon hers, it may be easily enough accounted for by the multiplicity of images there before her. I do not mean to imply that all or many of these were feminine, but, as I have indicated, Kendal was more occupied with impressions of all sorts than is the habit of his fellow-countrymen, and at twenty eight he had managed to receive quite enough to make a certain seriousness necessary in a fresh one. There was no seriousness in his impression of Elfrida. If he had gone so far as to trace its lines he would have found them to indicate a more than slightly fantastic young woman with an appreciation of certain artistic verities out of all proportion to her power to attain them. But he had not gone so far. His encounters with her were among his casual amusements; and if the result was an occasional dinner together or first night at the Folies Dramatiques, his only reflection was that a girl who could do such things and not feel compromised was rather pleasant to know, especially so clever a girl as Elfrida Bell. He did not recognize in his own mind the mingled beginnings of approval and disapproval which end in a personal theory. He was quite unaware, for instance, that he liked the contemptuous way in which she held at arm's length the moral laxities of the Quartier, and disliked the cool cynicism with which she flashed upon them there the sort of _jeu de mot_ that did not make him uncomfortable on the lips of a Frenchwoman. He understood that she had nursed Nadie Palicsky through three weeks of diphtheria, during which time Monsieur Vambery took up his residence fourteen blocks away, without any special throb of enthusiasm; and he heard her quote Voltaire on the miracles--some of her ironies were a little old-fashioned --without conscious disgust He was willing enough to meet her on the special plane she constituted for herself--not as a woman, but as an artist and a Bohemian. But there were others who made the same claim with whom it was an affectation or a pretence, and Kendal granted it to Elfrida without any special conviction that she was more sincere than the rest. Besides, it is possible to grow indifferent, even to the unconventionalities, and Kendal had been three years in the Quartier Latin.


CHAPTER VI

If Lucien had examined Miss Bell's work during the week of her experiment with Anglo-Parisian journalism, he would have observed that it grew gradually worse as the days went on. The devotion of the small hours to composition does not steady one's hand for the reproduction of the human muscles, or inform one's eye as to the correct manipulation of flesh tints. Besides, the model suffered from Elfrida an unconscious diminution of enthusiasm. She was finding her first serious attempt at writing more absorbing than she would have believed possible, and she felt that she was doing it better than she expected. She was hardly aware of the moments that slipped by while she dabbled aimlessly in unconsidered color meditating a phrase, or leaned back and let nothing interfere with her apprehension of the atelier with the other reproductive instinct. She did not recognize the deterioration in her work, either; and at the very moment when Nadie Palicsky, observing Lucien's neglect of her, inwardly called him a brute, Elfrida was to leave the atelier an hour earlier for the sake of the more urgent thing which she had to do. She finished it in five days, and addressed it to Frank Parke with a new and uplifting sense of accomplishment. The ever fresh miracle happened to her, too, in that the working out of one article begot the possibilities of half a dozen more, and the next day saw her well into another. In posting the first she had a premonition of success. She saw it as it would infallibly appear in a conspicuous place in _Raffini's Chronicle_, and heard the