The Second Fiddle Part 1

The Second Fiddle.

by Phyllis Bottome.

CHAPTER I

On the whole, Stella preferred the Cottage Dairy Company to the People's Restaurant. It was a shade more expensive, but if you ate less and liked it more, that was your own affair. You were waited on with more arrogance and less speed, but you made up for that artistically by an evasion of visible grossness.

Stella had never gone very much further than a ham sandwich in either place. You knew where you were with a ham sandwich, and you could disguise it with mustard.

On this occasion she took a cup of tea and made her meal an amalgamation. She hoped to leave work early, and she would have no time for tea. She was going to hear Chaliapine.

All London--all the London, that is, which thinks of itself as London--was raving about Chaliapine; but Stella in general neither knew nor cared for the ravings of London. They reached her as vaguely as the sound of breaking surf reaches the denizens of the deeper seas.

It was her sister Eurydice who had brought Chaliapine home to her. She had said quite plainly, with that intensity which distinguished both her utterances and her actions, that if she didn't hear Chaliapine she would die. He was like an ache in her bones.

Eurydice had never discovered that you cannot always do what you want or have what you very ardently wish to have. She believed that disappointment was a coincidence or a lack of fervency, and she set herself before each obstacle to her will like the prophets of Baal before their deaf G.o.d. She cut herself with knives till the blood ran.

Stella hovered anxiously by her side, stanching, whenever she was able, the flowing of Eurydice's blood. On this occasion she had only to provide seven shillings and to make, what cost her considerably more, a request to Mr. Leslie Travers to let her off at five.

Mr. Leslie Travers had eyed her with the surprise of a man who runs a perfect machine and feels it pause beneath his fingers. He could not remember that Stella Waring had ever made such a request before.

Her hours were from nine to five daily, but automatically, with the pressure of her work and the increase of her usefulness, they had stretched to six or seven.

Mr. Leslie Travers had never intended to have a woman secretary, but during the illness of a competent clerk he had been obliged to take a stop-gap. Miss Waring had appeared on a busy morning with excellent testimonials and a quiet manner. He told her a little shortly that he did not want a woman in his office. Her fine, humorous eyebrows moved upward, and her speculative gray eyes rested curiously upon his irritable brown ones.

"But I am a worker," she said gently. "If I can do your work, it is my own business whether I am a man or a woman. You shall not notice it."

Mr. Travers felt confused for a moment and as if he had been impertinent. In the course of a strenuous and successful life he had never felt impertinent; he believed it to be a quality found only in underlings. He stared, cleared his throat, read her testimonials, and temporarily engaged her. That was two years ago.

Miss Waring had kept her promise; she was a worker and not a woman. She took pleasure in keeping her wits about her, and Mr. Travers used them as if they were his own. Sometimes he thought they were.

She had many agreeable points besides her wits, but they were the only point she gave to Mr. Travers to notice. She deliberately suppressed her charm. She reduced his work by one half; he never had to say, "You ought to have asked me this," or, "You needn't have brought me that." Her initiative matched her judgment.

It did not occur to Mr. Travers to praise her for this most unusual quality, but he paid her the finest tribute of an efficient worker: he gave her more to do. He woke up to that fact when she tentatively asked him if he could make it convenient for her to leave at five.

"Five," he said, "is your hour for leaving this office. Of course you may go then. You ought always to do so."

A vague smile hovered about Stella's lips; she looked at him consideringly for a moment, her eyes seemed to say, "It must be nice for you, then, that I never do what I ought." Then she drew her secretarial manner like a veil over her face.

"You will find the drainage papers for Stafford Street in the second pigeon-hole on your desk," she said sedately, "with the inspector's report. I have put the plumber's estimate with it, and added a few marginal notes where I think their charges might be cut down."

"You had better see them about it yourself," said Mr. Travers; "then there won't be any unpleasantness."

He did not mean to be polite to Stella; he merely stated a convenient fact. When Stella saw people on business there was no unpleasantness.

Stella bowed, and left him.

Mr. Travers looked up for a moment after she had gone. "I am not sure,"

he said to himself, "that there are not some things women can do better than men when they do not know that they are doing them better." He did not like to think that women had any superior mental qualities to those of men, but he put them down to mother wit, which does not sound superior.

Stella went through the outer office on wings. It was full of her friends; her exits and her entrances were the events the lesser clerks liked best during the day.

Her smile soothed their feelings, and in her eyes reigned always that other Stella who lived behind her wits, a gay, serene, and friendly Stella, who did not know that she was a lady and never forgot that she was a human being.

Theoretically there is nothing but business in a business office, but practically in every smallest detail there is the pressure of personal influence. What gets done or, even more noticeably, what is left undone, is poised upon an inadmissible principle, the desire to please.

The office watched Stella, tested her, judged her, and once and for all made up its mind to please her.

Stella knew nothing at all about this probation. She only knew all about the office boy's mother, and where the girl typists spent their holidays, and when, if all went well, Mr. Belk would be able to marry his young lady. Mistakes and panic, telegrams and telephones, slipped into her hands, and were unraveled with the rapidity with which silk yields to expert fingers. She always made the stupidest clerk feel that mistakes, like the bites of a mosquito, might happen to any one even while she was making him see how to avoid them in future. She had the touch which takes the sting from small personal defeats. She always saw the person first and the defeat afterward.

Her day's work was a game of patience and skill, and she played it as she used to play chess with her father. It was a long game and sometimes it was a tiring one, but hardly a moment of it was not sheer drama; and the moment the town hall door swung behind her she forgot her munic.i.p.al juggling and started the drama of play.

On Thursday afternoon she stood for a moment considering her course.

There was the Underground, which was always quickest, or there was the drive above the golden summer dust on the swinging height of a motor-bus. She decided upon the second alternative, and slipped into infinity. She was cut off from duty, surrounded by strangers, unmoored from her niche in the world.

This was the moment of her day which Stella liked best; in it she could lose her own ident.i.ty. She let her hands rest on her lap and her eyes on the soft green of the new-born leaves. She hung balanced on her wooden seat between earth and sky, on her way to Russian music.

The brief and tragic youth of London trees was at its loveliest.

Kensington Gardens poured past her like a golden flame. The gra.s.s was as fresh as the gra.s.s of summer fields, swallows flitted over it, and the broad-shouldered elms were wrapped delicately in a mist of green.

Hyde Park Corner floated beneath her; the bronze horses of victory, compact and st.u.r.dy, trundled out of a cloudless sky. St George's Hospital, sun-baked and brown, glowed like an ancient palace of the Renaissance. The traffic surged down Hamilton Place and along Piccadilly as close packed as migratory birds. The tower of Westminster Cathedral dropped its alien height into an Italian blue sky; across the vista of the green park and all down Piccadilly the clubs flashed past her, vast, silver s.p.a.ces of comfort reserved for men, full of men. Stella did not know very much about men who lived in clubs. Cicely said they were very wicked and danced the tango and didn't want women to have votes; but Stella thought they looked as if they had attractions which rivaled these disabilities.

Probably she would see some of them less kaleidoscopically at the opera later.

Even men who danced the tango went to hear Chaliapine. It wasn't only his voice; he was a rage, a prairie fire. All other conversation became burned stubble at his name.

Piccadilly Circus shot past her like a bed of flowers.

The City was very hot, and all the world was in the streets, expansive and genial. It was the hour when work draws to an end and night is still far off. Pleasure had stretched down the scale and included workers.

People who didn't dance the tango bought strawberries and flowers off barrows for wonderful prices to take home to their children.

In the queue extending half-way down Drury Lane, Eurydice, pa.s.sionate and heavy-eyed, was waiting for Stella.

"If you hadn't come soon," she said, drawing Stella's arm through her own, "something awful would have happened to me. I got a messenger-boy to stand here for an hour to keep your place. The suspense has been agony, like waiting for the guillotine."

"But, O Eurydice dear, I do hope you will enjoy it!" Stella pleaded.

"I shall enjoy it, yes," said Eurydice, gloomily, "if I can bear it. I don't suppose you understand, but when you feel things as poignantly as I do, almost anything is like the guillotine. It is the death of something, even if it's only suspense. Besides, he may not be what I think him. I expect the opening of heaven."

Eurydice usually expected heaven to open, and this is sometimes rather hard upon the openings of less grandiose places.

A stout woman in purple raised an efficient elbow like an oar and dug it sharply into Stella's side.

"Oh, Stella, wouldn't it be awful if I fainted before the door opens!"

whispered Eurydice.

"The doors are opening," said Stella. "People have begun to plunge with umbrellas."