CHAPTER V
JULIAN FEARS THE FLAME
Although Cuckoo knew well that Julian carried out his intention of going home after he left her in Piccadilly, the fact of his being there, of his making one of that crowd, that slowly-moving crowd, troubled her. Valentine and Julian had argued the question of her real feeling about the matter. Cuckoo did not argue it. She never deliberately thought to herself, "I feel this or that. Why do I feel it?" She knew as much about astronomy as introspection, and that was simply nothing at all. Instead of diving into the depths of her mind and laboriously tracing every labelled and tabulated subtlety to its source, she sat in the squalid Marylebone Road sitting-room, with the folding doors open into the bedroom to temper the heat of summer with draughts from the frigid zone of the back area, and babbled her sensations to Jessie, who riggled in response to every passing shadow that stole across the heart of her mistress.
Jessie had learned much about Julian in these latter days. Into her pricked and pointed ear, leaf-shaped and the hue of India-rubber, had been whispered a strange tale of the dawning of love in a battered heart, of the blossoming of respect in a warped mind. She had heard of the meeting in Piccadilly, of the meal at the Monico, of the farewell on the kerbstone. And she alone knew—or ought to have known—the mingling of intense jealousy and of a grander feeling that burned in Cuckoo's breast whenever she thought of Julian's life, the greater part of it that lay beyond her knowledge, her sight, or keeping.
For the lady of the feathers, in most things a strange mixture, had never driven two more contrasted passions in double harness than those which she drove around the circle of which Julian was the core, the centre. One was a passion of jealousy; the other a curious passion of protection. Each backed up the other, urged it to its work. It would have been a hard task, indeed, to tell at first which was the greater of the two. Cuckoo neither knew nor cared. She did not even differentiate the two passions or say to herself that there were two. That was not her way. She felt quickly and strongly, and she acted on her feelings with the peculiar and almost wild promptitude that such a life as hers seems to breed in woman's nature. It is the French lady of the feathers who scatters vitriol in the streets of Paris, the Italian or Spanish lady of the feathers who snatches the dagger from her hair to stab an enemy. The wind of Cuckoo's feelings blew her about like a dancing mote, and the feelings awakened by Julian were the strongest her nature was capable of.
Only Jessie knew that at present, unless indeed Valentine had divined it, as seemed possible from his words to Julian.
And these twin passions were fed full by the peculiar circumstances of Cuckoo's relation to Julian, and by the depth of her knowledge concerning a certain side of life.
She went home, that night of their meeting, very late, and in the weariness of the morning succeeding it, and of many following mornings, she began to brood over the change in Julian that she had intuitively divined. Her street-woman's instinct could not be at fault with a boy. For Julian was little more than a boy. She knew that when she first met him, when they made toast together on the foggy afternoon that she could never forget, Julian was unshadowed by the darkness that envelopes the steps of so much human nature. Lively, bright, full of youth, strength, energy, as he was, Cuckoo knew that then he had been free from the bondage of sense which demands and obtains the sacrifice of so many lives like hers. And she knew that now he was not free from that bondage, and that she, by an irony of fate, had, with her own hands, fastened the first fetter upon him.
Valentine had plotted that.
Cuckoo's belief said so; but surely her curious instinct against
Valentine must have tricked her here!
It was this knowledge of her unwilling action against Julian's peace that first woke in her the strong protective feeling towards him, a feeling almost akin to the maternal instinct. It was her strange love for him that prompted the fiery antagonism against his relations with others that could only be called jealousy. And though one of her passions was noble, the other pitiable, they could but work together for the same end, aim at a similar salvation.
Yet how could any salvation for a man come out of that dreary house in the Marylebone Road, from that piteous rouged agent of the devil?
Cuckoo never stopped to ask such a question as that. She was a girl, and she began to understand love. She had no time to stop. And each passing day soon began to give fresh vitality to the vision of Julian's need.
Between him and her there had sprung up on the ruins of one night's folly a tower of comradeship. Its foundations were not of sand. Even Cuckoo, despite her ceaseless jealously, felt that. But, after all, she had only come into his life as a desolate waif drifts into a settled community. She was neither of his class, his understanding, or his education. She was in the gutter; in the gutter to an extent that no man, as women feel at present, can ever be. And though through her inspiration he had not to come into the gutter to find her and to be with her, yet she sometimes writhed with the thought that he was so far above her. Nevertheless, her position never once tempted her, in the struggle that the future quickly brought with it, to shrink from effort, to fail in fight, to despair in endeavour for him.
There are flames that burn the dross from humanity and reveal the gold.
There are flames in the eyes and in the hearts of women.
* * * * *
Julian's visits to Cuckoo were irregular but fairly frequent. He always came in the afternoon, an hour or two before the psychological moment of her start out for the evening's duty. Sometimes he would take her out to tea at a small Italian restaurant near Baker Street Station. More often they would make tea together in the little sitting-room, with the ecstatic assistance of Jessie. And Rip, Valentine's dog, generally made one of the party. He and Jessie got on excellently together, and devoutly shared the scraps that fell from the Marylebone Road table. The first time that Julian brought Rip to number 400, Cuckoo fell in love with him.
"Why, you never said you had a dog," she exclaimed.
"Rip's not mine," Julian answered.
"Isn't he? Whose is he?"
"Valentine's."
"Then why d'you have him with you?" asked Cuckoo, suddenly and rather roughly pushing away Rip, who was swirling in her lap like a whirlpool.
"Oh, he's taken a stupid dislike to Valentine," Julian answered thoughtlessly. "He won't stay with him."
In a moment Cuckoo had caught the little dog back.
"That's funny," she said.
"Yes, isn't it?" said Julian.
Then, seeing her thoughtful gaze, and the odd way in which she suddenly caressed the dog, he was angry with himself for having told her anything about the matter.
"Rip's a little fool," he said. "Perhaps Jessie will take a dislike to you some day, Cuckoo."
"Not she, never!" said Cuckoo, with conviction. And, after that, she could never spoil Rip enough.
These visits and teas ought to have been pleasant functions, bright oases in the desert of Cuckoo's life, but a cloud fell over them at the beginning and deepened as the days went by. For Cuckoo, with her sharpness of the gamin and her quick instinct of the London streets, was perpetually watching for and noting the signs in Julian's face, manner, or language, that fed those two passions of jealousy and of protection within her. And, at first, she allowed Julian to see what she was doing.
One day, as they sat at the table in the middle of the room, Julian said to her:
"I say, Cuckoo, why d'you look at me like that?"
"Like what?"
"Why d'you stare at me? Anything wrong?"
"I wasn't staring at you," she asserted. "The sun gets in my eyes if I look the other way."
"I'll draw the blind down," he said.
He got up from the table and shut the afternoon sun out. The tea-tray, the photographs, the little dogs, they two, were plunged in a greenish twilight manufactured by the sun with the assistance of the Venetian blind.
"There," Julian said, sitting down again, "now we shall all look ghostly."
"But if I do take a fancy to look at you, why shouldn't I, then?" Cuckoo asked.
"I don't mind," he laughed. "But you didn't seem pleased with me, I thought."
"Rot!"
"Oh! you were pleased, then?"
"I don't say as I was, or wasn't."
"You're rather like the Sphinx."
"What's that?"
"Enigmatic."
She didn't understand, and looked rather cross.
"I told you I wasn't looking at you," she exclaimed pettishly.
"Then you told a lie," Julian said, with supreme gravity. "Think of that,
Cuckoo."
"And what would you ever tell me but lies if I was to ask you things?" she rejoined quickly.
Julian began to see that there was something lurking in the background behind her show of temper. He wondered what on earth it was.
"Why should I tell you lies?" he said.
"Oh! to kid me. Men like that. You're just like the rest, I suppose."
"I suppose so."
She seemed vexed at his assent, and went on:
"Now, aren't you, though?"
"I say, yes."
"Well, you usen't to be," she exclaimed, with actual bitterness of accent and of look. "That's just why I was lookin' at you,—for I was lookin',—makin' out the difference."
"I'm just the same as I was," Julian said, and he spoke with quite sincere conviction.
"No, you ain't."
Having uttered this very direct contradiction, Cuckoo proceeded with great energy:
"You've been lettin' him do it. I know you have."
Julian was completely puzzled.
"What do you mean?" he asked, with a real desire for information.
"You know well enough. He's leadin' you wrong."
Julian reddened with a sudden understanding. Her words touched him in his sorest place. In the first place, no man likes to think he has been doing a thing because he has been led by some one else. In the second, Julian had grown ardently to dislike Cuckoo's unreasoning antipathy to Valentine. Originally, and for some time, he had believed that she would get over it. Finding later that there was no chance of that, he had once told her that he could not hear Valentine abused. Since that day she had been careful not to mention his name. But now her bitterness against him peeped out once more, and seemed even to have been gathering force during the interval.
"Cuckoo, you're talking great nonsense," he said, forcing himself to speak quietly.
But she was in one of her most mulish moods, and was not to be turned from the subject or silenced.
"No, I ain't," she said. "Where was you last week? You didn't come in once."
"I was in Paris."
Cuckoo's brow clouded still more. Her knowledge of Paris was not intimate, and, indeed, was confined to stories dropped from the lips of men who had been there for short periods, and for purposes the reverse of geographical or artistic. Julian's mention of the French capital drove a sword into her.
"With him?" she exclaimed.
"Yes, with Valentine."
"Oh, what did you do there?"
She spoke with angry insistence, and Julian could not help thinking of Valentine's remark, "That girl loves you." It seemed indeed that Cuckoo must have some deep and wholly personal reason prompting her to this strange demonstration of vexation.
"I can't tell you everything," Julian answered.
"Oh, you can't kid me over that. I know well enough what men go to Paris for!" she rejoined, with almost hysterical bitterness.
Julian was silent. It was curious, but this girl stirred his conscience from its sleep, as once Valentine alone could stir it. But by how different a method! The stillness and calm of one who was sinless were replaced by the vehemence and the passion of one who was steeped in sin. And yet the two opposites had, to some extent, the same effect. Julian did not yet realize this thoroughly, and did not analyze it at all. Had any one hinted to him that the waning influence of Valentine for good could ever be balanced by the waxing influence of the lady of the feathers, he would have laughed at the crazy notion. And in the first place he would have denied that Valentine's spell upon him had changed in nature; for Valentine was still as a god to him. And Cuckoo could never be a goddess, either to him or to any one else. But, though he would scarcely acknowledge it even to himself, he did not care for Cuckoo to know fully the changing way of his life. Perhaps it was the curiously strong line she had from the first taken with regard to his actions that made him careful with her. Perhaps it was the incident of the vision of the flame—but no; remembrance of that had been well-nigh lulled to sleep by the lullabies of Valentine, by his disregard of it, his certainty that it was an hallucination, a mirage. Whatever the cause might be, Julian felt somewhat like a naughty boy in the angry presence of Cuckoo. As he looked at her the greenish twilight painted a chill and menacing gleam in her eyes, and made her twisting lips venomous and acrid to his glance. Her rouge vanished in the twilight, or seemed only as a dull, darkish cloud upon her thin and worn cheeks. She sat at the table almost like a scarecrow, giving the tables of some strange law to a trembling and an unwilling votary.
"I know!" she reiterated.
Julian said nothing. He did not choose to deny what was in fact the truth, that his stay in Paris had not been free from fault, and yet he did not feel inclined to do what most men in his situation must by all means have done, challenge Cuckoo's right to sit in judgment, or even for a moment to criticise any action of his. There was something about her, a frankness perhaps, which made it impossible to put her out of court by any allusion to her own life. And indeed that must have been cowardice and an impossibility. Besides, she put herself and her own deeds calmly away as unworthy and impossible of discussion, as things sunk down beneath the wave of notice or comment, remote from criticism or condemnation, because the life of their hopelessness had been so long and sunless.
Cuckoo, with her eyes on Julian, was silent, too, now. She understood that what her suspicion had affirmed, without actually knowing, was true, and her stormy heart was swept by a whirlwind of jealousy, and of womanish pity for the man she was jealous of. In that moment she felt a sickness of life more sharp than she had ever felt before, and a dull longing to be a different woman, a woman of Julian's class, and clever, that she might be able to do something to keep him from sinking to the level of the men she hated.
How could she, in her nakedness of permanent degradation, give a helping hand to anybody? That was a clear rendering of the vague thought, vague as this twilight in which they sat, that ran through her mind. Suddenly she turned to the tray and poured herself out a cup of tea. The tea had been standing while they talked, and was black and strong. She drank it eagerly, and a wave of nervous energy rushed over her, surging up to her brain like light and electricity. It gave to her a sort of reckless valour to say just the thing she felt. She turned towards Julian with a manner that was half shrew, half wildcat—street girls cannot always compass the impressive, though they may feel the great eternities nestling round their hearts—and cried out:
"I just hate you!"
All her jealousy rang in that cry, smothering the whisper of the maternal passion that went ever with it. Julian could no longer doubt the truth of Valentine's words.
"Cuckoo, don't be silly," he said hastily, and awkwardly enough.
"Silly!" she burst out. "What do I care for that? I ain't silly, either, and I ain't blind like you are. I can see where you're goin'."
"I shall go away from here," Julian said, trying to laugh, "if you talk in this ridiculous way."
She sprang up and ran passionately in front of the door, as if she thought he was really going to escape.
"No, you don't," she said, and her accent seemed to draw near to that of
Whitechapel as her voice rose higher. "Not till I've said what I mean."
"Hush, Cuckoo! We shall have Mrs. Brigg up, thinking I'm murdering you."
"Let her come! And you are, that's what you are, murderin' me, and worse, seein' you go where you're goin'. He's takin' you. It's all him. Yes, it is! He'll make you as he is."
"Cuckoo, I won't have it."
Julian spoke sternly and got up. The little dogs, alarmed by the tumult, had begun to whine uneasily, and at his movement Jessie barked in a thin voice. Julian went to Cuckoo, took her wrists in his two hands, and drew her away from the door; but she tore herself from his grasp with fury, for the touch of his hands gave a clearer vision to her jealousy of his secret deeds, and made her understand better the depth of her present feeling.
"You shall have it," she cried. "You shall. I know men. I know what you'll be. I know what women'll make of you."
"A man makes himself," Julian interrupted.
"Rot! That's all you know about it. I've seen them begin so nice and go right down, like a stone in a well. And they never come up again. Not they. No more'll you. D'you hear that?"
"I shall hear you better if you speak lower."
Cuckoo suddenly changed from a sort of frenzy to a violent calm.
"You're different already," she said. "Can't I see it?"
As if to emphasize her remark she approached her face quite close to his in the twilight. While they had been arguing a cloud had passed over the sun, and dimness increased in the little room. Both of them were still standing up, and now Cuckoo peered into Julian's eyes with almost hungry scrutiny. Her lips were still trembling with excitement and her mouth was contorted into a sideways grin, expressive of contemptuous knowledge of the descent of Julian's nature. She was a mere mask of passion, no doubt a ridiculous object enough, touzled, dishevelled and shaken with temper, as she leaned forward to get a better view of him. And Julian was both vexed and disgusted by her outbreak, and sick of a scene which, like all men, he ardently hated and would have given much to avoid. He faced her coldly, endeavouring to calm her by banishing every trace of excitement from his expression.
And then, in the twilight of the dingy room, and in the twilight of her eyes, he saw the flame once more. A thin glint of sunshine found its way in from the street, and threw a shadow near them. Cuckoo's eyes emitted a greenish ray like a cat's, and in this ray the flame swam and flickered, cold and pale, and, Julian fancied, menacing.
Perhaps, because he was already irritated and slightly strung up by Cuckoo's attack, he felt a sudden anger against the flame, almost as he might have felt a rage against a person. As he stared upon it, he could almost believe that it, too, had eyes, scrutinizing, upbraiding, condemning him, and that in the thin riband and shade of its fire there dwelt a heart to hate him for the dear sin to which, at last, he began to give himself. For the moment Cuckoo and the flame were as one, and for the moment he feared and hated them both.
Abruptly he held up his hand to stop the further words that were fluttering on her thin and painted lips.
"Hush!" he said, in a little hiss of protest against sound.
For again, fighting with the anger, there was awe in his heart.
There was something unusual in his expression which held her silent, a furtive horror and expectation which she did not understand. And while she waited, Julian turned suddenly, and left the room and the house.