Individually a large number of Royal Academicians
pronounced John Kendal's work impertinent, if not
insulting, meaningless, affected, or flippant.
Collectively, with a corporate opinion that might be
discussed but could not be identified, they received it
and hung it, smothering a distressful doubt, where it
would be least likely to excite either the censure of
the right-minded or the admiration of the unorthodox.
The Grosvenor gave him a discreet appreciation, and the
New received him with joy and thanksgiving. If he had
gone to any of the Private Views, which temptation he
firmly resisted, he would have heard the British public
--for after all the British public is always well
represented at a Private View--say discontentedly how
much better it would like his pictures if they were only
a little more finished. He might even have had the cruel
luck to hear one patron of the arts, who began by designing
the pictorial advertisements for his own furniture-polish,
state that he would buy that twilight effect with the
empty fields, if only the trees in the foreground weren't
so blurred. Other things, too, he might have heard that
would have amused him more as being less commonplace,
but pleased him no better, said by people who cast furtive
glances over their shoulders to see if anybody that might
be the artist was within reach of their discriminating
admiration; and here and there, if he had listened well,
a vigorous word that meant recognition and reward. It
was not that he did not long for the tritest word of
comment from the oracle before which he had chosen to
lay the fruit of his labors; indeed, he was so conscious
of his desire to know this opinion, not over clever as
he believed it, that he ran away on the evening of
varnishing-day. If he staid he felt that he would inevitably
compromise his dignity, so he hid himself with some
amiable people in Hampshire, who could be relied upon
not to worry him, for a week. He did not deny himself
the papers, however. They reached him in stacks, with
the damp chill of the afternoon post upon them; and in
their solid paragraphs he read the verdict of the British
public written out in words of proper length and much
the same phrases that had done duty for Eastlake and Sir
Martin Shee. Fortunately, the amiable people included
some very young people, so young that they could properly
compel Kendal to go into the fields with them and make
cowslip balls, and some robust girls of eighteen and
twenty, who mutely demanded the pleasure of beating him
at tennis every afternoon. He was able in this way to
work off the depression that visited him daily with the
damp odor of London art, criticism, quite independently
of its bias toward himself. He told himself that he had
been let off fairly easily, though he winced considerably
under the adulation of the _Daily Mercury_, and found
himself breathing most freely when least was said about
him. The day of his triumph in the _Mercury_ he made
monstrous cowslip balls, and thought that the world had
never been sufficiently congratulated upon possessing
the ideal simplicity of children.
Thereafter for two days nothing came, and he began to
grow restless. Then the _Decade_ made its weekly slovenly
appearance, without a wrapper. He opened it with the
accumulated interest of forty-eight hours, turned to
"Fine Arts," and girded himself to receive the _Decade's_
ideas. He read the first sentence twice--the article
opened curiously, for the _Decade_. He looked at the
cover to see whether he had not been mistaken. Then he
sat down beside the open window, where a fine rain came
in and smote upon the page, and read it through, straining
his eyes in the gathering darkness over the last paragraph.
After that he walked up and down the room among the
shadows for half an hour, not ringing for lights, because
the scented darkness of the garden, where the rain was
dripping, and the half outlines of the things in the room
were so much more grateful to his imagination as the
_Decade's_ critic had stimulated it with the young,
mocking, brilliant voice that spoke in the department of
"Fine Arts." It stirred him all through. In the pleasure
it gave him he refused to reflect how often it dismissed
with contempt where it should have considered with respect,
how it was sometimes inconsistent, sometimes exaggerated
and obscure. He was rapt in the delicacy and truth with
which the critic translated into words the recognizable
souls of a certain few pictures--it could not displease
him that they were very few, since three of his were
among them. When it spoke of these the voice was strong
and gentle, with an uplifted tenderness, and all the
suppressed suggestion that good pictures themselves have.
It made their quality felt in the lines, and it spoke
with a personal joy.
"A new note!" Kendal thought aloud. "A voice crying in
the wilderness, by Jove! Wolff might have done it if it
had been in French, but Wolff would have been fairer and
more technical and less sympathetic."
A fine energy crept all through him and burned at his
finger-ends. The desire to work seized him deliciously
with the thrill of being understood, a longing to accomplish
to the utmost of his limitations--he must reasonably
suppose his limitations. Sometimes they were close and
real; at this moment they were far off and vague, and
almost dissolved by the force of his joyous intention.
He threw himself mentally upon half-finished canvas that
stood against the wall in Bryanston Street, and spent
ten exalted minutes in finishing it. When it was done he
found it ravishing, and raged because he could not decently
leave for town before four o'clock next day. He worked
off the time before dinner by putting his things together,
and the amiable people had never found him so delightful
as he was that evening. After amusing one of the robust
young ladies for half an hour at prodigious cost, he
found himself comparing their conversation with the talk
he might have had in the time with Elfrida Bell, and a
fresh sense of injury visited him at having been
high-handedly debarred from that pleasure for so many
weeks. It staid with him and pricked him all the way to
town next day. He was a fool, he thought, to have missed
the chance of meeting her upon the opening days of the
London exhibitions; she was sure to have gone, if it were
only to scoff, and her scoffing would have been so amusing
to listen to. He thought gloomily of the impossibility
of finding her in London if she didn't wish to be found,
and he concluded that he really wanted to see her, that
he must see her soon--to show her that article.
The desire had not passed from him three days later, when
the boy from below-stairs brought him up a card. Kendal
was in his shirt-sleeves, and had just established a
relation of great intimacy with an entirely new subject.
Before the boy reached him he recognized with annoyance
that it was a lady's card, and he took it between his
thumb and his palette with the most brutal impatience.
"You are to say--" he began, and stopped. "Show the lady
up," he said in substitution, while his face cleared with
a puzzled amusement, and he looked at the card again. It
read "Miss Elfrida Bell," but the odd thing was down in
one corner, where ran the statement, in small square
type, "_The Illustrated Age_."
There was a sweet glory of May sunlight in the streets
outside, and she seemed to bring some of it in with her,
as well as the actual perfume of the bunch of violets
which she wore in her belt. Her eyes, under the queerest
of hats, were bright and soft, there was a faint color
in her cheeks. Her shapely hands were in gray gloves with
long gauntlets, and in one of them she carried a
business-like little black notebook.
She came in with a shy hesitation that became her very
well, and as she approached, their old understanding
immediately arranged itself between them. "I should be
perfectly justified in sulking," he declared gaily,
disencumbering a chair of a battered tin box of empty
twisted tubes for her, "and asking you to what I might
attribute the honor of this visit." He put up his eye-glass
and stared through it with an absurd affectation of
dignified astonishment. "But I'll magnanimously admit
that I'm delighted to see you. I'll even lay aside my
wounded sensibilities enough to ask you where you've
been."
"I!" faltered Elfrida softly, with her wide-eyed smile.
"Oh! as if that were of any consequence!" She stepped
back a pace or two to look at an unpacked canvas, and
her expression changed. "Ah!" she said gravely, "how good
it is to see that! I wish I could remember by myself so
much, half so much, of the sunlight of that country. In
three days of these fogs I had forgotten it. I mean the
reality of it Only a pale theory staid with me. Now it
comes back."
"Then you _have_ been in London?" he probed, while she
looked wistfully at the fringe of a wood in Brittany that
stood upon his canvas. Her eyes left the picture and
wandered around the room.
"I!" she said again. "In London? Yes, I have been in
London. How _splendidly_ different you are!" she said,
looking straight at him as if she stated a falling of
the thermometer or a quotation from the Stock Exchange.
"But are you sure, _perfectly_ sure," she went on, with
dainty emphasis, "that you can stay different? Aren't
you the least bit afraid that in the end your work may
become--pardon me--commercial, like the rest? Is there
no danger?"
"I wish you would sit down," Kendal said ruefully. "I
shouldn't feel it so much, perhaps, if you sat down. And
pending my acknowledgment of a Londoner's sin in painting
in London, it seems to me that you have put yourself
under pretty much the same condemnation."
"I have not come to paint," Elfrida answered quickly. "I
have put away the insanity of thinking I ever could. I
told you that, I think, in a letter. But there are--other
things. You may remember that you thought there were."
She spoke with so much repressed feeling that Kendal
reproached himself with not having thought carefully
enough about it to take her at her letter's word. He took
up the card that announced her, and looked again at the
lower left-hand corner. "I do remember, but I don't
understand. Is this one of them?" he asked.
Something, something absolutely unintentional and of the
slightest quality, in his voice operated to lower her
estimate of the announcement on the card, and she flushed
a little.
"It's--it's a way," she said. "But it was stupid
--bourgeois--of me to send up a card--such a card. With
most of these people it is necessary; with you, of course,
it was hideous! Give it to me, please," and she proceeded
to tear it slowly into little bits. "You must pardon
me," she went on, "but I thought, you know--we are not
in Paris now--and there might be people here. And then,
after all, it explains me."
"Then I should like another," Kendal interrupted.
"I'm going to do a descriptive article for the _Age_;
the editor wants to call it 'Through the Studios,' or
something of that sort--about the artists over here and
their ways of working, and their places, and their ideas,
and all that, and I thought, if you didn't mind, I should
like to begin with you. Though it's rather like taking
an advantage."
"But are you going in for this sort of thing seriously?
Have you ever done anything of the sort before? Isn't it
an uncommon grind?" Kendal asked, with hearty interest.
"What made you think of it? Of course you may say any
mortal thing you want to about me--though I call it
treachery, your going over to the critics. And I'm afraid
you won't find anything very picturesque here. As you
say, we're not in Paris."
"Oh yes, I shall," she replied sweetly, ignoring his
questions. "I like pipes and cobwebs and old coats hanging
on a nail, and plenty of litter and dust and confusion.
It's much better for work than tapestries and old armour
and wood-carvings."
Miss Bell did not open her little black notebook to record
these things, however. Instead, she picked up a number
of the _London Magazine_ and looked at the title of an
article pencil-marked on the pale green cover. It was
Janet Cardiff's article, and Lady Halifax had marked it.
Elfrida had read it before. It was a fanciful recreation
of the conditions of verse-making when Herrick wrote,
very pleasurably ironical in its bearing upon more modern
poetry-making. It had quite deserved the praise she gave
it in the corner which the _Age_ reserved for magazines.
"I want you to understand," she said slowly, "that it is
only a way. I shall not be content to stick at
this--ordinary--kind of journalistic work. I shall aim
at something better--something perhaps even as good as
that," she held up the marked article. "I wonder if she
realizes how fortunate she is--to appear between the same
covers as Swinburne!"
"It is not fortune altogether," Kendal answered; "she
works hard."
"Do you know her? Do you see her often? Will you tell
her that there is somebody who takes a special delight
in every word she writes?" asked Elfrida impulsively.
"But no, of course not! Why should she care--she must
hear such things so often. Tell me, though, what is she
like, and particularly how old is she?"
Kendal had begun to paint again; it was a compliment he
was able to pay only to a very few people. "I shall
certainly repeat it to her," he said. "She can't hear
such things often enough--nobody can. How shall I tell
you what she is like! She is tall, about as tall as you
are, and rather thin. She has a good color, and nice hair
and eyes."
"What colored eyes?"
"Brown, I think. No--I don't know, but not blue. And good
eyebrows. Particularly good eyebrows."
"She must be plain," Elfrida thought, "if he has to dwell
upon her eyebrows. And how old?" she asked again. "Much
over thirty?"
"Oh dear, no! Not thirty. Twenty-four, I should say."
Elfrida's face fell perceptibly. "Twenty-four!" she
exclaimed. "And I am already twenty! I shall never catch
up to her in four years. Oh, you have made me so unhappy!
I thought she must be _quite_ old--forty perhaps. I was
prepared to venerate her. But twenty-four and good
eyebrows! It is too much."
Kendal laughed. "Oh, I say!" he exclaimed, jumping up
and bringing a journal from the other side of the room,
"if you're going in for art criticism, here's something!
Do you see the _Decade?_ The _Decade's_ article on the
pictures in last week's number fairly brought me back to
town." He held his brush between his teeth and found the
place for her. "There! I don't know who did it, and it
was the first thing Miss Cardiff asked me when I put in
my appearance there yesterday, so she doesn't either,
though she writes a good deal for the _Decade_."
Kendal had gone back to work, and did not see that Elfrida
was making an effort of self-control, with a curious
exaltation in her eyes. "I--I have seen this," she said
presently.
"Capital, isn't it!"
"Miss Cardiff asked you who wrote it?" she repeated
hungrily.
"Yes; she commissioned me to find out, and if he was
respectable to bring him there. Her father said I was to
bring him anyway. So I don't propose to find out. The
Cardiffs have burned their fingers once or twice already
handling obscure genius, and I won't take the
responsibility. But it's adorably savage, isn't it?"
"Do you really like it!" she asked. It was her first
taste of success, and the savor was very sweet. But she
was in an agony of desire to tell him, to tell him
immediately, but gracefully, delicately, that she wrote
it. How could she say it, and yet seem uneager, indifferent?
But the occasion must not slip. It was a miserable
moment.
"Immensely," he replied.
"Then," she said, with just a little more significance
in her voice than she intended, "you would rather not
find out?"
He turned and met her shining eyes. She smiled, and he
had an instant of conviction. "You," he exclaimed--"you
did it! Really?"
She nodded, and he swiftly reflected upon what he had
said. "Now criticise!" she begged impatiently.
"I can only advise you to follow your own example," he
said gravely. "It's rather exuberantly cruel in places."
"Adorably savage, you _said!_"
"I wasn't criticising then. And I suppose," he went on,
with a shade of awkwardness, "I ought to thank you for
all the charming things you put in about me."
"Ah!" she returned, with a contemptuous pout and shrug,
"don't say that--it's like the others. But," she clinched
it notwithstanding, and rather quickly, "will you take
me to see Miss Cardiff? I mean," she added, noting his
look of consternation, "will you ask her if I may come?
I forget--we are in London."
At this moment the boy from below-stairs knocked with
tea and cakes, little Italian cakes in iced jackets and
paper boats. "Yes, certainly--yes, I will," said Kendal,
staring at the tray, and trying to remember when he had
ordered it; "but it's your plain duty to make us both
some tea, and to eat as many of these pink-and-white
things as you possibly can. They seem to have come down
from heaven for you."
They ate and drank and talked and were merry for quite
twenty minutes. Elfrida opened her notebook and threatened
absurdities of detail for publication in the _Age_; he
defied her, tilted his chair back, put his feet on a
packing-box, and smoked a cigarette. He placed all the
studies he had made after she left Paris before her, and
as she finished the last but one of the Italian cakes,
they discussed these in the few words from which they
both drew such large and satisfying meanings as do not
lie at all in the vocabulary of outsiders. Elfrida felt
the keenest pleasure of her whole life in the knowledge
that Kendal was talking to her more seriously, more
carefully, because of that piece of work in the _Decade_;
the consciousness of it was like wine to her, freeing
her thoughts and her lips. Kendal felt, too, that the
plane of their relations was somehow altered. He was not
sure that he liked the alteration. Already she had grown
less amusing, and the real _camaraderie_ which she
constantly suggested her desire for he could not, at the
bottom of his heart, truly tolerate with a woman. He was
an artist, but he was also an Englishman, and he told
himself that he must not let her get into the way of
coming there. He felt an obscure inward irritation, which
he did not analyze, that she should talk so well and be
so charming personally at the same time.
Elfrida, still in the flush of her elation, was putting
on her gloves to go, when the room resounded to a masterful
double rap. The door almost simultaneously opened far
enough to disclose a substantial gloved hand upon the
outer handle, and in the tones of confident aggression
which habit has given to many middle-aged ladies, a
feminine voice said, "May we come in?"
It is not probable that Lady Halifax had ever been so
silently, surely, and swiftly damned before. In the
fraction of an instant that followed Kendal glanced at
the dismantled tray and felt that the situation was
atrocious. He had just time to put his foot upon his
half-smoked cigarette, and to force a pretence of unconcern
into his "Come in! Come in!" when the lady and her daughter
entered with something of unceremoniousness.
"Those are appalling stairs--" Lady Halifax observed
Elfrida, and came to an instant's astonished halt--"of
yours, Mr. Kendal, appalling!" Then as Kendal shook hands
with Miss Halifax she faced round upon him in a manner
which said definitely, "Explain!" and behind her sharp
good-natured little eyes Kendal read, "If it is possible!"
He looked at Elfrida in the silent hope that she would
go, but she appeared to have no such intention. He was
pushed to a momentary wish that she had got into the
cupboard, which he dismissed, turning a deeper brick
color as it came and went. Elfrida was looking up with
calm inquiry, buttoning a last glove-button.
"Lady Halifax," he said, seeing nothing else for it,
"this is Miss Bell, from America, a fellow-student in
Paris. Miss Bell has deserted art for literature, though,"
he went on bravely, noting an immediate change in his
visitor's expression, and the fact that her acknowledgment
was quite as polite as was necessary. "She has done me
the honor to look me up this afternoon in the formidable
character of a representative of the press."
Lady Halifax looked as if the explanation was quite
acceptable, though she reserved the right of criticism.
Elfrida took the first word, smiling prettily straight
into Lady Halifax's face.
"Mr. Kendal pretends to be very much frightened," she
said, with pleasant, modest coolness, and looked at
Kendal.
"From America," Lady Halifax repeated, as if for the
comfort of the assurance. "I am sure it is a great
advantage nowadays to have been brought up in America."
This was quite as delicately as Lady Halifax could possibly
manage to inform Kendal that she understood the situation.
Miss Halifax was looking absorbedly at Elfrida. "Are you
really a journalist?" Miss Halifax asked. "How nice! I
didn't know there were any ladies on the London press,
except, of course, the fashion-papers, but that isn't
quite the same, is it?"
When Miss Halifax said "How nice!" it indicated a strong
degree of interest. The threads of Miss Halifax's
imagination were perpetually twisting themselves about
incidents that had the least unusualness, and here was
a most unusual incident, with beauty and genius thrown
in! Whether she could approve it or not in connection
with Kendal, Miss Halifax would decide afterward. She
told herself that she ought to be sufficiently devoted
to Kendal to be magnanimous about his friends. Her six
years of seniority gave her the candor to confess that
she was devoted to Kendal--to his artistic personality,
that is, and to his pictures. While Kendal turned a still
uncomfortable back upon them, showing Lady Halifax what
he had done since she had been there last--she was always
pitiless in her demands for results--Elfrida talked a
little about "the press" to Miss Halifax. Very lightly
and gracefully she talked about it, so lightly and
gracefully that Miss Halifax obtained an impression which
she has never lost, that journalism for a woman had ideal
attractions, and privately resolved if ever she were
thrown upon the bleak world to take it up. As the others
turned toward them again Elfrida noticed the
conscience-stricken glance which Kendal gave to the
tea-tray.
"Oh," she said, with a slight enhancement of her pretty
Parisian gurgle, "I am very guilty--you must allow me to
say that I am very guilty indeed! Mr. Kendal did not
expect to see me to-day, and in his surprise he permitted
me to eat up all the cakes! I am so sorry! Are there no
more--anywhere?" she asked Kendal, with such a gay
pretence of tragic grief that they all laughed together.
She went away then, and while they waited for a fresh
supply of tea, Kendal did his best to satisfy the curiosity
of the Halifaxes about her. He was so more than thankful
she had convinced them that she was a person about whom
it was proper to be curious.