Part 98 (1/2)
”Shan't.”
”Turned pious, 'ave yer?” sneered the landlady. ”Or waitin' for a 'usband? Which is it to be? Mr. H'Addison, I dessey! Hee, hee, hee.”
She burst into a bitter sn.i.g.g.e.r. Cuckoo flushed scarlet and uttered words of the pavement. Any one hearing her then must have put her down as utterly unredeemed and irredeemable, a harridan to bandy foul language with a cabman, or to outvie a street-urchin b.u.mped against by a rival in the newspaper trade. She covered Mrs. Brigg with abuse, prompted by the gnawings at her heart, the hunger of mind and body, fear of the future, wonder at the impossibilities of life. Her own greatness--for her love and following obstinate unselfishness, without religious prompting or self-respect, as it was, might be called great--turned sour within her heart at such a moment. Her very virtue became as vinegar. Mrs. Brigg was drowned in epithets and finally pushed furiously out into the pa.s.sage. Cuckoo turned from the door to Jessie yelping, and directed a kick at the little dog. Jessie wailed, as only a toy dog can, like the ”mixture” stop of an organ, wailed and ran as one that runs to meet an unknown future. Then Cuckoo pursued, caught her, and burst into tears over her. The little creature's domed skull and india-rubber ears were wet with the tears of her mistress. And she whimpered, too, but with much relief, for she was back in her world of Cuckoo's lap; and could not be quite unhappy there. But in what a world was Cuckoo!
It will be said that Dr. Levillier knew of her circ.u.mstances; but anxiously kind and thoughtful though he was, he did not yet realize the effect of his advice given to the lady of the feathers during the drive on the Hampstead Heights. He had told her to prove her will by doing the thing that Julian had asked of her. But he did not know what Julian had asked. And he did not comprehend the bitter fruit that her following of his further advice to keep from low and loveless actions must bring to the ripening. When he spoke, as the sun went down on London, he was carried on by excitement, and was thinking rather of the fate of Julian, the _diablerie_ of Valentine, than of the individual life of the girl at his side. He was arming her for the battle. But he dreamed of weapons, not of rations, like many an enthusiast. He forgot that the soldier must be fed as well as armed. He said to Cuckoo: ”Fight! Use your woman's wit; use your heart; wake up, and throw yourself into this battle.” And she, filled with determination, and with a puzzled, pent ardour to do something, did not know what to do except--starve. So she began to starve for Julian's sake, and because the doctor had fired her heart.
He had said: ”Do what Julian asked you to do, and show Julian that you have done it.” But something within Cuckoo forbade her to fulfil this last injunction. She could give up the street, but an extraordinary shyness, false shame, and awkwardness had so far prevented her from letting Julian know it. If he knew it, he would understand what it meant for her, and would force money on her, and Cuckoo, having once made up her mind that money and Julian should never be linked together in her relations with him, stuck to secrecy on this subject with her normal dull pertinacity. So matters move slowly towards a deadlock. The lady of the feathers did not neglect the p.a.w.nshop. Her few trinkets went there very soon. Then things that were not trinkets, that green evening dress, for instance, the imitation lace, and one day a sale took place. Cuckoo disposed, for an absurd sum, of her t.i.tle deed, the headgear that had given birth to her nickname. She was no longer the lady of the feathers.
The hat that had seen so much of her life reposed upon the head of virtue, and knew Piccadilly no more. But Julian's present remained with her, and indeed came into every-day use. And still Jessie sported her yellow riband. Later there came a terrible time, when the eyes of Cuckoo--appraising everything on which they looked--fell with that fateful expression, not merely upon Jessie's yellow riband, but upon Jessie herself. But that time was not quite yet.
While Cuckoo endured this fate, Dr. Levillier was in a perplexity of another kind. The first round of that battle had ended in apparent decisive defeat of Valentine's accusers. During the evening the fortunes of war had certainly wavered to the doctor's side. Julian had displayed sudden strong signs of an awakening; but the sitting had thrown him back into his dream, had pushed him more firmly beneath the yoke of his master. The doctor did not understand why, although he recognized the fact; he could not divine the exact effect that disappointment would have upon sudden suspicious eagerness. Julian had been waked to wonder, to observe Valentine for an instant with new eyes, to look the mystery of the great change in him in the face, and know it as a mystery. Yes, he had even thought of Valentine as a stranger, and said to himself, ”Where, then, is my friend?” The new Valentine had risen out of the ashes of sleep. Julian pressed forward the sitting as a means, the only one, of searching among these ashes. In the old days each sitting had quickened his senses into a strange life, as the last sitting quickened the senses of the doctor. But to Julian this last sitting brought nothing but disappointment; the thing which had been alive was dead, and so the sudden hope which had come with the new wonder died too. He supposed that he had been the prey of an absurd fancy created by the idle words of the doctor, or by an idiotic movement of his mind, which had cried to him on a sudden: ”If the Valentine you love and revere is really gone away, what are you wors.h.i.+pping now?” Now, in his heavy disappointment he thought of this cry as a mad exclamation, and he sought to drown all memory of it, and every memory in fresh vices, and in his fatal habit of absinthe-drinking. He lay down under the yoke beneath which he had previously wept, and so succeeded in going still lower. So that night Valentine had won his intended triumph, although for a while it had been in jeopardy.
Doctor Levillier was in perplexity; he had been brought to the very threshold of revelation, and then thrust back into an every-day world of thwarted hopes and broken ambitions. But the memory of magic was still with him, and gave him a feeling of unrest, and a pertinacity that was not to be without reward forever. Valentine's triumph held for the conqueror a poison seed from which a flower was to spring. The doctor's determination to continue the fight was frustrated at this time by Julian, rather than by Valentine. Julian's disappointment plunged him in a deep sea of indifference, from which he declined to be rescued. The doctor's invitations to him remained unanswered. If he called, Julian was never at home. Several times the doctor met Valentine, who, with a deprecating smile, told him that Julian was away on some mad errand.
”I seldom see him now,” he even added upon one occasion. ”He has gone beyond me. Julian is living so fast that my poor agility cannot keep pace with him.”
It seemed as if the whole affair was going completely out of the doctor's knowledge, and that even Cuckoo had no longer any power of attraction for Julian. The doctor wrote to her and received an ill-spelt answer, telling him that Julian had not been near her since the last night of the year.
In this event the doctor's only hope lay in keeping closely in touch with Valentine. To do this proved an easy matter. Valentine responded readily to his invitations, asked him out in return, seemed glad to be with him.
The doctor believed he read the reason of this joy in Valentine's anxiety to prove the depth of Julian's degradation. He had now begun to play devilishly upon a pathetic stop, and sought every occasion to descant upon the social ruin that was overtaking Julian, and his deep concern in the matter. This hypocrisy was so transparent and so offensive that there were moments when it stank in the doctor's nostrils, and he could scarcely repress his horror and disgust. Yet to show them would be not only impolitic, but would only add fuel to the flames of Valentine's pyre of triumph. So the doctor, too, sought to play his part, and never wearied in seeking Julian, although his quest was in vain. From Valentine he gathered that Julian was now dropped even by the gay world; that his clubs looked askance at him; that men began to shun him, and to whisper against him.
”The stone is going down in the sea,” Valentine said.
”Who threw it into the sea?” the doctor asked. ”Tell me that.”
Valentine shrugged whimsical shoulders.
”Fate, I suppose,” he answered. ”Fate is a mischievous boy, and is always throwing stones. Is the lady of the feathers disconsolate?”
The doctor did not trust himself to reply, but was silent, plotting another meeting to sit. For he had begun, still magic-bound perhaps, to divine some possible salvation in that act which he had once condemned, led, as he thought, by knowledge and by experience, of the nervous system forsooth! Now he was led unscientifically by pure feeling, like a child by a warm, close hand. The instinct that had guided Cuckoo seemed to stretch out fingers to him. He must respond. But how to reach Julian?
While he strove to solve this problem it was solved for him in a manner utterly surprising to him, although engineered by words of his.
Cuckoo wrought a strange work with the skeleton hands of hunger and of pain.
CHAPTER VI
THE SELLING OF JESSIE
One chill morning of earliest February, a stirring of Jessie at the foot of her bed wakened Cuckoo from a short and uneasy sleep. She opened her eyes to the faint light that filtered through the green Venetian blind.
Jessie moved again, slowly rotating like a drowsy top, then suddenly dropped into the warm centre of a nest of bedclothes, breathing a big dog-sigh of satisfaction that shook her tiny frame. She slept. But she had wakened her mistress, who lay with her head resting on one hand, deep in thought while the day grew outside. Cuckoo, having directed her steps down a blind-alley had, not unnaturally, reached a dead-wall, blotting out the horizon. Lying there, she faced it. She stared at the wall, and the wall seemed to stare back at her. Perhaps for that reason a dull blankness flowed over and filled her mind, and made her widely opened eyes almost as expressionless as the eyes of a corpse. For a long time she lay in this alive stupor. Then Jessie stirred again, and Cuckoo, as she had been before spurred into wakefulness, was stirred into thoughtfulness. She began to pa.s.s the near past, the present, eventually the future, in review. The past was a crescendo, solitude growing louder each night, poverty growing louder, obstinacy growing louder, Mrs. Brigg growing louder. What an orchestra! Cuckoo had not seen Julian once. She had seen the doctor, to be told of his baffled efforts, of Julian's escape from all his friends, of Valentine's declaration of the stone going down in the sea, of utter deadlock, utter stagnation. For the doctor treated Cuckoo frankly as a brave woman, not deceitfully as a timid child to be buoyed on the waves of ill-circ.u.mstances with gas-filled bladders. Cuckoo knew the worst of things, and by the knowledge was confirmed in her mule's att.i.tude which so weighed upon Mrs. Brigg. Her hands were tied in every direction except one. She could only dumbly prove that Valentine was wrong; that her will was not dead, by exercising it to the detriment of her worldly situation. Doggedly then she put her whole past behind her, despite the ever-increasing curses of the landlady. She had given up her pilgrimages in search of honest work. They were too hopeless. She had p.a.w.ned everything she could p.a.w.n, and sold every trifle that was saleable. Even Jessie's broad band of yellow satin had been included in a heterogeneous parcel of odds and ends purchased by a phlegmatic German with eyes like marbles and the manner of a stone image. Living less and less well, doing without fires, sitting often in the dark at night to save the expense of gas, Cuckoo had managed to pay her rent until a week ago. Then money had failed, and the great earthquake had at length tossed and swallowed the wretched Mrs. Brigg. The scene had been tropical. Mrs. Brigg was really moved to the very depths of her being. For days she had been, as it were, eating and drinking apprehension. Now apprehension choked her. She was shot up in the air by the cannon of climax. Limbs and mind were in the extreme of commotion. From her point of view it must be acknowledged that the situation was unduly exasperating. For Cuckoo would give no reason whatever for her reiterated formula of refusal to earn any money. And now she could not pay her week's rent, plunging Mrs. Brigg into the further circle of an _inferno_, and yet sat within doors day after day. Mrs.
Brigg approached apoplexy by way of persuasion, was by turns pathetic and paralytic with pa.s.sion. She coaxed with the ardour of an executioner inveigling the victim's neck to the noose and in haste to be off to breakfast. She threatened like Jove in curl-papers. Cuckoo was inexorable.
”Then out you go!” said Mrs. Brigg at last. ”Out of my house you pack, you--” Nameless words followed.
Cuckoo got up from her chair with no show of emotion and moved towards her bedroom stonily to pack her box. She didn't care. She was in a mood to lie down in the gutter and wait the last blow of Fate, living only in her one obstinate determination to do what the doctor had told her, the one thing Julian had asked of her. She did not any longer war with words against the purple and hard-breathing landlady. And her silence and her movement of obedience awed Mrs. Brigg for the moment into another mood.
She shuffled after Cuckoo into the bedroom.
”Eh? What is it?” she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. ”What are you a-doing of?”
”Going,” Cuckoo threw at her.