There was a scraping and a stumbling sound in the second
floor front bedroom of Mrs. Jordan's lodgings in a by-way
of Fleet Street, at two o'clock in the morning. It came
up to Elfrida mixed with the rattle of a departing cab
over the paving-stones below, outside where the fog was
lifting and showing one street-lamp to another. Elfrida
in her attic had been sitting above the fog all night;
her single candle had not been obscured by it. The cab
had been paid and the andirons were being disturbed by
Mr. Golightly Ticke, returned from the Criterion Restaurant,
where he had been supping with the leading lady of the
Sparkle Company, at the leading, lady's expense. She
could afford it better than he could, she told him, and
that was extremely true, for Mr. Ticke had his capacities
for light comedy still largely to prove, while Mademoiselle
Phyllis Fane had almost disestablished herself upon the
stage, so long and so prosperously had she pirouetted
there. Mr. Golightly Ticke's case excited a degree of
the large compassion which Mademoiselle Phyllis had for
incipient genius of the interesting sex, and which served
her instead of virtue of the more ordinary sort. He had
a doable claim upon it, because, in addition to being
tall and fair and misunderstood by most people, with a
thin nose that went beautifully with a medieval costume,
he was such a gentleman. Phyllis loosened her purse-strings
instinctively, with genuine gratification, whenever this
young man approached. She believed in him; he had ideas,
she said, and she gave him more; in the end he would be
sure to "catch on." Through the invariable period of
obscurity which comes before the appearance of any star,
she was in the habit of stating that he would have no
truer friend than Filly Fane. She "spoke to" the manager,
she pointed out Mr. Ticke's little parts to the more
intimate of her friends of the press. She sent him delicate
little presents of expensive cigars, scents, and soaps;
she told him often that he would infallibly "get there."
The fact of his having paid his own cab-fare from the
Criterion on this particular morning gave him, as he
found his way upstairs, almost an injured feeling of
independence.
As the sounds defined themselves move distinctly, troublous
and uncertain, Elfrida laid down her pen and listened.
"What an absurd boy it is!" she said. "He's trying to go
to bed in the fireplace."
As a matter of fact, Mr. Ticke's stage of intoxication
was not nearly so advanced as that; but Elfrida's mood
was borrowed from her article, and she felt the necessity
of putting it graphically. Besides, a picturesque form
of stating his condition was almost due to Mr. Ticke.
Mr. Ticke lived the unfettered life; he was of the elect;
Elfrida reflected, as Mr. Ticke went impulsively to bed,
how easy it was to discover the elect. A glance would do
it, a word, the turning of an eyelid; she knew it of
Golightly Ticke days before he came up in an old velvet
coat, and without a shirt collar, to borrow a sheet of
note paper and an envelope from her. On that occasion
Mr. Ticke had half apologized for his appearance, saying,
"I'm afraid I'm rather a Bohemian," in his sympathetic
voice. To which Elfrida had responded, hanging him the
note paper, "Afraid!" and the understanding was established
at once. Elfrida did not consider Mr. Ticke's other
qualifications or disqualifications; that would have been
a bourgeois thing to do. He was a _belle dame_, that was
sufficient. He might find life difficult, it was natural
and probable. She, Elfrida Bell, found it difficult. He
had not succeeded yet; neither had she; therefore they
had a comradeship--they and a few others--of revolt
against the dull conventional British public that barred
the way to success. Yesterday she had met him at the
street-door, and he had stopped to remark that along the
Embankment nature was making a bad copy of one of
Vereschagin's pictures. When people could say things like
that, nothing else mattered much. It is impossible to
tell whether Miss Bell would have found room in this
philosophy for the godmotherly benevolence of Mademoiselle
Fane, if she had known of it, or not.
It was a long, low-roofed room in which Elfrida Bell
meditated, biting the end of her pen, upon the difference
it made when a fellow-being was not a Philistine; and it
was not in the least like any other apartment Mrs. Jordan
had to let. It was the atelier of the Rue Porte Royale
transported. Elfrida had brought all her possessions with
her, and took a nameless comfort in arranging them as
she liked them best. "Try to feel at home," she said
whimsically to her Indian zither as she hung it up. "We
shall miss Paris, you and I, but one day we shall go back
together." A Japanese screen wandered across the room
and made a bedroom of the end. Elfrida had to buy that,
and spent a day in finding a cheap one which did not
offend her. The floor was bare except for a little Afghan
prayer-carpet, Mrs. Jordan having removed, in suspicions
astonishment, an almost new tapestry of as nice a pattern
as she ever set eyes on, at her lodger's request. A
samovar stood on a little square table in the corner,
and beside it a tin box of biscuits. The dormer-windows
were hung with Eastern stuffs, a Roman lamp stood on the
mantel, a Koran-holder held Omar Khayyam second-hand,
and Meredith's last novel, and "Anna Karenina," and
"Salammbo," and two or three recent numbers of the
_Figaro_. Here and there on the wall a Salon photograph
was fastened. A study of a girl's head that Nadie had
given her was stuck with a Spanish dagger over the
fireplace. A sketch of Vambety's and one of Kendal's,
sacredly framed, hung where she could always see them.
There was a vague suggestion of roses about the room,
and a mingled fragrance of joss-sticks and cigarettes.
The candle shone principally upon a little bronze Buddha,
who sat lotus-shrined on the writing-table among Elfrida's
papers, with an ineffable, inscrutable smile. On the top
shelf of a closet in the wall a small pile of canvases
gathered dust, face downward. Not a brush-mark of her
own was visible. She told herself that she had done with
that.
The girl sat with her long cloak about her and a blanket
over her knees. Her fingers were almost nerveless with
cold; as she laid down her manuscript she tried to wring
warmth into them. Her face was white, her eyes were
intensely wide open and wide awake; they had black dashes
underneath, an emphasis they did not need. She lay back
in her chair and gave the manuscript a little push toward
Buddha smiling in the middle of the table. "Well?" she
said, regarding him with defiant inquiry, cleverly mocked.
Buddha smiled on. The candle spattered, and his shadow
danced on three or four long thick envelopes lying behind
him. Elrida's eyes followed it.
"Oh!" said she, "you refer me to those, do you? _Ce n'est
pas poli_, Buddha dear, but you are always honest, aren't
you?" She picked op the envelopes and held them fanwise
before her. "Tell me, Buddha, why have they all been sent
back? I myself read them with interest, I who wrote them,
and surely that proves something!" She pulled a page or
two out of one of them, covered with her clear, conscious,
handwriting, a handwriting with a dainty pose in it
suggestive of inscrutable things behind the word. Elfrida
looked at it affectionately, her eyes caressed the lines
as she read them. "I find here true things and clever
things," she went on; "Yes, and original, _quite_ original
things. That about Balzac has never been said before--I
assure you, Buddha, it has never been said before! Yet
the editor of the _Athenian_ returns it to me in two days
with a printed form of thanks--exactly the same printed
form of thanks with which he would return a poem by
Arabella Jones! Is the editor of the _Athenian_ a dolt,
Buddha? The _Decade_ typewrites his regrets--that's
better--but the _Bystander_ says nothing at all but
'Declined with thanks' inside the flap of the envelope."
The girl stared absently into the candle. She was not in
reality greatly discouraged by these refusals: she knew
that they were to be expected: indeed, they formed part
of the picturesqueness of the situation in which she saw
herself, alone in London, making her own fight for life
as she found it worth living, by herself, for herself,
in herself. It had gone on for six weeks; she thought
she knew all its bitterness, and she saw nowhere the
faintest gleam of coming success; yet the idea of giving
it up did not even occur to her. At this moment she was
reflecting that after all it was something that her
articles had been returned--the editors had evidently
thought them worth that much trouble--she would send them
an off again in the morning, trying; the _Athenian_
article with the _Decade_, and the rejected of the _Decade_
with the _Bystander_: they would see that she did not
cringe before one failure or many. Gathering up the loose
pages of one article to put them back, her eyes ran
mechanically again over its opening sentences. Suddenly
something magnetized them, a new interest flashed into
them; with a little nervous movement she brought the page
closer to the candle and looked at it carefully. As she
looked she blushed crimson, and dropping the paper,
covered her face with her hands.
"Oh, _Buddha!_" she cried softly, struggling with her
mortification, "no wonder they rejected it! There's a
mistake in the very second line--a mistake in _spelling!_"
She felt her face grow hotter as she said it, and
instinctively she lowered her voice. Her vanity was
pricked as with a sword; for a moment she suffered keenly.
Her fabric of hope underwent a horrible collapse; the
blow was at its very foundation. While the minute hand
of her mother's old-fashioned gold watch travelled to
its next point, or for nearly as long as that, Elfrida
was under the impression that a person who spelled
"artificially" with one _L_ could never succeed in
literature. She believed she had counted the possibilities
of failure. She had thought of style, she had thought of
sense--she had never thought of spelling! She began with
a penknife to make the word right, and almost fearfully
let herself read the first few fines. "There are no more!"
she said to herself, with a sigh of relief. Turning the
page, she read on, and the irritation began to fade out
of her face. She turned the next page and the next, and
her eyes grew interested, absorbed, enthusiastic. There
were some more, one or two, but she did not see them.
Her house of hope built itself again. "A mere slip," she
said, reassured; and then, as her eye fell on a little
fat dictionary that held down a pile of papers, "But I'll
go over them all in the morning, to make sore, with
_that_."
Then she turned with new pleasure to the finished work
of the night, settled the sheets together, put them in
an envelope, and addressed it:
_The Editor,_
_The Consul,_
_6 Tibby's Lane,_
_Fleet Street, E. C._
She hesitated before she wrote. Should she write "The
Editor" only, or "George Alfred Curtis, Esq.," first,
which would attract his attention, perhaps, as coming
from somebody who knew his name. She had a right to know
his name, she told herself; she had met him once in the
happy Paris days. Kendal bad introduced him to her, in
a brief encounter at the Salon, and she remembered the
appreciativeness of the glance that accompanied the stout
middle-aged English gentleman's bow. Kendal had told
her then that Mr. Curtis was the editor of the _Consul_.
Yes, she had a right to know his name. And it might make
the faintest shadow of a difference--but no, "The Editor"
was more dignified, more impersonal; her article should
go in upon its own merits, absolutely upon its own merits;
and so she wrote.
It was nearly three o'clock, and cold, shivering cold.
Mr. Golightly Ticke had wholly subsided. The fog had
climbed up to her, and the candle showed it clinging to
the corners of the room. The water in the samovar was
hissing. Elfrida warmed her hands upon the cylinder and
made herself some tea. With it she disposed of a great
many sweet biscuits from the biscuit box, and thereafter
lighted a cigarette. As she smoked she re-read an old
letter, a long letter in a flowing foreign hand, written
from among the haymakers at Barbizon, that exhaled a
delicate perfume. Elfrida had read it thrice for comfort
in the afternoon; now she tasted it, sipping here and
there with long enjoyment of its deliciousness. She kissed
it as she folded it up, with the silent thought that this
was the breath of her life, and soon--oh, passably
soon--she could bear the genius in Nadie's eyes again.
Then she went to bed. "You little brute," she said to
Buddha, who still smiled as she blew out the candle,
"can't you forget it?"