The Second Fiddle Part 16

I can do exactly as I like all day. n.o.body's plans conflict with any one else's. That's partly being rich and partly being sensible; it's quite wonderful how easy life is if you're both. There's a special room given to me, with a piano and books; and if I want Lady Verny, I can find her in the garden.

I can see her out of my window now; she's wearing a garment that's a cross between a bathing-dress and a dressing-gown, enormous gauntlets, and one of Sir Julian's old caps. There _are_ gardeners, especially one called Potter. (Whenever anything goes wrong Lady Verny shakes her head and says, "Ah, that's the Potter's thumb!") But you never see them. She's always doing something in the garden.

Half the time I can't discover what; but she just smiles at me and says, "Nature's so untidy," or, "The men need looking after." Both Lady Verny and Sir Julian are very serious over their servants. In a way they're incredibly nice to them, they seem to have them so much on their minds. They're always discussing their relatives or their sore throats, and they give very polite, plain orders; but then just when you're thinking how heavenly it must be to work for them, they say something that chills you to the bone. One of the housemaids broke a china bowl yesterday, and came to Lady Verny, saying:

"If you please, m' Lady, I didn't mean to do it."

"I should hope not," Lady Verny said in a voice like marble. "If you had _meant_ to do it, I should hardly keep you in the house; but your not having criminal tendencies is not an excuse for culpable carelessness."

Sir Julian's worse because his eyes are harder; he must have caught them from one of his icebergs. But the servants stay with them forever, and when one of the grooms had pneumonia in the winter, Sir Julian sat up with him for three nights because the man was afraid of dying, and it quieted him to have his master in the room.

I'm beginning to work in the garden myself, the smells are so nice, and the dogs like it. Lady Verny has a spaniel and two fox-terriers, and Sir Julian a very fierce, unpleasant Arctic monster, with a blunt nose like a Chow, and eyes red with temper and a thirst for blood.

He's always locked up when he isn't with Sir Julian. If he wasn't, I'm sure he'd take the other three dogs as hors-d'oeuvre, and follow them up with the gardeners.

I don't know what he does all day. Sir Julian I mean; the Arctic dog growls. They never turn up till tea-time; then they disappear again, and come back at dinner. At least Sir Julian does. The Arctic dog (his name is Ostrog) is not allowed at meals, because he thinks everything in the room ought to be killed first.

After dinner I play chess with Sir Julian. He's been quite different to me since he found I could; before he seemed to think I was something convenient for his mother, like a pocket-handkerchief. He was ready to pick me up and give me back to her if I fell about, but I didn't have a life of my own.

Now he often speaks to me as if I were really there. They're both immensely kind and good to everybody in the neighborhood, but they see as little of people as possible.

They're not a bit religious, though they always go to church, and Lady Verny reads Montaigne--beautifully bound, like Sir Thomas a Kempis--during the sermon. A great deal of the land belongs to them, and I suppose they could use a lot of influence if they chose. I always dislike people having power over other human beings; but the Vernys never use it to their own advantage. In nine cases out of ten they don't use it at all. I heard the vicar imploring Sir Julian to turn a drunken tenant out of a cottage, as his example was bad for the village. But Sir Julian wouldn't even agree to speak to him. "I always believe in letting people go to the devil in their own way," he said. "If you try to stop 'em, they only go to him in yours. Of course I don't mean you, Parson. It's your profession to give people a lead. But I couldn't speak about his morals to a man who owed me three years' rent."

I expect I shall have to come back next week to the town hall.

Thank Mr. Travers so much for saying I may stay on longer, but I really couldn't go on taking my salary when I'm bursting with health and doing nothing. I'll wait two more days before writing to him, but I must confess I'd rather have all my teeth extracted than mention Professor Paulson to Sir Julian.

I haven't seen the slightest desire for work in him; but, then, I haven't seen any desire in him at all except a suicidal fancy for driving a dangerous mare in a high dog-cart. He never speaks of himself or of the war, and he is about as personal as a mahogany sideboard.

Lady Verny isn't much easier to know, though she seems to like talking to me. I asked her to call me Stella the other day, and she put down her trowel and looked at me, as if she thought it wasn't my place to make such a suggestion; then she said, "Well, perhaps I will." I wish we'd been taught whose place things are; it would be so much simpler when you are with people who have places. But Lady Verny doesn't dislike me, because I've seen her with people she dislikes. She's much more polite then, and never goes on with anything. Last night when I was playing chess with Sir Julian (it was an awful fight, for he's rather better than I am, though I can't let him know it) she said to him, "I hope you are not tiring Stella."

He looked up sharply, as if he was awfully surprised to hear her saying my name, and then he gave me a queer little smile as if he were pleased with me. I believe they're fond of each other, but I've never seen them show any sign of affection.

But, O Eurydice, though they're awfully charming and interesting and dear, they're terribly unhappy. You feel it all the time--a dumb, blind pain that they can't get over or understand, and that nothing will ever induce them to show. They aren't a bit like the Arctic dog, who is always disagreeable unless he has a bone and Sir Julian. You know where you are with the Arctic dog.

Tell Mr. Travers I'll write directly I have fixed a date for my return.

Your ever-loving, disheveled, enthralled, perturbed, unfinished

STELLA.

P.S. I suppose as a family we all talk too much; we over-say things, and that makes them seem shallow. If you say very little, it comes out in chunks and sounds solid. You remember those dreadful old early-Saxon people we read once who never used adjectives? I think we ought to look them up.

CHAPTER XIX

Stella found Lady Verny weeding. She drew the weeds up very gracefully and thoroughly, with a little final shake.

It was a hard, shivering March morning. Next to the bed upon which Lady Verny was working was a sheet of snowdrops under a dark yew-hedge. They trembled and shook in the light air like a drift of wind-blown snow.

Stella hovered irresolutely above them; then she said:

"Lady Verny, I am afraid I must go back to the town hall next week. I haven't been any use."

Lady Verny elaborately coaxed out a low-growing weed, and then, with a vicious twist, threw it into the basket beside her.

"Why don't you go and talk to Julian?" she asked. "He can't be expected to jump a five-barred gate if he doesn't know it's there."

Stella hesitated before she spoke; then she said with a little rush:

"What I feel now is that I'm not the person to tell him--to tell him it's there, I mean. I don't know why I ever thought I was. The person to tell him that would be some one he could notice like a light, not a person who behaves like a candle caught in a draft whenever he speaks to her."

"My dear," said Lady Verny, ruthlessly exposing, and one by one exterminating, a family of wireworms, "I fear you have no feminine sense. You have a great many other kinds,--of the mind, and no doubt of the soul. You should try to please Julian. You don't; you leave him alone, and in consequence he thinks he's a failure with you. Women with the feminine sense please a man without appearing to make the effort.

The result is that the man thinks he's pleasing _them_, and a man who thinks that he has succeeded in pleasing an agreeable woman is not unaware of her."

"But I'm so afraid of him," pleaded Stella. "I don't believe you know how frightening he is."

"Yes," said Lady Verny; "he has lost his inner security. That makes a person very frightening, I know. He has become aggressive because he feels that something he has always counted on as a weapon has been withdrawn from him. It's like living on your wits; people who do that are always hard. I think you can give him the weapon back; but to succeed you must use all your own. You must go into a room as if it belonged to you. It's astonishing how this place suits you; but you must hold your head up, and lay claim to your kingdom."

"But I've never had a kingdom," objected Stella, "and I only want him to be interested in the idea of writing a book."

"Well, that's what I mean," said Lady Verny, decently interring the corpses of the worms. "At least it's part of what I mean. The only way to get Julian to write a book just now is to charm him. Men whose nerves and hearts are broken don't respond readily to the abstract. You can do what I can't, because I'm his mother. He's made all the concessions he could or ought to make to me. He promised not to take his life.

Sometimes in these last few months I've felt like giving him his promise back. Now are you going to be afraid of trying to please Julian?"

"O Lady Verny," Stella cried, "you make me hate myself! I'll do anything in the world to please him; I'd play like a bra.s.s band, or cover myself with bangles like Cleopatra I Don't, _don't_ think I'll ever be a coward again!"

"You needn't go as far as the bangles," said Lady Verny, smiling grimly.

"Do it your own way, but don't be afraid to let Julian think you like him. He finds all that kind of thing rather hard to believe just now.

"He's been frozen up. Remember, if he isn't nice to you, that thawing is always rather a painful process. Now run along, and leave me in peace with my worms."

It cannot be said that Stella ran, but she went. She pa.s.sed through the hall and down a pa.s.sage; and wondered, if she had been an early-Christian martyr about to step into the arena, whether she wouldn't on the whole have preferred a tiger to Julian.

The door opened on a short pa.s.sage at the end of which was an old oak doorway heavily studded with nails. She knew this must be Julian's room, because she heard Ostrog growling ominously from inside it. Julian presumably threw something at him which hit him, for there was the sound of a short snap, and then silence.

"Please come in," said Julian in a voice of controlled exasperation.

Stella stepped quickly into the room, closing the door behind her.

It was a long, wide room with a low ceiling. There were several polar bear-skins on the floor, and a row of stuffed penguins on a shelf behind Julian's chair. Three of the walls were covered with bookcases; the fourth was bare except for an extraordinarily vivid French painting of a girl seated in a cafe. She had red hair and a desperate, laughing face, and was probably a little drunk. There was a famous artist's signature beneath her figure, but Stella had a feeling that Julian had known the girl and had not bought the picture for the sake of the signature.

Ostrog stood in front of her, growling, with every separate hair on his back erect.

"Keep quite still for a moment," said Julian, quickly. "Ostrog, lie down!" The dog very slowly settled himself on his haunches, with his red, savage eyes still fixed on Stella. "Now I think you can pa.s.s him safely," Julian added. "He has a peculiar dislike to human proximity, especially in this room. You can't write him down as one who loves his fellow-men, and I fear he carries his unsociability even further in respect to his fellow-women."

"It must be nice for you," said Stella, "to have some one who expresses for you what you are too polite to say for yourself."

Julian gave her a quick, challenging look.