On every side the Oxford and Cambridge boys laughed and shouted, pushed and elbowed. They had begun to cast off restraint, and the god that is rowdy on a rowdy throne compelled them to their annual obeisance at his feet. Some of them moved along singing, and interrupting their song with shouts. Friends, when they met in the crowd, yelled shrill recognitions at each other, and nicknames sang in the air like noisy birds. Rows of men linked arms, and, striding forward, compelled the throng to yield them difficult passage, swinging this way and that to make their progress more comprehensive. The attendants, standing by the wall like giants, calmly smiled on the growing uproar, into which they darted now and then with a sudden frenzy of dutiful agility to eject some rude wit who had transgressed their code of propriety. The very spirit of lusty youth was in this crowd of hot, careless, blatant, roving youths, mad to find themselves away from the cool and grey Oxford towers, and from the vacant banks of the Cam, in passionate Leicester Square, fired by the scarlet ballet, and the thunder of the orchestra, and the sight of smart women. Sudden emancipation is the most flaming torch to human passions that exists in the world. It flared through all that mob, urging it to conflagration, to the flames that burst up in hearts that are fresh and ardent, and that so curiously confuse joy with wickedness.

Flames! flames! The word ran in Julian's mind, and in his breast flames surely burned that night, for, when he suddenly ran against Valentine and Cuckoo in the throng, he caught Valentine by the arm and said:

"Val, you were right just now. There was no flame; there could have been no flame where Margaret stood. She was too pure. What can fire have to do with snow? Cuckoo, I was a fool. Catch hold of my arm."

He pulled her arm roughly through his, never noticing how pale the girl's face was, how horror-stricken were her eyes. He wanted to bathe himself, and her, and Valentine, in this crowd that influenced him and that he helped to influence. He felt as the diver feels, who, when he plunges, has a sacred passion for the depths. There are people who have an ardour for going down comparable to the ardour felt by those who mount. Tonight such an ardour took hold of Julian.

Valentine fell in with it, seeing the humour of his friend, and Cuckoo, prisoned between the two men, did not attempt to resist them. As they moved on Valentine said, in a voice he made loud that it might be heard:

"Now, you feel the strength of the spring, Julian. Is it not better than all my teachings of asceticism?"

"Yes, by ——, it is."

And as he made that answer, Julian, for the first time, forgot to look up to Valentine, and felt a splendid equality with him, the equality that men of the same age and temper feel when they are bent on the same pursuit. How can one of two Bacchanals stoop in adoration of the other, when both are bounding in the procession of Silenus? Valentine fell from his pedestal and became a comrade instead of a god. He was no longer the chaperon of the dancing hours, but their partner. And a new fire shone in his blue eyes, an unaccustomed red ran over his cheeks, as he heard Julian's answer to his question. From that moment he ceased to play what, it seemed, had been but a part, the empty ivory rle of saint. For Julian was no longer conscious or observant of him, no longer able to wonder at his abrupt transformation. In a flash he cast off his habitual restraint and passed from the reserve of thought to the rowdyism of act.

He chattered unceasingly, dressing his English in all the slang embroidery of the day. He laughed and chaffed, exchanged repartees with the flowing multitude through which they passed, stopped to speak to the flaunting women and loaded them with extravagant compliments, elbowed loungers out of his way, and made the most personal remarks on those around him. Two men went by, and one of them exclaimed, with a surprised glance at Valentine:

"I'm damned! Why, there goes the Saint of Victoria Street."

"Saint!" said the other; "I should think devil the more appropriate name. That chap looks up to anything."

"Ah, well; when a saint turns sinner—," answered the first speaker, with a laugh.

Valentine heard the words and burst into a roar of laughter. He drew Cuckoo to the left and Julian followed. They passed under an archway into the bar, which was crowded with men, drinking and talking at the tops of their voices. Valentine called for drinks in a voice so loud and authoritative that the barmaid hurried to serve him, deserting other customers, who protested vainly. He forced Cuckoo to drink, and Julian needed no urging. Clinking glasses noisily with them, he gave as a toast:

"To the dance of the hours!"

These words, uttered with almost strident force, attracted attention even amid the violent hubbub that was raging, and several young men pressed round Valentine as he stood with his back against the counter of the bar. They raised their glasses, too, half in ridicule, and shouting in chorus, "To the dance of the hours!" drained them to this toast, which they could not comprehend. Valentine dashed his glass down. It broke and was trodden under foot. The barmaid protested. He threw her a sovereign. The young men gathered round, broke theirs in imitation, and Julian, snatching Cuckoo's from her, flung it away. As he did so, Valentine thrust another, filled with champagne, into her hand, and again cried out the toast.

"What the deuce does he mean by it?" one youth called out. "The dance of the hours; what's that?"

"The dance of the hours! The dance of the hours!" echoed other voices, and glasses were drained wildly. There was something exciting in the mere sound of the words that seemed to set brains jigging, and feet moving, and the world spinning and bowing. For if Time itself danced, what could the most Puritan human being do but dance with it? Seeing the crowd round Valentine, men who were drinking at the other end of the bar joined it, and the toast passed quickly from mouth to mouth. Uttered by every variety of voice, with every variety of accent, it filled the stifling atmosphere, and tickled many an empty brain, like the catchword political that can set a nation behind one astute wire-puller. Boys yelled it, men murmured it, and an elderly woman in a plush gown and yellow feathers screamed it out in a piercing soprano that would have put many a trumpet-blast to shame. Glasses were emptied and filled again in its honour. Yet nobody knew what it meant, and apparently nobody cared, except the Oxford boy who had already expressed his desire to be better informed on the subject. He had gradually edged his way through the throng until he was close to Valentine, at whom he gazed with a sort of tipsy reverence.

"I say, you chap," he cried. "What are we drinking to—eh? What the devil's the dance of the hours?"

Valentine brought his glass down on the counter.

"What is it?" he exclaimed. "Why, the greatest dance in the world, the dance that youth sends out the invitations for, and women live for, and old men die with longing for. We set the hours dancing in the night, we—all who are gay and careless, who love life in the greatest way, and who laugh at death, and who aren't afraid of the devil. The devil's only a bogey to frighten old women and children. What do the hours care for him? Not a snap. It's only cowards who fear him. Brave men do what they will, and when the hours dance they dance with them, and drink with them all the night through. Who says there'll be another morning? I don't believe it. Curse the sunshine. Give me the night and the dancing hours!"

The youth gave a yell, which was echoed by some of his rowdy companions, and by the two little schoolboys who had joined the throng in a frenzy of childish excitement, which they thought manly.

"The dancing hours! The dancing hours!" they cried, and one who was with a girl suddenly caught her round the waist and broke into wild steps. Others joined in. The confusion became tremendous. Glasses were knocked over. Whiskies and sodas were poured out in libations upon the carpet. The protests of the barmaids were unheeded or unheard. Julian whirled Cuckoo into the throng, and Valentine, snapping his long white fingers like castanets, stamped his feet as if to the measure of a wild music. Against the wall some loungers looked on in contemptuous amusement, but by far the greater number of men present were young and eager for any absurdity, and not a few were half tipsy. These ardently welcomed anything in the nature of a row, and the romp became general and noisy. Men danced awkwardly with one another, roaring the latest music-hall tunes at the pitch of their voices. The women screamed with laughter, or giggled piercingly as they were banged and trodden on in the tumult. The noise, penetrating to the promenade, drew the attention of the audience, many of whom hurried to see what was going on, and the block round the archways quickly became impenetrable. One or two of the gigantic chuckers-out forced their way into the throng and seized the dancers nearest to them, but they were entirely unable to stay the ridiculous impulse which impelled this mob of young human beings to capering and yelling. Indeed they merely increased the scuffle, which rapidly developed towards a free fight. Hats were knocked off, dresses were torn. The women got frightened and began to scream. The men swore, and some lost their tempers and struck out right and left. Valentine watched the scene with laughing eyes as if he enjoyed it. Especially he watched Julian, who, with scarlet face and sparkling eyes, still forced Cuckoo round and round in the midst of the tumult. Cuckoo was white, and seemed to be half fainting. Her head rested helplessly against Julian's shoulder, and her eyes stared at him as if fascinated. Her dress was torn, and her black veil hung awry. If she danced with the hours it was without joy or desire.

But suddenly police appeared. The dancers, abruptly realizing that a joke was dying in a disaster, ceased to prance. Some violently assumed airs of indifference and of alarming respectability. Many sinuously wound their way out to the promenade. A few, who had completely lost their heads, hustled the police, and were promptly taken into custody. Julian would have been among these had it not been for the intervention of Valentine, who caught him by the shoulder, and drew him and Cuckoo away.

"No; you mustn't end to-night in a cell," he said in Julian's ear. "The dancing hours want you still. Julian, you are only beginning your real life to-night."

Julian, like a man in an excited dream, followed Valentine to the bottom of the broad stairs, on, through the blooming masses of flowers, to the entrance. Two or three cabs were waiting. Valentine put Cuckoo into one. She had not spoken a word, and was trembling as if with fear.

"Get in, Julian."

Julian obeyed, and Valentine, standing on the pavement, leaned forward and whispered to him:

"Take her home, Julian."

Suddenly Julian shouted Cuckoo's address to the cabman hoarsely.

The cab drove away.

Valentine walked slowly towards Piccadilly Circus, whistling softly, "I want you, my honey; yes, I do."



BOOK III—THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS



CHAPTER I

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

The thin afternoon light of an indefinite spring day shone over the Marylebone Road. A heavy warmth was in the air, and the weather was peculiarly windless, but the sun only shone fitfully, and the street looked sulky. The faces of the passers-by were hot and weary. Women trailed along under the weight of their parcels, and men returned from work grimmer than usual, and wondering almost with a fretfulness of passion why they were born predestined to toil. The cabmen about Baker Street Station dozed with nodding heads upon their perches, and the omnibus conductors forgot to chaff, and collected their tolls with a mechanical deliberation. At the crossings the policemen, helpless in their uniforms of the winter, became dictatorial more readily than on cooler days. Some sorts of weather incline every one to temper or to depression. The day after the boat-race lay under a malign spell. It seemed to feel all the weariness of reaction, and to fold all men and women in the embrace of its lassitude and heavy hopelessness.

At number 400, Jessie whined pitifully in her basket, and her arched back quivered perpetually as her minute body expanded and contracted in the effort of breathing. Her beady eyes were open and fixed furtively upon her mistress, as if in inquiry or alarm, and her whole soul was whirling in a turmoil set in motion by the first slap she had ever received in gravity at the hands of Cuckoo. Jessie's inner nature was stung by that slap. It knocked her world over, like a doll hit by a child. Her universe lay prone upon its back.

And Cuckoo's? She was sitting in the one arm-chair with her thin hands folded in her lap. She wore the black dress given to her by Julian, but she did not look prepared to go out, for her hair was standing up over her head in violent disorder, her cheeks were haggard and unwashed, and her boots—still muddy from the previous night's promenading—stood in a corner near the grate in the first position, as if directed by a dancing-mistress. Cuckoo was neither reading nor working. She was simply staring straight before her, without definite expression. Her face indeed wore a quite singularly blank look and her mouth was slightly open. Her feet, stuck out before her, rested on the edge of the fender, shoeless, and both her general appearance and attitude betokened a complete absence of self-consciousness, and that lack of expectation of any immediate event which is often dubbed stupidity. The lady of the feathers sitting in the horsehair-covered chair in the cheap sitting-room with the folding doors looked indeed stupid, pale, and heavy. Fatigue lay in the shadows of her eyes, but something more than ordinary fatigue hovered round her parted lips and spoke in her posture. A dull weariness, in which the mind took part with the body, held her in numbing captivity. She had only broken through it in some hours to repulse the anxious effort of Jessie to scramble into the nest of her lap. That slap given, she had again relapsed without a struggle into this waking sleep.

The sun came out with a sudden violence, and an organ began to play a frisky tune in the street. Jessie whined and whimpered, formed her mouth into the shape of an O, and, throwing up her head, emitted a vague and smothered howl. Below stairs, Mrs. Brigg, who was afflicted with a complaint that prompted her to perpetual anxious movement, laboured about the kitchen, doing nothing in particular, among her pots and pans. The occasional clatter of them mingled with the sound of the organ, and with the suffocated note of Jessie, in a depressing symphony. The sun went in again, and some dust, stirred into motion by a passing omnibus, floated in through the half-open window and settled in a light film upon the photograph of Marr. Presently the organ moved away, and faded gradually in pert tunes down the street. Jessie's nervous system, no longer played upon, ceased to spend its pain in sound, and a London silence fell round the little room. Then, at length, Cuckoo shifted in her chair, stretched her hands in her lap, and sat up slowly. The inward expression had not faded from her eyes yet, for, leaning forward, she still stared blankly before her, looking, as it seemed, straight at Marr's photograph. Gradually she woke to a consciousness of what she was looking at, and putting up one hand she took the photograph from its place, laid it in her lap, and, bending down, gazed at it long and earnestly. Then she shook her head as if puzzled.

"I don't know," she murmured; "I don't know."

Encouraged by the sound of her mistress's voice, Jessie stepped from her basket and gingerly approached, snuffling round Cuckoo's feet, and wriggling her body in token of anxious humility. Cuckoo picked her up and stroked her mechanically, but still with her eyes on the photograph. Two tears swam in them. She dashed the photograph down. It lay on the carpet, and was still there when a knock at the door was succeeded by the entrance of Julian.

He, too, looked pale and rather weary, but excited.

"Cuckoo," he said.

She sat still in the chair, looking at him.

"Well?" she said, and closed her lips tightly.

He came a step or two forward into the little room, and put his hat and stick down on the table.

"You expected me to come, didn't you?"

"I don't know as I did."

Her eyes were on Jessie now, and she stroked the little dog's back steadily up and down, alternately smoothing and ruffling its short coat. Julian came over and stood by the mantelpiece.

"I told you I should come."

"Did you?"

"Don't you remember?"

She shifted round in the chair till he could only see her shoulder, and the side of her head and neck, on which the loose hair was tumbling in ugly confusion. Sitting thus she threw back at him the sentence:

"I don't want to remember nothing. I don't want to remember."

Julian stood hesitating. He glanced at Cuckoo's hair and at the back of her thin hand moving to and fro above the little contented dog.

"Why not?" he said.

At first she made no answer to this question, and seemed as if she had not heard it, but presently it appeared that her silence had been caused by the effect of consideration, for at length she said, still retaining her aloof attitude:

"I don't want to remember, because it's like a beastly dream, and when I remember I know it ain't a dream."

Julian said nothing, and suddenly Cuckoo turned round to him, and took her hand from Jessie's back.

"I say. You were mad last night. Now, weren't you?"

The words came from her almost pleadingly, and her eyes rested on Julian's insistently, as if demanding an affirmative.

"He'd made you mad," she continued.

"He," said Julian. "Who?"

"Your friend."

"Valentine! He had nothing to do with it."

"It was all his doing."

Her voice grew shrill with feeling.

"He's a devil," she said. "I hate him. I hate him worse than I hate that copper west side of Regent Street. And I hate you, too,—yes, I do,—to-day."

The tears gathered in her eyes and began to fall, tears of rage and shame and regret, tears of one who had lost a great possession. Julian looked embarrassed and pained, almost guilty, too. He put out his hand and tried to take Cuckoo's. But she drew hers away and went on crying. She spoke again with vehemence.

"I told you what I wanted you to be; yes, I did," she exclaimed. "Yes, I told you. You said you only come here to talk to me."

"It was true."

"No; it wasn't. You're just like all the others. And I did so want to have a pal. I've never had one."

With the words the sense of her desolation seemed to strike her with stunning force. She leaned her head against the back of the chair, and cried bitterly, catching at the horsehair with violent hands, as if she longed to hurt something, to revenge her loss even upon an object without power of feeling. Julian sprang up and went over to the window. He looked out onto the road and watched the people moving by in the fitful sunshine beyond the dirty railings. That day, he, too, was in a tumult. He felt like a monk who had suddenly thrown off his habit, broken his vows, and come forth into the world. The cell and the cloister were left behind, were things to be forgotten, with the grating of the confessional and the dim routine of service and of asceticism. He had been borne on by the wave of a brilliant, a violent hour, away from them. Let the angelus bell ring; he no longer heard it. Let the drone of prayers and praises rise in a monotonous music by day and by night; he no longer had the will to heed them. For there was another music in his ears. Soon it would be in his heart. Imagine a Trappist suddenly transported from the desert of his long silence to a gay plage on which a brass band was playing. Julian was that Trappist in mind. And though he knew Cuckoo was sobbing at his back, and though his heart held a sense of pity for her trouble, yet he heard her grief with a strange cruelty, at which he wondered, without being able to soften it. That afternoon it seemed to him useless for anybody to cry. No grief was quite worth tears. The violence of life was present with him, gave him light and blinded him at the same time. He found delight in the thought of violence, because it held action in its grasp. Even cruelty was worth something. Was he cruel to Cuckoo?

He turned from the window and looked at her, with the observation of a nature not generally his own. He noted the desolation of her hair, and he noted, too, that she wore the gown he had given to her. Would she have put it on if she had hated him as she said she did? Somehow it scarcely seemed to suit her to-day. It looked draggled, and as if it had been up all night, he thought. The black back of it heaved as Cuckoo sobbed, like a little black wave. Was the eternal movement of the sea caused by some horrible, inward grief which, though secret, must come thus to the eye of God and of the world? Julian found himself wondering in an unreasonable abstraction as he contemplated the crying girl. Then suddenly his mind swerved to more normal paths; he was seized by the natural feeling of a man who has made a woman weep, and had the impulse to comfort.

"Don't cry, Cuckoo," he said, coming over to her and sitting on the edge of her chair. "You must not. Let us say I was mad last night. Perhaps I was. Men are often mad, surely. To-day I'm sane, and I want you to forgive me."

He put his arm round her shoulder. She glanced up at him. Then, with the odd penetration that so often gilds female ignorance till it dazzles and distracts, she said quickly:

"You don't mean what you say; you don't really care."

Julian was taken aback by her sharpness, and by the self-revelation that immediately stabbed him.

"You mustn't say that," he began. But she stopped him on the instant.

"You don't care; you think it's nothing. So it ought to be to me, I know."

That had perhaps actually been his thought, the thought of a mind unimaginative to-day, because deadened by the excitement of action. But if it was his thought he hastened to deny it.

"You know I don't think of you in that way," he said.

"You will now. You do."

That was the scourge that had lashed her all through this weary day of miserable reaction; that now stung her to a passion that was like the passion of purity. As she made this statement there was a question in her eyes, but it was a question of despair, that scarcely even asked for the negative which Julian hastened to give. He was both perplexed and troubled by the unexpected violence of her emotion, and blamed himself as the cause. But, though he blamed himself, his regret for what was irrevocable had none of the poignancy of Cuckoo's. For a long time he had gloried in living in a cloister with Valentine. Now he had left the cloister, he did not look back to it with the curious pathos which so often gathers like moss upon even a dull and vacant past. He did not, for the moment, look back at all. Action had lifted scales from his eyes, had stirred the youth in him, had stung him as if with bright fire, and given him, at a breath, a thousand thoughts, visions, curiosities. A sense of power came to him. He did not ask whether the power made for evil or for good. Simply, he was inclined to glory in it, as a man glories in his recovered strength when he wakes from a long sleep following fatigue. Cuckoo, with feeble hands, seemed tugging to hold back this power, with feeble voice seemed crying against it as a deadly thing. And Julian, though he strove to console her, scarcely sympathized with her fully. He could not, if he would, be quite unhappy to-day. Only in Cuckoo's grief he began to read a curious legend. In her tears there was a passion, in her anger a vehemence that could only spring from the depths of a nature. Julian began to suspect that through all her sins and degradations this girl, his lady of the feathers, had managed to keep shut one door, though all the others had been ruthlessly opened. And beyond this door was surely that holy of holies, an unspoiled woman's heart. From what other dwelling could rush forth such a passion for a man's respect, such a fury to be rightly and chivalrously considered? As he half vaguely realized something of the true position of Cuckoo and of himself, Julian felt stirred by the wonder of life, in which such strange blossoms flower out of the very dust. He looked at Cuckoo with new eyes. She looked back at him with the old ones of a girl who loves.

As he looked she stopped crying. Perhaps the sudden understanding in his gaze thrilled her. He put out his hand to touch hers, and again repeated his negative, but this time with greater conviction.

"I do not think of you in that way. I never shall," he said.

Her face was still full of doubt, and thin with anxiety. She was not reassured, that seemed apparent; for in her ignorance she had a strange knowledge of life, and especially a strange intuition which guided her instincts as to the instinctive proceedings of men.

"They always do," she murmured. "Why should you be different?"

"All men aren't alike," he said, pretending to laugh at her.

"Yes, in some things, though," she contradicted. "They all think dirt of you for doing what they want."

Seeing how unsatisfied she was, and how restlessly her anxiety paced up and down, Julian resolved on more plain-speaking.

"Look here, Cuckoo," he said, and his voice had never sounded more boyish, "last night I was drunk. Last night I woke up, and I'd been asleep for years."

"Eh?" she interrupted, looking puzzled, but he went on:

"I was emancipated, and I was mad. Mind, I didn't mean to do you any wrong, but if you have thought of me in a different way, I'm sorry. Tell me what you want me to be to you, and in future I'll be it."

Hope and eagerness sprang up in her eyes then.

"I say," she began,

"Yes."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

The dull blood rose in her tired face.

"I want just a—just a friend," she said, as if almost ashamed.

Julian smiled.

"Not a lover," he said, with a fleeting air of gallantry. She shrank visibly from the word, and hurriedly went on:

"Not I. I've had too much of love." The last word was spoken with a violence of contempt. "I want a man as likes me, just really likes me, as he might another man. See?"

"And you'll not love him?"

His eyes searched hers with a gaiety of inquiry that was almost laughter. Cuckoo looked away.

"I'll not love him either," she said steadily. "I'll just like him too."

Seeing her earnestness and obvious emotion, Julian dropped his gently quizzing manner, and became earnest, too, in his degree.

"Then it's a bargain," he said. "You and I are to like each other thoroughly, never anything more, never anything less. Like two men, eh?"

She began at last to look relieved and happier.

"Yes, like that," she said. "Ain't it—ain't it truer than the other thing? There's something beastly about love; that's what I always think."

And she spoke with the sincerest conviction. When Julian left her that day, he shook hands with her by the door; she stood after he had done it as if still half expectant.

"There's a man's good-bye to a man," he said. "Better sort of thing than a man's good-bye to a woman, isn't it?"

"Rather!" she said hastily, and moved back into the sitting-room. She stepped on something, and bent down to pick it up. It was Marr's photograph.

"What's that?" Julian asked.

"Nothing," she said, concealing it. She had a foolish fancy that even the photograph of the creature she had feared and hated might spoil that good-bye of theirs. Yet even as it was, when Julian had gone she still seemed unsatisfied.

She was a woman after all, and woman is most feminine in her farewells.



CHAPTER II

VALENTINE SINGS

When Valentine heard of the scene in Marylebone Road he smiled.

"How extraordinary women are," he said. "A man might give his life to them, I suppose, yet never understand them."

"It would be rather jolly—making that gift, I mean," said Julian.

"You think so? Since last night."

"I want to talk to you about that, Valentine, d'you blame me?"

"Not a bit."

"Only wonder at me?"

"I don't even say that."

"No; but of course you must wonder at me."

Julian spoke almost wistfully, and as if he wanted Valentine to sweep away the suggestion. Last night they had been comrades. To-day, in the light and in the calm of afternoon, Valentine seemed much more remote, and Julian felt for the first time a sense of degradation. He was uneasily conscious that he might have fallen in Valentine's esteem. But Valentine reassured him.

"I don't wonder at you, either, Julian; I simply envy you, and metaphorically sit at your feet."

"That's absurd."

"Not quite; and I may not always be sitting there, for I believe I have really got a little bit of your soul. Last night I seemed to feel it stirring within me, and I liked its personality."

"You did seem different last night," Julian said, looking at Valentine with a keen interest. "Can it be possible that those sittings of ours have really had any effect?"

"On me they have; not on you. You haven't caught my coldness, but I have gained something of your warmth. Doesn't that perhaps show that mine was, after all, the wrong nature?"

"I don't know," Julian said doubtfully; "you look the same."

"Do I? Exactly?"

Valentine spoke with a sort of whimsical defiance, as if almost daring Julian to answer, Yes. And Julian, too, seemed suddenly doubtful whether he had stated what was the fact. He looked closely at Valentine.

"Do you think your face has changed? Do you mean to say that?" he asked.

"I only fancied there might be a little more humanity in it, that was all."

"Once or twice I have thought I noticed something," Julian said, still doubtfully; "but I believe it's imagination. It doesn't stay."

"When it does, I suppose I shall be able thoroughly to appreciate all your temptations. Don't you begin to think now it's good to have them."

"I don't know," Julian said. But he was conscious that there had come a change in his attitude of mind towards temptation. Some men glory in resisting temptation, others in yielding to it. Hitherto Julian had not been able to range himself in either of these two opposed camps. He had merely hated his faculty for being tempted. Did he entirely hate it now? He could not say so to himself, whatever he might say to others, but something kept him from making confession of the truth to Valentine. So he professed ignorance of his own exact state of feeling; really, had he analyzed his reticence, it sprang from a fine desire to give forth no breath that might tarnish the clear mirror of Valentine's nature. He would not admit a change that might make his friend again fall into the absurd dissatisfaction which he had combated on the night of their first sitting in the tent-room. While they talked the afternoon had fallen into a creeping twilight. In the twilight the front door bell rang.

"Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door," Valentine said, quoting Poe. "It must be the doctor."

Julian reddened suddenly.

"I hope not," he said.

"What?" Valentine cried. "You don't want our little doctor?"

"Somehow not—to-day."

The door opened and Doctor Levillier entered. Valentine greeted him warmly. They had not met since the night of the affray with the mastiffs. In Julian's manner there was a touch of awkwardness as he shook hands with the doctor. Levillier did not seem to notice it. He looked very tired and rather depressed.

"Cresswell," he said, "I have come to you for a tonic."

"Doctor coming to patient!"

"Doctors take medicine oftener than you may suppose. I'm in bad spirits to-day. I've been trying to cure too many people lately. It's hard work."

"It must be. Sit down and forget. Imagine the world beautifully incurable and your occupation consequently gone."

The doctor sat down, saying:

"My imagination stops short at that feat."

He kept silence for a moment, then he said:

"You know what I want."

"No," Valentine answered. "But I'll do anything. You know that."

"I want your music."

Valentine suddenly became unresponsive. He didn't speak at first, and both Julian and the doctor glanced at him in some surprise.

"Oh, you want me to be David to your Saul," he said at length.

"Yes."

"Do, Val," said Julian. "I should like it too."

Valentine, who was sitting near the doctor, looked down thoughtfully on the carpet.

"I'm not in the mood to-day," he said slowly.

"You are always in the mood enough to cheer and rest me," Levillier said.

He had driven all the way from Harley Street for his medicine, and it was obvious that he meant to have it. But Valentine still hesitated, and a certain slight confusion became noticeable in his manner. Moving the toe of his right boot to and fro, following the pattern of the carpet, he glanced sideways at the doctor, and an odd smile curved his lips.

"Doctor," he said, "d'you believe that talents can die in us while we ourselves live?"

"That's a strange question."

"It's waiting an answer."

"Well, my answer is, No; not wholly, unless through the approach of old age, or the development of madness."

"I'm neither old nor mad."

Levillier and Julian both looked at Valentine with some amazement.

"Are you talking about yourself?" the doctor asked.

"Certainly."

"Why? What talent is dead in you?"

"My talent for music. Do you know that for the last few days I've been able neither to sing nor play?"

"Val, you're joking," exclaimed Julian.

"I am certainly not," he answered, and quite gravely. "I am simply stating a fact."

Doctor Levillier seemed unable to appreciate that he was speaking seriously.

"I have come all this way to hear you sing," he said. "I have never asked you in vain yet."

"Is it my fault if you ask me in vain now?"

Valentine looked him in the face and spoke with a complete sincerity. The doctor returned the glance, as he sometimes returned the glance of a patient, very directly, with a clear and simple gravity. Having done this he felt completely puzzled.

"The talent for music has died in you?" he asked.

"Entirely. I can do nothing with my piano. I have even locked it."

As he spoke he went over to it and pulled at the lid to show them that he was speaking the truth.

"Where's the key?" asked the doctor.

"Here," said Valentine, producing it from his pocket.

"Give it to me," said the doctor.

Valentine did so and the doctor quietly opened the piano, drew up the music-stool, and signed to Valentine to sit down.

"If you mean what you say, the explanation must simply be that you are suffering from some form of hysteria," he said, rather authoritatively. "Now sing me something. No; I won't let you off."

Valentine, sitting on the stool, extended his hands and laid the tips of his long fingers upon the keys, but without sounding them.

"You insist on my trying to sing?" he asked.

"I do."

"I warn you, doctor, you will be sorry if I do. My voice is quite out of order."

"No matter."

"Go on, Val," cried Julian, from his arm-chair. "Anybody would think you were a young lady."

Valentine bent his head, with a quick gesture of abnegation.

"As you will," he said.

He struck his hand down upon the keys as he spoke. That was the strangest prelude ever heard. In their different ways Doctor Levillier and Julian were both intensely fond of music, both quickly stirred by it when it was good, not merely classical, but extravagant, violent, and in any way interesting. Each of them had heard Valentine play, not once only, but a hundred times. They knew not simply his large rpertoire of pieces and songs through and through, but also the peculiar and characteristic progressions of his improvisations, the ornaments he most delighted in, the wildness of his melancholy, the phantasy of his gaieties; and they knew every tone of his voice, which expressed with an exquisite realism the temperament of his soul. But now, as Valentine's hands powerfully struck the keys, they both started and exchanged an involuntary glance of keen surprise. The first few bars gave the lie to Valentine's assertion that he could no longer play. A cataract of notes streamed from beneath his fingers, and of notes so curiously combined, or following each other in such a fantastic array, that they seemed arranged in the musical pattern by an intelligence of the strangest order. It is often easy for a cultivated ear to detect whether a given composition has sprung from the brain of a Frenchman, a German, a Hungarian, a Russian. The wildness of Bohemia, too, may be identified, or the vague sorrow of that northern melody which seems an echo of voices heard amid the fiords or in pale valleys near the farthest cape of Europe. And then there is that large and lofty music of the stars and the spheres, of the mightiest passions and of the deepest imaginings, that is of no definite country, but seems to be of its own power and beauty, and not of the brain and heart of any one man. It exists for eternity, and its creator can only wonder and worship before it, far from conceit as God was when He said, "Let there be light." Such music, too, is recognized on the instant by the men who have loved and studied the secrets of the most divine of the arts, for profound genius can utter itself as easily in five notes as in fifty. But the prelude now played by Valentine was neither the great music that is of all time and of all countries, nor the music that is of any one country. It was not even distinctively northern or southern in character, impregnated with the mystery of the tuneless, wonderful East, or with the peculiar homeliness that stirs Western hearts. Both the doctor and Julian felt, as they listened, that it was music without an earthly home, without location, devoid of that sense of relation to humanity which links the greatness of the arts to the smallness of those who follow them. Eccentric the music was, but the eccentricity of it seemed almost inhuman, so unmannerly as to be beyond the range of the most uncouth man, in advance of the invention of any mind, however coarse and criminal. That was the atmosphere of this prelude, excessive, unutterable, crude, sombre vulgarity of a detached and remote kind. As Levillier listened to it amazed, he found that he did not instinctively connect the vulgarity with any human traits, or translate the notes into acts within his experience. He was simply conscious of being brought to the verge of some sphere in which the sordidness attained by our race would be sneered at as delicacy, in which our lowest grovellings of the pigsty would be as lofty flights through the skies. And the hideous eccentricity of the music, its wanton desolation, deepened until both Levillier and Julian were pale under its spell, shrank from its ardent, its merciless and lambent sarcasm against all things refined or beautiful. The prelude was as fire and sword, as plague and famine, as plunder and war, as all instruments that lay waste and that wound, a destroying angel before whose breath the first-born withered and the very sun shrivelled into a heap of grey ashes.

As Doctor Levillier leaned forward, moved by an irresistible impulse, and stretched out his hand to enforce silence from this blare of deplorable melody, Valentine looked up at him, into his eyes, and began to sing. The doctor's movement was arrested, his hand dropped to his side, he remained tense, frigid, his eyes fastened on Valentine's like a man mesmerised. At first he knew that he was wondering whether his brain was playing him a trick, whether his sense of hearing had, by some means, become impaired, so that he heard a voice, not dimly, as is the case with the partially deaf, but wrongly, as may be the case with the mad, or with those who have suffered under a blow or through an injury to the brain. For this voice was not Valentine's at all, but the voice of a stranger, powerful, harsh, and malignant. It rang through the room noisily. A thick hoarseness dressed it as in disease, and at moments broke it and crushed it down. Then it would emerge as in a sigh or wail, pushing its way up with all the mechanical power of the voice of a wild animal, and mounting to a desperate climax, sinister and alarming. So unlike ordinary singing was the performance of this voice that, after the first paralysis of surprise and disgust had passed away from the doctor and Julian, they both felt the immediate necessity of putting a period to this deadly song, to which no words gave the faintest touch of humanity. They knew that it must attract and rivet the attention of others in the mansions, even possibly of passers-by in the street. The doctor withdrew his gaze from Valentine's at length, and turned hastily to Julian, whom he found regarding him with a glance almost of horror.

"Stop him," Julian murmured.

"You!" answered Levillier.

And then each knew that the other was in some nervous crisis that rendered action almost an impossibility. And while they thus hesitated there came a loud, repeated, and unsteady knock at the door. Julian opened it. Valentine's man was standing outside, pale and anxious.

"Good God, sir," he ejaculated. "What is it? What on earth is the matter?"

The man's exclamation broke through Julian's frost of inaction. He whispered to Wade:

"It's all right," pushed him out and shut the door. Then he went straight up to the piano, seized Valentine's hands and dragged them from the keyboard.

The silence was like a sweet blow.

"I said my voice was out of order," Valentine said, simply and with a smile.

"You did not say you had another voice, the voice of—of a devil," Julian said, almost falteringly, for he was still shaken by his distress of the senses, into a mental condition that was almost anger.

Dr. Levillier said nothing. More sensitive to musical sounds than Julian, he dared not speak, lest he should say something that might stand like a fixed gulf to eternally separate him from Valentine. He knew the future that stretches out like a spear beyond one word. So he sat quietly with his eyes on the ground. His lips were set firmly together. Valentine turned to observe him.

"Doctor, you're not angry?" he asked.

The doctor made no reply.

"You know I warned you," Valentine went on. "You brought this thing on yourself."

"Yes," said Levillier.

But Julian interposed.

"No Valentine," he exclaimed. "For, of course, it is all a trick of yours. You didn't want to sing. We made you. This is your revenge, eh? I didn't know you had it in you to be so—so beastly and cantankerous."

Valentine shook his head.

"It's no trick. It's simply as I said. My talent for music is dead. You have been listening to the voice of its corpse."

Dr. Levillier looked up at length.

"You really mean that?" he said, and there was an awakening within him of his normal ready interest in all things.

"I mean it absolutely."

"That is the only event in which I can forgive the torture you have been inflicting upon me."

"That is the true event."

"But it's not possible," Julian said. "It's not conceivable. Surely, doctor, you would not say—"

The doctor interrupted him.

"I cannot believe that Cresswell would deliberately commit an outrage upon me," he said. "And it would be an outrage to sing like that to a tired man. Weeks of work would not fatigue me as I am fatigued by Cresswell's music."

Julian was silent and looked uneasy. Valentine repeated again:

"I couldn't help it. I am sorry."

Doctor Levillier ignored the remark. His professional interest was beginning to be aroused. For the first time he felt convinced that some very peculiar and bizarre change was dawning over the youth he knew so well. He wanted to watch it grow or fade, to analyze it, to study it, to be aware of its exact nature. But he did not want to put either Valentine or Julian upon the alert. So he spoke lightly as he said:

"But I shall soon get the better of my fatigue, even without the usual medicine. Cresswell, take my advice, give your music a rest. Lock your piano again for a while. It will be better."

Valentine shut down the lid on the instant, and turned the little key in the lock.

"Adieu to my companion of many lonely hours!" he said with a half whimsical pensiveness. Then, as if in joke, he held out his hand with the key in it, to the doctor.

"Will you take charge of this hostage?" he asked.

"Yes," the doctor replied.

Quite gravely he took the key and put it into his pocket.

And so it was that silence fell round the Saint of Victoria Street.



CHAPTER III

THE FLIGHT OF THE BATS

Julian had resolved to keep his compact with the lady of the feathers. He had learned partially to understand the curious and beautiful attitude which her mind had assumed towards him, polluted as it must be by the terror and working out of her fate, by many dreary actions, and by many vile imaginings. But although he held to his promise he did not, after that night of crisis, resume his former career of asceticism tempered by winds of temptation which could never blow his casement open. There are men who can vary the fine monotony of virtue by an occasional deliberate error, and who return from such an excursion into dangerous by-paths drilled and comforted, as it appears, for further journeying along the main road of their respectability. But Julian was not such a man. He resembled rather the morphia victim, or the inebriate, who must at all hazards abstain from any indulgence, even the smallest, in drug or draught, lest the demon who has such charm for him clasp him in imperturbable arms, and refuse with the steadfastness of a once-tricked Venus ever to let him go again.

Valentine's empire of five years was broken in one night.

At first Julian was scarcely conscious that his descent was not momentary, but rather tending to the permanent. Certainly, at the first, he was inclined to have the schoolboy outlook upon it, and the schoolboy outlook is as a glance through the wrong end of a telescope, dwindling giant sins to the stature of pigmies, and pigmy sins to mere points of darkness which equal nothingness. But, strangely enough, it was his interview with the weeping Cuckoo, that Magdalen of the streets, which drove the schoolboy to limbo, and set virtue and vice for the moment rightly on the throne and in the gutter. Despite his comparatively dull mood and tendency to a calm of self-satisfaction in the Marylebone Road, Julian could not be wholly unmoved by the passion of Cuckoo's regret, nor entirely unaware that it was a passion in which he must have some share, whether now or at some more distant time, when the thrall of recently moved senses was weakened, and the numbness really born of excitement melted in the quiet expansion of a manly and a reasonable calm. His understanding of her passion, none too definite at first, gave him a moment's wonder, both at her and at himself. It seemed strange that the shattered influence of Valentine should be of less account to him who had known and loved it than to her who had never known it. It seemed stranger still that the streets—those wolves which tear one by one the rags of good from human nature, till it stands naked and tearless beneath the lamps, which are the eyes of the wolves—stranger that those streets should have left to one of their children a veil so bridal and so beautiful as that which hung round Cuckoo when she wept. Julian was almost driven to believe that sin and purity can dwell together in one woman, yet never have intercourse. Yet he knew that to be impossible. The fact remained that the tarnished Cuckoo, in the first moments of regret, was more conscious of his sin for him than he was conscious of it for himself; that she led him, with her dingy hands, to such repentance as he experienced, and that she, too, guarded him against repetition of the sin, so far as she was concerned. Julian considered these circumstances; and there was a time when they were not without effect upon him, and when, with the assistance of a word from Valentine, they might have worked upon him an easy salvation. But Valentine did not speak that word. His peculiar purity had saved Julian in the past by its mere existence. Its presence was enough. That satis was dead now. Julian did not ask why. Nor did he find himself troubled by its decease. There is nothing like action for making man unobservant. Julian was no longer a ship in dock, nor even a ship riding at anchor. The anchor was up, the sails were set, the water ran back from the vessel's prow.

Cuckoo was not conscious of this. Sometimes she was subtle by intuition; often she was not subtle at all. When she understood Julian's nature for the moment, it was because his nature was, for the moment, in close relation to hers. Her fate was affected by it, or its passages of arms clashed near her heart. Then intuition, woman's guardian, had eyes and ears, saw and heard with a distinctness that was nearly brilliant. But when Julian's nature wandered, and the wanderings did not bring it where hers was dwelling, her observation slept soundly enough. So she was not conscious at first of Julian's gentle progress in a new direction. Whether Valentine was conscious of it did not immediately appear, for Julian said nothing. For five years he had not had a secret from Valentine. Now he had to have one. He ranked Valentine with Doctor Levillier as too good to be told of the evil thing. When he had had temptations and resisted them he had told Valentine of them frankly. Now he had temptations, and was beginning not to resist them; he kept silence about them. This silence lasted for a little while, and then Valentine swept it away, involuntarily it seemed, and by means of action, not of words.

One day Julian met a man at his club, a lively, devil-may-care soldier of fortune in the world. The man came to where he was sitting and said:

"So, Addison, your god has fallen from his pedestal. He's only a Dagon after all."

Julian looked at him ignorantly.

"What god?" he asked.

"Your saint has tumbled from his perch. I never believed in him."

He was of the species that never believes in anything except vice and the Sporting Times.

Julian rejoined:

"I don't understand you."

"Cresswell," said the man.

Julian began to wonder what was coming, and silently got ready for the defence, as he always did instinctively when Valentine was the subject of attack.

"What have you got to say about Cresswell?" he asked curtly.

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

"I'm in the dark."

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

"You'd better be more explicit."

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

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

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

Valentine a night-bird! What did that mean?

And then Julian thought of the great wheeling army of the bats, whose evolutions every night of creation witnesses. In the day they do not sleep, but they are hidden. Their wings are folded so closely as to be invisible. Nobody could tell that they ever flew through shadowy places, seeking that which never satiates, although it may transform, the appetite. Nobody could tell how the twilight affects them when it comes; how, in their obscurity, they have to keep a guard lest the involuntary fluttering of a half-spread pinion betray them. And then when the twilight, the blessed one of the twin twilights, one in course towards day, one in course towards night, has deepened and has died, they can dare to be themselves, to spread their short wings, and to flutter on their vagrant and monotonous courses. It is a great though secret army—the army of the bats. It scours through cities. No weather will keep it quite restful in camp. No darkness will blind it into immobility. The mainspring of sin beats in it as drums beat in a Soudanese fantasia, as blood beats in a heart. The air of night is black with the movement of the bats. They fly so thickly round some lives that those lives can never see the sky, never catch a glimpse of the stars, never hear the wings of the angels, but always and ever the wings of the bats. Nor can such lives hear the whisper of Nature and of the sirens who walk purely with Nature. The murmur of the bats drowns all other sounds, and makes a hoarse and monotonous music. And the eyes of the bats are hungry, and the breath of the bats is poisonous, and the flight of the bats is a charade of the tragedy of the flight of the devils in hell.

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

Yet Julian began to know that he had been aware of a change in Valentine. He had believed it to be momentary. Perhaps it was not momentary. Perhaps Valentine was concealing his new mode of life from some strange idea of chivalry towards Julian. As Julian pondered he grew excited. He began to long to tell Valentine now what he had not liked to tell him before. Suddenly he got up and hastened out of the club. He drove to Victoria Street. But Valentine was not at home.

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

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

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

"I see," Julian said.

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

"Say I called, will you?"

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

That night was warm and gentle, with a full moon riding in clear heavens. The season was growing towards its full height, and the streets were thronged with carriages till a late hour. There is one long pavement that is generally trodden by many feet at every time of the year, and in almost every hour of the wheeling twenty-four. It is the pavement on which the legend of London's disgrace is written in bold characters of defiance. Men from distant lands, having made the pilgrimage to our Mecca, the queen, by right of magnitude at least, of the world's cities, stare aghast upon the legend, almost as Belshazzar stared upon the writing on the wall. Colonists seeking for the first time the comfortable embrace of that mother country which has been the fable of their childhood and the dream of their laborious years of maturity, gaze with withering hearts at this cancer in her bosom. Pure women turn their eyes from it. Children seek it that they may learn in one sharp moment the knowledge of good and evil. The music of the feet on that pavement has called women to despair and men to destruction; has sung in the ears of innocence till they grew deaf to virtue, and murmured round the heart of love till it became the heart of lust. And that pavement is the camping-ground of the army of the bats. On wet nights they flit drearily through the rain. In winter they glide like shadows among the revealing snows. But in the time of flowers and of soft airs, when the moon at the full swims calmly above the towers of Westminster, and the Thames rests rocked in a silver dream among the ebony wharves and barges, the flight of the bats is gay and their number is legion. And their circle is joined by many who are but recruits, or as camp-followers, treading in the track of those whose names are on the roll-call.

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

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

Slowly she walked along. Piccadilly bats fly slowly. The moon went up. She had not met her fate. In the throng she saw Valentine pass. He looked at her with a smile. She turned her eyes hastily away. She had met him on several evenings of late, but had never told Julian so, for she began to understand now his reverence for Valentine, and a new-born, ladylike instinct taught her not to hurt that reverence. Valentine disappeared. He had not tried to speak with her. Once, on encountering her, he had paused, but Cuckoo glided behind two large Frenchwomen and escaped with the adroitness of a snake in the grass. Apparently he recognized her movement as one of retreat, and was resolved to leave her alone, for he had never followed her since that day, although he always lifted his hat when he saw her. The crowd grew thicker. It was very heterogeneous, but Cuckoo did not thread it with the attention of a psychologist, or examine it with the pains of a philosopher of the dark hours. She stared listlessly at the faces of the men, and if they stared back at her, smiled mechanically with a thin and stereotyped coquetry, moving on vacantly the while in a sort of dream, such as a tired journalist may fall into as he drives his pen over the paper, leaving a train of familiar words and phrases behind it. There are many dreamers like Cuckoo on the thin riband of that pavement, moving in a maze created by everlasting custom, beneath their flowers, half senseless to life, and yet alive to the least human notice, behind the stretched barriers of their veils. She walked from the Circus to Hyde Park corner and back again; then turned, with an ever-growing lassitude, to repeat the desolate experience. By this time the playhouses had vomited their patrons into the night, and locomotion was becoming more difficult. Sometimes there was a block, and Cuckoo found herself "hung up," as she called it, squashed in a mass of people, all intent on some scheme of their own, and resentful of the enforced interruption to their movement. Then, by some unknown and mysterious means, the human knot was untied, and all the atoms murmured on again through the ocean of the town. And still Cuckoo was alone, and still the mechanical smile came and went upon her lips, and her feet seemed to grow heavier and heavier, till they were as cannon-balls to be lifted and dragged by her protesting muscles. And still her senses seem to become more and more drugged by the familiarity of it all, the familiarity of smile, of tired limbs, of incessant slow motion, of staring faces and watchful eyes; the familiarity of the cabs rolling home towards Knightsbridge and farther Kensington, with a dull, harsh noise; the familiarity of personal, intense loneliness and longing for quiet; the familiarity of the knowledge that quiet could only be earned by failure, and that failure meant lack of food, debt, and deeper degradation.

At last—perhaps it was owing to the unusual heat of the night—Cuckoo became so over-fatigued that she was scarcely conscious what she was doing. Her smile was utterly devoid of meaning, and had she been suddenly asked, she could not have told whether she was at the Regent Street end of Piccadilly, at Hyde Park Corner, or midway between the two. Once more there was a block. The people were pressed, or surged of their own will, together, and Cuckoo found herself leaning against some stranger. This sudden support gave to her an equally sudden knowledge of the extent to which she was fatigued, and when the block ceased and the stranger—unconscious that he was being used as a species of pillow—moved away, Cuckoo almost fell to the ground. Stretching out her hands to save herself, she caught hold of a man's arm, and as she did so her eyes moved to his face. It was Julian, and, before her grasp had time to fix all his attention on her, Cuckoo saw why he was in Piccadilly. In an instant all her lassitude was gone; all the fatigue, so passionless and complete, vanished. An extraordinary warmth, that of fire, not of summer, swept into her heart. She stood still and trembled, as if from the accession of the abrupt strength that flows from an energy purely nervous.

"Hulloh, Cuckoo!" Julian said.

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

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

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

"Shall I take you somewhere?" he asked.

"Yes, do," she said.

They moved towards the Circus.

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

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

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

"What will you have?" Julian asked Cuckoo.

She considered, sinking back on the plush settee.

"A glass of stout, I think, and—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I say."

"Well?"

"What are you about to-night?"

The question came from her painted lips very sternly. It seemed addressed by one who had a right to condemn, and who was going to exercise that right. Julian was astonished by her tone, and had an instant's inclination to resent it. But then he thought that there was nothing in the words themselves, and that the odd manner probably sprang simply from fatigue or some other womanish, undivined cause. So he answered:

"Just taking a stroll. It's so fine," and began to drink his coffee.

But Cuckoo quickly showed that her manner meant all that it had seemed to say.

"That ain't it," she said, with emphatic excitement, though she spoke in a low voice because of the people all round them. "You know it ain't."

Julian was just lighting a cigarette. The match was flaming in his hand. He let it go out as he looked at her.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "What's the matter?"

"What are you doin'?" she retorted. "That's what I want to know. Not as I need to ask, though," she added, bitterly.

Julian was distinctly taken aback by the emotion in her manner, and the passion that she tried to keep quiet in her voice. He flushed rather red, a boyish trick which he could never quite get over.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, lighting another match, and this time making it do its office on his cigarette.

Cuckoo tossed her head in a way that was not wholly free from vulgarity, but that was certainly wholly unconscious and expressive of real feeling.

"Oh yes, you do," she rejoined. Then after a moment's silence, she added, with bitter emphasis, and a movement of her hand in the direction of the door:

"You out in that crowd, and doing the same as all of them?"

As she said the words tears started under her blackened eyelashes. If Julian had been taken aback before she spoke the last sentence, he was ten times more astonished now. The whole situation struck him as unexampled, and but for something so passionate in the girl's manner that it overrode the natural feeling of the moment, his sense of humour must have moved him to a smile. It was strange indeed to sit at midnight under the electric moons of the Monico, and to be passionately condemned for dissipation by a girl with a painted face, dyed hair, and that terribly unmistakable imprint of the streets. But Julian could not smile. Something in Cuckoo's demeanour, something so vehement and so unconscious as to be not far from dignity, impressed him and took him well beyond the gates of laughter.

"Why—but you were out in the crowd too," he said.

"I!" she said sharply, and with a touch of scathing contempt for herself, yet impatient, too, of any introduction of her entity into the discussion; "of course I've got to be there. What's that to do with it?"

"Really, Cuckoo," Julian began, but she interrupted him.

"I ain't you," she said.

"No, of course, but—"

"I'm different. It's nothing to me where I go of a night, or what I do. But you ain't got to be there. You needn't go, need you?"

"Nobody need," he said. "But—"

"Then what d'you do it for?" she reiterated, still in the same tone of one sitting on high in condemnation, and moved by her own utterance to an increasing excitement. This time she paused for a reply, and set her rouged lips together with the obvious intention of not speaking until Julian had plainly put forward his defence. Strange to say, her manner had impressed him with a ridiculous feeling that defence of some kind was actually necessary. It was a case of one denizen of the dock putting on the black cap to sentence another. Julian glanced at Cuckoo before he made any reply to her last question. If he had had any intention of not answering it at all, of calmly disposing, in a word or two, of her right to interrogate him on his proceedings, her fixed and passionate eyes killed it instantly. He moved his coffee-cup round uneasily in the saucer.

"Men do many things they needn't do, as well as women," he began. "I must have my amusements. Why not?"

At the word "amusements" she drew in her breath with a little hiss of contempt. Julian flushed again.

"You're the last person," he began, and then caught himself up short. It must be confessed that she was very aggravating, and that the position she took up was wholly untenable. Having checked himself, he said more calmly:

"What's the good of talking about it? I live as other men do, naturally."

"Are you a beast too, then?" she asked.

She still kept her voice low, and the sentence came with all the more effect on this account.

"I don't see that," Julian exclaimed, evidently stung. "Women are always ready to say that about men."

Cuckoo broke into a laugh. She picked up her glass, and drank all that was in it. Putting it down empty, she laughed again, with her eyes on Julian. That sound of mirth chilled him utterly.

"Why d'you laugh?" he said.

"I don't know—thinkin' that you're to be like all the rest, I suppose," she answered. "Like all them brutes out there, and him too."

"Him," said Julian. "Whom are you speaking of?"

She had not meant to say those last words, and tried to get out of an answer by asking for something more to drink.

"Chartreuse," she said, with the oddest imaginable accent.

Julian ordered it hastily, and then immediately repeated his question.

"Never mind," Cuckoo replied. "It don't matter."

But he was not to be denied.

"D'you mean Valentine?" he asked.

She nodded her head slowly. Although Julian had half suspected that Valentine might be there this confirmation of his suspicion gave him a decided shock.

"Oh, he was just walking home from some party," he exclaimed.

"P'raps."

"I'm certain of it."

"He don't matter," she said with a hard accent.

She drank the chartreuse very slowly, and seemed to be reflecting, and a change came over her face. It softened as much as a painted face can soften under dyed hair.

"Dearie," she said, "it makes me sick to see you like the rest."

"I never pretended to be anything different."

"But you was different," she asserted. "I know you was different."

How could she have divined the change in Julian that one night of the Empire had wrought?

"I say," she went on, and her voice was trembling with eagerness, "you've got to tell me somethin'."

"Well?"

"That night I—I—it wasn't me made you different, was it?"

And as she spoke Julian knew that it was she. Perhaps a fleeting expression in his face—telling naked truth as expressions may, though words belie them—made her understand, for her cheeks turned grey beneath the paint on them.

"I wish I'd killed myself long ago," she said in a whisper.

"Hush!" he exclaimed, cursing his tell-tale features. "I'm not different; and if I was you could have nothing to do with it."

She said no more, but he saw by her brooding expression that she clung to her intuition, and knew what he denied.

The hands of the clock fixed on the wall above their heads pointed to the half-hour after midnight. The pale and weary waiters were racing to and fro clearing the tables, dodging this way and that with trays, stealing along with arms full of long-stemmed, thick tumblers, eager for rest. The electric moons gave a sudden portentous wink.

"Time!" a voice cried.

People began to get up and move out, exchanging loud good-nights. The long room slowly assumed an aspect of desertion and greedy desolation.

"We must go," Julian said.

Cuckoo woke out of that reverie, which seemed so chilly, so terrible even. She glanced at Julian, and her eyes were again full of tears. He was standing, and he bent down to her with his two hands resting upon the marble of the table. He bent down and then suddenly stooped lower, lower, almost glaring into her eyes. She went back in her seat a little, half frightened.

"What's it?" she murmured.

But Julian only remained fixedly looking into her eyes. In the pool of the tears of them he saw two tiny shadowy flames, flickering, as he thought, but quite clear, distinct, unmistakable. And there came a thick beating in his side. His heart beat hard. Each time he had seen the vision of the flame he had been instantly impressed with a sense of strange mystery, as if at the vision of some holy thing, a flame upon a prayer-blessed altar, a flame ascending from a tear-washed sacrifice. And now he saw this thing that he fancied holy burning behind the tears in Cuckoo's eyes!

Cuckoo got up.

"Come on," she said, abruptly.

Julian followed her out of the caf.

The dream of the moon was with them as they came to the entrance, clear as a quiet soul, directly above them in a clear sky. Julian looked up at it, but Cuckoo looked, with eyes that were almost sullen, at the night panorama of the Circus. They waited a moment on the step. Julian was lighting a cigar, and many other voluble men, most of them French or Italian, were doing likewise. Having lighted it, and given a strong puff or two, Julian said to Cuckoo:

"Shall I drive you home?"

"I ain't going home yet," she replied doggedly. "Are you?"

He hesitated.

"Are you, or aren't you?" she reiterated.

While she spoke, in her voice that was often a little hoarse, a young voice with a thread in it, he realized that somehow she—painted sinner as she was—had managed to make him ashamed of himself. Or was it that an awe had come to his soul with that strange flame? In any case his mood had risen from the old night mood of a young man to something higher, something that could not be satisfied in the sordid way of the world.

"I think I shall go home," he said.

"Right," she answered, and for the first time there was an accent of pleasure in her voice.

"But I'll walk a little way with you first," he added.

Together they crossed the Circus and mingled with the humming mob at the corner of Regent Street. They pushed their way towards Piccadilly with difficulty, for numbers of people at this hour do not attempt to walk, but stand stock still, despite the cry of the policeman, staring at the passers-by, or talking and laughing with the women who throng the pavement. Having elbowed their way along as far as the St. James restaurant, they began to move with a little more ease, and could have talked as they went, but apparently neither of them felt conversational. Julian was comparing the vision of the moon with the vision of the street, a comparison no doubt often made even by young men in London on still nights of summer, suggestive to most people, perhaps, of much the same thoughts—yet a comparison to thrill, as all the wild and eternal contrasts of life thrill. And Julian was thinking, too, rather sombrely of himself. Cuckoo walked on beside him, looking straight before her. Quite unconsciously, with the unconsciousness of a mechanical toy, expressive at the turning of a key in its interior, she had assumed her thin, invariable, professional smile. It came to her face in a flash when the pavement of Piccadilly came to her feet. She did not know it was there.

The moon looked down on it, yet, if Julian had been able to see, perhaps the little flame still flickered in those eyes which had been full of tears. But a little beyond St. James's Hall their silent progress was arrested, for they both saw Valentine pass them swiftly in the crowd. He saw them, too, but did not attempt to speak to them. With a smile at Julian he walked on. Julian gazed after him, then turned to Cuckoo.

"And you saw him here to-night before I met you?" he asked.

"Yes."

"How long ago?"

"Two hours, I dare say."

After that Julian ceased to think of the vision of the moon. But presently he noticed that Cuckoo was walking more slowly.

"You're tired?" he said.

She nodded.

"Have you been out all the evening?"

She nodded again.

"Take a cab and go home. I'll pay the man."

"No; I can't go yet."

"Why not?"

"I can't," she repeated, and a mulish look of obstinacy came into her face.

Julian guessed the miserable reason.

"Let me—" he began, and in a moment his hand would have been in his pocket. She stopped him.

"I told you as I never would, not from you," she said. "And I wouldn't, all the more since—since that night."

Then, after an instant, she added:

"But you'd better leave me to myself now."

And then Julian realized that his presence and company were ruining her chance. That thought turned him sick and dull.

"I can't," he began almost desperately.

She gave with her hand a little twitch at his.

"I say," she whispered, and she spoke to him as if to Jessie in the tiny flannel-lined basket, "Go bials! will you?"

"But you?" he said, and there was something that was half a sob in his voice.

"I can't. But you—go bials."

And then, to please her, he held up his hand and hailed a hansom. Getting in he gave the direction of his rooms, loud enough for her to hear. She stood at the edge of the pavement and nodded at him as she heard it.

Then she turned away, and Julian saw the feathers in her big hat waving, as she joined once more the flight of the bats.



CHAPTER IV

THE FLAME IN A WOMAN'S EYES

"That girl loves you," Valentine had said, when Julian told him of Cuckoo's strange fragmentary sermon in the Monico, and of its effect upon himself.

Valentine spoke without any emotion or sympathy, and the absence of feeling from his voice seemed almost to bring a certain slight vexation into his manner. The love of Cuckoo, perhaps naturally, was to his fine nature a thing of no account, or even of ill account. At least, his look and manner faintly said so to Julian.

"But if she loves me," Julian said, and a certain wonder came into his heart at the thought, "surely she wouldn't behave to me as she does, turning me from a lover into a friend, and keeping me almost angrily in the latter relation."

"Perhaps not," Valentine said languidly.

No doubt he understood what Julian did not entirely understand, the subtleties of such a nature as Cuckoo's, a nature hammered out thin by cruel circumstance, drilled till it found the unspeakable ordinary and the loathsome inevitable, worn as a stone by dropping water till the water, ceasing to fall, must have left a loneliness of surprise. Julian did not fully realize that Cuckoo's life might well lead her to display real affection, if she possessed it, by ways the reverse of those naturally sought and gloried in by pure and protected women. To give is the act natural to the love of such women. It is at least their impulse, although restrained within strict limits, perhaps, by exigencies of conscience or of religion. But to give is the impulse, giving being the unusual act, the strange new act in them. Cuckoo's profession being an ordered routine of giving, how could she show her love better than by withholding? To be to Julian as she was to all men could prove nothing, either to him or to herself. To be to him as she was not to any other man whom she knew must mean something, argue something. So, at least, dimly and without mental self-consciousness, her mind reasoned rather instinctively, for the lady of the feathers was, above all things, instinctive. Instead of logic, ethics, morals, the equipment of sage, philosopher, good women, she had instinct only. Instinct told her the secret meaning of reticence in her relations with Julian. When she said good-bye to him, the hand-shake that passed between them had become something more to her than a kiss. She kissed so many whom she hated, so many who were dolls of vice to her, who were walking sins, incarnate lust shadows, scarcely men. To be to Julian what another woman might have been would be to seem to make him as all those dolls of horrible London. So Cuckoo set him apart by her relations towards him, as she had previously set him apart in her heart. She pushed the chair of her beloved from the heart where the dolls sat night after night warming their expressive hands at the cheap and ever-burning fire. She pushed it out into a circle of cold that was the only sacred thing she could supply. The world and her situation in it had bereft her of the power of even proving the simplicity of love by simplicity of natural action. She had to find a new way to show an old worship. She found it in refusal, where others find it in assent.

But, after all, she was a woman, and perhaps she wished Julian to be an anchorite. That was what Valentine meant when, after Julian's account of Cuckoo's anger on finding him in Piccadilly, he simply said:

"That girl loves you."

The sentence stirred Julian to a surprise warmer than seemed reasonable, for he had really known that Cuckoo had some feeling for him. But he had always at the back of his mind the idea, common to so many, that such a girl as Cuckoo could not be capable of the real love, the love ascetic, not the love Bacchanalian. Love among the roses is easy, but not many can welcome love among the nettles; and, moreover, Julian, despite his knowledge of the thorny paths along which Cuckoo walked habitually, along which all her poor sisterhood walked incessantly, had not entirely disabused himself of the fallacy that a life such as hers was, in some vague, undefined and indefinable way, a life of pleasure. Even when we know a thing to be, we often cannot feel it to be. Knowledge in the mind does not inevitably bring to the birth sensation in the heart, or even the mental apprehension, half reasonable and half emotional, on the base and foundation of which it is comparatively easy to ground acts that indicate an understanding.

From Valentine's remark Julian understood him to mean that Cuckoo's anger was entirely caused by jealousy, not at all by a fine desire of protecting some one stronger than herself from that which she knew so well through her own original weakness. Yet that was what Julian had been led to believe, not by any hint of Cuckoo's, but by something within himself.

"I don't see why she should love me," he said, presently.

"You're well off, Julian," Valentine rejoined.

Almost for the first time in his life Julian felt angry with Valentine.

"You don't know her at all," he said, hotly.

"I know her class."

Julian looked at him, and his anger died, as his mind sailed off on a new tack.

"Her class! Then you must have been studying it lately, Val. Not long ago you could not have studied it. Your nature would not have let you."

"That is true enough."

"Were you studying it when we met you the other night?"

"Yes."

"With what result?" Julian asked with eager curiosity.

"That I understand something I never understood before—the charm of sin."

Julian was greatly surprised at this deliverance of his friend, who uttered it in his coldly pure voice, looking serenely high-minded and even loftily intellectual.

"You find the charm of sin in Piccadilly?"

"I begin to find it everywhere, in every place in which human beings gather together."

"You no longer feel yourself aloof from the average man, then?"

Valentine pressed his right hand slowly upon Julian's shoulder.

"No longer," he answered quietly. "Julian, you and I are emerging together from the hermitage in which we have dwelt retired for so long. I always thought you would emerge some day. I never thought I should. But so it is. Don't think that I am standing still while you are travelling. It is not so."

The strength of his hand's grip upon Julian's shoulder seemed to indicate a violence of feeling which the tones of his voice did not imply. Julian listened, and then said, in a hesitating, irresolute manner:

"Yes, I see, Val; but I say, where are we travelling? or, at least, where shall we travel if we don't pull up, if we keep on? That's the thing, I suppose."

As he spoke he did not tell himself that it was nothing less than the disconnected and ungrammatical remarks of the lady of the feathers which prompted this consideration, this prophetic movement of his mind. Yet so it was. And when Valentine replied he, the saint, was fighting against her, the sinner, and surely in the cause of evil. For he said lightly:

"After all, do human souls travel? I often think they are like eyes looking at a whirling zoetrope. It is the zoetrope that travels."

"You think souls don't go up or down?"

"I think that none of us knows really much about souls, and that, after all, it is best not to bother ourselves too much about them."

"Marr thought a great deal about them. I used to fancy that as some maniacs have been known to murder people in order to tear out their hearts, he could have murdered them to tear out their souls."

Valentine took his hand from Julian's shoulder.

"Marr is dead and forgotten," he said almost sternly.

"I can't quite forget him, Val; and I still feel as if he had had some influence over both of us. We have changed since those days of the sittings, since that night of your trance and his death."

Julian was looking at Valentine in a puzzled way while he spoke. Valentine met his eyes calmly.

"If I have changed," he said slowly, "it cannot be in essentials. Look at me. Is my face altered? Is my expression different?"

"No, Valentine."

Julian said the words with a sort of return to confidence and to greater happiness. To look into the face of his friend set all his doubts at rest. No man with eyes like that could ever fall into anything which was really and radically evil. Valentine perhaps was playing with life as a boy plays with a dog, making life jump up at him, dance round him, just to see the strength and grace of the creature, its possibilities of quick motion, its powers of varied movement. Where could be the harm of that? And what Valentine could do safely he began to think he might do safely too. He gave expression to his thought with his usual frankness.

"You mean you are beginning to play with life?" he said.

"That is it exactly. I am putting life through its paces. After all, no man is worth his salt if he shuts himself up from that which is placed in the world for him to see, to know, and perhaps—but only after he has seen and known it—to reject. To do that is like living in the midst of a number of people who may be either very agreeable or the reverse, and declining ever to be introduced to them on the ground that they must all be horrible and certain to do one an infinity of harm."

"Yes, yes, I see. Then you think that Cuckoo is jealous of me?—that that was all she meant?"

Julian again returned to the old question. Valentine replied:

"I feel sure of it. Women are always governed by their hearts. So much so that my last sentence is a truism, scarcely worthy the saying. Besides, my dear Julian, what would it matter if she were not? What could the attitude of such a woman on any subject under the sun matter to you?"

The words were not spoken without intentional sarcasm. They stung Julian a little, but did not lead him, from any sense of false shame, to a feeble concealment of his real feeling.

"It does seem absurd, I dare say," he said. "But she's—well, she's not an ordinary woman, Val."

"Let us hope not."

"No; you don't understand. There's something strong about her. What she says might really matter, I think, to a cleverer man than I. She knows men, and then, Valentine, there's something else."

He stopped. There was a queer look of mystery in his face.

"Something else! What is it? What can there be?"

"I saw the flame as if it was burning in her eyes."

Valentine made an abrupt movement. It might have been caused by surprise, annoyance, anger, or simply by the desire to fidget which overcomes every one, not paralyzed, at some time or another. His action knocked over a chair, and he stooped to pick it up and set it in its place before he spoke. Then he said:

"The flame, you say! What on earth is your theory about this extraordinary flame? You seem to attach a strange importance to it. Yet it can only be the fire of a fancy, a jet from the imagination. Tell me, have you any theory about it, honestly? and if so, what is it?"

Julian was rather taken aback by this very sledgehammer invitation. Hitherto the flame, and his thought of it, had seemed to have the pale vagueness and the mystery of a dream. When the flame appeared, it is true, he was oppressed by a sense of awe; but the awe was indefinite, blurred, resisting analysis, and quite inexplicable to another.

"I did not say I had any theory about it," he answered.

"But then, why do you consider it at all? And why seem to think that its supposed presence in the eyes of a woman makes that woman in any way different from others?"

"But I did not say I thought so," Julian said, rather hastily. "How you jump to conclusions to-day!"

"You implied it, and you meant it. Now, didn't you?"

"Perhaps I may have."

"This is all too much for me," Valentine said, showing now a very unusual irritation. He even began to pace up and down the room with a slow, soft footstep, monotonous and mechanical in its regularity. As he was walking he went on:

"I do really think, Julian, that it is a mistake to allow any fancy to get upon your nerves. You know what the doctor thought about this flame."

"Yes."

"And you know what I think."

"Do I?"

"Yes, that it is a mere chimera. But my opinion on such a subject has no particular value. The doctor is different. He is a great specialist. The nerves have been his constant study for years. If this vision continues to haunt you, you really ought to put yourself definitely into his hands."

"Perhaps I will," said Julian.

He spoke rather seriously and meditatively. Valentine, possibly because he was in the sort of peculiarly irritable frame of mind that will sometimes cause a man to dislike having his tendered advice taken, seemed additionally vexed by this reply, or at any rate struck by it. He paused in his walk, and seemed for an instant as if he were going to say something sharply sarcastic. Then suddenly he laughed.

"After all," he exclaimed in a calmer voice, "we are taking an absurdity mighty seriously."

But Julian would not agree to this view of the matter.

"I don't know that we are," he said.

"You don't know!"

"That is an absurdity. No, Valentine, I don't; I can't think that it is. I saw it in Cuckoo's eyes only once, and that was—just—"

"Tell me just when you saw it."

The words came from Valentine's lips with a pressure, a hurry almost of anxiety. He seemed curiously eager about the history of this chimera. But Julian, eager too, and engrossed in thoughts that moved as yet in a maze full of vapors and of mists, did not find time to notice it.

"I noticed it just after, or when, she was begging me to go home."

"Like a good boy," Valentine hastily interposed. "Because her jealousy prompted her to hate the thought of your having any pleasure in which she did not share. Oh, you noticed the flame then. Did it, too, tell you to go home?"

He spoke rather harshly and flippantly, and apparently put the question without desire of an answer, and rather with the intention of ridicule than for any other reason. But Julian took it seriously and replied to it.

"Somehow I felt as if, perhaps, it did wish to speak some message to me, and that the message came, or might come, through her."

He spoke slowly, for indeed it was this action of words that was beginning to make clear to himself his own impression, so vague and so unpresentable before. As he thus traced it out, like a man following the blurred letters of an old inscription with the point of his stick, and gradually coming at their meaning, his excitement grew. He said, speaking with a rising emphasis of conviction:

"I'm not a mere fool. There is—there is something in all this; I feel it; I cannot be simply imagining. There is something. But I'm like a man in the dark. I can't see what it is; I can't tell. But you, Valentine, you, with your nature, so much better than I am, with so much deeper an insight, how is it you don't see this flame? Unless,"—and here Julian struck his hand violently on the table,—"unless it comes, as it seemed to come that night in the darkness, from you. If it's part of yourself—but then"—and his manner clouded again—"how can that be?"

"How indeed?" said Valentine, who had been watching him all through this outburst with a scrutiny that seemed almost uneasy, so narrow and so determined was it.

"Julian, listen to me; you trust me, don't you, and think my opinion worth something?"

"Worth everything."

"Well, I believe you're getting into an unnatural, if you weren't a man I should say a hysterical—habit of mind. If you can't throw it off by yourself, I must help you to do so."

"Perhaps you're right. But how will you help me?"

Valentine seemed to think and consider for a moment. Then he exclaimed:

"I'll tell you. By making you join with me in putting this life, this old life—new enough to both of us—through its paces. Why should each of us do it alone? We are friends. We can trust one another. You know me through and through. You know the—chilliness I'll call it—of my nature, my natural bookishness—my bias towards contemning people too readily, and avoiding what all men ought to know. And I know you. Without you I believe I should never go any distance. Without me you might go too far. Together we will strike the happy medium. For us life shall go through all his paces, but he shall never lame us with a kick, like a vicious horse, or give us a furtive bite when we're not looking. Men carry such bites and kicks, the wounds from them, to their graves. We'll be more careful. But we'll see the great play in all—all its acts. And, when we've seen it, we'll be as we were, only we'll be no longer blind. And we'll never forget our grand power of rejecting and refusing."

"Ah!" said Julian. "Perhaps I haven't that power."

"But I have."

"Yes, you have."

"And I'll share my power with you. We are friends and comrades. We ought to share everything."

"Yes," exclaimed Julian, carried away. "Yes, by Jove, yes!"

"And as to this flame—"

"Ah!"

"We'll soon know if it's a vision or a reality. But it's a vision. You saw it in a woman's eyes."

"I'll swear I did."

"Then that proves it's a fraud. The flame in a woman's eyes never burnt true yet—never, Julian, since the days of Delilah."



CHAPTER V

JULIAN FEARS THE FLAME

Although Cuckoo knew well that Julian carried out his intention of going home after he left her in Piccadilly, the fact of his being there, of his making one of that crowd, that slowly-moving crowd, troubled her. Valentine and Julian had argued the question of her real feeling about the matter. Cuckoo did not argue it. She never deliberately thought to herself, "I feel this or that. Why do I feel it?" She knew as much about astronomy as introspection, and that was simply nothing at all. Instead of diving into the depths of her mind and laboriously tracing every labelled and tabulated subtlety to its source, she sat in the squalid Marylebone Road sitting-room, with the folding doors open into the bedroom to temper the heat of summer with draughts from the frigid zone of the back area, and babbled her sensations to Jessie, who riggled in response to every passing shadow that stole across the heart of her mistress.

Jessie had learned much about Julian in these latter days. Into her pricked and pointed ear, leaf-shaped and the hue of India-rubber, had been whispered a strange tale of the dawning of love in a battered heart, of the blossoming of respect in a warped mind. She had heard of the meeting in Piccadilly, of the meal at the Monico, of the farewell on the kerbstone. And she alone knew—or ought to have known—the mingling of intense jealousy and of a grander feeling that burned in Cuckoo's breast whenever she thought of Julian's life, the greater part of it that lay beyond her knowledge, her sight, or keeping.

For the lady of the feathers, in most things a strange mixture, had never driven two more contrasted passions in double harness than those which she drove around the circle of which Julian was the core, the centre. One was a passion of jealousy; the other a curious passion of protection. Each backed up the other, urged it to its work. It would have been a hard task, indeed, to tell at first which was the greater of the two. Cuckoo neither knew nor cared. She did not even differentiate the two passions or say to herself that there were two. That was not her way. She felt quickly and strongly, and she acted on her feelings with the peculiar and almost wild promptitude that such a life as hers seems to breed in woman's nature. It is the French lady of the feathers who scatters vitriol in the streets of Paris, the Italian or Spanish lady of the feathers who snatches the dagger from her hair to stab an enemy. The wind of Cuckoo's feelings blew her about like a dancing mote, and the feelings awakened by Julian were the strongest her nature was capable of.