"Daddy," Janet said to her father a few days after their
return to town; "I've been thinking that we might--that
you might--be of use in helping Frida to place something
somewhere else than in that eternal picture paper."
"For instance?"
"Oh, in _Peterson's_, or the _London Magazine_, or
_Piccadilly_."
It was in the library after dinner, and Lawrence Cardiff
was smoking. He took the slender stem of his pipe from
his lips and pressed down the tobacco in the bowl with
a, caressing thumb, looking appreciatively, as he did
it, at the mocking buffoon's face that was carved on it.
"It seems to me that you are the influential person in
those quarters," he said, with the smile that Janet
privately thought the most delightfully sympathetic she
knew.
"Oh, I'm not really!" the girl answered quickly; "and
besides--" she hesitated, to pick words that would hurt
her as little as possible--"besides, Frida wouldn't care
about my doing it."
"Why?"
"I don't know quite why. But she wouldn't--it's of no
use. I don't think she likes having things done for her
by people anything like her own age, and--and standing."
Cardiff smiled inwardly at this small insincerity.
Janet's relation with Elfrida was a growing pleasure to
him. He found himself doing little things to enhance it,
and fancying himself in some way connected with its
initiation.
"But I'm almost certain she would let you do it," his
daughter urged.
"_In loco parentis_," Cardiff smiled, and immediately
found that the words left an unpleasant taste in his
mouth. "But I'm not at all sure that she could do anything
they would take."
"My dear daddy!" cried Janet resentfully. "Wait till she
tries! You said yourself that some of those scraps she
sent us in Scotland were delicious."
"So they were. She has a curious, prismatic kind of
mind--"
"Soul, daddy."
"Soul, if you like. It reflects quite wonderfully, the
angles at which it finds itself with the world are so
unusual. But I doubt her power, you know, of construction
or cohesion, or anything of that kind."
"I don't," Janet returned confidently. "But talk to her
about it, daddy; get her to show you what she's done--I
never see a line till it's in print. And--I don't know
anything about it, you know. Above all things, don't
let her guess that I suggested it."
"I'll see what can be done," Mr. Cardiff returned, "though
I profess myself faithless. Elfrida wasn't designed to
please the public of the magazines--in England."
When Janet reflected afterward upon what had struck her
as being odd about this remark of her father's, she found
it was Elfrida's name. It seemed to have escaped him; he
had never referred to her in that way before--which was
a wonder, Janet assured herself, considering how constantly
he heard it from her lips.
"How does the novel come on?" Mr. Cardiff asked before
she went to bed that night. "When am I to be allowed to
see the proofs?"
"I finished the nineteenth chapter yesterday," Janet
answered, flushing. "It will only run to about twenty-three.
It's a very little one, daddy."
"Still nobody in the secret but Lash and Black?"
"Not a soul I hope they're the right people," Janet said
anxiously. "I haven't even told Elfrida," she added. "I
want to surprise her with an early copy. She'll like it,
I think. I like it pretty well myself. It has an effective
leading idea."
Her father laughed, and threw her a line of Horace which
she did not understand. "Don't let it take too much time
from your other work," he warned her. "It's sure, you
know, to be an arrant imitation of somebody, while in
your other things you have never been anybody but yourself."
He looked at her in a way that disarmed his words, and
went back to his _Revue Bleue_.
"Dear old thing! You want to prepare me for anything,
don't you? I wonder whom I've imitated! Hardy, I think,
most of all--but then it's such a ludicrously far-away
imitation! If there's nothing in the thing but _that_,
it deserves to fall as flat as flat. But there is,
daddy!"
Cardiff laid down his journal again at the appealing
note.
"No!" she cried, "I won't bore you with it now; wait till
the proofs come. Good-night!" She kissed him lightly on
the cheek. "About Elfrida," she added, still bending
over him. "You'll be very careful, won't you, daddy
dear--not to hurt her feelings in any way, I mean?"
After she had gone, Lawrence Cardiff laid down the _Revue_
again and smoked meditatively for half an hour. During
that time he revolved at least five subjects which he
thought Elfrida, with proper supervision, might treat
effectively. But the supervision would be very necessary.
A fortnight later Mr. Cardiff sat in the same chair,
smoking the same pipe, and alternately frowned and smiled
upon the result of that evening's meditation. It had
reached him by post in the afternoon without an accompanying
word; the exquisite self-conscious manuscript seemed to
breathe a subdued defiance at him, with the merest ghost
of a perfume that Cardiff liked better. Once or twice he
held the pages closer to his face to catch it more
perfectly.
Janet had not mentioned the matter to him again; indeed,
she had hardly thought of it. Her whole nature was absorbed
in her fight with herself, in the struggle for self-control,
which had ceased to come to the surface of her life at
intervals, and had now become constant and supreme with
her. Kendal had made it harder for her lately by continually
talking of Elfrida. He brought his interest in her to
Janet to discuss as he naturally brought everything that
touched him to her, and Janet, believing it to be a
lover's pleasure, could not forbid him. When he criticised
Elfrida, Janet fancied it was to hear her warm defence,
which grew oddly reckless in her anxiety to hide the
bitterness that tinged it.
"Otherwise," she permitted herself to reflect, "he is
curiously just in his analysis of her--for a man," and
hated the thought for its touch of disloyalty.
Knowing Elfrida as she thought she knew her, Kendal's
talk wounded her once for herself and twice for him. He
was going on blindly, confidently, trusting, Janet thought
bitterly, to his own sweetness of nature, to his comeliness
and the fineness of his sympathies--who had ever refused
him anything yet? And only to his hurt, to his repulse--from
the point of view of sentiment, to his ruin. For it did
not seem possible to Janet that a hopeless passion for
a being like Elfrida Bell could result in anything but
collapse. Whenever he came to Kensington Square, and he
came often, she went down to meet him with a quaking
heart, and sought his face nervously for the haggard,
broken look which should mean that he had asked Elfrida
to marry him and been artistically refused. Always she
looked in vain; indeed, Kendal's spirits were so uniformly
like a schoolboy's that once or twice she asked herself,
with sudden terror, whether Elfrida had deceived
her--whether it might not be otherwise between them,
recognizing then, with infinite humiliation, how much
worse that would be. She took to working extravagantly
hard, and Elfrida noticed with distinct pleasure how much
warmer her manner had grown, and in how many pretty ways
she showed her enthusiasm. Janet was such a conquest!
Once when Kendal seemed to Janet on the point of asking
her what she thought of his chances, she went to a
florist's in the High, and sent Elfrida a pot of snowy
chrysanthemums, after which she allowed herself to refrain
from seeing her for a week. Her talk with her father
about helping Elfrida to place her work with the magazines
had been one of the constant impulses by which she tried
to compensate her friend, as it were, for the amount of
suffering that young woman was inflicting upon her--she
would have found a difficulty in explaining it more
intelligibly than that.
As he settled together the pages of Miss Bell's article
on "The Nemesis of Romanticism" and laid them on the
table, Lawrence Cardiff thought, of it with sincere
regret.
"It is hopeless--hopeless," he said to himself. "It must
be rewritten from end to end. I suppose she must do it
herself," he added, with a smile that he drew from some
memory of her, and he pulled writing materials toward
him to tell her so. Re-reading his brief note, he frowned,
hesitated, and tore it up. The next followed it into the
waste-paper basket. The third gave Elfrida gently to
understand that in Mr. Cardiff's opinion the article was
a little unbalanced--she would remember her demand that
he should be absolutely frank. She had made some delightful
points, but there was a lack of plan and symmetry. If
she would give him the opportunity he would be very happy
to go over it with her, and possibly she would make a
few changes. More than this Cardiff could not induce
himself to say. And he would await her answer before
sending the article back to her.
It came next day, and in response to it Mr. Cardiff
found himself walking, with singular lightness of step,
toward Fleet Street in the afternoon with Elfrida's
manuscript in his pocket. Buddha smiled more inscrutably
than ever as they went over it together, while the water
hissed in the samovar in the corner, and little blue
flames chased themselves in and out of the anthracite in
the grate, and the queer Orientalism of the little room
made its picturesque appeal to Cardiff's senses. He had
never been there before.
From beginning to end they went over the manuscript, he
criticising and suggesting, she gravely listening, and
insatiately spurring him on.
"You may say anything," she declared. "The sharper it is
the better, you know, for me. Please don't be polite--be
savage!" and he did his best to comply.
She would not always be convinced; he had to leave some
points unvanquished; but in the main she agreed and was
grateful. She would remodel the article, she told him,
and she would remember all that he had said. Cardiff
found her recognition of the trouble he had taken
delightful; it was nothing, he declared; he hoped very
particularly that she would let him be of use, if possible,
often again. He felt an inexplicable jar when she suddenly
said, "Did you ever do anything--of this sort--for Janet?"
and he was obliged to reply that he never did--her look
of disappointment was so keen. "She thought," he reflected,
"that I hoisted Janet into literature, and could be
utilized again perhaps," in which he did her injustice.
But he lingered over his tea, and when he took her hand
to bid her good-by he looked down at her and said, "Was
I very brutal?" in a way which amused Her for quite half
an hour after he had gone.
Cardiff sent the amended article to the _London Magazine_
with qualms. It was so unsuitable even then, that he
hardly expected his name to do much for it, and the
half-hour he devoted to persuading his literary conscience
to let him send it was very uncomfortable indeed. Privately
he thought any journalist would be rather an ass to print
it, yet he sincerely hoped the editor of the _London
Magazine_ would prove himself such an ass. He selected
the _London Magazine_ because it seemed to him that the
quality of its matter had lately been slightly
deteriorating. A few days later, when he dropped in at
the office, impatient at the delay, to ask the fate of
the article, he was distinctly, disappointed to find that
the editor had failed to approach it in the character he
had mentally assigned to him. That gentleman took the
manuscript out of the left-hand drawer of his writing-table,
and fingered, the pages over with a kind of disparaging
consideration before handing it back,
"I'm very sorry, Cardiff, but we can't do anything with
this, I'm afraid. We have--we have one or two things
covering the same ground already in hand."
And he looked at his visitor with some curiosity. It
was a queer article to have come through Lawrence Cardiff.
Cardiff resented the look more than the rejection. "It's
of no consequence, thanks," he said drily. "Very good
of you to look at it. But you print a great deal worse
stuff, you know."
His private reflection was different, however, and led
him to devote the following evening to making certain
additions to the sense and alterations in the style of
Elfrida's views on "The Nemesis of Romanticism," which
enabled him to say, at about one o'clock in the morning,
"_Enfin!_ It is passable!" He took it to Elfrida on his
way from his lecture next day. She met him at the door
of her attic with expectant eyes; she was certain of
success.
"Have they taken it?" she cried. "Tell me quick, quick!"
When he said no--the editor of the _London Magazine_ had
shown himself an idiot--he was very sorry, but they would
try again, he thought she was going to cry. But her face
changed as he went on, telling her frankly what he thought,
and showing her what he had done.
"I've' only improved it for the benefit of the Philistines,"
he said apathetically. "I hope you will forgive me."
"And now," she said at last, with a little hard air,
"what do you propose?"
"I propose that if you approve these trifling alterations,
we send the article to the _British Review_. And they
are certain to take it."
Elfrida held out her hand for the manuscript, and he gave
it to her. She looked at every page again. It was at
least half re-written in Cardiff's small, cramped hand.
"Thank-you," she said slowly. "Thank-you very much. I
have learned a great deal, I think, from what you have
been kind enough to tell me, and to write here. But this,
of course, so far as I am concerned in it, is a failure."
"Oh no!" he protested.
"An utter failure," she went on unnoticingly, "and it
has served its purpose. There!" she cried with sudden
passion, and in an instant the manuscript was flaming in
the grate.
"Please--please go away," she sobbed, leaning the mantel
in a sudden betrayal of tears; Cardiff, resisting the
temptation to take her in his arms and bid her be comforted,
went.