THE PICCADILLY EPISODE
Doctor Levillier and Julian bade each other good-bye on the doorstep.
The doctor hailed a hansom, but Julian preferred to walk. He wished to be
alone, to feel the cold touch of the air on his face. The dawn was indeed
just breaking, ever so wearily. A strong wind came up with it over the
housetops, and Victoria Street looked dreary in the faint, dusky, grey
light, which grew as slowly in the cloudy sky as hope in a long-starved
heart. Julian lived in Mayfair, and he now walked forward slowly towards
Grosvenor Place, making a deliberate detour for the sake of exercising
his limbs. He was glad to be out under the sky, glad to feel the breeze
on his face, and to be free from the horror of that little room in which
he had kept so appalling a vigil. The dull lines of the houses stretching
away through the foggy perspective were gracious to his eyes. His feet
welcomed the hard fibre of the pavement. They had learned in that night
almost to shudder at the softness of a thick carpet. And all his senses
began to come out of their bondage and to renew their normal sanity. Only
now did Julian realize how strenuous that bondage had been, a veritable
slavery of the soul. Such a slavery could surely only have been possible
within the four walls of a building. An artificial environment must be
necessary to such an artificial condition of feeling. For Julian now
gradually began to believe that Dr. Levillier was right, and that he had
somehow allowed himself to become unnaturally affected and strung up. He
could believe this in the air and in the dawn. For he escaped out of
prison as he walked, and heard the dirty sparrows begin to twitter as
they sank to the brown puddles in the roadway, or soared to the soot that
clung round the chimneys which they loved.
And yet he had been communing with death, had for the first time
completely realized the fact and the meaning of death. What a demon
of the world it was, sly, bitter, chuckling at its power, the one
thing, surely, that has perfect enjoyment of all the things in the
scheme of the earth. What a trick it had played on Julian and on
Valentine. What a trick! And as this idea struck into Julian's mind he
found himself on the pavement by the chemist's shop that is opposite to
the underground railway station of Victoria. His eyes fell on the hutch
of the boy-messengers, and he beheld through the glass shutter three
heads. He crossed the road and tapped on the glass. A young man pulled
it up.
"Want to send a message, sir?"
"No. I wish to speak to one of your boys, if the one I mean is here. Ah,
there he is."
Julian pointed to his little Hermes of the midnight, who was crouched
within, uneasily sleeping, his chin nestling wearily among the medals
which his exemplary conduct had won for him. The young man shook the
child by the shoulder.
"Hulloh, Bob!" he yelled. "Here's a gentleman wants to speak to yer."
Bob came from his dreams with a jerk, and stared upon Julian with his big
brown eyes. Presently he began to realize matters.
"Want another doctor, sir? It ain't no manner of good," he remarked
airily, beginning to search for his cap, and to glow in the prospect of
another cab-ride.
"No," said Julian. "I stopped to tell you that you were wrong. The
gentleman is quite well again."
He put his hand into his pocket and produced half a crown.
"There's something for your mistake," he said.
Bob took it solemnly, and, as Julian walked on, called after him:
"It wasn't my fault, sir; it was father's."
He had more desire to shine as an intellectual authority on great
matters of dissolution than to respect the departed. Julian could not
help smiling at the child's evident discomfiture as he pursued his way
towards Grosvenor Place. On one of the doorsteps of the big houses that
drive respect like a sharp nail into the hearts of the poor passers-by,
a ragged old woman was tumultuously squatting. Her gin-soddened face
came, like a scarlet cloud, to the view from the embrace of a vagabond
black bonnet, braided with rags, viciously glittering here and there
with the stray bugles which survived from some bygone era of comparative
respectability. Her penetrating snores denoted that she was oblivious
of the lounging approach of the policeman, whose blue and burly form
was visible in the extreme distance. Julian stopped to observe her
reflectively. His eye, which loved the grotesque, was pleased by the
bedragglement of her attitude, by the flat foot, in its bursting boot,
which protruded from the ocean of her mud-stained petticoats, by the
wisps of coarse hair wandering in the breeze above her brazen wrinkles.
Poor soul! she kept a diary of her deeds, even though she could perhaps
only make a mark where her signature should have been. Julian stared at
her very intently, and as he did so he started violently, for across the
human background which her sleeping dissipation supplied there seemed to
float the vague shadow, suggestion, call it what you will, of a tongue of
flame.
He walked hastily on, angrily blaming his nerves. As he passed the
policeman he fancied he noticed that the man glanced at him with a
certain flickering suspicion. Was horror legibly written in his face?
he wondered uneasily, confessing to himself that even in the dawn and
the lap of Grosvenor Place a horror had again seized him. What did this
shadow which he had now twice seen portend? Surely his nerves were not
permanently upset. He was at first heartily ashamed of himself. Near St.
George's Hospital, gaunt and grey in the morning, he stopped again, bent
his left arm forcibly, and with his right hand felt the hard lump of
muscle, that sprang up like a ball of iron under his coat sleeve. And
as he felt it he cursed himself for the greatest of all fools. Thin,
meagre little men of the town, tea-party men whose thoughts were ever
on their ties and their moustaches, no doubt gave themselves up readily
to disturbances of the nerves. But Julian had always prided himself on
being an athlete, able to hold his own in the world by mere muscular
force, if need be. He had found it possible to develop side by side brain
and biceps, each to an adequate end. It had seemed grand to him to hold
these scales of his being evenly, to balance them to a hair. Those scales
hung badly now, lopsidedly. One was up in the clouds. He resolved that
the other should correct it. After a cold bath and a sleep he would go
round to Angelo's and have an hour's hard fencing. Cold water, the
Englishman's panacea for every ill, cold steel, the pioneer's Minerva,
would tonic this errant brain of his and drill it into its customary
obedience. So he said to himself.
And yet as he walked there came to him a notion that this little shadow
of a flame was still his companion; that this night just passed, this
day just begun, were the birthnight and the birthday of this small,
ghostlike thing which had come into being to bear him company, to haunt
him. Yes, as he walked, followed always closely by Rip, and saw the tall
iron gates of the Park, Apsley House, the long line of Piccadilly, all
uncertain, gentle, reduced to a whimsical mildness of aspect in the
half-light of the dawning, he again recalled the fact, which he had
mentioned that night to Doctor Levillier, of people watching an invalid
who had seen, at the precise moment of dissolution, the soul escaping
furtively from its fleshy prison like a flame, which was immediately
lost in the air. Surely, wandering souls, if indeed there were such
things, might still retain this faint semblance of a shape, a form. And
if so, they might perhaps occasionally conceive a fantastic attachment
to a human being, and companion him silently as the dog companions his
master. He might have such a companion, whose nature he could not
comprehend, whose object in seeking him out he could not guess. Perhaps
it felt affection toward him; perhaps, on the other hand, enmity. A
lover, or a spy--it might be either. Or it might have no definite
purpose, but simply drift near him in the air, as some human beings
drift feebly along together through life, because they have long ago
loved each other, or thought each other useful, or fancied, in some
moment of madness, that God meant them for each other. It might be an
aimless, dreary soul, unable to be gone from sheer dulness of purpose--a
soul without temperament, without character.
As this thought crossed Julian's mind he happened to glance at the front
of a shop on his left, and against the iron shutters the flame was dimly
but distinctly outlined. He stopped at once to look at it, but even as he
stopped it was gone. Then he sternly brought himself back from the vague
regions of fancy, and was angry that he had permitted himself to wander
in them like a child lost in the forest. He bent down and patted Rip,
and sought to wrench his mind from its wayward course, and to thrust it
forcibly into its accustomed groove of healthy sanity. Yet sanity seemed
to become abruptly commonplace, a sort of whining crossing-sweeper,
chattering untimely, meaningless phrases to him. To divert himself
entirely he paused beside a peripatetic coffee-stall, presided over
by a grey-faced, prematurely old youth, with sharp features and the
glancing eyes of poverty-stricken avarice.
"Give me a cup of coffee," he said.
The youth clattered his wares in excited obedience.
While he was pouring out the steaming liquid there drifted down to Julian
through the grey weariness of the morning a painted girl of the streets,
crowned with a large hat, on which a forest of feathers waved in the weak
and chilly breeze. Julian glanced at her idly enough and she glanced back
at him. Horror, he thought, looked from her eyes as if from a window. As
she returned his gaze she hovered near him in the peculiar desultory way
of such women, and Julian, glad of any distraction, offered her a cup of
coffee. She drew nearer and accepted it.
"And a bun, my dear," she hinted to the sharp-featured youth.
"And a bun," echoed Julian, seeing his doubtful pause of hesitation.
The bun came into view from a hidden basket, and the meal began,
Julian, Rip, and the lady of the feathers forming a companionable group
upon the kerb. The lady's curious and almost thrilling expression, which
had seemed to beacon from some height of her soul some exceptional and
dreary deed, faded under the influence of the dough and currants. A smile
overspread her thin features. She examined Julian with a gracious
interest.
"It's easy to see you've been makin' a night of it, Bertie," she remarked
casually at length, in the suffocated voice of one divided between desire
of conversation and love of food.
"You think so?" said Julian.
"Think so, dear, I'm sure so! Ask me another as I _don't_ know; do
darlin'."
Julian took another draught from the thick coffee-cup that held so
amazingly little.
"And what about yourself?" he said. "Why are you out here so early?"
The lady of the feathers cast a suspicious glance upon him. Then the
horror dawned again in her eyes.
"I'm afraid to go home," she said. "Yes, that's a fact."
"Afraid--why?" Julian spoke abstractedly. In truth he merely talked to
this floating wisp of humanity to distract his mind, and thought of her
as a strange female David of the streets sent to make a cockney music
in his ears that his soul might be rid of its evil spirit.
"Never you mind why," the lady answered.
She shivered suddenly, violently, as a dog just come out of water.
"Have another cup?" Julian said.
"And a bun, dearie," the lady again rejoined. She shook her head till all
the feathers danced.
"Never you mind why," she said, reverting again to his vagrant question.
"There's some things as don't do to talk about."
"I'm sure I've no wish to pry into your private affairs," Julian rejoined
carelessly.
But again he noticed the worn terror of her face. Surely that night she,
too, had passed through some unwonted experience, which had written its
sign-manual amid the paint and powder of her shame.
The lady stared back at him. Beneath her tinted eyelids the fear seemed
to grow like a weed. Tears followed, rolling over her cheeks and mingling
with the coffee in her cup.
"Oh dear," she murmured lamentably. "Oh, dear, oh!"
"What's the matter?" said Julian.
But she only shook her head, with the peevish persistence of weak
obstinacy, and continued vaguely to weep as one worn down by chill
circumstance.
Julian turned his eyes from her to the coffee-stall, in which the
sharp-featured youth now negligently leant, well satisfied with the
custom he had secured. Behind the youth's head it seemed to Julian that
the phantom flame hung trembling, as if blown by the light wind of
the morning. He laid his hand on the lady's left arm and unconsciously
closed his fingers firmly over the flesh, while, in a low voice, he
said to her:
"Look there!"
The lady of the feathers stopped crying abruptly, as if her tears were
suddenly frozen at their source.
"Where, dearie?" she said jerkily. "Whatever do you mean?"
"There where the cups are hung up. Don't you see anything?"
But the lady was looking at him, and she now dropped her cup with a crash
to the pavement.
"There's a go," said the sharp-featured youth. "You're a nice one, you
are!"
Without regarding his protest, the lady violently wrenched her arm from
Julian's grasp and recoiled from the stall.
"Le-go my arm," she babbled hysterically. "Le-go, I say. I can't stand
any more--no, I can't."
"I'm not going to hurt you," said Julian, astonished at her outburst.
But she only repeated vehemently:
"Let go, let me go!"
Backing away, she trod the fallen coffee-cup to fragments on the
pavement, and began to drift down Piccadilly, her face under the
feathers set so completely round over her shoulder, in observation of
Julian, that she seemed to be promenading backwards. And as she went
she uttered deplorable wailing sounds, which gradually increased in
volume. Apparently she considered that her life had been in imminent
danger, and that she saved herself by shrieks; for, still keeping her
face toward the coffee-stall, she faded away in the morning, until
only the faint noise of her retreat betokened her existence any longer.
The sharp-featured youth winked wearily at Julian from the midst of his
grove of coffee-cups.
"Nice things, women, sir," he ejaculated. "Good ayngels the books calls
'm. O Gawd!"
Julian paid him and walked away.
And as he went he found himself instinctively watching for the fleeting
shadow of a flame, trying to perceive it against the grey face of a
house, against the trunk of a tree, the dark green of a seat. But the
light of the mounting morning grew ever stronger and the flame-shaped
shadow did not reappear.
Julian reached his chambers, undressed abstractedly and went to bed.
Before he fell asleep he looked at Rip reposing happily at the foot of
the bed, and had a moment of shooting wonder that the little dog was so
completely comfortable with him. That it had flown at its master, who
had always been kind to it, whom it had always seemed to love hitherto,
puzzled Julian.
But then so many things had puzzled him within the last few days.
He stroked Rip with a meditative hand and lay down. Soon his mind began
to wander in the maze whose clue is sleep. He was with Valentine, with
Doctor Levillier, with the sharp-featured youth and the lady of the
feathers. They sat round a table and it was dark; yet he could see. And
the lady's feathers grew like the beanstalk of Jack the Giant-killer
towards heaven and the land of ogres. Then Julian climbed up and up till
he reached the top of the ladder. And it seemed to him that the feather
ladder ended in blue space and in air, and that far away he saw the
outline of a golden bar. And on this bar two figures leaned. One seemed
an angel, one a devil. Yet they had faces that were alike, and were
beautiful. They faded.
Julian seemed vaguely to hear the sharp-featured youth say, "Good
ayngels! O Gawd!"
Was that the motto of his sleep?