Valentine watched him.

"You are treating the poor thing—and my carpet—scurvily, Julian," he said. "And you have startled Miss Bright."

Cuckoo's eyes were shining.

"No," she ejaculated.

Valentine rang the bell and directed Wade to collect the fragments of glass. While the man was doing so silence again reigned, and the little room seemed full of uneasiness. Only Valentine either was or affected to be nonchalant. As soon as Wade had gone he said to the doctor:

"This room is destined to be dedicated to strange uses, and to influence those who come within it. Julian is not himself to-night."

"Are you?" Julian asked.

"Myself?"

"Yes."

"My dear Julian, we shall be forced to think the absinthe has been at work too busily in your brain. What is the matter?"

"Nothing."

"One would think we had been having a sitting, you are so excited."

Julian suddenly drew his breath sharply, as if struck by a shot of an idea.

"Let us have one," he cried.

The distant bells rang faintly. The doctor thrilled to the suggestion, still bound by magic, surely. For now, since the inspiring exclamation of Cuckoo, which had broken his theories on the wheel and swept his reason like a dead flower along the wind, he no longer condemned, as a danger only, that which had produced the trance from which, as from a strange prison, had come the new Valentine. The former sitting had, it seemed, beckoned that trance, and with the trance had beckoned an incredibly evil and powerful thing. What if that which had the power to give had also the power to take away? Often it is so in ordinary conditions of life. Why not also in extraordinary conditions? So his thoughts ran, fantastically enough, to the sound of the far-off bells.

"A good notion," he said on the spur of the moment and this quick reflection.

"You think so?" said Valentine. "You who condemned us, even wrung a promise from us against sitting."

His regard was suspicious.

"Perhaps I have changed my mind. Perhaps I take the matter less seriously," said the doctor.

He had never been more near lying, nor was he ashamed of his dissimulation. There are creatures against which we must, whatever our principles, take up the nearest weapon that comes to hand. The doctor looked at Julian and at Valentine, and could have perjured himself a thousand times to wrest the one from the other.

"But Miss Bright is ill," said Valentine.

"No, I ain't. I'm all right now," Cuckoo said.

She did not understand what was being proposed, but she gathered that the doctor desired it. That was enough for her. Valentine looked at them all three with eyes that plainly betokened a busy mind, then a smile flickered over his lips. It was the smile of one in power watching his slaves creeping at their work—for him. He touched the point—of which he had spoken earlier in the evening—in that smile, a point of delirium.

"Let them try to break me," his mind said within itself. "Their very trial shall consolidate my empire."

And then his eyes left the others and rested only on Julian.

"Very well, we will sit," he said.



CHAPTER IV

THE SIXTH SITTING

Julian was painfully excited, but he strove to repress all evidences of his inward turmoil as he began to pull out a table and arrange it in the centre of the room. This act threw him with a jerk back into the days of the past, recalling so vividly the former life of himself and Valentine that he could not help saying:

"This is like last year."

"Like the year that the locust hath eaten," Valentine answered. "We must push our empty white years down into the water, Julian."

Julian made no reply. The table was soon arranged, the screen was drawn more closely round the fire, which had been allowed to burn low. Four chairs were set. Valentine turned to Cuckoo, who sat hunched on the divan staring with wide open eyes at these preparations.

"Will you come?" he said, with his hands on the back of one of the chairs.

"Whatever are we going to do?" she asked nervously.

"Something very simple—and perhaps very foolish," said the doctor, wondering, indeed, now the moment for beginning the phantasy was arrived, whether he was not to blame for encouraging a thing that in his under mind he so thoroughly disapproved of. "We are going to sit round that table in the dark with our hands upon it, and wait."

"Whatever for?"

Her simple and blatant question caused the doctor actually to blush. His confusion was quite obvious, but it was covered by Julian, who exclaimed, rather roughly:

"Now, Cuckoo, don't chatter, but come here and sit quiet."

He drew her from the divan into a chair and sat down beside her. Valentine glided swiftly into the chair on her other side and said:

"Oh, doctor, I forgot the light. Do you mind turning it out?"

The doctor obeyed, felt his way to the chair opposite Cuckoo and sat down.

Almost at the moment he turned out the light the bells that rang, "Le roi est mort, vive le roi," ceased. Cuckoo was directed to lay her hands on the table, and to touch with her fingers the fingers of her companions. She did so, trembling. This was a new experience to her, and her entire lack of knowledge of what was expected to happen filled the darkness with immoderate possibilities, and her soul with awe and with confusion. Then, to sit between the man she loved and the man she loathed, thus in the blackness, was a nerve-shaking experience which her preceding fainting-fit did not deprive of its normal terrors. The hand of Valentine and the hand of Julian were as ice and as fire to her. The darkness seemed crowded with nameless things. She could fancy that she heard it whisper incessantly in her ear.

But the real interest of this sitting, to any little demon gifted with a miraculous power of pushing its detective way into the minds of the sitters, would have lain, perhaps, chiefly in the mind of Doctor Levillier. It has been said that, suddenly struck to the soul by the conviction with which the instinctive Cuckoo pronounced those words, "From Marr," Doctor Levillier entered into a new world, abandoning old landmarks. He remained in this new world of the senses certainly, but already he was becoming accustomed to it, clear-headed, keen-sighted, even reasonable in it. Moved by some strange conviction that he was in the presence of an inexplicable mystery, he no longer tried to explain it in some ordinary fashion. He abandoned his theory of insanity, or it abandoned him. In any case, it was dead, buried, whether he would or no. He recognized a mystery at present beyond his capacity to understand or to explain. Having got thus far, and having entered, at Julian's word, into this present circumstance of sitting, table-turning, or rapping, or whatever you may choose to call it, he cleared any ordinary furniture of doctor's prejudices right out of his mind—made a clean sweep of them. That done—and the doing of it required some strong effort—his mind was receptive, ready for anything, odd or ordinary, that might come along. There he sat with his empty room waiting to be filled—the only reasonable way of waiting for that of which we have no knowledge. He did not clamour "I won't," or "I will." He said nothing at all, only waited with the strict desire and intention of recognizing things to be what they truly were, neither dressing them up nor tearing their garments off their backs. When he put out the light and sat down, what he expected—so far as he expected anything—was this, that the addition of darkness would add a cloud to his mind, and endeavour to give various finishing-touches to any spurious excitement created in him, however much against his will, by the enemy's doings. In this expectation he was entirely deceived. The falling of darkness drew a veil from his mind, leaving his mental sight singularly, even preternaturally, clear. The falling of silence gave an amazing acuteness to his inner sense of hearing. Certain people are so made that they can, under certain conditions, and at certain moments, hear the workings of their neighbours' minds, as you and I can hear the whirr of machinery, or the cry of a child in the street. An ordinary man or woman can only hear a mind when lips, teeth, and tongue utter it with living sounds that set the air in vibration. These abnormal people hear, in these abnormal moments, the silent murmurs of the mind making no effort at all to utter itself through the usual speech apparatus. Till this moment the doctor had supposed himself to be an entirely normal man, but he had been sitting only a very short time before he began to become aware of the silent murmurs of these three minds around him. The darkness set his own mind free from clouds of excitement and from mists of unreason. That was the first step. But it did more. It developed in him this marvellous faculty of the hearing of silence, called by some divination. All his senses were rendered amazingly acute. A perfectly distinct impression of the precise feelings of Cuckoo, of Valentine, and of Julian respectively came to him as he sat there, although he could neither see nor hear them. Each of them seemed to pour his or her thoughts into the doctor's mind. Thus, at first, did his empty room become furnished with the thoughts of his companions. He was sitting in the circle between Julian and Valentine and held their hands. And it was Valentine who forged the first link in this strange chain of unuttered communication. As the darkness cleared the doctor's mind, and set him once more on his feet—although in a new world—an aroma of triumph floated to him softly, like a scent in a damp wood at night. He heard then the mind of Valentine murmuring in the stillness the Litany of its glory, a long and an ornate Litany, deep and full, and he knew that he had been right in supposing that Valentine had invited him to witness that glory. But the doctor became aware, too, that at moments the Litany faltered, hesitated, as if the mind of Valentine grew uncertain or was assailed by vague fears. And these fears ran like little pale furtive things to Valentine from the lady of the feathers. By degrees the doctor could imagine that he actually saw them stealing back and forth. Now one would come alone as if to listen to the Litany, and then another would follow, and another, and, growing brave, they would combine against it. Then Valentine would waver and become uneasy, as one who hears little voices crying against him in the night, and knows not whence they come or from whom. But the Litany would begin again, and Valentine would triumph over the pale fears and they would shrink away. And in the Litany one name recurred again and again—the name of Julian. Over him was the triumph. In his ruin and fall and ultimate destruction the glory lived. To witness the complete possibility of this ruin, the complete sovereignty of this glory, the doctor and the lady of the feathers were there. And the doctor grew to feel that only some outside circumstance, alarming Valentine to anxiety and waking Julian to a new observation, had hindered the intended triumph. What circumstance was that? He looked back along the past evening and found it in himself, in his theory that a soul expelled was not necessarily a soul dead. The rift in the glory of the Litany came with that. Valentine was trying to close it by this act of sitting, to impress the strength of his will upon his companions in the darkness. The doctor felt his effort like a continually repeated blow, stealthy and hard and merciless.

And now, in the darkness and in the silence, the doctor heard the mind of Julian. Another scent floated through that imagined damp and breathing wood from another—but how different—soul-flower. No Litany of triumph murmured in the blackness where Julian sat, but a hoarse and broken solo, part despair, part fear, part anger, and all perplexed and flooded with bewilderment and with excitement. The doctor drew into him the murmur of Julian's mind until it seemed to become, for the time, the murmur of his own mind. He was conscious of a dreadful turmoil of doubt, and dread and perplexity, so strong, so painful, that it lay upon him like a dense and a suffocating burden. In that moment he knew utterly that the greatest load in the world laid on any man is the load of his own, perhaps beloved, sin. He was staggering wearily with Julian away from the light. His eyes were dim—with the eyes of Julian. His ears, like Julian's, were assailed with the dastard clamour of the calling sin. "Listen! Listen! you want me. I am here. Take me! Take me!" And the weltering seas of heavy flooding impotence rolled round him as they rolled round Julian. He grew numb and vacant and inert, then—alive ever to the murmur of Julian's mind—caught a glimpse, through the waters of that whelming sea, of far-away light, and heard that the voices of the importunate sins grew fainter. But whether the voices were loud or low, whether the seas flowed above his head or sank and failed, he was always conscious of the dominating mood of almost wild perplexity and a madness of bewilderment. For Julian stirred under the yoke that Valentine had laid upon him, as if at last conscious distinctly that it was indeed a yoke, and that it galled him; as if at last conscious, too, that without that yoke was freedom. And he shot against Valentine in the darkness arrows of inquiry. But always he lived in doubt and almost in terror.

And then, detaching himself from the triumph, touched with anxiety, of Valentine, and from the wild turmoil of Julian, Dr. Levillier opened the door of his mind wide, and the lady of the feathers entered in.

He heard the thoughts of a woman.

That was strangest of all—the most fantastic, eerie, wayward, wonderful music the doctor had dreamed of.

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.