"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.
"Quant.i.ties of things." Elfrida hesitated, not absolutely sure of the wisdom of her example. Then she ventured it.
"The picturesqueness of society--your d.u.c.h.esses and your women in the green-grocers" shops." It was not wise, she saw instantly.
"Really? It is so difficult to understand that d.u.c.h.esses 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 d.u.c.h.esses 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 n.o.bles with their swords drawn to protect her. Then your Upper Cla.s.ses and your Upper Middle Cla.s.ses walking stiffly two and two; and then your Lower Middle Cla.s.ses 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l enough, but pure unrelieved filth can"t be trans.m.u.ted 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 d.a.m.n 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 a.s.sure 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 p.a.w.n.
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 p.r.o.nounced 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 cla.s.s, as in all cla.s.ses, 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 n.o.body 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."
CHAPTER XIV.
Kendal hardly admitted to himself that his acquaintance with Elfrida had gone beyond the point of impartial observation. The proof of its impartiality, if he had thought of seeking it, would have appeared to him to lie in the fact that he found her, in her personality, her ideas, and her effects, to be damaged by London. The conventionality--Kendal"s careless generalization preferred a broad term--of the place made her extreme in every way, and it had recently come to be a conclusion with him that English conventionality, in moderation, was not wholly to be smiled at. Returning to it, its protectiveness had impressed him strongly, and he had a comforting sense of the responsibility it imposed upon society. Paris and the Quartier stood out against it in his mind like something full of light and color and transient pa.s.sion on the stage--something to be remembered with recurrent thrills of keen satisfaction and to be seen again. It had been more than this, he acknowledged, for he had brought out of it an element that lightened his life and vitalized his work, and gave an element of joyousness to his imagination--it was certain that he would go back there. And Miss Bell had been in it and of it--so much in it and of it that he felt impatient with her for permitting herself to be herself in any other environment. He asked himself why she could not see that she was crudely at variance with all color and atmosphere and law in her present one, and he speculated as to the propriety of telling her so, of advising her outright as to the expediency in her own interest, of being other than herself in London. That was what it came to, he reflected in deciding that he could not--if the girl"s convictions and motives and aims were real; and he was beginning to think they were real. And although he had found himself at liberty to say to her things that were harder to hear, he felt a curious repugnance to giving her any inkling of what he thought about this.
It would be a hideous thing to do, he concluded, an unforgivable thing, and an actual hurt. Kendal had for women the readiest consideration, and though one of the odd things he found in Elfrida was the slight degree to which she evoked it in him, he recoiled instinctively from any reasoned action which would distress her. But his sense of her inconsistency with British inst.i.tutions --at least he fancied it was that--led him to discourage somewhat, in the lightest way, Miss Halifax"s interested inquiries about her. The inquiries suggested dimly that eccentricity and obscurity might be overlooked in any one whose personality really had a value for Mr. Kendal, and made an attempt, which was heroic considering the delicacy of Miss Halifax"s scruples, to measure his appreciation of Miss Bell as a writer--to Miss Halifax the word wore a halo--and as an individual. If she did not succeed it was partly because he had not himself quite decided whether Elfrida, in London, was delightful or intolerable, and partly because he had no desire to be complicated in social relations which, he told himself, must be either ludicrous or insincere. The Halifaxes were not in any sense literary; their proper pretensions to that sort of society were buried with Sir William, who had been editor of the _Brown Quarterly_ in his day, and many other things. They had inherited his friends as they had inherited his ma.n.u.scripts; and in spite of a grievous inability to edit either of them, they held to one legacy as fast as to the other. Kendal thought with a somewhat repelled amus.e.m.e.nt of any attempt of theirs to a.s.similate Elfrida. It was different with the Cardiffs; but even under their enthusiastic encouragement he was disinclined to be anything but discreet and cautions about Elfrida.
In one way and another she was, at all events, a young lady of potentialities, he reflected, and with a view to their effect among one"s friends it might be as well to understand them. He went so far as to say to himself that Janet was such a thoroughly nice girl as she was; and then he smiled inwardly at the thought of how angry she would be at the idea of his putting any prudish considerations on her account into the balance against an interesting acquaintance. He had, nevertheless, a distinct satisfaction in the fact that it was really circ.u.mstances, in the shape of the _Decade_ article, that had brought them together, and that he could hardly charge himself with being more than an irresponsible agent in the matter.
Under the influence of such considerations Kendal did not write to Elfrida at the _Age_ office asking her address, as he had immediately resolved to do when he discovered that she had gone away without telling him where he might find her. It seemed to him that he could not very well see her at her lodgings. And the pleasure of coming upon her suddenly as she closed the door of the _Age_ behind her and stepped out into Fleet Street a fortnight later overcame him too quickly to permit him to reflect that he was yielding to an opposite impulse in asking her to dine with him at Baliero"s, as they might have done in Paris. It was an unlooked-for opportunity, and it roused a desire which he had not lately been calculating upon--a desire to talk with her about all sorts of things, to feel the exhilaration of her artistic single-mindedness, to find out more about her, to guess at the meanings behind her eyes. If any privileged cynic had taken the chance to ask him whether he found her eyes expressive of purely abstract significance, Kendal would have answered affirmatively in all honesty. And he would have added a confession of his curiosity to discover what she was capable of, if she was capable of anything--which he considered legitimate enough. At the moment, however, he had no time to think of anything but an inducement, and he dashed through whole pickets of scruples to find one. "They give one such capital strawberry ices at Baliero"s," he begged her to believe. His resolutions did not even rea.s.sert themselves when she refused. He was conscious only that it was a bore that she should refuse, and very inconsistent; hadn"t she often dined with him at the Cafe Florian? His gratification was considerable when she added, "They smoke there, you know," and, it became obvious, by whatever curious process of reasoning she arrived at it, that it was Baliero"s restaurant she objected to, and not his society.
"Well," he urged, "there are plenty of places where they don"t smoke, though it didn"t occur to me that--"
"Oh," she laughed; "but you must allow it to occur to you," and she put her finger on her lip. Considering their solitariness in the crowd, he thought, there was no reason why he should not say that he was under the impression she liked the smell of tobacco.
"There are other places," she went on. "There is a sweet little green-and-white place like a dairy in Oxford Street, that calls itself the "Hyacinth," which is sacred to ladies and to gentlemen properly chaperoned. If you would invite me to dine with you there I should like it very much."
"Anywhere," he said. He accepted her proposal to dine at the "Hyacinth" with the same unquestioning pleasure which he would have had in accepting her proposal to dine at the top of the Monument that evening; but he felt an under perplexity at its terms, which was vaguely disturbing.
How could it possibly matter? Did she suppose that she advanced palpably nearer to the proprieties in dining with him in one place rather than the other? There was an unreasonableness about that which irritated him.
He felt it more distinctly when she proposed taking an omnibus instead of the cab he had signalled. "Oh, of course, if you prefer it," he said; and there was almost a trace of injured feeling in his voice. It was so much easier to talk in a cab.
He lost his apprehensions presently, for it became obvious to him that this was only a mood, coming, as he said to himself devoutly, from the Lord knew what combination of circ.u.mstances--he would think that out afterward--but making Elfrida none the less agreeable while it lasted.
Under its influence she kept away from all the matters she was fondest of discussing with that extraordinary candor and startling equity of hers, and talked to him with a pretty cleverness, about commonplaces of sorts arising out of the day"s news, the shops, the weather.
She treated them all with a gaiety that made her face a fascinating study while she talked, and pointed them, as it were, with all the little poises and expressions and reserves which are commonly a feminine result of considerable social training. Kendal, entering into her whim, inwardly compared her with an acknowledged successful girl of the season with whom he had sat out two dances the night before in Eaton Square, to the successful girl"s disadvantage. Finding something lacking in that, he came upon a better a.n.a.logy in a young married lady of the diplomatic circle, who had lately been dipping the third finger of her left hand into politics with the effect of considerably increasing her note. This struck him as satisfactory, and he enjoyed finding completion for his parallel wherever her words and gestures offered it. He took her at the wish she implied, and eddied with her around the pool which some counter-current of her nature had made for the hour in its stream, pleasantly enough.
He made one attempt, as Elfrida unb.u.t.toned her gloves at their little table at the "Hyacinth," to get her to talk about her work for the _Age_.
"Please, _please_ don"t mention that," she said. "It is too revolting. You don"t know how it makes me suffer."