The Second Fiddle Part 2

"No, no," whispered Stella half to herself; "we've been listening to how it can't be defeated, how nothing touches it, not even death, not even despair, not even flames. The end of something that has never given in is victory."

They pa.s.sed behind Marian outside the opera house, but Stella did not speak to her. She heard Sir Julian saying in a determined, resonant voice: "Well, of course I'm glad you liked it. Chaliapine is a good workman, but personally I don't think much of Russian music. It has a whine in it like a beggar's, sounds too much as if it had knocked under.

My idea, you know, is not to knock under."

And Stella, slipping into the crowd, was aware again of a sharp pang of pity for him, as if she knew that, after all, his strength would meet and be consumed by fire.

CHAPTER III

Nothing in No. 9 Redcliffe Square ever got done; it happened, as leaves drop in autumn, or as dust acc.u.mulates, percolating softly and persistently through doors and windows.

The Warings had reached Redcliffe Square as accidentally as a tramp takes shelter under a hedge. Professor Waring, whose instinct was to burrow like a mole, blind and silent, into his researches, failed too completely to teach what he had discovered; and as he had never made the discovery that teaching was what he was paid for, his payments gradually ceased. When he found himself faced with an increasing family and a decreasing income, he thought of the South Kensington Museum. He thought of it as an habitual drunkard evicted for not paying his rent, thinks of the public house.

He brought his family as near to it as he could, dumped them down in a silent and slatternly street, and disappeared into the museum regularly every morning at nine. When he came out he wanted only cocoa, a back room, and the postage necessary for his researches. A Peruvian mummy went to his head like gin.

Mrs. Waring had been a gentle, dreamy girl with a strong religious tendency. She had married Professor Waring because he had wide blue eyes and a stoop and did not look at all coa.r.s.e.

Professor Waring had married her because he wanted to get married a little and had noticed her at that time. He was under the impression that women managed households, meals, and children without bothering their husbands. Mrs. Waring tried not to bother her husband. She lost her religion because the professor hadn't any, and she thought at first he was sure to be right. When she ceased to have this magic certainty, she sought out fresh religions that told you you had everything you wanted when you knew you hadn't.

She got through maternity in a desultory way, with a great deal of ill health and enormous household bills. She did not manage anything, and when she was very unhappy she said that she was in tune with the infinite.

From their earliest years her children fended for themselves, Eurydice with storms of anguish and through a drastic series of childish epidemics; Cicely with a stolid, cold efficiency; and Stella with an intuitive gentleness so great as to hide a certain inner force.

About two hundred pounds a year trickled in on them from uncertain sources. Mrs. Waring never knew quite when to expect it, and when it came it soaked itself solemnly up on non-essentials. The children never had proper clothes or a suitable education. They were Egyptologists before they could spell, and the Koran was an open book to them when they should have been reading "The Water Babies."

The professor spent what he considered his share of their income upon hieroglyphics, and Mrs. Waring, never personally extravagant, bought quant.i.ties of little books to teach people how to live, how to develop the will, how to create a memory, and power through repose. They had one servant, who had to have wages and insisted every now and then upon a joint of meat.

There was no waste-paper basket in the house, and a great deal of linoleum. When Mrs. Waring made up her mind that she must be more economical, she always went out and bought linoleum. She had been told it was a great saving. She never tidied anything up or put anything away. What was lost was never seen again, or seen only when you were hunting for something else. It was like a gambler's system at Monte Carlo: you looked for a bootjack, and were rewarded by black treacle; or you played, as it were, for black treacle, and discovered the bootjack.

Mrs. Waring never finished anything; even her conversations, which began at breakfast, jogged on throughout the day, and were picked up at much the same spot in the evening. She had covered a quant.i.ty of ground, but she had invariably escaped her destination. Through long years of perpetual indecision she had nearly succeeded in outwitting time and s.p.a.ce.

n.o.body minded this att.i.tude except Cicely. She fought against chaos from her youth up. They all dreaded her tongue and clung persistently to their habits. The professor fled earlier to the museum, sometimes in carpet slippers. Immediately after breakfast Mrs. Waring retired with a little book to an untidied bedroom.

Eurydice, dropping ma.n.u.scripts, hair-ribbons, and defiance, escaped to a locked attic; and Stella remained as a gentle adjutant to her severer sister. Cicely did get a few things done. She saw that meals were cooked, windows opened, beds made, and clocks wound; but nothing continuous rewarded her efforts. The power of the human will is a small weapon against consolidated inertia.

For five years Cicely played upon No. 9 Redcliffe Square like an intermittent searchlight; then she gave it up, and became a student in a women's hospital. The household breathed a sigh of intense relief at her departure, and collapsed benevolently into chaos.

n.o.body except Stella regretted it. The professor was openly thankful.

"She may become a student," he observed coldly when it was explained to him where Cicely had gone, "but she will never become a scholar. She has a superficial hunger for the definite.

"I really do not think it will be necessary for me to take my supper at a given hour. Stella will know that, whenever I ring my bell, I mean cocoa."

"Dear Cicely is a pioneer," murmured Mrs. Waring, with a gentle sigh. "I can always imagine her doing wonderful things in a desert with a buffalo."

"Now I shall be able to have my friends at the house without their being insulted," cried Eurydice, triumphantly. "Last time when Mr. Bolt was in the middle of reading his new poem, 'The Whirl,' a most delicate and difficult poem set to a secret rhythm, Cicely burst in and asked for the slop-pail. It looked so lovely! I had covered it with autumn leaves and placed it half-way up the chimney. It might have been a Grecian urn, but of course she dragged it out. She drags out everything."

Eurydice had a profession, too. She was a suppressed artist. She felt that she could have painted like Van Gogh, only perfectly individually.

She saw everything in terms of color and in the shape of cubes. Railway lines reminded her of a flight of asterisks. Flowers subdivided themselves before her like a tartan plaid. She saw human beings in tenuous and disjointed outlines suggestive of a daddy-long-legs. She could not afford paint and canvas, so she had to leave people to think that the world looked much as usual.

Eurydice had always felt that she could write out her thoughts as soon as she and Stella were alone and able to arrange her room in black and scarlet. When Cicely left, Stella bought black paper and pasted it over the walls, and dyed a white-wool mat, which had long lost its original purity, a sinister scarlet.

Eurydice did not want very much, either. None of the Warings wanted very much. What as a family they failed to understand was, that not having the money to pay for what they wanted, some more personal contribution of time and effort was necessary in order to attain it.

Stella grasped this fact when she was about eighteen. She said afterward that she never would have thought of it if it had not been made plain to her by Cicely. Still, before Cicely had gone to the hospital Stella was taking cheap lessons in the City in shorthand and type-writing. None of the three girls had what is called any "youth." They were as ignorant of young men as if they had been brought up in a convent. Neither Professor nor Mrs. Waring had ever supposed that parents ought to provide occupations or social resources for their children, and the children themselves had been too busy contributing to the family welfare to manage any other life. Cicely had read statistics and mastered physiological facts at fifteen. She was under the impression that she knew everything and disliked everything except work. Her feeling for men was singularly like that of a medieval and devout monk toward women. She had an uncomfortable knowledge of them as a necessary evil, to be evaded only by truculence or flight. When her work forced her into dealings with them, she was ferocious and unattractive. She was a pretty girl, but n.o.body had ever dared to mention it to her.

Even Stella, who in an unaggressive, flitting way dared most questions, had avoided telling Cicely that she herself liked men. Stella often felt that if she could meet a man who was capable of doing all kinds of dull things for you, very charmingly, and had a pretty wit, it would add quite enormously to the gaiety of life to put yourself out a little in order to make him laugh.

The men Stella worked with wouldn't have done at all. They wouldn't have cared for the kind of jokes Stella wanted to make, and of course Stella hadn't time to meet any other men. Perhaps she wouldn't have believed there were any if it hadn't been for Marian. Marian knew them; she knew them literally in dozens, and they were generally in love with her, and they always wanted to make her laugh and to do dull things for her.

Stella used to be afraid sometimes that Marian, in an embarra.s.sment of riches, might overlook her destiny. But Marian knew what she wanted and was perfectly certain that she would sooner or later get it. Stella had no such knowledge; she had long ago come to the conclusion that the simplest way of dealing with her life was to like what she had.

She took a scientific secretaryship at nineteen, and left it only at twenty-six, when her scientist, who was very stout and nearly sixty, died inconveniently from curried lobster. He left Stella an interesting experience, of which she could make no immediate use, and a testimonial which won her job at the town hall. It was very short. "This young woman," the learned scientist wrote, "is invaluable. She thinks without knowing it. I have benefited by this blessed process for seven years."

It did not seem to Stella that she was invaluable. She always saw herself in the light of the family failure, overlooking the fact that she was their main financial support.

Cicely was the practical and Eurydice the intellectual genius; but she was content if she could be the padding on which these jewels occasionally shone.

Sometimes she met Cicely in a tea-shop and had a real talk, but Eurydice was her chief companion. Eurydice shared with Stella nearly every thought that she had. She seized her on the stairs to retail her inspirations as Stella went up to take her things off. She sat on her bed late at night, and talked with interminable bitterness about the sharpness of life. Even while Stella b.u.t.toned up her boots and flung things at the last moment into her despatch-case, Eurydice pelted her with epigrams. She sometimes quoted Swinburne while Stella was jumping on the corner bus, till the bus-conductor told her not to let him catch her at it again. There was only one subject they did not discuss: neither of them voluntarily mentioned Mr. Bolt. Mr. Bolt was the editor of a magazine called "Shocks," to which Eurydice with trembling delight contributed weekly. Mr. Bolt had met her at a meeting of protest against Reticence, and he had taken to Eurydice at once; and almost at once he told her that her charm was purely intellectual. Emotionally he was appealed to only by fair, calm women with ample figures.

Mr. Bolt knew plenty of fair, calm women with ample figures. Eurydice only knew Mr. Bolt. She made an idol of him, and he used her like a door-mat. No early-Victorian woman ever bore from a male tyrant what poor, pa.s.sionate twentieth-century Eurydice bore from Mr. Bolt, and Stella could not help her. Stella abhorred Mr. Bolt. She would not listen to his Delphic oracle utterances upon style and art and life. She was outraged at his comments upon s.e.x. She was desperately, fiercely angry with a secret maternal anger that Eurydice should have to listen to these utterances. It carried her as far as an abortive appeal to her mother.

"My dear," said Mrs. Waring, placidly, "these things are outworn. They are stultified thought products; they do not really exist. s.e.x is like dust upon the house-tops; a cleansing process will shortly remove it.

Mr. Bolt is a misconception, a floating microcosm. I really should not bother about Mr. Bolt. He is not nearly so tangible as the butcher, and I have made up my mind never really again to bother about the butcher.

Perhaps you will see him for me if he calls about his bill to-morrow.

"It seems so strange to me that business men should not understand that when there is no money bills cannot be paid. Even the minor regions of fact seem closed to them."

Stella agreed to dip into the minor regions of fact with the butcher, but she went on bothering about Mr. Bolt. It seemed to Stella that he was the only real bother that she had.

CHAPTER IV

Darling:

Do come Sunday to tea. Mama is out of town, and I must have some support. Julian is going to bring his mother to see me for the first time. I believe she's rather alarming--awfully blue and booky; just your sort. I haven't had time to tell you anything.

It's so jolly being engaged; but it takes up all one's spare moments. I didn't mean to marry Julian; he swept me off my feet. I suppose I must be awfully in love with him. You know what explorers are. They go away for years and leave you to entertain alone, and then people say you don't get on; and of course exploring never pays. He has a little place in the country and about 2000 a year.

It's awfully little, really, but it's wonderful what you can put up with when you really care for a man; besides, he's sure to get on.

Don't fail me Sunday. I shall really be rather nervous. Old ladies never have been my forte. Julian is such a dear! You're sure to like him. He wants to meet you awfully, but he doesn't think women ought to work. He is full of chivalry, and has charming manners. It doesn't in the least matter what you wear. Heaps of love.

MARIAN.

It was this last reflection that gave Stella courage to ring the bell.

She had never been in the Youngs' house before. She had vaguely known that it was in a very quiet square, with a garden in the middle, quite near everything that mattered, and quite far away from everything that didn't. It was the kind of house that looks as if no one was in it unless they were giving a party. The interior was high, narrow, and box-like. A great deal of money had been unpretentiously spent on it, with a certain amount of good-humored, ordinary taste.