The Second Fiddle Part 15

"Not a bit of it," said Julian, with a gleam of amus.e.m.e.nt. "I chose a jolly good one, and she's improved it. You can go some distance with a decent poet, but you can't with your man, Miss Waring. He twiddles up into the sky before you've got your foot on the step."

"That's a direct challenge," said Lady Verny. "I think after dinner we must produce something of Sh.e.l.ley's in contradiction. Can you think of anything solid enough to bear Julian?"

"Yes," said Stella. "All the way here in the train I was thinking of one of Sh.e.l.ley's poems. Have you read it--'The Ode to the West Wind'?"

"No," said Julian, smiling at her; "but it doesn't sound at all substantial. You started your argument on a cloud, and you finish off with wind. The Lord has delivered you into my hand."

"Not yet, Julian," said Lady Verny. "Wait till you've heard the poem."

It did not seem in the least surprising to Stella to find herself, half an hour later, sitting in a patch of candle-light, on a high-backed oak chair, saying aloud without effort or self-consciousness Sh.e.l.ley's "Ode to the West Wind."

Neither Lady Verny nor Julian ever made a guest feel strange. There was in them both an innate courtesy, which was there to protect the feelings of others. They did not seem to be protecting Stella. They left her alone, but in the act of doing so they set her free from criticism. Lady Verny took up her embroidery, and Julian, sitting in the shadow of an old oak settle, contentedly smoked a cigarette. He did not appear to be watching Stella, but neither her movements nor her expressions escaped him. She was quite different from any one he had seen before. She wore a curious little black dress, too high to be smart, but low enough to set in relief her white, slim throat. She carried her head badly, so that it was difficult to see at first the beauty of the lines from brow to chin.

She had a curious, irregular face, like one of the more playful and less attentive angels in a group round a Botticelli Madonna. She had no color, and all the life of her face was concentrated in her gray, far-seeing eyes. Julian had never seen a pair of eyes in any face so alert and fiery. They were without hardness, and the fire in them melted easily into laughter. But they changed with the tones of her voice, with the rapid words she said, so that to watch them was almost to know before she spoke what her swift spirit meant. Her voice was unfettered music, low, with quick changes of tone and intonation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Her voice was unfettered music]

Stella was absorbed in her desire to give Julian a sense of Sh.e.l.ley. She wanted to make him see that beyond the world of fact, the ruthless, hampering world of which he was a victim, there was another, finer kingdom where no disabilities existed except those that a free spirit set upon itself.

She was frightened of the sound of her own voice; but after the first verse, the thought and the wild music steadied her. She lost the sense of herself, and even the flickering firelight faded; she felt out once more in the warm, swinging wind, with its call through the senses to the soul. The first two parts of the poem, with their sustained and tremendous imagery, said themselves without effort or restraint. It was while she was in the halcyon third portion of

"The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,"

that it shot through Stella's mind how near she was to the tragic unfolding of a fettered spirit which might be the expression of Julian's own. She dared not stop; the color rushed over her face. By an enormous effort she kept her voice steady and flung into it all the unconsciousness she could muster. He should not dream she thought of him; and yet as she said:

"Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bowed One too like thee--tameless, and swift, and proud."

it seemed to her that she was the voice of his inner soul stating his bitter secret to the world. A pulse beat in her throat and struggled with her breath, her knees shook under her; but the music of her low, grave voice went on unfalteringly:

"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.

What if my leaves are falling, like its own!"

Lady Verny laid down her embroidery. Julian had not moved. There was no sound left in the world but Stella's voice.

She moved slowly toward the unconquerable end,

"Oh, Wind, If winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

All the force of her heart throbbed through Sh.e.l.ley's words. They were only words, but they had the universe behind them. n.o.body spoke when she had finished.

She herself was the first to move. She gave a quick, impatient sigh, and threw out her hands with a little gesture of despair.

"I can't give it to you," she said, "but it's _there_. Read it for yourself! It's worth breaking laws for; I think it's worth being broken for."

Julian answered her. He spoke carefully and a little stiffly.

"I don't think I agree with you," he said. "Nothing is worth being broken for."

Stella bowed her head. She was aware of an absolute and appalling sense of exhaustion and of an inner failure more terrible than any physical collapse.

It was as if Julian had pushed aside her soul.

"Still, I think you must admit, Julian," Lady Verny said quietly, "that 'The Ode to the West Wind' is an admirable poem. I'm afraid, my dear, you have tired yourself in saying it for us. I know the poem very well, but I have never either understood or enjoyed it so much before. Do you not think you had better go to bed? Julian will excuse us. I find I am a little tired myself."

Stella rose to her feet uncertainly. She was afraid that Julian would get up again and light their candles; but for a moment he did not move.

He was looking at her reconsideringly, as if something in his mind was recognizing something in hers; then he dragged himself up, as she had feared he would, and punctiliously lighted their candles.

"It's rather absurd not having electric light here, isn't it?" he observed, handing Stella her candle. "But we can't make up our minds to it. We like candle-light with old oak. I'm not prepared to give in about your fellow Sh.e.l.ley; but I confess I like that poem better than the others I have read. You must put me up to some more another time."

If she had made one of her frightful blunders, he wasn't going to let her see it. His smile was perfectly kind, perfectly impenetrable. She felt as if he were treating her like an intrusive child. Lady Verny said nothing more about the poem; but as she paused outside Stella's door she leaned over her and very lightly kissed her cheek.

It was as if she said: "Yes, I know you made a mistake; but go on making them. I can't. I'm too like him; so that the only thing for me to do is to leave him alone. But perhaps one day one of your mistakes may reach him; and if they can't, nothing can."

Stella shivered as she stood alone before the firelight. Everything in the room was beautiful, the chintz covers, the thick, warm carpet, the gleam of the heavy silver candle-sticks. The furniture was not chosen because it had been suitable. It was suitable because it had been chosen long ago. It had grown like its surroundings into a complete harmony, and all this beauty, all this warm, old, shining polish of inanimate objects and generations of good manners, covered an ache like a hollow tooth. n.o.body could get down to what was wrong because they were too well bred; and was it very likely that they were going to let Stella?

She would annoy Julian, she had probably annoyed him to-night; but would she ever reach him? In her mind she had been able to think of him as near her; but now that she was in the same house, she felt as if she were on the other side of unbridged s.p.a.ce. He was frightening, too; he was so much handsomer than she remembered, and so much more alive. It was inconceivable that he should ever want to work with her.

She sat down before an oval silver mirror and looked at her face. It seemed to her that she was confronted by an empty little slab without light. She gave it a wintry smile before she turned away from it.

"I don't suppose he'll ever want anything of you," she said to herself, "except to go away."

CHAPTER XVIII

Later Stella wrote:

Eurydice dearest:

It's the strangest household, or else, perhaps, everybody else's is. You never see anybody doing anything, and yet everything gets done. It's all ease and velvet and bells; and yet in spite of nothing being a minute late, you never notice the slightest hurry.

It isn't clockwork; it's more like the stars in their courses. I always thought being properly waited on made people helpless; it would me in ten minutes. I can see myself sinking into a cream-fed cushion, but the Vernys sit bolt upright, and no servant they possess can do any given thing as well for them as they can do it for themselves.

I have breakfast in my room, with a robin, and the window open--oh, open on to the sharpest paradise!

While I lie in bed I can see an old, moss-covered barn which always manages to have a piece of pink sky behind it and a black elm bough in front. It's a wonderful barn, as old as any hill, and with all the colors of the rainbow subservient to it. That's one window; the other two look over the garden.

There's a terrace, and a lawn out of which little glens and valleys wander down the hillside into the water-meadows, and there's a lake drowned out by the water, with swans more or less kept in it by a hedge of willows.

The water-meadows are more beautiful than all the little shiny clouds that race across the valley. Sometimes they're like a silver tray, with green islands and wet brown trees on them; and sometimes they are a traveling mist; and then the sun slants out (I haven't seen it full yet), and everything's blue--the frailest, pearliest blue.

Yesterday was quite empty, with only its own light, and when evening came the water-meadows and the little hills were lost in amethyst.

I haven't said anything about the downs. I can't. We walk on them in the afternoon. At least we walk along the lane that goes through the village (it's full of mud; but one gets quite fond of mud), and then when you feel the short turf under you, and the fields drop down, you go up into the sky and float.

One begins so well, too. At breakfast there's such beautiful china, b.u.t.ter in a lordly dish, always honey, and often mushrooms.

Everything tastes as if it came fresh out of the sky.