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A Daughter of To Day by Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)

S >> Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes) >> A Daughter of To Day




"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
circumstances--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 analogy 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 unbuttoned 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."

A moment later she returned to it of her own accord,
however. "It is absurd to try to exact pledges from
people," she said, "but I should really be happier
--_much_ happier--if you would promise me something."

"'By Heaven, I will promise _any_ thing!'" Kendal quoted,
laughing, from a poet much in vogue.

"Only this--I hope I am not selfish--" she hesitated;
"but I think--yes, I think I must be selfish here. It is
that you will never read the _Age_."

"I never do," leapt to his lips, but he stopped it in
time. "And why!" he asked instead.

"Ah, you know why! It is because you might recognize my
work in it--by accident you might--and that would be so
painful to me. It is _not_ my best--please believe it is
not my best!"

"On one condition I promise," he said: "that when you do
your best you will tell me where to find it"

She looked at him gravely and considered. As she did so
it seemed to Kendal that she was regarding his whole
moral, mental, and material nature. He could almost see
it reflected in the glass of her great dark eyes.
"Certainly, yes. That is fair--if you really and truly
care to see it. And I don't know," she added, looking up
at him from her soup, "that it matters whether you do or
not, so long as you carefully and accurately pretend that
you do. When my best, my real best, sees the light of
common--"

"Type," he suggested.

"Type," she repeated unsmilingly, "I shall be so insatiate
for criticism--I ought to say praise--that I shall even
go so far as to send you a marked copy, very plainly
marked, with blue pencil. Already," she smiled with a
charming effect of assertiveness, "I have bought the blue
pencil."

"Will it come soon?" Kendal asked seriously.

"_Cher ami_," Elfrida said, drawing her handsome brows
together a little, "it will come sooner than you expect
That is what I want," she went on deliberately, "more
than anything else in the whole world, to do things
--_good_ things, you understand--and to have them
appreciated and paid for in the admiration of people who
feel and see and know. For me life has nothing else,
except the things that other people do, better and worse
than mine."

"Better and worse than yours," Kendal repeated. "Can't
you think of them apart?"

"No, I can't," Elfrida interrupted; "I've tried, and I
can _not_. I know it's a weakness--at least I'm half
persuaded that it is--but I must have the personal standard
in everything."

"But you are a hero-worshipper; often I have seen you
at it."

"Yes," she said cynically, while the white-capped maid
who handed Kendal asparagus stared at her with a curiosity
few of the Hyacinth's lady diners inspired, "and when I
look into that I find it is because of a secret
consciousness that tells me that I, in the hero's place,
should have done just the same thing. Or else it is
because of the gratification my vanity finds in my sympathy
with his work, whatever it is. Oh, it is no special
virtue, my kind of hero-worship." The girl looked across
at Kendal and laughed a bright, frank laugh, in which
was no discontent with what she had been telling him.

"You are candid," Kendal said.

"Oh yes, I'm candid. I don't mind lying for a noble end,
but it isn't a noble end to deceive one's self."

"'Oh, purblind race of miserable men--'" Kendal began
lightly, but she stopped him.

"Don't!" she cried. "Nothing spoils conversation like
quotations. Besides, that's such a trite one; I learned
it at school."

But Kendal's offence was clearly in his manner. It seemed
to Elfrida that he would never sincerely consider what
she had to say about herself. She went on softly, holding
him with her eyes: "You may find me a simple creature--"

"_A propos_," laughed Kendal easily, "what is this
particular noble end?"

"Bah!" she said, "you are right It was a lie, and it had
no end at all. I am complex enough, I dare say. But this
is true, that my egotism is like a little flame within
me. All the best things feed it, and it is so clear that
I see everything in its light. To me it is most dear
and valuable, it simplifies things so. I assure you I
wouldn't be one of the sloppy, unselfish people the world
is full of for anything."

"As a source of gratification isn't it rather limited?"
Kendal asked. He was thinking of the extra drop of nervous
fluid in Americans that he had been reading about in the
afternoon, and wondering if it often had this development.

"I don't quite know what you mean," Elfrida returned.
"It isn't a source of gratification, it's a channel. And
it intensifies everything so that I don't care how little
comes that way. If there's anything of me left when I
die it will be that little fierce flame. And when I do
the tiniest thing, write the shortest sentence that rings
_true_, see a beauty or a joy which the common herd pass
by, I have my whole life in the flame, and it becomes my
soul--I'm sure I have no other!

"When you say that there is no real pleasure in the world
that does not come through art," Elfrida went on again,
widening her eyes seriously, "don't you feel as if you
were uttering something religious--part of a creed--as
the Mussulman feels when he says there is no God but one
God, and Mohammed is his prophet? I do."

"I never say it," Kendal returned, with a smile. "Does
that make me out a Philistine, or a Hindu, or what?"

"_You_ a Philistine!" Elfrida cried, as they rose from
the little table. "You are saying a thing that is absolutely
wicked."

Her quasi-conventional mood had vanished completely, and
as they drove together in a hansom through the mysterious
movement of the lamp-lit London streets, toward her
lodgings, she plunged enjoyingly into certain theories
of her religion, which embraced Arnold and Aristotle and
did not exclude Mr. Whistler, and made wide, ineffectual,
and presumptuous grasps to include all beauty and all
faith. She threw handfuls of the foam of these things at
Kendal, who watched them vanish into the air with pleasure,
and asked if he might smoke. At which she reflected,
deciding that for the present he might not, but when they
reached her lodgings she would permit him to renew his
acquaintance with Buddha, and give him a cigarette.

During the hour they smoked and talked together Elfrida
was wholly delightful, and only one thing occurred to
mar the enjoyment of the evening as Kendal remembered
it. That was Mr. Golightly Ticke, who came up and smoked
too, and seemed to have an extraordinary familiarity,
for such an utterly impossible person, with Miss Bell's
literary engagements. On his way home Kendal reflected
that it was doubtless a question of time; she would take
to the customs of civilization by degrees, and the sooner
the better.




CHAPTER XV.

Shortly afterward Elfrida read Mr. Pater's "Marius," with
what she herself called, somewhat extravagantly, a "hungry
and hopeless" delight. I cannot say that this Oxonian's
tender classical recreation had any critical effect upon
her; she probably found it much too limpid and untroubled
to move her in the least. I mention it by way of saying
that Lawrence Cardiff lent it to her, with a smile of
half-indulgent, half-contemptuous assent to some of her
ideas, which was altered, when she returned the volumes,
by the active necessity of defending his own. Elfrida
had been accepted at the Cardiffs, with the ready tolerance
which they had for types that were remarkable to them,
and not entirely disagreeable; though Janet was always
telling her father that it was impossible that Elfrida
should be a type--she was an exception of the most
exceptionable sort. "I'll admit her to be abnormal, if
you like," Cardiff would return, "but only from an insular
point of view. I dare say they grow that way in Illinois."
But that was in the early stages of their acquaintance
with Miss Bell, which ripened with unprecedented rapidity
for an acquaintance in Kensington Square. It was before
Janet had taken to walking across the gardens with Elfrida
in the half-hour between tea-time and dressing for dinner,
when the two young women, sometimes under dripping
umbrellas, would let the right omnibus follow the wrong
one toward Fleet Street twice and thrice in their
disinclination to postpone what they had to say to each
other. It was also before Elfrida's invasion of the
library and fee-simple of the books, and before she had
said there many things that were original, some that were
impertinent, and a few that were true. The Cardiffs
discussed her less freely as the weeks went on--a sure
sign that she was becoming better liked, accepted less
as a phenomenon, and more as a friend. There grew up in
Janet the beginnings of the strong affection which she
felt for a very few people, an affection which invariably
mingled itself with a lively desire to bestir herself on
their account, to be fully informed as to their
circumstances, and above all to possess relations of
absolute directness with them. She had an imperious
successful strain which insisted upon all this. She was
a capable creature of much perception for twenty-four,
and she had a sense of injury when for any reason she
was not allowed to use her faculties for the benefit of
any one she liked in a way which excited the desire to
do it. Janet had to reproach herself, when she thought
of it, that this sort of liking seldom came by entirely
approved channels, and hardly ever found an object in
her visiting-list. Its first and almost its only essential,
to speak boldly, was an artistic susceptibility with some
sort of relation to her own, which her visiting-list did
not often supply, though it might have been said to
overflow with more widely recognized virtues. For that
Miss Cardiff was known to be willing to sacrifice the
Thirty-nine Articles, respectable antecedents, the
possession of a dress-coat. Her willingness was the more
widely known because in the circle which fate had drawn
around her--ironically, she sometimes thought--it was
not usual to sacrifice these things. As for Janet's own
artistic susceptibility, it was a very private atmosphere
of her soul. She breathed it, one might say, only
occasionally, and with a kind of delicious shame. She
was incapable of sharing her caught-up felicity there
with any one, but it was indispensable that she should
see it sometimes in the eyes of others less contained,
less conscious, whose sense of humor might be more slender
perhaps. Her own nature was practical and managing in
its ordinary aspect, and she had a degree of tact that
was always interfering with her love of honesty. Having
established a friendship by the arbitrary law of sympathy,
it must be admitted that she had an instinctive way of
trying to strengthen it by voluntary benefits, for
affection was a great need with her.

It was only about this time and very gradually that she
began to realize how much more she cared for John Kendal
than for other people. Since it seemed to be obvious
that Kendal gave her only a share of the affectionate
interest he had for humanity at large, the realization
was not wholly agreeable, and Janet doubtless found
Elfrida, on this account, even a more valuable distraction
than she otherwise would. One of the matters Miss Bell
was in the habit of discussing with some vivacity was
the sexlessness of artistic sympathy. Upon this subject
Janet found her quite inspired. She made a valiant effort
to illumine her thoughts of Kendal by the light Elfrida
threw upon such matters, and although she had to confess
that the future was still hid in embarrassed darkness,
she did manage to construct a theory by which it was
possible to grope along for the present. She also cherished
a hope that this trouble would leave her, as a fever
abates in the night, that she would awake some morning,
if she only had patience, strong and well. In other things
Miss Cardiff, was sometimes jarred rather than shocked
by the American girl's mental attitudes, which, she began
to find, were not so posed as her physical ones. Elfrida
often left her repelled and dissenting. The dissent she
showed vigorously; the repulsion she concealed, sore with
herself because of the concealment. But she could not
lose Elfrida, she told herself; and besides, it was only
a matter of a little tolerance--time and life would change
her, tone her inner self down into the something altogether
exquisite and perfect that she was, to look at, now.

Elfrida called the Cardiffs' house the oasis of Kensington,
and valued her privileges there more than she valued
anything else in the circumstances about her, except,
perhaps, the privilege she had enjoyed in making the
single contribution, to the _Decade_ of which we know.
That was an event lustrous in her memory, the more lustrous
because it remained solitary and when the editor's check
made its tardy appearance she longed to keep it as a
glorious archive--glorious that is to say, in suggestion,
if not particularly impressive intrinsically. In the end
she fought the temptation of giving herself a dinner a
day for a fortnight out of it, and bought a slender gold
bangle with the money, which she slipped upon her wrist
with a resolution to keep it there always. It must be
believed that her personal decoration did not enter
materially into this design; the bangle was an emblem of
one success and an earnest of others. She wore it as she
might have worn a medal, except that a medal was a public
voice, and the little gold hoop spoke only to her.

After the triumph that the bangle signified Elfrida felt
most satisfaction in what was constantly present to her
mind as her conquest of the Cardiffs. She measured its
importance by their value. Her admiration for Janet's
work in the beginning had been as sincere as her emulation
of its degree of excellence had been passionate, and
neither feeling had diminished with their intimacy. In
Lawrence Cardiff she felt vaguely the qualities that made
him a marked man among his fellows, his intellectual
breadth and keenness, his poise of brain, if one might
call it so, and the _habilete_ with which, without
permitting it to be part of his character, he sometimes
allowed himself to charm even people of whom he disapproved.
These things were indeterminately present to her, and
led her often to speculate as to how it was that Mr.
Cardiff's work expressed him so little. It seemed to her
that the one purpose of a personality like his was its
expression--otherwise one might as well be of the ruck.
"You write with your intellectual faculties," she said to
him once; "your soul is curiously dumb." But that was later.

The plane of Elfrida's relations with Janet altered
gradually, one might say, from the inclined, with Elfrida
on her knees at the lower end, to the horizontal. It
changed insensibly enough, through the freemasonry of
confessed and unconfessed ideals, through growing
attraction, through the feeling they shared, though only
Janet voiced it, that there was nothing but the
opportunities and the experience of four years between
them, that in the end Elfrida would do better, stronger,
more original work than she. Elfrida was so much more
original a person, Janet declared to herself, so--and
when she hesitated for this word she usually said
"enigmatical." The answer to the enigma, Janet was sure,
would be written large in publishers' advertisements one
day. In the meantime, it was a vast satisfaction to Janet
to be, as it were, behind the enigma, to consider it with
the privileges of intimacy. These young women felt their
friendship deeply, in their several ways. It held for
them all sacredness and honor and obligation. For Elfrida
it had an intrinsic beauty and interest, like a curio
--she had half a dozen such curios in the museum of her
friends--and for Janet it added something to existence
that was not there before, more delightful and important
than a mere opportunity of expansion. The time came
speedily when it would have been a positive pain to either
of them to hear the other discussed, however favorably.




CHAPTER XVI.

Lady Halifax and her daughter had met Miss Bell several
times at the Cardiffs', in a casual way, before it occurred
to either of them to take any sort of advantage of the
acquaintance. The younger lady had a shivering and
frightened delight in occasionally wading ankle-deep in
unconventionality, but she had-lively recollections, in
connection with the Cardiffs, of having been very nearly
taken off her feet. They had since decided that it was
more discreet to ignore Janet's enthusiasms, which were
sometimes quite impossible in their verdict, and always
improbable. The literary ladies and gentlemen whom the
ghost of the departed Sir William brought more or less
unwillingly to Lady Halifax's drawing-rooms were all of
unexceptionable _cachet_; the Halifaxes were constantly
seeing paragraphs about them in the "Literary Gossip"
department of the _Athenian_, mentioning their state of
health, their retirement from scientific appointments,
or the fact that their most recent work of fiction had
reached its fourth edition. Lady Halifax always read the
_Athenian_, even the publishers' announcements; she liked
to keep "in touch," she said, with the literary activities
of the day, and it gave her a special gratification to
notice the prosperity of her writing friends indicated
in tall figures. Miss Halifax read it too, but she liked
the "Art Notes" best; it was a matter of complaint with
her that the house was not more open to artists--new,
original artists like John Kendal. In answer to this
Lady Halifax had a habit of stating that she did not see
what more they could possibly want than the president of
the Royal Academy and the one or two others that came
already. As for John Kendal, he was certainly new and
original, but he was respectable notwithstanding; they
could be certain that he was not putting his originality
on--with a hearth-brush, for the sake of advertisement.
Lady Halifax was not so sure of Elfrida's originality,
of which she had been given a glimpse or two at first,
and which the girl's intimacy with the Cardiffs would
have presupposed in any case. But presently, and somewhat
to Lady Halifax's perplexity, Miss Bell's originality
disappeared. It seemed to melt into the azure of perfect
good-breeding, flecked by little clouds of gay sayings
and politenesses, whenever chance brought her under Lady
Halifax's observation. A not unreasonable solution of
the problem might have been found in Elfrida's instinctive
objection to casting her pearls where they are proverbially
unappreciated, and the necessity in her nature of pleasing
herself by one form of agreeable behavior if not by
another. Lady Halifax, however, ascribed it to the
improving influence of insular institutions, and finally
concluded that it ought to be followed up.

Elfrida wore amber and white the evening on which Lady
Halifax followed it up--a Parisian modification of a
design carried, out originally by the Sparta dressmaker,
with a degree of hysteria, under Miss Bell's direction.
She wore it with a touch of unusual color in her cheeks
and, an added light in her dark eyes that gave a winsomeness
to her beauty which it had not always. A cunningly bound
spray of yellow-stamened lilies followed the curving line
of her low-necked dress, ending in a cluster in her bosom;
the glossy little leaves of the smilax the florist had
wreathed in with them stood sharply against the whiteness
of her neck. Her hair was massed at the back of her head
simply and girlishly enough, and its fluffiness about
her forehead made a sweet shadow above her eyes. She had
a little fever of expectation, Janet had talked so much
about this reception. Janet had told her that the real
thing, the real English literary thing in numberless
volumes, would be on view at Lady Halifax's. Miss Cardiff
had mentioned this in their discussion of the Arcadia
Club, at which institution she had scoffed so unbearably
that Elfrida, while she cherished the memory of Georgiadi,
had not mentioned it since. Perhaps, after all, she
reflected, Janet was just a trifle blind where people
were not hall-marked. It did not occur to her to consider
how far she herself illustrated this theory.

But as she went down Mrs. Jordan's narrow flights of
stairs covered with worn oil-cloth, she kissed her own
soft arm for pure pleasure.

"You are ravishing to-night," she told herself.

Golightly Ticke's door was open, and he was standing in
it, picturesquely smoking a cigarette with the candle
burning behind him--"Just to see you pass," he said.

Elfrida paused and threw back her cloak. "How is it?"
she asked, posing for him with its folds gathered in
either hand.

Ticke scanned her with leisurely appreciation. "It is
exquisite," he articulated.

Elfrida gave him a look that might have intoxicated nerves
less accustomed to dramatic effects.

"Then whistle me a cab," she said.

Mr. Ticke whistled her a cab and put her into it. There
was the least pressure of his long fingers as he took
her hand, and Elfrida forbade herself to resent it. She
felt her own beauty so much that night that she could
not complain of an enthusiasm for it in such a _belle
ame_ as Golightly.

They went up to tie drawing-room together, if Elfrida
and the Cardiffs, and Lady Halifax immediately introduced
to Miss Bell a hollow-cheeked gentleman with a long gray
beard and bushy eyebrows as a fellow-countryman. "You
can compare your impressions of Hyde Park and St. Paul's,"
said Lady Halifax, "but _don't_ call us 'Britishers.' It
really isn't pretty of you."

Elfrida discovered that the bearded gentleman was principal
of a college in Florida, and corresponded regularly at
one time with the late Sir William. "It is to that," said
he ornately, "that I owe the honor of joining this
brilliant company to-night." He went on to state that he
was over there principally on account of his health--acute
dyspepsia he had, it seemed he'd got out of running order
generally, regularly off the track. "But I've just about
concluded," he continued, with a pathetic twinkle under
his bushy brows, "that I might have a worse reason for
going back. What do you think of the meals in Victoria's
country, Miss Bell? It seems to me sometimes that I'd
give the whole British Museum for a piece of Johnny-cake."

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