Flames Part 59

Cuckoo, with her eyes on Julian, was silent, too, now. She understood that what her suspicion had affirmed, without actually knowing, was true, and her stormy heart was swept by a whirlwind of jealousy, and of womanish pity for the man she was jealous of. In that moment she felt a sickness of life more sharp than she had ever felt before, and a dull longing to be a different woman, a woman of Julian's cla.s.s, and clever, that she might be able to do something to keep him from sinking to the level of the men she hated.

How could she, in her nakedness of permanent degradation, give a helping hand to anybody? That was a clear rendering of the vague thought, vague as this twilight in which they sat, that ran through her mind. Suddenly she turned to the tray and poured herself out a cup of tea. The tea had been standing while they talked, and was black and strong. She drank it eagerly, and a wave of nervous energy rushed over her, surging up to her brain like light and electricity. It gave to her a sort of reckless valour to say just the thing she felt. She turned towards Julian with a manner that was half shrew, half wildcat--street girls cannot always compa.s.s the impressive, though they may feel the great eternities nestling round their hearts--and cried out:

"I just hate you!"

All her jealousy rang in that cry, smothering the whisper of the maternal pa.s.sion that went ever with it. Julian could no longer doubt the truth of Valentine's words.

"Cuckoo, don't be silly," he said hastily, and awkwardly enough.

"Silly!" she burst out. "What do I care for that? I ain't silly, either, and I ain't blind like you are. I can see where you're goin'."

"I shall go away from here," Julian said, trying to laugh, "if you talk in this ridiculous way."

She sprang up and ran pa.s.sionately in front of the door, as if she thought he was really going to escape.

"No, you don't," she said, and her accent seemed to draw near to that of Whitechapel as her voice rose higher. "Not till I've said what I mean."

"Hush, Cuckoo! We shall have Mrs. Brigg up, thinking I'm murdering you."

"Let her come! And you are, that's what you are, murderin' me, and worse, seein' you go where you're goin'. He's takin' you. It's all him. Yes, it is! He'll make you as he is."

"Cuckoo, I won't have it."

Julian spoke sternly and got up. The little dogs, alarmed by the tumult, had begun to whine uneasily, and at his movement Jessie barked in a thin voice. Julian went to Cuckoo, took her wrists in his two hands, and drew her away from the door; but she tore herself from his grasp with fury, for the touch of his hands gave a clearer vision to her jealousy of his secret deeds, and made her understand better the depth of her present feeling.

"You shall have it," she cried. "You shall. I know men. I know what you'll be. I know what women'll make of you."

"A man makes himself," Julian interrupted.

"Rot! That's all you know about it. I've seen them begin so nice and go right down, like a stone in a well. And they never come up again. Not they. No more'll you. D'you hear that?"

"I shall hear you better if you speak lower."

Cuckoo suddenly changed from a sort of frenzy to a violent calm.

"You're different already," she said. "Can't I see it?"

As if to emphasize her remark she approached her face quite close to his in the twilight. While they had been arguing a cloud had pa.s.sed over the sun, and dimness increased in the little room. Both of them were still standing up, and now Cuckoo peered into Julian's eyes with almost hungry scrutiny. Her lips were still trembling with excitement and her mouth was contorted into a sideways grin, expressive of contemptuous knowledge of the descent of Julian's nature. She was a mere mask of pa.s.sion, no doubt a ridiculous object enough, touzled, dishevelled and shaken with temper, as she leaned forward to get a better view of him. And Julian was both vexed and disgusted by her outbreak, and sick of a scene which, like all men, he ardently hated and would have given much to avoid. He faced her coldly, endeavouring to calm her by banishing every trace of excitement from his expression.

And then, in the twilight of the dingy room, and in the twilight of her eyes, he saw the flame once more. A thin glint of sunshine found its way in from the street, and threw a shadow near them. Cuckoo's eyes emitted a greenish ray like a cat's, and in this ray the flame swam and flickered, cold and pale, and, Julian fancied, menacing.

Perhaps, because he was already irritated and slightly strung up by Cuckoo's attack, he felt a sudden anger against the flame, almost as he might have felt a rage against a person. As he stared upon it, he could almost believe that it, too, had eyes, scrutinizing, upbraiding, condemning him, and that in the thin riband and shade of its fire there dwelt a heart to hate him for the dear sin to which, at last, he began to give himself. For the moment Cuckoo and the flame were as one, and for the moment he feared and hated them both.

Abruptly he held up his hand to stop the further words that were fluttering on her thin and painted lips.

"Hush!" he said, in a little hiss of protest against sound.

For again, fighting with the anger, there was awe in his heart.

There was something unusual in his expression which held her silent, a furtive horror and expectation which she did not understand. And while she waited, Julian turned suddenly, and left the room and the house.

CHAPTER VI

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS LEARNS WISDOM

Julian did not come again to the house in the Marylebone Road for at least a fortnight, and during that time the lady of the feathers was left alone with her life and with her sad thoughts. The summer days went heavily by, and the sultry summer nights. No rain fell, and London was veiled in dust. The pavements were so hot that they burned the feet that trod them. Sometimes they seemed to burn Cuckoo's very soul, and to sear her heart as she stood upon them for hours in the night, while the crowds of Piccadilly flitted by like shadows in an evil dream. She stared mechanically at the faces of those pa.s.sing as she strolled with a lagging footstep along the line of houses. She turned to meet the eyes of the pale-faced loungers in the lighted entrance of the St. James's restaurant, "Jimmy's," as she called it. But her mind was preoccupied. A problem had fastened upon it with the tenacity of some vampire or strange clinging creature of night. Cuckoo was wrestling with an angel; or was it a devil? And often, when she stopped on the pavement and exchanged a word or two with some casual stranger, she scarcely knew what she said, or to what kind of man she was speaking. She was possessed by one thought, the thought of Julian and of his danger. Valentine, in her thoughts, was strangely a pale shadow, incredibly evil, incredibly persistent, luring Julian downwards, beckoning him with the thin hand of a saint to depths unpierced by the gaze of even the most sinful. And that hand of the saint was only part of the appalling deception of his beautiful and tragically lying body, a crystal temple in which a demon dwelt secretly, peering from its concealment through the shadowy blue windows, in which Julian saw truth and honour, but in which Cuckoo read things to terrify and to dismay.

For she was not wholly unaware of the mystery of Valentine, of the sharp contrast between his appearance and the vision of his nature as it came to her. She understood that there was something in the fine beauty of his face and figure to account for Julian's blindness and refusal to be warned against him. Cuckoo's intuition, the intuition of an unlearned and instinctive creature trained by the hardest circ.u.mstances to rely on what she called her wits, laid the crystal temple in ruins, and drove the demon from its lurking-place naked and shrieking into the open. But, after all, was not she rather deceived than Julian? Julian, from the first moment of meeting Valentine, looked upon him as saint. Cuckoo, from the first moment of meeting, looked upon him as devil. Each put him aside from the general run of humanity, the one in a heaven of the imagination, the other in a h.e.l.l. Neither would allow him to be midway between the two, containing possibilities of both,--ordinary, natural man. Julian angrily scouted the notion of Valentine's being like other men. Cuckoo felt instinctively that he was not. And so they glorified and cursed him.

Cuckoo had at first cursed him plainly in the market-place and upon the house-top. But that was before she had learned wisdom. Slowly she learnt it on these hot days and nights, when the London dust filtered over the paint upon her cheeks and lips, clung round the shadows in the hollows beneath her eyes, and slept in the artificial primrose of her elaborate cloud of hair. Slowly she learnt it in many vague and struggling mental arguments, in which logic was a dwarf and pa.s.sion a giant, in which instinct strangled reason, and love wandered as a shamefaced fairy with tear-dimmed eyes.

Julian's prolonged absence and silence first taught the lady of the feathers the slow necessity of wisdom, otherwise, perhaps, her vehement ignorance could never have absorbed the precious thing. Women of her training and vile experience, nerve-ridden, and clothed in hysteria as in a garment, often think to gain what they want by the mere shrillness of outcry, the mere grabbing of ostentatious, eager hands and frenzy of body. Their lives lead them through a wonder of knowledge and of danger to the demeanour of babyhood, and they cry for every rattle, much more for every moon. So Cuckoo had thrown her feelings down before Julian.

She had dashed her hatred of Valentine in his face; she had cried her fears of his downfall to that which she consorted with eternally and loathed--when she had still the energy to loathe it, which was not always--in his ears with the ardent shrillness of a boatswain's whistle.

She had, in fact, done all that her instinct prompted her to do, and the result was the exit of Julian from her life. This set her, always in her sharp and yet childish way, sometimes oddly clear sighted, often muddled and distressed, to turn upon instinct with a contempt not known before, to discard it with the fury still of a child. And instinct thus forsaken by an essentially instinctive creature opened the gates of distress and of confusion.

By day Cuckoo sat in her stuffy little parlour brooding wearily. She waited in day after day, always hoping that Julian would return, full of resolutions, prompted by fear, to be gentle, even lively, to him when he did come, full of excited intention which could not be fulfilled; for he did not come. And by night, while she tramped the streets, still Cuckoo's anxious mind revolved the question of her behaviour in the future. For she would not, pa.s.sionately would not, allow herself to contemplate the possibility that Julian's anger against her would keep him forever beyond reach either of her fury or of her tenderness. She insisted on contemplating his ultimate reappearance, and her wits were at work to devise means to win him from Valentine's influence without stirring his horror at any thought of disloyalty to his friend. Cuckoo, in fact, wanted to be subtle, intended to be subtle, and sought intensely the right way of subtlety. She sought it as she walked, as she hovered at street corners in the night, while the hours ran by, sometimes till the streets were nearly deserted, sometimes even till the dawn sang in the sky to the wail of the hungry woman beneath it. She sought it even in the company of those strangers who stepped for a night into her life as into a public room, and stepped from it on the morrow with a careless and everlasting adieu, half-drowned in the c.h.i.n.k of money.

And sometimes she thought, with a sick dreariness, that she would never find it, and sometimes courage failed her, and, despite her pa.s.sionate resolution, she did for a moment say to herself, "If he should never come again." There were moments, too, when every other feeling was drowned by sheer jealousy of Julian, when the tiger-cat woke in this street-girl who had always had to fight, when her thin frame shivered with the shaking violence of the soul it held. Then she clenched her hands, and longed to plant her nails in the faces of those other women, divined, though never seen,--those French women who had sung him, like sirens, to Paris, away from the sea of her greedy love. Her similes were commonplace. In her heart she called such sirens hussies. Had she met them the battle of words would have been strong and singularly unclean. That she herself was a hussy to other men, not to Julian, did not trouble her. She did not realize it. Human nature has always one blind eye, even when the other does not squint. This pa.s.sion of jealousy, circling round an absent man, seized her at the strangest, the most inopportune moments. Sometimes it came upon her in the street, and the meditation of it was so vital and complete that Cuckoo could not go on walking, lest she should, by movement, miss the keenest edge of the agony. Then she would stop wherever she was, lean against the down-drawn shutter of a shop, or the corner of a public house, among the gaping loungers, let her powdered chin drop upon her breast, and sink into a fit of desperate detective duty, during which she followed Julian like a shadow through imagined wanderings, and watched him committing all those imagined actions that could cause her to feel the wildest and most inhuman despair.

One night, when she was thus sunk and swallowed up in the maw of miserable inward contemplation, a young man, who was walking by, observed her. He was very young and eager, fresh from Cambridge, ardent after the mysteries and the subtleties of life, as is the fashion of clever modern youth. The sight of this painted girl leaning, motionless as some doll or puppet, against the iron shutters of the vacant house, her head drooped, and her hands, as if the strings to manipulate her had fallen loose from the grasp that guided them, caught and eventually fascinated him. It was a late hour of night. He pa.s.sed on and returned, shooting each time a devouring, a.n.a.lytical glance upon Cuckoo. Again he came back, walking a little nearer to the houses. His heart beat quicker as he approached the puppet. Its complete immobility was almost appalling, and each time he came within view of it he examined it violently to see if a limb was displaced. No; one might almost suppose that it was the body of some one struck dead so suddenly against the shop that she had not had time to fall, and so remained leaning thus. With shorter and shorter revolutions, like a dog working itself up to approach some motionless but strange object, the youth went by Cuckoo, hesitating more and more each time he came in front of her with strange feelings of one being vaguely criminal.

He longed to touch the puppet, to see if any quiver would convulse its limbs, any light flicker into its eyes. And he was so fascinated and interested that at last he did furtively stop precisely in front of it.

For a second both of them were motionless, he from contemplation of the outward, she of the inward. Then Cuckoo's thoughtful jealousy came to a ghastly crisis. Her imagination had shown her frightful things and herself an utterly helpless and compelled spectator. The puppet opened its red lips to utter a sob, lifted up its white and heavy eyelids to let loose tears upon its unnaturally bright cheeks, stirred its hanging hands to clasp them in a crude gesture of dull fury. The youth started as at a corpse showing suddenly the pangs of life. His movement shot Cuckoo like a bullet into her real world. Through her tears she saw a man regarding her. In a flash, old habit brought to her a smile, a turned head of coquetry, an entreating hand, a hackneyed phrase that reiteration rendered parrot-like in intonation. The youth shrank back and fled away in the darkness. Long afterwards that incident haunted him as an epitome of all the horrors of cruel London.

And Cuckoo, thus roused and deserted, put aside for the moment her nightmare, and started once more upon her promenade of the night.

At last she began to fear that Julian would never come back, and by a sudden impulse she wrote to him a short, very ill-spelt letter, hoping he would come to tea with her on a certain afternoon. On the day mentioned she waited in an agony of expectation. She had put on his black dress, removed all traces of paint and powder from her face, remembering his former request and her experiment, tricked Jessie out in a bright yellow satin riband twisted into a bow almost larger than herself, and bought flowers--large ones, sunflowers--to give to her dingy room an air of refinement and of gaiety. Amid all this brilliancy of yellow satin and yellow flowers she waited uneasily in her simple black gown. The day was dull, not wet, but brooding and severe, iron-grey, like a hard-featured Puritan, and still with the angry peace of coming thunder. The window was open to let in air, but no air seemed to enter, only the weariful and incessant street noises. Jessie wriggled about, biting sideways with animation to get at her yellow adornment, and pattering around the furniture seeking stray crumbs, which sometimes eluded her for a while and, lying in hidden nooks and corners, unexpectedly rewarded her desultory and impromptu search. Cuckoo leaned her arms across the table, glanced at the tea things for two, and listened. A cab stopped presently.

She twisted in her chair to face the window. It had drawn up next door, and she subsided again into her fever of attention. Jessie found a crumb and swallowed it with as much action and large air of tasting it as if it had been a city dinner. The hands of the clock drew to the hour named in Cuckoo's note, touched it, pa.s.sed it. A sickness of despair began to creep upon her like a thousand little biting insects. She shuffled in her seat, glanced this way and that, pressed her lips together, and, taking her arms from the table, clasped her hands tightly in her lap. Then she sat straight up and counted the tickings of the clock, the spots on the tablecloth, the gold stars upon the wallpaper of the room. She counted and counted until her head began to swim. And all the time she waited, the lady of the feathers was learning wisdom. The lesson was harsh, as the lessons of time usually are; the lesson was bitter as Marah waters.

And she thought the lesson was going to be a cross too heavy for her narrow shoulders to bear when the iron gate of the garden sang its invariable little note of protest on being opened. Cuckoo's head turned slowly to one side. Her haggard eyes swept the view of the path. Julian was walking up it.

She met him very quietly, almost seriously, and he shook hands with her as if they had been together quite recently and parted the best of friends. Only, as he held her hand, she noticed that he cast a hasty, and as she fancied a fearful, glance into her eyes. Then he seemed rea.s.sured and they sat down to tea. Cuckoo supposed that he had for the moment dreaded what she called another row, and was satisfied by her expression of good temper. They drank their tea, and after a short interval of constraint began chattering together very much as usual. At first Cuckoo had hardly dared to look much at Julian, lest he should see the joy she felt at his coming, but when she was pouring out his second cup she let her eyes rest fully on his face, and only then did she realize that a shadow lay upon it, a shadow from which it had been free before.

With a trembling hand she filled the cup and stared upon the shadow.

She knew its brethren so well. In dead days she herself had helped to manufacture such shadows upon the faces of men. She had seen them come, thin, faint, delicate, impalpable as a veil of mist before morning. Only morning light never followed them. And she had seen them stay and grow and deepen and darken. Shadow over the eyes of the man, shadow round his lips, shadow like a cloud upon the forehead, shadow over the picture painted by the soul, working through the features, that we call expression. Many times had she seen the journey taken by a man's face to that haunted bourne, arrived at which it is scarcely any more a man's face, but only a mask expressive of one, or of many, sins. Had Julian then definitely set foot upon that journey? As yet the shadow that lay over him was no more than the lightest film, suggestive of a slightly unnatural and forbidding fatigue. Yet Cuckoo shrank from it as from a ghost.

"Why, Cuckoo, your hand is trembling!" Julian said.

"Oh, I was out late last night," she answered, putting the teapot hastily down. And they talked on, pretending there were only two of them and no shadowy third.

Julian, having returned at last to the Marylebone Road, fell into his old habit of coming there often. And each time that he came the lady of the feathers counted a fresh step on his hideous journey towards the haunted bourne. Yet she never spoke of the dreary addition sum she was doing. She never reproached Julian, or wept, or let him see that her heart was growing cold as a pilgrim who kneels, bare, in long prayers upon the steps of a shrine. For she had learnt wisdom, and hugged it in her arms. Valentine was scarcely ever mentioned between them; but once, and evidently by accident, Julian allowed an expression to escape him which implied that Valentine now objected to the intimacy with Cuckoo.

Immediately the words were uttered, Julian looked confused, and obviously would have wished to recall them, had it been possible.

"Oh, I know as he don't like me," Cuckoo said.

Julian answered nothing.