Flames Part 55

"I can't," he began almost desperately.

She gave with her hand a little twitch at his.

"I say," she whispered, and she spoke to him as if to Jessie in the tiny flannel-lined basket, "Go bials! will you?"

"But you?" he said, and there was something that was half a sob in his voice.

"I can't. But you--go bials."

And then, to please her, he held up his hand and hailed a hansom. Getting in he gave the direction of his rooms, loud enough for her to hear. She stood at the edge of the pavement and nodded at him as she heard it.

Then she turned away, and Julian saw the feathers in her big hat waving, as she joined once more the flight of the bats.

CHAPTER IV

THE FLAME IN A WOMAN'S EYES

"That girl loves you," Valentine had said, when Julian told him of Cuckoo's strange fragmentary sermon in the Monico, and of its effect upon himself.

Valentine spoke without any emotion or sympathy, and the absence of feeling from his voice seemed almost to bring a certain slight vexation into his manner. The love of Cuckoo, perhaps naturally, was to his fine nature a thing of no account, or even of ill account. At least, his look and manner faintly said so to Julian.

"But if she loves me," Julian said, and a certain wonder came into his heart at the thought, "surely she wouldn't behave to me as she does, turning me from a lover into a friend, and keeping me almost angrily in the latter relation."

"Perhaps not," Valentine said languidly.

No doubt he understood what Julian did not entirely understand, the subtleties of such a nature as Cuckoo's, a nature hammered out thin by cruel circ.u.mstance, drilled till it found the unspeakable ordinary and the loathsome inevitable, worn as a stone by dropping water till the water, ceasing to fall, must have left a loneliness of surprise. Julian did not fully realize that Cuckoo's life might well lead her to display real affection, if she possessed it, by ways the reverse of those naturally sought and gloried in by pure and protected women. To give is the act natural to the love of such women. It is at least their impulse, although restrained within strict limits, perhaps, by exigencies of conscience or of religion. But to give is the impulse, giving being the unusual act, the strange new act in them. Cuckoo's profession being an ordered routine of giving, how could she show her love better than by withholding? To be to Julian as she was to all men could prove nothing, either to him or to herself. To be to him as she was not to any other man whom she knew must mean something, argue something. So, at least, dimly and without mental self-consciousness, her mind reasoned rather instinctively, for the lady of the feathers was, above all things, instinctive. Instead of logic, ethics, morals, the equipment of sage, philosopher, good women, she had instinct only. Instinct told her the secret meaning of reticence in her relations with Julian. When she said good-bye to him, the hand-shake that pa.s.sed between them had become something more to her than a kiss. She kissed so many whom she hated, so many who were dolls of vice to her, who were walking sins, incarnate l.u.s.t shadows, scarcely men. To be to Julian what another woman might have been would be to seem to make him as all those dolls of horrible London. So Cuckoo set him apart by her relations towards him, as she had previously set him apart in her heart. She pushed the chair of her beloved from the heart where the dolls sat night after night warming their expressive hands at the cheap and ever-burning fire. She pushed it out into a circle of cold that was the only sacred thing she could supply. The world and her situation in it had bereft her of the power of even proving the simplicity of love by simplicity of natural action. She had to find a new way to show an old wors.h.i.+p. She found it in refusal, where others find it in a.s.sent.

But, after all, she was a woman, and perhaps she wished Julian to be an anchorite. That was what Valentine meant when, after Julian's account of Cuckoo's anger on finding him in Piccadilly, he simply said:

"That girl loves you."

The sentence stirred Julian to a surprise warmer than seemed reasonable, for he had really known that Cuckoo had some feeling for him. But he had always at the back of his mind the idea, common to so many, that such a girl as Cuckoo could not be capable of the real love, the love ascetic, not the love Baccha.n.a.lian. Love among the roses is easy, but not many can welcome love among the nettles; and, moreover, Julian, despite his knowledge of the th.o.r.n.y paths along which Cuckoo walked habitually, along which all her poor sisterhood walked incessantly, had not entirely disabused himself of the fallacy that a life such as hers was, in some vague, undefined and indefinable way, a life of pleasure. Even when we know a thing to be, we often cannot feel it to be. Knowledge in the mind does not inevitably bring to the birth sensation in the heart, or even the mental apprehension, half reasonable and half emotional, on the base and foundation of which it is comparatively easy to ground acts that indicate an understanding.

From Valentine's remark Julian understood him to mean that Cuckoo's anger was entirely caused by jealousy, not at all by a fine desire of protecting some one stronger than herself from that which she knew so well through her own original weakness. Yet that was what Julian had been led to believe, not by any hint of Cuckoo's, but by something within himself.

"I don't see why she should love me," he said, presently.

"You're well off, Julian," Valentine rejoined.

Almost for the first time in his life Julian felt angry with Valentine.

"You don't know her at all," he said, hotly.

"I know her cla.s.s."

Julian looked at him, and his anger died, as his mind sailed off on a new tack.

"Her cla.s.s! Then you must have been studying it lately, Val. Not long ago you could not have studied it. Your nature would not have let you."

"That is true enough."

"Were you studying it when we met you the other night?"

"Yes."

"With what result?" Julian asked with eager curiosity.

"That I understand something I never understood before--the charm of sin."

Julian was greatly surprised at this deliverance of his friend, who uttered it in his coldly pure voice, looking serenely high-minded and even loftily intellectual.

"You find the charm of sin in Piccadilly?"

"I begin to find it everywhere, in every place in which human beings gather together."

"You no longer feel yourself aloof from the average man, then?"

Valentine pressed his right hand slowly upon Julian's shoulder.

"No longer," he answered quietly. "Julian, you and I are emerging together from the hermitage in which we have dwelt retired for so long.

I always thought you would emerge some day. I never thought I should. But so it is. Don't think that I am standing still while you are travelling.

It is not so."

The strength of his hand's grip upon Julian's shoulder seemed to indicate a violence of feeling which the tones of his voice did not imply. Julian listened, and then said, in a hesitating, irresolute manner:

"Yes, I see, Val; but I say, where are we travelling? or, at least, where shall we travel if we don't pull up, if we keep on? That's the thing, I suppose."

As he spoke he did not tell himself that it was nothing less than the disconnected and ungrammatical remarks of the lady of the feathers which prompted this consideration, this prophetic movement of his mind. Yet so it was. And when Valentine replied he, the saint, was fighting against her, the sinner, and surely in the cause of evil. For he said lightly:

"After all, do human souls travel? I often think they are like eyes looking at a whirling zoetrope. It is the zoetrope that travels."

"You think souls don't go up or down?"

"I think that none of us knows really much about souls, and that, after all, it is best not to bother ourselves too much about them."

"Marr thought a great deal about them. I used to fancy that as some maniacs have been known to murder people in order to tear out their hearts, he could have murdered them to tear out their souls."

Valentine took his hand from Julian's shoulder.

"Marr is dead and forgotten," he said almost sternly.

"I can't quite forget him, Val; and I still feel as if he had had some influence over both of us. We have changed since those days of the sittings, since that night of your trance and his death."

Julian was looking at Valentine in a puzzled way while he spoke.