The Second Fiddle Part 28

He knew when he left her that he must be prepared for a sharp wrench and an unforgetable loss; what he had not foreseen was that the wrench would be continuous, and that he would be confronted by her presence at every turn.

Women's faces had haunted him before, and he had known what it was to be maddened by the sudden cessation of an intense relationship; but that was different. He could not remember Stella's face; he had no visual impression of her physical presence; he had simply lost the center of his thoughts. He felt as if he were living in a nightmare in which one tries to cross the ocean without a ticket.

He was perpetually starting lines of thought which were not destined to arrive. For the first few weeks it was almost easier; he felt the immediate relief which comes from all decisive action, and he was able to believe that he was angry with Stella. She had obeyed him implicitly by not writing, and his mother never mentioned her except for that worst moment of all when she gave him Stella's words, without comment. "She would like to take the money, but she cannot do it." This fed his anger.

"If I'd been that fellow Travers, I suppose she'd have taken it right enough," he said to himself, bitterly, and without the slightest conviction. He said nothing at all to his mother. Julian knew why Stella had not taken the money. It was because she had not consented to what he had done; he had forced her will. Of all her remembered words, the ones that remained most steadily in his mind were: "You are not only sacrificing yourself; you are sacrificing me. I give you no such right."

That was her infernal woman's casuistry. He had a perfect right to save her. He was doing what a man of honor ought to do, freeing a woman he loved from an incalculable burden. It was no use Stella's saying she ought to have a choice,--pity had loaded her dice,--and it was sheer nonsense to accuse him of pride. He hadn't any. He'd consented to take her till he found she had a decent marriage at her feet. He couldn't have done anything else then but give her up. The greatest scoundrel unhung wouldn't have done anything else. It relieved Julian to compare himself to this illusory and self-righteous personage.

As to facing Stella with it, which he supposed was her fantastic claim, it only showed what a child she was and how little Stella knew about the world or men. There were things you couldn't tell a woman. Stella was too confoundedly innocent.

Why should he put them both to a scene of absolute torture? Surely he had endured enough. He wasn't a coward, but to meet her eyes and go against her was rather more than he could undertake, knocked about as he was by every kind of beastly helplessness. He fell back upon self-pity as upon an ally; it helped him to obscure Stella's point of view. She ought to have realized what it would make him suffer; and she didn't, or she would have taken the money. He did well, he a.s.sured himself, to be angry; everything in life had failed him. Stella had failed him. But at this point his prevailing sanity shook him into laughter. He could still laugh at the idea of Stella's having failed him.

You do not fail people because you refuse to release them from acting up to the standard you had expected of them; you fail them when you expect less of them than they can give you. When Julian had faced this fact squarely he ceased to beat about the bush of his vanity. He confessed to himself that he was a coward not to have had it out with Stella. But he acquiesced in this spiritual defeat; he a.s.sured himself that there were situations in life when for the sake of what you loved you had to be a coward. Of course it was for Stella's sake; a man, he argued, doesn't lie down on a rack because he likes it.

He wished he could have gone on being angry with Stella, because when he stopped being angry he became frightened.

He was haunted by the fear of Stella's poverty. He didn't know anything about poverty except that it was disagreeable and a long way off. He had a general theory that people who were very poor were either used to it or might have helped it; but this general theory broke like a bubble at the touch of a special instance.

The worst of it was that Stella had not really told him anything about her life. He knew that her father was a well-known Egyptologist, that her mother had various odd ethical beliefs, and he knew all that he wanted to know about Eurydice. But of Stella's actual life, of its burdens and its cares, what had she told him? That there weren't any bells in the house and that the clocks didn't go.

This showed bad management and explained her unpunctuality, but it explained nothing more. It did not tell Julian how poor she was, or if she was properly looked after when she came home from work.

If she married Travers, she would have about nine hundred a year. Julian had made investigations into the income of metropolitan town clerks.

He supposed that people could just manage on this restricted sum, with economy; but there seemed no reliable statistics about the incomes of famous Egyptologists. Why hadn't he asked Stella? She ought to have told him without being asked. He tried being angry with her for her secretiveness, but it hurt him, so he gave it up. He knew she would have told him if he had asked her.

Julian made himself a nuisance at the office for which he worked on the subject of pay for woman clerks. It relieved him a little, but not much.

Logically he ought to have felt only his own pain, which he could have stood; he had made Stella safe by it. But he had deserted her; he couldn't get this out of his head. He kept saying to himself, "If she's in any trouble, why doesn't she go to Travers?" But he couldn't believe that Stella would ever go to Travers.

The lighting restrictions--it was November, and the evening thoroughfares were as dark as tunnels--unnerved him. Stella might get run over; she was certain to be hopelessly absent-minded in traffic, and would always be the last person to get on to a crowded bus.

It was six months since he had broken off their engagement. Julian did not think it could possibly remind Stella of him if he sent her, addressed by a shop a.s.sistant, a flash-light lamp for carrying about the streets. She wouldn't send back a thing as small as a torch-lamp, even if she did dislike anonymous presents. He was justified in this conjecture. Stella kept the lamp, but she never had a moment's doubt as to whom it came from; if it had had "Julian" engraved on it she couldn't have been surer.

Julian always drove to his club at four o'clock, so that he didn't have to take his tea alone. He didn't wish to talk to anybody, but he liked being disturbed. Then he played bridge till dinner, dined at the club, and went back to his rooms, where he worked till midnight. This made everything quite possible except when he couldn't sleep.

He sat in an alcove, by a large, polished window of the club. It was still light enough to see the faces of the pa.s.sers-by, to watch the motor-buses lurching through the traffic like steam tugs on a river, and the shadows creeping up from Westminster till they filled the green park with the chill gravity of evening.

A taxi drew up opposite to the club, and a man got out of it. There was nothing particularly noticeable about the man except that he was very neatly dressed. Julian took an instant and most unreasonable dislike to him. He said under his breath, "Why isn't the fellow in khaki?"

The man paid the driver what was presumably, from the scowl he received in return, his exact fare. Then he prepared to enter the club. He did not look in the least like any of the men who belonged to Julian's club.

A moment later the waiter brought to Julian a card with "Mr. Leslie Travers" engraved upon it.

"Confound his impudence," was Julian's immediate thought. "Why on earth should I see the fellow?" Then he realized that he was being angry simply because Mr. Travers had probably seen Stella.

Julian instantly rejected the idea that Stella had sent Mr. Travers to see him; she wouldn't have done that. He wasn't in any way obliged to receive him; still, there was just the off chance that he might hear something about Stella if he did. Julian would rather have heard something about Stella from a condemned murderer; but as Providence had not provided him with this source of information, he decided to see the town clerk instead. You could say what you liked to a man if he happened to annoy you, and Julian rather hoped that Mr. Travers would give him this opportunity.

Mr. Travers entered briskly and without embarra.s.sment. His official position had caused him to feel on rather more than an equality with the people he was likely to meet. He did not think that Sir Julian Verny was his equal.

Mr. Travers considered all members of the aristocracy loafers. Even when they worked, they did it, as it were, on their luck. They had had none of the inconveniences and resulting competence of having climbed from the bottom of the ladder to the top by their own unaided efforts.

There were three or four other men in the room when he entered it, but Mr. Travers picked out Julian in an instant. Their eyes met, and neither of them looked away from the other. Julian said stiffly: "Sit down, won't you? What will you take--a whisky and soda?"

"Thanks," said Mr. Travers, drawing up a chair opposite Julian and placing his hat and gloves carefully on the floor beside him. "I do not drink alcohol in between meals, but I should like a little aerated water."

Julian stared at him fixedly. This was the man Eurydice had compared with Napoleon, to the latter's disadvantage.

Mr. Travers refused a cigar, and sat in an arm-chair as if there were a desk in front of him. It annoyed Julian even to look at him.

"I have no doubt," said Mr. Travers, "that you are wondering why I ventured to ask you for this interview."

"I'm afraid I am, rather," Julian observed, with hostile politeness. "I know your name, of course."

"Exactly," said Mr. Travers, as if Julian had presented him with a valuable concession greatly to his advantage. "I had counted upon that fact to approach you directly and without correspondence. One should avoid black and white, I think, when it is possible, in dealing with personal matters."

"I am not aware," said Julian, coldly, "that there are any personal matters between us to discuss."

"I dare say not," replied Mr. Travers, blandly, placing the tips of his fingers slowly together. "You may have observed, Sir Julian, that coincidences bring very unlikely people together at times. I admit that they have done so in this instance."

"What for?" asked Julian, succinctly. He found that he disliked Mr.

Travers quite as much as he intended to dislike him, and he despised him more.

"An injustice has been brought to my notice," said Mr. Travers, slowly and impressively. He was not in the least flurried by Julian's hostile manner, which he considered was due to an insufficient business education; it only made him more careful as to his own. "I could not overlook it, and as it directly concerns you, Sir Julian, I am prepared to make a statement to you on the subject."

"I'm sure I'm much obliged to you," said Julian; "but I trust you will make the statement as short and as little personal as possible."

"Speed," Mr. Travers said reprovingly, "is by no means an a.s.sistance in elucidating personal problems; and I may add, Sir Julian, that it is at least as painful for me as for you, to touch upon personal matters with a stranger."

"The fact remains," said Julian, impatiently, "that you're doing it, and I'm not. Go on!"

Mr. Travers frowned. Town clerks are not as a rule ordered to go on.

Even their mayors treat them with munic.i.p.al hesitancy. Still, he went on. Julian's eyes held him as in a vice.

"You have probably heard my name," Mr. Travers began, "from the elder Miss Waring." Julian nodded. "She was for two years and a half my secretary. I may say that she was the most efficient secretary I have ever had. There have been, I think, few instances in any office where the work between a man and woman was more impersonal or more satisfactory. It is due to the elder Miss Waring that I should tell you this. It was in fact entirely due to her, for I found myself unable to continue it. There was a lapse on my part. Miss Waring was consideration itself in her way of meeting this--er--lapse; but she unconditionally refused me."

Julian drew a quick breath, and turned his eyes away from Mr. Travers.

"At the same time," Mr. Travers continued, "she gave me to understand, in order, I fancy, to palliate my error of judgment, that her affections were engaged elsewhere."

Julian could not speak. His pride had him by the throat. He could not tell Mr. Travers to go on now, although he felt as if his life depended on it.

"There are one or two points which I put together, at a later date," Mr.

Travers continued, after a slight pause, "and by which I was able to connect Miss Waring's statement with her subsequent actions. She is, if I may say so, a woman who acts logically. You were the man upon whom her affections were placed, Sir Julian, and that was her only reason for accepting your proposal of marriage."

Julian stared straight in front of him. It seemed to him as if he heard again the music of Chaliapine--the unconquerable music of souls that have outlasted their defeat. He lost the sound of Mr. Travers's punctilious, carefully lowered voice. When he heard it again, Mr.

Travers was saying:

"It came to my knowledge through an interview with the younger Miss Waring, who has also become one of our staff, that she had regrettably misinformed you as to her sister's point of view. The younger Miss Waring acts at times impetuously and without judgment, but she had no intention whatever of harming her sister. She has been deeply anxious about her for the last few months, and she at length communicated her anxiety to me."