Second String

But even universal favourites have their particular ties. For the last few months Harry had been especially attached to Mrs. Freere, the wife of a member of Parliament of his own party who lived in Grosvenor Street. Mr. Freere was an exceedingly laborious person; he sat on more committees than any man in London, and had little leisure for the joys of home life. Mrs. Freere could take very good care of herself, and, all question of principles apart, had no idea of risking the position and the comforts she enjoyed. Subject to the limits thus clearly imposed on her, she had no objection at all to her friendship with Harry Belfield being as sentimental as Harry had been disposed to make it; indeed she had a taste for that kind of thing herself. Once or twice he had tried to overstep the limits, elastic as they were – he was impulsive, Mrs. Freere was handsome – but he had accepted her rebuke with frank penitence, and the friendship had been switched back on to its appointed lines without an accident. The situation was pleasant to her; she was convinced that it was good for Harry. Certainly he met at her house many people whom it was proper and useful for him to meet; and her partiality offered him every opportunity of making favourable impressions. If her conscience needed any other salve – it probably did not feel the need acutely – she could truthfully aver that she was in the constant habit of urging him to lose no time in looking out for a suitable wife.

"A wife is such a help to a man in the House," she would say. "She can keep half the bores away from him. I don't do it because Wilson positively loves bores – being bored gives him a sense of serving his country – but I could if he'd let me."

Harry had been accustomed to meet such prudent counsels with protests of a romantic order; but Mrs. Freere, a shrewd woman, had for some weeks past noticed that the protests were becoming rather less vehement, and decidedly more easy for her to control. When she repeated her advice one day, in the spring after Andy Hayes came back from Canada, Harry looked at her for a moment and said,

"Would you drop me altogether if I did, Lily?" He called her Lily when they were alone.

"I'm married; you haven't dropped me," said Mrs. Freere with a smile.

"Oh, that's different. I shouldn't marry a woman unless I was awfully in love with her."

"I don't think I ought to make that a reason for finally dropping you, because you'll probably be awfully in love with several. Put that difficulty – if it is one – out of your mind. We shall be friends."

"And you wouldn't mind? You – you wouldn't think it – ?" He wanted to ask her whether she would think it what, on previous occasions, he had said that he would think it.

Mrs. Freere laughed. "Oh, of course your wife would be rather a bore – just at first, anyhow. But, you know, I can even contemplate my life without you altogether, Harry." She was really fond of him, but she was not a woman given to illusions either about her friends or about herself.

Harry did not protest that he could not contemplate his life without Mrs. Freere, though he had protested that on more than one of those previous occasions. Mrs. Freere leant against the mantelpiece, smiling down at him in the armchair.

"Seen somebody?" she asked.

Harry blushed hotly. "You're an awfully good sort, Lily," he said.

She laughed a little, then sighed a little. Well, it had been very agreeable to have this handsome boy at her beck and call, gracefully adoring, flattering her vanity, amusing her leisure, giving her the luxury of reflecting that she was behaving well in the face of considerable temptation – she really felt entitled to plume herself on this exploit. But such things could not last – Mrs. Freere knew that. The balance was too delicate; a topple over on one side or the other was bound to come; she had always meant that the toppling over, when it came, should be on the safe side – on to the level ground, not over the precipice. A bump is a bump, there's no denying it, but it's better than a broken neck. Mrs. Freere took her bump smiling, though it certainly hurt a little.

"Is she very pretty?"

He jumped up from the armchair. He was highly serious about the matter, and that, perhaps, may be counted a grace in him.

"I suppose I shall do it – if I can. But I'm hanged if I can talk to you about it!"

"That's rather nice of you. Thank you, Harry."

He bowed his comely head, with its waving hair, over her hand and kissed it.

"Good-bye, Harry," she said.

He straightened himself and looked her in the face for an instant. He shrugged his shoulders; she understood and nodded. There was, in fact, no saying what one's emotions would be up to next – what would be the new commands of the Restless and Savage Master. Poor Harry! She knew his case. She herself had "taken him" from her dear friend Rosa Hinde.

He was gone. She stood still by the mantelpiece a moment longer, shrugged shoulders in her turn – really that Savage Master! – crossed the room to a looking-glass – not much wrong there happily – and turned on the opening of the door. Mr. Freere came in – between committees. He had just time for a cup of tea.

"Just time, Wilson?"

"I've a committee at five, my dear."

She rang the bell. "Talk of road-hogs! You're a committee-hog, you know."

He rubbed his bald head perplexedly. "They accumulate," he pleaded in a puzzled voice. "I'm sorry to leave you so much alone, my dear." He came up to her and kissed her. "I always want to be with you, Lily."

"I know," she said. She did know – and the knowledge was one of the odd things in life.

"Goodness, I forgot to telephone!" He hurried out of the room again.

"Serves me right, I suppose!" said Mrs. Freere; to which of recent incidents she referred must remain uncertain.

Mr. Freere came back for his hasty cup of tea.

The Park was gay in its spring bravery – a fine setting for the play of elegance and luxury which took place there on this as on every afternoon. Harry Belfield sought to occupy and to distract his mind by the spectacle, familiar though it was. He did not want to congratulate himself on the thing that had just happened, yet this was what he found himself doing if he allowed his thoughts to possess him. "That's over anyhow!" was the spontaneous utterance of his feelings. Yet he felt very mean. He did not see why, having done the right thing, he should feel so mean. It seemed somehow unfair – as though there were no pleasing conscience, whatever one did. Conscience might have retorted that in some situations there is no "right thing;" there is a bold but fatal thing, and there is a prudent but shabby thing; the right thing has vanished earlier in the proceedings. Still he had done the best thing open to him, and, reflecting on that, he began to pluck up his spirits. His sensuous nature turned to the pleasant side; his volatile emotions forsook the past for the future. As he walked along he began to hear more plainly and to listen with less self-reproach to the voice which had been calling him now for many days – ever since he had addressed that meeting in the Town Hall at Meriton. Meriton was calling him back with the voice of Vivien Wellgood, and with her eyes begging him to hearken. He had "seen somebody," in Mrs. Freere's sufficient phrase. Great and gay was London, full of lures and charms; many were they who were ready to pet, to spoil, and to idolize; many there were to play, to laugh, and to revel with. Potent must be the voice which could draw him from all this! Yet he was listening to it as he walked along. He was free to listen to it now – free since he had left Mrs. Freere's house in Grosvenor Street.

Suddenly he found himself face to face with Andy Hayes – not a man he expected to meet in Hyde Park at four o'clock in the afternoon. But Andy explained that he had "knocked off early at the shop" and come west, to have a last look at the idle end of the town – everybody there seemed idle, even if all were not.

"Because it's my last day in London. I'm going down to Meriton to-morrow for the summer. I've taken lodgings there – going to be an up-and-downer," Andy explained. "And I think I shall generally be able to get Friday to Monday down there."

To Meriton to-morrow! Harry suffered a sharp and totally unmistakable pang of envy.

"Upon my soul, I believe you're right!" he said. "I'm half sick of the racket of town. What's the good of it all? And one gets through the devil of a lot of money. And no time to do anything worth doing! I don't believe I've opened a book for a week."

"Well, why don't you come down too? It would be awfully jolly if you did."

"Oh, it's not altogether easy to chuck everything and everybody," Harry reminded his friend, who did not seem to have reflected what a gap would be caused by Mr. Harry Belfield's departure from the metropolis. "Still I shall think about it. I could get through a lot of work at home." The historical and sociological reading obligingly supplied an excellent motive for a flight from the too-engrossing gaieties of town. "And, of course, there's no harm in keeping an eye on the Division." The potent voice was gathering allies apace! Winning causes have that way. "I might do much worse," Harry concluded thoughtfully.

Andy was delighted. Harry's presence would make Meriton a different place to him. He too, for what he was worth (it is not possible to say that he was worth very much in this matter), became another ally of the potent voice, urging the joys of country life and declaring that Harry already looked "fagged out" by the arduous pleasures of London life.

"I shall think about it seriously," said Harry, knowing in himself that the voice had won. "Are you doing anything to-night? I happen for once to have an off evening."

"No; only I'd thought of dropping into the pit somewhere. I haven't seen 'Hamlet' at the – "

"Oh lord!" interrupted Harry. "Let's do something a bit more cheerful than that! Have you seen the girl at the Empire – the Nun? Not seen her? Oh, you must! We'll dine at the club and go; and I'll get her and another girl to come on to supper. I'll give you a little fling for your last night in town. Will you come?"

"Will I come? I should rather think I would!" cried Andy.

"All right; dinner at eight. We shall have lots of time – she doesn't come on till nearly ten. Meet me at the Artemis at eight. Till then, old chap!" Harry darted after a lady who had favoured him with a gracious bow as she passed by, a moment before.

Here was an evening-out for Andy Hayes, whose conscience had suggested "Hamlet" and whose finances had dictated the pit. He went home to his lodgings off Russell Square all smiles, and spent a laborious hour trying to get the creases out of his dress coat. "Well, I shall enjoy an evening like that just for once," he said out loud as he laboured.

"I've got her and another girl," Harry announced when Andy turned up at the Artemis. "The nuisance is that Billy Foot here insists on coming too, so we shall be a man over. I've told him I don't want him, but the fellow will come."

"I'm certainly coming," said the tall long-faced young man – for Billy Foot was still several years short of forty – to whom Andy had listened with such admiration at Meriton. In private life he was not oppressively epigrammatic or logical, and not at all ruthless; and everybody called him "Billy," which in itself did much to deprive him of his terrors.

The Artemis was a small and luxurious club in King Street. Why it was called the "Artemis" nobody knew. Billy Foot said that the name had been chosen just because nobody would know why it had been chosen – it was a bad thing, he maintained, to label a club. Harry, however, conjectured that the name indicated that the club was half-way between the Athenæum and the Turf – which you might take in the geographical sense or in any other you pleased.

Andy ate of several foods that he had never tasted before and drank better wine than he had ever drunk before. His physique and his steady brain made any moderate quantity of wine no more than water to him. Harry Belfield, on the contrary, responded felicitously to even his first glass of champagne; his eyes grew bright and his spirit gay. Any shadow cast over him by his interview with Mrs. Freere was not long in vanishing.

They enjoyed themselves so well that a cab had only just time to land them at their place of entertainment before the Nun, whose name was Miss Doris Flower, came on the stage. She was having a prodigious success because she did look like a nun and sang songs that a nun might really be supposed to sing – and these things, being quite different from what the public expected, delighted the public immensely. When Miss Flower, whose performance was of high artistic merit, sang about the baby which she might have had if she had not been a nun, and in the second song (she was on her death-bed in the second song, but this did not at all impair her vocal powers) about the angel whom she saw hovering over her bed, and the angel's likeness to her baby sister who had died in infancy, the public cried like a baby itself.

"Jolly good!" said Billy Foot, taking his cigar out of his mouth and wiping away a furtive tear. "But there, she is a ripper, bless her!" His tone was distinctly affectionate.

But supper was the great event to Andy: that was all new to him, and he took it in eagerly while they waited for the Nun and her friend. Such a din, such a chatter, such a lot of diamonds, such a lot of smoke – and the white walls, the gilding, the pink lampshades, the band ever and anon crashing into a new tune, and the people shouting to make themselves heard through it – Andy would have sat on happily watching, even though he had got no supper at all. Indeed he was no more hungry than most of the other people there. One does not go to supper there because one is hungry – that is a vulgar reason for eating.

However supper he had, sitting between Billy Foot and the Nun's friend, a young woman named Miss Dutton, who had a critical, or even sardonic, manner, but was extremely pretty. The Nun herself contrived to be rather like a nun even off the stage; she did not talk much herself, but listened with an innocent smile to the sallies of Billy Foot and Harry Belfield.

"Been to hear her?" Miss Dutton asked Andy.

Andy said that they had, and uttered words of admiration.

"Sort of thing they like, isn't it?" said Miss Dutton. "You can't put in too much rot for them."

"But she sings it so – " Andy began to plead.

"Yes, she can sing. It's a wonder she's succeeded. How sick one gets of this place!"

"Do you come often?"

"Every night – with her generally."

"I've never been here before in my life."

"Well, I hope you like the look of us!"

Harry Belfield looked towards him. "Don't mind what she says, Andy. We call her Sulky Sally – don't we, Sally? – But she looks so nice that we have to put up with her ways."

Miss Dutton smiled reluctantly, but evidently could not help smiling at Harry. "I know the value of your compliments," she remarked. "There are plenty of them going about the place to judge by!"

"Mercy, Sally, mercy! Don't show me up before my friends!"

Miss Dutton busied herself with her supper. The Nun ate little; most of the time she sat with her pretty hands clasped on the table in front of her. Suddenly she began to tell what proved to be a rather long story about a man named Tommy – everybody except Andy knew whom she meant. She told this story in a low, pleasant, but somewhat monotonous voice. In truth the Nun was a trifle prolix and prosy, but she also looked so nice that they were quite content to listen and to look. It appeared that Tommy had done what no man should do; he had made love to two girls at once. For a long time all went well; but one day Tommy, being away from the sources of supply of cash (as a rule he transacted all his business in notes), wrote two cheques – the Nun specified the amounts, one being considerably larger than the other – placed them in two envelopes, and proceeded to address them wrongly. Each lady got the other lady's cheque, and – "Well, they wanted to know about it," said the Nun, with a pensive smile. So, being acquaintances, they laid their heads together, and the next time Tommy (who had never discovered his mistake) asked lady number one to dinner, she asked lady number two, "and when Tommy arrived," said the Nun, "they told him he'd find it cheaper that way, because there'd only be one tip for the waiter!" The Nun, having reached her point, gave a curiously pretty little gurgle of laughter.

"Rather neat!" said Billy Foot. "And did they chuck him?"

"They'd agreed to, but Maud weakened on it. Nellie did."

"Poor old Tommy!" mused Harry Belfield.

It was not a story of surpassing merit whether it were regarded from the moral or from the artistic point of view; but the Nun had grown delighted with herself as she told it, and her delight made her look even more pretty. Andy could not keep his eyes off her; she perceived his honest admiration and smiled serenely at him across the table.

"I suppose it was Nellie who was to have the small cheque?" Billy Foot suggested.

"No; it was Maud."

"Then I drink to Maud as a true woman and a forgiving creature!"

Andy broke into a hearty enjoying laugh. Nothing had passed which would stand a critical examination in humour, much less in wit; but Andy was very happy. He had never had such a good time, never seen so many gay and pretty women, never been so in touch with the holiday side of life. The Nun delighted him; Miss Dutton was a pleasantly acid pickle to stimulate the palate for all this rich food. Billy Foot and Harry looked at him, looked at one another, and laughed.

"They're laughing at you," said Miss Dutton in her most sardonic tone.

"I don't mind. Of course they are! I'm such an outsider."

"Worth a dozen of either of them," she remarked, with a calmly impersonal air that reduced her compliment to a mere statement of fact.

"Oh, I heard!" cried Harry. "You don't think much of us, do you, Sally?"

"I come here every night," said Miss Dutton. "Consequently I know."

The pronouncement was so confident, so conclusive, that there was nothing to do but laugh at it. They all laughed. If you came there every night, "consequently" you would know many things!

"We must eat somewhere," observed the Nun with placid resignation.

"We must be as good as we can and hope for mercy," said Billy Foot.

"You'll need it," commented Miss Dutton.

"Let's hope the law of supply and demand will hold good!" laughed Harry.

"How awfully jolly all this is!" said Andy.

He had just time to observe Miss Dutton's witheringly patient smile before the lights went out. "Hullo!" cried Andy; and the rest laughed.

Up again the lights went, but the Nun rose from her chair.

"Had enough of it?" asked Harry.

"Yes," said the Nun with her simple, candid, yet almost scornful directness. "Oh, it's been all right. I like your friend, Harry – not Billy, of course – the new one, I mean."

When they had got their cloaks and coats and were waiting for the Nun's electric brougham, Harry made an announcement that filled Andy with joy and the rest of the company with amazement.

"This is good-bye for a bit, Doris," he said. "I'm off to the country the day after to-morrow."

"What have we done to you?" the Nun inquired with sedate anxiety.

"I've got to work, and I can't do it in London. I've got a career to look after."

The Nun gurgled again – for the second time only in the course of the evening. "Oh yes," she murmured with obvious scepticism. "Well, come and see me when you get back." She turned her eyes to Andy, and, to his great astonishment, asked, "Would you like to come too?"

Andy could hardly believe that he was himself, but he had no doubt about his answer. The Nun interested him very much, and was so very pretty. "I should like to awfully," he replied.

"Come alone – not with these men, or we shall only talk nonsense," said the Nun, as she got into her brougham. "Get in, Sally."

"Where's the hurry?" asked Miss Dutton, getting in nevertheless. The Nun slapped her arm smartly; the two girls burst into a giggle, and so went off.

"Where to now?" asked Harry.

Andy wondered what other place there was.

"Bed for me," said Billy Foot. "I've a consultation at half-past nine, and I haven't opened the papers yet."

"Bed is best," Harry agreed, though rather reluctantly. "Going to take a cab, Billy?"

"What else is there to take?"

"Thought you might be walking."

"Oh, walking be – !" He climbed into a hansom.

"I'll walk with you, Harry. I haven't had exercise enough."

Harry suggested that they should go home by the Embankment. When they had cut down a narrow street to it, he put his arm in Andy's and led him across the road. They leant on the parapet, looking at the river. The night was fine, but hazy and still – a typical London night.

"You've given me a splendid evening," said Andy. "And what a good sort those girls were!"

"Yes," said Harry, rather absently, "not a bad sort. Doris has got her head on her shoulders, and she's quite straight. Poor Sally's come one awful cropper. She won't come another; she's had more than enough of it. So one doesn't mind her being a bit snarly."

Poor Sally! Andy had had no idea of anything of the sort, but he had an instinct that people who come one cropper – and one only – feel that one badly.

"I'm feeling happy to-night, old fellow," said Harry suddenly. "You may not happen to know it, but I've gone it a bit for the last two or three years, made rather a fool of myself, and – well, one gets led on. Now I've made up my mind to chuck all that. Some of it's all right – at any rate it seems to happen; but I've had enough. I really do want to work at the politics, you know."

"It's all before you, if you do," said Andy in unquestioning loyalty.

"I'm going to work, and to pull up a bit all round, and – " Harry broke off, but a smile was on his lips. There on the bank of the Thames, fresh from his party in the gay restaurant, he heard the potent voice calling. It seemed to him that the voice was potent enough not only to loose him from Mrs. Freere, to lure him from London delights, to carry him down to Meriton and peaceful country life; but potent enough, too, to transform him, to make him other than he was, to change the nature that had till now been his very self. He appealed from passion to passion; from the soiled to the clean, from the turgid to the clear. A new desire of his eyes was to make a new thing of his life.