Have you listened to far-off and mingling melodies at night--melodies of

things opposed and differing, yet drawn together, in strange places far

from your home? Have you heard a woman wailing over some abominable

sorrow in a dark house, and an organ--before which filthy children dance

fantastically--playing a merry Neapolitan tune in front of it, while the

mutter of scowling men comes from the blazing corner where the gin-palace

faces the night? There you have sorrow, sunshine, crime, singing together

in a great city. Or have you stood in a land not your own, and gleaned

the whisper of an ancient river, the sough of a desert wind, the hoarse

and tuneless song of a black man at a waterwheel, the soprano ballad of

a warbling hotel English lady, and the remote and throbbing roar of a

savage Soudanese hymn and beaten drums from the golden Eastern night?

There you have nature, toil, shrill civilization and war claiming you

with one effort in a sad and sweet country. Or have you, in a bright and

dewy morning, heard the "murmur of folk at their prayers," the drone of a

church organ, and, beyond the hedgerow, two graceless lovers quarrelling,

and an atheist, leaning over the church gate, sneering to his fellow at

the devotion of deluded Sabbath-keepers? There you have love of the

hidden and faith, love of the visible and distrust, hatred of hidden love

and faithlessness, making a symphony for you. Such mingled music is

strange--strange as life. But to the doctor the music of this girl,

Cuckoo, in the dark seemed stranger and more eerie far. Her mind sang to

him of a thousand things in a moment, as is the fashion of women. Only

men normally hear but one, at most two or three, of the many feminine

melodies. And now Doctor Levillier heard them all, as a man may hear

those differing songs already recounted, simultaneously and clearly.

Degradation and the hopelessness that catches it by the hand, passion

and the strength and purity of passion, hatred, fear, physical fatigue,

ignorant nervousness, grossness of the gutter, which will cling even to

a soul capable of great devotion and noble effort, and accompany it on

the upward journey, very far and very high, resolve and shrinking, mere

street-boy virulence of enmity, and mere angel tenderness of pity--all

these sang their song from the mind and heart of Cuckoo to the mind and

heart of the doctor. It was a chorus of women in one woman, as it so

often is in the dearest women we know. In that choir a harlot sat,

hating, by a girl who was all love and reverence. And they sang out

of the same hymn-book. Jenny joined her voice with Susannah, Mary

Magdalene with Mary Mother, so near together in one thing, so far

apart in another--alike in this, that both were singing. And in that

choir--celestial and infernal--sang the jealous woman with grey cheeks

and haggard eyes, and the timorous woman, and she of the fearless face,

and the woman who could scale the stars for the creature she worshipped,

and the woman who could lie down in the mud and let the world see her

there, and the woman who had sold her soul for food, and a thin woman,

such a thin, almost transparent, wistful creature, who was facing the

thing men call with bated breath--starvation. She sang too, but, of all

these women, she was the only one the doctor could not rightly hear nor

rightly see. For she, as yet, was remote, far down the level line of that

choir, hardly perhaps one with it yet, faint of voice, dim of outline.

The doctor heard the choir sing, and then--

His mind, as the time of the darkness grew longer, continued to grow

more and more clear, until he felt thoroughly, and was able to try to

analyze its unnatural condition. Scales had fallen from him and from

his companions for him. Their bodies were clothed, their souls, their

flames, seemed stripped bare and offered to him naked. He had examined

them with this greedy, yet sane, attention and curiosity. He had led them

into the empty room and stayed with them there. He had heard the Litany

of the Glory of Valentine, and the suffocation, and the anger, and the

stirring beneath his yoke of Julian. He had heard the many women sing in

the heart of the lady of the feathers. But all this seemed leading him

forward and onward, step by step, as to a threshold beyond which was some

greater, some more importunate, thing. And he took the last step with

Cuckoo. It was as if he was handed on from one room to another, as is the

fashion in the palace of a great king, his name being called in each, and

sent before, like a voice sent on the wind, and as if Cuckoo was in the

last anteroom that gave upon the audience-chamber. Now he had arrived,

and suddenly a great wave of mysterious expectation ran over him and

filled the cup of his soul. He felt that he stood still and waited. The

sense of Cuckoo, of all she felt and thought in the darkness, gradually

dropped away from him, like leaves from a tree, till every branch was

leafless. And this autumnal ravishment, like the ravishment of nature,

was but a preparation surely for a future spring.

The doctor waited outside that door, beyond which, perhaps, spring

blossomed and sang. He lost at last all sense of being in a company of

people, and felt as one feels who is entirely alone, expectant, calm,

ready. And still only the darkness and the silence. Nothing more at

first. But presently what seemed to him a marvel.

He had by this time grown at ease with his power of thought-reading,

at ease with this new sense of the hearing of silence. The differing

scents of these three flowers hidden in the night had been breathed

out to him. With infallible certainty he had recognized each one,

differentiated the one from the other. And as the scent of one flower

had failed, the scent of another had risen upon him, until he had known

the heart of each of the three. Then for a while was the night scentless,

silent, blank, empty. But presently the doctor was aware of an uneasiness

and of an anxiety stealing upon him. Whence it came he could not tell.

Only this he knew, that he received it from something, but that it came

neither from the lady of the feathers, from Valentine, nor from Julian.

From whom, then, could it emanate, this weird eagerness, this fluttering,

pulsing fear, and hope, and intention? From himself only? He asked

himself that question. Was he communing in the dark with his own soul?

He knew that he was not. The scent of this new and unknown flower grew

stronger in the night, more penetrating and intentional. Yet was it

vaguer, more distant, than that emitted by those other three flowers.

The exact impression received by the doctor at this moment was very

subtle. Precisely it was this: It seemed to him that he was gradually

coming into communication with a fourth mind, or soul; that this soul was

actually more strong, more vehement, even more determined, than the souls

of his three companions, but that some barrier removed it from him, set

it very far of. The flame of a match held to a man's eyes may dazzle him

more than the flame of a great fire on the horizon. This new flame was as

the latter in comparison to match-flames that had been flaring in the

doctor's eyes. And this great and distant flame burned slowly in a smoke

of mystery and upon the verge of dense darkness.

Never had the doctor known so peculiar, and even awe-striking, an

experience as that which he now underwent. What utterly bewildered him

was the circumstance of this undoubted new and definite personality

enclosed in this tiny room with him and with his three companions. He

was receiving the impression of the thoughts of a stranger. Yet there

was no stranger in the chamber. And he was vexed and curiously irritated

by the fact of the impression being at the same time very vague and very

violent, like the cry of a man which reaches you faintly from a very long

distance, but which you feel instinctively to have been uttered with the

frantic force of death or of despair. And the mind of this stranger was

tugging at the doctor's mind, anxiously, insistently. There was a depth

of distress in it that was as no mere human distress, and that moved the

doctor to a mood beyond the mood of tears or of prayers. There came over

him an awful sense of pity for this stranger-soul. What had it done? How

was it circumstanced? In what ghastly train of events did it move? It was

surely powerful and helpless at the same time; a cripple with a mind on

fire with fight; Samson blind. He felt that it wanted something--of him,

or of his companions, some light in its severe desolation. Deeper and

deeper grew his horror and pity for it, deeper and deeper his sense of

its ill fate. The woe of it was unearthly, yet more than earthly woe.

Similes came to the doctor to compare with its dreadful circumstance:

a child motherless in a world all winter; a saint devoted to hell by

some great error of God; even one more blasphemous, and more _bizarre_

still--God worsted by humanity, and, at the last, helpless to reclaim

the souls to which He had Himself given being; lonely God in a lonely

heaven, seeing far-off hell bursting with the countless multitudes of

the writhing lost. This last simile stayed with him. He fancied, he

felt--not heard--the voice of this frustrate God calling to him: "Do what

I could not do. Strive to help My impotence. A little--a little--and even

yet hell would stand empty, the vacant courts of heaven be filled.

Act--act--act."

"Doctor, why are you trembling? Why are you trembling?"

It was the voice of Valentine that spoke. The doctor, by an effort so

painful that the memory of it remained with him to the end of his life,

recalled his mind from its journey.

"Trembling!" he said. "What do you mean? I am all right. I am quietly in

my place. How long have we been sitting?"

"An immense time I fancy. It seems fruitless, Julian!"

"Yes."

Julian's voice sounded heavy and weary.

"Don't you think we had better stop?"

"If you like."

Valentine got up and turned on the light.

Then they saw that the lady of the feathers, leaning back in her chair,

was fallen asleep, no doubt from sheer weariness. Her face was very

white, and in sleep its expression had become ethereal and purified. Her

thin hands still rested nervelessly upon the table. She seemed like a

little child that had known sorrow early, and sought gently to lose the

sense of it in rest.

"Cuckoo," Julian said, leaning over her, "Cuckoo!"

She stirred and woke.

"I'm awfully done," she murmured, in her street voice. "Pardon!"

She sat up.

"I seemed as if I was put to sleep," she said.

"You were," Valentine answered her. "I willed that you should sleep."

He looked at the doctor, and his eyes said:

"I have had my triumph. You witness it."

Cuckoo reddened with anger, but she said nothing.

"Did you feel anything, Julian?" Valentine asked.

Julian looked strangely hopeless.

"Nothing," he said. "It's all different from what it was; like a dead

thing that used to be alive."

It seemed as if the sitting had filled him with a dogged despair.

"A dead thing," he repeated.

Then he went over to the spirit-stand and poured himself out more

absinthe.

"And you, doctor?" said Valentine. "What did you feel?"

"I was thinking all the time," he said, "of other things. Not of the

table or of table-turning."

When he and Cuckoo left the flat that night, or rather in the chill first

morning of the new year, they left Julian with Valentine.

He said he would stay, speaking in the voice of a man drugged almost into

uncertainty of his surroundings.

CHAPTER V

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS STARVES

Down in her dreary kitchen, among her dingy pots and pans, Mrs. Brigg was

filled with an anger that seemed to her as righteous as the anger of a

Puritan against Museum-opening on Sunday. Her ground-floor lodger was

going to the bad. Analysed, reduced to its essence, that was her feeling

about the lady of the feathers. Cuckoo had lived at number 400 for a

considerable time. Being, in some ways, easy-going, or perhaps one should

say rather reckless, she had given herself with a good enough grace to be

plucked by the claws of the landlady. She had endured being ruthlessly

rooked, with but little murmuring, as do so many of her patient class,

accustomed to be the prey of each unit in the large congregation of the

modern Fates. For months and years she had paid a preposterous price for

her badly furnished little rooms. She had been overcharged habitually for

every morsel of food she ate, every drop of beer or of tea she drank,

every fire that was kindled in her badly cleaned grate, every candle that

lighted her, almost every match she struck. She and Mrs. Brigg had had

many rows, had, times without number, lifted up their respective voices

in vituperation, and shown command of large and vile vocabularies. But

these rows had not been on the occasion of the open cheating of the

former by the latter. Fallen women, as they are called, seldom resent

being cheated by those in whose houses they live. Rather do they expect

the bleeding process as part of the penalty to be paid for a lost

character. The landlord of the leper is owed, for his charity and

tolerance, good hard cash. The landlady of the Pariah puts down mentally

in each added-up bill this item: "To loss of character--so much." And the

Pariah understands and pays. Such is the recognized dispensation. Mrs.

Brigg had had a fine time of robbery during the stay of Cuckoo in her

ugly house, and, in consequence, a certain queer and slow respect for

her lodger had very gradually grown up in her withered and gnarled old

nature. She had that feeling towards Cuckoo that a bad boy, too weak

to steal apples, has towards a bad boy not too weak to steal them. It

could hardly be called an actual liking. Of that the old creature in

her nethermost Hades was nearly incapable. But she enjoyed seeing apples

off the tree lying in her kitchen, and so could have patted any hands

that had gathered them nefariously. So far as she looked into the future

she saw there always Cuckoo, and herself robbing Cuckoo comfortably,

faithfully, unblamed and unrepentant, while the years rolled along,

the leech ever at its sucking profession.

Now this agreeable vision was abruptly changed. This slide of the magic

lantern was smashed to fragments. And Mrs. Brigg was filled with the

righteous anger of a balked and venerable robber. As a mother, dependent

upon the earnings of her child in some godly profession might feel on the

abrupt and reasonless refusal of that child to continue in it, so did

Mrs. Brigg feel now.

The lady of the feathers had, for the moment at least, given up

her profession. She sat at home with folded hands at night. It was

earth-shaking. It stirred the depths of the Brigg being. Quakings of a

world in commotion were as nothing to it. And the sweet Brigg dream that

had dawned on the last night of the old year, dream of a rich "toff" in

love with Cuckoo and winding her up to gilded circles, in which the fall

of night set gay ladies bareheaded, and scattered all feathered hats to

limbo, died childless and leaving no legacies. Certainly, Cuckoo was not

making money on the quiet enough in one night to keep her as seven or

fourteen nights would formerly have supplied. Mrs. Brigg questioned,

remonstrated, stormed, sulked, was rude, insinuating, artful, blunt, and

blackguardly--all to no purpose. Cuckoo would give no explanation of her

conduct. In the day she went out, but Mrs. Brigg was not to be deceived

by that. She based her observations and conclusions on weighty matters

connected with the culinary art and with things about which her trained,

disgraceful intelligence could not be deceived. Cuckoo was falling into

poverty. In the eyes of Brigg she had formerly been in touch with riches,

that is to say, she had--so the landlady considered--lived well. She had

got along without falling into debt. The exorbitant rent, regularly

earned, had been as regularly paid. The Brigg perquisites had not been

disputed. No watchful eye had been directed upon the claws that grabbed

and clung, the fingers that filched and retained.

But now was come a devastating change. Cuckoo grown, or growing, poor

was no longer easy-going. Living much less well, she also began to keep

a sharp eye on all she had. If it went mysteriously, without explanatory

action of her own, she called loudly on Brigg for enlightment. Where had

it gone? The old lady, disgusted to be brought to subterfuge, a thing to

which she was frankly unaccustomed, lied freely and with a good courage.

But her lies did not stand her in much stead with Cuckoo, who had, from

the start, no intention whatever of believing any word she might say.

So war of a novel kind came about between them. Mrs. Brigg was forced to

live and hear herself named thief, a distressing circumstance which she

could scarcely surmount with dignity, whatever she might manage in the

way of fortitude. Denial only armed forces for the attack. Battles were

numerous and violent. Cuckoo, who had in some directions no perception

at all of what was humiliating, took to measuring proportions of legs of

mutton going down to Hades and remeasuring them on their return. If the

inches did not tally, Mrs. Brigg knew it. Her soul revolted against such

surveyor's work on meat that her own hands had cooked. She called Cuckoo

names, and was called worse names in reply. But still the measurings went

on, and still Cuckoo spent her evenings within doors, sometimes without a

fire in the winter cold.

Mrs. Brigg therefore said within herself that Cuckoo had gone to the bad,

and beheld, with fancy's agitated eye, a time in the near future when not

only prequisites would be no more, but the very rent itself would be in

jeopardy. Fury sparkled in her heart.

Meanwhile the situation of Cuckoo above stairs was becoming at once

sordid and tragic. Starvation is always sordid. It exposes cheek-bones,

puts sharp points on elbows, writes ugliness over a face, and sets a

wolf crouching in the heart. Tragic it must always be, for a peculiar

sorrow walks with it; but when it is obstinate, and springs from the mule

in a human being, the tragedy has a lustre, a colour of its own. The lady

of the feathers was forever obstinate. She had been obstinate in vice,

she was now obstinate in virtue. In the old days Julian had said to her,

"Take some of my money and let the streets alone--even for one night."

She had refused. Now Doctor Levillier had said to her, "Prove your will.

Lean on it. Do something for Julian." She could only do this one thing.

She could only leave the street! With frowning, staring obstinacy she

left it. There was always something pathetically blind about Cuckoo's

proceedings. She was not lucid. But once she had grasped an idea she was

like the limpet on the rock. So now she sat at home. Out of her earnings

she had managed to save a very little money. One or two men had made her

small presents from time to time. For a little while she could exist. As

she sat alone on those strange new evenings she did much mental

arithmetic, calculating how long, with these reduced expenses, which

brought Mrs. Brigg's so low, she could live without earning. Sad sums

were these, whether rightly or wrongly worked out. The time must be

short. And afterwards? This question drove Cuckoo out in the mornings,

vaguely seeking an occupation. She knew that London was full of "good"

girls, who went forth to work while she lay in bed in the morning, and

came home to tea, and one boiled egg and watercress, when she started out

in the evening. So she put on her hat and jacket and went forth to find

out what work they did, and whether she could join in it. Those were

variegated pilgrimages full of astonishment. Cuckoo would stroll along

the road till she saw, perhaps, a girl who looked good--that is, as

unlike herself as possible--descend into the frost, or the mud from a

bus. Then she would dog the footsteps of this girl, find out where she

went, with a view of deducing from it what she did. In this manner she

once came to a sewing-machine shop in Praed Street, on the trail of a

bright-looking stranger, who walked gaily as to pleasant toil. Cuckoo

remained outside while the stranger went in and disappeared. She examined

the window--rows of sewing-machines, beyond them the dressed head of a

woman in a black silk gown. What did the stranger do here to gain a

living, and that bright smile of hers? Suddenly Cuckoo walked into the

shop and up to the lady with the dressed head.

"A machine, ma'am?" said the lady, with a very female look at Cuckoo.

Cuckoo shook her head.

"What can I do for you?"

"I'd like some work."

"Work!" said the lady, her voice travelling from the contralto to the

soprano register.

"I ain't got nothing to do. I want something; I'll do anything, like she

does," this, with a nod in the direction of a door through which the

pleasant stranger had vanished.

"Miss King; our bookkeeper! You know her?"

"No. I only see her in the street."

"Good morning," came from the lady, and a back confronted Cuckoo.

The pilgrimages were resumed. Cuckoo visited dressmakers, bonnet-shops,

ABC establishments, with no success. Her face, even when unpainted, told

its tale. Nature can write down the truth of a sin better than art.

Cuckoo learnt that fact by her walks. But still she trudged, learning

each day more truths, one of which--a finale to the long sermon, it

seemed--was that there is no army on earth more difficult to enlist in,

under certain circumstances her own, than the army of good working-girls.

The day she thoroughly understood that finale Cuckoo went home and had a

violent row with Mrs. Brigg. A cold scrag of mutton was supposed to be

the bone of contention, but that was only supposition. Cuckoo was really

cursing Mrs. Brigg because the world is full of close boroughs, not at

all because cold mutton has not learnt how to achieve eternal life, while

at the same time fulfilling its duties as an edible. Not understanding

this subtlety of emotion, Mrs. Brigg let herself loose in sarcasm.

"Why don't yer go out of a night?" she screamed, battering with one hand

on a tea-tray, held perpendicularly, to emphasize her words. "What's come

to yer? Go out; go out of a night."

"Shan't."

"Turned pious, 'ave yer?" sneered the landlady. "Or waitin' for a

'usband? Which is it to be? Mr. H'Addison, I dessey! Hee, hee, hee."

She burst into a bitter snigger. Cuckoo flushed scarlet and uttered words

of the pavement. Any one hearing her then must have put her down as

utterly unredeemed and irredeemable, a harridan to bandy foul language

with a cabman, or to outvie a street-urchin bumped against by a rival in

the newspaper trade. She covered Mrs. Brigg with abuse, prompted by the

gnawings at her heart, the hunger of mind and body, fear of the future,

wonder at the impossibilities of life. Her own greatness--for her love

and following obstinate unselfishness, without religious prompting or

self-respect, as it was, might be called great--turned sour within her

heart at such a moment. Her very virtue became as vinegar. Mrs. Brigg

was drowned in epithets and finally pushed furiously out into the

passage. Cuckoo turned from the door to Jessie yelping, and directed a

kick at the little dog. Jessie wailed, as only a toy dog can, like the

"mixture" stop of an organ, wailed and ran as one that runs to meet an

unknown future. Then Cuckoo pursued, caught her, and burst into tears

over her. The little creature's domed skull and india-rubber ears were

wet with the tears of her mistress. And she whimpered, too, but with much

relief, for she was back in her world of Cuckoo's lap; and could not be

quite unhappy there. But in what a world was Cuckoo!

It will be said that Dr. Levillier knew of her circumstances; but

anxiously kind and thoughtful though he was, he did not yet realize the

effect of his advice given to the lady of the feathers during the drive

on the Hampstead Heights. He had told her to prove her will by doing the

thing that Julian had asked of her. But he did not know what Julian had

asked. And he did not comprehend the bitter fruit that her following of

his further advice to keep from low and loveless actions must bring to

the ripening. When he spoke, as the sun went down on London, he was

carried on by excitement, and was thinking rather of the fate of Julian,

the _diablerie_ of Valentine, than of the individual life of the girl at

his side. He was arming her for the battle. But he dreamed of weapons,

not of rations, like many an enthusiast. He forgot that the soldier must

be fed as well as armed. He said to Cuckoo: "Fight! Use your woman's wit;

use your heart; wake up, and throw yourself into this battle." And she,

filled with determination, and with a puzzled, pent ardour to do

something, did not know what to do except--starve. So she began to

starve for Julian's sake, and because the doctor had fired her heart.

He had said: "Do what Julian asked you to do, and show Julian that you

have done it." But something within Cuckoo forbade her to fulfil this

last injunction. She could give up the street, but an extraordinary

shyness, false shame, and awkwardness had so far prevented her from

letting Julian know it. If he knew it, he would understand what it meant

for her, and would force money on her, and Cuckoo, having once made up

her mind that money and Julian should never be linked together in her

relations with him, stuck to secrecy on this subject with her normal dull

pertinacity. So matters move slowly towards a deadlock. The lady of the

feathers did not neglect the pawnshop. Her few trinkets went there very

soon. Then things that were not trinkets, that green evening dress, for

instance, the imitation lace, and one day a sale took place. Cuckoo

disposed, for an absurd sum, of her title deed, the headgear that had

given birth to her nickname. She was no longer the lady of the feathers.

The hat that had seen so much of her life reposed upon the head of

virtue, and knew Piccadilly no more. But Julian's present remained with

her, and indeed came into every-day use. And still Jessie sported her

yellow riband. Later there came a terrible time, when the eyes of

Cuckoo--appraising everything on which they looked--fell with that

fateful expression, not merely upon Jessie's yellow riband, but upon

Jessie herself. But that time was not quite yet.

While Cuckoo endured this fate, Dr. Levillier was in a perplexity of

another kind. The first round of that battle had ended in apparent

decisive defeat of Valentine's accusers. During the evening the fortunes

of war had certainly wavered to the doctor's side. Julian had displayed

sudden strong signs of an awakening; but the sitting had thrown him back

into his dream, had pushed him more firmly beneath the yoke of his

master. The doctor did not understand why, although he recognized the

fact; he could not divine the exact effect that disappointment would have

upon sudden suspicious eagerness. Julian had been waked to wonder, to

observe Valentine for an instant with new eyes, to look the mystery of

the great change in him in the face, and know it as a mystery. Yes, he

had even thought of Valentine as a stranger, and said to himself, "Where,

then, is my friend?" The new Valentine had risen out of the ashes of

sleep. Julian pressed forward the sitting as a means, the only one, of

searching among these ashes. In the old days each sitting had quickened

his senses into a strange life, as the last sitting quickened the senses

of the doctor. But to Julian this last sitting brought nothing but

disappointment; the thing which had been alive was dead, and so the

sudden hope which had come with the new wonder died too. He supposed

that he had been the prey of an absurd fancy created by the idle words

of the doctor, or by an idiotic movement of his mind, which had cried

to him on a sudden: "If the Valentine you love and revere is really gone

away, what are you worshipping now?" Now, in his heavy disappointment he

thought of this cry as a mad exclamation, and he sought to drown all

memory of it, and every memory in fresh vices, and in his fatal habit

of absinthe-drinking. He lay down under the yoke beneath which he had

previously wept, and so succeeded in going still lower. So that night

Valentine had won his intended triumph, although for a while it had been

in jeopardy.

Doctor Levillier was in perplexity; he had been brought to the very

threshold of revelation, and then thrust back into an every-day world

of thwarted hopes and broken ambitions. But the memory of magic was

still with him, and gave him a feeling of unrest, and a pertinacity that

was not to be without reward forever. Valentine's triumph held for the

conqueror a poison seed from which a flower was to spring. The doctor's

determination to continue the fight was frustrated at this time by

Julian, rather than by Valentine. Julian's disappointment plunged him

in a deep sea of indifference, from which he declined to be rescued. The

doctor's invitations to him remained unanswered. If he called, Julian

was never at home. Several times the doctor met Valentine, who, with a

deprecating smile, told him that Julian was away on some mad errand.

"I seldom see him now," he even added upon one occasion. "He has gone

beyond me. Julian is living so fast that my poor agility cannot keep pace

with him."

It seemed as if the whole affair was going completely out of the doctor's

knowledge, and that even Cuckoo had no longer any power of attraction for

Julian. The doctor wrote to her and received an ill-spelt answer, telling

him that Julian had not been near her since the last night of the year.

In this event the doctor's only hope lay in keeping closely in touch with

Valentine. To do this proved an easy matter. Valentine responded readily

to his invitations, asked him out in return, seemed glad to be with him.

The doctor believed he read the reason of this joy in Valentine's anxiety

to prove the depth of Julian's degradation. He had now begun to play

devilishly upon a pathetic stop, and sought every occasion to descant

upon the social ruin that was overtaking Julian, and his deep concern

in the matter. This hypocrisy was so transparent and so offensive that

there were moments when it stank in the doctor's nostrils, and he could

scarcely repress his horror and disgust. Yet to show them would be not

only impolitic, but would only add fuel to the flames of Valentine's pyre

of triumph. So the doctor, too, sought to play his part, and never

wearied in seeking Julian, although his quest was in vain. From Valentine

he gathered that Julian was now dropped even by the gay world; that his

clubs looked askance at him; that men began to shun him, and to whisper

against him.

"The stone is going down in the sea," Valentine said.

"Who threw it into the sea?" the doctor asked. "Tell me that."

Valentine shrugged whimsical shoulders.

"Fate, I suppose," he answered. "Fate is a mischievous boy, and is always

throwing stones. Is the lady of the feathers disconsolate?"

The doctor did not trust himself to reply, but was silent, plotting

another meeting to sit. For he had begun, still magic-bound perhaps, to

divine some possible salvation in that act which he had once condemned,

led, as he thought, by knowledge and by experience, of the nervous system

forsooth! Now he was led unscientifically by pure feeling, like a child

by a warm, close hand. The instinct that had guided Cuckoo seemed to

stretch out fingers to him. He must respond. But how to reach Julian?

While he strove to solve this problem it was solved for him in a manner

utterly surprising to him, although engineered by words of his.

Cuckoo wrought a strange work with the skeleton hands of hunger and of

pain.

CHAPTER VI

THE SELLING OF JESSIE

One chill morning of earliest February, a stirring of Jessie at the foot

of her bed wakened Cuckoo from a short and uneasy sleep. She opened her

eyes to the faint light that filtered through the green Venetian blind.

Jessie moved again, slowly rotating like a drowsy top, then suddenly

dropped into the warm centre of a nest of bedclothes, breathing a big

dog-sigh of satisfaction that shook her tiny frame. She slept. But she

had wakened her mistress, who lay with her head resting on one hand,

deep in thought while the day grew outside. Cuckoo, having directed her

steps down a blind-alley had, not unnaturally, reached a dead-wall,

blotting out the horizon. Lying there, she faced it. She stared at the

wall, and the wall seemed to stare back at her. Perhaps for that reason

a dull blankness flowed over and filled her mind, and made her widely

opened eyes almost as expressionless as the eyes of a corpse. For a

long time she lay in this alive stupor. Then Jessie stirred again, and

Cuckoo, as she had been before spurred into wakefulness, was stirred

into thoughtfulness. She began to pass the near past, the present,

eventually the future, in review. The past was a crescendo, solitude

growing louder each night, poverty growing louder, obstinacy growing

louder, Mrs. Brigg growing louder. What an orchestra! Cuckoo had not

seen Julian once. She had seen the doctor, to be told of his baffled

efforts, of Julian's escape from all his friends, of Valentine's

declaration of the stone going down in the sea, of utter deadlock,

utter stagnation. For the doctor treated Cuckoo frankly as a brave

woman, not deceitfully as a timid child to be buoyed on the waves of

ill-circumstances with gas-filled bladders. Cuckoo knew the worst of

things, and by the knowledge was confirmed in her mule's attitude which

so weighed upon Mrs. Brigg. Her hands were tied in every direction

except one. She could only dumbly prove that Valentine was wrong; that

her will was not dead, by exercising it to the detriment of her worldly

situation. Doggedly then she put her whole past behind her, despite the

ever-increasing curses of the landlady. She had given up her pilgrimages

in search of honest work. They were too hopeless. She had pawned

everything she could pawn, and sold every trifle that was saleable. Even

Jessie's broad band of yellow satin had been included in a heterogeneous

parcel of odds and ends purchased by a phlegmatic German with eyes like

marbles and the manner of a stone image. Living less and less well, doing

without fires, sitting often in the dark at night to save the expense of

gas, Cuckoo had managed to pay her rent until a week ago. Then money had

failed, and the great earthquake had at length tossed and swallowed the

wretched Mrs. Brigg. The scene had been tropical. Mrs. Brigg was really

moved to the very depths of her being. For days she had been, as it were,

eating and drinking apprehension. Now apprehension choked her. She was

shot up in the air by the cannon of climax. Limbs and mind were in the

extreme of commotion. From her point of view it must be acknowledged that

the situation was unduly exasperating. For Cuckoo would give no reason

whatever for her reiterated formula of refusal to earn any money. And now

she could not pay her week's rent, plunging Mrs. Brigg into the further

circle of an _inferno_, and yet sat within doors day after day. Mrs.

Brigg approached apoplexy by way of persuasion, was by turns pathetic

and paralytic with passion. She coaxed with the ardour of an executioner

inveigling the victim's neck to the noose and in haste to be off to

breakfast. She threatened like Jove in curl-papers. Cuckoo was

inexorable.

"Then out you go!" said Mrs. Brigg at last. "Out of my house you pack,

you--" Nameless words followed.

Cuckoo got up from her chair with no show of emotion and moved towards

her bedroom stonily to pack her box. She didn't care. She was in a mood

to lie down in the gutter and wait the last blow of Fate, living only in

her one obstinate determination to do what the doctor had told her, the

one thing Julian had asked of her. She did not any longer war with words

against the purple and hard-breathing landlady. And her silence and her

movement of obedience awed Mrs. Brigg for the moment into another mood.

She shuffled after Cuckoo into the bedroom.

"Eh? What is it?" she ejaculated. "What are you a-doing of?"

"Going," Cuckoo threw at her.

"Now?"

"Yes."

"Where to?"

No answer. Cuckoo was thrusting the few things still left to her into the

only box she now possessed in the world. Mrs. Brigg stood in the folding

doorway watching, and making mouths, as is the fashion of the elderly

when emotional.

"What are you going for?" she said presently, as Cuckoo, bending down,

stuffed a white petticoat into the depths.

"Can't pay," snarled Cuckoo.

"It don't matter--for a day or two," said Mrs. Brigg, reluctantly.

She stumped downstairs, torn by conflicting emotions. She had got

accustomed to Cuckoo, and then both Julian and Valentine, Cuckoo's

visitors, had taught her the colour of the British sovereign. They had

not been near 400 lately, but they might come again. And then Doctor

Levillier. Cuckoo had some fine friends, who would surely do something

for her. Mrs. Brigg had no other possible lodger in her eye. On the

whole, prudence dictated a day or two's patience, just a day or two,

or a week's, not more, not a moment more. Thus it came about that Cuckoo

had now been another week beneath the roof of Mrs. Brigg without paying

hard cash for the asylum. The previous evening the landlady had burst

out again into fury, refusing to get in any more food for Cuckoo, and

demanding the fortnight's rent. She had even, carried away by cupidity

and passion, striven to drive Cuckoo out to her night's work. A physical

struggle had taken place between them, ending in the landlady's

hysterics. Other lodgers had been drawn by the noise from their floors

to witness the row. Two of them had come, on the scene accompanied by

men, and to them Mrs. Brigg had shrieked her wrongs and explanations of

this swindling virtue of a woman who had formerly paid her way honestly

from the street. The lodgers and their men had provided an accompaniment

of jeering laughter to the Brigg solo, and Cuckoo, her clothes nearly

torn from her back, had flung at last into her sitting-room and locked

the door. That was last night--the past which she now reviewed in the

morning twilight. What was she to do? She was without food. She was in

debt, must leave Mrs. Brigg, no doubt, but must pay her first, had no

means to pay for another lodging. She might apply to Doctor Levillier.

What held her back from taking that road was mainly this. She had the

dumb desire to make a sacrifice for Julian, and the doctor had given her

the idea of the only sacrifice she could make--retention of herself from

the degradation that kept her free of debt. If she asked the doctor to

pay the expenses of the sacrifice, whose would it be? His, not hers. So

there was no banker in the world for Cuckoo. The dead-wall faced her.

The horizon was shut out. She lay there and tried to think--and tried to

think. How to get some money? Something--the devil perhaps--prompted the

sleeping Jessie to stir again at the bottom of the bed. Cuckoo felt the

little dog's back shift against her stretched-out toes, and suddenly a

bitter flood of red ran over her thin, half-starved face, and she hid it

in the tumbled pillow, pressing it down. The movement was the attempted

physical negation of an abominable, treacherous thought which had just

stabbed her mind. How could it have come to her, when she hated it so?

She burrowed further into the pillow, at the same time caressing the back

of Jessie with little movements of her toes. Horrible, horrible thought!

It brought tears which stained the pillow. It brought a hard beating of

the heart. And these manifestations showed plainly that Cuckoo had not

dismissed it yet. She tried to dismiss it, shutting her eyes up tightly,

shaking her head at the black, venomous thing. But it stayed and grew

larger and more dominant. Then she took her head from the pillow, faced

it, and examined it. It was a clear-cut, definite thought now, perfectly

finished, coldly complete.

Jessie was embodied money, an embodied small sum of money.

Long ago Cuckoo had said to Julian with pride:

"She's a show-dog. I wouldn't part with her for nuts."

Now she remembered those words, and knew, could not help knowing, that a

show-dog was worth more than nuts. At that moment she wished Jessie were

worthless. Then the sting would be drawn from her horrible thought.

Meanwhile Jessie slept calmly on, warm and cosey.

Cuckoo was cold and trembling. She knew that she was on the verge of

starvation. The doctor had said that one day she could help Julian, only

she. So she must not starve. Love alone would not let her do that.

Between her and starvation lay Jessie, curved in sleep, unconscious that

her small future was being debated with tears and with horror.

Long ago the little dog had entered Cuckoo's heart to be cherished

there. Many wretched London women own such a little dog, to whom they

cling with a passion such as more fortunate women lavish upon their

children. A great many subtleties combine to elevate companions with

tails to the best thrones the poor, the wicked, and the deserted can

give them. A dog has such a rich nature to give to the woman who is poor,

so much innocence at hand for the woman who is wicked, such completeness

of attachment ready for the woman who is lonely. It is so beautifully

humble upon its throne, abased in its own eyes before the shrine of its

mistress, on whom it depends entirely for all its happiness. A little

king, perhaps, it has the pretty manners of a little servitor. And even

when it presumes to be determined in the expressed desire for the dryness

of a biscuit or the warmth of a lap, with how small a word or glance can

it be laid upon its back, in the abject renunciation of every pretension,

anxious only for the forgiveness that nobody with a touch of tenderness

could withhold. Ah, there is much to be thankful for in a companion with

a tail! Jessie had winning ways, the deep heart of a dog. A toy dog she

was, no doubt, but hers was no toy nature. Cuckoo could not have shed

such tears as those she now shed over any toy. For she began to cry

weakly at the mere thought that had come to her, although it was not yet

become a resolve. Life with Jessie had been very sordid, very sad. What

would life be without her? What would such a morning as this be, for

instance? Cuckoo's imagination set tempestuously to work, with physical

aids--such as the following. She drew away her feet from the bottom of

the bed, where they touched the little dog's back. Doing this she said

to herself, "Now, Jessie is gone." Curled up, she set herself to realize

the lie. And perhaps she might have succeeded thoroughly in the sad

attempt had not Jessie, in sleep missing the contact of her mistress,

wriggled lazily on her side up the bed after Cuckoo's feet, discovering

which, she again composed herself to slumber. The renunciation was

not to be complete in imagination. Jessie's love, when present, was too

frustrating. And Cuckoo, casting away her horrible thought in a sort of

hasty panic, caught her companion with a tail in her arms, and made her

rest beside her, close, close. Jessie was well content, but still sleepy.

She reposed her tiny head upon the pillow, lengthened herself between the

sheets and dreamed again. And while she dreamed, the black thought about

her came back to Cuckoo. It was assertive, and Cuckoo began to fear it.

The fear of a thought is a horrible thing; sometimes it is worse than

the fear of death. This one made Cuckoo think herself more cruel than

any woman since the world began. Yet she could not exorcise it. On the

contrary, she grew familiar with it as the day marched on, until it put

on a fatal expression of duty. All that day she revolved it. Mrs. Brigg

attacked her again. Food was lacking. Cuckoo's case became desperate. She

turned over carefully all her few remaining possessions to see if there

was any inanimate thing that she had omitted to turn into money. Jessie,

poor innocent, assisted with animation at the forlorn inventory, nestling

among the tumbled garments, leaping on and off the bed. Her ingenuous

nature supposed some odd game to be in progress, and was anxious to play

a principal and effective part in it. Yet she was quieted by the look

Cuckoo cast upon her when the wardrobe had been passed in review and no

saleable thing was to be found. She shrank into a corner, ready for

whimpering. That night Cuckoo did not sleep, and through all the long

hours she held Jessie in her arms, and heard, as so often before, the

regular breathing of this little companion of hers. And each drawn breath

pierced her heart.

Next morning she got up early. She was faint with hunger and with a

resolve that she had made. She dressed herself, then carried Jessie to

the flannel-lined basket, put her into it and kissed her.

"Go bials," she said, with a raised finger. "Go bials."

Jessie winked her eyes pathetically, her chin resting on the basket edge.

Cuckoo went out into the passage and called down to Mrs. Brigg.

"What is it?" cried Hades.

"I'm going to get some money."

Mrs. Brigg ran out.

"Money!" she said in a keen treble. "Where are you going to git it?"

"Never you mind," said Cuckoo, in a dull voice.

She turned from Mrs. Brigg's flooding ejaculations and was gone. In her

peregrinations about London she had sometimes encountered in a certain

thoroughfare a broad old man with a face marked with small-pox, who

wore a fur cap and leggings. This individual conveyed upon his thickest

person certain clinging rats, which crawled about him in the public view

while he walked, and he led in strings three or four terriers, sometimes

a pup or two. Cuckoo had seen him more than once in conversation with

some young swell, even with gaily-dressed women, had noticed that his

terriers here to-day were often gone to-morrow, replaced by other dogs,

pugs perhaps, or a waddling, bow-legged dachshund. She drew her own

conclusions. And she had seen that the old man's eyes, in his poacher

face, were kindly, that his trotting dogs often aimed their sharp, or

blunt, noses at his hands and seemed to claim his notice. Her morning

errand was to him.

She walked a long time in search of him, trembling with the fear of

finding him, inconsistently. Her mind, reacting on her ill-fed body,

planted a crawling weariness there, and at last she had to stop and

examine her pockets. She came upon two or three pence, went into a shop,

bought a bun, and ate it sitting by a marble-topped table. It nearly

choked her. Yet she knew she needed it badly. With one penny the less she

resumed her pilgrimage. But nowhere could she see the old man in his

leggings, and suddenly a sort of joyful spasm shook her superstitiously.

Fate opposed her cruel resolution. In a rush of eager contrition she

started for home, walking as quickly as her abnormal fatigue would allow

her. She had left the street in which the old man generally walked, and

took care, as she turned its corner, not to cast one glance behind her.

She passed through the next street, and the next, and was far away from

his neighbourhood, rejoicing, when suddenly she saw him coming straight

towards her slowly, the rats resting on his shoulders, various small dogs

in strings pattering on each side of him.

Cuckoo's heart gave a great thump, and then for an appreciable fragment

of time stopped beating. She muttered a bad word under her breath and had

an impulse to flee as from an enemy. She did not flee, but stood still

like one condemned, while the old man stolidly approached with his

menagerie. When he reached her she lifted her head and looked him in the

face. The little dogs were jumping to reach his hands. Evidently they

loved him.

"I say," Cuckoo said huskily.

The old gentleman stopped, lifted a rat from his shoulder, placed it on

his breast, like a man who arranged his necktie, clicked his tongue

against his teeth, and remarked:

"Parding, lydy."

Cuckoo swallowed. She felt as if she had a ball in her throat shifting up

and down.

"I say," she repeated. "You buy toy dogs, eh?"

"I buys 'em and I sells 'em," answered the old man, with a large accent

on the conjunction. "Buys 'em dear and sells 'em cheap. There's a wy to

mike a living, lydy!"

His small eyes twinkled with humour as he spoke.

Cuckoo swallowed again. The ball in her throat was getting larger.

"Want to buy one this morning?" she asked. "A show little dog, eh?"

She choked.

The old man did not appear to notice it. He looked at her with sharp

consideration.

"Oh, you means selling!" he remarked. "Where is it, then?"

"What?"

"The show little dawg?"

Cuckoo gulped out her address. All this time the old man had been summing

her up, and drawing his own conclusions from her thin figure and haggard

face. He scented a possible bargain.

"Trot along, lydy," he said, turning on his heels with all his little

dogs in commotion. "Trot along. I'm with yer."

Cuckoo heard muffled drums of a dead-march as she walked. She, who had

lived a life so shameless, shivered with shame at the thought of what

she was going to do. Her treachery laid her out in its winding-sheet.

The old man tried to entertain her, as they went, by chatting about his

profession, declaiming the merits of his rats, and spreading before her

mind a verbal panorama of the canine life that had defiled through his

changeful existence. Cuckoo did not hear a word--they turned into

the Marylebone Road. She walked slower and slower, yet never had the

street in which she lived seemed so short. At length the iron gate of

number 400 was reached. Cuckoo stopped.

"In 'ere, lydy?" said the old man.

She nodded, unable to speak. He turned in with his crowd of pattering

dogs, and proceeded jauntily up the narrow path. Cuckoo followed slowly

and with a furtive step. She longed to open the front door, let him in,

and then run away herself. Anywhere, anywhere, only to be away, out of

sight and hearing of the cruel scene that was coming.

Now they were on the doorstep. The old man waited. She fumbled for her

latchkey, found it, thrust it into the door. Instantly the shrill bark of

Jessie was heard. Cuckoo's guilty shining eyes met the twinkling eyes of

the old man.

"That she a-barkin'?" he inquired, with a professional air.

Cuckoo nodded again.

"A nice little pype," he rejoined. "This wy, is it?"

The patter of feet in the oil-clothed passage roused Jessie to a frenzied

excitement. When the two opened the door of the sitting-room, the little

creature, planted tree-like upon her four tiny feet, was barking her dog

life into the air. Cuckoo, entering first, snatched her up and gave her a

sudden, vehement kiss.

It was good-bye.

Then she turned and faced the old man, who had paused in the doorway. She

held Jessie silently towards him. Transferring the strings held in his

right hand to his left, he took the wriggling dog from Cuckoo, lifted her

up and down as if considering her weight, ran his eyes over her points

with the quick decision of knowledge.

"'Ardly a show dawg, lydy," he said.

Cuckoo flamed at him.

"She is, she is," she cried vehemently, all her passion trying to find a

vent in the words. "You shan't have her, you shan't have her, you shan't

if--"

"Neow, neow; I ain't sying nothink ag'in 'er," he interposed. "She's a

pretty dawg, a very pretty dawg. 'Ow much do yer sy, lydy?"

Cuckoo sickened. She looked away. She could not have met the eyes of

Jessie at that moment.

"'Ow much, then?" repeated the old man, still weighing the whining Jessie

up and down.

"I dunno; you say."

The old man mentioned a price. It was bigger than Cuckoo had expected.

She nodded, moving her tongue across her lips. Then she looked away out

of the window. She heard the chink of money.

"Put it on the table," she murmured.

He did so, looking steadily at her.

"You feels the parting, lydy," he began. "Very nat'ral, very. I knows

what it is."

He extended Jessie, now whining furiously, towards Cuckoo.

"Want to sy good-bye, lydy?" he said.

Cuckoo shook her head. The old man popped Jessie into one of the

capacious side-pockets of his coat and buttoned the flap down.

"Mornin', lydy," he said, turning towards the door.

Cuckoo made no reply. Her chest was heaving and her lips were working.

The old man went out. Cuckoo heard the pattering feet of the little army

of dogs on the oilcloth of the passage. The hall door opened and shut. A

pause. The iron gate clicked. She had never moved. The money lay on the

table. At last Cuckoo went out into the passage, and called in a strange

voice:

"Mrs. Brigg."

The landlady came with hasty alacrity.

"Come here," said Cuckoo, leading the way into the sitting-room.

"There--there's some money for you."

Mrs. Brigg pounced on it with a vulture's eagerness.

"'Owever did yer--" she began.

But Cuckoo had rushed into the bedroom. The landlady stood with the money

in her hand, and heard the key turned in the lock of the door.

CHAPTER VII

A MEETING OF STARVATION AND EXCESS

Now an awful loneliness, like the loneliness of the grave, fell round

Cuckoo. Like Judas, she could have gone out and hanged herself, but for

one thing, the love in her heart that seemed so useless. In her muddled,

illogical way, and to stifle gnawing thoughts of the betrayed Jessie, she

dwelt upon this love of hers for Julian. What had it ever brought her?

What had it brought him? To her it had given many sorrows, humiliations.

She remembered them one by one, and they looked at her like ghosts. Her

dawning recognition of her own degradation never yet come to surmise; her

tearing jealousy when Julian went out to do as other men did, preceded by

and linked with the knowledge of that dreary incident in which she played

the part of accomplice, that incident which she always believed had

started him on his journey to destruction; her acquaintance with

Valentine and the arrows planted in her heart by him; her despair when

she learned from him her own impotence; not yet counterbalanced by full

trust in herself or in her power for good, despite the faith of the

doctor; her vision of the constantly falling Julian, of the stone going

down in the deep sea; her desperate adherence to the doctor's request to

prove her will, rewarded now by an apparently useless starvation, and by

this treacherous sale of Jessie, her truest, trustiest friend. Cuckoo

reviewed these ghosts, and no longer prayed, but cursed. So long as she

had Jessie--she knew it now--she had never been really quite hopeless,

often as she had thought herself hopeless. She had never even been

utterly without self-respect, because Jessie had always deeply respected

her and had thus given her little moments of clean and cheering

confidence. And she had never been absolutely alone. Now she was alone,

and felt like Judas, a betrayer. By turns she thought of Julian lost and

of Jessie sold to strange hands, strange hearts, in a cruel and a bitter

world. But even now she did not think much or often of herself, for

Cuckoo was no egotist. Her very lack of egotism must have been the

despair of any good woman trying to rescue her. She sat at home and

starved and betrayed now, not because her egoism shrank from the touch of

the men of the street, not because she had any idea of the great duty a

woman owes to herself--to keep herself pure--but simply moved by the

dogged determination to do something for Julian. Were Julian dead Cuckoo

would have gone out into Piccadilly again as of old, and earned the rent

for Mrs. Brigg, and food for herself, and a sovereign or two to buy back

Jessie. The circumstances of her life had stuffed cotton wool into the

ears of her soul and rendered it deaf to the voices that govern good

women. Cuckoo was pathetically incomprehensible to most people, because

she was pathetically twisted in mind. But her heart grew straight and

surely towards heaven.

The sale of Jessie had brought in enough money to keep Mrs. Brigg quiet

for a little while, but not enough to satisfy her claim against Cuckoo,

or to give Cuckoo food. It went as an instalment towards the rent. Now

the landlady began to clamour again, and Cuckoo was literally starving.

One night her despair reached a point of cruelty which drove her out into

the street, not for the old reason, not at all for that. Cuckoo was

sheathed in armour from head to foot against sin and its wages. Her

obstinacy seemed to her the only thing that really lived in her miserable

body, her miserable soul. It was surely obstinacy which pulsed in her

heart, which shone in her hollow eyes, tingled in her tired limbs,

flushed her thin cheeks with blood, gave her mind a thought, her will the

impetus to mark time in this desolation. Cuckoo was like a hollow shell

containing the everlasting murmur, "I'll starve--for him." Whether her

starvation was useless or not did not concern her at this moment. She no

longer even saw those ghosts. She seemed blind and deaf and dull in a

fashion, yet driven by an active despair. Had Jessie been with her still,

she could have stayed within doors. The little dog's faint and regular

breathing, her occasional rustling movements, had made just enough music

to keep Cuckoo still faintly singing even when her heart was saddest. Now

her room and her life were empty of all song, and Jessie's untenanted

basket--in which the red flannel seemed to Cuckoo like blood--was a

spectre and a vision of hell.

So, on this night, Cuckoo put on her hat and jacket. She meant to go out,

to walk anywhere, just to move, to be in the open air. As she went into

the passage she ran against Mrs. Brigg. The gas-jet was alight, and the

landlady could see how she was dressed. Suddenly Mrs. Brigg fell on

Cuckoo and began slobbering her with kisses.

The old wretch actually began to whimper. She had been sore tried, and

must have had a fragment of affection for Cuckoo somewhere about her

nature. For she did not want to part with her, and the tears she now let

fall were prompted not only by a prospect of money coming in to her, but

also of pleasure in the thought that Cuckoo had not entirely gone to the

bad. She wept like the mother who sees her child return from its evil

way.

Cuckoo thrust her away without a word, violently. Mrs. Brigg did not

resent the action, but fell against the passage wall sobbing and

murmuring, "My precious, my chickabiddy!" while Cuckoo banged the hall

door and went out into the night. Then the landlady, moved by a sacred

impulse of pardon, bolted down to her kitchen and began to rummage

enthusiastically in her larder. She knew Cuckoo had been near to

starving, and had supported the knowledge with great equanimity while

this prodigal daughter chose to wander in wicked ways of idleness. But

now she killed the fatted calf with trembling hands, and made haste to

set out a reverend supper in Cuckoo's parlour to welcome her on her

return. The cold bacon, the pot of porter, the bread, the butter, all

were Mrs. Brigg's symbols of pardon and of peace! And as she laid them

on the table she sang:

"In 'er 'air (_whimper_) she wore a white cam-eelyer,

Dark blue (_whimper_) was the colour of 'er heye." (_Whimper._)

It was like a religious service with one devout worshipper.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Cuckoo walked slowly along. It was a dark night, very still

and very damp. The frost had gone. The stars were spending their

brightness on clouds that were a carpet to them, a roof to poor human

beings who could not see them. In the air was the unnatural, and so

almost unpleasant, warmth that, coming suddenly out of due season,

strikes at the health of many people, and exhausts them as it would

never exhaust them in time of summer. Cuckoo, faint with hunger, fainter

yet with sorrow, felt intensely fatigued. She did not consider where she

was going, but just walked on slowly and heavily; but the habit of her

life, profiting by her unconsciousness, led her towards that long street

in which she had passed hours which, if added together, would have made a

large part of her life. Piccadilly drew her to it as the whirlpool draws

the thing which inadvertently touches even the farthest outpost of its

influence. Presently she was at the Circus. The little boys upon the

kerb, crying newspapers, greeted her with excited comments and with

laughter. They had missed her for so long that they had imagined her

ill, perhaps dead. Seeing her turn up again, they were full of greedy

ardour for her news. They put to her searching and opprobrious questions.

She did not hear them. Soon she was in the midst of the crowd. Yet she

scarcely realized that she was not alone. No mechanical smile came to her

face. It seemed as if she had forgotten the old wiles of the streets, put

off forever the frigid mask of vice, that freezes young blood, yet makes

old blood sometimes run strangely faster. What was the street to Cuckoo

now, or Cuckoo to the street? Once it had at least been much, almost

everything, to her. And she had been perhaps as much to it as one of the

paving-stones on which the feet of its travellers trod. Now things were

changed. The human wolf was in the snow still, but it no longer feared

starvation. Rather did it live in starvation with a fervour that was

untouched by anything animal.

Cuckoo walked on.

The crowd flowed up and down, in two opposed and gliding streams. The

warm heaviness of this premature air of spring had brought many people

out, and had even induced some of the women to assume costumes of

mid-summer. There were great white hats floating on the stream, like

swans. Bright and light coloured dresses touched the black gown of Cuckoo

as with fingers of contempt. She did not see them. Many women who knew

her by sight murmured to each other their surprise at her reappearance.

One, a huge negress in orange cotton, ejaculated a loud and guttural:

"My sakes!"

Unheeding, Cuckoo walked on.

A few of the men looked at her. More especially did those observe her who

love vice that is quiet, sedate, demure, and unobtrusive. To these her

pale, unpainted cheeks, her unconscious demeanour, her downcast eyes,

and severely plain black dress and hat appealed with emphasis. One or two

of them turned to follow her. She never heard their footsteps. One spoke

to her. She did not reply. He persisted. When at last she was obliged to

heed him she only shook her head. He fell away, abashed by the dull

glance of her eyes, and wondering discontentedly why she was there and

what she was doing.

Forgetting him instantly, she walked on.

Some one she had known in old days met her. It was the young man in the

millinery establishment who had loved her for a week, and given her the

green evening dress trimmed with the imitation lace. Since those days

he had become strictly respectable, had married an assistant in the shop,

rented a tiny villa at Clapham, added two childish lives to the teeming

word, and developed on Sundays into a sidesman at a suburban church.

Now he was on his way to Charing Cross from a solemn supper given by his

employers at a restaurant to some of their staff. He recognized Cuckoo

and the spirit moved him to speak to her. He touched her arm.

"Miss-er-Miss Bright," he said.

Cuckoo stopped.

"Miss Bright, you remember me? Alf Heywood!"

He was a little man, with a whitish face and wispy light brown hair. Now

his pale brown eyes glanced up at Cuckoo rather nervously under rapidly

winking lids. She stared at him.

"Alf Heywood?" she repeated, without meaning.

"Yes, yes; Alf Heywood, as was in Brenton's millinery establishment, top

of Regent Street. Him as give you that green dress. Don't you recall?"

Cuckoo shook her head.

"Green, with white lace on it," he continued, with nervous emphasis.

Suddenly Cuckoo said:

"White; no, it was yellow."

Mr. Heywood was delighted at this evidence of recollection.

"So it was, so it was," he said. "But what I wanted to say was, that I'm

sorry to see you here still."

"Eh?"

"Sorry to see you here. I'm married, you know, turned over a new leaf,

with two children of my own, and come to see the error of my ways. I

hoped as you--"

Cuckoo walked on.

Her dream of despair was not to be broken by Mr. Heywood and his

new-found respectability. Fate shattered it to fragments in very

different fashion. A sudden thrill ran through the crowd, coming from

a distance. People began to pause, to turn their heads, to murmur to

one another, then to press forward in one direction, craning their necks

as if to catch sight of something. The street was almost blocked, and

Cuckoo was entangled in this seething excitement, of which at first she

could not divine the cause. Presently she heard shouts. The crowd swayed.

Then a man's fierce yell cut the general murmur with the sharpness of a

knife. Suddenly Cuckoo's dream fled. She pushed her way forward in the

direction of the cry; she struggled; she crept under arms and glided

through narrow spaces with extraordinary dexterity and swiftness.

"He's mad," she heard a voice say.

"No; only drunk."

"He'll kill the other fellow if he gets at him."

"The coppers will be on him in a minute."

Cuckoo was panting with her effort, but she passed the voices and came

upon the core of the crowd, the man who had yelled--Julian. She saw in

a moment that he was mad with drink. His hat was off; his coat was torn;

his evening clothes were covered with mud. Apparently he had fallen while

getting out of a cab. Two men--strangers of the street--were holding him

forcibly back while he struggled furiously to attack another man, who

faced him calmly on the pavement with a smile of keen contempt. This man

was Valentine. Julian was screaming incoherent curses at him and wild

threats of murder. The crowd listened and jeered.

Cuckoo caught Julian by the arm. He turned on her to strike her. Then

his arm fell by his side. It seemed as if he recognized her even through

the veil of his excess. The drunken man looked on the starving woman, and

the curses died upon his lips. He began to shiver and to tremble from

head to foot. Valentine made a step towards him, but some in the crowd

interposed.

"Let him alone," they said. "You'll only make him worse. Leave him to

her."

The cab from which Julian had apparently just alighted was drawn up by

the kerbstone. Cuckoo, who had not uttered a word as yet, drew Julian

towards it. He staggered after her in silence, stumbled into the cab

and collapsed in a heap in the corner, half on the floor, half on the

seat. She got in after him, watched by the crowd, who seemed awed by the

abrupt silence of this yelling madman at the touch of this spectral girl

in black. Cuckoo gave her address to the cabman. Just as he was whipping

up his horse to drive away, she leaned forward out of the cab as if to

the crowd--really to one man in it.

"He's my man!" she said, drawing her thick eyebrows together, and with a

nod of her head. "He's my man. I'll see to him."

The cab drove off into the darkness.

CHAPTER VIII

AN AWAKENING

That drive in the night was taken in silence. Julian, a crumpled heap of

degraded humanity, slept. Cuckoo watched over him, half supporting him

with one thin arm. Exultation shone in her eyes and beat in her heart.

The glory of being alone with this drunken creature, his protector, his

guide, lay round the girl like a glory of heaven. As she looked at his

white face, and pressed her handkerchief against the blood that trickled

from his forehead, wild tears of triumph, passionate tears of joy and

determination, swam to her eyes. She felt at last the pride and the

self-respect of one who possesses a will, and who has exercised it.

That was a justification of life to her mind. Something had given even

to her the power to snatch this man to herself from the jaws of dark

London, to carry him off, a succoured prey, from the world laughing at

his degradation. She bent over him in the rattling cab and touched his

face with her lips. Was that a kiss? She, who had known so many kisses,

wondered. It was the going forth of her soul to purify with flame the

thing it loved.

The cab stopped; Cuckoo shook Julian. He stirred uneasily, opened his

eyes and shut them again, relapsing into something that seemed rather a

sort of fit than a slumber. She called to the cabman to come and help

her. Between them they carried Julian into the house and laid him out

upon the horsehair sofa.

"He'll come to all right, lady," said the cabby, with a pleasant grin of

knowledge. "There's a many it takes like that. It ain't nothing."

He paused for his payment, and then Cuckoo remembered that she had no

money. The thought did not worry her; it seemed too far off.

"I ain't got no money," she said.

Cabby's jaw dropped.

"Wait a second," she said. "Go out, I'll get some."

The man withdrew doubtfully, then Cuckoo robbed Julian. She, who had

never yet taken money from him, stole the price of his fare to her

protection. Then she let the cabman out, locked the street door, and

returned. She sat down by Julian, who still appeared to sleep. And now

suddenly she felt that she was starving. She looked round the room; there

was nothing upon the table. Mrs. Brigg, an hour after her "Te Deum," had

been seized in the claws of reaction, and had repented of her generosity.

Suspicions and doubts obscured the previous rapture of her mind. She

bethought herself that Cuckoo might chance to return alone, still

penniless; she remembered the rent still owing. Her impulse to kill

fatted calves suddenly struck her as the act of a mad woman. As locusts

clear a smiling country of all that nourishes, she swept the table of

Cuckoo clear, impounding to her larder with trembling, eager hands the

food that might never have been paid for. Thereupon she went to bed,

nodding her old head, and muttering to herself with pursed lips.

So the eyes of Cuckoo looked in vain for something to stay the bodily

misery that stole upon her as she watched by Julian. Starvation stripped

away all the mists from her soul and left it naked with the burdened

soul it loved. Despite her increasing pain of body, Cuckoo was conscious

gradually of a light and airy delicacy of sensation that was touched with

something magical. This awful hunger made her feel strangely pure, as

if her deeds, which for years had clung round her like a brood of filthy

vampires, were falling away from her one by one. They dropped down into

the night; she was mounting into freedom. And, despite faint agonies

which at moments threatened to overwhelm her, she had never felt so

happy. Instinct led her to get away from the consciousness of her body

by leaning utterly upon her mind. She sat down by Julian, bent over him,

absorbed herself in him. One of his hands she took gently in her own.

The little act baptized him hers in her mind, and she was aware of a

great rush of happiness never known before. For she had him there in her

nest, she alone. And she loved him. Even in his drunken sleep, even in

his massacred condition of ugliness and hatefulness, he was so beautiful

to her that she could have wept from thankfulness. The world had taken

from her everything, the very little that she had ever possessed, the

purity that every creature has once, the innocence that she had never

understood, left her this tipsy, degraded, abandoned, tragic atom of

evil. And a great glory was hers. She could have fallen upon her knees

in blessing and thankfulness, forgetful of all her tribe of sorrows,

conscious only that she was a woman crowned and throned. By degrees she

forgot that she was starving, forgot everything in an ecstasy of pure

passion and pride, an ecstasy that brought food, rest, calm, to her.

In the dawn Julian stirred and murmured incoherent words. Cuckoo bent

down to hear them. But he slept again. And as the dawn grew, the light

and airy feeling within her grew with it, till she seemed to be floating

in the air and among soft, billowing clouds. At first there was light

through them, light of the sun, strong and beautiful. But then it faded.

And darkness came, and strange sounds like far-off voices, and a murmur

as of waters deepening in volume and rushing upon her. They reached her.

She put out her hands and thought she cried out.

The waters swept her away.

* * * * *

"Cuckoo! Cuckoo! What is it? Cuckoo!"

"She's a-comin'--she's a-comin' to."

"Give me some more water, then."

Cuckoo felt it very cold upon her face, and fancied at first that it was

those rushing waters of her dream. But the darkness parted, showing her

two faces close together, one old and withered and yellow, one young, but

white and lined. At first she looked at them without recognition. Again

she felt the cold drops of water dashing against her cheeks and lips, and

then she knew Mrs. Brigg and Julian, and she saw her little room, and

that it was morning and light. They helped her to sit up. She glanced

wearily towards the table.

"What is it, Cuckoo?" Julian said.

"Food; I'm starving," she whispered, faintly.

Horror was written on his face.

"Starving! What the devil does she mean?"

He turned on Mrs. Brigg, who suddenly shrunk away muttering:

"I'll get something; breakfast--I'll get it."

Julian looked dazed. He was only recovering gradually from his drunken

stupor.

"Starving--starving," he repeated, vacantly staring at Cuckoo, who said

nothing more, only lay back, trying to understand things, and to emerge

from the mists and noises in which she still seemed to be floating.

Presently Mrs. Brigg returned and shuffled about the table with a

furtive, contorted face, laying breakfast. The teapot smoked.

"Come along, my dearie," began the old creature.

But Julian thrust her out of the room. He brought Cuckoo tea and food,

fed her, put the cup to her lips. At first she had scarcely the strength

to swallow, but presently she began to revive, and then ate and drank so

ravenously that Julian, even in his vague condition, was appalled.

"Good God, it's true!" he said. "Cuckoo starving!"

He sat by her turning this piercing matter over in his mind. Its

strangeness helped to sober him.

"You eat too," she said.

He shook his head.

"Yes, yes," she insisted feverishly.

To pacify her he made a sort of attempt at breakfast, and felt the better

for it. Together they progressed slowly towards the normal. At last the

meal was over. Cuckoo lay back, feeling wonderfully better and calm and

happy. But Julian's eyes were searching hers insistently.

"What have you been doing?" he said. "You've got to tell me. Starving!

What's the meaning of it?"

His voice sounded almost angry and threatening.

"I ain't got any money," she said.

"Why?"

She didn't answer.

"Why--I say?" he repeated.

"Because I've given up the street," she said simply.

"Given up the street--Cuckoo!"

He laid his hand down heavily upon one of hers.

"Since when?"

"Oh--a little while. It don't matter how long."

He sat glancing about the room.

"Where's Jessie?" he asked suddenly.

Cuckoo burst out crying.

"I had to--I had to," she sobbed.

"To do what?"

"To part with her."

"What! You've sold Jessie!"

Julian stood up. This last fact struck right home to him, banishing all

his vagueness, setting his mind on its feet firmly.

"Jessie sold!" he exclaimed again, in a loud voice. "Cuckoo, why have you

done this? Tell me--tell me at once."

She strove to control her sobs.

"I didn't know what to do to get you away from him," she said presently,

flushing scarlet. "I didn't never see you; I didn't know where you was. I

knew as you didn't like me going on the street. Once you asked me not to.

Remember?"

Julian nodded, with a piercing gaze on her.

"So--so thinks I--I'll keep away; p'rhaps it'll get him back."

"Me?"

He sat down with a white face. All about him there was flame. He seemed

to understand what he had never understood before, the wonder of the lady

of the feathers, the mystery that had drawn him so strangely to her. He

caught her in his arms.

"Oh, Cuckoo, Cuckoo," he said, brokenly. "You love me."

He laid his lips on hers, and pressed her mouth in a passion of emotion

that was almost an assault. And still the fire was about him. She clung

to him with her thin arms.

"That's it," she whispered, in reply to his words.

Julian held her in silence, felt her heart beating, the piteous tenuity

of her little body, the weak grasp of her arms round him. These things

broke upon him one by one with a crescendo of meaning that came like a

great revelation, came to him shod with flame, winged with flame, moving

in flame, warm like flame.

"You starved for me, sold Jessie for me," he whispered. "How I love you!

How I love you!"

And he crushed her close in an embrace that was almost brutal.

The door bell rang. Julian let Cuckoo go.

"He has come for me," he said.

She knew it too, and looked at him with a piteous, greedy questioning.

"I hate him now," he said in answer.

The door of the room opened. They both turned towards it. Valentine

entered.

"I thought I should find you here," he said, stopping near the door. "Are

you better, Julian?"

"Better?"

"Last night you were not yourself."

"I have not been myself for a long time," Julian replied.

"I had not noticed any change."

Julian made no reply. A dogged expression had come into his face. He was

still sitting close to Cuckoo. Now he took her hand in his. As he did so,

Valentine moved a little nearer, as if urged by a sudden impulse. He bent

down to gaze into Cuckoo's face, and uttered a short exclamation.

"The battle!" he said.

An expression almost of awe had come into his eyes, and for a moment he

hesitated, even half turned as if to slink away. But then, with a strong

effort, he recovered himself and again fixed his eyes on Julian.

"Come, Julian!" he said.

"I will not come."

"I have a cab here waiting." Valentine spoke with an iron calm. "We had

arranged to go to Magdalen's."

Julian uttered an oath.

"That devil!" he exclaimed. "I won't go to her. I am half dead. I am

killing myself."

He pulled himself up short, then cried out savagely, and half

despairingly:

"No, by God, you are killing me!"

He began to tremble, and looked towards Cuckoo as a man looks who seeks

for refuge.

"You are treating me very strangely, Julian," Valentine said frigidly.

"Last night you were drunk. You seemed to take me for some enemy, and

struck me. Many men would resent your conduct. I am too much your

friend."

"You--my friend!" Julian exclaimed bitterly.

"You!"

Abruptly he sprang up, tearing his hand out of Cuckoo's. He went over to

Valentine and stared with a passion of perplexity and of loathing into

his eyes.

"What, in God's name, are you?" he said, in an uncertain voice. "Are you

man or devil? You are not Valentine--not the man I loved. I'll swear it.

You are some damned stranger, and I have lived with you"--he shuddered

irrepressibly--"and never knew it till now."

"You say I am a stranger?"

"Yes, with the face of my friend."

"How can that be?"

Again a misery of confusion and of fear swept over Julian.

"Whence did I come, then?" Valentine asked.

He began to have the air of a man bent on some revelation. An immense

power infused itself through him. His blue eyes were utterly fearless.

The moment of open battle had come at last. Well, he would not attempt

to avoid it, to gain further uneasy peace. He would strike a final blow,

secure of his own victory.

And Cuckoo sat watching silently. She remembered the night on which

Valentine had half revealed the mystery to her, who could not understand

it. Was he about to reveal it now to Julian? Her eyes flamed with

eagerness, and again Valentine looked into them and faltered for a

moment. Then he turned resolutely away from her, as if he gave his whole

heart and soul to the business before him, to this Julian who at last

began to shrink from him, to feel terror at his approach, even to

repudiate him.

"From what have I come, then?" he repeated.

Julian paused, as if he sought an answer, looking backwards into the

past. Suddenly he cried:

"From that trance! Yes; it was then. That flame going away, it was--it

must have been--Valentine."

"You talk like a madman."

But Julian did not heed the sneer. He was passionately engrossed by

the flood of thoughts that had come to him. He was struggling to wake

finally from the dreary and infamous dream in which he had been

walking--deceived, tricked, tyrant-ridden--for so long.

"But then Valentine is dead," he cried.

His face went white. He sank down, clinging suddenly to Cuckoo.

"Dead!" he repeated in a whisper.

The girl's touch was strangely warm on his hands, like fire. He looked up

into her eyes, seeking passionately for that flame that now he began

vaguely to connect with the Valentine he had lost.

"Or is he--?"

Julian hesitated, still gazing at the white and weary face of Cuckoo.

Suddenly Valentine said loudly:

"You are right. He is dead."

He laughed aloud.

"I killed him," he said, "when I took his place. Julian, you shall

know now, what the lady of the feathers knows already, what a human

will can do, when it is utterly content with itself, when it is trained,

developed, perfected. I came through Marr to Valentine. I was Marr."

"Marr!" Julian said slowly. "You!"

"And Marr, too, was my prey. Like Valentine he was not content with

himself. His weakness of discontent was my opportunity. I expelled his

will, for mine was stronger than his. I lived in his body until the time

came for me to be with you. Have you ever read of vampires?"

Julian muttered a hoarse assent. He seemed bound by a strange spell,

inert, paralysed almost.

"There are vampires in the modern world who feed, not upon bodies, but

upon souls, wills. And each soul they feed upon gives to them greater

strength, a longer reign upon the earth. Who knows? One of them in

time may compass eternity."

He seemed to tower up in the little room, to blaze with triumph.

"When you see a man go down, sink into the mire, and you say, 'He is

weak--he has come under a bad influence'--it is a vampire who feeds upon

his soul, who sucks the blood of his will. Sometimes the vampire comes in

his own form, sometimes he wears a mask--the mask of a friend's form and

face. The influences that wreck men are the vampires of the soul at work,

Julian, at work."

His face was terrible. Julian shrank from it. He turned to Cuckoo.

"They feed on women too," he said. "On the souls of women. Men say that

magic is a dream and a chimera. Women say that miracles are past, or that

there never were such things. But the power of sin is magical. The death

of beauty and of innocence in a soul is a miracle. My power over you,

Julian, is magic. The bondage of your soul to mine is a miracle. Come

with me."

"I will not come."

But Julian's face, his whole attitude, betokened the most piteous and

degraded irresolution. This man, this creature, governed him despite

himself. He felt once more for the hand of Cuckoo, and finding it, spoke

again more firmly:

"I'll not come," he said. "I'll stay with her. I love her."

Valentine cast a malign glance upon Cuckoo, but again fear seemed to draw

near to him. He made no answer.

"Only once I'll come," Julian said. "To-night. I lost Valentine in the

dark. In the dark I'll seek for him, I'll find him again. Cuckoo shall

come too, and the doctor. That flame--it went into the air. I'll find

it--I'll find it again."

"Come, then--seek it--seek Valentine. But I, too, was with you in the

dark. And in the dark I will destroy you. Till to-night then, Julian!"

He turned and went out.

CHAPTER IX

THE LAST SITTING

That evening Julian drove Cuckoo down Victoria Street. On the way

they scarcely spoke. The doctor, summoned by a messenger, was there

before them. He, although ignorant of what had passed been Julian and

Valentine, was deeply expectant. Cuckoo was exhausted by the sleepless

night of her vigil over Julian, and by the severe joy, almost like pain,

that had burst upon her with his avowal and with his savage embrace.

When she entered the tentroom followed by Julian, she looked like a

shadow gliding wearily through twilight. The doctor was there with

Valentine. Valentine's face was gay. His manner was ardent, almost

tempestuous. The clear calmness so generally characteristic of him had

vanished, swept away by the flood of his triumph perhaps. Julian seemed

nervous, and his appearance was so haggard as to be engrossing to any one

who was observant. There was a hunted, fearful look in his eyes. His

hands were never for a moment still. He kept close to Cuckoo. He even

held her hands as he sat by her, and she felt that his were burning hot.

He scarcely noticed the doctor, who observed him closely. Valentine

watched his feverish excitement with laughing eyes. Of those four people

he alone seemed entirely untouched by any deep emotion, entirely master

of himself. For even Doctor Levillier was curiously moved that night, and

was unable to suppress every trace of abnormal emotion.

They sat down. There were no flowers in the room. Valentine explained

that he had remembered Cuckoo's fainting fit and feared its renewal.

"I am afraid you are still scarcely yourself," he added, with a

solicitude that was too elaborate to be agreeable. "You are looking

pale and tired. You are sure to sleep again."

"I'll not sleep to-night," she answered, showing none of her usual fear

of him.

The assertion of her will, her momentary rescue of Julian, Julian's

avowed love for her, his clinging to her as to a refuge--all these

things, so Cuckoo thought, built up in her a great fearlessness. In her

bodily weakness she felt strong. Her faded, weakly frame held now a large

spirit of which she was finely conscious. And she attributed this leaping

spirit, so brave, so intense to these things, these facts of which she

could make a list. She did not know that behind them all there was a

motive power inspiring her, through them perhaps, but of itself. How

often is the power behind the throne unsuspected, unheeded. Cuckoo did

not recognize it in this crisis, although there had been moments in the

past when the murmur of its voice had stolen upon her and stirred her to

wonder and to perturdation. And Valentine, to whom the combat came, saw

not his real foe. And Julian looked only into Cuckoo's faded eyes for

refuge, for comfort. And Doctor Levillier--? At present he could only

wait patiently in the hope, doubtful, fragmentary of revelation.

Conversation that night was uneasy and disjointed. Cuckoo's defiance

of Valentine was fully apparent. Julian's fear, obviously grown up to

hatred, of his former friend shone clearly. There was a nakedness about

the manners of both tired woman and shattered man that was disquieting

and unusual. Valentine did not seem to notice it or to be moved about it.

If anything, it might be supposed to add to his pleasure an unnatural

revelry in being hated. Doctor Levillier, glancing from him to Julian,

found him self-involved in remembrances of Rip and Valentine. The terror

and the hate of the dog seemed to be reproduced vividly in the terror and

the hate of the man. Valentine watched both with smiling eyes and drew

draughts of power from that fountain of horror.

At last conversation failed entirely. Julian was half stretched on the

divan, gazing at Cuckoo as one who aspires to salvation. It was apparent

that he was fully awake to the terror of his own situation; that he

pierced the depths of the abyss into which he had fallen, in which he lay

crippled, prisoned, ruined. Yet a hope had dawned on him with the dawning

of the full knowledge of his fall, of his fantastic self-deception. The

great love in this woman's eyes shone down into the abyss, shone from

that face pinched by starvation. There was Heaven in it. There was the

flame. Yes, he saw it now, not literally as in the past days, when its

mystery had plunged him in awe, when its presence had touched him with a

great fear, but imaginatively, as men see flames of help, and of faith,

and of purity, shining in the eyes of the good women they worship, with

the reverence of earth for the distant wonder of the sky. He saw it now

without fear, but with a passion of desire, a sharp consciousness of his

degradation, that swept over him like a storm. And even yet, in this new

knowledge, this rapture of awakening, he was still a bond slave, or

feared he was, to this stranger with the face of a friend, this enemy

with the presence of his former guardian angel. Only Cuckoo could save

him, he said to himself, if indeed the day of salvation were not long

ago past--only Cuckoo. For despite her many sins, the flame shone in her

eyes. And where the flame shone there alone was even the shadow of help,

a shadow within the shadow of those eyes.

In the silence that had come upon his guests, Valentine turned to them,

and said:

"We are supposed to be here for a sitting. Well, shall we have it?"

"Yes--yes," Julian said, "a last sitting."

"Why--last?"

Julian sat up on the divan, and his hands were clenched on the cushions.

"Because if nothing happens to-night I'll give it up. I'll never sit

again. And if Cuckoo sleeps--"

He paused.

"She will sleep," Valentine said. "I have the power to make her."

"No," said Cuckoo.

"Don't you think so, doctor?"

"It seemed so the other night," the doctor answered.

"And with each sitting my power will increase. Do you hear, Julian?"

"You're very fond of talking about your power," Julian said, roughly.

"No. But I may be very fond of exercising it. Why help me, then, by

sitting?"

He spoke in a bantering tone. Julian began to look doubtful. Could it

be that all was changed, that there was only danger in this act, that to

grope thus in the darkness for lost hope, lost safety, a lost Valentine,

with love, trust, beauty, still clinging about him, was to stumble

further into a deepening night? It might be so. And if Cuckoo slept--!

Valentine smiled at this wavering approach of indecision. But Doctor

Levillier said, decisively:

"I wish to sit. It interests me. Send me to sleep, too, if you can,

Cresswell."

"I will," Valentine answered, lightly. "Come."

The doctor saw him standing for a moment in the light, with a glory

of power and of triumph upon his face, and remembered that glory, even

seemed to see it, a clear vision, when darkness filled the room.

Out of the darkness came the murmur of a voice.

"The last sitting," it said.

Julian was the speaker. Nobody replied. Silence followed. As before,

the doctor sat between Julian and Valentine and touched their hands. As

before, the darkness, and this mutual act in it, developed in him the

faculty of hearing, or of thinking he heard, the voices of the thoughts

of his companions. So far this night echoed the last night of the year.

Would it echo that night farther still to the ultimate notes of this

music of minds? The doctor wondered. He was soon to know.

Once again the notes of Valentine's Litany stole upon his heart. And

to-night they seemed to him louder, more strident than before, as if

blared from a soul that held a veritable brass band of shrill egoism

within it. The doctor listened. He remembered presently that the former

Litany had been broken sometimes, hesitating, that Valentine had been

assailed by vague fears that stole upon him like ghosts from the lady of

the feathers. To-night those little ghosts were laid. They came not. It

seemed that Valentine had conquered them. No longer did they crowd to

hear the bold fury of the Litany. No longer dared even one to creep along

alone to bend and to listen. The doctor knew then that this night was not

destined to be a mere echo of its fore-runner. It was at first as if

Valentine had closed the rift in his lute, had bridged the gulf between

his trial and his triumph. A tremendous sadness came upon the doctor with

this thought, enveloping him in a cloud of cold. His heart fainted within

him, as at some great catastrophe. He could have wept like a man who

finds the trust of his life ill-founded, the faith in which he has dwelt

builded upon the quicksand. He fancied that Valentine instantly became

aware of his distress, and that the knowledge swelled the mighty tide of

the music of the Litany. And this thought struck him and roused the man

in him, like the call of circumstance on valour, crying: "Will a man say

that anything is irrevocable, while there is breath in him to give the

battle-cry, strength in him to stir a limb?" Then the faintness left him

with the demeanour of that which is ashamed. The cold cloud evaporated.

He heard the Litany without fear, but with a great desire to strike a

lightning silence through it, with a fine hatred that destroyed his

former hopelessness. This blatant will that sang ever the song of self,

that had no desire but to itself, no glory but in its own deeds, no

aim but to impress itself upon some slave, some Julian of this world,

stood before the doctor's imagination like a personality, a devil

embodied,--more, like the devil of whom men and women speak, against whom

religion prays, and strives and rears great churches, and consecrates

priests. Egoism developed to the utmost limits, is that the Devil? The

doctor asked himself the question, and the great shadow that dogs the

steps of life went by him on its black mission in the likeness of

Valentine singing. And all the modern world stood still to hear and

whispered: "Hark! It is an angel singing! If we but echo the song we

touch the stars. If we but echo the song we, who are weary of time, shall

know eternity. If we but echo the song we shall lay grief to rest beneath

many roses, and draw from its sculptured sepulchre the radiant form of

joy. We shall sing that we shall be great." And the modern world lifted

up its voice, and when it sang, harmony was slain by discord.

The doctor shuddered, seeing an inferno of many circles. But the coward

in him did not rise again. There was the gleam of a distant light upon

him, unquenchable and serene. He doubted the eternity of the triumph of

this Valentine, though he knew not why he doubted, nor upon what his

doubts were based.

And as this doubt, which was a faith, blossomed within him he had a fancy

that the music of the Litany wavered, faltered--that through it ran a

thrill like a faint shadow of some dull despair.

At this moment Valentine spoke in the darkness.

"What are you doing, Julian?" he asked, quickly.

"Nothing," Julian answered.

"I heard you whisper."

"I only said something to Cuckoo."

"We must not talk. Let us link our fingers instead of only touching each

other."

They all did so and were silent once more.

* * * * *

And now a fear seized the doctor. He became aware that a drowsy spirit

like the little sandman who threw the dust of slumber into the eyes of

the children stole round the circle. In his hands were poppy-seeds and

opiates, and his touch was magical with sleep. Valentine had surely

evoked him by a strange effort of will. He came, and his feet were shod

so that he moved without noise. He filled the atmosphere with heaviness,

and with a murmurous melody, like the melody of the drooping streams that

hang their silver ribands over the hills of the far Lotus land. Passing

the doctor, he stole to the place where Cuckoo sat between Julian and

Valentine. And then he paused. The doctor divined his mission, to weave

a veil and cast a cloud of sleep around the lady of the feathers. The

weariness of Cuckoo's life lay like a burden upon her, a heavy burden

to-night, despite the wild wakefulness of her spirit, the passion of

her answered love, the strength of her resolution, the purity that drew

near to her at last with ivory wings along the miry ways. She, who was at

last awake, and conscious of the glory of a woman's will to rescue and to

shelter, was to sleep again. The sentinel was to be overcome at her post,

that the enemy might penetrate the lines and seize the citadel. How heavy

the air was! To the doctor it seemed alive with sleep, as the waters of

the great sea are alive with death for the sailor who sinks down in them.

He saw the weaving of the veil that was dropping gently round Cuckoo. He

saw the cloud shrouding her in a scarcely palpable mist. Or was it his

dream? Or was it his fancy? For it was dark. There stood the tiny,

obstinate spirit by Cuckoo's side. His hands touched her forehead, and

touched her white and weary eyelids, and the doctor knew that all the

fatigues of her life trooped together, as at a word of command, and came

upon her to conquer her. They pressed round, nameless wearinesses induced

by acts which had made Cuckoo that which she was. And they seemed to

whisper to her: "You cannot fight. You cannot protect--it is all over.

You can only sleep--you can only sleep. Sleep! You are so weary. Sleep,

for life, which has taken everything else from you, has left you that."

Cuckoo's face was white with the story of her life, and with the wonder

of her recent self-denial, and with the memory of her martyrdom when the

little old man of the many dogs shuffled to the door, bearing from her

the friend of her loneliness. Her eyes were hollow and desolate. It

seemed that she gave heed to the voices and listened to the beautiful

legend of the magic and the holiness of sleep. And as she seemed to

give heed, the devil of the egoism of Valentine rose again before the

doctor, sharply outlined and distinct, and smiled with the triumph of

the egoism--that modern vampire--of all the world, terrifically

unconquerable. Would Cuckoo sleep? The doctor debated this question

silently and with an agony of anxiety. He felt as if the fate of worlds

hung upon it, and the destinies of kings.

Would she sleep?

The obstinate spirit stood by her always, and the song of Valentine was a

procession of triumph in the night.

* * * * *

Julian's thoughts broke upon the doctor fiercely, and swept him from his

contemplation of Cuckoo. No drowsy poppy-bed was Julian's. The shadowy

spirit of sleep strove not to influence him. No opiates gave him peace.

No veil of gentle forgetfulness descended upon him. He was a human being

plunged in the deepest abyss of fate, beneath the range of the starlight

and the gaze of other worlds. He was trembling, stretching out his feeble

hands in the blackness for guidance, sick with apprehension, betrayed,

deluded. And now he began to writhe in the grasp of a new terror, for it

seemed to the doctor that he, too, was conscious of the obstinate spirit

that stood beside Cuckoo, and that he dreaded the approach of his doom in

her slumber. He, too, murmured silently, "Will she sleep? Will she

sleep?" If indeed she slept at the word of Valentine--Julian's last hope

was gone. For he had now concentrated himself almost utterly on Cuckoo.

No longer did he draw near to her half in awe, half in derision, led to

her by the presence of the flame that flickered, something strangely

apart from her, in her sad eyes. No longer did he set her and the flame

apart. To him she was the flame, the only refuge, the only safety. For he

sought the lost Valentine indeed, but with a strange hopelessness of ever

finding him again. She must not sleep. She must not sleep. In her slumber

the flame would die down, flicker lower and lower to a spark, to grey,

cold ashes. And Julian in his distraction thought of himself as

inevitably lost should the flame die, should Cuckoo sleep, ruled by

Valentine. The fight was between Cuckoo, the flame, and Valentine.

Everything else fell away and left Julian's world bare of all things save

this one contest. This the doctor learnt in the darkness. But still the

spirit of sleep kept vigil by Cuckoo, and the air grew heavy and full of

slumber.

The doctor began to feel that his own powers were being strenuously

attacked. Inertia grew in his body. He sat almost like one paralyzed. His

limbs, at first heavy as if loaded with intolerable weights, gradually

became numb, until he was no longer aware of them. He seemed to be merely

a live mind poised there in the darkness, striving against the power that

sought to sweep from its path all those that fought against it or dared,

however feebly, to resist it. But his mind, poised thus in this strange

circle of slumber, came by imperceptible degrees to have a grip upon the

past. Imitating the mind that is enclosed within a drowning body, it

gazed upon the wildly flitting pictures of the years that were gone.

Regent Street by night rose up before it. The doctor saw, painted upon

the background of the dense gloom in which they sat, the huge and vacant

thoroughfare in the last watch of the night. Faint figures wandered here

and there, or paused beneath the shadow of the tall blind houses,

assuming postures of fatigue or of leering and attentive evil. But one

moved onward steadily, scarcely glancing to the right or to the left. The

doctor's mind, watching, knew that this moving figure was himself, and,

as if with bodily eyes, he marked its course down the long vista of the

dim street until it passed into more private ways of the town. It passed

into more private ways, but not alone. A shadow followed it, and the face

of the shadow was turned away. The doctor could not see it, but there

rose in him the horror and the fear which had attacked him long ago, when

he turned to pursue the thing that dogged him in the darkness. And he saw

the shadow waver, pause, then turn to flee. And as it turned he thought

that it had the soul, though not the face, of the new Valentine. Then

suddenly a great anger against himself was born in him. Why had he been

so blind, so deceived? He might have protected Julian. But he, too, had

been a foolish victim of outward beauty, the prey of the glory of a face.

He had not read the book of the heart. And other pictures succeeded this

vision of the streets and of the shadows that walk in them by night. He

saw Valentine singing while he and Julian listened. And the eyes of

Valentine were as the eyes of a saint, but now he knew that behind them

crouched a soul that was filled with evil. Slowly the air grew heavy.

Slumber paced in the tiny room. The doctor struggled against it. But the

colours of the brain-pictures faded. He saw them still, but only as one

sees the world in a fog; looming forms that have lost their true

character, that have assumed a vagueness of mystery, outlines at once

heavy and remote, suggestive yet indefinite. And still the spirit of

sleep keep vigil by Cuckoo.

* * * * *

There was a slight hoarse cry in the night.

"What is that?" Valentine said, sharply.

There was no reply. The doctor could have told him that the cry came from

Julian, and that the lady of the feathers, leaning low in her chair, had

passed from consciousness into insensibility.

The spirit of sleep stole away. His work was accomplished. Julian sank

forward upon the table with a gesture of utter abnegation. He thought

that Cuckoo was dead. He felt that she was dead, as long ago he had felt

that his loved friend, that Valentine who had protected him and taught

him the right way of life, was dead in the night.

Doctor Levillier seemed to see Rip crouching down against the wall.

And now Valentine's will prepared to assert itself finally. It rose up to

triumph as it had risen up to triumph over Rip. Was that struggle going

to be repeated? Nothing had intruded upon it except the marvellous

tenacity of the dog, who had died rather than yield obedience, died

fighting. That tenacity surely did not dwell in the nerveless Julian,

utterly despairing, utterly wrecked.

The doctor trembled, feeling that the close of the strange mystery was

at hand. And as he trembled he seemed to see in the dense darkness a

tiny flame. It shivered up in the blackness where Cuckoo slept, moved

away from her, like a thing blown on a light wind, and flickered above

the bowed, despairing head of Julian. And, as he watched it, wondering,

the doctor was conscious once more that there was a new presence in the

room, something mysterious, intent, vehement, yet touched with a strange

and pathetic helplessness, something that cried against itself, something

that had suffered a martyrdom unknown, unequalled, in all the pale

history of the martyrdoms of the world. The doctor recalled the sitting

of the former night and his impression then--and again he was governed by

the tragedy of this unknown soul. Its despair laid upon him cold hands.

Its impotence crushed him. He could have wept and prayed for it. This was

for a moment. Then a new wonder grew in him. His eyes were on the flame

which burned above the bowed head of Julian, and presently, while he

gazed, he seemed to see, beyond and through it--as one who peers through

a lit window--the face of Valentine, the beautiful, calm, lofty Valentine

whom once he had loved. The face was white with a soft glory of

endurance, and the eyes smiled like the eyes of a great king. And the

doctor knew comfort. For this face, although marred by the shadow intense

suffering ever leaves behind it, was instinct with the majesty of

triumph. And the eyes were bent on Julian. Then Julian moved in the

darkness and looked upward, despair seeking hope.

The man who sat by the doctor, and who was now nameless to him, was

filled with a passionate fury. The doctor heard the Litany of his glory

cease, and the long pulse of his heart throbbing with effort. His soul

rose up, as the cruel spectre of the new Valentine had risen up to seize

upon Rip, and moved towards Julian to dominate him finally, to draw him

into its own eternal evil and pride and passion of degraded power. But

Julian stretched his arms towards the flame which drew its brightness and

its force from Cuckoo sleeping. That was a last battle of souls, and the

allegory of it came clearly to the doctor's mind.

He divined, as in a vision, or as in a dream that is more real than

reality, the story of his friend, the true Valentine, whom he had loved.

He remembered Valentine's dissatisfaction with the glory of his own

beautiful nature, his mad desire to change it. That dissatisfaction, that

desire, had been the opportunity of the enemy. The soul that sighed in

sorrow as it contemplated its own loveliness had been expelled by the

soul that was completely satisfied with its own hatefulness. The weakness

of the flame of purity had built up the strength of the flame of

impurity. And so beauty was driven out to wander in the wilderness of the

air, and ugliness dwelled in its body, its temple swept and garnished,

like the seven devils of the Scripture. For how long a time had the

wandering flame or soul of beauty been helpless, impotent, tortured by

the appalling deception of the soul of Julian, whom it could no longer

protect! Unable to be at rest, it had stayed to contemplate the dreary

legend of Julian's gradual fall. It had seen his confidence in his love

for the stranger whom he thought his friend and his protector. In the

pale and delicate dawn, shrouded in the mystery of night and day,

enclosed between the clasping hands of the angels of darkness and of

light, it had hung in the air above the solitary Julian, as he walked

homeward after his vigil by the lifeless body of Valentine. With a

passionate effort it had sought to draw him to a knowledge of the truth,

that he might wake from the dream in which lay his insecurity, at last

his tragic danger. And faintly, even as the first sunbeam it had dawned

upon him, once as he met the lady of the feathers, again as he bent his

gaze upon the theatrical glories that attended the apotheosis of

Margaret. And it had flickered behind the film of the tears in a woman's

eyes, seeking to make itself known through the beauty of the love that

clung inexorably to the heart of Cuckoo in the midst of the degradation

and the corruption of her fate. Cuckoo had given it a home. She was

alone. It approached her. She was an outcast. It stayed with her. She

was beaten by the thongs of a world that teems with Pharisees. It clung

to her. She had, through all her days and nights, been put only to the

black uses of evil. It sought to use her only for good. And now at last

it drew strength and power from the soul of the lady of the feathers. And

the doctor knew that the secret of Cuckoo's grand influence to succour

lay in her completeness. Degraded, wretched, soiled, ignorant, pent

within the prison-house of lust--yet she loved completely. And because

she loved completely, the sad, wandering, driven soul of Valentine chose

her from all the world to help him in the rescue of Julian. For she, like

the widow, had given her all to feed the poor. Her starvation had set her

on high, more than the starvation and the mortification of saints and

hermits. For they crucify the flesh for the good of their own souls.

Cuckoo thought ever and only of another. She had betrayed Jessie and

touched the stars. Now in her slumber, physical allegory of her

abnegation of self, she fought in this battle of the souls.

The flame above the head of Julian grew brighter. The flame of Marr,

striving with the fury of despair, flickered lower.

Doctor Levillier held his breath and prayed. Again he thought of Rip.

Would Julian too die rather than yield to the final grip of evil? Would

he die fighting?

* * * * *

A strange thin cry broke through the silence. The doctor saw two flames

float up together through the darkness. They passed before the face of

Cuckoo and were lost in the air above her. Two happy flames.

She stirred suddenly and murmured.

The thing that sat by the doctor sprang up. Light flashed through the

room.

As it flashed the doctor leaned towards Julian, who lay forward with his

arms stretched along the table.

He was dead.

Valentine--the spirit, at least, that had usurped the body of

Valentine--stood looking down upon Julian, dead, in silence.

Then it turned upon the doctor. The doctor stood up as one that nerves

himself to meet a great horror.

He watched the light fade out of the eyes of this horror, the expression

slink from the features, the breath remove from the lips, the pulses

cease in the veins and arteries, until an image, some lifeless and

staring idol, stood before him.

It swayed. It tottered. It fell, crumpling itself together like things

that return to dust. The flesh, formerly kept alive by the spirit, now

deserted finally by that which had dwelt within it and sought to use it

for destruction, went down to death.

Then the lady of the feathers awoke at last from her sleep. The doctor

bent over her and took her hands in his. It seemed to him that she had

won a great battle. He felt awestruck as he looked into her eyes. He

tried to speak to her, but no words came to him except these, which he

murmured at last below his breath:

"Your victory."

Cuckoo looked up at him. Her eyes were still lightly clouded with sleep,

but they were smiling, as if they had been gazing upon the face of

beauty.

For how long had Cuckoo slept? Surely through all the length of her life,

through all the tears that she had shed, through all the sad deeds that

she had committed! Now, at last, she woke.

Her slumber had been as the deep slumber of death.

And from death do we not awake to a new understanding and to a new world?