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
analytical 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 association 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 amusements; 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 constituted 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.