CHAPTER IV
THE SIXTH SITTING
Julian was painfully excited, but he strove to repress all evidences of his inward turmoil as he began to pull out a table and arrange it in the centre of the room. This act threw him with a jerk back into the days of the past, recalling so vividly the former life of himself and Valentine that he could not help saying:
"This is like last year."
"Like the year that the locust hath eaten," Valentine answered. "We must push our empty white years down into the water, Julian."
Julian made no reply. The table was soon arranged, the screen was drawn more closely round the fire, which had been allowed to burn low. Four chairs were set. Valentine turned to Cuckoo, who sat hunched on the divan staring with wide open eyes at these preparations.
"Will you come?" he said, with his hands on the back of one of the chairs.
"Whatever are we going to do?" she asked nervously.
"Something very simple—and perhaps very foolish," said the doctor, wondering, indeed, now the moment for beginning the phantasy was arrived, whether he was not to blame for encouraging a thing that in his under mind he so thoroughly disapproved of. "We are going to sit round that table in the dark with our hands upon it, and wait."
"Whatever for?"
Her simple and blatant question caused the doctor actually to blush. His confusion was quite obvious, but it was covered by Julian, who exclaimed, rather roughly:
"Now, Cuckoo, don't chatter, but come here and sit quiet."
He drew her from the divan into a chair and sat down beside her.
Valentine glided swiftly into the chair on her other side and said:
"Oh, doctor, I forgot the light. Do you mind turning it out?"
The doctor obeyed, felt his way to the chair opposite Cuckoo and sat down.
Almost at the moment he turned out the light the bells that rang, "Le roi est mort, vive le roi," ceased. Cuckoo was directed to lay her hands on the table, and to touch with her fingers the fingers of her companions. She did so, trembling. This was a new experience to her, and her entire lack of knowledge of what was expected to happen filled the darkness with immoderate possibilities, and her soul with awe and with confusion. Then, to sit between the man she loved and the man she loathed, thus in the blackness, was a nerve-shaking experience which her preceding fainting-fit did not deprive of its normal terrors. The hand of Valentine and the hand of Julian were as ice and as fire to her. The darkness seemed crowded with nameless things. She could fancy that she heard it whisper incessantly in her ear.
But the real interest of this sitting, to any little demon gifted with a miraculous power of pushing its detective way into the minds of the sitters, would have lain, perhaps, chiefly in the mind of Doctor Levillier. It has been said that, suddenly struck to the soul by the conviction with which the instinctive Cuckoo pronounced those words, "From Marr," Doctor Levillier entered into a new world, abandoning old landmarks. He remained in this new world of the senses certainly, but already he was becoming accustomed to it, clear-headed, keen-sighted, even reasonable in it. Moved by some strange conviction that he was in the presence of an inexplicable mystery, he no longer tried to explain it in some ordinary fashion. He abandoned his theory of insanity, or it abandoned him. In any case, it was dead, buried, whether he would or no. He recognized a mystery at present beyond his capacity to understand or to explain. Having got thus far, and having entered, at Julian's word, into this present circumstance of sitting, table-turning, or rapping, or whatever you may choose to call it, he cleared any ordinary furniture of doctor's prejudices right out of his mind—made a clean sweep of them. That done—and the doing of it required some strong effort—his mind was receptive, ready for anything, odd or ordinary, that might come along. There he sat with his empty room waiting to be filled—the only reasonable way of waiting for that of which we have no knowledge. He did not clamour "I won't," or "I will." He said nothing at all, only waited with the strict desire and intention of recognizing things to be what they truly were, neither dressing them up nor tearing their garments off their backs. When he put out the light and sat down, what he expected—so far as he expected anything—was this, that the addition of darkness would add a cloud to his mind, and endeavour to give various finishing-touches to any spurious excitement created in him, however much against his will, by the enemy's doings. In this expectation he was entirely deceived. The falling of darkness drew a veil from his mind, leaving his mental sight singularly, even preternaturally, clear. The falling of silence gave an amazing acuteness to his inner sense of hearing. Certain people are so made that they can, under certain conditions, and at certain moments, hear the workings of their neighbours' minds, as you and I can hear the whirr of machinery, or the cry of a child in the street. An ordinary man or woman can only hear a mind when lips, teeth, and tongue utter it with living sounds that set the air in vibration. These abnormal people hear, in these abnormal moments, the silent murmurs of the mind making no effort at all to utter itself through the usual speech apparatus. Till this moment the doctor had supposed himself to be an entirely normal man, but he had been sitting only a very short time before he began to become aware of the silent murmurs of these three minds around him. The darkness set his own mind free from clouds of excitement and from mists of unreason. That was the first step. But it did more. It developed in him this marvellous faculty of the hearing of silence, called by some divination. All his senses were rendered amazingly acute. A perfectly distinct impression of the precise feelings of Cuckoo, of Valentine, and of Julian respectively came to him as he sat there, although he could neither see nor hear them. Each of them seemed to pour his or her thoughts into the doctor's mind. Thus, at first, did his empty room become furnished with the thoughts of his companions. He was sitting in the circle between Julian and Valentine and held their hands. And it was Valentine who forged the first link in this strange chain of unuttered communication. As the darkness cleared the doctor's mind, and set him once more on his feet—although in a new world—an aroma of triumph floated to him softly, like a scent in a damp wood at night. He heard then the mind of Valentine murmuring in the stillness the Litany of its glory, a long and an ornate Litany, deep and full, and he knew that he had been right in supposing that Valentine had invited him to witness that glory. But the doctor became aware, too, that at moments the Litany faltered, hesitated, as if the mind of Valentine grew uncertain or was assailed by vague fears. And these fears ran like little pale furtive things to Valentine from the lady of the feathers. By degrees the doctor could imagine that he actually saw them stealing back and forth. Now one would come alone as if to listen to the Litany, and then another would follow, and another, and, growing brave, they would combine against it. Then Valentine would waver and become uneasy, as one who hears little voices crying against him in the night, and knows not whence they come or from whom. But the Litany would begin again, and Valentine would triumph over the pale fears and they would shrink away. And in the Litany one name recurred again and again—the name of Julian. Over him was the triumph. In his ruin and fall and ultimate destruction the glory lived. To witness the complete possibility of this ruin, the complete sovereignty of this glory, the doctor and the lady of the feathers were there. And the doctor grew to feel that only some outside circumstance, alarming Valentine to anxiety and waking Julian to a new observation, had hindered the intended triumph. What circumstance was that? He looked back along the past evening and found it in himself, in his theory that a soul expelled was not necessarily a soul dead. The rift in the glory of the Litany came with that. Valentine was trying to close it by this act of sitting, to impress the strength of his will upon his companions in the darkness. The doctor felt his effort like a continually repeated blow, stealthy and hard and merciless.
And now, in the darkness and in the silence, the doctor heard the mind of Julian. Another scent floated through that imagined damp and breathing wood from another—but how different—soul-flower. No Litany of triumph murmured in the blackness where Julian sat, but a hoarse and broken solo, part despair, part fear, part anger, and all perplexed and flooded with bewilderment and with excitement. The doctor drew into him the murmur of Julian's mind until it seemed to become, for the time, the murmur of his own mind. He was conscious of a dreadful turmoil of doubt, and dread and perplexity, so strong, so painful, that it lay upon him like a dense and a suffocating burden. In that moment he knew utterly that the greatest load in the world laid on any man is the load of his own, perhaps beloved, sin. He was staggering wearily with Julian away from the light. His eyes were dim—with the eyes of Julian. His ears, like Julian's, were assailed with the dastard clamour of the calling sin. "Listen! Listen! you want me. I am here. Take me! Take me!" And the weltering seas of heavy flooding impotence rolled round him as they rolled round Julian. He grew numb and vacant and inert, then—alive ever to the murmur of Julian's mind—caught a glimpse, through the waters of that whelming sea, of far-away light, and heard that the voices of the importunate sins grew fainter. But whether the voices were loud or low, whether the seas flowed above his head or sank and failed, he was always conscious of the dominating mood of almost wild perplexity and a madness of bewilderment. For Julian stirred under the yoke that Valentine had laid upon him, as if at last conscious distinctly that it was indeed a yoke, and that it galled him; as if at last conscious, too, that without that yoke was freedom. And he shot against Valentine in the darkness arrows of inquiry. But always he lived in doubt and almost in terror.
And then, detaching himself from the triumph, touched with anxiety, of Valentine, and from the wild turmoil of Julian, Dr. Levillier opened the door of his mind wide, and the lady of the feathers entered in.
He heard the thoughts of a woman.
That was strangest of all—the most fantastic, eerie, wayward, wonderful music the doctor had dreamed of.
Have you listened to far-off and mingling melodies at night—melodies of things opposed and differing, yet drawn together, in strange places far from your home? Have you heard a woman wailing over some abominable sorrow in a dark house, and an organ—before which filthy children dance fantastically—playing a merry Neapolitan tune in front of it, while the mutter of scowling men comes from the blazing corner where the gin-palace faces the night? There you have sorrow, sunshine, crime, singing together in a great city. Or have you stood in a land not your own, and gleaned the whisper of an ancient river, the sough of a desert wind, the hoarse and tuneless song of a black man at a waterwheel, the soprano ballad of a warbling hotel English lady, and the remote and throbbing roar of a savage Soudanese hymn and beaten drums from the golden Eastern night? There you have nature, toil, shrill civilization and war claiming you with one effort in a sad and sweet country. Or have you, in a bright and dewy morning, heard the "murmur of folk at their prayers," the drone of a church organ, and, beyond the hedgerow, two graceless lovers quarrelling, and an atheist, leaning over the church gate, sneering to his fellow at the devotion of deluded Sabbath-keepers? There you have love of the hidden and faith, love of the visible and distrust, hatred of hidden love and faithlessness, making a symphony for you. Such mingled music is strange—strange as life. But to the doctor the music of this girl, Cuckoo, in the dark seemed stranger and more eerie far. Her mind sang to him of a thousand things in a moment, as is the fashion of women. Only men normally hear but one, at most two or three, of the many feminine melodies. And now Doctor Levillier heard them all, as a man may hear those differing songs already recounted, simultaneously and clearly. Degradation and the hopelessness that catches it by the hand, passion and the strength and purity of passion, hatred, fear, physical fatigue, ignorant nervousness, grossness of the gutter, which will cling even to a soul capable of great devotion and noble effort, and accompany it on the upward journey, very far and very high, resolve and shrinking, mere street-boy virulence of enmity, and mere angel tenderness of pity—all these sang their song from the mind and heart of Cuckoo to the mind and heart of the doctor. It was a chorus of women in one woman, as it so often is in the dearest women we know. In that choir a harlot sat, hating, by a girl who was all love and reverence. And they sang out of the same hymn-book. Jenny joined her voice with Susannah, Mary Magdalene with Mary Mother, so near together in one thing, so far apart in another—alike in this, that both were singing. And in that choir—celestial and infernal—sang the jealous woman with grey cheeks and haggard eyes, and the timorous woman, and she of the fearless face, and the woman who could scale the stars for the creature she worshipped, and the woman who could lie down in the mud and let the world see her there, and the woman who had sold her soul for food, and a thin woman, such a thin, almost transparent, wistful creature, who was facing the thing men call with bated breath—starvation. She sang too, but, of all these women, she was the only one the doctor could not rightly hear nor rightly see. For she, as yet, was remote, far down the level line of that choir, hardly perhaps one with it yet, faint of voice, dim of outline.
The doctor heard the choir sing, and then—
His mind, as the time of the darkness grew longer, continued to grow more and more clear, until he felt thoroughly, and was able to try to analyze its unnatural condition. Scales had fallen from him and from his companions for him. Their bodies were clothed, their souls, their flames, seemed stripped bare and offered to him naked. He had examined them with this greedy, yet sane, attention and curiosity. He had led them into the empty room and stayed with them there. He had heard the Litany of the Glory of Valentine, and the suffocation, and the anger, and the stirring beneath his yoke of Julian. He had heard the many women sing in the heart of the lady of the feathers. But all this seemed leading him forward and onward, step by step, as to a threshold beyond which was some greater, some more importunate, thing. And he took the last step with Cuckoo. It was as if he was handed on from one room to another, as is the fashion in the palace of a great king, his name being called in each, and sent before, like a voice sent on the wind, and as if Cuckoo was in the last anteroom that gave upon the audience-chamber. Now he had arrived, and suddenly a great wave of mysterious expectation ran over him and filled the cup of his soul. He felt that he stood still and waited. The sense of Cuckoo, of all she felt and thought in the darkness, gradually dropped away from him, like leaves from a tree, till every branch was leafless. And this autumnal ravishment, like the ravishment of nature, was but a preparation surely for a future spring.
The doctor waited outside that door, beyond which, perhaps, spring blossomed and sang. He lost at last all sense of being in a company of people, and felt as one feels who is entirely alone, expectant, calm, ready. And still only the darkness and the silence. Nothing more at first. But presently what seemed to him a marvel.
He had by this time grown at ease with his power of thought-reading, at ease with this new sense of the hearing of silence. The differing scents of these three flowers hidden in the night had been breathed out to him. With infallible certainty he had recognized each one, differentiated the one from the other. And as the scent of one flower had failed, the scent of another had risen upon him, until he had known the heart of each of the three. Then for a while was the night scentless, silent, blank, empty. But presently the doctor was aware of an uneasiness and of an anxiety stealing upon him. Whence it came he could not tell. Only this he knew, that he received it from something, but that it came neither from the lady of the feathers, from Valentine, nor from Julian. From whom, then, could it emanate, this weird eagerness, this fluttering, pulsing fear, and hope, and intention? From himself only? He asked himself that question. Was he communing in the dark with his own soul? He knew that he was not. The scent of this new and unknown flower grew stronger in the night, more penetrating and intentional. Yet was it vaguer, more distant, than that emitted by those other three flowers. The exact impression received by the doctor at this moment was very subtle. Precisely it was this: It seemed to him that he was gradually coming into communication with a fourth mind, or soul; that this soul was actually more strong, more vehement, even more determined, than the souls of his three companions, but that some barrier removed it from him, set it very far of. The flame of a match held to a man's eyes may dazzle him more than the flame of a great fire on the horizon. This new flame was as the latter in comparison to match-flames that had been flaring in the doctor's eyes. And this great and distant flame burned slowly in a smoke of mystery and upon the verge of dense darkness.
Never had the doctor known so peculiar, and even awe-striking, an experience as that which he now underwent. What utterly bewildered him was the circumstance of this undoubted new and definite personality enclosed in this tiny room with him and with his three companions. He was receiving the impression of the thoughts of a stranger. Yet there was no stranger in the chamber. And he was vexed and curiously irritated by the fact of the impression being at the same time very vague and very violent, like the cry of a man which reaches you faintly from a very long distance, but which you feel instinctively to have been uttered with the frantic force of death or of despair. And the mind of this stranger was tugging at the doctor's mind, anxiously, insistently. There was a depth of distress in it that was as no mere human distress, and that moved the doctor to a mood beyond the mood of tears or of prayers. There came over him an awful sense of pity for this stranger-soul. What had it done? How was it circumstanced? In what ghastly train of events did it move? It was surely powerful and helpless at the same time; a cripple with a mind on fire with fight; Samson blind. He felt that it wanted something—of him, or of his companions, some light in its severe desolation. Deeper and deeper grew his horror and pity for it, deeper and deeper his sense of its ill fate. The woe of it was unearthly, yet more than earthly woe. Similes came to the doctor to compare with its dreadful circumstance: a child motherless in a world all winter; a saint devoted to hell by some great error of God; even one more blasphemous, and more bizarre still—God worsted by humanity, and, at the last, helpless to reclaim the souls to which He had Himself given being; lonely God in a lonely heaven, seeing far-off hell bursting with the countless multitudes of the writhing lost. This last simile stayed with him. He fancied, he felt—not heard—the voice of this frustrate God calling to him: "Do what I could not do. Strive to help My impotence. A little—a little—and even yet hell would stand empty, the vacant courts of heaven be filled. Act—act—act."
"Doctor, why are you trembling? Why are you trembling?"
It was the voice of Valentine that spoke. The doctor, by an effort so painful that the memory of it remained with him to the end of his life, recalled his mind from its journey.
"Trembling!" he said. "What do you mean? I am all right. I am quietly in my place. How long have we been sitting?"
"An immense time I fancy. It seems fruitless, Julian!"
"Yes."
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.