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 a.n.a.lytical 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 a.s.sociation 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 amus.e.m.e.nts; 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 const.i.tuted 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 people of the American Colony wondering who in the world could have written it. She conceived that it would fill about two columns and a half. On Sat.u.r.day afternoon, when Kendal joined her crossing the courtyard of the atelier, she was preoccupied with the form of her rebuff to any inquiries that might be made as to whether she had written it.
They walked on together, talking casually of casual things. Kendal, glancing every now and then at the wet study Elfrida was carrying home, felt himself distinctly thankful that she did not ask his opinion of it, as she had, to his embarra.s.sment once or twice before; though it was so very bad that he was half disposed to abuse it without permission. Miss Bell seemed persistently interested in other things, however--the theatres, the ecclesiastical bill before the Chamber of Deputies, the new amba.s.sador, even the recent improvement of the police system. Kendal found her almost tiresome. His half-interested replies interpreted themselves to her after a while, and she turned their talk upon trivialities, with a gay exhilaration which was not her frequent mood.
She asked him to come up when they arrived, with a frank cordiality which he probably thought of as the American way. He went up, at all events, and for the twentieth time admired the dainty chic of the little apartment, telling himself, also for the twentieth time, that it was extraordinary how agreeable it was to be there --agreeable with a distinctly local agreeableness whether its owner happened to be also there or not. In this he was altogether sincere, and only properly discriminating.
He spent fifteen minutes wondering at her whimsical interest, and when she suddenly asked him if he really thought the race _had_ outgrown its physical conditions, he got up to go, declaring it was too bad, she must have been working up back numbers of the _Nineteenth Century_.
At which she consented to turn their talk into its usual personal channel, and he sat down again content.
"Doesn"t the Princess Bobaloff write a charming hand!"
Elfrida said presently, tossing him a square white envelope.
"It isn"t hers if it"s an invitation. She has a wretched relation of a Frenchwoman living with her who does all that. May I light a cigarette?"
"You know you may. It is an invitation, but I didn"t accept."
"Her soiree last night? If I"d known you had been asked I should have missed you."
"I ought to tell you," Elfrida went on, coloring a little, "that I was invited through Leila Van Camp--that ridiculously rich girl, you know, they say Lucien is in love with. The Van Camp has been affecting me a good deal lately. She says my manners are so pleasing, and besides, Lucien once told her she painted better than I did. The princess is a great friend of hers."
"Why didn"t you go?" Kendal asked, without any appreciable show of curiosity. If he had been looking closely enough he would have seen that she was waiting for his question.
"Oh, it lies somehow, that sort of thing, outside my idea of life. I have nothing to say to it, and it has nothing to say to me."
Kendal smiled introspectively. He saw why he had been shown the letter. "And yet," he said, "I venture to hope that if we had met there we might have had some little conversation."
Elfrida leaned back in her chair and threw up her head, locking her slender fingers over her knee. "Of coa.r.s.e,"
she said indifferently. "I understand why you should go.
You must. You have arrived at a point where the public claims a share of your personality. That"s different."
Kendal"s face straightened out. He was too much of an Englishman to understand that a personally agreeable truth might not be flattery, and Elfrida never knew how far he resented her candor when it took the liberty of being gracious.
"I went in the humble hope of getting a good supper and seeing some interesting people," he told her. "Loti was there, and Madame Rives-Chanler, and Sargent."
"And the supper?" Miss Bell inquired, with a touch of sarcasm.
"Disappointing," he returned seriously. "I should say bad--as bad as possible." She gave him an impatient glance.
"But those people--Loti and the rest--it is only a serio-comic game to them to go the Princess Bobaloffs.
They wouldn"t if they could help it They don"t live their real lives in such places--among such people!"
Kendal took the cigarette from his mouth and laughed.
"Your Bohemianism is quite Arcadian in its quality --deliriously fresh," he declared. "I think they do.
Genius clings to respectability after a time. A most worthy and amiable lady, the Princess."
Elfrida raised the arch of her eyebrows. "Much too worthy and amiable," she ventured, and talked of something else, leaving Kendal rasped, as she sometimes did, without being in any degree aware of it.
"How preposterous it is," he said, moved by his irritation to find something preposterous, "that girls like Miss Van Camp should come here to work."
"They can"t help being rich. It shows at least the germ of a desire to work out their own salvation. I think I like it."
"It shows the germ of an affectation in rather an advanced stage of development. I give her three months more to tire of snubbing Lucien and distributing caramels to the less fortunate young ladies of the studio. Then she will pack up those pitiful attempts of hers and take them home to New York, and spend a whole season in glorious apology for them."
Elfrida looked at him steadily for an instant. Then she laughed lightly. "Thanks," she said. "I see you had not forgotten my telling you that Lucien said she painted better than I did."
Kendal wondered whether he had really meant to go so far. "I am sorry," he said, "but I am afraid I had not forgotten it."
"Well, you would not say it out of ill-nature. You must have wanted me to know--what you thought."
"I think," he said seriously, "that I did--at least that I do--want you to know. It seems a pity that you should work on here--mistakenly--when there are other things that you could do well."
""Other things" have been mentioned to me before," she returned, with a strain in her voice that she tried to banish. "May I ask what particular thing occurs to you?"
He was already remorseful. After all, what business of his was it to interfere, especially when he knew that she attached such absurd importance to his opinion? "I hardly know," he said, "but there must be something; I am convinced that there is something."
Elfrida put her elbows on a t.i.ttle table, and shadowed her face with her hands.
"I wish I could understand," she said, "why I should be so willing to--to go on at any sacrifice, if there is no hope in the end."
Kendal"s mood of grim frankness overcame him again. "I believe I know," he said, watching her. Her hands dropped from her face, and she turned it toward him mutely.