CHAPTER X

THE DANCE OF THE HOURS

Even so huge a city as London, full of so many varying personalities and

clashing interests, assumes upon certain days of the year a particular

and characteristic aspect, arising from a community of curiosity, of

excitement, or of delight felt by its inhabitants. Such days are Derby

day and boat-race day. On the latter more especially London is leavened

by a huge mob of juveniles from the universities, and their female

admirers from the country, who cast a pleasant spell over the frigid

indifference of town-bred dullards, and wake even the most vacuous of the

Piccadilly loungers into a certain vivacity and boyishness. The cabmen

blossom cheerily in dark and light blue favours. The butcher-boys are

partisans. Every _gamin_ in the gutter is all for one boat or for the

other, and dances excitedly to know the result. London, in fact, loses

several wrinkles on boat-race day, and smiles itself into a very pleasant

appearance of briskness and of youth. As a rule, Julian went to see the

race and to lunch with his friends at Putney or elsewhere, without either

abnormal experience of excitement or any unusual vivacity. He was

naturally full of life, and had hot blood in his veins, loved a

spectacle, and especially a struggle of youth against youth. But no

boat-race day had ever stirred him as this one did--found him so

attentive to outside influence, so receptive of common things. For

Julian had recently been half-conscious that he was progressing, and with

increasing rapidity, though he knew not in what exact direction. Simply,

he had the feeling of motion, of journeying, and it seemed to him that he

had been standing comparatively still for years. And this boat-race day

came to him like a flashing milestone upon the road of life. He felt as

if it held in its hours a climax of episodes or of emotions, as if upon

it either his body or his mind must prepare to undergo some large

experience, to meet the searching eyes of a face new and unfamiliar.

Possibly the reason of his own excitement lay in the excitement of

another, in the curious preparations, which he had oddly shared, for the

transformation of the unmistakable into the vague. For the transformation

of Cuckoo Bright had been preparing apace, and Julian was looking forward

like a schoolboy to the effect which her novel respectability of

appearance would have upon Valentine. The rouge-box lay lonely and

untouched in a drawer. Even the powder-puff suffered an unaccustomed

neglect. The black gown had been tried on and taught to fit the thin

young figure, and a hat--with only one feather--kept company with the

discarded sarcophagus which had given to Cuckoo her original nickname.

And Cuckoo herself was almost as excited as Francine when she received

her muff. She had not seen Valentine since the day of the tea-party,

yet her attitude of mind had undergone a change towards him, bent to it

probably by her vanity. Ever since Julian had given her the invitation to

the Empire she had displayed a furtive desire to meet him again, and was

perpetually talking of him and asking questions about him. Nevertheless

her fear of him had not died away. Even now she sometimes exclaimed

against him almost with vehemence, and made Julian renew his promise not

to leave her during the evening. But Julian could see that she longed, as

well as dreaded, to meet him again. After all, had he not picked her out

from all the girlhood of London as one to whom he wished, to do honour?

Had he been the Minotaur, such a fact must have made her look upon him

with desirous interest.

When the great day arrived poor Cuckoo had to struggle with a keen and a

sore temptation. She longed to deck herself out in her usual borrowed

plumage, to take the habitual brilliant complexion out of the accustomed

drawer, to crown her frizzed head with feathers, and to look noisily

dashing--her only idea of elegance and grace. Never before had she so

desired to create an impression. Yet she had given Julian her most solemn

promise, and she intended to keep it. As she slowly attired herself,

however, she wondered very much why he was so set upon denuding her of

her accustomed magnificence. Her mind was entirely unable to grasp his

conception of beauty and of attractiveness. She thought all men preferred

the peony to the violet. To-night it was very certain that she would be

no peony, scarcely even a violet. Her new gown had been expensive, but it

was terribly simple, and the skirt hung beautifully, but was surely most

direfully sombre. Nevertheless, it rustled with a handsome sound, a

melody of wealth, when she had put it on and promenaded about her dingy

bedroom, with Jessie at her heels, pretending to worry it playfully. The

black bodice had some trimming. But it was all black. Cuckoo wished it

had been scarlet, or, at the least, orange--something to catch the eye

and hold it. When she was fully attired, and was staring into her glass,

between two boldly flaring gas-jets, she nearly resolved to break her

promise to Julian. She even went so far as to paint her lips and eyes,

and was charmed with the effect against the black. But then with a sudden

fury she sponged her pale face clean, threw the new feather boa round her

throat, and, without daring to glance again at her funereal image, turned

out the gas, and went into the sitting-room. As usual, her last act was

to ensconse the pensive Jessie in the flannel-lined basket, and to give

her a kiss. To-night, as she did so, she let a tear fall on the little

dog's head. She scarcely knew why she cried. Perhaps the quiet gown, the

lack of paint and powder, the prospect of kind and even respectful

treatment from at least Julian, if not from Valentine, gave to her heart

a vision of some existence in which Piccadilly Circus had no part.

Jessie shivered as she felt the tear, and licked the face of her mistress

eagerly. Then Cuckoo rustled forth, avoiding Mrs. Brigg, who might be

heard laboriously ascending the kitchen stairs to view her in her gala

attire. In the twinkling of an eye she was out in the street, and Mrs.

Brigg returned, swearing gustily, to the lower regions.

Cuckoo was to join the young men in their box, of which she had received

the number. She took a cab to the Empire, and was there in excellent

time. As she paid the man, she saw several women going noisily in,

dressed in bright colours and gigantic hats. She looked at them, and

felt terribly mean and poor, and it was with no trace of her usual airy

impudence that she asked her way of the towering attendant in uniform who

stood at the bottom of the carpeted staircase.

Julian and Valentine were already there. They turned round as she came

in, and stood up to receive her. Julian took her hand, but Valentine

hesitated for a moment. Then he said:

"Is it--can it be really Miss Bright?"

"Sure enough it is," Cuckoo answered, with an effort after liveliness.

But her eyes were fixed on his. She had seen a curious expression of

mingled annoyance and contempt flit across his face as she came in.

Why, why had she allowed Julian to over-persuade her? She was looking

horrible, a scarecrow, a ghost of a woman. She was certain of it. For

a moment she felt almost angry with Julian for placing her in such a

bitter position. But he was glowing with a consciousness of successful

diplomacy, and was delighted with her neat black aspect, and with her

smart, though small, hat. He was indeed surprised to find how really

pretty she still was when she allowed her true face to be seen, and was

only wishing that she had made a little less of her hair, which was more

vigorously arranged even than usual. He glanced to see Valentine's

surprise.

"You are so altered," the latter continued. "I scarcely recognized you."

Cuckoo's lips tightened.

"Altered or not, it's me, though," she said.

Valentine did not reply to this. He only made her come to the front of

the box, and placed a chair for her. She sat down feeling like a dog just

whipped. The young men were on each side of her, and the band played an

overture. Cuckoo peered out over the bar of the box, shifting ever so

little away from the side on which Valentine sat. In his presence all her

original and extreme discomfort returned, with an added enmity caused by

her secret certainty that he thought her looking her worst. She peered

from the box and strove to interest herself in the huge crowd that

thronged the house, and in her own dignified and elevated position in it.

For Valentine had taken one of the big boxes next the stage on the

first tier, and Cuckoo had never been in such a situation before. She

could survey the endless rows of heads in the stalls with a completeness

of bird's-eye observation never previously attained. What multitudes

there were. Endless ranks of men, all staring in the same direction,

all smoking, all with handkerchiefs peeping out of their cuffs, and gold

rings on their little fingers. Some of them looked half asleep, others,

who had evidently been dining, threw themselves back in their stalls,

roaring with laughter, and leaning to tell each other stories that must

surely have teemed with wit. Most of them were young. But here and there

an elderly and lined figure-head appeared among them, a figure-head

that had faced many sorts of weather in many shifting days and nights,

and that must soon face eternity--instead of time. Yet at the gates of

death it still sipped its brandy and soda, smiled over a French song

with tired lips, and sat forward with a pale gleam dawning in its eyes

to reconnoitre the charms of a _ballet_. And if it looked aside at youth

and was pierced by the sword of tragedy, yet it was too well bred or too

conventional to let even one of the world around witness the wound. There

is much secret bravery in social life. But these elderly figure-heads

were fewer than usual to-night. Youth seemed to have usurped the

playing-grounds of pleasure, to have driven old age away into the

shadows. With flag flying, with trumpet and drum, it gaily held the

field. The lady of the feathers, Valentine, and Julian leaned out from

their box as from the car of a balloon and saw below them a world of

youth hand in hand with the world of pleasure the gods offer to youth as

wine. It was yet early in the evening, and the hours were only tripping

along, as women trip in the pictures of Albert Moore. They had not begun

to dance, although the band was playing a laughing measure from an opera

of Auber that foams with frivolity. Men kept dropping in, cigar in mouth,

walking to their seats with that air of well-washed and stiff composure

peculiar to British youth, grim with self-consciousness, but affecting

the devil-may-care with a certain measure of success. Some of them

escorted ladies, but by far the greater number were in couples, or in

parties of three or four. The rose of health, or, in many cases, of

repletion, sat enthroned upon their cheeks; on the upper lips of many the

moustaches were budding delicately. These were just getting up on the box

and gripping the reins for the great coach-drive. Little wonder if the

veins in their eager hands stood out. Little wonder if they flourished

the whip with an unnecessary vehemence. But for them, too, so far the

hours were only tripping, a slow and a dainty measure, a formal minuet.

And they were but watching. Only later would they rise up and join the

great dance of the hours, large, complicated, alluring, through whose

measures the feet of eventual saints have trod, whose music rings in the

ears of many who, long after, try to pray and to forget. Some who were

with women made conversation jocosely, putting on travesties of military

airs, and a knowingness of expression that might have put the wisdom of

the Sphinx to shame. Nor did they hesitate to appear amorous in the

public eye. On the contrary, their attitudes of attention were purposely

assumed silently to utter volumes. They lay, to all intents and purposes,

at the feet of their houris, as Samson lay shorn at the feet of Delilah.

In loud young voices they told the secrets of their hearts, until even

the clash of the music could scarcely keep them hidden. And Delilah,

who had shorn the locks of so many Samsons, and who had heard so many

secrets, gave ear with a clever affectation of interested surprise that

deceived these gay deceivers and set them high on the peaks of their own

estimation. Two or three family parties, one obviously French, seemed out

of place, indecently domestic in the midst of such a throng, in which

matrimony was a Cinderella before the ball, cuffed in curl-papers rather

than kissed in crystal slippers. They sat rather silent. One consisted of

a father, a mother and two daughters, the latter in large flowered hats.

The father smoked. The mother looked furtive in a bonnet, and the two

daughters, with wide open eyes, examined the flirtations around them as a

child examines a butterfly caught in a net. One of them blushed. But she

did not turn away her eyes. Nor were her girlish ears inactive. Family

life seemed suddenly to become dull to her. She wondered whether it were

life at all. And the father still smoked domestically. He knew it all.

That was the difference. And perhaps it was his knowledge that made him

serenely content with domesticity and the three women who belonged to

him. Two boys, who had come up from a public school for the race, and had

forgotten to go back, sat at the end of a row in glistening white collars

and neat ties, almost angrily observant of all that was going on around

them. For them the dance of the hours was already begun, and already

become a can-can. They watched it with an eager interest and excitement,

and the calm self-possession with which some of the men near them made

jokes to magnificently dressed women with diamond earrings struck them

dumb with admiration. Yet, later on, they too were fated to join in the

dance, when the stars affected to sleep on the clouds and the moon lay

wearily inattentive to the pilgrims of the night, like an invalid in a

blue boudoir. On the thick carpet by the wall attendants stood loaded

with programmes. One of them, very trim and respectable, in a white cap,

was named Clara and offered a drink by an impudent Oxonian. She giggled

with all the vanity of sixteen, happily forgetful of her husband and

of the seven children who called her mother. Yet the dance of the hours

was a venerable saraband to her, and she often wished she was in bed as

she stood listening to the familiar music. In the enclosure set apart for

the orchestra the massed musicians earned their living violently in the

midst of the gaily dressed idlers, who heard them with indifference, and

saw them as wound-up marionettes. The drummer hammered on his blatant

instrument with all the crude skill of his tribe, producing occasional

terrific noises with darting fists, while his face remained as immovable

as that of a Punchinello. A flautist piped romantically an Arcadian

measure, while his prominent eyes stared about over the chattering

audience as if in search of some one. Suddenly he gave a "couac." He had

seen his sweetheart in the distance with a youth from Christ Church. The

conductor turned on the estrade in the centre of the orchestra and

scowled at him, and he hastened to become Arcadian once again, gazing at

his flute as if the devil had entered into it. In a doorway shrouded with

heavy curtains two acting managers talked warily, their hands in retreat

behind their coat-tails. They surveyed the house and mentally calculated

the amount of money in it, raising their eyes to the more distant

promenade, at the back of which large hats covered with flowers and

feathers moved steadily to and fro. One of them curled his lips and

murmured the word "Chant." Then they both laughed and strolled out to

the bar. More men passed in. Many could not get seats, and these stood,

smoking and exchanging remarks in the broad space between the stalls and

the wall. Some of them leaned nonchalantly against it and criticised the

appearance of the seated audience, or nodded to acquaintances. Others

gathered round the bar, and a few looked at the drop-curtain as if they

thought their ascetic glances would cause it to roll up and disappear.

The overture at length ended. The stage was disclosed, and a man came

forward with a smirk, and a wriggle of gigantic feet, to sing a song.

But Cuckoo Bright, Valentine, and Julian, from their balloon-car, still

surveyed the world. Cuckoo had heard the man before. She was no stranger

to the upper regions of the Empire, but the fascination of knowing

herself watched and commented on from the stalls was a new experience,

and she wished to make the most of it. Forgetting that she was not

painted and powdered, she stretched herself into view and believed she

was creating a sensation. So absorbed was she in the grand effort of

being seen, that when Valentine drew his chair a little closer to her

she did not notice it. One of her hands lay on her lap, the other being

on the ledge of the box supporting her chin. She returned eagerly the

glances of the stalls. The hand that was in her lap felt another hand

close on it. Instinctively Cuckoo turned towards Julian, ready to smile.

But Julian was gazing absorbed at the crowd, and half abstractedly

listening to the song of the man in the huge, distorted boots. It was

Valentine who held her hand. She tried to draw it away. He merely

tightened his grip on it and continued sitting in silence, not even

looking towards her. And as he held her hand a sense of helplessness came

over Cuckoo. Even through his kid glove she could feel the burning heat

of his palm, of the fingers that clutched hers with the strength of an

athlete. She gazed towards him through the new black veil that was drawn

over her face, and it seemed even to her limited intelligence that the

man who was so brutally holding her against her will could not be the man

at whom she was now looking. For Valentine, whose profile was set towards

her, was pale, calm, almost languid in appearance. His blue eyes were

glancing quietly over the multitude, with an air of indifferent

observation. His lips were slightly parted in a sort of dawning smile,

and his whole attitude was that of a man lazily at ease and taking his

pleasure in a desultory mood. Yet the hand on Cuckoo's knees was vicious

in its grasp. This startling and silent contradiction threw her into a

complete panic, but she did not dare to say anything in protest. She

sat silently trembling, and drawing her lips together in growing

perturbation, till Julian happened to turn towards them. Then Valentine's

fingers relaxed their grasp quietly, and slipped away. At the same time

he moved with an air of energy, and broke into gay conversation. His

languor vanished. His blue eyes sparkled. Julian was astonished at his

intense vivacity. He laughed, made jokes, became absolutely boyish.

"Why, Val, how gay you are!" Julian said.

"Every one is gay to-night."

He was interrupted by a roar of laughter. The man in the boots was

becoming immoderately whimsical. His feet seemed to have escaped from

control, and to be prancing in Paradise while he looked on in Purgatory.

"Every one is gay."

As Valentine repeated the words, and the huge theatre laughed like one

enormous person, Julian felt again the strange thrill of overmastering

excitement that had shaken him on the night when he and Valentine had

leaned out of the Victoria Street window. The strength of the spring

and of his long tended and repressed young instincts stirred within

him mightily. Scales fell from his eyes. From the car of the balloon

he gazed down, and it seemed to him that they--Valentine, Cuckoo,

and himself--were drifting over a new country, of which all the

inhabitants were young, gay, careless, rightly irresponsible. The

rows of open-mouthed, laughing faces called to him to join in their

mirth,--more, to join in their lives, and in the lives of the pirouetting

hours. He moved in his chair as if he were impelled to get up and leave

his seat. And as he moved a voice whispered in his ear:

"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."

Was it Valentine's voice? He turned round hastily, curiously perturbed.

"Val, was that you? Did you speak to me?"

"No."

Julian looked at Cuckoo. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes shone with

dancing excitement.

"Did you, Cuckoo?"

"Not I, dearie. I say, ain't he funny to-night?"

Then the voice must have spoken in his own brain. He listened for it and

fancied he could hear it again and again, driving him on like a phantom

fate. But the voice was in timbre like the voice of Valentine, and he

felt as if Valentine spoke with a strange insistence and reiteration.

His heart, his whole being, made answer to the whisper.

"To-morrow we die. It is true. Ah, then, let us--let us eat and let us

drink."

The man in the boots wriggled furiously into the wings, and the curtain

rose on the ballet. Wenzel had ascended to the conductor's platform amid

loud applause. The first weary melodies of "Faust" streamed plaintively

from the orchestra, and a gravity came over the rows of faces in the

stalls. Julian's face, too, was grave, but his excitement and his sense

of his own power of youth grew as he looked on. The old Faust appeared,

heavy with the years and with the trouble of useless thought, and Julian

felt that he could sneer at him for his venerable age. As he watched the

philosopher's grandiloquent pantomime of gesture, like a mist there

floated over him the keen imagination of the hell of regret in which the

old age, that never used to the full its irrevocable youth, must move,

and a passion of desire to use his own youth rushed over him as fire

rushes over a dry prairie. Even a sudden anger against Valentine came to

him,--against Valentine for the protection he had given through so many

years. For had he not been protecting Julian against joy? and does not

the capacity for joy pass away with a tragic swiftness? As Faust was

transformed into youth, and the ballet danced in the market-place, Julian

turned to Valentine and said:

"We will live to-night."

Valentine laughed.

"You look excited."

"I feel excited. Don't you?"

Valentine answered:

"I may presently. We mustn't stay in here all the evening."

There was a knock at the door of the box. An attendant appeared to ask

their orders. Valentine spoke some words to him, and in a few minutes he

brought three long drinks to the box. Julian drank his mechanically. His

eyes were always on the ballet. The betrayal of poor Margaret had now

been accomplished and the soldiers were returning from the wars. Beyond

the wall of the garden the tramp of their feet was heard, a vision of the

tops of their passing weapons was seen. The orchestra played the fragment

of a march. Cuckoo sipped her brandy and soda, and gazed sometimes at the

stage indifferently, often at the audience eagerly, and then at Julian.

When her eyes were on Julian's face a light came into them that made her

expression young, and even pure. A simplicity hovered about her lips, and

a queer dawning of something that was almost refinement spoke in her

attitude. But if she chanced to meet the eyes of Valentine her face was

full of fear.

And now the last great scene of the pageant approached, and the two

schoolboys leant forward in their stalls in a passion of greedy

excitement. Julian happened to see them, and instead of smiling at their

frankly lustful attitudes with the superiority of the drilled man over

the child, he was conscious of an eager sympathy with their vigour of

enjoyment and of desire. His nature retrograded and became a schoolboy's

nature, with the whole garden of life flowering before its feet. Suddenly

there came to him the need of touching something human. He stole his arm

closely around Cuckoo's waist. She glanced at him surprised. But his eyes

were turned away to the stage. Valentine pushed his chair a little

backwards. He was watching them, and when he saw the movement of Julian's

arm, he laughed to himself. The classical Sabbath sprang into view, and

it seemed to be just then that the feet of the hours first began to move

in the opening steps of their great dance of that night. Was it the

magnificent Cleopatra that gave them the signal? Or did Venus herself

whisper in their ears that the time for their _fête_ was come at length,

that the paid vagaries of the stage demanded companionship, and that the

audience, too, must move in great processions, whirl in demon circles,

rise up in heart to the clash of cymbals, bow down before the goddesses

of the night, the women who gave to modern men the modern heaven that

they desire in our days? The stage was a waving sea of scarlet, through

which one white woman floated, like a sin with pale cheeks in the midst

of the rubicund virtues. She was, perhaps, not beautiful, but she was

provocative and alluring, and her whiteness made her as voluptuous as

innocence is when it moves through the habitations of the wicked. Julian

watched her come to Faust and win him from the scarlet dancers and from

the arms of Cleopatra, and the strange rejuvenation of this philosopher

who had been old, and known decaying faculties, and the flight of the

heart from the warm closes of the summer to the white and iron winter

plains, filled him with sympathy. It must be easy to use your youth after

you have known the enforced reserve of age. For age is a bitter lesson.

The dance grew more wild and rattling. The _frou-frou_ of the swinging

scarlet skirts filled the great house with sound as the glitter of

spangles filled it with a shimmering light. Faust was surrounded by

fluttering women moving in complicated evolutions with a trained air of

reckless devilry. And Julian gave himself to the illusion created by the

skill of Katti Lanner, ignoring entirely the real care of the dancers,

and choosing to consider them as merely driven by wild impulse, vagrant

desires of furious motion, and the dashing gaiety of keen sensual

sensation. They danced to fire a real Faust, and he was Faust for the

moment. His arm closed more firmly round the waist of Cuckoo, and he

could feel the throbbing of her heart against the palm of his hand. He

did not look at her, and so he did not see the dawning anxiety with which

she was beginning furtively to regard him. Entirely engrossed with the

stage spectacle, the movement of his arm had been entirely mechanical,

prompted by the hardening pressure of excitement in his mind. If he had

actually crushed Cuckoo and hurt her he would have been unconscious that

he was doing it.

And Valentine all this time leaned back in his chair, that stood in the

shadow of the box, and looked at the enlaced figures before him with an

unvarying smile.

Contrast and surprise are the essence of the successful "spectacle."

Just as the scarlet dervish whirl was at its height the character of

the music changed, slackened, softened, died from the angrily sensuous

into an ethereal delicacy. The stage filled with clouds that faded in

golden light, and a huge and glittering stairway rose towards the painted

sky. On either side of it hung in the blue ether guardian angels with

outstretched wings, and between their attentive ranks stood the radiant

figure of the purified Margaret, at whose white feet the red crowd of

women, even the majestic Cleopatra and pale voluptuous Venus, sank

abashed. Harps sounded frostily, suggesting that crystal heaven of St.

John, in which the beauties we know in nature are ousted by unbreathing

jewels, the lifeless pearl and chrysolite. The air filled with thin and

wintry light, that deepened, and began to glow, through lemon to amber

and to rose. The angels swam in it, and then the huge stairway leading

up to heaven shone with the violence of a gigantic star. Faust fell in

repentance before the girl he had ruined and failed to ruin, the girl who

bent as if to bless him upon this fiery ascent to heaven. And Julian,

absorbed, devoured the wide and glowing scene with his eyes, which were

attracted especially by the living flames that were half veiled and half

revealed beneath the feet of Margaret. The music of the orchestra rippled

faintly, and then it seemed to Julian that, as if in answer, there

rippled up from the golden stairs and from the hidden company of flames

that faint, thin riband of shadowy fire which had already so strangely

been with him in the dawn and in the dusk. It came from beneath the

pausing feet of the girl who blessed Faust, and trembled upwards slowly

above her glittering hair. Julian felt a burning sensation at his heart,

as if the tiny fire found its way there. He turned round sharply,

withdrawing his arm from Cuckoo's waist with an abruptness that startled

her.

"Valentine!" he exclaimed in a whisper. "There; now you see it."

Valentine leaned to him.

"See what?"

"The flame. It's no fancy. It's no chimera. Look, it is mounting up

behind Margaret. Watch it, Valentine, and tell me what it is."

"I see nothing."

Julian stared into his eyes, as if to make certain that he really spoke

the truth. Then Valentine asked of Cuckoo:

"Miss Bright, can you see this flame of which Julian speaks?"

Cuckoo answered, with the roughness that always came to her in the

company of alarm:

"Not I. There ain't nothing, no more than there was that day when I had

the coffee."

She added to Julian, reproachfully:

"You've been drinkin'. Now, dearie, you have."

Suddenly his two companions became intolerable to Julian. He thought them

stupid, boorish, dense, devoid of the senses of common humanity, not to

see what he saw, not to feel as he felt,--that this vague flame had a

meaning and a message not yet interpreted, perhaps not even remotely

divined. With an angry exclamation he sprang to his feet, turning once

more to the stage. And as the curtain fell, he distinctly saw the flame

glowing like a long and curiously shaped star above the head of Margaret.

And this man and woman would not see it! A sudden enmity to them both

came to him in that moment. He abruptly opened the door of the box, and

went out without another word to either of them. Cuckoo's voice shrilly

calling to him to stop did not affect his resolution and desire to escape

from them if only for a moment.

Out in the corridor at the back of the dress circle people were beginning

to circulate, relieved from the tension of examining the ballet. Julian

was instantly swallowed up in a noisy crowd, hot, flushed, loud-voiced,

bright-eyed. Masses of excited young men lounged to and fro, smoking

cigarettes, and making fervent remarks upon the gaily dressed women, who

glided among them observantly. From the adjoining bar rose the music of

popping corks and flowing liquids. The barmaids were besieged. Clouds of

smoke hung in the air, and the heat was terrific. Julian felt it clinging

to him as if with human arms as he slowly walked over the thick carpet,

glancing about him. Humanity touched him on every side. At one moment an

elderly woman, with yellow hair and a fat-lined face, enveloped him in

her skirts of scarlet and black striped silk. The black chiffon that

swept about her neck and heaving shoulders fluttered against his face.

Her high-heeled boots trod on his. He seemed one with her. Then she had

vanished, and instantly he was in the arms of a huge racing-man, who wore

gigantic pink pearls in his shirt front, and bellowed the latest slang to

a thin and dissipated companion. It seemed to Julian that he was kicked

like a football from one life to another, and that from each life he drew

away something as he bounded from it, the fragment of a thought, the

thrill of a desire, the indrawn breath of a hope. Like a machine that

winds in threads of various coloured silks, he wound in threads from the

various coloured hearts about him,--red, white, coarse, and fine. And,

half-unconsciously, was he not weaving them into a fabric? Never before

had he understood the meaning of a crowd, that strange congregation of

passions and of fates which speaks in movements and is melodious in

attitudes, which quarrels in all its parts, silently, yet is swayed

through and through by large impulses, and as an intellect far more keen

and assertively critical than the intellect of any one person in it. And

now, when Julian began to feel the meaning of this surging mob of men and

women, the hours danced, and he and all the crowd danced with them. And

the music that accompanied and directed the feet through the figures of

that night's quadrille was the music of words and of laughter, of hissing

enticements and of whispered replies. Irresistible was the performance

of the hours and of the crowd that lived in them. Julian knew it when the

dance began, marvelled at it for a little when the dance was ended. There

was contagion in the air, furtive, but strong as the contagion of

cholera,--the contagion of human creatures gathered together in the

night. Only the youth who dwells--like Will-o'-the-Mill--forever by the

lonely stream in the lonely mountain valley escapes it entirely. Aged

saints look backward on their lives, and remember at least one night

when it seized them in its embrace; and even the purest woman, through

its spell, has caught sight of the vision behind the veil of our

civilization, and although she has shrunk from it, has had a moment of

wonder and of interest, never quite effaced from her memory.

On every side the Oxford and Cambridge boys laughed and shouted, pushed

and elbowed. They had begun to cast off restraint, and the god that is

rowdy on a rowdy throne compelled them to their annual obeisance at his

feet. Some of them moved along singing, and interrupting their song with

shouts. Friends, when they met in the crowd, yelled shrill recognitions

at each other, and nicknames sang in the air like noisy birds. Rows of

men linked arms, and, striding forward, compelled the throng to yield

them difficult passage, swinging this way and that to make their progress

more comprehensive. The attendants, standing by the wall like giants,

calmly smiled on the growing uproar, into which they darted now and then

with a sudden frenzy of dutiful agility to eject some rude wit who had

transgressed their code of propriety. The very spirit of lusty youth was

in this crowd of hot, careless, blatant, roving youths, mad to find

themselves away from the cool and grey Oxford towers, and from the vacant

banks of the Cam, in passionate Leicester Square, fired by the scarlet

ballet, and the thunder of the orchestra, and the sight of smart women.

Sudden emancipation is the most flaming torch to human passions that

exists in the world. It flared through all that mob, urging it to

conflagration, to the flames that burst up in hearts that are fresh and

ardent, and that so curiously confuse joy with wickedness.

Flames! flames! The word ran in Julian's mind, and in his breast flames

surely burned that night, for, when he suddenly ran against Valentine and

Cuckoo in the throng, he caught Valentine by the arm and said:

"Val, you were right just now. There was no flame; there could have been

no flame where Margaret stood. She was too pure. What can fire have to do

with snow? Cuckoo, I was a fool. Catch hold of my arm."

He pulled her arm roughly through his, never noticing how pale the girl's

face was, how horror-stricken were her eyes. He wanted to bathe himself,

and her, and Valentine, in this crowd that influenced him and that he

helped to influence. He felt as the diver feels, who, when he plunges,

has a sacred passion for the depths. There are people who have an ardour

for going down comparable to the ardour felt by those who mount. Tonight

such an ardour took hold of Julian.

Valentine fell in with it, seeing the humour of his friend, and Cuckoo,

prisoned between the two men, did not attempt to resist them. As they

moved on Valentine said, in a voice he made loud that it might be heard:

"Now, you feel the strength of the spring, Julian. Is it not better than

all my teachings of asceticism?"

"Yes, by ----, it is."

And as he made that answer, Julian, for the first time, forgot to look

up to Valentine, and felt a splendid equality with him, the equality

that men of the same age and temper feel when they are bent on the same

pursuit. How can one of two Bacchanals stoop in adoration of the other,

when both are bounding in the procession of Silenus? Valentine fell from

his pedestal and became a comrade instead of a god. He was no longer the

chaperon of the dancing hours, but their partner. And a new fire shone in

his blue eyes, an unaccustomed red ran over his cheeks, as he heard

Julian's answer to his question. From that moment he ceased to play what,

it seemed, had been but a part, the empty ivory _rôle_ of saint. For

Julian was no longer conscious or observant of him, no longer able to

wonder at his abrupt transformation. In a flash he cast off his habitual

restraint and passed from the reserve of thought to the rowdyism of act.

He chattered unceasingly, dressing his English in all the slang

embroidery of the day. He laughed and chaffed, exchanged repartees with

the flowing multitude through which they passed, stopped to speak to the

flaunting women and loaded them with extravagant compliments, elbowed

loungers out of his way, and made the most personal remarks on those

around him. Two men went by, and one of them exclaimed, with a surprised

glance at Valentine:

"I'm damned! Why, there goes the Saint of Victoria Street."

"Saint!" said the other; "I should think devil the more appropriate name.

That chap looks up to anything."

"Ah, well; when a saint turns sinner--," answered the first speaker, with

a laugh.

Valentine heard the words and burst into a roar of laughter. He drew

Cuckoo to the left and Julian followed. They passed under an archway into

the bar, which was crowded with men, drinking and talking at the tops of

their voices. Valentine called for drinks in a voice so loud and

authoritative that the barmaid hurried to serve him, deserting other

customers, who protested vainly. He forced Cuckoo to drink, and Julian

needed no urging. Clinking glasses noisily with them, he gave as a toast:

"To the dance of the hours!"

These words, uttered with almost strident force, attracted attention even

amid the violent hubbub that was raging, and several young men pressed

round Valentine as he stood with his back against the counter of the bar.

They raised their glasses, too, half in ridicule, and shouting in chorus,

"To the dance of the hours!" drained them to this toast, which they could

not comprehend. Valentine dashed his glass down. It broke and was

trodden under foot. The barmaid protested. He threw her a sovereign. The

young men gathered round, broke theirs in imitation, and Julian,

snatching Cuckoo's from her, flung it away. As he did so, Valentine

thrust another, filled with champagne, into her hand, and again cried

out the toast.

"What the deuce does he mean by it?" one youth called out. "The dance of

the hours; what's that?"

"The dance of the hours! The dance of the hours!" echoed other voices,

and glasses were drained wildly. There was something exciting in the mere

sound of the words that seemed to set brains jigging, and feet moving,

and the world spinning and bowing. For if Time itself danced, what could

the most Puritan human being do but dance with it? Seeing the crowd round

Valentine, men who were drinking at the other end of the bar joined it,

and the toast passed quickly from mouth to mouth. Uttered by every

variety of voice, with every variety of accent, it filled the stifling

atmosphere, and tickled many an empty brain, like the catchword political

that can set a nation behind one astute wire-puller. Boys yelled it, men

murmured it, and an elderly woman in a plush gown and yellow feathers

screamed it out in a piercing soprano that would have put many a

trumpet-blast to shame. Glasses were emptied and filled again in its

honour. Yet nobody knew what it meant, and apparently nobody cared,

except the Oxford boy who had already expressed his desire to be better

informed on the subject. He had gradually edged his way through the

throng until he was close to Valentine, at whom he gazed with a sort of

tipsy reverence.

"I say, you chap," he cried. "What are we drinking to--eh? What the

devil's the dance of the hours?"

Valentine brought his glass down on the counter.

"What is it?" he exclaimed. "Why, the greatest dance in the world, the

dance that youth sends out the invitations for, and women live for, and

old men die with longing for. We set the hours dancing in the night,

we--all who are gay and careless, who love life in the greatest way, and

who laugh at death, and who aren't afraid of the devil. The devil's only

a bogey to frighten old women and children. What do the hours care for

him? Not a snap. It's only cowards who fear him. Brave men do what they

will, and when the hours dance they dance with them, and drink with them

all the night through. Who says there'll be another morning? I don't

believe it. Curse the sunshine. Give me the night and the dancing hours!"

The youth gave a yell, which was echoed by some of his rowdy companions,

and by the two little schoolboys who had joined the throng in a frenzy of

childish excitement, which they thought manly.

"The dancing hours! The dancing hours!" they cried, and one who was with

a girl suddenly caught her round the waist and broke into wild steps.

Others joined in. The confusion became tremendous. Glasses were knocked

over. Whiskies and sodas were poured out in libations upon the carpet.

The protests of the barmaids were unheeded or unheard. Julian whirled

Cuckoo into the throng, and Valentine, snapping his long white fingers

like castanets, stamped his feet as if to the measure of a wild music.

Against the wall some loungers looked on in contemptuous amusement, but

by far the greater number of men present were young and eager for any

absurdity, and not a few were half tipsy. These ardently welcomed

anything in the nature of a row, and the romp became general and noisy.

Men danced awkwardly with one another, roaring the latest music-hall

tunes at the pitch of their voices. The women screamed with laughter,

or giggled piercingly as they were banged and trodden on in the tumult.

The noise, penetrating to the promenade, drew the attention of the

audience, many of whom hurried to see what was going on, and the block

round the archways quickly became impenetrable. One or two of the

gigantic chuckers-out forced their way into the throng and seized the

dancers nearest to them, but they were entirely unable to stay the

ridiculous impulse which impelled this mob of young human beings to

capering and yelling. Indeed they merely increased the scuffle, which

rapidly developed towards a free fight. Hats were knocked off, dresses

were torn. The women got frightened and began to scream. The men swore,

and some lost their tempers and struck out right and left. Valentine

watched the scene with laughing eyes as if he enjoyed it. Especially he

watched Julian, who, with scarlet face and sparkling eyes, still forced

Cuckoo round and round in the midst of the tumult. Cuckoo was white, and

seemed to be half fainting. Her head rested helplessly against Julian's

shoulder, and her eyes stared at him as if fascinated. Her dress was

torn, and her black veil hung awry. If she danced with the hours it was

without joy or desire.

But suddenly police appeared. The dancers, abruptly realizing that a joke

was dying in a disaster, ceased to prance. Some violently assumed airs of

indifference and of alarming respectability. Many sinuously wound their

way out to the promenade. A few, who had completely lost their heads,

hustled the police, and were promptly taken into custody. Julian would

have been among these had it not been for the intervention of Valentine,

who caught him by the shoulder, and drew him and Cuckoo away.

"No; you mustn't end to-night in a cell," he said in Julian's ear. "The

dancing hours want you still. Julian, you are only beginning your real

life to-night."

Julian, like a man in an excited dream, followed Valentine to the bottom

of the broad stairs, on, through the blooming masses of flowers, to the

entrance. Two or three cabs were waiting. Valentine put Cuckoo into one.

She had not spoken a word, and was trembling as if with fear.

"Get in, Julian."

Julian obeyed, and Valentine, standing on the pavement, leaned forward

and whispered to him:

"Take her home, Julian."

Suddenly Julian shouted Cuckoo's address to the cabman hoarsely.

The cab drove away.

Valentine walked slowly towards Piccadilly Circus, whistling softly,

"I want you, my honey; yes, I do."

BOOK III--THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

CHAPTER I

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

The thin afternoon light of an indefinite spring day shone over the

Marylebone Road. A heavy warmth was in the air, and the weather was

peculiarly windless, but the sun only shone fitfully, and the street

looked sulky. The faces of the passers-by were hot and weary. Women

trailed along under the weight of their parcels, and men returned from

work grimmer than usual, and wondering almost with a fretfulness of

passion why they were born predestined to toil. The cabmen about Baker

Street Station dozed with nodding heads upon their perches, and the

omnibus conductors forgot to chaff, and collected their tolls with a

mechanical deliberation. At the crossings the policemen, helpless in

their uniforms of the winter, became dictatorial more readily than on

cooler days. Some sorts of weather incline every one to temper or to

depression. The day after the boat-race lay under a malign spell. It

seemed to feel all the weariness of reaction, and to fold all men and

women in the embrace of its lassitude and heavy hopelessness.

At number 400, Jessie whined pitifully in her basket, and her arched back

quivered perpetually as her minute body expanded and contracted in the

effort of breathing. Her beady eyes were open and fixed furtively upon

her mistress, as if in inquiry or alarm, and her whole soul was whirling

in a turmoil set in motion by the first slap she had ever received in

gravity at the hands of Cuckoo. Jessie's inner nature was stung by that

slap. It knocked her world over, like a doll hit by a child. Her universe

lay prone upon its back.

And Cuckoo's? She was sitting in the one arm-chair with her thin hands

folded in her lap. She wore the black dress given to her by Julian, but

she did not look prepared to go out, for her hair was standing up over

her head in violent disorder, her cheeks were haggard and unwashed, and

her boots--still muddy from the previous night's promenading--stood

in a corner near the grate in the first position, as if directed by

a dancing-mistress. Cuckoo was neither reading nor working. She was

simply staring straight before her, without definite expression. Her

face indeed wore a quite singularly blank look and her mouth was slightly

open. Her feet, stuck out before her, rested on the edge of the fender,

shoeless, and both her general appearance and attitude betokened a

complete absence of self-consciousness, and that lack of expectation of

any immediate event which is often dubbed stupidity. The lady of the

feathers sitting in the horsehair-covered chair in the cheap sitting-room

with the folding doors looked indeed stupid, pale, and heavy. Fatigue lay

in the shadows of her eyes, but something more than ordinary fatigue

hovered round her parted lips and spoke in her posture. A dull weariness,

in which the mind took part with the body, held her in numbing captivity.

She had only broken through it in some hours to repulse the anxious

effort of Jessie to scramble into the nest of her lap. That slap given,

she had again relapsed without a struggle into this waking sleep.

The sun came out with a sudden violence, and an organ began to play a

frisky tune in the street. Jessie whined and whimpered, formed her mouth

into the shape of an O, and, throwing up her head, emitted a vague and

smothered howl. Below stairs, Mrs. Brigg, who was afflicted with a

complaint that prompted her to perpetual anxious movement, laboured about

the kitchen, doing nothing in particular, among her pots and pans. The

occasional clatter of them mingled with the sound of the organ, and with

the suffocated note of Jessie, in a depressing symphony. The sun went in

again, and some dust, stirred into motion by a passing omnibus, floated

in through the half-open window and settled in a light film upon the

photograph of Marr. Presently the organ moved away, and faded gradually

in pert tunes down the street. Jessie's nervous system, no longer played

upon, ceased to spend its pain in sound, and a London silence fell round

the little room. Then, at length, Cuckoo shifted in her chair, stretched

her hands in her lap, and sat up slowly. The inward expression had not

faded from her eyes yet, for, leaning forward, she still stared blankly

before her, looking, as it seemed, straight at Marr's photograph.

Gradually she woke to a consciousness of what she was looking at, and

putting up one hand she took the photograph from its place, laid it in

her lap, and, bending down, gazed at it long and earnestly. Then she

shook her head as if puzzled.

"I don't know," she murmured; "I don't know."

Encouraged by the sound of her mistress's voice, Jessie stepped from

her basket and gingerly approached, snuffling round Cuckoo's feet, and

wriggling her body in token of anxious humility. Cuckoo picked her up and

stroked her mechanically, but still with her eyes on the photograph. Two

tears swam in them. She dashed the photograph down. It lay on the carpet,

and was still there when a knock at the door was succeeded by the

entrance of Julian.

He, too, looked pale and rather weary, but excited.

"Cuckoo," he said.

She sat still in the chair, looking at him.

"Well?" she said, and closed her lips tightly.

He came a step or two forward into the little room, and put his hat and

stick down on the table.

"You expected me to come, didn't you?"

"I don't know as I did."

Her eyes were on Jessie now, and she stroked the little dog's back

steadily up and down, alternately smoothing and ruffling its short coat.

Julian came over and stood by the mantelpiece.

"I told you I should come."

"Did you?"

"Don't you remember?"

She shifted round in the chair till he could only see her shoulder, and

the side of her head and neck, on which the loose hair was tumbling in

ugly confusion. Sitting thus she threw back at him the sentence:

"I don't want to remember nothing. I don't want to remember."

Julian stood hesitating. He glanced at Cuckoo's hair and at the back of

her thin hand moving to and fro above the little contented dog.

"Why not?" he said.

At first she made no answer to this question, and seemed as if she had

not heard it, but presently it appeared that her silence had been caused

by the effect of consideration, for at length she said, still retaining

her aloof attitude:

"I don't want to remember, because it's like a beastly dream, and when I

remember I know it ain't a dream."

Julian said nothing, and suddenly Cuckoo turned round to him, and took

her hand from Jessie's back.

"I say. You were mad last night. Now, weren't you?"

The words came from her almost pleadingly, and her eyes rested on

Julian's insistently, as if demanding an affirmative.

"He'd made you mad," she continued.

"He," said Julian. "Who?"

"Your friend."

"Valentine! He had nothing to do with it."

"It was all his doing."

Her voice grew shrill with feeling.

"He's a devil," she said. "I hate him. I hate him worse than I hate

that copper west side of Regent Street. And I hate you, too,--yes, I

do,--to-day."

The tears gathered in her eyes and began to fall, tears of rage and shame

and regret, tears of one who had lost a great possession. Julian looked

embarrassed and pained, almost guilty, too. He put out his hand and tried

to take Cuckoo's. But she drew hers away and went on crying. She spoke

again with vehemence.

"I told you what I wanted you to be; yes, I did," she exclaimed. "Yes,

I told you. You said you only come here to talk to me."

"It was true."

"No; it wasn't. You're just like all the others. And I did so want to

have a pal. I've never had one."

With the words the sense of her desolation seemed to strike her with

stunning force. She leaned her head against the back of the chair, and

cried bitterly, catching at the horsehair with violent hands, as if she

longed to hurt something, to revenge her loss even upon an object without

power of feeling. Julian sprang up and went over to the window. He looked

out onto the road and watched the people moving by in the fitful sunshine

beyond the dirty railings. That day, he, too, was in a tumult. He felt

like a monk who had suddenly thrown off his habit, broken his vows, and

come forth into the world. The cell and the cloister were left behind,

were things to be forgotten, with the grating of the confessional and the

dim routine of service and of asceticism. He had been borne on by the

wave of a brilliant, a violent hour, away from them. Let the angelus bell

ring; he no longer heard it. Let the drone of prayers and praises rise in

a monotonous music by day and by night; he no longer had the will to heed

them. For there was another music in his ears. Soon it would be in his

heart. Imagine a Trappist suddenly transported from the desert of his

long silence to a gay _plage_ on which a brass band was playing. Julian

was that Trappist in mind. And though he knew Cuckoo was sobbing at his

back, and though his heart held a sense of pity for her trouble, yet he

heard her grief with a strange cruelty, at which he wondered, without

being able to soften it. That afternoon it seemed to him useless for

anybody to cry. No grief was quite worth tears. The violence of life was

present with him, gave him light and blinded him at the same time. He

found delight in the thought of violence, because it held action in its

grasp. Even cruelty was worth something. Was he cruel to Cuckoo?

He turned from the window and looked at her, with the observation of a

nature not generally his own. He noted the desolation of her hair, and he

noted, too, that she wore the gown he had given to her. Would she have

put it on if she had hated him as she said she did? Somehow it scarcely

seemed to suit her to-day. It looked draggled, and as if it had been up

all night, he thought. The black back of it heaved as Cuckoo sobbed, like

a little black wave. Was the eternal movement of the sea caused by some

horrible, inward grief which, though secret, must come thus to the eye of

God and of the world? Julian found himself wondering in an unreasonable

abstraction as he contemplated the crying girl. Then suddenly his mind

swerved to more normal paths; he was seized by the natural feeling of a

man who has made a woman weep, and had the impulse to comfort.

"Don't cry, Cuckoo," he said, coming over to her and sitting on the edge

of her chair. "You must not. Let us say I was mad last night. Perhaps I

was. Men are often mad, surely. To-day I'm sane, and I want you to

forgive me."

He put his arm round her shoulder. She glanced up at him. Then, with the

odd penetration that so often gilds female ignorance till it dazzles and

distracts, she said quickly:

"You don't mean what you say; you don't really care."

Julian was taken aback by her sharpness, and by the self-revelation that

immediately stabbed him.

"You mustn't say that," he began. But she stopped him on the instant.

"You don't care; you think it's nothing. So it ought to be to me, I

know."

That had perhaps actually been his thought, the thought of a mind

unimaginative to-day, because deadened by the excitement of action.

But if it was his thought he hastened to deny it.

"You know I don't think of you in that way," he said.

"You will now. You do."

That was the scourge that had lashed her all through this weary day of

miserable reaction; that now stung her to a passion that was like the

passion of purity. As she made this statement there was a question in

her eyes, but it was a question of despair, that scarcely even asked for

the negative which Julian hastened to give. He was both perplexed and

troubled by the unexpected violence of her emotion, and blamed himself

as the cause. But, though he blamed himself, his regret for what was

irrevocable had none of the poignancy of Cuckoo's. For a long time he

had gloried in living in a cloister with Valentine. Now he had left the

cloister, he did not look back to it with the curious pathos which so

often gathers like moss upon even a dull and vacant past. He did not,

for the moment, look back at all. Action had lifted scales from his eyes,

had stirred the youth in him, had stung him as if with bright fire, and

given him, at a breath, a thousand thoughts, visions, curiosities. A

sense of power came to him. He did not ask whether the power made for

evil or for good. Simply, he was inclined to glory in it, as a man

glories in his recovered strength when he wakes from a long sleep

following fatigue. Cuckoo, with feeble hands, seemed tugging to hold back

this power, with feeble voice seemed crying against it as a deadly thing.

And Julian, though he strove to console her, scarcely sympathized with

her fully. He could not, if he would, be quite unhappy to-day. Only in

Cuckoo's grief he began to read a curious legend. In her tears there was

a passion, in her anger a vehemence that could only spring from the

depths of a nature. Julian began to suspect that through all her sins

and degradations this girl, his lady of the feathers, had managed to

keep shut one door, though all the others had been ruthlessly opened.

And beyond this door was surely that holy of holies, an unspoiled woman's

heart. From what other dwelling could rush forth such a passion for a

man's respect, such a fury to be rightly and chivalrously considered? As

he half vaguely realized something of the true position of Cuckoo and of

himself, Julian felt stirred by the wonder of life, in which such strange

blossoms flower out of the very dust. He looked at Cuckoo with new eyes.

She looked back at him with the old ones of a girl who loves.

As he looked she stopped crying. Perhaps the sudden understanding in his

gaze thrilled her. He put out his hand to touch hers, and again repeated

his negative, but this time with greater conviction.

"I do not think of you in that way. I never shall," he said.

Her face was still full of doubt, and thin with anxiety. She was not

reassured, that seemed apparent; for in her ignorance she had a strange

knowledge of life, and especially a strange intuition which guided her

instincts as to the instinctive proceedings of men.

"They always do," she murmured. "Why should you be different?"

"All men aren't alike," he said, pretending to laugh at her.

"Yes, in some things, though," she contradicted. "They all think dirt of

you for doing what they want."

Seeing how unsatisfied she was, and how restlessly her anxiety paced up

and down, Julian resolved on more plain-speaking.

"Look here, Cuckoo," he said, and his voice had never sounded more

boyish, "last night I was drunk. Last night I woke up, and I'd been

asleep for years."

"Eh?" she interrupted, looking puzzled, but he went on:

"I was emancipated, and I was mad. Mind, I didn't mean to do you any

wrong, but if you have thought of me in a different way, I'm sorry.

Tell me what you want me to be to you, and in future I'll be it."

Hope and eagerness sprang up in her eyes then.

"I say," she began,

"Yes."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

The dull blood rose in her tired face.

"I want just a--just a friend," she said, as if almost ashamed.

Julian smiled.

"Not a lover," he said, with a fleeting air of gallantry. She shrank

visibly from the word, and hurriedly went on:

"Not I. I've had too much of love." The last word was spoken with a

violence of contempt. "I want a man as likes me, just really likes me,

as he might another man. See?"

"And you'll not love him?"

His eyes searched hers with a gaiety of inquiry that was almost laughter.

Cuckoo looked away.

"I'll not love him either," she said steadily. "I'll just like him too."

Seeing her earnestness and obvious emotion, Julian dropped his gently

quizzing manner, and became earnest, too, in his degree.

"Then it's a bargain," he said. "You and I are to like each other

thoroughly, never anything more, never anything less. Like two men, eh?"

She began at last to look relieved and happier.

"Yes, like that," she said. "Ain't it--ain't it truer than the other

thing? There's something beastly about love; that's what I always think."

And she spoke with the sincerest conviction. When Julian left her that

day, he shook hands with her by the door; she stood after he had done it

as if still half expectant.

"There's a man's good-bye to a man," he said. "Better sort of thing than

a man's good-bye to a woman, isn't it?"

"Rather!" she said hastily, and moved back into the sitting-room.

She stepped on something, and bent down to pick it up. It was Marr's

photograph.

"What's that?" Julian asked.

"Nothing," she said, concealing it. She had a foolish fancy that even

the photograph of the creature she had feared and hated might spoil that

good-bye of theirs. Yet even as it was, when Julian had gone she still

seemed unsatisfied.

She was a woman after all, and woman is most feminine in her farewells.

CHAPTER II

VALENTINE SINGS

When Valentine heard of the scene in Marylebone Road he smiled.

"How extraordinary women are," he said. "A man might give his life to

them, I suppose, yet never understand them."

"It would be rather jolly--making that gift, I mean," said Julian.

"You think so? Since last night."

"I want to talk to you about that, Valentine, d'you blame me?"

"Not a bit."

"Only wonder at me?"

"I don't even say that."

"No; but of course you must wonder at me."

Julian spoke almost wistfully, and as if he wanted Valentine to sweep

away the suggestion. Last night they had been comrades. To-day, in the

light and in the calm of afternoon, Valentine seemed much more remote,

and Julian felt for the first time a sense of degradation. He was

uneasily conscious that he might have fallen in Valentine's esteem. But

Valentine reassured him.

"I don't wonder at you, either, Julian; I simply envy you, and

metaphorically sit at your feet."

"That's absurd."

"Not quite; and I may not always be sitting there, for I believe I have

really got a little bit of your soul. Last night I seemed to feel it

stirring within me, and I liked its personality."

"You did seem different last night," Julian said, looking at Valentine

with a keen interest. "Can it be possible that those sittings of ours

have really had any effect?"

"On me they have; not on you. You haven't caught my coldness, but I have

gained something of your warmth. Doesn't that perhaps show that mine was,

after all, the wrong nature?"

"I don't know," Julian said doubtfully; "you look the same."

"Do I? Exactly?"

Valentine spoke with a sort of whimsical defiance, as if almost daring

Julian to answer, Yes. And Julian, too, seemed suddenly doubtful whether

he had stated what was the fact. He looked closely at Valentine.

"Do you think your face has changed? Do you mean to say that?" he asked.

"I only fancied there might be a little more humanity in it, that was

all."

"Once or twice I have thought I noticed something," Julian said, still

doubtfully; "but I believe it's imagination. It doesn't stay."

"When it does, I suppose I shall be able thoroughly to appreciate all

your temptations. Don't you begin to think now it's good to have them."

"I don't know," Julian said. But he was conscious that there had come

a change in his attitude of mind towards temptation. Some men glory in

resisting temptation, others in yielding to it. Hitherto Julian had not

been able to range himself in either of these two opposed camps. He had

merely hated his faculty for being tempted. Did he entirely hate it now?

He could not say so to himself, whatever he might say to others, but

something kept him from making confession of the truth to Valentine. So

he professed ignorance of his own exact state of feeling; really, had he

analyzed his reticence, it sprang from a fine desire to give forth no

breath that might tarnish the clear mirror of Valentine's nature. He

would not admit a change that might make his friend again fall into the

absurd dissatisfaction which he had combated on the night of their first

sitting in the tent-room. While they talked the afternoon had fallen into

a creeping twilight. In the twilight the front door bell rang.

"Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door," Valentine

said, quoting Poe. "It must be the doctor."

Julian reddened suddenly.

"I hope not," he said.

"What?" Valentine cried. "You don't want our little doctor?"

"Somehow not--to-day."

The door opened and Doctor Levillier entered. Valentine greeted him

warmly. They had not met since the night of the affray with the mastiffs.

In Julian's manner there was a touch of awkwardness as he shook hands

with the doctor. Levillier did not seem to notice it. He looked very

tired and rather depressed.

"Cresswell," he said, "I have come to you for a tonic."

"Doctor coming to patient!"

"Doctors take medicine oftener than you may suppose. I'm in bad spirits

to-day. I've been trying to cure too many people lately. It's hard work."

"It must be. Sit down and forget. Imagine the world beautifully incurable

and your occupation consequently gone."

The doctor sat down, saying:

"My imagination stops short at that feat."

He kept silence for a moment, then he said:

"You know what I want."

"No," Valentine answered. "But I'll do anything. You know that."

"I want your music."

Valentine suddenly became unresponsive. He didn't speak at first, and

both Julian and the doctor glanced at him in some surprise.

"Oh, you want me to be David to your Saul," he said at length.

"Yes."

"Do, Val," said Julian. "I should like it too."

Valentine, who was sitting near the doctor, looked down thoughtfully on

the carpet.

"I'm not in the mood to-day," he said slowly.

"You are always in the mood enough to cheer and rest me," Levillier said.

He had driven all the way from Harley Street for his medicine, and it was

obvious that he meant to have it. But Valentine still hesitated, and a

certain slight confusion became noticeable in his manner. Moving the toe

of his right boot to and fro, following the pattern of the carpet, he

glanced sideways at the doctor, and an odd smile curved his lips.

"Doctor," he said, "d'you believe that talents can die in us while we

ourselves live?"

"That's a strange question."

"It's waiting an answer."

"Well, my answer is, No; not wholly, unless through the approach of old

age, or the development of madness."

"I'm neither old nor mad."

Levillier and Julian both looked at Valentine with some amazement.

"Are you talking about yourself?" the doctor asked.

"Certainly."

"Why? What talent is dead in you?"

"My talent for music. Do you know that for the last few days I've been

able neither to sing nor play?"

"Val, you're joking," exclaimed Julian.

"I am certainly not," he answered, and quite gravely. "I am simply

stating a fact."

Doctor Levillier seemed unable to appreciate that he was speaking

seriously.

"I have come all this way to hear you sing," he said. "I have never asked

you in vain yet."

"Is it my fault if you ask me in vain now?"

Valentine looked him in the face and spoke with a complete sincerity.

The doctor returned the glance, as he sometimes returned the glance of

a patient, very directly, with a clear and simple gravity. Having done

this he felt completely puzzled.

"The talent for music has died in you?" he asked.

"Entirely. I can do nothing with my piano. I have even locked it."

As he spoke he went over to it and pulled at the lid to show them that he

was speaking the truth.

"Where's the key?" asked the doctor.

"Here," said Valentine, producing it from his pocket.

"Give it to me," said the doctor.

Valentine did so and the doctor quietly opened the piano, drew up the

music-stool, and signed to Valentine to sit down.

"If you mean what you say, the explanation must simply be that you are

suffering from some form of hysteria," he said, rather authoritatively.

"Now sing me something. No; I won't let you off."

Valentine, sitting on the stool, extended his hands and laid the tips of

his long fingers upon the keys, but without sounding them.

"You insist on my trying to sing?" he asked.

"I do."

"I warn you, doctor, you will be sorry if I do. My voice is quite out of

order."

"No matter."

"Go on, Val," cried Julian, from his arm-chair. "Anybody would think you

were a young lady."

Valentine bent his head, with a quick gesture of abnegation.

"As you will," he said.

He struck his hand down upon the keys as he spoke. That was the strangest

prelude ever heard. In their different ways Doctor Levillier and Julian

were both intensely fond of music, both quickly stirred by it when it

was good, not merely classical, but extravagant, violent, and in any way

interesting. Each of them had heard Valentine play, not once only, but a

hundred times. They knew not simply his large _répertoire_ of pieces and

songs through and through, but also the peculiar and characteristic

progressions of his improvisations, the ornaments he most delighted in,

the wildness of his melancholy, the phantasy of his gaieties; and they

knew every tone of his voice, which expressed with an exquisite realism

the temperament of his soul. But now, as Valentine's hands powerfully

struck the keys, they both started and exchanged an involuntary glance of

keen surprise. The first few bars gave the lie to Valentine's assertion

that he could no longer play. A cataract of notes streamed from beneath

his fingers, and of notes so curiously combined, or following each other

in such a fantastic array, that they seemed arranged in the musical

pattern by an intelligence of the strangest order. It is often easy for a

cultivated ear to detect whether a given composition has sprung from the

brain of a Frenchman, a German, a Hungarian, a Russian. The wildness

of Bohemia, too, may be identified, or the vague sorrow of that northern

melody which seems an echo of voices heard amid the fiords or in pale

valleys near the farthest cape of Europe. And then there is that large

and lofty music of the stars and the spheres, of the mightiest passions

and of the deepest imaginings, that is of no definite country, but seems

to be of its own power and beauty, and not of the brain and heart of any

one man. It exists for eternity, and its creator can only wonder and

worship before it, far from conceit as God was when He said, "Let there

be light." Such music, too, is recognized on the instant by the men who

have loved and studied the secrets of the most divine of the arts, for

profound genius can utter itself as easily in five notes as in fifty.

But the prelude now played by Valentine was neither the great music that

is of all time and of all countries, nor the music that is of any one

country. It was not even distinctively northern or southern in character,

impregnated with the mystery of the tuneless, wonderful East, or with the

peculiar homeliness that stirs Western hearts. Both the doctor and Julian

felt, as they listened, that it was music without an earthly home,

without location, devoid of that sense of relation to humanity which

links the greatness of the arts to the smallness of those who follow

them. Eccentric the music was, but the eccentricity of it seemed almost

inhuman, so unmannerly as to be beyond the range of the most uncouth man,

in advance of the invention of any mind, however coarse and criminal.

That was the atmosphere of this prelude, excessive, unutterable, crude,

sombre vulgarity of a detached and remote kind. As Levillier listened to

it amazed, he found that he did not instinctively connect the vulgarity

with any human traits, or translate the notes into acts within his

experience. He was simply conscious of being brought to the verge of some

sphere in which the sordidness attained by our race would be sneered at

as delicacy, in which our lowest grovellings of the pigsty would be as

lofty flights through the skies. And the hideous eccentricity of the

music, its wanton desolation, deepened until both Levillier and Julian

were pale under its spell, shrank from its ardent, its merciless and

lambent sarcasm against all things refined or beautiful. The prelude was

as fire and sword, as plague and famine, as plunder and war, as all

instruments that lay waste and that wound, a destroying angel before

whose breath the first-born withered and the very sun shrivelled into a

heap of grey ashes.

As Doctor Levillier leaned forward, moved by an irresistible impulse, and

stretched out his hand to enforce silence from this blare of deplorable

melody, Valentine looked up at him, into his eyes, and began to sing. The

doctor's movement was arrested, his hand dropped to his side, he remained

tense, frigid, his eyes fastened on Valentine's like a man mesmerised. At

first he knew that he was wondering whether his brain was playing him a

trick, whether his sense of hearing had, by some means, become impaired,

so that he heard a voice, not dimly, as is the case with the partially

deaf, but wrongly, as may be the case with the mad, or with those who

have suffered under a blow or through an injury to the brain. For this

voice was not Valentine's at all, but the voice of a stranger, powerful,

harsh, and malignant. It rang through the room noisily. A thick

hoarseness dressed it as in disease, and at moments broke it and crushed

it down. Then it would emerge as in a sigh or wail, pushing its way up

with all the mechanical power of the voice of a wild animal, and mounting

to a desperate climax, sinister and alarming. So unlike ordinary singing

was the performance of this voice that, after the first paralysis of

surprise and disgust had passed away from the doctor and Julian, they

both felt the immediate necessity of putting a period to this deadly

song, to which no words gave the faintest touch of humanity. They knew

that it must attract and rivet the attention of others in the mansions,

even possibly of passers-by in the street. The doctor withdrew his gaze

from Valentine's at length, and turned hastily to Julian, whom he found

regarding him with a glance almost of horror.

"Stop him," Julian murmured.

"You!" answered Levillier.

And then each knew that the other was in some nervous crisis that

rendered action almost an impossibility. And while they thus hesitated

there came a loud, repeated, and unsteady knock at the door. Julian

opened it. Valentine's man was standing outside, pale and anxious.

"Good God, sir," he ejaculated. "What is it? What on earth is the

matter?"

The man's exclamation broke through Julian's frost of inaction. He

whispered to Wade:

"It's all right," pushed him out and shut the door. Then he went straight

up to the piano, seized Valentine's hands and dragged them from the

keyboard.

The silence was like a sweet blow.

"I said my voice was out of order," Valentine said, simply and with a

smile.

"You did not say you had another voice, the voice of--of a devil," Julian

said, almost falteringly, for he was still shaken by his distress of the

senses, into a mental condition that was almost anger.

Dr. Levillier said nothing. More sensitive to musical sounds than Julian,

he dared not speak, lest he should say something that might stand like a

fixed gulf to eternally separate him from Valentine. He knew the future

that stretches out like a spear beyond one word. So he sat quietly with

his eyes on the ground. His lips were set firmly together. Valentine

turned to observe him.

"Doctor, you're not angry?" he asked.

The doctor made no reply.

"You know I warned you," Valentine went on. "You brought this thing on

yourself."

"Yes," said Levillier.

But Julian interposed.

"No Valentine," he exclaimed. "For, of course, it is all a trick of

yours. You didn't want to sing. We made you. This is your revenge, eh?

I didn't know you had it in you to be so--so beastly and cantankerous."

Valentine shook his head.

"It's no trick. It's simply as I said. My talent for music is dead. You

have been listening to the voice of its corpse."

Dr. Levillier looked up at length.

"You really mean that?" he said, and there was an awakening within him of

his normal ready interest in all things.

"I mean it absolutely."

"That is the only event in which I can forgive the torture you have been

inflicting upon me."

"That is the true event."

"But it's not possible," Julian said. "It's not conceivable. Surely,

doctor, you would not say--"

The doctor interrupted him.

"I cannot believe that Cresswell would deliberately commit an outrage

upon me," he said. "And it would be an outrage to sing like that to a

tired man. Weeks of work would not fatigue me as I am fatigued by

Cresswell's music."

Julian was silent and looked uneasy. Valentine repeated again:

"I couldn't help it. I am sorry."

Doctor Levillier ignored the remark. His professional interest was

beginning to be aroused. For the first time he felt convinced that some

very peculiar and bizarre change was dawning over the youth he knew so

well. He wanted to watch it grow or fade, to analyze it, to study it, to

be aware of its exact nature. But he did not want to put either Valentine

or Julian upon the alert. So he spoke lightly as he said:

"But I shall soon get the better of my fatigue, even without the usual

medicine. Cresswell, take my advice, give your music a rest. Lock your

piano again for a while. It will be better."

Valentine shut down the lid on the instant, and turned the little key in

the lock.

"Adieu to my companion of many lonely hours!" he said with a half

whimsical pensiveness. Then, as if in joke, he held out his hand with the

key in it, to the doctor.

"Will you take charge of this hostage?" he asked.

"Yes," the doctor replied.

Quite gravely he took the key and put it into his pocket.

And so it was that silence fell round the Saint of Victoria Street.

CHAPTER III

THE FLIGHT OF THE BATS

Julian had resolved to keep his compact with the lady of the feathers. He

had learned partially to understand the curious and beautiful attitude

which her mind had assumed towards him, polluted as it must be by the

terror and working out of her fate, by many dreary actions, and by many

vile imaginings. But although he held to his promise he did not, after

that night of crisis, resume his former career of asceticism tempered by

winds of temptation which could never blow his casement open. There are

men who can vary the fine monotony of virtue by an occasional deliberate

error, and who return from such an excursion into dangerous by-paths

drilled and comforted, as it appears, for further journeying along the

main road of their respectability. But Julian was not such a man. He

resembled rather the morphia victim, or the inebriate, who must at

all hazards abstain from any indulgence, even the smallest, in drug

or draught, lest the demon who has such charm for him clasp him in

imperturbable arms, and refuse with the steadfastness of a once-tricked

Venus ever to let him go again.

Valentine's empire of five years was broken in one night.

At first Julian was scarcely conscious that his descent was not

momentary, but rather tending to the permanent. Certainly, at the first,

he was inclined to have the schoolboy outlook upon it, and the schoolboy

outlook is as a glance through the wrong end of a telescope, dwindling

giant sins to the stature of pigmies, and pigmy sins to mere points of

darkness which equal nothingness. But, strangely enough, it was his

interview with the weeping Cuckoo, that Magdalen of the streets, which

drove the schoolboy to limbo, and set virtue and vice for the moment

rightly on the throne and in the gutter. Despite his comparatively dull

mood and tendency to a calm of self-satisfaction in the Marylebone Road,

Julian could not be wholly unmoved by the passion of Cuckoo's regret, nor

entirely unaware that it was a passion in which he must have some share,

whether now or at some more distant time, when the thrall of recently

moved senses was weakened, and the numbness really born of excitement

melted in the quiet expansion of a manly and a reasonable calm. His

understanding of her passion, none too definite at first, gave him a

moment's wonder, both at her and at himself. It seemed strange that the

shattered influence of Valentine should be of less account to him who had

known and loved it than to her who had never known it. It seemed stranger

still that the streets--those wolves which tear one by one the rags of

good from human nature, till it stands naked and tearless beneath the

lamps, which are the eyes of the wolves--stranger that those streets

should have left to one of their children a veil so bridal and so

beautiful as that which hung round Cuckoo when she wept. Julian was

almost driven to believe that sin and purity can dwell together in one

woman, yet never have intercourse. Yet he knew that to be impossible. The

fact remained that the tarnished Cuckoo, in the first moments of regret,

was more conscious of his sin for him than he was conscious of it for

himself; that she led him, with her dingy hands, to such repentance as he

experienced, and that she, too, guarded him against repetition of the

sin, so far as she was concerned. Julian considered these circumstances;

and there was a time when they were not without effect upon him, and

when, with the assistance of a word from Valentine, they might have

worked upon him an easy salvation. But Valentine did not speak that word.

His peculiar purity had saved Julian in the past by its mere existence.

Its presence was enough. That _satis_ was dead now. Julian did not ask

why. Nor did he find himself troubled by its decease. There is nothing

like action for making man unobservant. Julian was no longer a ship in

dock, nor even a ship riding at anchor. The anchor was up, the sails were

set, the water ran back from the vessel's prow.

Cuckoo was not conscious of this. Sometimes she was subtle by intuition;

often she was not subtle at all. When she understood Julian's nature for

the moment, it was because his nature was, for the moment, in close

relation to hers. Her fate was affected by it, or its passages of arms

clashed near her heart. Then intuition, woman's guardian, had eyes and

ears, saw and heard with a distinctness that was nearly brilliant. But

when Julian's nature wandered, and the wanderings did not bring it where

hers was dwelling, her observation slept soundly enough. So she was not

conscious at first of Julian's gentle progress in a new direction.

Whether Valentine was conscious of it did not immediately appear, for

Julian said nothing. For five years he had not had a secret from

Valentine. Now he had to have one. He ranked Valentine with Doctor

Levillier as too good to be told of the evil thing. When he had had

temptations and resisted them he had told Valentine of them frankly. Now

he had temptations, and was beginning not to resist them; he kept silence

about them. This silence lasted for a little while, and then Valentine

swept it away, involuntarily it seemed, and by means of action, not of

words.

One day Julian met a man at his club, a lively, devil-may-care soldier of

fortune in the world. The man came to where he was sitting and said:

"So, Addison, your god has fallen from his pedestal. He's only a Dagon

after all."

Julian looked at him ignorantly.

"What god?" he asked.

"Your saint has tumbled from his perch. I never believed in him."

He was of the species that never believes in anything except vice and the

_Sporting Times_.

Julian rejoined:

"I don't understand you."

"Cresswell," said the man.

Julian began to wonder what was coming, and silently got ready for the

defence, as he always did instinctively when Valentine was the subject of

attack.

"What have you got to say about Cresswell?" he asked curtly.

"My dear chap, now don't you get your frills out. Nothing that I should

mind being said about me, I assure you. Only Cresswell will soon lose his

nickname if he goes on as he's going now."

"I'm in the dark."

"That's what he likes being, if what they say is true. Quite a

night-bird, I'm told."

"You'd better be more explicit."

But the man glanced at Julian's face and seemed to think better of it. He

moved off muttering:

"Damned rot, minding a little chaff. And when we're all in the same boat

too."

Julian sat pondering over his veiled remarks. They surprised him, but at

first he was inclined to consider them as meaningless and unfounded as so

much of the gossip of the clubs. Men like Valentine must always be a

target for the arrows of the cynical. Julian had heard his sanctity

laughed at in billiard-rooms and in bars many times, and had simply felt

an easy contempt for the laughers, who could not understand that any

nature could be finer than their own. But to-day his own faint change of

life--as yet in its gentle beginnings--led him presently to wonder,

literally for the first time, whether there was a side of Valentine's

life that was not merely a side of feeling, but of action, and that he

knew nothing of. If it were so, Julian felt an inward conviction that the

very nearest weeks of the past had seen its birth. He remembered once

more Valentine's idle remark about his weariness of goodness, and

wondered whether--in violation of his nature, in violent revolt against

his own nobility--he was living at last that commonplace, theatrical

puppet-play of the world, a double life.

Valentine a night-bird! What did that mean?

And then Julian thought of the great wheeling army of the bats, whose

evolutions every night of creation witnesses. In the day they do not

sleep, but they are hidden. Their wings are folded so closely as to be

invisible. Nobody could tell that they ever flew through shadowy places,

seeking that which never satiates, although it may transform, the

appetite. Nobody could tell how the twilight affects them when it comes;

how, in their obscurity, they have to keep a guard lest the involuntary

fluttering of a half-spread pinion betray them. And then when the

twilight, the blessed one of the twin twilights, one in course towards

day, one in course towards night, has deepened and has died, they can

dare to be themselves, to spread their short wings, and to flutter on

their vagrant and monotonous courses. It is a great though secret

army--the army of the bats. It scours through cities. No weather will

keep it quite restful in camp. No darkness will blind it into immobility.

The mainspring of sin beats in it as drums beat in a Soudanese fantasia,

as blood beats in a heart. The air of night is black with the movement of

the bats. They fly so thickly round some lives that those lives can never

see the sky, never catch a glimpse of the stars, never hear the wings of

the angels, but always and ever the wings of the bats. Nor can such lives

hear the whisper of Nature and of the sirens who walk purely with Nature.

The murmur of the bats drowns all other sounds, and makes a hoarse and

monotonous music. And the eyes of the bats are hungry, and the breath of

the bats is poisonous, and the flight of the bats is a charade of the

tragedy of the flight of the devils in hell.

How could Valentine be one of the bats? It seemed to Julian that if

Valentine tried to join them they would fall upon him, as certain birds

will fall upon one who is not of their tribe, and kill him. And yet?

Yet Julian began to know that he had been aware of a change in Valentine.

He had believed it to be momentary. Perhaps it was not momentary. Perhaps

Valentine was concealing his new mode of life from some strange idea of

chivalry towards Julian. As Julian pondered he grew excited. He began to

long to tell Valentine now what he had not liked to tell him before.

Suddenly he got up and hastened out of the club. He drove to Victoria

Street. But Valentine was not at home.

"I suppose Mr. Cresswell goes out every night Wade?" he asked the man,

after a moment of hesitation.

Wade looked very much astonished at such a question coming from Julian.

"Yes, sir. At least, most nights," Wade answered.

"I see," Julian said.

He stood a minute longer. Then he turned away, after an abrupt:

"Say I called, will you?"

Wade looked after him as he went down the stairs, with the raised

eyebrows of the confidential butler.

That night was warm and gentle, with a full moon riding in clear heavens.

The season was growing towards its full height, and the streets were

thronged with carriages till a late hour. There is one long pavement that

is generally trodden by many feet at every time of the year, and in

almost every hour of the wheeling twenty-four. It is the pavement on

which the legend of London's disgrace is written in bold characters of

defiance. Men from distant lands, having made the pilgrimage to our

Mecca, the queen, by right of magnitude at least, of the world's cities,

stare aghast upon the legend, almost as Belshazzar stared upon the

writing on the wall. Colonists seeking for the first time the comfortable

embrace of that mother country which has been the fable of their

childhood and the dream of their laborious years of maturity, gaze with

withering hearts at this cancer in her bosom. Pure women turn their eyes

from it. Children seek it that they may learn in one sharp moment the

knowledge of good and evil. The music of the feet on that pavement has

called women to despair and men to destruction; has sung in the ears of

innocence till they grew deaf to virtue, and murmured round the heart of

love till it became the heart of lust. And that pavement is the

camping-ground of the army of the bats. On wet nights they flit drearily

through the rain. In winter they glide like shadows among the revealing

snows. But in the time of flowers and of soft airs, when the moon at the

full swims calmly above the towers of Westminster, and the Thames rests

rocked in a silver dream among the ebony wharves and barges, the

flight of the bats is gay and their number is legion. And their circle is

joined by many who are but recruits, or as camp-followers, treading in

the track of those whose names are on the roll-call.

The lady of the feathers rarely failed to join the evening flight of the

bats. Her acquaintance with Julian, even her curious passion for his

respect and distant treatment, had not won her to different evenings, or

to a new mode of life. But her feeling for Julian led her to ignore now

the fact of this fate of hers. She chose to set him aside from it, to

keep him for a friend, as an innocent peasant-girl might keep some

recluse wandering after peace into her solitude. Julian was to be the

one man who looked on her with quiet, habitual eyes, who touched her

with calm, gentle hand, who spoke to her with the voice of friendship,

demanding nothing, and thought of her with a feeling that was neither

greed nor contempt. And that one fatal night in which Cuckoo's private

and secluded heart was so bitterly wounded she put out of her

recollection with a strength of determination soldier-like and almost

fierce. It lay in the past, but she did not treat the past as a woman

treats a drawer full of old, used things, opening it in quiet moments

and turning over its contents with a lingering and a loving hand. She

shut it, locked it almost angrily, and never, never looked into it.

Julian was to be her friend of leisure, never associated in any way with

her tragic hours. All other men were the same, stamped with a similar

hall-mark. He only was unstamped and was beautiful.

On this evening of summer, Cuckoo, as usual, joined the flight of the

bats with a tired wing. The heat tried her. Her cheeks were white as

ivory under their cloud of rouge. Her mouth was more plaintive even than

usual, and her heart felt dull and heavy. As she got out of the omnibus

at the Circus one of her ankles turned, and she gave an awkward jump that

set all the feathers on her hat in commotion, and made the newspaper boys

laugh at her scornfully. They knew her by sight, and joked her every

evening when she arrived. At first--that was a long while ago--she had

resented their remarks, still more their shrewd unboyish questions, and

had answered them with angry bitterness. But--well, that was a long while

ago. Now she simply recovered her footing, paused a moment on the

kerbstone to arrange her dress, and then drifted away into the crowd

slowly, without even glancing at her nightly critics, who were aware of

a new bow on her gown, recognized with imperturbable _sang-froid_ the

change in a trimming or the alteration of a waist-belt.

Slowly she walked along. Piccadilly bats fly slowly. The moon went up.

She had not met her fate. In the throng she saw Valentine pass. He looked

at her with a smile. She turned her eyes hastily away. She had met him on

several evenings of late, but had never told Julian so, for she began to

understand now his reverence for Valentine, and a new-born, ladylike

instinct taught her not to hurt that reverence. Valentine disappeared.

He had not tried to speak with her. Once, on encountering her, he had

paused, but Cuckoo glided behind two large Frenchwomen and escaped with

the adroitness of a snake in the grass. Apparently he recognized her

movement as one of retreat, and was resolved to leave her alone, for he

had never followed her since that day, although he always lifted his hat

when he saw her. The crowd grew thicker. It was very heterogeneous, but

Cuckoo did not thread it with the attention of a psychologist, or examine

it with the pains of a philosopher of the dark hours. She stared

listlessly at the faces of the men, and if they stared back at her,

smiled mechanically with a thin and stereotyped coquetry, moving on

vacantly the while in a sort of dream, such as a tired journalist may

fall into as he drives his pen over the paper, leaving a train of

familiar words and phrases behind it. There are many dreamers like Cuckoo

on the thin riband of that pavement, moving in a maze created by

everlasting custom, beneath their flowers, half senseless to life, and

yet alive to the least human notice, behind the stretched barriers of

their veils. She walked from the Circus to Hyde Park corner and back

again; then turned, with an ever-growing lassitude, to repeat the

desolate experience. By this time the playhouses had vomited their

patrons into the night, and locomotion was becoming more difficult.

Sometimes there was a block, and Cuckoo found herself "hung up," as she

called it, squashed in a mass of people, all intent on some scheme of

their own, and resentful of the enforced interruption to their movement.

Then, by some unknown and mysterious means, the human knot was untied,

and all the atoms murmured on again through the ocean of the town. And

still Cuckoo was alone, and still the mechanical smile came and went upon

her lips, and her feet seemed to grow heavier and heavier, till they were

as cannon-balls to be lifted and dragged by her protesting muscles. And

still her senses seem to become more and more drugged by the familiarity

of it all, the familiarity of smile, of tired limbs, of incessant slow

motion, of staring faces and watchful eyes; the familiarity of the cabs

rolling home towards Knightsbridge and farther Kensington, with a dull,

harsh noise; the familiarity of personal, intense loneliness and longing

for quiet; the familiarity of the knowledge that quiet could only be

earned by failure, and that failure meant lack of food, debt, and deeper

degradation.

At last--perhaps it was owing to the unusual heat of the night--Cuckoo

became so over-fatigued that she was scarcely conscious what she was

doing. Her smile was utterly devoid of meaning, and had she been suddenly

asked, she could not have told whether she was at the Regent Street

end of Piccadilly, at Hyde Park Corner, or midway between the two.

Once more there was a block. The people were pressed, or surged of

their own will, together, and Cuckoo found herself leaning against

some stranger. This sudden support gave to her an equally sudden

knowledge of the extent to which she was fatigued, and when the block

ceased and the stranger--unconscious that he was being used as a species

of pillow--moved away, Cuckoo almost fell to the ground. Stretching

out her hands to save herself, she caught hold of a man's arm, and as

she did so her eyes moved to his face. It was Julian, and, before her

grasp had time to fix all his attention on her, Cuckoo saw why he was in

Piccadilly. In an instant all her lassitude was gone; all the fatigue, so

passionless and complete, vanished. An extraordinary warmth, that of

fire, not of summer, swept into her heart. She stood still and trembled,

as if from the accession of the abrupt strength that flows from an energy

purely nervous.

"Hulloh, Cuckoo!" Julian said.

She nodded at him. He looked down at her, not quite knowing what to say,

for he knew, by this time, that she objected to any hint from him on the

subject of her proceedings of the night. That was ignored between them,

and when they met the situation was that of a lodger in the Marylebone

Road holding friendly intercourse with a dweller in Mayfair, nothing more

and nothing less.

"Taking a stroll?" Julian said at last. "Isn't it a lovely night?"

"Yes. I say, I'm tired," she answered.

"Shall I take you somewhere?" he asked.

"Yes, do," she said.

They moved towards the Circus.

"Where shall we go?" Julian said. "Have you any pet place?"

"I don't know--oh, the Monico," she replied.

The restaurant was right in front of them. They dodged across to the

island, thence to the opposite pavement, and passed in silently. The

outer hall was thronged with people. So was the long inner room, and

for a moment they stood in the doorway looking for a table. At length

Julian caught sight of an empty one far down under the clock at the end.

They made their way to it and sat down.

"What will you have?" Julian asked Cuckoo.

She considered, sinking back on the plush settee.

"A glass of stout, I think, and--"

"And a bun," he interposed, smiling in recollection of their first

interview.

But Cuckoo did not smile or seem to recognize the allusion.

"Please, I'll have a sandwich," she said.

Julian ordered it, the stout, a cup of coffee and a liqueur brandy for

himself. While the waiter was getting the things he noticed Cuckoo's

extreme and active gravity, a gravity which seemed oddly to give her

quite a formidable appearance under her feathers. Despite the obvious

weariness written on her face, there was somehow a look of energy about

her, the aspect of a person full of intention and purpose.

"Why, Cuckoo," he said, "you look like a young judge about to deliver a

sentence on somebody."

And indeed that was just how her expression and pose behind the

marble-topped table affected him. Just then the waiter brought the

stout and the other things. Cuckoo removed her cheap kid gloves, took

the tumbler in her thin fingers and sipped at it. After a sip or two

she put the glass down, and said to Julian:

"I say."

"Well?"

"What are you about to-night?"

The question came from her painted lips very sternly. It seemed

addressed by one who had a right to condemn, and who was going to

exercise that right. Julian was astonished by her tone, and had an

instant's inclination to resent it. But then he thought that there was

nothing in the words themselves, and that the odd manner probably sprang

simply from fatigue or some other womanish, undivined cause. So he

answered:

"Just taking a stroll. It's so fine," and began to drink his coffee.

But Cuckoo quickly showed that her manner meant all that it had seemed to

say.

"That ain't it," she said, with emphatic excitement, though she spoke in

a low voice because of the people all round them. "You know it ain't."

Julian was just lighting a cigarette. The match was flaming in his hand.

He let it go out as he looked at her.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "What's the matter?"

"What are you doin'?" she retorted. "That's what I want to know. Not as I

need to ask, though," she added, bitterly.

Julian was distinctly taken aback by the emotion in her manner, and the

passion that she tried to keep quiet in her voice. He flushed rather red,

a boyish trick which he could never quite get over.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, lighting another

match, and this time making it do its office on his cigarette.

Cuckoo tossed her head in a way that was not wholly free from vulgarity,

but that was certainly wholly unconscious and expressive of real feeling.

"Oh yes, you do," she rejoined. Then after a moment's silence, she added,

with bitter emphasis, and a movement of her hand in the direction of the

door:

"You out in that crowd, and doing the same as all of them?"

As she said the words tears started under her blackened eyelashes.

If Julian had been taken aback before she spoke the last sentence, he

was ten times more astonished now. The whole situation struck him as

unexampled, and but for something so passionate in the girl's manner

that it overrode the natural feeling of the moment, his sense of humour

must have moved him to a smile. It was strange indeed to sit at midnight

under the electric moons of the Monico, and to be passionately condemned

for dissipation by a girl with a painted face, dyed hair, and that

terribly unmistakable imprint of the streets. But Julian could not smile.

Something in Cuckoo's demeanour, something so vehement and so unconscious

as to be not far from dignity, impressed him and took him well beyond the

gates of laughter.

"Why--but you were out in the crowd too," he said.

"I!" she said sharply, and with a touch of scathing contempt for

herself, yet impatient, too, of any introduction of her entity into the

discussion; "of course I've got to be there. What's that to do with it?"

"Really, Cuckoo," Julian began, but she interrupted him.

"I ain't you," she said.

"No, of course, but--"

"I'm different. It's nothing to me where I go of a night, or what I do.

But you ain't got to be there. You needn't go, need you?"

"Nobody need," he said. "But--"

"Then what d'you do it for?" she reiterated, still in the same tone of

one sitting on high in condemnation, and moved by her own utterance to an

increasing excitement. This time she paused for a reply, and set her

rouged lips together with the obvious intention of not speaking until

Julian had plainly put forward his defence. Strange to say, her manner

had impressed him with a ridiculous feeling that defence of some kind was

actually necessary. It was a case of one denizen of the dock putting on

the black cap to sentence another. Julian glanced at Cuckoo before he

made any reply to her last question. If he had had any intention of not

answering it at all, of calmly disposing, in a word or two, of her right

to interrogate him on his proceedings, her fixed and passionate eyes

killed it instantly. He moved his coffee-cup round uneasily in the

saucer.

"Men do many things they needn't do, as well as women," he began. "I must

have my amusements. Why not?"

At the word "amusements" she drew in her breath with a little hiss of

contempt. Julian flushed again.

"You're the last person," he began, and then caught himself up short. It

must be confessed that she was very aggravating, and that the position

she took up was wholly untenable. Having checked himself, he said

more calmly:

"What's the good of talking about it? I live as other men do, naturally."

"Are you a beast too, then?" she asked.

She still kept her voice low, and the sentence came with all the more

effect on this account.

"I don't see that," Julian exclaimed, evidently stung. "Women are always

ready to say that about men."

Cuckoo broke into a laugh. She picked up her glass, and drank all that

was in it. Putting it down empty, she laughed again, with her eyes on

Julian. That sound of mirth chilled him utterly.

"Why d'you laugh?" he said.

"I don't know--thinkin' that you're to be like all the rest, I suppose,"

she answered. "Like all them brutes out there, and him too."

"Him," said Julian. "Whom are you speaking of?"

She had not meant to say those last words, and tried to get out of an

answer by asking for something more to drink.

"Chartreuse," she said, with the oddest imaginable accent.

Julian ordered it hastily, and then immediately repeated his question.

"Never mind," Cuckoo replied. "It don't matter."

But he was not to be denied.

"D'you mean Valentine?" he asked.

She nodded her head slowly. Although Julian had half suspected that

Valentine might be there this confirmation of his suspicion gave him a

decided shock.

"Oh, he was just walking home from some party," he exclaimed.

"P'raps."

"I'm certain of it."

"He don't matter," she said with a hard accent.

She drank the chartreuse very slowly, and seemed to be reflecting, and

a change came over her face. It softened as much as a painted face can

soften under dyed hair.

"Dearie," she said, "it makes me sick to see you like the rest."

"I never pretended to be anything different."

"But you was different," she asserted. "I know you was different."

How could she have divined the change in Julian that one night of the

Empire had wrought?

"I say," she went on, and her voice was trembling with eagerness, "you've

got to tell me somethin'."

"Well?"

"That night I--I--it wasn't me made you different, was it?"

And as she spoke Julian knew that it was she. Perhaps a fleeting

expression in his face--telling naked truth as expressions may, though

words belie them--made her understand, for her cheeks turned grey beneath

the paint on them.

"I wish I'd killed myself long ago," she said in a whisper.

"Hush!" he exclaimed, cursing his tell-tale features. "I'm not different;

and if I was you could have nothing to do with it."

She said no more, but he saw by her brooding expression that she clung to

her intuition, and knew what he denied.

The hands of the clock fixed on the wall above their heads pointed to the

half-hour after midnight. The pale and weary waiters were racing to and

fro clearing the tables, dodging this way and that with trays, stealing

along with arms full of long-stemmed, thick tumblers, eager for rest. The

electric moons gave a sudden portentous wink.

"Time!" a voice cried.

People began to get up and move out, exchanging loud good-nights. The

long room slowly assumed an aspect of desertion and greedy desolation.

"We must go," Julian said.

Cuckoo woke out of that reverie, which seemed so chilly, so terrible

even. She glanced at Julian, and her eyes were again full of tears. He

was standing, and he bent down to her with his two hands resting upon the

marble of the table. He bent down and then suddenly stooped lower, lower,

almost glaring into her eyes. She went back in her seat a little, half

frightened.

"What's it?" she murmured.

But Julian only remained fixedly looking into her eyes. In the pool of

the tears of them he saw two tiny shadowy flames, flickering, as he

thought, but quite clear, distinct, unmistakable. And there came a thick

beating in his side. His heart beat hard. Each time he had seen the

vision of the flame he had been instantly impressed with a sense of

strange mystery, as if at the vision of some holy thing, a flame upon a

prayer-blessed altar, a flame ascending from a tear-washed sacrifice.

And now he saw this thing that he fancied holy burning behind the tears

in Cuckoo's eyes!

Cuckoo got up.

"Come on," she said, abruptly.

Julian followed her out of the café.

The dream of the moon was with them as they came to the entrance, clear

as a quiet soul, directly above them in a clear sky. Julian looked up at

it, but Cuckoo looked, with eyes that were almost sullen, at the night

panorama of the Circus. They waited a moment on the step. Julian was

lighting a cigar, and many other voluble men, most of them French or

Italian, were doing likewise. Having lighted it, and given a strong puff

or two, Julian said to Cuckoo:

"Shall I drive you home?"

"I ain't going home yet," she replied doggedly. "Are you?"

He hesitated.

"Are you, or aren't you?" she reiterated.

While she spoke, in her voice that was often a little hoarse, a young

voice with a thread in it, he realized that somehow she--painted sinner

as she was--had managed to make him ashamed of himself. Or was it that an

awe had come to his soul with that strange flame? In any case his mood

had risen from the old night mood of a young man to something higher,

something that could not be satisfied in the sordid way of the world.

"I think I shall go home," he said.