The Second Fiddle Part 8

Julian promised quickly that he never would. He saw for the first time that love was not liberty, and for the moment he preferred love. He had not felt deeply enough to know that there is a way in which you may widen liberty and yet keep love.

"I shall let you go," Marian said gently, "and I shall try to bear it as best I can."

At the thought of how difficult it was going to be to bear, not to be able to tell anybody anything, she cried a little. Her face was uncontorted by her tears. They streamed down her blossom-colored cheeks like drops of pearly dew. Julian thought her tears were softness, and he struck at his chance. Now perhaps she would surrender to his hidden hope.

He pleaded, with her head against his heart, that she would marry him, marry him now--at once. He could arrange it all in twenty-four hours. He presented a thousand impetuous arguments. All his wits and his ardor fought for him against her soft, closed eyes. She was his; she would be his forever. He would go with that great possession in his heart; he would go like a man crowned to meet his future.

She opened her eyes at last and moved away from him. At that instant she would have liked to marry him, she would have liked it very much; but besides the fact that she had no things, there loomed the blank uncertainty of the future. Would she be a wife or a widow, and how should she know which she was? There were more immediate difficulties.

Her parents were in Scotland; hurried weddings were always very awkward; you couldn't have bridesmaids or wedding presents; and a few hours'

honeymoon, with an indefinite parting ahead of it, would be extremely painful.

Even if a marriage under all these disabilities was legal--wouldn't it be worse than illegal--wouldn't it be rather funny?

Julian was sometimes impossible; he had been nearly overwhelming, but he was quite impossible. He might be a dangerous man to marry in a hurry.

She would have to train him first.

"It's out of the question, Julian," she said firmly. "The whole future is too uncertain. I should love to--but I can't do it. It wouldn't be right for me to do it. We must wait till you come back."

Julian returned to his study of the short down gra.s.ses. He knew that if she had loved to--she would have done it. He had a moment that was bitter with doubt and pain; then his love rose up and swallowed it. He saw the uncertainty for her.

He wanted her now because he knew that he might never have her. He wanted her with the fierce hunger of a pirate for a prize; but the very sharpness of his desire made him see that it was sheer selfishness to press his point. He overlooked the fact that it would have been perfectly useless. No pressure would have changed Marian. Pressure had done what it could for her already: it had moved her to tears. She dried them now, and suggested that they had stayed on the downs long enough.

CHAPTER X

It sometimes seemed to Stella as if Chaliapine had brought on the war.

Those last long golden summer days were filled with his music, and then suddenly out of them flashed the tents in the park, the processions of soldiers and bands, the grim stir that swept over London like a squall striking the surface of a summer sea.

The town hall did not collapse, but it shook. It was a place where, as a rule, the usual things took place, and even unusual things happened usually; but there were several weeks at the beginning of the war when all day long strange things happened strangely. Offices were changed, the routine of years was swept up like dust into a dust-pan, and a new routine, subject to further waves of change, took its place. Workers voluntarily offered to do work that they were unaccustomed to do. The council hall became a recruiting office. No. 8, the peculiar sanctum of the sanitary inspector, was given up to an army surveyor. Tramps asked the cashier questions. It was like the first act of "Boris Goudonoff."

Even food was carried about on trays, and as for proclamations, somebody or other was proclaiming something all day long.

There was no religion and no dancing, but there was the same sense of brooding, implacable fate; it took the place of music, and seemed, without hurry and without pause, to be carrying them all along in a secret rhythm of its own toward an unseen goal.

Mr. Leslie Travers ruled most of the town hall committees, and he required innumerable statistics to be compiled and ready to be launched intimidatingly at the first sign of any opposition to his ruling.

Stella, to whom the work of compiling fell, had very little time to consider the war.

When she got home she usually went to sleep. From time to time she heard Mrs. Waring announcing that there was no such thing as war and Eurydice reciting battle-odes to Belgium.

For the first time in her life Eurydice shared a common cause. She was inclined to believe that England was fighting for liberty. She knew that France was, partly because France was on the other side of the channel and partly because of the French Revolution. The destruction of Louvain settled the question of Belgium. To Eurydice, whatever was destroyed was holy. Later on she became a violent pacifist because Mr.

Bolt said that we ourselves were Prussian; but for the moment n.o.body, not even Mr. Bolt, had traced this evasive parallel.

Professor Waring wrote several letters to the papers, asking what precautions the Belgians were taking about Sanskrit ma.n.u.script. He had a feeling that King Albert, though doubtless an estimable young man and useful in the trenches, might, like most kings, have been insufficiently educated to appreciate the importance of Sanskrit. That men should die in large numbers to protect their country was an unfortunate incident frequent in history, but that a Sanskrit ma.n.u.script should be destroyed was a national calamity, for the ma.n.u.script could never be replaced.

He made an abortive effort to reach Belgium and see about it himself, but at the Foreign Office he was stopped by a young man with a single eyegla.s.s, from whom the professor had demanded a pa.s.sport. The exact expression used by this ignorant young person was, "I'm awfully sorry, sir, but I'm afraid just at present Sanskrit ma.n.u.script will have to rip."

Professor Waring promptly addressed letters of remonstrance and advice to several German professors upon the subject. They were returned to him after three weeks, with a brief intimation that he was not to communicate with the enemy. Professor Waring had considered German professors to be his natural enemies all his life; this had been his chief reason for communicating with them. He was fitted, as few officials in the Foreign Office can ever have been fitted, to point out to the German professors the joints in their armor.

They had a great deal of armor and very few joints, and it discouraged Professor Waring to leave these unpierced spots to the perhaps less-practised hands of neutrals.

But it was not until the destruction of Louvain that he grasped to the full the reaction of his former antagonists. When Professor Waring read a signed letter from some of the German professors agreeing to the destruction of the famous Belgian library he acquiesced in the war. He stood in front of his wife and woke Stella up in order to make his declaration.

"Henrietta, there _is_ a war," he announced. "It is useless for you to a.s.sert that there is not. Not only _is_ there a war, but there should be one; and if I were twenty years younger, though wholly unaccustomed to the noisy mechanisms of physical destruction, I should join in it. As it is, I propose to write a treatise upon the German mind. It is not one of my subjects, and I shall probably have to neglect valuable work in order to undertake it; still, my researches into the rough Stone Age will no doubt greatly a.s.sist me. Many just parallels have already occurred to me. I hope that no one in this house will be guilty of so uneducated a frame of mind as to sympathize with the Teutonic iconoclasts even to the extent of a.s.serting, as I believe I heard you a.s.sert just now, Henrietta, that none of them exist."

Mrs. Waring murmured gently that she thought an intense hopefulness might refine degraded natures, but the next day she bought wool and began to knit a m.u.f.fler. She had capitulated to the fact of the war.

While she knitted she patiently a.s.serted that there was no life, truth, intelligence, or force in matter; and Stella, when she came home in the evening, picked up the dropped st.i.tches.

It was strange to Stella that her only personal link with the war was a man whom she had seen only once and might never see again. She thought persistently of Julian. She thought of him for Marian's sake, because Marian was half frozen with misery. She thought of him because unconsciously he stood in her mind for England. He was an adventurer, half-G.o.d, half-child, who had the habit of winning without the application of fear. She thought of him because he was the only young, good-looking man of her own cla.s.s with whom she had ever talked.

Marian was afraid that Stella might think she had been unsympathetic to Julian about his mission. She told Stella, with her usual direct honesty, how angry she had been with him.

"I know I was nasty to him," she said. "I can't bear to have any one involve me first and tell me about it afterward."

"Of course you can't," agreed Stella, flaming up with a gust of annoyance more vivid than Marian's own. "How like him! How exactly like him to be so high-handed! Fancy whirling you along behind him as if you were a sack of potatoes! Of course you were annoyed, and I hope you gave him a good sharp quarrel. One only has to look at Julian to see that he ought to be quarreled with at regular intervals in an agreeable way for the rest of his life."

"I don't like quarrels," Marian said slowly. "They don't seem to me to be at all agreeable; but I don't think Julian will act without consulting me again."

Stella looked at Marian curiously. What was this power that Marian had, which moved with every fold of her dress, and stood at guard behind her quiet eyes? How had she made Julian understand without quarreling that he must never repeat his independences? Stella was sure Marian _had_ made him understand it. It would be of no use to ask Marian how she had done it, because Marian would only laugh and say: "Nonsense! It was perfectly easy." She probably did not know herself what was the secret of her power; she would merely in every circ.u.mstance in life composedly and effectively use it. Was it perhaps that though Julian had involved her actions, he had never involved Marian? Was love a game in which the weakest lover always wins?

"Of course I've never been in love," Stella said slowly, "and I haven't the slightest idea how it's done or what happens to you; but I fancy quarreling might be made very agreeable. Love is so tremendous, isn't it, that there must be room for concealed batteries and cavalry charges; and yet of course you know all the time that you are loving the person more and more outrageously, so that nothing gets wasted or destroyed except the edges you are knocking off for readjustments."

"I don't think I do love Julian outrageously," Marian objected. "I didn't, you see, do what he wanted: he had a mad idea of getting a special license and having a whirlwind wedding, leaving me directly afterward. Of course I couldn't consent to that."

"Couldn't you?" asked Stella, wonderingly. "I don't see that it matters much, you know, when you give that kind of thing to a person you love.

If you do love them, I suppose it shows you're willing to marry them, doesn't it? But how, when, or where is like the sound of the dinner-bell. You don't owe your dinner to the dinner-bell; it's simply an arrangement for bringing you to the table. Marriage always seems to me just like that. I should have married Julian in a second if I'd been you; but I should have made him understand that I wasn't a sack of potatoes, if I'd had to box his ears regularly every few minutes for twenty-four hours at a stretch."

"Surely marriage is sacred," said Marian, gravely. Stella's point of view was so odd that Marian thought it rather coa.r.s.e.

"But it needn't be long," objected Stella; "you can be short and sacred simultaneously. In fact, I think I could be more sacred if I was quick about it; I should only get bored if I was long."

"You have such a funny way of putting things," said Marian, a little impatiently. "Of course I know what you mean, but I don't like being hurried. I love Julian dearly, and I will marry him when there is time for us to do it quietly and properly. Meanwhile it's quite awful not hearing from him. I have never been so miserable in my life."

Stella sat on the floor at Marian's feet with Marian's misery. She entered into it so deeply that after a time Marian felt surprised as well as comforted. She had not thought grief so pictorial. She felt herself placed on a pinnacle and lifted above the ranks of happier lovers. She thought it was her love for Julian that held her there; she did not know that it was Stella's love for her. Stella for a time saw only Marian--Marian frozen in a vast suspense, Marian racked with silences and tortured with imagined dangers. She did not see Julian until Marian had gone, and then suddenly she put her hands to her throat, as if she could not bear the sharp pulsation of fear that a.s.sailed her. If all this time they were only fearing half enough and Julian should be dead?

She whispered, "Julian dead!" Then she knew that she was not feeling any more for Marian. She was feeling for herself. Fortunately, she knew this didn't matter. Feeling for oneself was sharp and abominable, but it could be controlled. It did not count; and she could keep this much of Julian--the fear that he might be dead. It would not interfere with Marian or with Julian. Hopes interfere: but Stella had no personal hopes; she did not even envisage them. She claimed only the freedom of her fears.

CHAPTER XI

It is disconcerting to believe that you are the possessor of one kind of temper--a cold, deadly, on-the-spot temper--which cuts through the insignificant flurries of other people like a knife through b.u.t.ter, and then to find a sloppy explosiveness burst from you unaware.

Mr. Travers had never dreamed that in the town hall itself he could ever be led to lose a thing he had in such entire control as his temper. He did not lose it when the blushing Mr. Belk had the audacity to stop him in mid-career, on his way to his sanctum through No. 7, the outer office of his a.s.sistant clerks, though they were, as a body, strictly forbidden to address him while pa.s.sing to and fro. Mr. Belk was so ill advised as to say: