Flames Part 97

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. a.n.a.lysed, 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 cla.s.s, 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 G.o.dly 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 circ.u.mstance which she could scarcely surmount with dignity, whatever she might manage in the way of fort.i.tude. 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 l.u.s.tre, 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 circ.u.mstances 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."