Part 97 (1/2)

Julian's voice sounded heavy and weary.

”Don't you think we had better stop?”

”If you like.”

Valentine got up and turned on the light.

Then they saw that the lady of the feathers, leaning back in her chair, was fallen asleep, no doubt from sheer weariness. Her face was very white, and in sleep its expression had become ethereal and purified. Her thin hands still rested nervelessly upon the table. She seemed like a little child that had known sorrow early, and sought gently to lose the sense of it in rest.

”Cuckoo,” Julian said, leaning over her, ”Cuckoo!”

She stirred and woke.

”I'm awfully done,” she murmured, in her street voice. ”Pardon!”

She sat up.

”I seemed as if I was put to sleep,” she said.

”You were,” Valentine answered her. ”I willed that you should sleep.”

He looked at the doctor, and his eyes said:

”I have had my triumph. You witness it.”

Cuckoo reddened with anger, but she said nothing.

”Did you feel anything, Julian?” Valentine asked.

Julian looked strangely hopeless.

”Nothing,” he said. ”It's all different from what it was; like a dead thing that used to be alive.”

It seemed as if the sitting had filled him with a dogged despair.

”A dead thing,” he repeated.

Then he went over to the spirit-stand and poured himself out more absinthe.

”And you, doctor?” said Valentine. ”What did you feel?”

”I was thinking all the time,” he said, ”of other things. Not of the table or of table-turning.”

When he and Cuckoo left the flat that night, or rather in the chill first morning of the new year, they left Julian with Valentine.

He said he would stay, speaking in the voice of a man drugged almost into uncertainty of his surroundings.

CHAPTER V

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS STARVES

Down in her dreary kitchen, among her dingy pots and pans, Mrs. Brigg was filled with an anger that seemed to her as righteous as the anger of a Puritan against Museum-opening on Sunday. Her ground-floor lodger was going to the bad. a.n.a.lysed, reduced to its essence, that was her feeling about the lady of the feathers. Cuckoo had lived at number 400 for a considerable time. Being, in some ways, easy-going, or perhaps one should say rather reckless, she had given herself with a good enough grace to be plucked by the claws of the landlady. She had endured being ruthlessly rooked, with but little murmuring, as do so many of her patient cla.s.s, accustomed to be the prey of each unit in the large congregation of the modern Fates. For months and years she had paid a preposterous price for her badly furnished little rooms. She had been overcharged habitually for every morsel of food she ate, every drop of beer or of tea she drank, every fire that was kindled in her badly cleaned grate, every candle that lighted her, almost every match she struck. She and Mrs. Brigg had had many rows, had, times without number, lifted up their respective voices in vituperation, and shown command of large and vile vocabularies. But these rows had not been on the occasion of the open cheating of the former by the latter. Fallen women, as they are called, seldom resent being cheated by those in whose houses they live. Rather do they expect the bleeding process as part of the penalty to be paid for a lost character. The landlord of the leper is owed, for his charity and tolerance, good hard cash. The landlady of the Pariah puts down mentally in each added-up bill this item: ”To loss of character--so much.” And the Pariah understands and pays. Such is the recognized dispensation. Mrs.