Part 17 (1/2)
In course of time this particular olive plant, like her sisters, picked up a smattering of certain branches of knowledge, and, armed thus, went out into the wide world to make her own way. Her knowledge was not extensive; it comprised a fluent power of speaking her mother-tongue with a pleasant tone and correct accent, but without any very well-grounded idea of why and wherefore it was so. She also knew a little French of doubtful quality, and a little less German that was distinctly off colour. She could copy a drawing in a woodenly accurate kind of way, with stodgy skies made chiefly of Chinese white, and exceedingly woolly trees largely helped out with the same useful composition. At that time there was no sham about Nora Browne's pretensions to art--there they were, good, bad, or indifferent, and you might take them for what they were worth, which was not much. It was not until she had been Mrs. Mackenzie for some years that she took to ”doing” the picture-galleries armed with catalogue and pencil, and talked learnedly about _chiar-oscuro_, about distance and atmosphere, about this school and that, this method or the other treatment. There were frequenters of the art-galleries of London to whom Mrs. Mackenzie, _nee_ Nora Browne, was a delightful study; but then, on the other hand, there was a much larger number of persons than these whom she impressed deeply, and who even went so far as to speak of her with bated breath as ”a power” on the press, while, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Mackenzie's little paragraphs were very innocent, and not very remunerative, and generally won for the more or less weekly society papers in which they appeared a reputation for employing an art-critic who knew a good deal more about the frames than about the pictures within them.
However, all this is a little by the way! I really only give these details of Mrs. Mackenzie's doings to show that the family was, by virtue of their mother being a dabbler in journalism, in touch with the set which I saw the other day elegantly described as ”Upper Bohemia.”
Now in the circles of ”Upper Bohemia” n.o.body is anybody unless they can do something--unless they can paint pictures or umbrella vases and milking-stools, unless they can sing attractively, or play some instrument beyond the ordinary average of skill, unless they can write novels or make paragraphs for the newspapers, unless they can act or give conjuring entertainments, or unless they can compose pretty little songs with a distinct _motif_, or pieces for the piano which n.o.body can make head or tail of. It is very funny that there should be so wide a difference necessary between the composition of music for the voice and music for the piano. For the first there must be a little something to catch the ear, a little swing in the refrain, a something to make the head wag to and fro; the words may be ever so silly if they are only bordering on the pathetic, and if the catch in the refrain is taking enough the rest of the song may be as silly as the words, and still it will be a success. But with a piece it is different. For that the air must be resolutely turned inside out, as it were, and apparently if the composer chances to light on one or two pretty bits, he goes back again and touches them up so as to make them match all the rest. It seems odd this, but the world does not stop to listen, but talks its hardest, and as at the end it says ”How lovely!” I suppose it is all right.
But all these people stand in the very middle of ”Upper Bohemia,” and, as a pebble dropped into the water makes circles and ever-widening circles on the smooth surface, so do the circles which const.i.tute ”Upper Bohemia” widen and widen until eventually they merge into the world beyond! There are the amateurs and the reciters, and the artists who put ”decorative” in front of the word which denotes their calling, and then put a hyphen between the two! And there are the thought-readers, and the palmists, and the people who have invented a new religion! All these are in the ever-widening circles of ”Upper Bohemia.” And outside these again come the fas.h.i.+onable lady-dressmakers and the art-milliners, the trained nurses and the professors of cooking. After these you may go on almost _ad libitum_, until the circle melts into professional life on the one hand and fas.h.i.+onable life on the other.
You have perhaps been wondering, my gentle reader, what all this can possibly have to do with the pug, Yum-Yum, which belonged to a little girl named Nannie Mackenzie. Well, it really has something to do with it, as I will show you. First, because it tells you that this was the set of people to whom the Mackenzies belonged and took a pride in belonging. It is true that they had a stronger claim to belong to a city set; but you see Mrs. Mackenzie had been brought up in the bosom of the Church, and thought more of the refined society in ”Upper Bohemia” than she did of all the money bags to be found east of Temple Bar! In this I think she was right; in modern London it does not do for the lion to lie down with the lamb, or for earthenware pipkins to try sailing down the stream with the iron pots. In ”Upper Bohemia,” owing to the haziness of her right of entry, Mrs. Mackenzie was quite an important person; in the city, owing to various circ.u.mstances--shortness of money, most of all--Mrs. Mackenzie was nowhere.
Mrs. Mackenzie had not followed the example of her father and mother with regard to the size of her family; she had only three children, two girls and a boy--Rosalind, Wilfrid, and Nannie.
At this time Nannie was only ten years old, a pretty, sweet, engaging child, with frank blue eyes and her mother's pretty trick of manner, a child who was never so happy as when she had a smart sash on with a clean white frock in readiness for any form of party that had happened to come in her way.
Wilf was different. He was a grave, quiet boy of thirteen, already working for a scholars.h.i.+p at St. Paul's School, and meaning to be a great man some day, and meanwhile spending all his spare hours collecting insects and gathering specimens of fern leaves together.
Above Wilf was Rosalind, and Rosalind was sixteen, a tall, willowy slip of a girl, with a pair of fine eyes and a pa.s.sion for art. I do not mean a pa.s.sion for making the woodenly accurate drawings with stodgy clouds and woolly trees which had satisfied her mother's soul and made her so eminently competent to criticise the work of other folk--no, not that, but a real pa.s.sion for real art.
Now the two Mackenzie girls had had a governess for several years, a mildly amiable young lady of the same cla.s.s, and possessed of about the same amount of knowledge as Mrs. Mackenzie herself had been. She too made wooden drawings with stodgy clouds and woolly trees, and she painted flowers--such flowers as made Rosalind's artistic soul rise within her and loathe Miss Temple and all her works, nay, sometimes loathe even those good qualities which were her chiefest charm.
Rosalind wanted to go further a-field in the art world than either her mother's paragraphs or Miss Temple's copies; she wanted to join some well-known art-cla.s.s, and, giving up everything else, go in for real hard, grinding work.
But it could not be done, for, as I have said, money was not plentiful in the house at Putney, and there was always the boy to be thought of, and also there was Nannie's education to finish. To let Rosalind join an expensive art-cla.s.s would mean being without Miss Temple, and Mrs.
Mackenzie felt that to do that would be to put a great wrong upon little Nannie, for which she would justly be able to reproach her all her life long.
”It would not do, my dear,” she said to Rosalind, when her elder daughter was one day holding forth on the glories which might one day be hers if only she could get her foot upon this, the lowest rung of the ladder by which she would fain climb to fame and fortune; ”and really I don't see the sense or reason of your being so anxious to follow art as a profession. I am sure you paint very well. That little sketch of wild roses you did last week was exquisite; indeed, I showed it to Miss Dumerique when I was looking over her new art-studio in Bond Street.
She said it would be charming painted on a thrush's-egg ground for a milking-stool or a tall table, or used for a whole suite of bedroom or boudoir furniture. I'm sure, my dear, you might make quite an income----”
”Did Miss Dumerique _offer_ to do one--to let me do any work of that kind for her?” Rosalind broke in impatiently.
”No, she did not,” Mrs. Mackenzie admitted, ”but----”
”But, depend upon it, she is at work on the idea long before this,”
cried Rosalind. She knew Miss Dumerique, and had but small faith in any income from that quarter, several of her most cherished designs having _suggested_ ideas to that gifted lady.
”If I only had twenty pounds, twenty pounds,” Rosalind went on, ”it would give me such a help, such a lift I should learn so much if I could spend twenty pounds; and it's such a little, only the price of the dress Mrs. Arlington had on the other day, and she said it was so cheap--'Just a cheap little gown, my dear, to wear in the morning.' Oh! if only I had the price of that gown.”
”Rosalind, my dear,” cried Mrs. Mackenzie, ”don't say that--it sounds so like envy, and envy is a hateful quality.”
”Yes, I know it is, but I do want twenty pounds so badly,” answered Rosalind in a hopeless tone.
Mrs. Mackenzie began to sob weakly. ”If I could give it to you, Rosalind, you know I would,” she wailed, ”but I haven't got it. I work and work and work and strain every nerve to give you the advantages; ay, and more than the advantages that I had when I was your age. But I can't give you what I haven't got--it's unreasonable to ask it or to expect it.”
”I didn't either ask or expect it,” said Rosalind; but she said it under her breath, and felt that, after all, her mother was right--she could not give what she had not got.
It was hard on them both--on the girl that she could not have, on the mother that she could not give! Rosalind from this time forth kept silence about her art, because she knew that it was useless to hope for the impossible--kept silence, that is, from all but one person. And yet she could not keep her thoughts from flying ever and again to the art-cla.s.ses and the twenty pounds which would do so much for her. So up in the room at the top of the house, where she dabbled among her scanty paints and sketched out pictures in any colours that she happened to have, and even went so far in the way of economy as to utilize the leavings of her mother's decorative paints--hedge-sparrow's-egg-blue, Arabian brown, eau de Nil, Gobelin, and others equally unsuitable for her purpose,--Rosalind Mackenzie dreamed dreams and saw visions--visions of a great day when she would have paints in profusion and art-teaching galore. There was not the smallest prospect of her dreams and visions coming true, any more than, without teaching and without paints, there was of her daubs growing into pictures, and finding places on the line at the Academy and the New. It is always so with youth. It hopes and hopes against hope, and when hope is dead, there is no longer any youth; it is dead too.
”There are youthful dreamers, Building castles fair, with stately stairways; Asking blindly Of the Future what it cannot give them.”