"It is not achievement you want, but success. That is why," said he.
There was silence for a moment, broken by light footsteps on the stair and a knock. "My good friends," cried Mademoiselle Palicsky from the doorway, "have you been quarrelling?" She made a little dramatic gesture to match her words, which brought out every line of a black velvet and white corduroy dress, which would have been a horror upon an Englishwoman. Upon Mademoiselle Palicsky it was simply an admiration-point of the kind never seen out of Paris, and its effect was instantaneous. Kendal acknowledged it with a bow of exaggerated deference.
"_C"est parfait!_" he said with humility, and lifted a pile of studies off the nearest chair for her.
Nadie stood still, pouting. "Monsieur is amused," she said. "Monsieur is always amused. But I have that to tell which monsieur will graciously take _au grand servieux_."
"What is it, Nadie?" Elfrida asked, with something like dread in her voice. Nadie"s air was so important, so rejoiceful.
"_Ecoutez donc!_ I am to send two pictures to the Salon this year. Carolos Duran has already seen my sketch for one, and he says there is not a doubt--_not a doubt_--that it will be considered. Your congratulations, both of you, or your hearts" blood! For on my word of honor I did not expect it this year."
"A thousand and one!" cried Kendal, trying not to see Elfrida"s face. "But if you did not expect it this year, mademoiselle, you were the only one who had so little knowledge of affairs," he added gaily.
"And now," Nadie went on, as if he had interrupted her, "I am going to drive in the Bois to see what it will be like when the people in the best carriages turn and say, "That is Mademoiselle Nadie Palicsky, whose picture has just been bought for the Luxembourg.""
She paused and looked for a curious instant at Elfrida, and then slipped quickly behind her chair. "_Embra.s.se moi, cherie!_" she said, bringing her face with a bird-like motion close to the other girl"s.
Kendal saw an instinctive momentary aversion in the backward start of Elfrida"s head, and from the bottom of his heart he was sorry for her. She pushed her friend away almost violently.
"No!" she said. "No! I am sorry, but it is too childish.
We never kiss each other, you and I. And listen, Nadie: I am delighted for you, but I have a sick headache--_la migraine_, you understand. And you must go away, both of you--both of you!" Her voice raised itself in the last few words to an almost hysterical imperativeness. As they went down the stairs together Mademoiselle Palicsky remarked to Mr. John Kendal, repentant of the good that he had done:
"So she has consulted her oracle and it has barked out the truth. Let us hope she will not throw herself into the Seine!"
"Oh no!" Kendal replied. "She"s horribly hurt but I am glad to believe that she hasn"t the capacity for tragedy.
Somebody," he added gloomily, "ought to have told her long ago."
Half an hour later the postman brought Elfrida a letter from Mr. Frank Parke, and a packet containing her ma.n.u.script. It was a long letter, very kind, and appreciative of the article, which Mr. Parke called bright and gossipy, and, if anything, too cleverly unconventional in tone. He did not take the trouble to criticise it seriously, and left Elfrida under the impression that, from his point of view at least, it had no faults. Mr. Parke had offered the article to _Raffini_, but while they might have printed it upon his recommendation, it appeared that even his recommendation could not induce them to promise to pay for it. And it was a theory with him that what was worth printing was invariably worth paying for, so he returned the ma.n.u.script to its author in the sincere hope that it might yet meet its deserts. He had been thinking over the talk they had had together, and he saw more plainly than ever the hopelessness of her getting a journalistic start in Paris, however, and he would distinctly advise her to try London instead. There were a number of ladies" papers published in London--he regretted that he did not know the editors of any of them--and amongst them, with her freshness of style, she would be sure to find an opening. Mr. Parke added the address of a lodging-house off Fleet Street, where Elfrida would be in the thick of it, and the fact that he was leaving Paris for three months or so, and hoped she would write to him when he came back. It was a letter precisely calculated to draw an unsophisticated amateur mind away from any other mortification, to pour balm upon any unrelated wound. Elfrida felt herself armed by it to face a sea of troubles. Not absolutely, but almost, she convinced herself on the spot that her solemn choice of an art had been immature, and to some extent groundless and unwarrantable; and she washed all her brushes with a mechanical and melancholy sense that it was for the last time. It was easier than she would have dreamed for her to decide to take Frank Parke"s advice and go to London. The life of the Quartier had already vaguely lost in charm since she knew that she must be irredeemably a failure in the atelier, though she told herself, with a hot tear or two, that no one loved it better, more comprehendingly, than she did. Her impulse was to begin packing at once; but she put that off until the next day, and wrote two or three letters instead.
One was to John Kendal. This is the whole of it:
"Please believe me very grateful for your frankness this afternoon. I have been most curiously blind. But I agree with you that there is something else, and I am going away to find it out and to do it. When I succeed I will let you know, but you shall not tell me that I have failed again.
"ELFRIDA BELL."
The other was addressed to her mother, and when it reached Mr. and Mrs. Bell in Sparta they said it was certainly sympathetic and very well written. This was to disarm one another"s mind of the suspicion that its last page was doubtfully daughterly.
"In view of what are now your very limited resources, I am sure dear mother, you will understand my unwillingness to make any additional drain upon them, as I should do if I followed your wishes and came home. I am convinced of my ability to support myself, and I am not coming home. To avoid giving you the pain of repeating your request, and the possibility of your sending me money which you cannot afford to spare, I have decided not to let you know my whereabouts until I can write to you that I am in an independent position.
I will only say that I am leaving Paris, and that no letters sent to this address will be forwarded. I sincerely hope you will not allow yourself to be in any way anxious about me, for I a.s.sure you that there is not the slightest need. With much love to papa and yourself,
"Always your affectionate daughter,
"ELFRIDA.
"P.S.--I hope your asthma has again succ.u.mbed to Dr. Paley."
CHAPTER VII.
There was a sc.r.a.ping and a stumbling sound in the second floor front bedroom of Mrs. Jordan"s lodgings in a by-way of Fleet Street, at two o"clock in the morning. It came up to Elfrida mixed with the rattle of a departing cab over the paving-stones below, outside where the fog was lifting and showing one street-lamp to another. Elfrida in her attic had been sitting above the fog all night; her single candle had not been obscured by it. The cab had been paid and the andirons were being disturbed by Mr. Golightly Ticke, returned from the Criterion Restaurant, where he had been supping with the leading lady of the Sparkle Company, at the leading, lady"s expense. She could afford it better than he could, she told him, and that was extremely true, for Mr. Ticke had his capacities for light comedy still largely to prove, while Mademoiselle Phyllis Fane had almost disestablished herself upon the stage, so long and so prosperously had she pirouetted there. Mr. Golightly Ticke"s case excited a degree of the large compa.s.sion which Mademoiselle Phyllis had for incipient genius of the interesting s.e.x, and which served her instead of virtue of the more ordinary sort. He had a doable claim upon it, because, in addition to being tall and fair and misunderstood by most people, with a thin nose that went beautifully with a medieval costume, he was such a gentleman. Phyllis loosened her purse-strings instinctively, with genuine gratification, whenever this young man approached. She believed in him; he had ideas, she said, and she gave him more; in the end he would be sure to "catch on." Through the invariable period of obscurity which comes before the appearance of any star, she was in the habit of stating that he would have no truer friend than Filly Fane. She "spoke to" the manager, she pointed out Mr. Ticke"s little parts to the more intimate of her friends of the press. She sent him delicate little presents of expensive cigars, scents, and soaps; she told him often that he would infallibly "get there."
The fact of his having paid his own cab-fare from the Criterion on this particular morning gave him, as he found his way upstairs, almost an injured feeling of independence.
As the sounds defined themselves move distinctly, troublous and uncertain, Elfrida laid down her pen and listened.
"What an absurd boy it is!" she said. "He"s trying to go to bed in the fireplace."
As a matter of fact, Mr. Ticke"s stage of intoxication was not nearly so advanced as that; but Elfrida"s mood was borrowed from her article, and she felt the necessity of putting it graphically. Besides, a picturesque form of stating his condition was almost due to Mr. Ticke.
Mr. Ticke lived the unfettered life; he was of the elect; Elfrida reflected, as Mr. Ticke went impulsively to bed, how easy it was to discover the elect. A glance would do it, a word, the turning of an eyelid; she knew it of Golightly Ticke days before he came up in an old velvet coat, and without a shirt collar, to borrow a sheet of note paper and an envelope from her. On that occasion Mr. Ticke had half apologized for his appearance, saying, "I"m afraid I"m rather a Bohemian," in his sympathetic voice. To which Elfrida had responded, hanging him the note paper, "Afraid!" and the understanding was established at once. Elfrida did not consider Mr. Ticke"s other qualifications or disqualifications; that would have been a bourgeois thing to do. He was a _belle dame_, that was sufficient. He might find life difficult, it was natural and probable. She, Elfrida Bell, found it difficult. He had not succeeded yet; neither had she; therefore they had a comradeship--they and a few others--of revolt against the dull conventional British public that barred the way to success. Yesterday she had met him at the street-door, and he had stopped to remark that along the Embankment nature was making a bad copy of one of Vereschagin"s pictures. When people could say things like that, nothing else mattered much. It is impossible to tell whether Miss Bell would have found room in this philosophy for the G.o.dmotherly benevolence of Mademoiselle Fane, if she had known of it, or not.
It was a long, low-roofed room in which Elfrida Bell meditated, biting the end of her pen, upon the difference it made when a fellow-being was not a Philistine; and it was not in the least like any other apartment Mrs. Jordan had to let. It was the atelier of the Rue Porte Royale transported. Elfrida had brought all her possessions with her, and took a nameless comfort in arranging them as she liked them best. "Try to feel at home," she said whimsically to her Indian zither as she hung it up. "We shall miss Paris, you and I, but one day we shall go back together." A j.a.panese screen wandered across the room and made a bedroom of the end. Elfrida had to buy that, and spent a day in finding a cheap one which did not offend her. The floor was bare except for a little Afghan prayer-carpet, Mrs. Jordan having removed, in suspicions astonishment, an almost new tapestry of as nice a pattern as she ever set eyes on, at her lodger"s request. A samovar stood on a little square table in the corner, and beside it a tin box of biscuits. The dormer-windows were hung with Eastern stuffs, a Roman lamp stood on the mantel, a Koran-holder held Omar Khayyam second-hand, and Meredith"s last novel, and "Anna Karenina," and "Salammbo," and two or three recent numbers of the _Figaro_. Here and there on the wall a Salon photograph was fastened. A study of a girl"s head that Nadie had given her was stuck with a Spanish dagger over the fireplace. A sketch of Vambety"s and one of Kendal"s, sacredly framed, hung where she could always see them.
There was a vague suggestion of roses about the room, and a mingled fragrance of joss-sticks and cigarettes.
The candle shone princ.i.p.ally upon a little bronze Buddha, who sat lotus-shrined on the writing-table among Elfrida"s papers, with an ineffable, inscrutable smile. On the top shelf of a closet in the wall a small pile of canvases gathered dust, face downward. Not a brush-mark of her own was visible. She told herself that she had done with that.
The girl sat with her long cloak about her and a blanket over her knees. Her fingers were almost nerveless with cold; as she laid down her ma.n.u.script she tried to wring warmth into them. Her face was white, her eyes were intensely wide open and wide awake; they had black dashes underneath, an emphasis they did not need. She lay back in her chair and gave the ma.n.u.script a little push toward Buddha smiling in the middle of the table. "Well?" she said, regarding him with defiant inquiry, cleverly mocked.
Buddha smiled on. The candle spattered, and his shadow danced on three or four long thick envelopes lying behind him. Elrida"s eyes followed it.
"Oh!" said she, "you refer me to those, do you? _Ce n"est pas poli_, Buddha dear, but you are always honest, aren"t you?" She picked op the envelopes and held them fanwise before her. "Tell me, Buddha, why have they all been sent back? I myself read them with interest, I who wrote them, and surely that proves something!" She pulled a page or two out of one of them, covered with her clear, conscious, handwriting, a handwriting with a dainty pose in it suggestive of inscrutable things behind the word. Elfrida looked at it affectionately, her eyes caressed the lines as she read them. "I find here true things and clever things," she went on; "Yes, and original, _quite_ original things. That about Balzac has never been said before--I a.s.sure you, Buddha, it has never been said before! Yet the editor of the _Athenian_ returns it to me in two days with a printed form of thanks--exactly the same printed form of thanks with which he would return a poem by Arabella Jones! Is the editor of the _Athenian_ a dolt, Buddha? The _Decade_ typewrites his regrets--that"s better--but the _Bystander_ says nothing at all but "Declined with thanks" inside the flap of the envelope."
The girl stared absently into the candle. She was not in reality greatly discouraged by these refusals: she knew that they were to be expected: indeed, they formed part of the picturesqueness of the situation in which she saw herself, alone in London, making her own fight for life as she found it worth living, by herself, for herself, in herself. It had gone on for six weeks; she thought she knew all its bitterness, and she saw nowhere the faintest gleam of coming success; yet the idea of giving it up did not even occur to her. At this moment she was reflecting that after all it was something that her articles had been returned--the editors had evidently thought them worth that much trouble--she would send them an off again in the morning, trying; the _Athenian_ article with the _Decade_, and the rejected of the _Decade_ with the _Bystander_: they would see that she did not cringe before one failure or many. Gathering up the loose pages of one article to put them back, her eyes ran mechanically again over its opening sentences. Suddenly something magnetized them, a new interest flashed into them; with a little nervous movement she brought the page closer to the candle and looked at it carefully. As she looked she blushed crimson, and dropping the paper, covered her face with her hands.
"Oh, _Buddha!_" she cried softly, struggling with her mortification, "no wonder they rejected it! There"s a mistake in the very second line--a mistake in _spelling!_"
She felt her face grow hotter as she said it, and instinctively she lowered her voice. Her vanity was p.r.i.c.ked as with a sword; for a moment she suffered keenly.
Her fabric of hope underwent a horrible collapse; the blow was at its very foundation. While the minute hand of her mother"s old-fashioned gold watch travelled to its next point, or for nearly as long as that, Elfrida was under the impression that a person who spelled "artificially" with one _L_ could never succeed in literature. She believed she had counted the possibilities of failure. She had thought of style, she had thought of sense--she had never thought of spelling! She began with a penknife to make the word right, and almost fearfully let herself read the first few fines. "There are no more!"
she said to herself, with a sigh of relief. Turning the page, she read on, and the irritation began to fade out of her face. She turned the next page and the next, and her eyes grew interested, absorbed, enthusiastic. There were some more, one or two, but she did not see them.
Her house of hope built itself again. "A mere slip," she said, rea.s.sured; and then, as her eye fell on a little fat dictionary that held down a pile of papers, "But I"ll go over them all in the morning, to make sore, with _that_."
Then she turned with new pleasure to the finished work of the night, settled the sheets together, put them in an envelope, and addressed it:
_The Editor,_ _The Consul,_ _6 Tibby"s Lane,_ _Fleet Street, E. C._
She hesitated before she wrote. Should she write "The Editor" only, or "George Alfred Curtis, Esq.," first, which would attract his attention, perhaps, as coming from somebody who knew his name. She had a right to know his name, she told herself; she had met him once in the happy Paris days. Kendal bad introduced him to her, in a brief encounter at the Salon, and she remembered the appreciativeness of the glance that accompanied the stout middle-aged English gentleman"s bow. Kendal had told her then that Mr. Curtis was the editor of the _Consul_.
Yes, she had a right to know his name. And it might make the faintest shadow of a difference--but no, "The Editor"
was more dignified, more impersonal; her article should go in upon its own merits, absolutely upon its own merits; and so she wrote.
It was nearly three o"clock, and cold, shivering cold.
Mr. Golightly Ticke had wholly subsided. The fog had climbed up to her, and the candle showed it clinging to the corners of the room. The water in the samovar was hissing. Elfrida warmed her hands upon the cylinder and made herself some tea. With it she disposed of a great many sweet biscuits from the biscuit box, and thereafter lighted a cigarette. As she smoked she re-read an old letter, a long letter in a flowing foreign hand, written from among the haymakers at Barbizon, that exhaled a delicate perfume. Elfrida had read it thrice for comfort in the afternoon; now she tasted it, sipping here and there with long enjoyment of its deliciousness. She kissed it as she folded it up, with the silent thought that this was the breath of her life, and soon--oh, pa.s.sably soon--she could bear the genius in Nadie"s eyes again.
Then she went to bed. "You little brute," she said to Buddha, who still smiled as she blew out the candle, "can"t you forget it?"
CHAPTER VIII.
Miss Bell arose late the next morning, which was not unusual. Mrs. Jordan had knocked three times vainly, and then left the young lady"s chop and coffee outside the door on the landing. If she _would_ "ave it cold, Mrs.
Jordan reasoned, she would, and more warnin" than knockin"
three times no livin" bean could expect Mrs. Jordan went downstairs uneasy in her mind, however. The matter of Miss Bell"s breakfast generally left her uneasy in her mind. It was not in reason, Mrs. Jordan thought, that a young littery lady should keep that close, for Elfrida"s custom of having her breakfast deposited outside her door was as invariable as it was perplexing. Miss Bell was as charming to her land-lady as she was to everybody else, but Mrs. Jordan found a polite pleasantness that permitted no opportunity for expansion whatever more stimulating to the curiosity and irritating to the mind generally than the worst of bad manners would have been. That was the reason she knocked three times when she brought up Miss Bell"s breakfast. At Mr. Ticke"s door she wrapped once, and cursorily at that. Mr. Ticke was as conversational as you please on all occasions, and besides, Mr. Ticke"s door was usually half open. The shroud of mystery in which Mrs. Jordan wrapped her "third floor front" grew more impenetrable as the days went by. Her original theory, which established Elfrida as the heroine of the latest notorious divorce case, was admirably ingenious, but collapsed in a fortnight with its own weight. "Besides,"
Mrs. Jordan reasoned, "if it "ad been that person, ware is the corrispondent all this time? There"s been nothin"
in the shape of a corrispondent hangin" round _this_ house, for I"ve kep" my eye open for one. I give "er up,"