Flames Part 52

"My dear chap, now don't you get your frills out. Nothing that I should mind being said about me, I a.s.sure you. Only Cresswell will soon lose his nickname if he goes on as he's going now."

"I'm in the dark."

"That's what he likes being, if what they say is true. Quite a night-bird, I'm told."

"You'd better be more explicit."

But the man glanced at Julian's face and seemed to think better of it. He moved off muttering:

"d.a.m.ned rot, minding a little chaff. And when we're all in the same boat too."

Julian sat pondering over his veiled remarks. They surprised him, but at first he was inclined to consider them as meaningless and unfounded as so much of the gossip of the clubs. Men like Valentine must always be a target for the arrows of the cynical. Julian had heard his sanct.i.ty laughed at in billiard-rooms and in bars many times, and had simply felt an easy contempt for the laughers, who could not understand that any nature could be finer than their own. But to-day his own faint change of life--as yet in its gentle beginnings--led him presently to wonder, literally for the first time, whether there was a side of Valentine's life that was not merely a side of feeling, but of action, and that he knew nothing of. If it were so, Julian felt an inward conviction that the very nearest weeks of the past had seen its birth. He remembered once more Valentine's idle remark about his weariness of goodness, and wondered whether--in violation of his nature, in violent revolt against his own n.o.bility--he was living at last that commonplace, theatrical puppet-play of the world, a double life.

Valentine a night-bird! What did that mean?

And then Julian thought of the great wheeling army of the bats, whose evolutions every night of creation witnesses. In the day they do not sleep, but they are hidden. Their wings are folded so closely as to be invisible. n.o.body could tell that they ever flew through shadowy places, seeking that which never satiates, although it may transform, the appet.i.te. n.o.body could tell how the twilight affects them when it comes; how, in their obscurity, they have to keep a guard lest the involuntary fluttering of a half-spread pinion betray them. And then when the twilight, the blessed one of the twin twilights, one in course towards day, one in course towards night, has deepened and has died, they can dare to be themselves, to spread their short wings, and to flutter on their vagrant and monotonous courses. It is a great though secret army--the army of the bats. It scours through cities. No weather will keep it quite restful in camp. No darkness will blind it into immobility.

The mainspring of sin beats in it as drums beat in a Soudanese fantasia, as blood beats in a heart. The air of night is black with the movement of the bats. They fly so thickly round some lives that those lives can never see the sky, never catch a glimpse of the stars, never hear the wings of the angels, but always and ever the wings of the bats. Nor can such lives hear the whisper of Nature and of the sirens who walk purely with Nature.

The murmur of the bats drowns all other sounds, and makes a hoa.r.s.e and monotonous music. And the eyes of the bats are hungry, and the breath of the bats is poisonous, and the flight of the bats is a charade of the tragedy of the flight of the devils in h.e.l.l.

How could Valentine be one of the bats? It seemed to Julian that if Valentine tried to join them they would fall upon him, as certain birds will fall upon one who is not of their tribe, and kill him. And yet?

Yet Julian began to know that he had been aware of a change in Valentine.

He had believed it to be momentary. Perhaps it was not momentary. Perhaps Valentine was concealing his new mode of life from some strange idea of chivalry towards Julian. As Julian pondered he grew excited. He began to long to tell Valentine now what he had not liked to tell him before.

Suddenly he got up and hastened out of the club. He drove to Victoria Street. But Valentine was not at home.

"I suppose Mr. Cresswell goes out every night Wade?" he asked the man, after a moment of hesitation.

Wade looked very much astonished at such a question coming from Julian.

"Yes, sir. At least, most nights," Wade answered.

"I see," Julian said.

He stood a minute longer. Then he turned away, after an abrupt:

"Say I called, will you?"

Wade looked after him as he went down the stairs, with the raised eyebrows of the confidential butler.

That night was warm and gentle, with a full moon riding in clear heavens.

The season was growing towards its full height, and the streets were thronged with carriages till a late hour. There is one long pavement that is generally trodden by many feet at every time of the year, and in almost every hour of the wheeling twenty-four. It is the pavement on which the legend of London's disgrace is written in bold characters of defiance. Men from distant lands, having made the pilgrimage to our Mecca, the queen, by right of magnitude at least, of the world's cities, stare aghast upon the legend, almost as Belshazzar stared upon the writing on the wall. Colonists seeking for the first time the comfortable embrace of that mother country which has been the fable of their childhood and the dream of their laborious years of maturity, gaze with withering hearts at this cancer in her bosom. Pure women turn their eyes from it. Children seek it that they may learn in one sharp moment the knowledge of good and evil. The music of the feet on that pavement has called women to despair and men to destruction; has sung in the ears of innocence till they grew deaf to virtue, and murmured round the heart of love till it became the heart of l.u.s.t. And that pavement is the camping-ground of the army of the bats. On wet nights they flit drearily through the rain. In winter they glide like shadows among the revealing snows. But in the time of flowers and of soft airs, when the moon at the full swims calmly above the towers of Westminster, and the Thames rests rocked in a silver dream among the ebony wharves and barges, the flight of the bats is gay and their number is legion. And their circle is joined by many who are but recruits, or as camp-followers, treading in the track of those whose names are on the roll-call.

The lady of the feathers rarely failed to join the evening flight of the bats. Her acquaintance with Julian, even her curious pa.s.sion for his respect and distant treatment, had not won her to different evenings, or to a new mode of life. But her feeling for Julian led her to ignore now the fact of this fate of hers. She chose to set him aside from it, to keep him for a friend, as an innocent peasant-girl might keep some recluse wandering after peace into her solitude. Julian was to be the one man who looked on her with quiet, habitual eyes, who touched her with calm, gentle hand, who spoke to her with the voice of friendship, demanding nothing, and thought of her with a feeling that was neither greed nor contempt. And that one fatal night in which Cuckoo's private and secluded heart was so bitterly wounded she put out of her recollection with a strength of determination soldier-like and almost fierce. It lay in the past, but she did not treat the past as a woman treats a drawer full of old, used things, opening it in quiet moments and turning over its contents with a lingering and a loving hand. She shut it, locked it almost angrily, and never, never looked into it.

Julian was to be her friend of leisure, never a.s.sociated in any way with her tragic hours. All other men were the same, stamped with a similar hall-mark. He only was unstamped and was beautiful.

On this evening of summer, Cuckoo, as usual, joined the flight of the bats with a tired wing. The heat tried her. Her cheeks were white as ivory under their cloud of rouge. Her mouth was more plaintive even than usual, and her heart felt dull and heavy. As she got out of the omnibus at the Circus one of her ankles turned, and she gave an awkward jump that set all the feathers on her hat in commotion, and made the newspaper boys laugh at her scornfully. They knew her by sight, and joked her every evening when she arrived. At first--that was a long while ago--she had resented their remarks, still more their shrewd unboyish questions, and had answered them with angry bitterness. But--well, that was a long while ago. Now she simply recovered her footing, paused a moment on the kerbstone to arrange her dress, and then drifted away into the crowd slowly, without even glancing at her nightly critics, who were aware of a new bow on her gown, recognized with imperturbable _sang-froid_ the change in a tr.i.m.m.i.n.g or the alteration of a waist-belt.

Slowly she walked along. Piccadilly bats fly slowly. The moon went up.

She had not met her fate. In the throng she saw Valentine pa.s.s. He looked at her with a smile. She turned her eyes hastily away. She had met him on several evenings of late, but had never told Julian so, for she began to understand now his reverence for Valentine, and a new-born, ladylike instinct taught her not to hurt that reverence. Valentine disappeared.

He had not tried to speak with her. Once, on encountering her, he had paused, but Cuckoo glided behind two large Frenchwomen and escaped with the adroitness of a snake in the gra.s.s. Apparently he recognized her movement as one of retreat, and was resolved to leave her alone, for he had never followed her since that day, although he always lifted his hat when he saw her. The crowd grew thicker. It was very heterogeneous, but Cuckoo did not thread it with the attention of a psychologist, or examine it with the pains of a philosopher of the dark hours. She stared listlessly at the faces of the men, and if they stared back at her, smiled mechanically with a thin and stereotyped coquetry, moving on vacantly the while in a sort of dream, such as a tired journalist may fall into as he drives his pen over the paper, leaving a train of familiar words and phrases behind it. There are many dreamers like Cuckoo on the thin riband of that pavement, moving in a maze created by everlasting custom, beneath their flowers, half senseless to life, and yet alive to the least human notice, behind the stretched barriers of their veils. She walked from the Circus to Hyde Park corner and back again; then turned, with an ever-growing la.s.situde, to repeat the desolate experience. By this time the playhouses had vomited their patrons into the night, and locomotion was becoming more difficult.

Sometimes there was a block, and Cuckoo found herself "hung up," as she called it, squashed in a ma.s.s of people, all intent on some scheme of their own, and resentful of the enforced interruption to their movement.

Then, by some unknown and mysterious means, the human knot was untied, and all the atoms murmured on again through the ocean of the town. And still Cuckoo was alone, and still the mechanical smile came and went upon her lips, and her feet seemed to grow heavier and heavier, till they were as cannon-b.a.l.l.s to be lifted and dragged by her protesting muscles. And still her senses seem to become more and more drugged by the familiarity of it all, the familiarity of smile, of tired limbs, of incessant slow motion, of staring faces and watchful eyes; the familiarity of the cabs rolling home towards Knightsbridge and farther Kensington, with a dull, harsh noise; the familiarity of personal, intense loneliness and longing for quiet; the familiarity of the knowledge that quiet could only be earned by failure, and that failure meant lack of food, debt, and deeper degradation.

At last--perhaps it was owing to the unusual heat of the night--Cuckoo became so over-fatigued that she was scarcely conscious what she was doing. Her smile was utterly devoid of meaning, and had she been suddenly asked, she could not have told whether she was at the Regent Street end of Piccadilly, at Hyde Park Corner, or midway between the two.

Once more there was a block. The people were pressed, or surged of their own will, together, and Cuckoo found herself leaning against some stranger. This sudden support gave to her an equally sudden knowledge of the extent to which she was fatigued, and when the block ceased and the stranger--unconscious that he was being used as a species of pillow--moved away, Cuckoo almost fell to the ground. Stretching out her hands to save herself, she caught hold of a man's arm, and as she did so her eyes moved to his face. It was Julian, and, before her grasp had time to fix all his attention on her, Cuckoo saw why he was in Piccadilly. In an instant all her la.s.situde was gone; all the fatigue, so pa.s.sionless and complete, vanished. An extraordinary warmth, that of fire, not of summer, swept into her heart. She stood still and trembled, as if from the accession of the abrupt strength that flows from an energy purely nervous.

"Hulloh, Cuckoo!" Julian said.

She nodded at him. He looked down at her, not quite knowing what to say, for he knew, by this time, that she objected to any hint from him on the subject of her proceedings of the night. That was ignored between them, and when they met the situation was that of a lodger in the Marylebone Road holding friendly intercourse with a dweller in Mayfair, nothing more and nothing less.

"Taking a stroll?" Julian said at last. "Isn't it a lovely night?"

"Yes. I say, I'm tired," she answered.

"Shall I take you somewhere?" he asked.

"Yes, do," she said.

They moved towards the Circus.

"Where shall we go?" Julian said. "Have you any pet place?"

"I don't know--oh, the Monico," she replied.

The restaurant was right in front of them. They dodged across to the island, thence to the opposite pavement, and pa.s.sed in silently. The outer hall was thronged with people. So was the long inner room, and for a moment they stood in the doorway looking for a table. At length Julian caught sight of an empty one far down under the clock at the end.

They made their way to it and sat down.

"What will you have?" Julian asked Cuckoo.

She considered, sinking back on the plush settee.

"A gla.s.s of stout, I think, and--"

"And a bun," he interposed, smiling in recollection of their first interview.

But Cuckoo did not smile or seem to recognize the allusion.

"Please, I'll have a sandwich," she said.

Julian ordered it, the stout, a cup of coffee and a liqueur brandy for himself. While the waiter was getting the things he noticed Cuckoo's extreme and active gravity, a gravity which seemed oddly to give her quite a formidable appearance under her feathers. Despite the obvious weariness written on her face, there was somehow a look of energy about her, the aspect of a person full of intention and purpose.

"Why, Cuckoo," he said, "you look like a young judge about to deliver a sentence on somebody."

And indeed that was just how her expression and pose behind the marble-topped table affected him. Just then the waiter brought the stout and the other things. Cuckoo removed her cheap kid gloves, took the tumbler in her thin fingers and sipped at it. After a sip or two she put the gla.s.s down, and said to Julian:

"I say."

"Well?"