Flames

by Robert Hichens

CHAPTER II

CAFÉ NOIR

Snow fell, melodramatically, on the year's death-night. During the day Valentine occupied himself oddly in decorating his flat for the evening. But although he thus seemed to fall in with the consecrated humours of the season his decorations would scarcely have commanded the approval of those good English folk who think that no plant is genial unless it is prickly, and that prickly things represent appropriately to the eye the inward peace and good will that grows, like a cactus, perhaps within the heart. He did not put holly rigidly above his doors. No mistletoe drooped from the apex of the tentroom. Instead, he filled his flat with flowers, brought from English conservatories or from abroad. Crowds of strange and spotted orchids stood together in the drawing-room, staring upon the hurly-burly of furniture and ornaments. In the corners of the room were immense red flowers, such as hang among the crawling green jungles of the West Indies. They gleamed, like flames, amid a shower of cunningly arranged green leaves, and palms sheltered them from the electric rays of the ceiling. The tentroom was a maze of tulips, in vases, in pots, in china bowls that hung by thin chains from the sloping green roof. Few of these tulips were whole coloured. They were slashed, and striped, and spotted with violent hues. Some were of the most vivid scarlet streaked with black. Others were orange-coloured with livid pink spots, circus-pink, such as you see round the eyes of horses bred specially for the ring. There were white tulips, stained as if with blood, pale pink tulips tipped with deepest brown, rose-coloured tulips barred with wounds whose edges were saffron-hued, tulips of a warm wallflower tint dashed with the stormy yellow of an evening sky. And hidden among those scentless flowers, in secret places cunningly contrived, were great groups of hyacinths, which poured forth their thick and decadent scent, breathing heavily their hearts into the small atmosphere of the room, and giving a strange and unnatural soul to the tulips who had spent all their efforts in the attainment of form and daring combinations of colour. As if relapsing into sweet simplicity, after the vagaries of a wayward nature had run their course, Valentine had filled his hall and dining-room with violets, purple and white, and a bell of violets hung from the ceiling over the chair which the lady of the feathers was to occupy at dinner. These were white only, white and virginal, flowers for some sweet woman dedicated to the service of God, or to the service of some eternal altar-flame burning, as the zeal of nature burns, through all the dawning and fading changes of the world.

Thus Valentine passed his day among flowers, and only when the last twilight of the year fell had he fixed the last blossom in its place. Then he rested, as after six days of creation, and from the midst of his flowers saw the snow falling delicately upon London. Lights began to gleam in the tall houses opposite his drawing-room windows. He glanced at them, and they brought him thoughts at which he smiled. Behind those squares of light he imagined peace and good will in enormous white waistcoats and expansive shirt-fronts, red-faced, perhaps even whiskered, getting ready for good temper and turkey, journalistic geniality and plum pudding. And holly everywhere, with its prickly leaves and shining, phlegmatic surfaces.

Peace and good will!

He glanced at his orchids and at the red West Indian flowers, and he thought of those crawling green jungles from which they should have come, and smiled gently.

Peace and good will!

He went to dress.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, in the Marylebone Road the lady of the feathers achieved her toilet, assisted by Jessie. The only evening dress that Cuckoo possessed had been given to her long ago by a young man in the millinery department of a large London shop. For a week he had adored Cuckoo. During that week he had presented her with this tremendous gift. She went into her bedroom now, took it out and looked at it. The gown rustled a great deal whenever it was moved; this had been the young man's idea. He considered that the more a gift rustled, the more aristocratic it was, and, being well acquainted with all the different noises made by different fabrics, he had selected one with a voice as of many waters. Cuckoo heard it now as in a dream. She laid it down upon the bed and regarded it by candle-light. The young man's taste in sound found its equivalent in his taste in colour. The hue of the gown was also very loud, the brightest possible green, trimmed with thick yellow imitation lace. Once it had enchanted Cuckoo, she had put it on with a thrill to go to music-halls with the young man. But now she gazed upon it with a lack lustre and a doubtful eye. The flickering flame of the candle lit it up in patches, and those patches had a lurid aspect. Remembering that Julian had liked her best in black, she shrank from appearing before him in anything so determined. Yet it was her only dress for the evening, and at first she supposed the wearing of it to be inevitable. She put it on and went in front of the glass. In these days she had become even thinner than of old, and more haggard. The gown increased her tenuity and pallor to the eye, and, after a long moment of painful consideration, Cuckoo resolved to abandon these green glories. Once her mind was made up, she was out of the dress in an instant; time was short. She hurriedly extracted her black gown from the wardrobe, caught hold of a pair of scissors, and in a few minutes had ripped the imitation lace from its foundations and was transferring it with trembling fingers to Julian's gift. Never before had she worked at any task with such grim determination, or with such deftness; inspired by exceptional circumstances, she might for twenty minutes have been a practised dressmaker. Certainly, pins were called in as weapons to the attack; but what of that? Compromises are often only stuck together with pins. In any case Cuckoo was not entirely in despair with the new aspect of an old friend, and when she was ready was able at least to hope that things might have been worse.

Putting on over the dress a black jacket, she went out into the passage and called down to Mrs. Brigg, who, as usual, was wandering to and fro in her kitchen, like an uneasy shade in nethermost Hades.

"Mrs. Brigg! Mrs. Brigg, I say!"

"Well?"

"Where's the whistle?"

Mrs. Brigg came to the bottom of the kitchen stairs.

"What d' yer want it for?"

"A cab, of course," cried Cuckoo, in the narrow voice of one in a hurry.

"A cab!" rejoined Mrs. Brigg, ascending the dark stairs all the time she was speaking. "And what do you want with cabs, I should like to know? Who pays for 'em, that's what I say; who's to do it?"

Her grey head hove in sight.

"Where are you going? Piccadilly?"

"No; get the whistle."

"What—and no hat!"

She was evidently impressed.

"A toff is it?" she ejaculated, obviously appeased. "Well! so long as I get the rent I—"

With a white glare Cuckoo seized the whistle from her claw, and in a moment was driving away through the snow.

Mrs. Brigg trotted back to the kitchen decidedly relieved. Cuckoo's suddenly altered mode of life had tried her greatly. The girl had taken to going out in the day and staying at home at night. Simultaneously with this changed régime her funds had evidently become low. She had begun to live less well, to watch more keenly than of old the condition in which her commons went down to the kitchen and returned from it on the advent of the next meal. By various little symptoms the landlady knew that her lodger was getting hard up. Yet no amount of badgering and argument would induce Cuckoo to say why she sat indoors at night. She acknowledged that she was not ill. Mrs. Brigg had been seriously exercised. But now her old heart was glad. Cuckoo was, perhaps, mounting into higher circles, circles in which hats were not worn during the evening. And as Mrs. Brigg entered her nethermost hell she broke into a thin, quavering song:

"In 'er 'air she wore a white cam-eeiyer,
Dark blue was the colour of 'er heye."

It was her song of praise. She always sang it on great occasions.

When the lady of the feathers reached Victoria Street she found the little party already assembled. Valentine met her ceremoniously in the violet-scented hall and helped her to slide out of her jacket. His glance upon the imitation lace was quick and gay, but Cuckoo did not see it. She was gazing at the flowers, and when she entered the drawing-room and found herself in the midst of the orchids, the West Indian flowers and the palms, her astonishment knew no bounds.

"I never!" she murmured under her breath.

Then she forgot the flowers, having only time to remember to be shy. Dinner was immediately announced by Wade, whose years of trained discretion could not banish a faint accent of surprise from his voice. He was, in fact, bouleversé by this celebration of the death of the old year. Valentine offered Cuckoo his arm. She took it awkwardly, with a shooting glance of question at the doctor, who seemed her only spar in this deep social sea. Valentine placed her beneath the bell of violets, and took his seat beside her. Julian was on her other hand, the doctor exactly opposite. Wade presented her with hors-d'oeuvres. Cuckoo selected a sardine. She understood sardines, having met them at the Monico. Valentine and the doctor began to talk. Julian ate slowly, and Cuckoo stole a glance at him. His aspect startled her so much that she with difficulty repressed a murmur of astonishment. He had the appearance of one so completely exhausted as to be scarcely alive. Most people, however stupid, however bored, have some air, when in society, of listening even when they do not speak, of giving some sort of attention to those about them, or to the place in which they find themselves. They glance this way and that, however phlegmatically. They bend in attention or lean back in observation. It is seen that they are conscious of their environment. But Julian was engrossed with fatigue. The lids drooped over his eyes. His face wore a leaden hue. Even his lips were colourless. He ate slowly and mechanically till his plate was empty. Then he laid down his fork and remained motionless, his eyes still cast down towards the tablecloth, his two hands laid against the table edge, while the fingers were extended upon the cloth on either side of his plate. Cuckoo looked at him with terror, wondering if he were ill. Then, glancing up, she met the eyes of the doctor. They seemed to bid her take no heed of Julian's condition, and she did not look at him again just then. Trying to control her fears, she listened to Valentine's conversation with the doctor.

"Doctors are sceptics by profession," she heard him say.

"I believe in individualism too firmly to allow that any beliefs or unbeliefs can be professional, Cresswell."

"Possibly you are right," Valentine answered lightly. "What a pity it is that there is no profession of which all the members at least believe in themselves."

"Ah; would you enter it?"

"I scarcely think it would be necessary."

He glanced first at the doctor, then at Cuckoo as he spoke.

"I am thankful to say," he added in his clear, cool voice, "that I have no longer either the perpetual timidity of the self-doubter or even the occasional anxiety of the egoist."

"You have passed into a region which even egoism cannot enter."

"Possibly—the average egoism."

"The average egoism of the end of the century moves in a very rarefied air."

"Its feet touch ground nevertheless."

"And yours?"

Valentine only laughed, as if he considered the question merely rhetorical or jocose.

"But we are getting away from the question, which was not personal," he said. "I contend that doctors, as a body, are bound to combat these modern Athenians, who are inclined to attribute everything to some obscure action of the mind. For, if their beliefs are founded on rock, and if they can themselves sufficiently, by asceticism, or by following any other fixed course of life which they may select as the right one, train their minds to do that which they believe can be done, the profession of doctors may in time be abolished. Mind will be the universal medicine; will, not simply the cure, but the preventive, of disease."

"And of death?" the doctor asked quietly. "Will man be able to think himself into an eternity on earth?"

Valentine looked at him very strangely.

"You ask that question seriously?" he said.

"I ask seriously whether you think so."

It was evident that the doctor meant to make the question above all things a personal one. This time Valentine accepted that condition. He sat for a moment twisting his champagne-glass about in his long fingers, and glancing rapidly from the doctor to Cuckoo, who heard this conversation without very well understanding it. Indeed, she sat beneath her bell of violets in much confusion, distraite in her desire to command intellectual faculties which she did not possess. Valentine watched her narrowly, though he seemed unattentive to her. Perhaps he thought of his delivery of his gospel to her, and wondered if she recalled it at this moment; or perhaps once more he began to rejoice in her mental distress and alienation.

"Wade," he said "the champagne to Mr. Addison. Well, doctor, suppose I acknowledged that I did so—mind, I don't acknowledge it!—you might, on your side, think something too—that I am mad, for instance. Ah! Miss Bright has knocked over her glass!"

Cuckoo murmured a stumbling apology, gazing with nervous intentness at
Valentine. It seemed to her that he had a gift of divination. Doctor
Levillier laughed gently.

"I am not inclined to suppose all my opponents in thought mad," he said. "Still, such a belief would certainly indicate in the holder of it the possession of a mind so uncommon, so unique, I may say, that it would naturally rouse one to very close attention and observation of it."

"Exactly," Valentine rejoined.

A certain audacity was slowly creeping into his demeanour and growing while he talked. It manifested itself in slight gesticulations, conceited movements of the hand and head, in the colour of the voice and the blunt directness of his glances.

"Exactly. Attention and observation directed towards the object of satisfying yourself that the man—myself, let us say—was mad? You don't reply. Let me ask you a question. Why should a profound belief in human power of will indicate madness?"

"A belief that is not based on any foundation or proof—that is my point. An extraordinary belief, personal to one person, rejected by mankind in the mass, and founded upon nothing, no fact, no inference even, in the history of mankind, is decidedly a strong indication of dementia."

"But suppose it is a belief founded upon a fact?"

"Of course that would entirely alter the matter."

The two men looked across at one another with a long and direct glance full in the eyes. Cuckoo watched them anxiously. Julian sat with his eyes cast down. He seemed unaware that there was any one near him, any conversation going on around him. Wade moved softly about, ministering to the wants of his master's guests. Course succeeded course.

"Do you propose to give me a fact proving the reasonableness of entertaining a belief that a man, by his own deliberate action of the will, can compass immortality on earth, or even prolong his life in such a way as this, for instance; by the successful domination, or banishment, of any disease recognized as mortal?—For I acknowledge that the will to live may prolong for a certain time a life threatened merely by the sapping action of old age.—Do you propose to give me a fact to prove that?"

"I do not say that I intend to give it to you," Valentine answered, with scarcely veiled insolence.

"But you know of such a fact?" said the doctor, ignoring his host's tone.

"Possibly."

The voice of Valentine thrilled with triumph as he spoke the word. Again he glanced at the lady of the feathers.

"Cannot you convert the doctor?" he asked her, in tones full of sarcastic meaning. "You know something of my theories, something of their putting into practice."

"I don't know—I don't understand," she murmured helplessly.

She looked down at her plate, flushing scarlet with a sense of shame at her own complete mental impotence.

"What's the matter, Cuckoo?"

The words came slowly from the lips of Julian, whose heavy eyes were now raised and fixed with a stare of lethargic wonder upon Cuckoo.

"What are they saying to you?"

His look travelled on, still slow and unwieldy, to the doctor and to
Valentine.

"I won't have Cuckoo worried," he said. And then he relapsed with a mechanical abruptness upon the consideration of his food. Valentine seemed about to make some laughing rejoinder, but, after a glance at Julian, he apparently resigned the idea as absurd, and, turning again to the doctor, remarked:

"It is sometimes injudicious to state all that one knows."

"Still more so all that one does not know. But I have no desire to press you," the doctor said, lightly. "This is wonderful wine. Where did you get it?"

"At the Cercle Blanc sale," Valentine answered quickly.

It seemed that he was slightly irritated. He frowned and cast a glance that was almost threatening upon the doctor.

"Would you assume weakness in every strong man who refuses to take off his coat, roll up his shirt sleeve and display the muscle of his arm?" he said, harshly.

"The case is not analogous. That muscle exists in the world is a proved fact. When I was at Eton, I was knocked down by a boy stronger than I was. Since then I acknowledge the power of muscle."

"And have you never been knocked down mentally?"

"Not in the way you suggest."

Valentine shifted in his seat. It did not escape the doctor that he had the air of a man longing to either say or do something startling, but apparently held back by tugging considerations of prudence or of expediency.

"Some day you may be," he said at last, obviously conquered by this prompting prudence.

"When I am, the 'Christian scientist' who once declared to me that she cured a sprained ankle by walking on it many miles a day, and thinking it was well while she walked, shall receive my respectful apologies," the doctor answered, laughing.

Valentine handed the lady of the feathers some strawberries. On her nervous refusal of them he exclaimed:

"I see you have finished your wine, doctor. No more? Really? Nor you,
Julian?"

Julian made no reply. He simply pushed his glass a little away from him.

"Then shall we accompany Miss Bright into the tentroom? I thought we would have coffee there. You have never seen the tentroom," he added to Cuckoo, getting up from his seat as he spoke.

"I usually sit in it when I am alone or with Julian. You will not mind our cigarettes, I know."

He led the way down the scented corridor, scented with the thin, gently bright scent of violets.

"The tentroom has a history," he continued to Cuckoo, opening a door on the left. "It was once the scene of an—an absurd experiment. Eh, doctor?"

They entered the room. As they did so the hot, sticky scent of the hidden hyacinths poured out to meet them. For a moment it seemed overwhelming, and Cuckoo hung back with an almost unconquerable sensation of aversion and even of fear. The aspect of this small room astonished her; she had never seen any chamber so arranged. Certainly, it looked very unusual to-night. The small fire was hidden by a large screen of white wood, with panels of dull green brocade. Only one of the electric lamps was turned on, and that was shaded, so that the diffused light was faint, a mere unflickering twilight. The masses of tulips hung like quantities of monotonously similar shadows from the tented ceiling, and the flood of scent caused the room to seem even smaller than it really was, a tiny temple dedicated to the uncommon, perhaps to the sinister.

"We will see the old year out and drink our café noir here," said
Valentine. "Where will you sit, Miss Bright?"

"I don't mind. It's all one to me," murmured Cuckoo. "What a funny room, though!" she could not help adding. "It ain't like a room at all."

"Imagine it an Arab tent, the home of a Bedouin Sheik in a desert of Nubia," said Valentine. "This divan is very comfortable. Let me arrange the cushions for you."

As he bent over her to do so, he murmured in her ear:

"And you, having tossed your will away, are nothing!"

They had been the last words of his gospel, proclaimed to her that night on which she prayed!

The lady of the feathers looked up at him with a new knowledge, the knowledge of her recent lonely nights, of which he knew nothing as yet; the knowledge of that glancing spectre of want whom, by her own action, she summoned while she feared its gaunt presence; the knowledge of the doctor's trust in her; the knowledge of her great love for Julian; the knowledge, perhaps, that leaning her arms upon the slippery horse-hair sofa in her little room, she had once thrown a muttered prayer, incoherent, unfinished, yet sincere, out into the great darkness that encompasses the beginning, the progress, and the ending of all human lives with mystery. She looked up at him with this world of mingling knowledge in her eyes, and Valentine drew away from her with a stifling sensation of frigid awe.

"What—what?" he began. Then, recovering himself, he turned suddenly away.

"Sit down, doctor. Do you like my flowers? Julian, are you still tired? The coffee will wake you up. A cigarette, doctor, or a cigar? Here are the matches."

Julian came over heavily and sat down on the divan by Cuckoo. His unnatural lethargy was gradually passing away into a more explicable fatigue, no longer speechless. Leaning on his elbow, he looked into her face with his weary eyes, in which to-night there was a curious dim pathos. It seemed that the only thing which had so far struck him during the evening was still Cuckoo's confusion over her own misunderstanding at dinner, for he now again referred to it.

"Have they been chaffing you, Cuckoo?" he said, striking a match on the heel of his shoe and lighting a cigarette. "Have they been worrying you? Never mind. It's only Val's fun. He doesn't mean anything by it. I say, how awfully pale you look to-night, and thin."

He paused, considering her with a glance that was almost severe.

"I'm all right," said Cuckoo, trying to repress the agitation she always felt now when speaking to Julian. "I ain't ill. Why don't you come to see me now?" she added. "You don't never come."

Julian glanced over to Valentine, who was standing by the hearth talking to the doctor, who sat in an armchair.

"I've been busy," he said. "I've had a lot of things to do. Do you miss me, Cuckoo, when I don't come?"

"Yes," she replied, but without softness. Then she added, lowering her voice almost to a whisper:

"Don't he want you to come?"

Julian did not reply, but puffed rather moodily at his cigarette, glancing towards Valentine. He was thinking of the conversation at the Savoy and of the antagonism between Valentine and Cuckoo. Suddenly there came into his mind a dull wish to reconcile these two on the last night of the year, to—in Valentine's own words—bury the hatchet. He sat meditating over his plan and trying to revolve different and dramatic methods of accomplishing it. Presently he said:

"Cuckoo, you and Val have got to be friends from to-night."

She started, stirring uneasily on the great cushions that were heaped at her back.

"We are," she said.

He shook his head.

"Not real friends."

"Oh, we are all right."

"D'you hate him still?"

"He don't like me," she answered, evasively.

"Yet he invites you here," Julian said. "Why does he do that?"

"I dunno," Cuckoo said.

She wondered why. Not so the doctor, to whom it had become evident that Valentine had asked his guests out of vanity, and with a view to some peculiar and monstrous display of his power over Julian. While Cuckoo and Julian talked together on the divan Valentine came over to the doctor. His eyes still held an expression of awe created in him by the strange new glance of the lady of the feathers. He sought to conquer this sensation of awe, which fought fiercely against his intended blatant triumph of to-night.

"Your cigarette all right, doctor?" he said, in a quick voice.

"A delicious one, thanks."

Valentine began touching the ornaments on the mantelpiece with nervous fingers.

"We didn't quite finish our conversation at dinner," he said.

"No?"

"I did not give you a reason for my belief."

A deep interest woke in the doctor, but he did not show it. He thought:

"So, he must insanely return to this one subject, round which his brain makes an eternal tour."

"No," he said aloud; "you have a reason then?"

"Yes."

Valentine's voice vibrated with arrogance. His hand still darted to and fro on the mantelpiece while he stood looking down at the doctor. There was something in his manner that suggested a mixture of triumph and fighting anxiety in his mind. But, as he continued to speak, the former got the upper hand.

"A reason that might convince even you if you knew it."

"Convince me, of exactly what?" the doctor asked, indifferently.

His indifference seemed to pique Valentine, who replied with energy:

"That human will can be cultivated, has been developed, until it has moved the mountain, achieved the thing men call a miracle."

"By whom has it been so developed?"

Valentine hesitated almost like one who fears to be led into a trap. The doctor could see "By me!" trembling upon his lips. He didn't actually utter it, but instead exclaimed with a laugh:

"Some day you will discover."

And as he spoke he looked at Julian and the lady of the feathers. The doctor was anxious to lead him on, and leaning easily back in his comfortable chair, occupied himself with his cigarette for a minute, as a man calmly at ease. Between his whiffs he presently threw out carelessly:

"This man has compassed eternity by his own will?"

"Oh, I did not say that."

"He has contented himself with curing a sprained ankle by walking upon it, like my Christian scientist?"

"Now you fly to the other extreme—from the very great to the very little. Take a middle course."

"Where would that lead me?"

Valentine threw a glance round the dim, hot, scented little room, then once more his eyes rested on Julian and Cuckoo.

"What if I said—To this little room, to Julian and that girl, to myself?" he answered in a low voice.

"And the miracle?" said the doctor.

The door opened. Wade appeared with coffee.