CHAPTER III
THE HEALTH OF THE NEW YEAR
Valentine turned quickly, with an air of mingled irritation and relief at the interruption.
"We must all take coffee," he cried. "It will give us impetus, vitality, so that as the old year dies we may live more swiftly, more strongly. I like to feel that my life is increasing while that of another—the old year for instance—is decreasing."
But the doctor noticed that his eyes had rested with a curiously significant expression upon Julian as he spoke the last sentence.
"Leave the coffee-pot on that little table," he added to Wade, when the man had filled all four cups. "We may want it."
Wade obeyed him and disappeared.
"Your man makes wonderful coffee," the doctor said, sipping.
"Yes. Julian, have you reached that café noir I spoke of the other day?" Valentine asked laughingly, returning to his simile of the greedy man and happiness.
"I don't know. Not yet, Val, I think," Julian answered. This coffee seemed to give him life at last. The heavy weariness disappeared from his face. His eyes gleamed with something of their old youthfulness and ardour.
"If so, I must be close on happiness," he added.
As he spoke he looked into the hollow eyes of Cuckoo, seeming, strangely, to seek in them the will-o'-the-wisp of which he spoke.
"Never look for it in unfurnished rooms," Valentine exclaimed with sudden violence.
This glance of Julian, so the doctor judged, precipitated his curious and subtle insanity towards an outburst.
"You will find it in the thing that is most definite, not in the thing that is most indefinite. Isn't it so, doctor? Happiness lies in the positive, not in the negative."
"Happiness lies in many places. Each finds it in a different house."
"Perhaps you can't tell where I should find it, Val," Julian interposed, with a certain sturdiness of manner.
"No," said Cuckoo, eagerly.
The coffee, it appeared, had an effect upon her too. There was a life, a keen intentness in her thin, white face, not visible there before. Valentine turned round upon her. He was holding his coffee cup in his right hand. With the other he put his cigarette to his lips.
"Can you tell us where Mr. Addison is likely to find happiness?" he said.
"Can you tell us, lady of the feathers?"
"No. He can tell himself. That's all," she said. "Let him find it himself."
"Each for himself and God for us all, eh?"
"I don't know about God," she said, looking towards the doctor as if for assistance.
"Each for another and God for us all is perhaps a better motto," the doctor interposed.
"Ah, Charity!"
Valentine took out his watch and looked at it.
"Charity! Midnight is approaching, and, of course, this is Charity's benefit-night by common consent. Thank you, doctor, for the hint. Did the dying old year prompt you with its husky voice full of the wind and of the snow?"
"Possibly."
"Let us have some more coffee. Julian, give me Miss Bright's cup. You shall have your absinthe presently. Wade has not forgotten it."
"Absinthe?" said the doctor.
"Julian drinks it every night. He has got tired of whiskey. Doctor, your cup too."
"We shall not sleep a wink to-night."
"All the better. Why should not we see the dawn in, as we did once before? You recollect."
"Ah, Val! on the night of your trance."
"Yes. You were not here then, lady of the feathers."
He spoke with a light mockery.
"I fainted, or died—the doctor was deceived into thinking so—and was born again in the dawn of the very day on which Julian first met you."
Cuckoo shivered with the recollection of Marr and her horror of that night.
"Why do you shiver?" Valentine continued. "Do you find the room cold?"
"No, no."
Indeed, the heat and the overpowering scent of the hyacinths had previously weighed upon her physique, and increased the malaise into which her curious new dutifulness, and the faint spectre which drew near to her, had brought her.
"Perhaps you shiver in the influence of this little room," he continued, persistently. "Julian and I once did so. Eh, Julian?"
"Yes, in those sittings."
"I didn't shiver," Cuckoo said, bluntly and very obviously lying.
She quickly drank some more coffee.
"If you had, it might not have been astonishing," said Valentine. "For this little room has seen marvels, and strange things that happen perhaps stamp their strange impression upon the places in which they happen. We ought to discuss the occult, doctor, on the last night of the year."
"By all means."
"How long ago it seems!" Julian said suddenly, with a sigh.
"Yes," Valentine answered. "Because so much has happened in the interval.
The greedy man has eaten so many courses, Julian."
He seemed to take a delight in throwing out allusions to one and the other of his guests, allusions which nobody but the person addressed could understand rightly. For he now went on, addressing himself to Cuckoo:
"In this little room was committed the great act of brigandage of which
I once spoke to you. Do you remember?"
She shook her head.
"Never mind. But, though you cannot remember, that might make you shiver."
"What act of brigandage, Valentine?" Julian asked.
"Oh, the attempt—my attempt to seize upon a different soul."
"But you failed."
"Did I? Do you think so, doctor?"
His apparent audacity seemed to increase. In the twilight of the scented room he drew himself up as he stood by the brocaded screen that hid the fire. He closed and unclosed rapidly his left hand which hung at his side. His foot tapped the thick carpet gently.
"Did you not?" the doctor answered quietly.
But Julian was roused to vivacity.
"What do you mean, Valentine?" he said. "Of course you may have changed, or developed, or whatever you like to call it, since then. But to say you have got a different soul!"
"Is absurd? Yes, you are right. Because if I had got a different soul the original 'I,' that was dissatisfied with itself, must have ceased to be. Since the soul of a man—his will to do things, his will to feel things—is the man himself, if I had a different soul I should be another man. The former man would have ceased to be."
"Or would be elsewhere."
It was the doctor who spoke, and he spoke without special interest, simply expressing his thought of what might happen in so whimsical an event as that harped upon by Valentine. But Valentine seemed painfully struck by the almost idle words.
"Elsewhere!" he exclaimed, with a lowering expression. "What do you mean, doctor? What do you imply?"
The doctor looked at him surprised.
"Merely that a thing expelled is not necessarily a thing slain. If you turn me out of this room I am not certain to expire on the doormat."
Valentine broke into a nervous and uneasy laugh, and cast a quick glance all around him, and especially on Cuckoo, who sat listening silently with her eyebrows drawn together in a pent frown of puzzled attention.
"I see, I see," he said hastily. And here Julian broke in.
"But the whole thing's impossible," he said with a laugh.
"You would say so, doctor?"
Valentine addressed this question to Doctor Levillier in a very marked and urgent manner.
"You would say so, since the will of man cannot perform miracles?"
"Certainly, I should say so, despite the triumphs of hypnotism. A man may change greatly through outside influence, or perform occasional acts foreign to his nature under the influence of 'suggestion' or hypnotism. But I do not believe he can change radically and permanently, except from one cause."
The last words were spoken after a moment of hesitation. Valentine rejoined quickly:
"What? What? One cause, you say! You allow that—wait, though! What is the cause?"
Doctor Levillier was silent. He was asking himself should he play this forcing card, make this sharp, cutting experiment. He resolved that he would make it.
"A man may change radically," he said, "if he becomes insane."
A short breath, like a sigh, came from Cuckoo. Valentine stood quite still, regarding the doctor closely for a moment. Then he said contemptuously:
"Mad! Oh, madmen don't interest me."
The doctor had gained nothing from his experiment. It was impossible to gather from Valentine's manner that he was in any way struck by this suggestion, and indeed he abandoned all allusion to it with careless haste, and returned to that other suggestion of which the doctor himself had thought nothing.
"Supposing the soul of a man to be expelled," he said, abruptly, "where—where do you suppose it would go, would be?"
It was obvious that he endeavoured to speak lightly, but there was a most peculiar anxiety visible in his manner. The doctor wondered from what cause it sprang.
"I have never formed a supposition on that matter," he said.
"Well—well—try to form one now. Yes, and you, Julian, too."
He did not address himself to the lady of the feathers, but he looked at her long and narrowly. The doctor lit another cigarette. He seemed to be seriously considering this odd question. Julian, whose lethargy was changing into an almost equally pronounced excitement, was not so hesitating. As if struck by a sudden flashing idea, he exclaimed:
"How if it was in the air? How if it was wandering about from place to place. By God, Val!" he cried, with emphasis, "do you know what I read in a book I took up from your shelves the other day—something about souls being like flames? It was in Rossetti: Flames!"
He turned to Cuckoo and stared into her eyes.
"I was half asleep when I read it," he said. "Why should I remember it now? That flame—I saw that flame months ago." He seemed like a man puzzling something out, trying to trace a way through a tangled maze of thought that yet might be clear. "It came from you, Val, that night, with a cry like a lost thing. A soul expelled, did you say?"
Suddenly his face was set in an awestruck gravity.
"Why—but then, if so, that flame would be you. Valentine, the flame that seemed to haunt me, that I have seen in—"
He looked at Cuckoo again and was silent.
"Yes, Julian?" Valentine said in a hard, thin voice. "Go on, I am listening."
Julian stared at him with strong excitement.
"And what are you, then, Valentine? Where do you come from?" he said slowly.
"From Marr."
The words came from the divan, from the dry lips of Cuckoo. Doctor Levillier knew not why, but he was thrilled to the very soul by them, as by a revelation throwing strong light upon the depths of things. Whether it was the influence of this strange scented room, in which strange things had happened, or the influence of the hour and the climax and death of the year, or a voice in his heart speaking to him with authority, he could not tell. Only he knew that on a sudden all his guiding reason, all his knowledge, all his cool contemplation of the physician and common sense of the man, were swept entirely away. His theory of insanity seemed in a moment the theory of a dwarf intellect trying to stick wretched, absurd pins through angels—white or black—that it thought butterflies. His conversation with Cuckoo on the Hampstead Heights seemed the vain babble of a tricked and impotent observer. His mind fell on its knees before the mind of the lady of the feathers. Reason was stricken by instinct. The confused feeling of the woman had conquered the logical inferences of the man. From that moment the doctor secretly abandoned the old landmarks which had guided him all his life, and entered into a new world—a world in which he would not have dreamed of permitting any of his patients to walk if he could help it. A strange magic floated round him like a mist blotting out the crude familiarities of the normal world. The tentroom, with its shadowy tulips, its scented warmth, its pale twilight, its quick silences when voices ceased, was a temple of wonder and a home of the miraculous. And those gathered in it, what were they? Men and a woman? Bodies? Earthly creatures? No. To his mind they were stripped bare of the clothes in which man—governed by decrees of some hidden power—must make his life pilgrimage. They were stripped bare and naked of their bodies. They were warm, stirring, disembodied things—they were flames leaping, waving, contending, aspiring. And he remembered the night when he sat alone in the drawing-room of Valentine, and saw the red walls glow, and the light deepen, and saw the stillness grow to movement, and the shadows come away from their background, and take forms—the forms of flames. Was that night a night of prophesy? Were those flames silent voices speaking to the ear of his mind? He looked around him like a man in a strange country, who takes a long breath and liberates his soul in wonder. He looked around, and the shadowy, thin girl leaning forward on the divan, with one arm outstretched as if she gave a message, was among the other flames as a flame upon an altar. At least his instinct had not played him false with regard to her. He knew it now. In the wild and sad streets, where feet of men tread ever, where tears of women flow ever, grow flowers of Paradise, strange flowers, leap flames from the eternal fires of heaven. And the voice of Cuckoo thrilled him as the voice of revelation.
Valentine turned upon the lady of the feathers, hearing her cry.
"Marr!" he said, "your lover who died! Ah!"
The brutality of the remark was so unexpected, so savage, that it struck all those who heard it like a whip. Cuckoo shrank back among her cushions trembling. Julian made a slight forward movement as if to stop Valentine. The doctor laid his hands on the arms of his chair and pressed them hard. He felt a need of physical energy. In the sudden silence Valentine touched the electric bell. Before any one spoke it was answered by Wade, who carried a tray on which stood various bottles and glasses.
"We must counteract the exciting effects of our café noir," Valentine said, addressing his guests in a group. "Otherwise we shall be strung up to a pitch of tension that will make us think the requiem of church bells, which we shall hear in a few minutes, the voices of spirits or of spectres. Julian, here is your absinthe. What will you drink, Miss Bright? Brandy, lemonade, whiskey?"
"Lemonade, please," Cuckoo said, almost in a whisper.
The tears were crowding in her eyes. She dared not look Julian in the face. Never before had her past risen up before her painted in such grim and undying colours. The reprise of Valentine had been as the reprise of a Maxim gun to a volley fired by a child from an air-tube. So Cuckoo felt. But how greatly was she deceived! Perhaps physical conditions played a subtle part in the terrible desolation that seized her now, after her outburst of daring and of excitement. The warmth and smallness of the room, the penetrating scent that filled it, even the movements of her companions, the sound of their voices, suddenly became almost insupportable to Cuckoo. She was the victim of a reaction that was so swift and so intense as to be unnatural. And in it both her mind and body were bound in chains. Then she was petrified. Her very heart felt cold and cramped, and then hard, icy, inhuman. Her tears did not fall, but were dried up in her eyes, like dew by a scorching sun. She looked at Julian, and felt as indifferent towards him as if he had been a shadow on the grass in the evening time. Then he became remote, with a removedness attained by no shadow even. For a shadow is in the world, and Julian seemed beyond the world to Cuckoo. She thought, even repeated, with tiny lip-movements, the cruel words of Valentine, and they seemed to her no longer cruel, or of any meaning, bad or good. For they came from too far away. They were as a cry of shrill music from a cave leagues onward beyond the caves of any winds.
Valentine poured out some lemonade and gave it to her. She accepted it mechanically. She even put it to her lips and drank some of it. But her palate was aware of no flavour, no coolness of liquid. And she continued sipping without tasting anything.
Meanwhile Julian was saying to Valentine:
"I don't think I'll take any absinthe to-night. Give me some lemonade too."
"Lemonade for you? Nonsense. I ordered the absinthe specially. You must have some. Here it is."
As he spoke he poured some of the opalescent liquid into a tumbler and handed it to Julian. While he did so his eyes were on the doctor and they gleamed again with a sort of audacity or triumph. He seemed recovering himself, returning to his former mood and veiled intentions. And Doctor Levillier thought he saw the flame of Valentine's soul glow more deeply and fiercely. The three men, as if with one accord, ignored the lady of the feathers at this period of the evening. Valentine, having shot his bolt, left his victim to shudder in the dust. Julian and the doctor, full of pity or of wonder, were drawn instinctively to leave her for the moment outside of the circle of intimacy, lest the conflict should be renewed. They did not know how far outside of it she felt; how dim the twilight was becoming to her eyes; how dim the voices to her ears. She lay back on her pillows, in the shadow of the divan, and they supposed her to be listening, as before, to what they said; to be drawing into her nostrils the scent of the hyacinths, and into her soul—it might be—some fragments of their uttered thoughts. But for the moment they seemed to put her outside the door.
Julian did not protest against the absinthe. He took it and placed it on a little table beside him, and as he talked he occasionally drank a little of it, till his glass was empty. Valentine had again looked at his watch.
"The flame of the year is flickering very low," he said.
This simile of the flame of the year, so ordinary, he had spoken against his will. He asked himself angrily why he had said flame, and again the doctor saw the flame of Valentine's soul trying to leap higher, to aspire to some strange and further region than that in which it seemed to dwell. Julian sat looking at Valentine with a gaze that was surely new in his eyes, the dawning gaze of inquiry which a man directs upon a stranger just come into his life. He had not alluded in any way to Cuckoo's startling and vehement interposition. Valentine had killed that conversation with one blow, it seemed. They buried it by deserting it. Yet the thought of it was obviously with them, making quick interchange of words on another subject difficult. Valentine had seized again on the poor, prostrate year; yet he carried even to it the memory of that which seemed to encompass them as with a ring of fire, and that despite himself.
"We shall hear the bells directly," he added. "I hate bells at night.
They will sound odd in this room."
"Very odd," the doctor said.
"We ought to sit reviewing our past year," Valentine went on.
"Our past year and all it has done for us."
"Do you think it has done much for you, Addison?" the doctor asked. And, despite his intention, there was a certain significance in his tone.
Julian looked rather grave and moody, yet excited too, like a man who might burst into either gaiety or anger at a moment's notice.
"I suppose it has," he answered. "Yes, more than any year since I was quite a boy."
"It has taught you how to live," Valentine said quickly.
"Or how to—die," the doctor could not resist saying.
"Why do you say that, doctor?" Valentine asked sharply. "Julian is neither sick nor sad; are you, Julian?"
"Oh, I don't know. Don't bother about me."
But Valentine seemed suddenly determined that Julian should state in precise terms his contentment with his present fate.
"You are making your grand tour towards happiness," he exclaimed.
"Dessert, café noir—then the cigarette and contentment."
"I have had the café noir," Julian said, indicating his empty cup, which Wade had by accident omitted to clear away. "I have had the cigarette."
"Well. What then? Are you unhappy?"
"I tell you I don't know. Give me some more absinthe."
The doctor watched his excitement growing as he drank. It seemed an excitement adverse to Valentine.
"One may have too much black coffee," he suddenly said.
"And that exerts a very depressing effect upon the nerves," said the doctor, taking him literally. "Neither you nor I are likely to sleep well to-night, Addison."
"I never sleep well now, doctor," Julian said.
All this time he continued to regard Valentine in the peculiar, observant manner of a stranger who is trying to make up his mind about the unfamiliar man at whom he looks.
"Then you should not drink black coffee."
As he spoke a very faint sound of bells penetrated to the tentroom.
"The psychological moment!" said Valentine.
And then they were all silent, listening.
To the doctor, the prey of magic art since the soft cry of the lady of the feathers, the bells seemed magical and strange to-night, thin and dreamy and remote. They rang outside the circle of the flames, yet they, too, had an eerie meaning. Nor did their music come, he thought, from any church tower, from any belfry, summoned by the tugging hands of men. Very softly they rang. Their sound was deadened by the thick draperies. They ceased.
"My year is born," Valentine said.
"Your year?" the doctor repeated.
"Yes. I feel that in this year I shall culminate; I shall touch a point; I shall put the corner-stone to the temple of my ambition. No one can prevent me now, no one. Look, she has fainted!"
He had been watching Cuckoo, and had seen her posture of mere rest change, almost imperceptibly, to the prostration of insensibility.
The doctor sprang up from his chair. Julian uttered an exclamation. Valentine only smiled. The door was opened. A fan was used. Air was let into the room. Presently Cuckoo stirred and sat up. The three men were gathered round her, and suddenly Valentine said:
"My trance over again. The lady of the feathers imitates me."
Julian turned round to him with abrupt irritation.
"That's not so," he said. "Cuckoo is herself always." He turned again to her.
"Are you better?" he asked, touching her hand gently.
"Yes, I'm all right. It was—them."
She glanced vaguely round at the tulips, as if searching for the cause of the scent which filled the room.
"There are hyacinths somewhere," the doctor said.
"Yes, they are hidden!" said Valentine. "A hidden power is the greatest power. But now you may see them."
And he drew from a nook, guarded by some large ferns, a pot of red hyacinths.
Cuckoo sat up and drank a little brandy, which the doctor gave to her.
Some colour came into her pale and thin cheeks.
"I'm as right as ninepence now," she said, with an effort after brightness.
The bells began again.
"What's that?" she asked. "Not New Year, is it?"
"Yes," answered Valentine. "A happy New Year to you, lady of the feathers."
Julian was struck by a sudden thought.
"Val," he said, "Cuckoo, I want you to be real friends this year."
He caught hold of Valentine's hand and placed it in Cuckoo's. But then, again, a bewilderment seemed to take hold of him, for even as he touched Valentine's hand he looked at him askance, and the eagerness died away from his face.
"I don't know," he muttered to himself, and getting up from the end of the divan, where he had been sitting, he moved away towards the fire, leaving Cuckoo's hand in the hand of Valentine.
Valentine smiled coldly on Cuckoo.
"Lady of the feathers," he said, "we are to be allies."
"What's that?" she asked, pulling her hand away, directly Julian had turned his back upon them.
"When people fight together against a common enemy they are allies."
"Then we ain't," she whispered, "New Year or not."
"You defy me," he said, raising his voice so that the doctor might hear the words.
"Yes," she said.
"Doctor, do you hear?"
He seemed suddenly bent on forcing a quarrel. Doctor Levillier felt again that sense of dread and horror which had attacked him now more than once of late in Valentine's presence. This time the sensation was so acute that he could scarcely combat it sufficiently to reply.
"I hear," he murmured.
"Julian!" Valentine called. "Julian, come here. Miss Bright wishes to tell you something."
Julian turned round.
"Now, lady of the feathers!"
But Cuckoo burst into a shrill little laugh. Her head was spinning again.
"I've nothing—nothing to say," she cried out. "Give me some more brandy."
"Very well. Let us all drink to the health of the New Year."
Valentine filled the glasses—Julian's with absinthe—and gave the toast:
"The New Year!"
They all raised their glasses to their lips simultaneously. One fell with a crash to the ground and was broken. It was Julian's.
"I won't drink it," he said, doggedly, looking at Valentine.
There was a silence. Then Valentine said, calmly:
"Have you an animus against the thing you don't yet know?"
It was sufficiently obvious that he alluded to the year just coming in upon London. But the words were taken by the doctor, and apparently by Julian, in a hidden and different sense.
"Perhaps because I don't yet know it thoroughly, and had thought I did," Julian answered, staring him full in the face still with that strange glance of mingled interrogation and bewilderment.
Valentine watched him.
"You are treating the poor thing—and my carpet—scurvily, Julian," he said. "And you have startled Miss Bright."
Cuckoo's eyes were shining.
"No," she ejaculated.
Valentine rang the bell and directed Wade to collect the fragments of glass. While the man was doing so silence again reigned, and the little room seemed full of uneasiness. Only Valentine either was or affected to be nonchalant. As soon as Wade had gone he said to the doctor:
"This room is destined to be dedicated to strange uses, and to influence those who come within it. Julian is not himself to-night."
"Are you?" Julian asked.
"Myself?"
"Yes."
"My dear Julian, we shall be forced to think the absinthe has been at work too busily in your brain. What is the matter?"
"Nothing."
"One would think we had been having a sitting, you are so excited."
Julian suddenly drew his breath sharply, as if struck by a shot of an idea.
"Let us have one," he cried.
The distant bells rang faintly. The doctor thrilled to the suggestion, still bound by magic, surely. For now, since the inspiring exclamation of Cuckoo, which had broken his theories on the wheel and swept his reason like a dead flower along the wind, he no longer condemned, as a danger only, that which had produced the trance from which, as from a strange prison, had come the new Valentine. The former sitting had, it seemed, beckoned that trance, and with the trance had beckoned an incredibly evil and powerful thing. What if that which had the power to give had also the power to take away? Often it is so in ordinary conditions of life. Why not also in extraordinary conditions? So his thoughts ran, fantastically enough, to the sound of the far-off bells.
"A good notion," he said on the spur of the moment and this quick reflection.
"You think so?" said Valentine. "You who condemned us, even wrung a promise from us against sitting."
His regard was suspicious.
"Perhaps I have changed my mind. Perhaps I take the matter less seriously," said the doctor.
He had never been more near lying, nor was he ashamed of his dissimulation. There are creatures against which we must, whatever our principles, take up the nearest weapon that comes to hand. The doctor looked at Julian and at Valentine, and could have perjured himself a thousand times to wrest the one from the other.
"But Miss Bright is ill," said Valentine.
"No, I ain't. I'm all right now," Cuckoo said.
She did not understand what was being proposed, but she gathered that the doctor desired it. That was enough for her. Valentine looked at them all three with eyes that plainly betokened a busy mind, then a smile flickered over his lips. It was the smile of one in power watching his slaves creeping at their work—for him. He touched the point—of which he had spoken earlier in the evening—in that smile, a point of delirium.
"Let them try to break me," his mind said within itself. "Their very trial shall consolidate my empire."
And then his eyes left the others and rested only on Julian.
"Very well, we will sit," he said.