Flames Part 78

The doctor had broken Valentine's spell over Cuckoo with that word. He believed in her. He told her to fight. He a.s.sumed that she had some power, even more power for Julian than he had. "Only you can do it," he had said. The sentence armed her from head to foot, put weapons in her hands, light in her hollow eyes, a leaping exultation in her heart. The flickering power that she had marvelled at, and then despaired of, burnt up at last into a strong flame. That evening it had dazzled Julian's eyes. He seemed to see a new Cuckoo, and he was thinking of her as he walked along now in the frost under the stars. His meditation was not very intellectual or very profound, for since the change in his life Julian had put his old intellectualities away from him. Pa.s.sion, so long guarded, so bravely repressed, once it had broken loose stormed all the heights of his nature, and drove every sentiment that tried to oppose it into exile. The animalism that is so generally present in a boy physically strong took possession of him, and would not tolerate any divided allegiance. It declined to permit his life to be a thing of mingled enjoyments, now rejoicing in the leaping desires of the body, now disregarding them for the aspirations and clear contentments of the mind.

It seemed vengeful, like a man long kept fasting against his will, and having at last come into its empire made that empire an autocracy, a tyranny. Julian had pa.s.sed at a step from one extreme to another, and had already so lost the habit of following any mental process to a conclusion that he could no longer think clearly with ease, or observe himself with any acuteness. He was for the time all body, knew his muscles, his flesh, his limbs, like intimates; his mind only distantly, like a stranger. With pa.s.sion, with greed, he had seized on all those pleasures which he had previously feared and shunned, until his brain was heavy as is the brain of a glutton and a drunkard, and his mind stepped in any direction with a languid lethargy. So to-night he had the face of a man puzzled as he walked in the frost under the stars.

Once the hint of some power lurking in Cuckoo had thrilled and awed him, as only a certain clearness--a certain receptive, appreciative clearness--can be thrilled and awed. Now the abrupt development of that power almost distressed, because it confused him. He had gone down lower in the interval between the two possibilities of sensation.

"What the devil's come over Cuckoo?" so ran his thought with a schoolboy gait. That something had come over her he recognized. She was no longer the girl he had stared at in Piccadilly, the creature he had pitied in the twilight hour of their first friendly interview. Nor was she the woman whose soul he had injured by his cruel whim, the woman who had beaten him with reproaches, and made him for an instant almost ashamed of his l.u.s.ts. All these humanities perhaps slept, or woke, in her still.

Yet it was not they which heavily concerned him on his way to the Marble Arch. There is a vitality about power of whatever kind that makes itself instantly felt, even when it is not understood, even when it is neither beloved nor appreciated. Julian was confused by his dull and sudden recognition of power in Cuckoo. No longer did it flash upon him, a mystery of flame in her eyes, moving him to the awe and the constraint that a man may feel at sight of an unearthly thing, a phantom, or a vision of the night. (He had looked for the flame in her eyes, and he had not found it.) But it glowed upon him more steadily, with a warmth of humanity, of something inherent, rooted, not detached, and merely for the moment and as if by chance prisoned in some particular place, from which at a breath it might escape. It drew him to Cuckoo, and at the same time it slightly repelled him, the latter--though Julian did not know it--by the sharp abruptness of its novelty. For the doctor had lit a blaze of strength in the girl by a word. Julian's eyes were dazzled by the blaze.

Custom might teach them to face it more calmly. At present he could look at the stars with greater ease. Indeed, as he walked, he did look at them, and thought of the eyes of Cuckoo, and then of the eyes of all women, and of their strange intensities of suggestion and of realization, of their language of the devil and of the clouds, of their kindling vigours. But the eyes of Cuckoo were no longer as the eyes of any other woman. Julian glanced at a girl who watched him from the corner of the street. He knew that Cuckoo looked each night at men as that girl looked at him. He knew it, yet he felt that he did not believe it. For to him she was dressed already in the fillet of some priestess, in the robes of one tending some strange and unnamed altar. She woke in him a little of the uneasy fear and uneasy attraction that a creature whom a man feels to be greater than himself often wakes in him. That evening, while Julian sat with her, he had been seized with curious conflicting desires to fall before her or to strike her, to draw her close or to fend her off from him, all dull, too, and vague as in heaviness of dreaming. Those feelings, vague in the house, were scarcely clearer in the cold and in the open s.p.a.ces of the night, and Julian was conscious of a sense of irritation, of anger against himself. He felt as if he were an oaf, a lout. Was it, could it be, Cuckoo who had made him feel so? After all, what was she? Julian tried to hug and soothe himself in the unworthy remembrance of Cuckoo's monotonous life and piteous deeds, to reinstate himself in contented animalism by thoughts of the animalism of this priestess! He laughed aloud under the stars, but the laugh rang hollow.

He could not reinstate himself. He could only wearily repeat, "What the devil's come over Cuckoo?" with an iteration of dull, moody petulance.

A hansom suddenly pulled up beside him and a voice called:

"Julian! Julian, where are you coming from?"

It was Valentine. He was m.u.f.fled in a fur coat, and stretched himself over the wooden ap.r.o.n to attract his friend's attention.

"I have been to your rooms," he continued. "Don't you remember we had arranged to dine together?"

Julian looked at him without animation.

"I had forgotten it," he answered.

"Your memory is becoming very treacherous," Valentine said. "Where are you off to? Get in. I will drive you."

"I hadn't any plan," Julian said, getting into the cab.

"Drive to the Savoy," Valentine called to the cabman. "I want some supper," he added.

"I can't come in. I'm not dressed."

"We will have a private room, then. Have you dined?"

"I? No."

Valentine looked at him narrowly.

"Have you been in the Marylebone Road again?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

The answer was the bald truth. In making it Julian experienced a slight feeling of relief. He was putting into words the vagueness that perplexed him. He wondered why he did go to see Cuckoo.

"But you must know. You must have a reason," said Valentine.

"If I have I don't know what it is. I wish you would tell me, old fellow."

"I can't supply you with reasons for all your actions."

"And I can't supply myself with reasons for any of them," Julian said slowly. The words were leading him to a dawning wonder at his own way of life, a dawning desire to know if there were really any reasons for the things he did. But Valentine did not accept the reply as satisfactory. On the contrary, it evidently irritated him still more, for he said with unusual warmth:

"Your reason for dropping your engagements, throwing me over and wasting my evenings is quite obvious. The blessed damozel of the feathers is attractive to you. Her freshness captivates you. Her brilliant conversation entertains you. She is the powdered and painted reason of these irrelevant escapades."

"Don't sneer at her, Val."

The words came quickly, like a bolt. Valentine frowned, and a deepening suspicion flashed in his eyes.

"I did not think you were so easily flattered," he continued.

"Flattered?"

"Yes. Cuckoo Bright admires you, and you go to number 400 to smell the rather rank fumes of the incense which she burns at your shrine."

"Nonsense!" Julian cried warmly.

"What other reason can you have? She has no beauty; she has no conversation, no gaiety, no distinction, no manners--she has nothing.

She is nothing."

"Ah, it's there you're wrong."

"Wrong!"

"When you say she is nothing."

"I say it again," Valentine reiterated almost fiercely.

"The lady of the feathers is nothing, nothing at all. G.o.d and the devil--they have completely forgotten her. A creature like that is neither good, nor would I call her really evil, for she is evil merely that she may go on living, not because she has a fine pleasure in sin.

But if you sell your will for bread and b.u.t.ter, you slip out of the world, the world that must be reckoned with. I say, Cuckoo Bright is nothing."

"And I tell you she is something extraordinary."

As Julian spoke the words the cab stopped at the Savoy. Valentine sprang out and paid the man. His face was flushed as if with heat, despite the piercing cold of the night.

"A private room and supper for two," he said to the man in the vestibule.

"Take my coat," and he drew himself with obvious relief from the embrace of his huge coat. Julian and he said nothing more until they were sitting opposite to one another at a small oval table in a small and strongly decorated room, whose windows faced the Thames Embankment. The waiter uncorked a bottle of champagne with the air of one performing a religious rite. The electric light gleamed and a fire chased the frost from recollection. Julian had already forgotten what they had been talking about in the cab. The first sip of champagne swept the heavy meditativeness from him. But Valentine, unfolding his napkin slowly, and with his eyes on the _menu_, said:

"In what way is she something extraordinary?"

"H'm?" Julian muttered.

"Surely you can define it."

"What, Val?"

"The peculiarity of Cuckoo Bright that you laid so much stress on just now."

"Oh, yes, now I remember. No, I can't define it. How good this soup is.