Flames Part 73

"Where have you been, Julian?" said Valentine.

"Oh, with her--with Molly, of course," he replied.

"What? Till now?"

Julian seemed uneasy under his scrutiny.

"Till this morning," he replied, almost suddenly.

"Well, but since then?"

"With Cuckoo. Oh! don't bother me."

He went over towards the window.

"Oh, how hot it is here," he said.

He glanced at the bright fire.

"Intolerably!" he murmured.

And he opened the window to the drifting snow.

"Am I mad?" he suddenly cried to them. "I saw the flame in her eyes again to-day, in Cuckoo's eyes. It held me with her. I'll swear it held me. It wouldn't let me go--wouldn't let me--till now!"

He sank down in a chair by the window, and turning his back on them, pushed his head out to get air.

"I say," he suddenly called. "What's that, that lying there?"

Valentine and the doctor joined him. He was pointing to the body of Rip, which was already almost covered by the snow.

"That," Valentine said; "that is--"

"The body of a creature that died fighting," the doctor interrupted. "A fine fas.h.i.+on of dying. Look at it, Julian. Its soul was indomitable to the last, and so it won the battle it fought. It won by its very death even. Nature is at work on its winding-sheet."

Valentine said nothing.

CHAPTER V

DOCTOR LEVILLIER VISITS THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

Julian's utterance about the flame that held him with the lady of the feathers struck Dr. Levillier forcibly at the time it was made, and remained in his mind. He could not fail to connect it with his own experience in Valentine's empty room, and, going further back, with the last sitting of the two young men which was succeeded by the long trance of Valentine. And as he thought of these things, it suddenly occurred to him that the ghastly change which had taken place in Valentine might well date from that night. Since the death of Rip the doctor had formed the opinion that Valentine was no longer perfectly sane. His excitement, the fury of his eyes when he spoke of the triumphs of will, seemed to give the clue to his transformation. The insane perpetually glorify themselves, and are transcendent egoists. Surely the egoism of insanity had peeped out in Valentine's diatribe upon the eternity of a strong man's individual will. The night of the trance had been a strange crisis of his life. He had seemed to recover from it, to come back from that wonderful simulation of death healthy, calm, reasonable as before. This might have been only seeming. In that sleep the sane and beautiful Valentine might have died, the insane and unbeautiful Valentine have been born. There are many instances of a sudden and acute shock to the nervous system leaving an indelible and dreary writing upon the nature. If Valentine had thus been tossed to madness, it was very possible that his dog, an instinctive creature, should recognize the change with terror. It was even possible that other instinctive creatures should divine the hideous mind of a maniac hidden in the beautiful body of an apparently normal man. And Cuckoo, she too was instinctive, a girl without education, culture, the reading that opens the mind and sometimes shuts the eyes. Cuckoo Bright, she had divined the evil of Valentine. To her he had made confession. In her eyes Julian had seen the mysterious flame. Some influence from her had kept him from his invited guests and from his house. Yes, Cuckoo, the lady of the feathers, the blessed damozel of Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus, the painted and possessed, faded and degraded, wanderer of the pavements, seemed to become the centre of this wheel of circ.u.mstances, as Doctor Levillier reflected upon her.

It was time for him to go to Cuckoo. Julian's descent must be stayed, before he went down, like a new Orpheus without a mission, into Hades.

Valentine's influence, whether mad or sane, must be fought. It was to be a struggle, a battle of wills, of what Valentine chose to consider souls.

And some prompting led the doctor to think of Cuckoo as a possible weapon. Why? Because she had even once held Julian against his will, against the intention of his soul.

So the doctor at length sought the lady of the feathers. She had been pa.s.sing through a period of great and benumbing desolation, believing that her last appeal, her great effort for Julian, had been a failure.

For the doctor had not come to her, and Cuckoo could not tell that he was making observations for himself and that she was often in his mind.

She supposed that he, like all others, laughed at her pretensions to gravity, swept her exhibition of real and honest emotion away from his memory with a sneer, considered her despair over another's ruin a vile travesty, a grinning absurdity and trick. Never had Cuckoo felt more lonely than in these days, though a vast loneliness is the constant companion of her large sisterhood. Even Jessie failed to comfort her, and she could find little courage within herself. And yet there were moments when the vigour that had led her once to defy Valentine, when the fire that had sprung up in her, as a flame may burst forth in a swamp, seemed to be near to her again. She felt a new possibility within her, stirring, striving. It was at such moments that she longed to see the doctor, and could have cursed him for not coming to her. For at such moments she seemed only waiting for a touch of sympathy, a word of encouragement, to perform some great action, some momentous deed. But the touch, the word, were lacking, and her life and experience of constant and monotonous degradation dulled the impulse, stifled the enthusiasm that she could not understand. And she fell again to brooding, and to an ignorant and vague consciousness of impotence.

She bought a new hair-dye, painted her thin cheeks more heavily than ever before, and sought, almost with a wild exultation that swiftly fled away, to sink lower.

The monotony of sin is one of the scourges of sin. In those days Cuckoo suffered many stripes. Her eyes grew more weary, her smile in Piccadilly more mechanical, her walk more puppet-like than ever. Life was like a moving dream of horror. And yet no day pa.s.sed without a gleam of that strange sensation of ignorant power, fluttering upward, fading away, pausing, pa.s.sing, dead.

She did not know what it meant. She could not keep it nor use it. She could not unravel its message nor rest upon its strength. It was gone almost while it came, but it did something for the lady of the feathers.

It gave to her the little seed of expectation that, quite alone in a weary desert, yet makes of that desert the plot men call a garden. Like a thread of steel, it held up this girl from the uttermost abyss, until at last the doctor's hand struck upon her door.

Julian's occasional visits were as the scourgings of G.o.d, giving to Cuckoo a vision of s.h.i.+fting ruin, in which she--so she told herself, thinking of the dance of the hours--had been the first to have a share.

It was a wintry afternoon when the doctor came. Frost clung stealthily round the grimy black trees, outlining their naked boughs with meagre lines of white sewn with s.m.u.ts. Above the frost hung the fog as if in charge of the town, a despondent and gloomy sentinel. During the morning the sun had lain in the fog like a faint blood-red jewel in a thick and awkward sulphur setting, but with the afternoon the jewel faded to a distant dim phantom, from that to blank nothingness. As if satisfied with this piteous exit, the fog drew closer, keeping especially heavy watch upon the long and bleak line of the Marylebone Road, and taking the high and narrow house in which Cuckoo dwelt under its severest protection. Twilight wanted to come as the afternoon drew on, but it had been forestalled and was practically already there. Doubtless it did come, but no one was much the wiser. The lamps had been alight all day, and no procession of gloomy things, advancing from whithersoever, could have added much to the volume of the crowding darkness, or have appreciably increased its density. In the darkness the cold gathered, and the frost began to take a harder grip of everything,--of desolate, solitary pumps in tiny and squalid back yards, of pipes that crawled like liver-coloured snakes over the unpresentable sides of houses, of pools thick with orange-brown mud, and vagrant bushes creaking above the grimy earth in places that children named gardens.

Fog and frost had taken a strong grip, too, upon the heart of the lady of the feathers. Somewhere about eleven o'clock in the morning she had stirred wearily in her bed, had stretched out her arms to the stagnant air of the room, and crouched up on her pillow in a grotesque hump. For a while the hump remained motionless. Then Cuckoo rolled round and extended a bare thin leg to test the atmosphere. The leg was quickly withdrawn, the atmosphere having been evidently tried in the balance and found wanting. Cuckoo's bell rang, and Mrs. Brigg was called for tea and toast, while once more the hump decorated the upper part of the disordered bed.

Jessie, awakened in her basket at the foot of the bed, joined the hump, whining a greeting, and wriggling furiously in an effort to tunnel her way to the ultimate depths of sheets and blankets. Then Mrs. Brigg, of yellowish and bleak aspect, beneath a tumbled appurtenance that she called a cap, appeared with a tray.

"Going to stop abed?" she asked, in a husky voice, in which the s.m.u.ts seemed floating.

"Yes. What's there to get up for?" Cuckoo groaned.

"Nothun' as I know of."

And Mrs. Brigg was gone about her business.

All the morning Cuckoo lay staring at the blank square of the window, and Jessie snored under the blankets. The tea was drunk, the toast lay about in fragments. One bit, hard and many cornered as it seemed, somehow gained entrance to the bed, and greeted Cuckoo's every movement with uncompromising grittiness. No shaking of coverlet and sheet, no beating of pillow, no kicks and scufflings could expel it. The bed seemed full of hard bits of toast, and Cuckoo felt as if an additional burden were laid upon her by this slight evil. But, indeed, the horror of her existence reached a culminating point to-day,--a point of loneliness, vacant dreariness, squalor, and degradation that could not be surpa.s.sed. The preceding night had been peculiarly horrible, and as Cuckoo now lay on the tumbled bed, in the dim, cold room, with the fog gazing in, the leaden hours of winter crawling by, she felt as if she could bear no more. She could bear no more addition to her sick weariness; no more addition to her useless hunger of love for Julian, that could never be crowned with anything but despair; no more addition to her bodily fatigue, born of tramping monotony succeeded by yet more enervating weariness of the flesh. She could bear no more. Yes, but she must bear more. For Cuckoo knew that she was not dying, was not even ill. She was only tired in body, prostrate in heart, deserted in life, and forced to witness the quick and running ruin of the man she had the farcical absurdity to love. Imaginative, for once, in her morbid fatigue, she began to wish that she could fade away and become part of the fog that lay about London, be drawn into its murkiness, with all her murky recollections, her fiendish knowledge, her mechanical wiles of the streets, her thin and ghostly despairs and desires. For they seemed thin and ghostly, they too, to-day, fit food for the fog, as indeed the whole of her was. How could such as she evaporate into sweet air, a clear heaven?

She caught at the hand-gla.s.s, leaning far out on the bed, as the blessed damozel o'er the bright bar of heaven, and tried to see, with staring eyes, how the new hair-dye that she was now using became her. Her mind was vagrant, coming and going miserably, from that love of hers which was strangely strong and subtle, to the powder-box with its a.r.s.enic-green lid, or the rouge-pot of dirty white china. And by each event it paused and sank, as if benumbed by the increasing frost. Leaning again to put back the hand-gla.s.s she fell over too far and dropped it. The gla.s.s fell face downwards and was smashed. Cuckoo laughed aloud, revelling feebly in the additional misery a superst.i.tious mind now began to promise her. The fragments of broken gla.s.s actually pleased her, and, on a sudden, she resolved to set her feet in them, that she might be cut and wounded, that she might bleed outwardly as she had been bleeding inwardly for so long.

She swung her legs over the breadth of the bed, disorganizing Jessie, planted her feet in the array of gla.s.s and stood up. As she did so the doctor mounted her doorstep, plied the knocker and rang the bell. Cuckoo stood listening. A fragment of gla.s.s had really penetrated the bare sole of her foot, which bled a little gently on the carpet. But she scarcely knew it. She heard Mrs. Brigg go by, and then steps sounding in the pa.s.sage. Then there came to her ears a quiet voice with a very characteristic note of bright calmness in it. Standing in her frilled nightdress among the bits of gla.s.s, Cuckoo flushed scarlet all over her face and neck. She knew who the visitor was. With one dart she reached the washhand-stand. Sponges, brushes, combs, all her weapons of the toilet, were immediately in commotion, and when Mrs. Brigg opened her door, the room was a whirlpool of quick activities, in the midst of which, as on a frouzy throne, Jessie stood upon the bed barking excitedly. Mrs. Brigg came in and closed the door. Her thin lips were pursed.

"Light the fire!" Cuckoo called at her from the basin.

"What do you want the doctor for?"

Mrs. Brigg uttered the words with some suspicion.

"Hurry up and light the fire!"

Cuckoo turned round, her hands darting in her hair, and actually laughed with a touch of merriment.

"You old owl! He's not come to doctor me, only to see me."

Mrs. Brigg looked relieved, but still surprised.

"Oh," she said. "That's it, is it?"

She paused as if in consideration.