Читать книгу A Daughter of To-Day - Sara Jeannette Duncan - Страница 6

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"Three months more," Elfrida Bell said to herself next morning, in the act of boiling an egg over a tiny kerosene stove in the cupboard that served her as a kitchen, "and I will put it to every test I know. Three unflinching months! John Kendal will not have gone back to England by that time. I shall still get his opinion. If he is only as encouraging as Nadie was last night, dear thing! I almost forgave her for being so much, much cleverer than I am. Oh, letters!" as a heavy knock repeated itself upon the door of the room outside.

There was only one; it was thrust beneath the door, showing a white triangle to her expectancy as she ran out to secure it, while the fourth flight creaked under Madame Vamousin descending. She picked it up with a light heart—she was young and she had slept. Yesterday's strain had passed; she was ready to count yesterday's experience among the things that must be met. Nadie had been so sensible about it. This was a letter from home, and the American mail was not due until next day. Inside there would be news of a little pleasure trip to New York, which her father and mother had been planning lately—Elfrida constantly urged upon her parents the necessity of amusing themselves—and a remittance. The remittance would be more than usually welcome, for she was a little in debt—a mere trifle, fifty or sixty francs; but Elfrida hated being in debt. She tore the end of the envelope across with absolute satisfaction, which was only half chilled when she opened out each of the four closely written sheets of foreign letter-paper in turn and saw that the usual postal order was not there.

Having ascertained this however, she went back to her egg; in another ten seconds it would have been hard-boiled, a thing she detested. There was the, egg, and there was some apricot-jam—the egg in a slender-stemmed Arabian silver cup, the jam golden in a little round dish of wonderful old blue. She set it forth, with the milk-bread and the butter and the coffee, on a bit of much mended damask with a pattern of rosebuds and a coronet in one corner. Her breakfast gave her several sorts of pleasure.

Half an hour after it was over she was still sitting with the letter in her lap. It is possible to imagine that she looked ugly. Her dark eyes had a look of persistence in spite of fear, a line or two shot up from between her brows, her lips were pursed a little and drawn down at the corners, her chin thrust forward. Her face and her attitude helped each other to express the distinctest possible negative. Her neck had an obstinate bend; she leaned forward clasping her knees, for the moment a creature of rigid straight lines. She had hardly moved since she read the letter.

She was sorry to learn that her father had been unfortunate in business, that the Illinois Indubitable Insurance Company had failed. At his age the blow would be severe, and the prospect, after a life of comparative luxury, of subsisting even in Sparta on eight hundred dollars a year could not be an inviting one for either of her parents. When she thought of their giving up the white brick house in Columbia Avenue and going to live in Cox Street, Elfrida was thoroughly grieved. She felt the sincerest gratitude, however, that the misfortune had not come sooner, before she had learned the true significance of living, while yet it might have placed her in a state of blind irresolution which would probably have lasted indefinitely. After a year in Paris she was able to make up her mind, and this she could not congratulate herself upon sufficiently, since a decision at the moment was of such vital importance! For one point upon which Mrs. Leslie's letter insisted, regretfully but strongly, was that the next remittance, which they hoped to be able to send in a week or two, would necessarily be the last. It would be as large as they could make it; at all events it would amply cover her passage and railway expenses to Sparta, and of course she would sail as soon as it reached her. It was an elaborate letter, written in phrases which Mrs. Leslie thought she evolved, but probably remembered from a long and comprehensive course of fiction as appropriate to the occasion, and Elfrida read between the lines with some impatience how largely their trouble was softened to her mother by the consideration that it would inevitably bring her back to them. "We can bear it well if we bear it together," wrote Mrs. Bell. "You have always been our brave daughter, and your young courage will be invaluable to us now. Your talents will be our flowers by the way-side. We shall take the keenest possible delight in watching them expand, as, even under the cloud of financial adversity, we know they will."

"Dear over-confident parent," Elfrida reflected grimly at this point, "I must yet prove that I have any."

Along with the situation she studied elaborately the third page of the Sparta Sentinel. When it had arrived, months before, containing the best part of a long letter describing Paris, which she had written to her mother in the first freshness of her delighted impressions, she had glanced over it with half-amused annoyance at the foolish parental pride that suggested printing it. She was already too remote from the life of Sparta to care very much one way or another, but such feeling as she had was of that sort. And the compliments from the minister, from various members of the Browning Club, from the editor himself, that filtered through her mother's letters during the next two or three weeks, made her shrug with their absolute irrelevance to the only praise that could thrill her and the only purpose she held dear. Even now, when the printed lines contained the significance of a possible resource, she did not give so much as a thought to the flattering opinion of Sparta as her mother had conveyed it to her. She read them over and over, relying desperately on her own critical sense and her knowledge of what the Paris correspondent of the Daily Dial thought of her chances in that direction. He, Frank Parke, had told her once that if her brush failed she had only to try her pen, though he made use of no such commonplace as that. He said it, too, at the end of half an hour's talk with her, only half an hour. Elfrida, when she wished to be exact with her vanity, told herself that it could not have been more than twenty-five minutes. She wished for particular reasons to be exact with it now, and she did not fail to give proper weight to the fact that Frank Parke had never seen her before that day. The Paris correspondent of the Daily Dial was well enough known to be of the monde, and rich enough to be as bourgeois as anybody. Therefore some of the people who knew him thought it odd that at his age this gentleman should prefer the indelicacies of the Quartier to those of "tout Paris," and the bad vermouth and cheap cigars of the Rue Luxembourg to the peculiarly excellent quality of champagne with which the president's wife made her social atonement to the Faubourg St. Germain. But it was so, and its being so rendered Frank Parke's opinion that Miss Bell could write if she chose to try, not only supremely valuable to her, but available for the second time if necessary, which was perhaps more important.

There would be a little more money from Sparta, perhaps one hundred and fifty dollars. It would come in a week, and after that there would be none. But a supply of it, however modest, must be arranged somehow—there were the "frais" of the atelier, to speak of nothing else. The necessity was irritatingly absolute. Elfrida wished that her scruples were not so acute about arranging it by writing for the press. "If I could think for a moment that I had any right to it as a means of expression!" she reflected. "But I haven't. It is an art for others. And it is an art, as sacred as mine. I have no business to degrade it to my uses." Her mental position when she went to see Frank Parke was a cynical compromise with her artistic conscience, of which she nevertheless sincerely regretted the necessity.

The correspondent of the Daily Dial had a club for one side of the river and a cafe for the other. He dined oftenest at the cafe, and Elfrida's card, with "urgent" inscribed in pencil on it, was brought to him that evening as he was finishing his coffee. She had no difficulty in getting it taken in. Mr. Parke's theory was that a newspaper man gained more than he lost by accessibility. He came out immediately, furtively returning a toothpick to his waistcoat pocket—a bald, stout gentleman of middle age, dressed in loose gray clothes, with shrewd eyes, a nose which his benevolence just saved from being hawk-like, a bristling white mustache, and a pink double chin. It rather pleased Frank Parke, who was born in Hammersmith, to be so constantly taken for an American—presumably a New Yorker.

"Monsieur—" began Elfrida a little formally. She would not have gone on in French, but it was her way to use this form with the men she knew in Paris, irrespective of their nationality, just as she invariably addressed letters which were to be delivered in Sparta, Illinois, "a madame Leslie Bell, Avenue Columbia," of that municipality.

"Miss Elfrida, I am delighted to see you," he interrupted her, stretching out one hand and looking at his watch with the other. "I am fortunate in having fifteen whole minutes to put at your disposal At the end of that time I have an appointment with a cabinet minister, who would rather see the devil. So I most be punctual. Shall we walk a bit along these dear boulevards, or shall I get a fiacre? No? You're quite right—Paris was made for eternal walking. Now, what is it, my dear child?"

Mr. Parke had already concluded that it was money, and had fixed the amount he would lend. It was just half of what Mademoiselle Knike, of Paolo Rossi's, had succeeded in extracting from him last week. He liked having a reputation for amiability among the ateliers, but he must not let it cost too much.

Elfrida felt none of that benumbing shame which sometimes seizes those who would try literature confessing to those who have succeeded in it, and the occasion was too important for the decorative diffidence that might have occurred to her if it had been trivial. She had herself well gathered together, and she would have been concise and direct even if there had been more than fifteen minutes.

"One afternoon last September, at Nadie Palicsky's—there is no chance that you will remember, but I assure you it is so—you told me that I might, if I tried—write, monsieur."

The concentration of her purpose in her voice made itself felt where Frank Parke kept his acuter perceptions, and put them at her service.

"I remember perfectly," he said.

"Je m'en felicite. It is more than I expected. Well, circumstances have made it so that I must either write or scrub. Scrubbing spoils one's hands, and besides, it isn't sufficiently remunerative. So I have come to ask you whether you seriously thought so, or whether it was only politeness—blague—or what? I know it is horrible of me to insist like, this, but you see I must." Her big dark eyed looked at him without a shadow of appeal, rather as if he were destiny and she were unafraid.

"Oh, I meant it," he returned ponderingly. "You can often tell by the way people talk that they would write well. But there are many things to be considered, you know."

"Oh, I know—whether one has any real right to write, anything to say that makes it worth while. I'm afraid I can't find that I have. But there must be scullery-maid's work in literature—in journalism, isn't there? I could do that, I thought. After all, it's only one's own art that one need keep sacred." She added the last sentence a little defiantly.

Bat the correspondent of the Daily Dial was not thinking of that aspect of the matter. "It's not a thing you can jump into," he said shortly. "Have you written anything, anywhere, for the press before?"

"Only one or two things that have appeared in the local paper at home. They were more or less admired by the people there, so far as that goes."

"Were you paid for them?"

Elfrida shook her head. "I've often heard the editor say he paid for nothing but his telegrams," she said.

"There it is, you see."

"I want to write for Raffini's Chronicle," Elfrida said quickly. "You know the editor of Raffini, of course, Mr. Parke. You know everybody. Will you do me the very great favor to tell him that I will report society functions for him at one half the price he is accustomed to pay for such writing, and do it more entertainingly?"

Frank Parke smiled. "You are courageous indeed, Hiss Elfrida. That is done by a woman who is invited, every where in her proper person, and knows 'tout Paris' like her alphabet I believe she holds stock in Raffini; anyway, they would double her pay rather than lose her. You would have more chance of ousting their leader-writer."

"I should be sorry to oust anybody," Elfrida returned with dignity.

"How do you propose to help it, if you go in for doing better or cheaper what somebody else has been doing before?"

Miss Bell thought for a minute, and demonstrated her irresponsibility with a little shrug. "Then I'm very sorry," she said. "But, monsieur, you haven't told me what to do."

The illuminator of European politics for the Daily Dial wished heartily that it had been a matter of two or three hundred francs.

"I'm afraid I—well, I don't see how I can give you any very definite advice. The situation doesn't admit of it, Miss Bell. But—have you given up Lucien?"

"No. It is only that—that I must earn money to pay him."

"Oh! Home supplies stopped?"

"My people have lost all their money except barely enough to live on. I cant expect another sou."

"That's hard lines!"

"I'm awfully sorry for them. But it isn't enough, being sorry, you know. I must do something. I thought I might write for Raffini, for—for practice, you know—the articles they print are really very bad—and afterward arrange to send Paris letters to some of the big American newspapers. I know a woman who does it I assure you she is quite stupid. And she is paid—but enormously!" Mr. Parke repressed his inclination to smile.

"I believe that sort of thing over there is very much in the hands of the syndicates—McClure and those fellows," he said, "and they won't look at you unless you're known. I don't want to discourage you, Miss Bell, but it would take you at least a year to form a connection. You would have to learn Paris about five times as well as you fancy you know it already, and then you would require a special course of training to find out what to write about. And then, remember, you would have to compete with people who know every inch of the ground. Now if I can be of any assistance to you en camarade, you know, in the matter of your passage home—"

"Thanks," Elfrida interposed quickly, "I'm not going home. If I can't write I can scrub, as I said. I must find out." She put out her hand. "I am sure there are not many of those fifteen minutes left," she said, smiling and quite undismayed. "I have to thank you very sincerely for—for sticking to the opinion you expressed when it was only a matter of theory. As soon as I justify it in practice I'll let you know."

The correspondent of the Daily Dial hesitated, looked at his watch and hesitated again. "There's plenty of time," he fibbed, frowning over the problem of what might be done.

"Oh no!" Elfrida said. "You are very kind, but there can't be. You will be very late, and perhaps his Excellency will have given the audience to the devil instead—or to Monsieur de Pommitz." Her eyes expressed perfect indifference. Frank Parke laughed outright. De Pommitz was his rival for every political development, and shone dangerously in the telegraphic columns of the London World.

"De Pommitz isn't in it this time," he said. "I'll tell you what I might do, Miss Elfrida. How long have you got for this—experiment?"

"Less than a week."

"Well, go home and write me an article—something locally descriptive. Make it as bright as you can, and take a familiar subject. Let me have it in three days, and I'll see if I can get it into Raffini for you. Of course, you know, I can't promise that they'll look at it."

"You are very good," Elfrida returned hastily, seeing his real anxiety to be off. "Something locally descriptive. I've often thought the atelier would make a good subject."

"Capital, capital! Only be very careful about personalities and so forth. Raffini hates giving offence. Good-bye! Here you, cocher! Boulevard Haussmann!"