Flames Part 21

Doctor Levillier and Julian bade each other good-bye on the doorstep.

The doctor hailed a hansom, but Julian preferred to walk. He wished to be alone, to feel the cold touch of the air on his face. The dawn was indeed just breaking, ever so wearily. A strong wind came up with it over the housetops, and Victoria Street looked dreary in the faint, dusky, grey light, which grew as slowly in the cloudy sky as hope in a long-starved heart. Julian lived in Mayfair, and he now walked forward slowly towards Grosvenor Place, making a deliberate detour for the sake of exercising his limbs. He was glad to be out under the sky, glad to feel the breeze on his face, and to be free from the horror of that little room in which he had kept so appalling a vigil. The dull lines of the houses stretching away through the foggy perspective were gracious to his eyes. His feet welcomed the hard fibre of the pavement. They had learned in that night almost to shudder at the softness of a thick carpet. And all his senses began to come out of their bondage and to renew their normal sanity. Only now did Julian realize how strenuous that bondage had been, a veritable slavery of the soul. Such a slavery could surely only have been possible within the four walls of a building. An artificial environment must be necessary to such an artificial condition of feeling. For Julian now gradually began to believe that Dr. Levillier was right, and that he had somehow allowed himself to become unnaturally affected and strung up. He could believe this in the air and in the dawn. For he escaped out of prison as he walked, and heard the dirty sparrows begin to twitter as they sank to the brown puddles in the roadway, or soared to the soot that clung round the chimneys which they loved.

And yet he had been communing with death, had for the first time completely realized the fact and the meaning of death. What a demon of the world it was, sly, bitter, chuckling at its power, the one thing, surely, that has perfect enjoyment of all the things in the scheme of the earth. What a trick it had played on Julian and on Valentine. What a trick! And as this idea struck into Julian's mind he found himself on the pavement by the chemist's shop that is opposite to the underground railway station of Victoria. His eyes fell on the hutch of the boy-messengers, and he beheld through the gla.s.s shutter three heads. He crossed the road and tapped on the gla.s.s. A young man pulled it up.

"Want to send a message, sir?"

"No. I wish to speak to one of your boys, if the one I mean is here. Ah, there he is."

Julian pointed to his little Hermes of the midnight, who was crouched within, uneasily sleeping, his chin nestling wearily among the medals which his exemplary conduct had won for him. The young man shook the child by the shoulder.

"Hulloh, Bob!" he yelled. "Here's a gentleman wants to speak to yer."

Bob came from his dreams with a jerk, and stared upon Julian with his big brown eyes. Presently he began to realize matters.

"Want another doctor, sir? It ain't no manner of good," he remarked airily, beginning to search for his cap, and to glow in the prospect of another cab-ride.

"No," said Julian. "I stopped to tell you that you were wrong. The gentleman is quite well again."

He put his hand into his pocket and produced half a crown.

"There's something for your mistake," he said.

Bob took it solemnly, and, as Julian walked on, called after him:

"It wasn't my fault, sir; it was father's."

He had more desire to shine as an intellectual authority on great matters of dissolution than to respect the departed. Julian could not help smiling at the child's evident discomfiture as he pursued his way towards Grosvenor Place. On one of the doorsteps of the big houses that drive respect like a sharp nail into the hearts of the poor pa.s.sers-by, a ragged old woman was tumultuously squatting. Her gin-soddened face came, like a scarlet cloud, to the view from the embrace of a vagabond black bonnet, braided with rags, viciously glittering here and there with the stray bugles which survived from some bygone era of comparative respectability. Her penetrating snores denoted that she was oblivious of the lounging approach of the policeman, whose blue and burly form was visible in the extreme distance. Julian stopped to observe her reflectively. His eye, which loved the grotesque, was pleased by the bedragglement of her att.i.tude, by the flat foot, in its bursting boot, which protruded from the ocean of her mud-stained petticoats, by the wisps of coa.r.s.e hair wandering in the breeze above her brazen wrinkles.

Poor soul! she kept a diary of her deeds, even though she could perhaps only make a mark where her signature should have been. Julian stared at her very intently, and as he did so he started violently, for across the human background which her sleeping dissipation supplied there seemed to float the vague shadow, suggestion, call it what you will, of a tongue of flame.

He walked hastily on, angrily blaming his nerves. As he pa.s.sed the policeman he fancied he noticed that the man glanced at him with a certain flickering suspicion. Was horror legibly written in his face?

he wondered uneasily, confessing to himself that even in the dawn and the lap of Grosvenor Place a horror had again seized him. What did this shadow which he had now twice seen portend? Surely his nerves were not permanently upset. He was at first heartily ashamed of himself. Near St.

George's Hospital, gaunt and grey in the morning, he stopped again, bent his left arm forcibly, and with his right hand felt the hard lump of muscle, that sprang up like a ball of iron under his coat sleeve. And as he felt it he cursed himself for the greatest of all fools. Thin, meagre little men of the town, tea-party men whose thoughts were ever on their ties and their moustaches, no doubt gave themselves up readily to disturbances of the nerves. But Julian had always prided himself on being an athlete, able to hold his own in the world by mere muscular force, if need be. He had found it possible to develop side by side brain and biceps, each to an adequate end. It had seemed grand to him to hold these scales of his being evenly, to balance them to a hair. Those scales hung badly now, lopsidedly. One was up in the clouds. He resolved that the other should correct it. After a cold bath and a sleep he would go round to Angelo's and have an hour's hard fencing. Cold water, the Englishman's panacea for every ill, cold steel, the pioneer's Minerva, would tonic this errant brain of his and drill it into its customary obedience. So he said to himself.

And yet as he walked there came to him a notion that this little shadow of a flame was still his companion; that this night just pa.s.sed, this day just begun, were the birthnight and the birthday of this small, ghostlike thing which had come into being to bear him company, to haunt him. Yes, as he walked, followed always closely by Rip, and saw the tall iron gates of the Park, Apsley House, the long line of Piccadilly, all uncertain, gentle, reduced to a whimsical mildness of aspect in the half-light of the dawning, he again recalled the fact, which he had mentioned that night to Doctor Levillier, of people watching an invalid who had seen, at the precise moment of dissolution, the soul escaping furtively from its fleshy prison like a flame, which was immediately lost in the air. Surely, wandering souls, if indeed there were such things, might still retain this faint semblance of a shape, a form. And if so, they might perhaps occasionally conceive a fantastic attachment to a human being, and companion him silently as the dog companions his master. He might have such a companion, whose nature he could not comprehend, whose object in seeking him out he could not guess. Perhaps it felt affection toward him; perhaps, on the other hand, enmity. A lover, or a spy--it might be either. Or it might have no definite purpose, but simply drift near him in the air, as some human beings drift feebly along together through life, because they have long ago loved each other, or thought each other useful, or fancied, in some moment of madness, that G.o.d meant them for each other. It might be an aimless, dreary soul, unable to be gone from sheer dulness of purpose--a soul without temperament, without character.

As this thought crossed Julian's mind he happened to glance at the front of a shop on his left, and against the iron shutters the flame was dimly but distinctly outlined. He stopped at once to look at it, but even as he stopped it was gone. Then he sternly brought himself back from the vague regions of fancy, and was angry that he had permitted himself to wander in them like a child lost in the forest. He bent down and patted Rip, and sought to wrench his mind from its wayward course, and to thrust it forcibly into its accustomed groove of healthy sanity. Yet sanity seemed to become abruptly commonplace, a sort of whining crossing-sweeper, chattering untimely, meaningless phrases to him. To divert himself entirely he paused beside a peripatetic coffee-stall, presided over by a grey-faced, prematurely old youth, with sharp features and the glancing eyes of poverty-stricken avarice.

"Give me a cup of coffee," he said.

The youth clattered his wares in excited obedience.

While he was pouring out the steaming liquid there drifted down to Julian through the grey weariness of the morning a painted girl of the streets, crowned with a large hat, on which a forest of feathers waved in the weak and chilly breeze. Julian glanced at her idly enough and she glanced back at him. Horror, he thought, looked from her eyes as if from a window. As she returned his gaze she hovered near him in the peculiar desultory way of such women, and Julian, glad of any distraction, offered her a cup of coffee. She drew nearer and accepted it.

"And a bun, my dear," she hinted to the sharp-featured youth.

"And a bun," echoed Julian, seeing his doubtful pause of hesitation.

The bun came into view from a hidden basket, and the meal began, Julian, Rip, and the lady of the feathers forming a companionable group upon the kerb. The lady's curious and almost thrilling expression, which had seemed to beacon from some height of her soul some exceptional and dreary deed, faded under the influence of the dough and currants. A smile overspread her thin features. She examined Julian with a gracious interest.

"It's easy to see you've been makin' a night of it, Bertie," she remarked casually at length, in the suffocated voice of one divided between desire of conversation and love of food.

"You think so?" said Julian.

"Think so, dear, I'm sure so! Ask me another as I _don't_ know; do darlin'."

Julian took another draught from the thick coffee-cup that held so amazingly little.

"And what about yourself?" he said. "Why are you out here so early?"

The lady of the feathers cast a suspicious glance upon him. Then the horror dawned again in her eyes.

"I'm afraid to go home," she said. "Yes, that's a fact."

"Afraid--why?" Julian spoke abstractedly. In truth he merely talked to this floating wisp of humanity to distract his mind, and thought of her as a strange female David of the streets sent to make a c.o.c.kney music in his ears that his soul might be rid of its evil spirit.

"Never you mind why," the lady answered.

She shivered suddenly, violently, as a dog just come out of water.

"Have another cup?" Julian said.

"And a bun, dearie," the lady again rejoined. She shook her head till all the feathers danced.

"Never you mind why," she said, reverting again to his vagrant question.

"There's some things as don't do to talk about."

"I'm sure I've no wish to pry into your private affairs," Julian rejoined carelessly.

But again he noticed the worn terror of her face. Surely that night she, too, had pa.s.sed through some unwonted experience, which had written its sign-manual amid the paint and powder of her shame.

The lady stared back at him. Beneath her tinted eyelids the fear seemed to grow like a weed. Tears followed, rolling over her cheeks and mingling with the coffee in her cup.

"Oh dear," she murmured lamentably. "Oh, dear, oh!"

"What's the matter?" said Julian.

But she only shook her head, with the peevish persistence of weak obstinacy, and continued vaguely to weep as one worn down by chill circ.u.mstance.

Julian turned his eyes from her to the coffee-stall, in which the sharp-featured youth now negligently leant, well satisfied with the custom he had secured. Behind the youth's head it seemed to Julian that the phantom flame hung trembling, as if blown by the light wind of the morning. He laid his hand on the lady's left arm and unconsciously closed his fingers firmly over the flesh, while, in a low voice, he said to her:

"Look there!"

The lady of the feathers stopped crying abruptly, as if her tears were suddenly frozen at their source.

"Where, dearie?" she said jerkily. "Whatever do you mean?"

"There where the cups are hung up. Don't you see anything?"