He spoke with an effort after scathing contempt, but she detected a
quiver of agitation in his voice.
"If I have, I'll break you yet!" she cried.
"Me? What are you talking about?"
"You know well enough."
"But do you know--do you know that I--I am Marr?"
He almost whispered the last words! A chill of awe fell over the lady of
the feathers. She did not understand what he meant, and yet she felt as
if he spoke the truth, as if this inexplicable mystery were yet indeed no
fiction, no phantasy, but stern fact, and as if, strangely, she had at
the back of her mind divined it, known it when she first knew Valentine,
yet only realized it now that he himself told her. She did not speak. She
only looked at him, turning white slowly as she looked.
"I am Marr," he repeated. "Now do you understand my gospel? Understand it
if you can, for you are bereft of the power that belongs of right only to
the woman who is pure. Long ago, perhaps, you might have fought me. Who
knows, you might even have conquered me? But you have thrown yourself to
the wolves, and they have torn you till you are only a skeleton. And how
can a soul dwell in a skeleton? Your soul, your will, is as useless as
that vagrant soul of Valentine, which I expelled into the air and into
the night. It can do nothing; you can do nothing either. If I have ever
feared you, and hated you because I feared you, I have fooled myself. I
have divined your thoughts. I have known your enmity against me, and your
love--_yours_!--for Julian. But if the soul and the will of Valentine
could not save Julian from my possession, how can yours? You are an
outcast of the streets! Go back to the streets. Live in them! Die in
them! They are your past, your present, your future. They are your hell,
your heaven. They are everything to you. I tell you that you are as much
of them as are the stones of the pavement that the feet of such women as
you tread night after night. And what soul can a street thing have? What
can be the will of a creature who gives herself to every man who beckons,
and who follows every voice that calls? I feared you. I might as well
have feared a shadow, an echo, a sigh of the wind, or the fall of an
autumn leaf. I might as well have feared that personal devil whom men
raise up for themselves as a bogey. Will is God! Will is the Devil! Will
is everything! And you--you, having tossed your will away--are nothing."
He had spoken gravely, even sombrely. On the last word he was gone.
The lady of the feathers stood alone in the ugly little room, and heard
the clock of the great church close by chime the hour of midnight. Her
face was set and white under its rouge, in its frame of disordered
canary-coloured hair. Her eyes were clouded with perplexity, with horror,
and with awe. Yet she looked undaunted. Staring at the door through which
the man men still called Valentine Cresswell had vanished, she whispered:
"It ain't true! It ain't! Nothin' does for a woman; not when she loves a
man! Nothin'. Nothin'."
She fell down against the hard horsehair sofa, and stretched her arms
upon it, and laid her head against them, as if she prayed.
BOOK IV--DOCTOR LEVILLIER
CHAPTER I
THE LADY VISITS DOCTOR LEVILLIER
The Russian Grand Duke, whose malady was mainly composed of two
ingredients, unlimited wealth and almost unlimited power, was slow
in recovering, and slower still in making up his mind to part with the
little nerve-doctor whom he had summoned from England. And so London
was beginning to fall into its misty autumn mood before Doctor Levillier
was once more established in Harley Street. He had heard occasionally
from both Valentine and Julian during his long absence, but their letters
had not communicated much, and once or twice when he, in replying to
them, had put one or two friendly questions as to their doings, those
questions had remained unanswered. The doctor had been particularly
reluctant to leave England at the time when the Grand Duke's summons
reached him, as his interest and curiosity about Valentine had just been
keenly and thoroughly roused. But fate fought for the moment against his
curiosity. It remained entirely ungratified. He had not once seen
Valentine since the afternoon in Victoria Street, when the lamentation
of that thoroughfare's saint had struck consternation into the hearts of
musical sinners. Nor had the doctor met any one who could give him news
of the two youths over whose welfare his soul had learned to watch. Now,
when he returned to London, he found that both Valentine and Julian were
abroad. Only Rip, left in charge of Julian's servant, greeted him with
joy; Rip, whose conduct had given the first strong impulse to his wonder
and doubt about Valentine.
Doctor Levillier took up the threads of his long-forsaken practice, and
gave himself to his work while autumn closed round London. One day he
heard casually from a patient that Valentine and Julian had returned to
town. He wondered that they had not let him know: the omission seemed
curious and unfriendly.
During the day on which the news reached him he was, as usual,
busily engaged from morning till evening in the reception of
patients. His reputation was very great, and men and women thronged
his consulting-rooms. Although his rule was that nobody could ever
gain admission to him without an appointment, it was a rule made to be
broken. He never had the heart to turn any one from his door in distress,
and so it frequently happened that his working-day was prolonged by the
admission of people who unexpectedly intruded themselves upon him. Great
ladies, more especially, often came to him on the spur of the moment,
prompted to seek his solace by sudden attacks of the nerves. A lover had
used them ill, perhaps, or a husband had turned upon them and had rent a
long dressmaker's bill into fragments, without paying it first. Or the
_ennui_ of an exquisite life of unbridled pleasure had suddenly sprung
upon them like a grisly spectre, torn their hearts, shaken them into
tears. Or--and this happened often--a fantastic recognition of the
obvious fact that even butterflies must die, had abruptly started into
their minds, obtruding a skeleton head above the billowing _chiffons_,
rattling its bones until the dismal sound outvied the _frou-frou_ of
silk, the burr of great waving fans, the click of high heels from Paris.
Then, in terror, they drove to Doctor Levillier's door and begged to see
him, if only for a moment.
There was no doctor in London so universally sought by the sane lunatics
of society as Dr. Levillier. He was no mad-doctor. He had no private
asylum. He had never definitely aimed at becoming a famous specialist in
lunacy. But the pretty lunatics came to him, nevertheless; the lunatics
who live at afternoon parties, till the grave yawns at their feet, and
they must go down the strange ways of another world, teacup in hand,
scandal still fluttering upon their ashy lip; the lunatics who live
for themselves, until their eyes are hollow as tombs and their mouths
fall in from selfishness, and their cheeks are a greenish white from
satiety, and lust's gratified flame beacons on their drawn cheeks and
along their crawling wrinkles; the lunatics who seek to be what they can
never be, the beauties of this world, the great Queens of the Sun, whose
gaze shall glorify, whose smile shall crown and bless, whose touch shall
call hearts to agony and to worship, whose word shall take a man from
his plough and send him out to win renown, or snatch a leader from his
ambition and set him creeping in the dust, like a white mouse prisoned
by a scarlet silken thread; the lunatics who dandle religions like dolls,
and play with faiths as a boy plays with marbles, until the moment comes
when the game is over, and the player is faced by the terror of a great
lesson; the lunatics who stare away their days behind prancing horses in
the Park, who worship in the sacred groves of bonnets, who burn incense
to rouged and powdered fashions, who turn literature into a "movement,"
and art into a cult, and humanity into a bogey, and love into an
adulterous sensation; the lunatics who think that to "live" is only
another word for to sin, that innocence is a prison and vice liberty; the
lunatics who fill their boudoirs with false gods, and cry everlastingly,
"Baal, hear us!" till the fire comes down from heaven, which is no
painted ceiling presided over by a plaster god. These came to Doctor
Levillier day by day, overtaken by sad moments, by sudden, dreary
crises of the soul, that set them impotently wailing, like Job among
the potsherds. Many of them did not "curse God," only because they did
not believe in Him.
It is not the fashion in London to believe in God just now.
Dr. Levillier had always, since he was a youth, walking hospitals and
searching the terror of life for all its secrets, felt a deep care, a
deep solicitude, for each duet, body and soul, that walked the world. He
had never set them apart, never lost sight of one in turning his gaze
upon the other. This fact, no doubt, accounted partially for the fact
that many looked upon him as the greatest nerve-doctor in London. For the
nervous system is surely a network lacing the body to the soul, and _vice
versa_. Every _liaison_ has its connecting links, the links that have
brought it into being. One lust stretches forth a hook and finds an eye
in another, and there is union. So with faiths, with longings, with fine
aspirations, with sordid grovellings. There is ever the hook seeking the
appropriate eye. The body has a hook, the soul an eye. They meet at birth
and part only at death.
Dr. Levillier was constantly, and ignorantly, entreated to adjust the
one comfortably in the other. It is a delicate business, this adjustment,
sometimes an impossible business. Half of the Harley Street patients came
saying, "Make me well." What they really meant was, "Make me happy." Yet
the most of them would have resented a valuable mixed prescription,
advice for the hook, and advice for the eye. Such prescriptions had to
be very deftly, sometimes very furtively, made up. Often the doctor felt
an intense exhaustion steal over him towards the close of day. This
tremendous and eternal procession passing onwards through his life,
filing before him like a march-past of sick soldiers, saluting him
with cries, and with questions, and with entreaties; this never-ceasing
progress fatigued him. There were moments when he longed to hide his
face, to turn away, to shut his ears to the murmuring voices, and his
eyes to the pale, expressive faces, to put his great profession from
him, as one puts a beggar into the night. But these were only moments,
and they passed quickly. And the little doctor was always bitterly
ashamed of them, as a brave man is ashamed of a secret tug of cowardice
at his heart. For it seemed to him the greatest thing in all the world to
help to make the unhappy rightly happier.
And this was, and had always been, his tireless endeavour. Upon this day
one of these hated moments of mental and physical exhaustion had come
upon him, and he struggled hard against his enemy. The procession of
patients had been long, and more than once in the tiny interval between
the exit of one and the entry of another, Dr. Levillier had peeped at his
watch. His last appointment was at a quarter to five, then he would be
free, and he said to himself that he would take a cab and drive down to
Victoria Street. Valentine was often at home about six. The doctor put
aside the little devil of pride that whispered, "You have been badly
treated," and resolved to make the advance to this friend, who seemed
to have forgotten him. In times of fatigue and depression he had often
sought Valentine in order to be solaced by his music. But this solace was
at an end, unless, indeed, the strange burden of musical impotence had
been lifted from Valentine, and his talent had been restored to him.
The last patient came to the doctor's door punctually and was punctually
dismissed as the clock chimed the quarter of an hour after five. The last
prescription was written. The doctor drew in a deep breath of relief. He
touched the bell and his servant appeared.
"There is no one waiting?" he asked.
"No, sir."
"I have made no other appointment for to-day, and I am going out almost
immediately. If any patients should call casually tell them I cannot
possibly see them to-day. Ask them to make an appointment. But I cannot
see any one to-day under any circumstances."
"Yes, sir."
Dr. Levillier took his way upstairs, made a careful toilet, selected from
his absurd array of boots a pair perfectly polished, put them on, took
his hat and gloves, sighed once again heavily, almost as a dog sighs
preparatory to its sleep, and turned to go downstairs. He forgot for the
moment that he was prepared to watch Valentine. Perhaps, indeed, his long
period of absence had dulled in his memory the recollection of any
apparent change in his friend. For at this moment of fatigue he only
recalled Valentine's expression of purity and high-souled health, and
the atmosphere of lofty serenity in which he seemed habitually to dwell.
The doctor wanted relief. How Valentine's presence would refresh him
after this dreary array of patients, after the continuous murmurs of
their plaintive voices! As he opened his bedroom door he perceived his
man-servant mounting the stairs.
"Lawler, I can't see any one," he said, more hastily than usual. "I told
you so distinctly. I am going out immediately."
The man paused. He had been with the doctor for many years, and both
adored and understood him. The doctor looked at him.
"It is a patient, I suppose?" he asked.
"Well, sir, I can't exactly say."
"A lady?"
"Yes, sir. At least, sir--well, no, sir."
"What do you mean?"
"A female, sir."
"What does she want?"
"To see you, sir. I can't get her to go. I asked her to, sir; then I told
her to."
"Well?"
"She only gave me this and said she'd come to see you, and if you were in
she'd wait."
He handed a card to his master. The doctor took it and read:
"Cuckoo Bright, 400 Marylebone Road."
The words conveyed nothing to his mind, for neither Julian nor Valentine
had ever talked to him of the lady of the feathers.
"Cuckoo Bright," he said. "An odd name! And an odd person, I suppose,
Lawler?"
Lawler pursed his lips rather primly.
"Very odd, sir. Not at all a usual sort of patient, sir."
"H'm. Go and ask her if she comes as a patient or on private business."
The man retreated and returned.
"The--lady says she's ill and must see you, sir, if only for a moment."
This was Cuckoo's ruse to get into the house, and was based upon Julian's
long-ago remark that the doctor could never resist helping any one who
was in trouble. Standing on the doorstep, she had histrionically
simulated faintness for the special benefit of Lawler, who regarded
her with deep suspicion.
"I suppose I must see her," the doctor said with a sigh. "Show her in,
Lawler."
Lawler departed, disapprovingly, to do so, and after a moment the doctor
followed him. He walked into his consulting-room, where he found the lady
of the feathers standing by the writing table. The autumn day was growing
dark, and the street was full of deepening mist. Cuckoo was but a
fantastic shadow in the room. Her dress rustled with an uneasy sound
as the doctor came in. His first act was to turn on the electric light.
In a flash the rustling shadow was converted into substance. Cuckoo and
the doctor stood face to face, and Cuckoo's tired eyes fastened with a
hungry, almost a wolfish, scrutiny upon this stranger. She wanted so much
of him. The look was so full of intense meaning that, coming in a flash
with the electric flash, it startled the doctor. Yet he had seen
something like it before in the eyes of those who suspected that they
carried death within them, and came to ask him if it were true. He was
surprised, too, by her appearance. The women of the streets did not come
to him, although if they had been able to read the writing in his heart
many of them would surely have come. He shook hands with Cuckoo, told
her to sit down, and sat down himself opposite to her.
"What is the matter? Please tell me your symptoms," he said gently.
"Eh?" was the reply, spoken in a thin and high voice.
"What has been troubling you?"
Cuckoo, who was wholly unaccustomed to answer a doctor's questions,
started violently. She fancied from his words that he had divined the lie
she had told when she said that she was ill, and knew that she came for a
mental reason. Instinctively she connected the word "trouble" with the
heart, in a way that was oddly and pathetically girlish. Acting upon this
impulse she exclaimed:
"Then you know as I ain't ill?"
Doctor Levillier was still more surprised. Not understanding what was in
her mind, he entirely failed to keep pace with its agility.
"Why do you come to me, then?" he asked.
"Oh," she returned, with a quickly gathering hesitation, "I thought as
perhaps you knew."
"I! But we have never met before."
The doctor bent his eyes on her searchingly. For a moment he began to
wonder whether his visitor was quite right in her head. Cuckoo shuffled
under his gaze. The very kindliness of his face and gentleness of his
voice made her feel hot and abashed. A prickly sensation ran over her
body as she cleared her throat and said, monosyllabically:
"No."
The doctor waited.
"What is it?" he said at length. "Tell me why you have called. If you are
not ill, what is it you want of me?"
"You'll laugh, p'r'aps."
"Laugh? Is it something funny, then?"
"Funny! Not it!"
The sound of her voice seemed to give her some courage, for she went on
with more hardy resolution:
"Look here, you can see what I am--oh yes, you can--and you wonder what
I'm doin' here. Well, if I tell you, will you promise as you won't laugh
at me?"
This was Cuckoo's way of delicately sounding the doctor's depths. She
thought it decidedly subtle.
"Yes, I'll promise that," the doctor said.
He looked at her faded young face and felt no inclination to laugh.
"Well, then," Cuckoo said, more excitedly, "you know Ju--Mr. Addison,
don't you?"
The doctor began to see a ray of light.
"Certainly I do," he said.
"And Mr. Cresswell?"
"He is one of my most intimate friends."
The words were spoken with an unconscious warmth that chilled Cuckoo. For
surely the man who spoke thus of the man she hated, must be her enemy.
She faltered visibly, and a despairing expression crept into her eyes.
"I don't know as it's any use my sayin' it," she began as if half to
herself.
The doctor saw that she was much troubled and the kindness of his nature
was roused.
"Don't be afraid of me," he said. "You have come here to tell me
something, tell it frankly. I am a friend of both the people you
mention."
"You can't be that," she suddenly cried. "Nobody can't be that!"
"Why not?"
"You ought to know."
She said it fiercely. All her self-consciousness was suddenly gone, swept
away by the flood of thought and of remembrance that was surging through
her mind.
"Why can't you see what he is," she exclaimed, "any more than he can,
than Julian--Mr. Addison, I mean? Any one'd think you was all mad, they
would."
Doctor Levillier was glad he had admitted the lady of the feathers to his
presence. Interest sprang up in him, alive and searching.
"Tell me what you mean," he said. "Are you talking about Mr. Cresswell?"
"Yes, I am; and I say of all the beasts in London he's the greatest."
Cuckoo did not choose her words carefully. She was highly excited and she
wanted to be impressive. It seemed to her that to use strong language was
the only way to be impressive. So she used it. The doctor's face grew
graver.
"Surely you hardly know what you're saying," he said very quietly.
But his thoughts flew to that summer night when his mastiffs howled
against Valentine, and he felt as if a mystery were deepening round
him as the autumn mist of evening deepened in the street outside.
"I do," she reiterated. "I do. But nobody won't see it. And it's no use
what I see. How can it be?"
The words were almost a wail.
"Tell me what you see."
Cuckoo looked into the doctor's sincere eyes, and a sudden rush of hope
came to her.
"That's what I want to. But if you like him you'll only be angry."
"No, I shall not."
"Well, then. I see as he's ruinin' his friend."
"Ruining Mr. Addison?"
"Yes."
It struck the doctor as very strange that such a girl as Cuckoo obviously
was should cry out in such a passionate way against the ruin of any young
man. Was it not her fate to ruin others as she herself had been ruined?
He wondered what her connection with the two youths was, and perhaps his
face showed something of his wonder, for Cuckoo added, after a long
glance at him:
"It's true; yes, it is," as if she read his doubts.
"How do you come to know it?" the doctor said, not at all unkindly, but
as if anxious to elucidate matters.
"Why, I tell you I can see it plain. Besides," and here she dropped her
voice, "Valentine, as he calls himself--though he ain't--as good as told
me. He did tell me, only I couldn't understand. He knew I couldn't--d'you
see? That's why he told me. Oh, if he'd only tell you!"
Fragments of Valentine's exposition of his deeds and of his strange
gospel were floating through Cuckoo's mind as fragments of broken wood
float by on a stream, fragments of broken wood that were part of a
puzzle, that should be rescued by some strong hand from the stream,
and fitted together into a perfect whole.
"Valentine! You say he told you that he was ruining Julian?"
Unconsciously the doctor used the Christian names. His doing so set
Cuckoo more at her ease.
"Yes. Not like that. But he told me. He ain't what you think, nor what
Julian thinks. He's somebody else, and you can't tell it. He's laughing
at you all."
Thus the gospel came forth from the painted lips of Cuckoo, crude and
garbled, yet true gospel. The doctor was completely puzzled. All he
gathered from this announcement was that Valentine seemed in some way
to have been confiding in this girl of the streets. Such a fact was
sufficiently astounding. That they should ever have been associated
together in any way was almost incredible to any one who knew Valentine.
Yet it was quite obvious that they did know each other, and in no
ordinary manner.
"Do you know Mr. Cresswell well?" the doctor said.
He saw that he could only make the tangle clear by being to some extent
judicial. Humanity merely excited Cuckoo to something that was violently
involved, passionate, and almost hysterical.
"Well enough."
"And Mr. Addison?"
Cuckoo flushed slowly.
"Yes, I know him--quite well."
An almost similar answer, but given with such a change of manner as would
be possible only in a woman. It told the doctor much of the truth and
gave him the first page of a true reading of Cuckoo's character. But
he went on with apparently unconscious quietude:
"And you came here to tell me, who know and like them both, that the one
is ruining the other. What made you come to me?"
"Why, somethin' Julian said once. He thinks a lot of you. I was afraid to
come, but I--I thought I would. It's seein' them--at least Julian--since
they got back made me come."
"I haven't seen them yet," the doctor said, and there was an
interrogation in the accent with which he spoke. Something in Cuckoo's
intense manner roused both wonder and alarm in him. She evidently spoke
driven by tremendous impulse. What vision had given that impulse life?
"Ah!" she said, and fell suddenly into a dense silence, touching her left
cheek mechanically with her hand, which was covered by a long, black silk
glove. She alternately pressed the fingers of it against the cheek bone
and withdrew them, as one who marks the progress of a tune, hummed or
played on some instrument. Her eyes were staring downwards upon the
carpet. The doctor watched her, and the wonder and fear grew in him.
"Have you nothing more to tell me?" he said at last.
"Eh?"
She put down her hand slowly and turned her eyes on him.
"What do you wish me to do?" he said, "I do not know yet what may--" he
checked himself and substituted, "I must go and see my friends."
"Yes, go."
She nodded her head slowly, and then she shivered as she sat in the
chair.
"Go, and do somethin'," she said. "I would--I want to--but I can't. It's
true, I suppose, what he said. I'm nearly done with, I'm spoilt. I say,
you're a doctor, aren't you? You know things? Tell me then, do, what's
the good of goin' on being able to feel--I mean to feel just like
anybody, anybody as hasn't gone down, you know--if you can't do anythin'
the same as they can, get round anybody to make 'em go right? I could
send him right, I could, as well as any girl, if feelin' 'd only do it.
But feelin' ain't a bit of good. It's looks, I suppose. Everythin' 's
looks."
"No, not everything," the doctor said.
Cuckoo's speech both interested and touched him. Its confused wistfulness
came straight from the heart. And then it recalled to the doctor a
conversation he had had with Valentine, when they talked over the
extraordinary influence that the mere appearance--will working through
features--of one man or woman can have over another. The doctor could
only at present rather dimly apprehend the feeling entertained for Julian
by Cuckoo. But as he glanced at her, he understood very well the pathos
of the contest raging at present between her heart and the painted shell
which held it.
"Nobody who feels goodness is utterly bereft of the power of bringing
good to another," he said. "For we can seldom really feel what we can
never really be."
Light shone through the shadows of the tired face at the words.
"He said different from that," she exclaimed.
"He--who?"
"Him as you call Valentine. That's why he told me all about it, because
he knew as I shouldn't understand, and because he thinks I can't do
nothin' for any one. But I say, you do somethin' for Julian, will you,
will you?"
There was a passion of pleading in her voice. She had lost her fear of
him, and, stretching out her hand, touched the sleeve of his coat.
"I don't understand it all," the doctor said. "I don't like to accept
what you say about Mr. Cresswell, even in thought. But I will go and see
him, and Julian. The dogs," he added in a low and secret voice to
himself. "There is something terribly strange in all this."
He fell into a silence of consideration that lasted longer than he knew.
The lady of the feathers began to fidget in it uneasily. She felt that
her mission was perhaps accomplished and that she ought to go. She
looked across at the doctor, pulled her silk gloves up on her thin arms,
and kicked one foot against the other. He did not seem to notice. She
glanced towards the window. The fog was pressing its face against the
glass like a dreary and terrible person looking upon them with haggard
eyes. It was time, she supposed, for her to drift out into the arms that
belonged to that dreary and terrible face. She got up.
"I'll go now," she said.
The doctor did not hear.
"I'll go now, please," she repeated.
This time he heard and got up. He looked at her and said, "I have your
address. I will see you again."
If misery chanced to stand once in his path, he seldom lost sight of it
till he had at least tried to bring a smile to its lips, a ray of hope to
its eyes. But in the instance of Cuckoo he had other reasons, or might
have other reasons, for seeing her in the future.
"You are sure you have nothing more to say to me?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"No, I don't think," she murmured.
"Then good-bye."
He held out his hand. She put hers in it, with an action that was oddly
ladylike for Cuckoo. Then she went out, rather awkwardly, in a reaction,
to the hall, the doctor following. He opened the door for her, and the
mist crawled instantly in.
"It's a gloomy night," he said. "Very autumnal."
"Yes, ain't it? I do hate the nights."
She spoke the words with an accent that was venemous.
"C-r-r!" she said.
And with that ejaculation, half an uttered shiver, half a muttered curse,
she gave herself to the fog, and was gone.
Doctor Levillier stood for a moment looking into the vague and dreamy
darkness. Then he put on his coat and hat, caught up a cab whistle, and
with a breath, sent a shrill and piercing note into the night. Long and
mournfully it sounded. And only the moist silence answered like that
paradox--a voice that is dumb. Again and again the cry went forth, and at
last there was an answering rattle. Two bright eyes advanced in the fog
very slowly, looking for the sound, it seemed, as for a thing visible.
The doctor got into the cab, and set forth in the fog to visit Valentine.
CHAPTER II
THE VOICE IN THE EMPTY ROOM
When the doctor arrived at the Victoria Street flat Valentine's man
answered his ring. Wade had been with Valentine for many years and was
always famous for his great devotion to, and admiration of, his master.
Wade was also especially partial--as he would have expressed himself--to
Doctor Levillier, and when he saw who the visitor was, his face relaxed
into contentment that strongly suggested a smile.
"Back at last Wade, you see," the doctor said, cheerfully. "Is Mr.
Cresswell in?"
"No, sir. But I expect him every minute to dress for dinner. He's dining
out, and it's near seven now. Will you come in and wait?"
"Yes."
The doctor entered and walked into the drawing-room, preceded by Wade,
who turned on the light.
"Why! what have you been doing to the room?" the doctor said, looking
round in some surprise. "Dear me. It's very much altered."
In truth, the change in it was marked. The grand piano had vanished, and
in its place stood an enormous cabinet made of wood, stained black, and
covered with grotesque gold figures, whose unnatural faces were twisted
into the expressions of all the vices. Some of these faces smiled, others
scowled, others protruded forked tongues like snakes and seemed to hiss
along the blackness of the background. The shapes of the figures were
voluptuous and yet suggested, rather than fully revealed, deformity, as
if the minds of these monsters sought to reveal their distortion by the
very lines of their curved and wanton limbs. Upon the top of this cabinet
stood a gigantic rose-coloured jar filled with orchids, the Messalinas of
the hothouse, whose mauve corruption and spotted faces leered down to
greet the gold goblins beneath. It was easy to imagine them whispering to
each other soft histories of unknown sins, and jeering at the corrupt
respectabilities of London, as they clustered together and leaned above
the ruddy ramparts of the china, wild flowers as no hedgerow violet, or
pale smirking primrose, is ever wild in the farthest wood.
Glancing from this cabinet, and those that stood upon it, the doctor
was aware of a deep and dusty note of red in the room, sounding from
carpet and walls, tingling drowsily in the window curtains and in the
cushions that lay upon the couches. This was not the crude and cheerful
sealing-wax red with which the festive Philistine loves to dye the
whiteness of his dining-room walls, cooling its chubby absurdity with
panels of that old oak, which is forever new. It was a dim and deep
colour, such as a dust-filmed ruby might emit if illuminated by a soft
light. And Valentine had shrouded it so adroitly that though it pervaded
the entire room, it always seemed distant and remote, a background, vast
perhaps, but clouded and shadowed by nearer things. These nearer things
were many, for Valentine's original asceticism, which had displayed
itself essentially in the slight bareness of his principal sitting-room
had apparently been swept away by a tumultuous greed for ornaments. The
room was crowded with furniture, chairs, and sofas of the most peculiar
shapes, divans and tables, bookstands and settees. One couch was made of
wood, carved and painted into the semblance of a woman, between whose
outstretched arms was placed the pillow to receive the head of one
resting there. Another lay on the bent backs of two grinning Indian
boys, whose crouching limbs seemed twined into a knot. Upon the tables
and cabinets stood a thousand ornaments, many of them silver toys,
sweetmeat-boxes, tiny ivory figures and wriggling atrocities from the
East. But what struck the doctor most in the transformation of the room
was the panorama presented upon its walls. The pictures that he
remembered so well were all gone. The classical figures, the landscapes
full of atmosphere and of delicacy had vanished. And from their places
leered down jockeys and street-women painted by Jan Van Beers and Dégas,
Chaplin and Gustav Courbet, while above the mantelpiece, where once had
hung "The Merciful Knight," a Cocotte by Leibl smoked a pipe into the
room. It seemed incredible that Valentine could be at rest in such a
livid chamber, and not even the vague communications of Cuckoo woke
in the doctor such a definite and alive sensation of discomfort as
this vision of outward change that must surely betoken an inward
transformation of the most vivid and unusual kind. And everywhere, as
a deep and monotonous bell ringing relentlessly through a symphony of
discordant and crying passions, there sounded that sinister note of deep
and dusty red. Despite his own complete health of mind, and the frantic
disquisitions of the morbid Nordau, the little doctor felt as if he heard
the colour, as if it spoke from beneath his very feet, as if it sang
under his fingers when he laid them on the brocade of a couch, as if the
room palpitated with a heavy music which murmured drowsily in his ears
a monotonous song of dull and weary change. No silence had ever before
spoken to him so powerfully. He was greatly affected, and did not scruple
to show his discomfort to Wade, who waited respectfully by the door.
"What an alteration!" he said again, but in a lower and more withdrawn
voice. "I cannot recognize the room I once knew--and loved!"
"Mr. Valentine has been doing it up, sir."
"But why, Wade; why?"
"I don't know, sir; a fancy, I suppose, sir."
"An evil one," the doctor murmured to himself.
He glanced at Wade. It struck him that the man's mind might possibly
march with Cuckoo's in detection of his master's transformation, if
transformation there were. Wade returned the doctor's glance with calm,
good breeding.
"Mr. Valentine is well, I hope, Wade?" he said.
"Very well, sir, I believe."
"And Mr. Addison?"
"I couldn't quite say, sir, as to that."
"Do you mean that he looks ill?"
"I couldn't say, sir. Mr. Julian don't look quite what he was, to my
view, sir."
"Oh."
The butler's level voice mingled with the clouded red of the room, and
again a prophetic chord of change was struck.
"Thank you, Wade" said the doctor.
The man retired, and the doctor was left alone in the empty room.
* * * * *
Although he was intensely sensitive, Doctor Levillier was not a man whose
nerves played him tricks. He was, above all things, sane, both in mind
and in body, full of a lively calm, and a bright power of observation.
Indeed, having made the nervous system his special life study, he was,
perhaps, less liable than most other human beings to be carried away by
the fancies that many people tabulate as realities, or to be governed
by the beings that have no real existence and are merely projected by
the action of the imagination. Half, at least, of his great success in
life had been owing to his self-possession, which never verged on
hardness or fused itself with its near relation, stolidity. No man, in
fact, was less likely to be upset by the creatures of his mind than he.
Yet when Wade had gently closed the drawing-room door and retreated into
his private region, the doctor allowed himself to become the possession
of an influence which, to the end of his life, he believed to proceed
from the empty room in which he sat, not from his mind who sat there.
The electric light shone softly beneath the shades that shrouded it, and
revealed delicately but clearly every smallest detail of the crowded
chamber.
The hour was quiet. No fire danced in the grate. Doctor Levillier
leaned back in his low chair with the intention of composedly awaiting
Valentine's return. But the composure which had already been slightly
shaken by the visit of the lady of the feathers, and by the words of
Wade, was destined to be curiously upset by the motionless vision of the
empty room.
Sitting thus in it alone the doctor examined it with more detail, and
with a more definite remembrance of Valentine's habit of mind than
before. And he found himself increasingly amazed and confounded. For not
only was the change great, but it was not governed and directed by good
taste, or even by any definite taste, either good or bad. A number of
people might have devised the arrangement and selection of the mass of
furniture and ornaments, and have thrown things down here and there in
sheer defiance of each other's predilections. Only in the setting, the
red setting of the picture, was there evidence of the presence of a
presiding genius. In that red setting the doctor supposed that he was to
read Valentine. He could read nobody in the rest of the room, or perhaps
everybody whose taste refused purity and calm as foolish Dead Sea
growths. Some of the silver ornaments might have assembled in the garish
boudoir of a Parisian _fille de joie_, as the carved woman might have
been the couch to which Thais tempted Paphnuce, and the Indian boys the
lifeless slaves of Aphrodite. The jockeys on the wall would have been at
home on the lid of a cigar box belonging to any average member of the
_jeunesse dorée_ of any Continental city, while an etching of Felicien
Rops that lounged upon a sidetable would have been eminently suitable to
the house of a certain celebrity nicknamed the "Queen of Diamonds." The
golden figures that sprawled over the huge cabinet must have delighted
certain modern artists, whose rickety fingers can only portray in line
a fanciful corruption totally devoid of relation to humanity, but such
frail spectres would have shrunk with horror from certain robust works of
art, over which the most healthy of the beefy brigade might have smacked
large lips for hours. The room was in fact one quarrel between the
masculine and feminine, the corrupt "modern" and the flagrant Philistine,
the vaguely suggestive Nineteenth Century Athenian and the larky and
unbridled schoolboy. A neurotic woman seemed to have been at work here, a
sordid youth there. On a sidetable the hysterical man of our civilization
fought a duel in taste with some Amazon whose kept vow had evidently
wrought a cancer in her mind. In every corner there was the clash of
civil war. Yet there was always the cloudy red, visible through the
lattice-work of decoration, as the blue sky is visible through the
lattice-work of a Tadema interior. In that clouded red the doctor felt
himself reading a new yet powerful Valentine, and in the grotesque
orchids leaning their misshapen chins upon the rosy rim of their vase.
Those flowers had evil faces, and they seemed strangely at home in the
silent room where no clock ticked and no caged bird twittered. Only the
red cloud spoke like a dull voice, and Doctor Levillier sat and listened
to it, until he felt as if he began to know a new Valentine. There is an
influence that emanates from lifeless things, strong, subtle, and
penetrating; an influence in form, in colour, in scent, even in
juxtaposition. And such influence is like a voice speaking to the soul.
There was a voice in that empty room; and the words it uttered stirred
the doctor to a greater surprise, a greater dread than the words of
Cuckoo. Her painted lips related that which might well be a legend of
her fancy or of her hate. This voice related a reality and no legend.
As the doctor sat there he conversed of many strange and evil matters,
of many discomforting affairs. He was the interrogator, the perpetual
anxious questioner, and the voice in the empty room gave vague and
sinister answers. That was a terrible catechism, a catechism of the
devil, not of God. Question and answer flowed on, and in the doctor's
soul the anxiety and the distress ever deepened. Nor could he control
their development, although at moments his common sense broke into the
catechism like a cool voice from without, and sought to interrupt it
finally. But the twig could not stay the torrent. And the darkness
deepened, darkness in which there was a vision of fire, the vision of a
man, fantastic and menacing. He was the genius of this room. This room
sang of him. Yes, even now the twisted silver goblins, the curved
monstrosities on the cabinet, the crouched Indian boys, the leering
pictures, and always the dull red cloud on wall and carpet, cushion and
hanging. And then a strange deception overtook the doctor and shook his
usually steady nerves. The red cloud seemed to his observing eyes to
tremble, like a flame shaken in a breath of wind, and to glow all around
him. He looked again, endeavouring to laugh at his delusion. But the glow
deepened and there was surely distinct movement. Everywhere on walls,
floor, hangings, couches, faint, thin shadows took shape, grew more
definite. He watched them and saw that they were tiny flames, glowing red
relieved against the red. It was as if he sat in the midst of a ghostly
furnace; for these flames had no pleasant crackling voices. Silently they
burned, and fluttered upward noiselessly. He saw them move this way and
that. Some leaped up; others bent sideways; others wavered uncertainly,
as if their desire were incomplete and their intention undecided. The
doctor stared upon them, and listened for the chorus that fires sing
to tremble and to murmur from their lips. Yet they sang no chorus, but
always, in a ghostly silence, aspired around him. He knew himself to be
the victim of a delusion. He knew what he would have said to a patient
seeking his aid against such a deception of the senses. In his common
sense he knew this, and yet he gradually lost the notion that he was
being deceived, and allowed himself to drift, as he had seen others
drift, into the fancy that he was holding strange intercourse with the
actual. These flames were real. They had forms. They moved. They enclosed
him in a circle. They embraced him. As he watched them he fancied that
they longed to be near to him, and--and--yes--so ran his thoughts--to
communicate something to him, to sigh out their fiery hearts on his. They
trembled as if convulsed with emotion, with desire. They tried to escape
from the sinister red background that held them in its grasp as in a
leash. The doctor was impelled ardently to believe that they yearned to
find voices and to utter some word. And then, on a sudden, he recalled
Julian's declaration on the night of Valentine's trance, that he had seen
a flame shine from his friend's lips, and fade away in the darkness. He
recalled, too, Julian's question about death-beds. Was the soul of a man
a flame? And, if so, were these flames many souls, or one soul reproduced
on all sides by his excitement, and by the intensity of his gaze after
them?
They burned more clearly. Their forms were more defined. Then suddenly
they grew vague, blurred, faint all around him. They faded. They died
into the red of the room. And once more the doctor sat alone.
He listened and heard the click of a key in the front door. And then
suddenly the horror that he had felt long ago, on the night when he was
followed in Regent Street, once more possessed him. He got on his feet
to face it, and, as the drawing-room door was pushed slowly open, faced
Valentine.
CHAPTER III
THE DOCTOR MEETS TWO STRANGERS
Upon seeing the doctor, Valentine paused on the threshold of the door,
and, as he paused, the doctor's horror fled.
"Valentine," he said, holding out his hand.
"Doctor."
Their hands met and their eyes. And then Levillier had an instant
sensation that he shook hands with a stranger. He looked upon the face of
Valentine certainly, but he was aware of a subtle, yet large, change in
it. All the features were surely coarser, heavier. There was a line or
two near the eyes, a loose fullness about the mouth. Yet, as he looked
again, he could not be certain if it were so, or if his memory were at
fault, groping after a transformation that was not there. The words he
now said truthfully expressed his real feeling in the matter.
"You are quite a stranger to me," he said.
Valentine accepted the remark in the conventional sense.
"Yes, quite a stranger. We have not met for an age."
The voice was cool and careless.
"I have been waiting for you," the doctor went on, still unable to feel
at his ease. "By the way, how you have changed your room."
"Yes. Do you like it?"
"Well, frankly, no."
"I am sorry for that," Valentine replied, drawing off his gloves. "Julian
chose a great many of the things in it."
"Julian! Did he devise the colour scheme?"
"That curious red? No, that was my idea. But he had a great deal to do
with the new furniture and the ornaments."
"I should have supposed many minds had been at work here."
Valentine smiled, and the doctor was convinced that both his mouth and
eyes had altered in expression.
"That's true in a way," he answered. "Julian has had various advisers--of
the feminine gender. The love of the moment is visible all over this
room. That is why it amuses me. Those silver ornaments were chosen
by a pretty Circassian. A Parisian picked out that black cabinet in a
warehouse of Boulogne. A little Italian insisted upon that vulgar-painted
sofa--and so on."
"Why do you allow such people to have any intercourse with a room of
yours?"
"Oh, it amused Julian, and I was tired of my room as it was. After 'The
Merciful Knight' went to be cleaned, I resolved on a change."
"For the worse."
"Is it for the worse?"
"Surely."
The eyes of the two men challenged each other. Valentine's glance
was carelessly impudent and hardy. The deference which he had always
given to the doctor was gone. If it had been genuine it was dead. If
it had only been a mask it had apparently served its purpose and was
now contemptuously thrown aside. Doctor Levillier was deeply moved
by the transformation. His friend had become a stranger during the
interval of his absence. The man he admired was less admirable than
of old. He recognized that, although he was not yet fully aware of the
transformation of Valentine. Before he left England he vaguely suspected
a change. Now the change hit him full in the heart. So acute was it
that, in an age of miracles, he could well have believed Cuckoo Bright's
disjointed statement. Valentine was, to his mind, even in some strange
way to his eye, at this moment no longer Valentine. He was talking with a
man whose features he knew certainly, but whose mind he did not know, had
never known. And his former resolution to watch Valentine closely was
consolidated. It became a passion. The doctor woke in the man. Nor was
the old friend and lover of humanity lulled to sleep.
"How is Julian?" the doctor asked, dropping his eyes.
"Very well, I think. He will be here directly. He's coming to fetch me.
We are dining at the Prince's in Piccadilly in the same party. That
reminds me, I must dress. But do stay, and have some coffee."
"No coffee, thank you."
"But you will stay and see Julian. I dare say he will be here early."
"Yes, I will stay. I should like to meet him."
After a word or two more Valentine vanished to dress, and the doctor
was once more alone. He was much perplexed and saddened, but keenly
interested too, and, getting up from the chair in which he had been
sitting, he moved about the grotesque and vulgar room, threading his
way through the graceless furniture with a silent and gentle caution.
And as he walked meditatively he remembered a conversation he had held
with Valentine long ago, when the latter had spoken complainingly of
the tyranny of an instinctive purity. The very words he had used came
back to him now:
"The minds of men are often very carefully, very deftly poised, and a
little push can send them one way or the other. Remember if you lose
heaven, the space once filled by heaven will not be left empty."
Had not the little push been given? Had not heaven been lost? That was
the problem. But Doctor Levillier, if he saw a little way into effect,
was quite at a loss as to cause. And already he had a suspicion that the
change in Valentine was not quite on the lines of one of those strange
and dreadful human changes familiar to any observant man. This suspicion,
already latent, and roused, perhaps, in the first instance long ago by
the mystery of Rip's avoidance of his master, and by the shattering of
Valentine's musical powers, was confirmed in the strongest way when
Julian appeared a few minutes later. Yet the change in Julian would
have seemed to most people far more remarkable.
He came into the drawing-room rather hastily, in evening dress with
a coat over it. Wade had forewarned him of the doctor's presence, and
he entered, speaking loud words of welcome, and holding out a greeting
hand. The too-ready voice and almost premature hand betokened his latent
uneasiness. Vice makes some people unconscious, some self-conscious.
Julian belonged at present to the latter tribe. Whether he was thoroughly
aware of self-alteration or not, he evidently stirred uneasily under an
expectation of the doctor's surprise. This drove his voice to loud notes
and his manner to a boisterous heartiness, belied by the shifting glance
of his brown eyes.
The doctor was astounded as he looked at him. Yet the change here was
far less inexplicable than that other change in Valentine. Its mystery
was the familiar mystery of humanity. Its horror was the horror that we
all accept as one of the elements of life. Deterioration, however rapid,
however complete, does not come upon us like a ghost in the night to
puzzle us absolutely. It is not altogether out of the range of our
experience. Most men have seen a man crumble gradually, through the
action of some vice, as a wall crumbles through the action of time, falls
into dust and decay, filters away into the weed-choked ditches of utter
ruin and degradation. Most women have watched some woman slip from the
purity and hope and innocence of girlhood into the faded hunger and
painted and wrinkled energies of animalism. Such tragedies are no more
unfamiliar to us than are the tragedies of Shakespeare. And such a
tragedy--not complete yet, but at a third-act point, perhaps--now faced
Doctor Levillier in Julian. The wall that had been so straight and trim,
so finely built and carefully preserved, was crumbling fast to decay. A
ragged youth slunk in the face, beggared of virtue, of true cheerfulness,
of all lofty aspiration and high intent. It was youth still, for nothing
can entirely massacre that gift of the gods, except inevitable Time. But
it was youth sadder than age, because it had run forward to meet the
wearinesses that dog the steps of age but that should never be at home
with age's enemy. Julian had been the leaping child of healthy energy.
He was now quite obviously the servant of lassitude. His foot left the
ground as if with a tired reluctance, and his hands were fidgetty, yet
nerveless. The eyes, that looked at the doctor and looked away by swift
turns, burned with a haggard eagerness unutterably different from their
former bright vivacity. Beneath them wrinkles crept on the puffy white
face as worms about a corpse. Busy and tell-tale, they did not try to
conceal the story of the body into which they had prematurely cut
themselves. Nor did Julian's features choose to back up any reserve
his mind might possibly feel about acknowledging the consummate
alteration of his life. They proclaimed, as from a watch-tower, the
arrival of enemies. The cheeks were no longer firm, but heavy and
flaccid. The mouth was deformed by the down-drawn looseness of the
sensualist, and the complexion beaconed with an unnatural scarlet that
was a story to be read by every street-boy.
Yet, even so, the doctor, as he looked pitifully and with a gnawing grief
upon Julian, felt not the mysterious thrill communicated to him by
Valentine. These two men, these old time friends of his, were both in a
sense strangers. But it was as if he had at least heard much of Julian,
knew much of him, understood him, comprehended exactly why he was a
stranger. Valentine was the total stranger, the unknown, the undivined.
Long ago the doctor had foreseen the possibility of the Julian who now
stood before him. He had never foreseen the possibility of the new
Valentine. The one change was summed up in an instant. The other walked
in utter mystery. The doctor had been swift to notice Julian's furtive
glance, and was equally swift in banishing all trace of surprise from
his own manner. So they met with a fair show of cordiality, and Julian
developed a little of his old cheerfulness.
"Val's dressing," he said. "Well, there's plenty of time. By the way,
how's your Russian, doctor?"
"Better."
"You've cured him! Bravo!"
"I hope I have persuaded him to cure himself."
Julian looked up hastily.
"Oh, that sort of complaint, was it?"
He laughed, not without a tinge of bitterness.
"Perhaps he doesn't want to be cured."
"I have persuaded him to want to be, I think."
"Isn't that rather a priest's office?" Julian asked.
The doctor noticed that a very faint hostility had crept into his manner.
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. Such an illness is a matter of temperament, I dare
say, and the clergy tinker at our temperaments, don't they? while you
doctors tinker at our bodies."
"A nerve-doctor has as much to do with mind as body, and no doctor can
possibly do much good if he entirely ignores the mind. But you know my
theories."
"Yes. They make you clergyman and doctor in one, a dangerous man."
And he laughed again, jarringly, and shifted in his seat, looking around
him with quick eyes.
"What do you think of the room?" he said abruptly.
"I think it entirely spoilt and ruined," the doctor answered gravely.
"It's altered, certainly."
"Yes, for the worse. It was a beautiful room, one of the most beautiful
in London."
A momentary change came over Julian. He dropped his hard manner, which
seemed an assumption to cover inward discomfort or shame.
"Yes," he said almost regretfully. "I suppose it was. But it's gayer now,
got more things in it. Full of memories this room is."
The last remark was evidently put forth as a feeler, to find out what
Valentine had been talking about. Dr. Levillier was habitually truthful,
although he could be very reserved if occasion seemed to require it. At
present he preferred to be frank.
"Memories of women," he remarked.
"Oh, you've heard?"
"That several tastes helped to make his room the pandemonium which it is.
Yes."
"You're severe, doctor."
"Perhaps you like the room for its memories, Addison."
Julian looked doubtful.
"I don't know. I suppose so," he hesitated.
"By the way, is there among these vagrant memories of Circassians,
Greeks, and Italians anything chosen by Cuckoo Bright?"
Julian started violently.
"Cuckoo Bright," he exclaimed, "what do you know of her?"
As he spoke Valentine strolled into the room dressed for dinner. He was
drawing on a pair of lavender gloves, and looked down sideways at his
coat to see if his buttonhole of three very pale and very perfectly
matched pink roses was quite straight.
"Cuckoo Bright?" he echoed. "Does everybody know her, then? How came she
into your strict life, doctor?"
Doctor Levillier noticed that Valentine, like Julian, carefully set him
aside as a being in some different sphere, much as a great many people
insist on setting clergymen. This fact alone showed that he was talking
with two strangers, and seemed to give the lie to long years of the most
friendly and almost brotherly intercourse.
"Is my life so strict, then?" he asked gently.
"I think little Cuckoo would call it so, eh, Julian?"
He glanced at Julian and laughed softly, still drawing on his gloves. In
evening dress he looked curiously young and handsome, and facially less
altered than the doctor had at first supposed him to be. Still there was
a difference even in the face; but it was so slight that only a keen
observer would have noticed it. The almost frigid and glacial purity had
floated away from it like a lovely cloud. Now it was unveiled, and there
was something hard and staring about it. The features were still
beautiful, but their ivory lustre was gone. A line was penciled, too,
here and there. Yet the doctor could understand that even Valentine's own
man might not appreciate the difference. The manner, however, was more
violently altered. It was that which made the doctor think again and
intensely of Cuckoo's vague yet startling statement.
"Where did you meet Cuckoo, doctor?"
It was Julian who spoke, and the words were uttered with some excitement.
"I have met her," Levillier replied.
It was sufficiently evident that he did not intend to say where.
But Valentine broke in:
"She has called on you again, then, and this time found you at home.
I scarcely thought she would take the trouble."
"Again!" the doctor said.
"Yes. One evening when you were away I saw her at your door and ventured
to give her a piece of advice."
"And that was?"
"Not to trouble you. I told her your patients were of a different class."
"In that case I fear you misrepresented me, Cresswell. I do not choose my
patients. But Cuckoo Bright is no patient of mine."
"If she's not ill," Julian said, "why should she go to you?"
"That is her affair, and mine," the doctor answered, in his quietest and
most finishing tone.
Julian accepted the delicate little snub quietly, but Valentine sneered.
"Perhaps she went to seek you in your capacity of a doctor of the mind
rather than of the body. Perhaps, after all, she sought your aid."
As he spoke the doctor could not help having driven into him the
conviction that the words were spoken with meaning, that Valentine knew
the nature of Cuckoo's mission to Harley Street. There rose in him
suddenly a violent sensation of enmity against Valentine. He strove
to beat it down, but he could not. Never had he felt such enmity against
any man. It was like the fury so obviously felt by Cuckoo. The doctor
was ashamed to be so unreasonable, and believed for a moment that the
poor street-girl had absolutely swayed him, and predisposed him to this
animus that surged up over his normal charity and good, clear impulses
of tenderness for all that lived.
"My aid," he said--and the turmoil within him caused him to speak with
unusual sternness. "And if she did, what then?"
"Poor Cuckoo!" Julian said, and there was a touch of real tenderness in
his voice.
"Oh, I have nothing to say against it," Valentine replied, buttoning
slowly and carefully the last button of the second glove. "Only, Cuckoo
Bright is beyond aid. She can neither help herself nor any one else."
"How do you know, Cresswell?"
"Because I have observed, doctor. Once I, too, thought that even
Cuckoo might--might--well, have some fight in her. I know now that
she has not. Her corruption of body has led to worse than corruption
of mind, to corruption of will. Cuckoo Bright is as helpless as is a
seabird with a shot through its wings, upon the sea. She can only drift
in the present--die in the future."
The doctor listened silently. But Julian said again:
"Poor, poor Cuckoo!"
The exclamation seemed to irritate Valentine, for he caught up his cloak
and cried:
"Bah! Let's forget her. Doctor, we must say good-night. We are due at the
Prince's. It has been good to meet you again."
The last words sounded like the bitterest sarcasm.
CHAPTER IV
THE DEATH OF RIP
Although Dr. Levillier's visit to Victoria Street had been such a painful
one, he had no intention whatever of letting the two young men drift away
out of his acquaintance. He wanted especially to be with them in public
places, and to see for himself, if possible, whether Cuckoo's accusation
against Valentine were true. That a frightful change had taken place in
Julian's life, and that he was rapidly sinking in a slough of wholly
inordinate dissipation was clear enough. But did Valentine, this new,
strange Valentine, lead him, or merely go with him, or stand aloof
smiling at him and letting him take his own way like a foolish boy? That
question the doctor must decide for himself. He could only decide it
satisfactorily by ignoring Valentine's impertinence to himself, and
endeavouring to resume his former relations of intimacy with these old
friends who were strangers. He began by asking them both to dinner.
Rather to his surprise they accepted and came. The mastiffs were shut
close in their den below, lest they should repeat their performance of
the summer. The dinner passed off with some apparent cheerfulness, but
it served to show the doctor the gulf that was now fixed between him and
his former dear associates. He was on one shore, they on another. Their
faces were altered as if by the desolate influence of distance. Even
their voices sounded strange and far away. Great spaces had widened
between their minds and his. He endeavoured at first to cover those
spaces, to bridge that gulf; but he soon came to learn the vanity of
such an attempt. He could not go to them, nor would they return to him.
He could only pretend to bridge the gulf by the exercise of a suave
diplomacy, and by carefully banishing from his manner every trace of that
dispraising elderliness which seems to the young the essence of prudery
arising, like an appalling Phoenix, from the ashes of past imprudence.
In this way he drew a little nearer to Julian, who obviously feared at
first to suffer condemnation at his hands, but, finding only geniality,
lost his uneasiness and suffered himself to become more natural.
But this thawing of Julian, the quick response of humanity to the adroit
treatment of it, only threw into harsher relief the immobility of
Valentine, and to him the doctor drew no nearer, but seemed, with each
moment, more distant, more absolutely divided from him. And the gulf
between them was full of icebergs, which filled the atmosphere with the
breath of a deadly frost. This was what the doctor felt. What Valentine,
the new Valentine, felt could not be ascertained. He wore a brilliant
mask, on whose gay mouth the society smile was singularly well painted.
He wore a manner edged with tinkling bells of brilliancy. Happiness and
ease beamed in his eyes. Yet his look, his voice, his smile, his gaiety
chilled the doctor and set him mentally shivering. And with each bright
saying and merry laugh he struck a blow upon the former friendship.
The doctor fancied he could actually hear the sound of the hammer at
its work.
The simile of the hammer was peculiarly consonant with his present
view of the new Valentine, for, despite the latter's gaiety, ease, and
self-possession, his smiling sociability and expansiveness, the doctor
was perpetually conscious of a lurking violence, an incessant and
forcible exigence in him. It might be a fancy, but the doctor was not,
as a rule, the prey of fancies. Yet Valentine gave no outward hint of
inward turmoil. Rather did the doctor divine it as by a curious intuition
that guided him to that which lay in hiding. And it was this apprehension
of a deep violence and peculiar, excessive animation in Valentine that
woke the doctor's deepest wonder, and set the gulf between them so
widely. For all violence had once been so specially abhorred by
Valentine. He had so loved and sought all calm. The calm, he had often
said, were the true aristocrats of life. Fury and any wild movements of
the passions were of the gutter.
That dinner was returned. The doctor dined with Valentine and Julian
more than once, and accompanied them to the theatre. But he was unable to
make certain of Valentine's precise attitude towards Julian, although he
saw easily that the influence of the one over the other had rather waxed
than waned. This being so, it followed that Julian, having completely
changed, the influence that guided him must have completely changed also.
The pendulum had swung back. That often happened in the record of men's
lives. But not in such a way as this. The doctor, like Cuckoo, recognized
the existence of a mystery. But he was by no means prepared to accept
her fantastic and ignorantly vague explanation of it. That was a wild
fable, a fairy tale for a child, not a reasonable elucidation for a man
and a doctor. The most curious thing of all was that she declared that
Valentine had actually told her the truth about the matter, knowing that
she could not understand it. The doctor resolved to see her later, and
to question her more minutely on this point. Meanwhile he began to watch
Valentine carefully, and with the most sedulous attention to every detail
and _nuance_ of manner, look, and word. He understood Julian. His sad
case was to an extent due to his long happiness and freedom from the
bondage in which so many men move wearily. It was as if his passions had
been dammed up by the original influence of Valentine. Through the years,
behind the height of the dam, the waters had been rising, accumulating,
pressing. Suddenly the dam was removed, and a devastating flood swept
forth, uncontrollable, headlong, and furious. Julian needed rescue, but
the only way to rescue seemed to lie through Valentine, within whose
circle of influence he was so closely bound. The mystery of Valentine
must be laid bare.
And so the doctor watched and wondered, bringing all his knowledge of the
world and of the minds and bodies of men to help him.
And meanwhile the lady of the feathers was seen nightly in Piccadilly.
And Julian went his way steadily downwards.
* * * * *
One night there was a flicker of snow over London, and the air was chill
with the breath of coming winter. The dreary light of snow illumined the
faces of all who walked in the streets, painting the brightest cheeks
with a murky grey pigment, and making the sweetest eyes hollow and
expressive of depression. Heavily the afternoon went by and the evening
came sharply, like a blow.
Dr. Levillier was engaged to dine with Julian and Valentine at the
former's rooms in Mayfair. Of late Valentine had seemed to seek him
out, and especially to enjoy seeing him in the company of Julian. And
the doctor fancied he detected something of a triumph that was almost
blatant in Valentine's manner when they three were together, and when the
doctor's eyes rested sorrowfully upon that crumbling wall, which had once
been so fair and strong. Of late, too, the doctor, ever watching for the
signs of change in Valentine, had grown more and more aware that he was
an utterly, through and through, different man from the youth men had
called the Saint of Victoria Street. He felt the transformation to be
inhuman, and, by slow and reluctant degrees, he was beginning to form
an opinion. It was only in embryo as yet, a shadow hesitating in the
background of his mind. He shrank from holding it. He shuddered at its
coming. Yet, if it were right, it might explain everything, might make
what was otherwise incredible clear and comprehensible.
Was this vile change in his friend caused by a radical distortion of
mind? Was Valentine a madman?
Lunacy turns temperaments upside down, transforms the lamb into the
tiger, the saint into the murderer.
Was Valentine then mad? and was the monstrous distortion of his brain
playing upon the life of Julian, who, like the rest of the world,
believed him sane?
The thought came to the doctor, and once it had been born it was often
near to him. Yet he would not encourage it unless he could rest it upon
facts. That a man should change was not a proof of his madness, however
unaccountable the change might seem. The doctor watched Valentine, and
was compelled to admit to himself that in every way Valentine seemed
perfectly sane. His cynicism, his love of ordinary life, his toleration
of common and wretched people, might seem amazing to one who had known
him well years ago, but there were many perfectly sane men of the same
habits and opinions, of the same modes of speech and of action. If the
doctor's strange thought were to become a definite belief, much more
was needed, something at least of proof, something that would carry
conviction not merely to the imagination, but to the cool and searching
intellect.
On this night of the first snow the doctor's thought moved a step forward
towards conviction.
When he arrived at Julian's rooms, he was greeted by Valentine alone.
"Our host has deserted us," he said, leading the doctor into the fire.
"What, is he ill?"
"He has not returned. He went away last night--on a quest of a certain
pleasure. This afternoon he wired, asking me to entertain you. He was
unavoidably detained, but hoped to arrive in time for dessert. His
present love's arms are very strong. They keep him."
"Oh!" the doctor said, slipping out of his cloak; "we dine here then?"
"We do, alone. I don't think we've dined alone since Julian and I came
back from abroad, and you deserted your Russian."
"No. I will consider myself your guest."
It struck the doctor that here was an excellent opportunity for
confirming or abandoning his dreary suspicion. Alone with Valentine, he
would be able to lead the conversation in any direction he chose. He was
glad that Julian had not returned, and resolved to use this opportunity.
They went into the dining-room and sat down to dinner. Valentine was
apparently rather amused at playing the host in another man's house.
It was novel, and entertained him. He was obviously in splendid spirits,
ate with good appetite and drank the champagne with an elation not
unlike the elation of the dancing wine. More than once, too, he alluded
to Julian's absence and probable occupation, as if both the one and
the other were bouquets in his cap, or laurels in some crown which he
alone could wear. Dr. Levillier noticed it and sought to draw him on
in that direction, and to lead him to some open acknowledgment of his
share in Julian's rapidly proceeding ruin. But Valentine changed the
conversation into another channel without apparently observing his
companion's intention, or deliberately frustrating it. He chattered
of a thousand things, mostly of topics that are the common converse
of London dinner-tables. The doctor joined in. To a listening stranger
the two men would have seemed old friends, pleasantly at ease and secure
with one another. Yet the doctor was doing detective duty all the time.
And Valentine! was he not secretly revelling in that destruction of a
human soul that was galloping apace?
Course succeeded course. At last dessert was placed upon the table.
Valentine raised his glass with a smile:
"Let us drink the health of Julian's absence," he said. "For you and I
get on so perfectly together."
"Rather a cruel toast in Julian's own rooms," said the doctor.
"Ah, but he's happy enough where he is."
"You know where that is?"
"No--I only suspect," Valentine cried gaily. "In the wilds of South
Kensington, in a tiny house, all Morris tapestry and Burne-Jones stained
glass, dwells the latest siren who has been calling to our Ulysses. He
is there, I suspect. Wait a moment, though. His telegram might tell us.
Where was it sent from?"
He sprang up, went to the writing-table near the window, and caught up
the crumpled thin paper that he had flung down there. Smoothing it out,
he read, holding the paper close to a wax candle:
"Handed in at the Marylebone Road office at 5:50."
His brow clouded.
"Marylebone Road," he repeated, looking at the doctor. "Why should he be
there?"
His words immediately set the doctor on the track.
"Does not Cuckoo Bright live there?" he said.
"Yes, she does."
"May he not be with her?"
Valentine had dropped the telegram. He was standing at the table, and he
pressed his two fists, clenched, upon the white cloth.
"I have told him he must give Cuckoo up," he said, almost in a snarl.
The doctor glanced at him quickly.
"You have told him?"
"Advised him, I mean."
"You dislike her?"
"I! No. How can one dislike a painted rag? How can one dislike a pink and
white shell that holds nothing?"
"Every body holds a soul. Every human shell holds its murmur of the great
sea."
"The body of Cuckoo then contains a soul that's cankered with disease,
moth-eaten with corruption, worn away to an atom not bigger than a grain
of dust. I would not call it a soul at all."
He spoke with more than a shade of excitement, and the gay expression of
his face had changed to an uneasy anger. The doctor observed it, and
rejoined quietly:
"How can you answer for another person's soul? We see the body, it is
true. But are we to divine the soul from that--wholly and solely?"
"The soul! Let us call it the will."
"Why?"
"The will of man is the soul of man. It is possible to judge the will
by the body. The will of such a woman as Cuckoo Bright is a negative
quantity. Her body is the word 'weakness,' written in flesh and blood
for all to read."
"Ah, you speak of her will for herself," the doctor said, thinking of
Cuckoo's broken wail to him, as she sat on that autumn evening in his
consulting-room. "But what of her will for another, her soul for
another?"
He had spoken partly at random, partly led by the thought, the suspicion,
that Cuckoo's abandoned body held a fine love for Julian. He was by no
means prepared for the striking effect his remark had upon Valentine.
No sooner were the words spoken than a strong expression of fear was
visible in Valentine's face, of terror so keen that it killed the anger
which had preceded it. He trembled as he stood, till the table shook; and
apparently noticing this, and wishing to conceal so extreme an exhibition
of emotion, he slid hastily into a seat.
"Her will for another," he repeated,--"for another. What do you mean by
that? where's the other, then? who is it?"
The doctor looked upon him keenly.
"Anybody for whom she has any desire, any solicitude, or any love--you,
myself, or--Julian."
"Julian!" Valentine repeated unsteadily. "Julian! you mean to say you--"
He pulled himself together abruptly.
"Doctor," he said, "forgive me for saying that you are scarcely talking
sense when you assume that such a creature as Cuckoo Bright can really
love anybody. And even if she did, Julian's the last man--oh, but the
whole thing is absurd. Why should you and I talk about a street-girl,
a drab whose life begins and ends in the gutter? Julian will be here
directly. Meanwhile let us have coffee."
He pushed his cigarette-case over to the doctor and touched the bell.
"Coffee!" he said, when Julian's man answered it.
The door stood open, and as the man murmured, "Yes, sir," a dog close by
howled shrilly.
The noise diverted Valentine's attention and roused him from the
agitation into which he had fallen. He glanced at the doctor.
"Rip," he said.
"Howling for his master," said the doctor.
"Wait a moment," Valentine said to the man, who was preparing to leave
the room. Then, to the doctor:
"I am his master."
"To be sure," rejoined the doctor, who had, in truth, for the moment
forgotten the fact, so long a time had elapsed since the little dog took
up his residence with Julian.
"You think he's howling for me?" Valentine said.
"I was thinking of Julian at the moment."
"And what do you say now? Still that he is howling for his master?"
The dog's voice was heard again. It sounded almost like a shriek of fear.
"No," the doctor replied, wondering what intention was growing in
Valentine's face.
"Oh!" Valentine said curtly.
He turned to the man.
"Bateman, bring Rip in here to us."
The man hesitated.
"I don't think he'll come, sir."
"I said, bring him to us."
The man went out, as if with reluctance. Valentine turned to the doctor.
"We spoke about soul--that is, will--just now," he said. "To deny the
will is death, despite Schopenhauer. Death? Worse than death--cowardice.
To assert the will is life and victory. With each assertion a man steps
nearer to a god. With each conquest of another will a man mounts, and
if any man wants to enjoy an eternity he must create it for himself by
feeding his will or soul with conquest till it is so strong that it
cannot die."
His eyes shone with excitement. It seemed to the doctor that he was
caught in the whirlpool of a violent reaction. He had shown fear,
weakness; he was aware of it, and determined to reassert himself. The
doctor answered nothing, neither agreeing with his fantastic philosophy
nor striving to controvert it. And at this moment there was the sound of
a struggle and of whining outside. The door was pushed open, and Julian's
man appeared, hauling Rip along by the collar. The little dog was hanging
back, with all its force, and striving to get away. Having succeeded in
getting it into the room, the man quickly retreated, shutting the door
hastily behind him. The little dog was left with Valentine and the
doctor. It remained shrinking up against the door in a posture that
denoted abject fear, its pretty head turned in the direction of
Valentine, its eyes glaring, its teeth snapping at the air. The doctor
looked at it and at Valentine. His pity for the dog's condition was held
in check by a strange fascination of curiosity. He leaned his arms on the
table and his eyes were fixed on Valentine, who got up slowly from his
chair.
"I have let Rip be the prey of his absurd fancies long enough, doctor,"
he said. "To-night I will make him like me as he used to, or at least
come to me."
And he whistled to the dog and called Rip, standing by the table. Rip
howled and trembled in reply, and snapped more fiercely in the direction
of Valentine.
"Do you see that, doctor? But he shall come. I will make him."
He shut his lips firmly and stared upon the animal. It was very evident
that he was exerting himself strongly in some way. Indeed, he looked
like a man performing some tremendous physical feat. Yet all his limbs
were still. The violence of his mind created the illusion. Rip wavered
against the door. There was foam on his jaws and his white legs trembled.
Valentine snapped his fingers as one summoning or coaxing a dog. The
doctor started at the sound and leaned further forward along the table
to see the upshot of this strange fight between a man's desire and an
animal's fear. Rip scarcely whined now, but turning his head rapidly
from one side to the other, with a motion that seemed to become merely
mechanical, he made a hoarse noise that was like a terrified and
distressed growl half strangled in his throat. But though he wavered
against the door, he did not obey Valentine and go to him, and the
doctor was conscious of a sudden thrill of joy in the dog's obstinacy.
This obstinacy angered Valentine greatly. His face clouded. He bent
forward. He put out his hands as if to seize Rip. The dog snapped at
him frantically, wildly. But Valentine did not recoil. On the contrary,
he advanced, bending down over the wretched little creature. Then Rip
shrank down on all fours before the door. To the doctor's watching
eyes he seemed to wane visibly smaller. He dropped his head. Valentine
bent lower. Rip lay right down, pressing himself upon the floor. As
Valentine's hand touched him a quiver ran over him, succeeded by a
surprising stillness.
The doctor made a slight sound. He knew that Rip was dead. Valentine took
the little dog by the scruff of its neck and lifted it up. Then he, too,
saw what he held. He glanced at the doctor, and there was a glare of
defeat in his eyes. Then he passed across the room to the window, still
holding the dog, pulled aside the curtain and thrust up the window. The
ground was white and the snow was falling. With an angry gesture he flung
the body out. It dropped with a soft noise in the snow and lay there.
Valentine closed the window, but the doctor felt as if he still saw the
poor little corpse in the snow. And he shuddered.
A moment afterwards there was a step in the passage and Julian entered.
He was looking haggard and excited, and ill with dissipation. His eyes
shone in deep hollows that seemed to have been painted with indigo,
and his lips were parched and feverish.
"Where have you been, Julian?" said Valentine.
"Oh, with her--with Molly, of course," he replied.
"What? Till now?"
Julian seemed uneasy under his scrutiny.
"Till this morning," he replied, almost suddenly.
"Well, but since then?"
"With Cuckoo. Oh! don't bother me."
He went over towards the window.
"Oh, how hot it is here," he said.
He glanced at the bright fire.
"Intolerably!" he murmured.
And he opened the window to the drifting snow.
"Am I mad?" he suddenly cried to them. "I saw the flame in her eyes again
to-day, in Cuckoo's eyes. It held me with her. I'll swear it held me. It
wouldn't let me go--wouldn't let me--till now!"
He sank down in a chair by the window, and turning his back on them,
pushed his head out to get air.
"I say," he suddenly called. "What's that, that lying there?"
Valentine and the doctor joined him. He was pointing to the body of Rip,
which was already almost covered by the snow.
"That," Valentine said; "that is--"
"The body of a creature that died fighting," the doctor interrupted. "A
fine fashion of dying. Look at it, Julian. Its soul was indomitable to
the last, and so it won the battle it fought. It won by its very death
even. Nature is at work on its winding-sheet."
Valentine said nothing.
CHAPTER V
DOCTOR LEVILLIER VISITS THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS
Julian's utterance about the flame that held him with the lady of the
feathers struck Dr. Levillier forcibly at the time it was made, and
remained in his mind. He could not fail to connect it with his own
experience in Valentine's empty room, and, going further back, with
the last sitting of the two young men which was succeeded by the long
trance of Valentine. And as he thought of these things, it suddenly
occurred to him that the ghastly change which had taken place in
Valentine might well date from that night. Since the death of Rip the
doctor had formed the opinion that Valentine was no longer perfectly
sane. His excitement, the fury of his eyes when he spoke of the triumphs
of will, seemed to give the clue to his transformation. The insane
perpetually glorify themselves, and are transcendent egoists. Surely
the egoism of insanity had peeped out in Valentine's diatribe upon the
eternity of a strong man's individual will. The night of the trance had
been a strange crisis of his life. He had seemed to recover from it,
to come back from that wonderful simulation of death healthy, calm,
reasonable as before. This might have been only seeming. In that sleep
the sane and beautiful Valentine might have died, the insane and
unbeautiful Valentine have been born. There are many instances of a
sudden and acute shock to the nervous system leaving an indelible and
dreary writing upon the nature. If Valentine had thus been tossed to
madness, it was very possible that his dog, an instinctive creature,
should recognize the change with terror. It was even possible that other
instinctive creatures should divine the hideous mind of a maniac hidden
in the beautiful body of an apparently normal man. And Cuckoo, she too
was instinctive, a girl without education, culture, the reading that
opens the mind and sometimes shuts the eyes. Cuckoo Bright, she had
divined the evil of Valentine. To her he had made confession. In her
eyes Julian had seen the mysterious flame. Some influence from her had
kept him from his invited guests and from his house. Yes, Cuckoo, the
lady of the feathers, the blessed damozel of Regent Street and Piccadilly
Circus, the painted and possessed, faded and degraded, wanderer of the
pavements, seemed to become the centre of this wheel of circumstances,
as Doctor Levillier reflected upon her.
It was time for him to go to Cuckoo. Julian's descent must be stayed,
before he went down, like a new Orpheus without a mission, into Hades.
Valentine's influence, whether mad or sane, must be fought. It was to be
a struggle, a battle of wills, of what Valentine chose to consider souls.
And some prompting led the doctor to think of Cuckoo as a possible
weapon. Why? Because she had even once held Julian against his will,
against the intention of his soul.
So the doctor at length sought the lady of the feathers. She had been
passing through a period of great and benumbing desolation, believing
that her last appeal, her great effort for Julian, had been a failure.
For the doctor had not come to her, and Cuckoo could not tell that he
was making observations for himself and that she was often in his mind.
She supposed that he, like all others, laughed at her pretensions to
gravity, swept her exhibition of real and honest emotion away from his
memory with a sneer, considered her despair over another's ruin a vile
travesty, a grinning absurdity and trick. Never had Cuckoo felt more
lonely than in these days, though a vast loneliness is the constant
companion of her large sisterhood. Even Jessie failed to comfort her,
and she could find little courage within herself. And yet there were
moments when the vigour that had led her once to defy Valentine, when
the fire that had sprung up in her, as a flame may burst forth in a
swamp, seemed to be near to her again. She felt a new possibility within
her, stirring, striving. It was at such moments that she longed to see
the doctor, and could have cursed him for not coming to her. For at
such moments she seemed only waiting for a touch of sympathy, a word of
encouragement, to perform some great action, some momentous deed. But the
touch, the word, were lacking, and her life and experience of constant
and monotonous degradation dulled the impulse, stifled the enthusiasm
that she could not understand. And she fell again to brooding, and to
an ignorant and vague consciousness of impotence.
She bought a new hair-dye, painted her thin cheeks more heavily than ever
before, and sought, almost with a wild exultation that swiftly fled away,
to sink lower.
The monotony of sin is one of the scourges of sin. In those days Cuckoo
suffered many stripes. Her eyes grew more weary, her smile in Piccadilly
more mechanical, her walk more puppet-like than ever. Life was like
a moving dream of horror. And yet no day passed without a gleam of that
strange sensation of ignorant power, fluttering upward, fading away,
pausing, passing, dead.
She did not know what it meant. She could not keep it nor use it. She
could not unravel its message nor rest upon its strength. It was gone
almost while it came, but it did something for the lady of the feathers.
It gave to her the little seed of expectation that, quite alone in a
weary desert, yet makes of that desert the plot men call a garden. Like a
thread of steel, it held up this girl from the uttermost abyss, until at
last the doctor's hand struck upon her door.
Julian's occasional visits were as the scourgings of God, giving to
Cuckoo a vision of shifting ruin, in which she--so she told herself,
thinking of the dance of the hours--had been the first to have a share.
It was a wintry afternoon when the doctor came. Frost clung stealthily
round the grimy black trees, outlining their naked boughs with meagre
lines of white sewn with smuts. Above the frost hung the fog as if in
charge of the town, a despondent and gloomy sentinel. During the morning
the sun had lain in the fog like a faint blood-red jewel in a thick and
awkward sulphur setting, but with the afternoon the jewel faded to a
distant dim phantom, from that to blank nothingness. As if satisfied
with this piteous exit, the fog drew closer, keeping especially heavy
watch upon the long and bleak line of the Marylebone Road, and taking
the high and narrow house in which Cuckoo dwelt under its severest
protection. Twilight wanted to come as the afternoon drew on, but it had
been forestalled and was practically already there. Doubtless it did
come, but no one was much the wiser. The lamps had been alight all day,
and no procession of gloomy things, advancing from whithersoever,
could have added much to the volume of the crowding darkness, or have
appreciably increased its density. In the darkness the cold gathered,
and the frost began to take a harder grip of everything,--of desolate,
solitary pumps in tiny and squalid back yards, of pipes that crawled like
liver-coloured snakes over the unpresentable sides of houses, of pools
thick with orange-brown mud, and vagrant bushes creaking above the
grimy earth in places that children named gardens.
Fog and frost had taken a strong grip, too, upon the heart of the lady
of the feathers. Somewhere about eleven o'clock in the morning she had
stirred wearily in her bed, had stretched out her arms to the stagnant
air of the room, and crouched up on her pillow in a grotesque hump. For a
while the hump remained motionless. Then Cuckoo rolled round and extended
a bare thin leg to test the atmosphere. The leg was quickly withdrawn,
the atmosphere having been evidently tried in the balance and found
wanting. Cuckoo's bell rang, and Mrs. Brigg was called for tea and toast,
while once more the hump decorated the upper part of the disordered bed.
Jessie, awakened in her basket at the foot of the bed, joined the hump,
whining a greeting, and wriggling furiously in an effort to tunnel her
way to the ultimate depths of sheets and blankets. Then Mrs. Brigg, of
yellowish and bleak aspect, beneath a tumbled appurtenance that she
called a cap, appeared with a tray.
"Going to stop abed?" she asked, in a husky voice, in which the smuts
seemed floating.
"Yes. What's there to get up for?" Cuckoo groaned.
"Nothun' as I know of."
And Mrs. Brigg was gone about her business.
All the morning Cuckoo lay staring at the blank square of the window, and
Jessie snored under the blankets. The tea was drunk, the toast lay about
in fragments. One bit, hard and many cornered as it seemed, somehow
gained entrance to the bed, and greeted Cuckoo's every movement with
uncompromising grittiness. No shaking of coverlet and sheet, no beating
of pillow, no kicks and scufflings could expel it. The bed seemed full of
hard bits of toast, and Cuckoo felt as if an additional burden were laid
upon her by this slight evil. But, indeed, the horror of her existence
reached a culminating point to-day,--a point of loneliness, vacant
dreariness, squalor, and degradation that could not be surpassed. The
preceding night had been peculiarly horrible, and as Cuckoo now lay on
the tumbled bed, in the dim, cold room, with the fog gazing in, the
leaden hours of winter crawling by, she felt as if she could bear no
more. She could bear no more addition to her sick weariness; no more
addition to her useless hunger of love for Julian, that could never
be crowned with anything but despair; no more addition to her bodily
fatigue, born of tramping monotony succeeded by yet more enervating
weariness of the flesh. She could bear no more. Yes, but she must bear
more. For Cuckoo knew that she was not dying, was not even ill. She was
only tired in body, prostrate in heart, deserted in life, and forced to
witness the quick and running ruin of the man she had the farcical
absurdity to love. Imaginative, for once, in her morbid fatigue, she
began to wish that she could fade away and become part of the fog that
lay about London, be drawn into its murkiness, with all her murky
recollections, her fiendish knowledge, her mechanical wiles of the
streets, her thin and ghostly despairs and desires. For they seemed thin
and ghostly, they too, to-day, fit food for the fog, as indeed the whole
of her was. How could such as she evaporate into sweet air, a clear
heaven?
She caught at the hand-glass, leaning far out on the bed, as the blessed
damozel o'er the bright bar of heaven, and tried to see, with staring
eyes, how the new hair-dye that she was now using became her. Her mind
was vagrant, coming and going miserably, from that love of hers which was
strangely strong and subtle, to the powder-box with its arsenic-green
lid, or the rouge-pot of dirty white china. And by each event it paused
and sank, as if benumbed by the increasing frost. Leaning again to put
back the hand-glass she fell over too far and dropped it. The glass fell
face downwards and was smashed. Cuckoo laughed aloud, revelling feebly in
the additional misery a superstitious mind now began to promise her. The
fragments of broken glass actually pleased her, and, on a sudden, she
resolved to set her feet in them, that she might be cut and wounded, that
she might bleed outwardly as she had been bleeding inwardly for so long.
She swung her legs over the breadth of the bed, disorganizing Jessie,
planted her feet in the array of glass and stood up. As she did so the
doctor mounted her doorstep, plied the knocker and rang the bell. Cuckoo
stood listening. A fragment of glass had really penetrated the bare sole
of her foot, which bled a little gently on the carpet. But she scarcely
knew it. She heard Mrs. Brigg go by, and then steps sounding in the
passage. Then there came to her ears a quiet voice with a very
characteristic note of bright calmness in it. Standing in her frilled
nightdress among the bits of glass, Cuckoo flushed scarlet all over her
face and neck. She knew who the visitor was. With one dart she reached
the washhand-stand. Sponges, brushes, combs, all her weapons of the
toilet, were immediately in commotion, and when Mrs. Brigg opened her
door, the room was a whirlpool of quick activities, in the midst of
which, as on a frouzy throne, Jessie stood upon the bed barking
excitedly. Mrs. Brigg came in and closed the door. Her thin lips were
pursed.
"Light the fire!" Cuckoo called at her from the basin.
"What do you want the doctor for?"
Mrs. Brigg uttered the words with some suspicion.
"Hurry up and light the fire!"
Cuckoo turned round, her hands darting in her hair, and actually laughed
with a touch of merriment.
"You old owl! He's not come to doctor me, only to see me."
Mrs. Brigg looked relieved, but still surprised.
"Oh," she said. "That's it, is it?"
She paused as if in consideration.
Suddenly Cuckoo sprang on her, twisted her round, and spun her out into
the cold passage. "Light the fire, I tell you!"
She banged the bedroom door and went on with her rapid toilet.
When she came into the sitting-room an uneasy fire was sputtering in
the grate, one gas-jet flared, and Doctor Levillier was standing by the
window looking out at the fog. He turned to greet her.
"I thought you'd forgotten--or didn't mean to come," Cuckoo said; "they
often do--people that say they will to me, I mean."
The doctor held out his hand with a smile.
"No. Am I interrupting you?"
"Me!" said Cuckoo, in amazement, thinking of her empty days. "Lord, no."
Her accent was convincing. The little doctor sat down by the fire and put
his hat and gloves on the table.
"Mrs. Brigg thought I was ill--you bein' a doctor," Cuckoo said, with an
attempt at a laugh. She felt nervous now, and was not sustained today by
the strung-up enthusiasm which had supported her in Harley Street. "Funny
there bein' a fog again this time, ain't it?"
"Yes. I hope we shall meet some day in clear weather."
As the doctor said that, following a tender thought of the girl, he
glanced round the room and at Cuckoo. "I hope so," he repeated. Then,
rather abruptly:
"Two or three nights ago I went to dine with Mr. Addison. He was out. He
was here with you."
Cuckoo got red. She could still be very sensitive with a few people, and
perhaps Mrs. Brigg and her kind had trained her into irritable suspicion
of suspicion in others.
"Only for a friendly visit," she said hastily. "Nothin' else. He would
stop."
"I understand perfectly," the doctor said gently. Cuckoo was reassured.
"Did he say as he'd been?"
"Yes."
Cuckoo looked at the doctor and a world of reproach dawned in her eyes.
"I say," she said, "you haven't done nothin'. He's worse than ever. He's
gettin'--oh, he's gettin' cruel bad."
Tears came up over the world of reproach.
"It's all him, all Valentine," she said.
And Doctor Levillier was moved to cast reticence, the usual loyalty of
one man to another who has been his friend, away. Somehow the dead body
of Rip lying in the snow put that old friendship far off. And also an
inward thrill caught him near to Cuckoo. An impulse, swift and vital,
thrust his mind to hers.
"You are right," he answered. "I believe that it is all Valentine."
"There! Didn't I tell you?" Cuckoo cried with eyes of triumph. "It's been
him from the first. Oh, get him--get Julian away."
The doctor laid his hand upon Cuckoo's, which was stretched upon the
tablecloth, very gently, almost abstractedly.
"Will you tell me something?" he said.
"What's it?"
"You love Julian?"
"Me!" the lady of the feathers said.
Her voice trembled over the word. She stole a hasty, hunted glance at the
doctor. Was he, too, going to jeer at her? Would no one allow her to have
a clean corner in her heart?
"You're laughin' at me. What's the good of such as me doin' a thing like
that--lovin' a man?"
"I think you must love Julian. If you do, perhaps you are meant to
protect and save him."
A secret voice prompted the doctor with the words he spoke, gave them to
him, bent him irresistibly to repeat them. Never before had he felt what
it is to be between the strong hands of destiny.
"Me! Me save any one!" Cuckoo said, trembling.
"Yes, you. There is something in you--I feel it and I can't tell you why,
nor what it is--something that has hold of Julian. He told us so the
other night. Don't you know what it is?"
"Eh?"
"Perhaps he feels that you love him--purely, cleanly."
"I do--oh! I do that!" Cuckoo cried.
A wonder as to the relations between Julian and this girl shot through
the doctor. He was the last man in the world to think evil of any one,
but just then, as Cuckoo moved, the gaslight struck fully on her. The dye
on her hair shone crudely. The red and white of her face burned as on the
face of a clown. And then even the doctor's good heart wondered. Cuckoo
knew it in an instant, and her face hardened and looked older.
"Oh, go on," she said rudely. "Think as the others do. Damn you men! Damn
you! Damn you!"
And without warning she put her head down on the table and broke into a
wild passion of tears. She sobbed, and as she sobbed she cursed and
clenched her hands. She lost herself in fury and in despair. The Fates
had stung her too hard this time, and she must blaspheme against them
with her voice of the streets, her language of the streets, her poor
heart--not quite of the streets. The Fates had stung her too hard, for
they had put a flaw even in this one self-respect of hers. That one
night accused her whenever she thought of Julian, whenever she saw the
dissipation deepen round his eyes. She was not to have even one thing
that she could be quite proud of; not one thing of which she could say,
"This has been always pure." And then she turned on the doctor and cried:
"Go on--think it--think it! Think what you like! But I'll tell you the
truth. There was only once I did him any harm, and that wasn't my fault.
I never wanted to. I hated it. I told him I hated it. I didn't want him
to be that, like the others. And that was Valentine, too. And now--just
because of that I'm no use. And you'd said I might be, you'd said I might
be."
"And I say you shall be."
The wail died in Cuckoo's throat. The tears were arrested as by a spell.
Dr. Levillier had got upon his feet. All the truth and tenderness of his
heart was roused and quickened. He knew real passion, real grief, and
from that moment he knew and trusted the lady of the feathers. And by
the strength of her bitterness, even by the broken curses that would have
shocked so many of the elect of this world, he measured the width and
the depth of her possibilities. She had sent to damnation--what? The
vile cruelty, the loathsome, unspeakable, dastardly mercilessness of the
world. To damnation with it! That was the loud echo in his man's heart.
"That one night is nothing," he said. "Or rather it is something that you
must redeem. It is good to have to pay for a thing. It is that makes one
work. There is a work for you to do, a work which I believe no one else
can do. You love Julian. Love him more. Make him love you. My will cannot
fight the will of Valentine over him. No man's will can. A woman's may.
Yours may, shall."
His pale, small, delicate face flamed with excitement as he spoke. Few
of his patients looking upon him just then would have known their calm
little doctor. But Cuckoo had cried to him out of the very depths, and
out of the very depths he answered her, still prompted--though now he
knew it not--by that secret voice which sometimes rules a man, at which
he wonders ignorantly, the voice of some soul, some great influence,
hidden from him in the spaces of the air, the voice of a flame, warm,
keen, alive, and power-prompting.
And Cuckoo, as she listened to the doctor, had once again a hint of her
own strength, a thrill of hope, a sense that she, even she, was not
broken quite in pieces upon the cruel wheel of the world.
"Whatever can I do?" she said; "Valentine's got him."
As she spoke, the doctor, restless, as men are in excitement, had moved
over to the mantelpiece, and stood with one foot upon the edge of the
fender. Thinking deeply, he glanced over the photographs of Cuckoo's
acquaintance, without actually seeing them. But presently one, at which
he had looked long and fixedly, dawned upon him, cruelly, powerfully. It
was the face of Marr.
"Who is that?" he said abruptly to Cuckoo.
"That?" She too got up and came near to him, lowering her voice almost to
a whisper. "That's really _him_."
"Him?"
"Valentine."
The doctor looked at her in blank astonishment.