"_Pas mal, parbleu!_" Lucien remarked, with pursed-out
lips, running his fingers through his shock of coarse
hair, and reflectively scratching the top of his big head
as he stepped closer to Nadie Palicsky's elbow, where
she stood at her easel in his crowded atelier. The girl
turned and looked keenly into his face, seeking his eyes,
which were on her work with a considering, interested
look. Satisfied, she sent a glance of joyous triumph at
a somewhat older woman, whose place was next, and who
was listening with the amiable effacement of countenance
that is sometimes a more or less successful disguise for
chagrin. On this occasion it seemed to fail, for
Mademoiselle Palicsky turned her attention to Lucien and
her work again with a slight raising of the eyebrows and
a slighter sigh. Her face assumed a gentle melancholy,
as if she were pained at the exhibition of a weakness of
her sex; yet it was unnecessary to be an acute observer
to read there the hope that Lucien's significant phrase
had not by any chance escaped her neighbor.
"The drawing of the neck," Lucien went on, "is excellently
brutal." Nadie wished he would speak a little louder,
but Lucien always arranged the carrying power of his
voice according to the susceptibilities of the atelier.
He thrust his hands into his pockets and still stood
beside her, looking at her study of the nude model who
posed upon a table in the midst of the students. "In you,
mademoiselle," he added in a tone yet lower, "I find the
woman and the artist divorced. That is a vast advantage--an
immense source of power. I am growing more certain of
you; you are not merely cleverly eccentric as I thought.
You have a great deal that no one can teach you. You have
finished that--I wish to take it downstairs to show the
men. It will not be jeered at, I promise you."
"_Cher maitre!_ You mean it?"
"But certainly!"
The girl handed him the study with a look of almost
doglike gratitude in her narrow gray eyes. Lucien had
never said so much to her before, though the whole atelier
had noticed how often he had been coming to her easel
lately, and had disparaged her in corners accordingly.
She looked at the tiny silver watch she wore in a leather
strap on her left wrist--he had spent nearly five minutes
with her this time, watching her work and talking to her,
in itself a triumph. It was almost four o'clock, and the
winter daylight was going; presently they would all stop
work. Partly for the pleasure of being chaffed and envied
and complimented in the anteroom in the general washing
of brushes, and partly to watch Lucien's rapid progress
among the remaining easels, Mademoiselle Palicsky
deliberately sat down, in a prematurely vacant chair,
slung one slender little limb over the other, and waited.
As she sat there a generous thought rose above her
exultation. She hoped everybody else in the atelier had
guessed what Lucien was saying to her all that while,
and had seen him carry off her day's work, but not the
little American. The little American, who was at least
thirteen inches taller than Mademoiselle Palicsky, was
sufficiently discouraged already, and it was pathetic,
in view of almost a year of failure, to see how she clung
to her ghost of a talent Besides, the little American
admired Nadie Palicsky, her friend, her comrade, quite
enough already.
Elfrida had heard, nevertheless. She listened eagerly,
tensely, as she always did when Lucien opened his lips
in her neighborhood. When she saw him take the sketch to
show in the men's atelier downstairs, to exhibit to that
horde of animals below, whose studies and sketches and
compositions were so constantly brought up for the stimulus
and instruction of Lucien's women students, she grew
suddenly so white that the girl who worked next her, a
straw-colored Swede, asked her if she were ill, and
offered her a little green bottle of salts of lavender.
"It's that beast of a calorifere," the Swede said, nodding
at the hideous black cylinder that stood near them,
"they will always make it too hot."
Elfrida waved the salts back hastily--Lucien was coming
her way. She worked seated, and as he seemed on the point
of passing with merely a casual glance and an ambiguous
"H'm!" she started up. The movement effectually arrested
him, unintentional though it seemed. He frowned slightly,
thrusting his hands deep into his coat-pockets, and looked
again.
"We must find a better place for you, mademoiselle; you
can make nothing of it here so close to the model, and
below him thus." He would have gone on, but in spite of
his intention to avert his eyes he caught the girl's
glance, and something infinitely appealing in it stayed
him again. "Mademoiselle," he said, with visible irritation,
"there is nothing to say that I have not said many times
already. Your drawing is still ladylike, your color is
still pretty, and, _sapristi!_ you have worked with me
a year! Still," he added, recollecting himself--Lucien
never lost a student by over-candor--"considering your
difficult place the shoulders are not so bad. _Continuez_,
mademoiselle."
The girl's eyes were fastened immovably upon her work as
she sat down again, painting rapidly in an ineffectual,
meaningless way, with the merest touch of color in her
brush. Her face glowed with the deepest shame that had
ever visited her. Lucien was scolding the Swede roundly;
she had disappointed him, he said. Elfrida felt heavily
how impossible it was that _she_ should disappoint him.
And they had all heard--the English girl in the South
Kensington gown, the rich New Yorker, Nadie's rival the
Roumanian, Nadie herself; and they were all, except the
last, working more vigorously for hearing. Nadie had
turned her head away, and so far as the back of a neck
and the tips of two ears could express oblivion of what
had passed, it might have been gathered from hers. But
Elfrida knew better, and she resented the pity of the
pretence more than if she had met Mademoiselle Palicsky's
long light gray eyes full of derisive laughter.
For a year she had been in it and of it, that intoxicating
life of the Quartier Latin: so much in it that she had
gladly forgotten any former one; so much of it that it
had become treason to believe existence supportable under
any other conditions. It was her pride that she had felt
everything from the beginning; her instinctive apprehension
of all that is to be apprehended in the passionate,
fantastic, vivid life on the left side of the Seine had
been a conscious joy from the day she had taken her tiny
appartement in the Rue Porte Royale, and bought her colors
and sketching-block from a dwarf-like little dealer in
the next street, who assured her proudly that he supplied
Henner and Dagnan-Bouveret, and moreover knew precisely
what she wanted from experience. "_Moi aussi, mademoiselle,
je suis artist!_" She had learned nothing, she had absorbed
everything. It seemed to her that she had entered into
her inheritance, and that in the possessions that throng
the Quartier Latin she was born to be rich. In thinking
this she had an Overpowering realization of the poverty
of Sparta, so convincing that she found it unnecessary
to tell herself that she would never go back there. That
was the unconscious pivotal supposition in everything
she thought or said or did. After the first bewildering
day or two when the exquisite thrill of Paris captured
her indefinitely, she felt the full tide of her life turn
and flow steadily in a new direction with a delight of
revelation and an ecstasy of promise that made nothing
in its sweep of every emotion that had not its birth and
growth in art, and forbade the mere consideration of
anything that might be an obstacle, as if it were a sin.
She entered her new world with proud recognition of its
unwritten laws, its unsanctified morale, its riotous
overflowing ideals; and she was instant in gathering that
to see, to comprehend these was to be thrice blessed, as
not to see, not to comprehend them was to dwell in outer
darkness with the bourgeois, and the "sandpaper" artists,
and others who are without hope. It gave her moments of
pure delight to reflect how little "the people" suspected
the reality of the existence of such a world notwithstanding
all they read and all they professed, and how absolutely
exclusive it was in the very nature of nature; how it
had its own language untranslatable, its own creed
unbelievable, its own customs unfathomable by outsiders,
and yet among the true-born how divinely simple recognition
was. Her allegiance had the loyalty of every fibre of
her being; her scorn of the world she had left was too
honest to permit any posing in that regard. The life at
Sparta assumed the colors and very much the significance
depicted on a bit of faded tapestry; when she thought of
it, it was to groan that so many of her young impressionable
years had been wasted there. She hoarded her years, now
that every day and every hour was suffused with its
individual pleasure or interest, or that keen artistic
pain which also had its value, as a sensation, in the
Quartier Latin. It distressed her to think that she was
almost twenty-one.
The interminable year that intervened between Elfrida's
return from Philadelphia and her triumph in the matter
of being allowed to go to Paris to study, she had devoted
mainly to the society of the Swiss governess in the Sparta
Seminary for young ladies--Methodist Episcopal--with the
successful object of getting a working knowledge of
French. There had been a certain amount of "young society"
too, and one or two incipient love-affairs, watched with
anxious interest by her father and with a harrowed
conscience by her mother, who knew Elfrida's capacity
for amusing herself; and unlimited opportunities had
occurred for the tacit exhibition of her superiority to
Sparta, of which she had not always taken advantage. But
the significance of the year gathered into the French
lessons; it was by virtue of these that the time had a
place in her memory. Mademoiselle Joubert supplemented
her instruction with a violent affection, a great deal
of her society, and the most entertainingly modern of
the French novels, which Brentano sent her monthly in
enticing packets, her single indulgence. So that after
the first confusion of a multitude of tongues in the
irrelevant Parisian key Elfrida found herself reasonably
fluent and fairly at ease. The illumined jargon of the
atelier staid with her naturally; she never forgot a word
or a phrase, and in two months she was babbling and
mocking with the rest.
She lived alone; she learned readily to do it on eighty
francs a month, and her appartement became charming in
three weeks. She divined what she should have there, and
she managed to get extraordinary bargains in mystery and
history out of the dealers in such things, so cracked
and so rusty, so moth-eaten and of such excellent color,
that the escape of the combined effect from _banalite_
was a marvel. She had a short, sharp struggle with her
American taste for simple elegance in dress, and overthrew
it, aiming, with some success, at originality instead.
She found it easy in Paris to invest her striking
personality in a distinctive costume, sufficiently becoming
and sufficiently odd, of which a broad soft felt hat,
which made a delightful brigand of her, and a Hungarian
cloak formed important features. The Hungarian cloak
suited her so extremely well that artistic considerations
compelled her to wear it occasionally, I fear, when other
people would have found it uncomfortably warm. In nothing
that she said or did or admired or condemned was there
any trace of the commonplace, except, perhaps, the desire
to avoid it; it had become her conviction that she owed
this to herself. She was thoroughly popular in the atelier,
her _petits soupers_ were so good, her enthusiasms so
generous, her drawing so bad. The other pupils declared
that she had a head _divinement tragique_, and for those
of them she liked she sometimes posed, filling impressive
parts in their weekly compositions. They all knew the
little appartement in the Rue Porte Royale, more or less
well according to the favor with which they were received.
Nadie Palicsky perhaps knew it best--Nadie Palicsky and
her friend Monsieur Andre Vambery, who always accompanied
her when, she came to Elfrida's in the evening, finding
it impossible to allow her to be out alone at night,
which Nadie confessed agreeable to her vanity, but a bore.
Elfrida found it difficult in the beginning to admire
the friend. He was too small for dignity, and Nadie's
inspired comparison of his long black hair to "_serpents
noirs_" left her unimpressed. Moreover she thought she
detected about him a personal odor which was neither that
of sanctity nor any other abstraction. It took time and
conversation and some acquaintance with values as they
obtain at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the knowledge of
what it meant to be "selling," to lift Monsieur Vambery
to his proper place in her regard. After that she blushed
that he had ever held any other. But from the first
Elfrida had been conscious of a kind of pride in her
unshrinking acceptance of the situation. She and Nadie
had exchanged a pledge of some sort, when Mademoiselle
Palicsky bethought herself of the unconfessed fact. She
gave Elfrida a narrow look, and then leaned back in her
low chair and bent an imperturbable gaze upon the slender
spiral of blue smoke that rose from the end of her
cigarette.
"It is necessary now that you should know, petite--nobody
else does, Lucien would be sure to make a fuss, but--I
have a lover, and we have decided about marriage that it
is ridiculous. It is a _brave ame_. You ought to know
him; but if it makes any difference--"
Elfrida reflected afterward with satisfaction that she
had not even changed color, though she had found the
communication electric. It seemed to her that there had
been something dignified, noble almost, in the answer
she had made, with a smile that acknowledged the fact
that the world had scruples on such accounts as these:
"_Cela m'est absolument egal!_"
So far as the life went it was perfect. The Quartier
spoke and her soul answered it, and the world had nothing
to compare with a conversation like that. But the question
of production, of achievement, was beginning to bring
her moments when she had a terrible sensation that the
temperature of her passion was chilled. She had not yet
seen despair, but she had now and then lost her hold of
herself, and she had made acquaintance with fear. There
had been no vivid realization of failure, but a problem
was beginning to form in her mind, and with it a distinct
terror of the solution, which sometimes found a shape in
her dreams. In waking, voluntary moments she would see
her problem only as an unanswerable enigma.
Yet in the beginning she had felt a splendid confidence.
Her appropriation of theory had been so brilliant and so
rapid, her instructive appreciation had helped itself
out so well with the casual formulas of the schools, she
seemed to herself to have an absolute understanding of
expression. She held her social place among the others
by her power of perception, and that, with the completeness
of her repudiation of the bourgeois, had given her Nadie
Palicsky, whom the rest found difficult, variable,
unreasonable. Elfrida was certain that if she might only
talk to Lucien she could persuade him of a great deal
about her talent that escaped him--she was sore it escaped
him--in the mere examination of her work. It chafed her
always that her personality could not touch the master;
that she must day after day be only the dumb, submissive
pupil. She felt sometimes that there were things she
might say to Lucien which would be interesting and valuable
for him to hear.
Lucien was always non-committal for the first few months.
Everybody said so, and it was natural enough. Elfrida
set her teeth against his silences, his casual looks and
ambiguous encouragements for a length of time which did
infinite credit to her determination. She felt herself
capable of an eternity of pain; she was proudly conscious
of a willingness to oppose herself to innumerable
discouragements--to back her talent, as it were, against
all odds. That was historic, dignified, to be expected!
But in the inmost privacy of her soul she had conceived
the character of the obstacles she was prepared to face,
and the list resolutely excluded any idea that it might
not be worth while. Indifference and contempt cut at the
very roots of her pledges to herself. As she sat listening
on this afternoon to the vivid terms of Lucien's disapproval
of what the Swede had done, she had a sharp consciousness
of this severance.
She had nothing to say to any one in the general babble
of the anteroom, and nobody notified her white face and
resolute eyes particularly--the Americans were always
so pale and so _exalte_. Nadie kept away from her.
Elfrida had to cross the room and bring her, with a little
touch of angry assertion upon the arm, from the middle
of the group she had drawn around her, on purpose, as
her friend knew.
"I want you to dine with me--really _dine_," she said,
and her voice was both eager and repressed. "We win go
to Babaudin's--one gets an excellent haricot there--and
you shall have that little white cheese that you love.
Come! I want you particularly. I will even make him
bring champagne--anything."
Nadie gave her a quick look and made a little theatrical
gesture of delight.
"_Quell bonheur!_" she cried for the benefit of the
others; and then in a lower tone: "But not Babaudins,
petite. Andre will not permit Babaudin's; he says it is
not _convenable_," and she threw up her eyes with mock
resignation. "Say Papaud's. They keep their feet off the
table at Papaud's--there are fewer of those _betes des
Anglais_."
"Papaud's is cheaper," Elfrida returned darkly. "The
few Englishmen who dine at Babaudin's behave perfectly
well. I will not be insulted about the cost. I'll be
answerable to Andre. You don't lie as a general thing,
and why now? I can afford it, truly. You need not be
distressed."
Mademoiselle Palicsky looked into the girl's tense face
for an instant, and laughed a gay assent. But to herself
she said, as she finished drying her brushes on an
inconceivably dirty bit of cotton: "She has found herself
out, she has come to the truth. She has discovered that
it is not in her, and she is coming to me for corroboration.
Well, I will not give it, me! It is extremely disagreeable,
and I have not the courage. _Pourquoi donc!_ I will send
her to Monsieur John Kendal; she may make him responsible.
He will break her, but he will not lie to her; they
sacrifice all to their consciences, those English! And
now, you good-natured fool, you are in for a devil of an
evening!"