THE SECOND FIDDLE
BY PHYLLIS BOTTOME
AUTHOR OF "THE DARK TOWER," "THE DERELICT AND OTHER STORIES," ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
NORMAN PRICE
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1917
Copyright, 1917, by
THE CENTURY Co.
_Published, October, 1917_
TO
MARGUERITE AND LILIAN
TWO SISTERS WHO, ALIKE IN JOY
AND SORROW, ARE A LIGHT
TO THEIR FRIENDS
[Illustration: "Then have the kindness to inform me ... why Marian has
consented to marry me."]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
"Then have the kindness to inform me ... why Marian has consented to
marry me" _Frontispiece_
A proclamation was read by a great person from a bedizened balcony 19
"I'm afraid I don't like big feelings much" 91
"Women like you can't marry logs of wood" 141
"This," Stella thought to herself, "is like a battle" 165
Her voice was unfettered music 189
She tugged and twisted again 265
The most extraordinary figure we had ever seen 295
"Not very clever of you," he murmured, "not to guess why I wanted a
taxi" 349
THE SECOND FIDDLE
CHAPTER I
On the whole, Stella preferred the Cottage Dairy Company to the People's
Restaurant. It was a shade more expensive, but if you ate less and liked
it more, that was your own affair. You were waited on with more
arrogance and less speed, but you made up for that artistically by an
evasion of visible grossness.
Stella had never gone very much further than a ham sandwich in either
place. You knew where you were with a ham sandwich, and you could
disguise it with mustard.
On this occasion she took a cup of tea and made her meal an
amalgamation. She hoped to leave work early, and she would have no time
for tea. She was going to hear Chaliapine.
All London--all the London, that is, which thinks of itself as
London--was raving about Chaliapine; but Stella in general neither knew
nor cared for the ravings of London. They reached her as vaguely as the
sound of breaking surf reaches the denizens of the deeper seas.
It was her sister Eurydice who had brought Chaliapine home to her. She
had said quite plainly, with that intensity which distinguished both her
utterances and her actions, that if she didn't hear Chaliapine she would
die. He was like an ache in her bones.
Eurydice had never discovered that you cannot always do what you want or
have what you very ardently wish to have. She believed that
disappointment was a coincidence or a lack of fervency, and she set
herself before each obstacle to her will like the prophets of Baal
before their deaf god. She cut herself with knives till the blood ran.
Stella hovered anxiously by her side, stanching, whenever she was able,
the flowing of Eurydice's blood. On this occasion she had only to
provide seven shillings and to make, what cost her considerably more, a
request to Mr. Leslie Travers to let her off at five.
Mr. Leslie Travers had eyed her with the surprise of a man who runs a
perfect machine and feels it pause beneath his fingers. He could not
remember that Stella Waring had ever made such a request before.
Her hours were from nine to five daily, but automatically, with the
pressure of her work and the increase of her usefulness, they had
stretched to six or seven.
Mr. Leslie Travers had never intended to have a woman secretary, but
during the illness of a competent clerk he had been obliged to take a
stop-gap. Miss Waring had appeared on a busy morning with excellent
testimonials and a quiet manner. He told her a little shortly that he
did not want a woman in his office. Her fine, humorous eyebrows moved
upward, and her speculative gray eyes rested curiously upon his
irritable brown ones.
"But I am a worker," she said gently. "If I can do your work, it is my
own business whether I am a man or a woman. You shall not notice it."
Mr. Travers felt confused for a moment and as if he had been
impertinent. In the course of a strenuous and successful life he had
never felt impertinent; he believed it to be a quality found only in
underlings. He stared, cleared his throat, read her testimonials, and
temporarily engaged her. That was two years ago.
Miss Waring had kept her promise; she was a worker and not a woman. She
took pleasure in keeping her wits about her, and Mr. Travers used them
as if they were his own. Sometimes he thought they were.
She had many agreeable points besides her wits, but they were the only
point she gave to Mr. Travers to notice. She deliberately suppressed her
charm. She reduced his work by one half; he never had to say, "You ought
to have asked me this," or, "You needn't have brought me that." Her
initiative matched her judgment.
It did not occur to Mr. Travers to praise her for this most unusual
quality, but he paid her the finest tribute of an efficient worker: he
gave her more to do. He woke up to that fact when she tentatively asked
him if he could make it convenient for her to leave at five.
"Five," he said, "is your hour for leaving this office. Of course you
may go then. You ought always to do so."
A vague smile hovered about Stella's lips; she looked at him
consideringly for a moment, her eyes seemed to say, "It must be nice for
you, then, that I never do what I ought." Then she drew her secretarial
manner like a veil over her face.
"You will find the drainage papers for Stafford Street in the second
pigeon-hole on your desk," she said sedately, "with the inspector's
report. I have put the plumber's estimate with it, and added a few
marginal notes where I think their charges might be cut down."
"You had better see them about it yourself," said Mr. Travers; "then
there won't be any unpleasantness."
He did not mean to be polite to Stella; he merely stated a convenient
fact. When Stella saw people on business there was no unpleasantness.
Stella bowed, and left him.
Mr. Travers looked up for a moment after she had gone. "I am not sure,"
he said to himself, "that there are not some things women can do better
than men when they do not know that they are doing them better." He did
not like to think that women had any superior mental qualities to those
of men, but he put them down to mother wit, which does not sound
superior.
Stella went through the outer office on wings. It was full of her
friends; her exits and her entrances were the events the lesser clerks
liked best during the day.
Her smile soothed their feelings, and in her eyes reigned always that
other Stella who lived behind her wits, a gay, serene, and friendly
Stella, who did not know that she was a lady and never forgot that she
was a human being.
Theoretically there is nothing but business in a business office, but
practically in every smallest detail there is the pressure of personal
influence. What gets done or, even more noticeably, what is left undone,
is poised upon an inadmissible principle, the desire to please.
The office watched Stella, tested her, judged her, and once and for all
made up its mind to please her.
Stella knew nothing at all about this probation. She only knew all about
the office boy's mother, and where the girl typists spent their
holidays, and when, if all went well, Mr. Belk would be able to marry
his young lady. Mistakes and panic, telegrams and telephones, slipped
into her hands, and were unraveled with the rapidity with which silk
yields to expert fingers. She always made the stupidest clerk feel that
mistakes, like the bites of a mosquito, might happen to any one even
while she was making him see how to avoid them in future. She had the
touch which takes the sting from small personal defeats. She always saw
the person first and the defeat afterward.
Her day's work was a game of patience and skill, and she played it as
she used to play chess with her father. It was a long game and sometimes
it was a tiring one, but hardly a moment of it was not sheer drama; and
the moment the town hall door swung behind her she forgot her municipal
juggling and started the drama of play.
On Thursday afternoon she stood for a moment considering her course.
There was the Underground, which was always quickest, or there was the
drive above the golden summer dust on the swinging height of a
motor-bus. She decided upon the second alternative, and slipped into
infinity. She was cut off from duty, surrounded by strangers, unmoored
from her niche in the world.
This was the moment of her day which Stella liked best; in it she could
lose her own identity. She let her hands rest on her lap and her eyes on
the soft green of the new-born leaves. She hung balanced on her wooden
seat between earth and sky, on her way to Russian music.
The brief and tragic youth of London trees was at its loveliest.
Kensington Gardens poured past her like a golden flame. The grass was as
fresh as the grass of summer fields, swallows flitted over it, and the
broad-shouldered elms were wrapped delicately in a mist of green.
Hyde Park Corner floated beneath her; the bronze horses of victory,
compact and sturdy, trundled out of a cloudless sky. St George's
Hospital, sun-baked and brown, glowed like an ancient palace of the
Renaissance. The traffic surged down Hamilton Place and along Piccadilly
as close packed as migratory birds. The tower of Westminster Cathedral
dropped its alien height into an Italian blue sky; across the vista of
the green park and all down Piccadilly the clubs flashed past her, vast,
silver spaces of comfort reserved for men, full of men. Stella did not
know very much about men who lived in clubs. Cicely said they were very
wicked and danced the tango and didn't want women to have votes; but
Stella thought they looked as if they had attractions which rivaled
these disabilities.
Probably she would see some of them less kaleidoscopically at the opera
later.
Even men who danced the tango went to hear Chaliapine. It wasn't only
his voice; he was a rage, a prairie fire. All other conversation became
burned stubble at his name.
Piccadilly Circus shot past her like a bed of flowers.
The City was very hot, and all the world was in the streets, expansive
and genial. It was the hour when work draws to an end and night is still
far off. Pleasure had stretched down the scale and included workers.
People who didn't dance the tango bought strawberries and flowers off
barrows for wonderful prices to take home to their children.
In the queue extending half-way down Drury Lane, Eurydice, passionate
and heavy-eyed, was waiting for Stella.
"If you hadn't come soon," she said, drawing Stella's arm through her
own, "something awful would have happened to me. I got a messenger-boy
to stand here for an hour to keep your place. The suspense has been
agony, like waiting for the guillotine."
"But, O Eurydice dear, I do hope you will enjoy it!" Stella pleaded.
"I shall enjoy it, yes," said Eurydice, gloomily, "if I can bear it. I
don't suppose you understand, but when you feel things as poignantly as
I do, almost anything is like the guillotine. It is the death of
something, even if it's only suspense. Besides, he may not be what I
think him. I expect the opening of heaven."
Eurydice usually expected heaven to open, and this is sometimes rather
hard upon the openings of less grandiose places.
A stout woman in purple raised an efficient elbow like an oar and dug it
sharply into Stella's side.
"Oh, Stella, wouldn't it be awful if I fainted before the door opens!"
whispered Eurydice.
"The doors are opening," said Stella. "People have begun to plunge with
umbrellas."
The purple woman renewed her rowing motion; the patient queue expanded
like a fan. Stella moved forward in the throng. She was pushed and
elbowed, lifted and driven, but she never stopped being aware of
delight. She watched the faces sweeping past her like petals on a
stream; she flung down her half-crowns and seized her metal disks,
dashing on and up the narrow stairs, with Eurydice fiercely struggling
behind her like a creature in danger of drowning.
They sprang up and over the back ledges of the gallery on into the first
row, breathless, gasping, and victorious.
"How horrible people are!" gasped Eurydice. "Dozens of brutal men have
stepped on my toe. Your hat's crooked. Is anything worth this dreadful
mingling with a mob?"
"Does one mingle really?" asked Stella, taking off her hat. "Only one's
shoulders. Besides, I think I rather like mobs if they aren't purple and
don't dig. I've just been thinking how dull it must be to walk into a
box having done nothing but pay for it, and knowing, too, you are going
to get it! The lady beside me has been to every opera this season. She
sits on a camp-stool from two o'clock till eight with milk chocolate,
and knows every one's name and all the motives and most of the scores.
She's going to lend me this one. She says the excitement of not knowing
whether she is going to get a front seat or not has never palled."
The great opera house filled slowly. There was splendor in it--the
splendor put on for the occasion in the cheaper seats, and every-day
splendor taking its place later and more expensively because it did not
know how to be anything else but splendid.
Women's dresses that summer were made as much as possible to resemble
underclothes. From the waist upwards filmy specimens of petticoat
bodices appeared; there were wonderful jewels to be seen above them:
immemorial family jewels, collars of rubies and pearls. The older the
woman, the finer the jewels, and the more they looked like ancient
mosaics glimmering archaically in early Roman churches.
The safety curtain was lowered reassuringly before a bored audience that
was not afraid of danger.
Some one on the left of Stella remarked that there was a rumor that the
Crown Prince and Princess of Austria had been assassinated in Serbia. It
did not sound very likely. The Russian music began--fiery melancholy
music, drunk with sorrow. Then the real curtain rose.
Eurydice flung herself forward; she hung over the ledge, poised like an
exultant Fury. She dared life to disappoint her.
Stella leaned back in her seat with a little thrill of excitement.
Everything felt so safe, and sorrow sounded beautiful, and far away.