CHAPTER V
DOCTOR LEVILLIER VISITS THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS
Julian's utterance about the flame that held him with the lady of the feathers struck Dr. Levillier forcibly at the time it was made, and remained in his mind. He could not fail to connect it with his own experience in Valentine's empty room, and, going further back, with the last sitting of the two young men which was succeeded by the long trance of Valentine. And as he thought of these things, it suddenly occurred to him that the ghastly change which had taken place in Valentine might well date from that night. Since the death of Rip the doctor had formed the opinion that Valentine was no longer perfectly sane. His excitement, the fury of his eyes when he spoke of the triumphs of will, seemed to give the clue to his transformation. The insane perpetually glorify themselves, and are transcendent egoists. Surely the egoism of insanity had peeped out in Valentine's diatribe upon the eternity of a strong man's individual will. The night of the trance had been a strange crisis of his life. He had seemed to recover from it, to come back from that wonderful simulation of death healthy, calm, reasonable as before. This might have been only seeming. In that sleep the sane and beautiful Valentine might have died, the insane and unbeautiful Valentine have been born. There are many instances of a sudden and acute shock to the nervous system leaving an indelible and dreary writing upon the nature. If Valentine had thus been tossed to madness, it was very possible that his dog, an instinctive creature, should recognize the change with terror. It was even possible that other instinctive creatures should divine the hideous mind of a maniac hidden in the beautiful body of an apparently normal man. And Cuckoo, she too was instinctive, a girl without education, culture, the reading that opens the mind and sometimes shuts the eyes. Cuckoo Bright, she had divined the evil of Valentine. To her he had made confession. In her eyes Julian had seen the mysterious flame. Some influence from her had kept him from his invited guests and from his house. Yes, Cuckoo, the lady of the feathers, the blessed damozel of Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus, the painted and possessed, faded and degraded, wanderer of the pavements, seemed to become the centre of this wheel of circumstances, as Doctor Levillier reflected upon her.
It was time for him to go to Cuckoo. Julian's descent must be stayed, before he went down, like a new Orpheus without a mission, into Hades. Valentine's influence, whether mad or sane, must be fought. It was to be a struggle, a battle of wills, of what Valentine chose to consider souls. And some prompting led the doctor to think of Cuckoo as a possible weapon. Why? Because she had even once held Julian against his will, against the intention of his soul.
So the doctor at length sought the lady of the feathers. She had been passing through a period of great and benumbing desolation, believing that her last appeal, her great effort for Julian, had been a failure. For the doctor had not come to her, and Cuckoo could not tell that he was making observations for himself and that she was often in his mind. She supposed that he, like all others, laughed at her pretensions to gravity, swept her exhibition of real and honest emotion away from his memory with a sneer, considered her despair over another's ruin a vile travesty, a grinning absurdity and trick. Never had Cuckoo felt more lonely than in these days, though a vast loneliness is the constant companion of her large sisterhood. Even Jessie failed to comfort her, and she could find little courage within herself. And yet there were moments when the vigour that had led her once to defy Valentine, when the fire that had sprung up in her, as a flame may burst forth in a swamp, seemed to be near to her again. She felt a new possibility within her, stirring, striving. It was at such moments that she longed to see the doctor, and could have cursed him for not coming to her. For at such moments she seemed only waiting for a touch of sympathy, a word of encouragement, to perform some great action, some momentous deed. But the touch, the word, were lacking, and her life and experience of constant and monotonous degradation dulled the impulse, stifled the enthusiasm that she could not understand. And she fell again to brooding, and to an ignorant and vague consciousness of impotence.
She bought a new hair-dye, painted her thin cheeks more heavily than ever before, and sought, almost with a wild exultation that swiftly fled away, to sink lower.
The monotony of sin is one of the scourges of sin. In those days Cuckoo suffered many stripes. Her eyes grew more weary, her smile in Piccadilly more mechanical, her walk more puppet-like than ever. Life was like a moving dream of horror. And yet no day passed without a gleam of that strange sensation of ignorant power, fluttering upward, fading away, pausing, passing, dead.
She did not know what it meant. She could not keep it nor use it. She could not unravel its message nor rest upon its strength. It was gone almost while it came, but it did something for the lady of the feathers. It gave to her the little seed of expectation that, quite alone in a weary desert, yet makes of that desert the plot men call a garden. Like a thread of steel, it held up this girl from the uttermost abyss, until at last the doctor's hand struck upon her door.
Julian's occasional visits were as the scourgings of God, giving to Cuckoo a vision of shifting ruin, in which she—so she told herself, thinking of the dance of the hours—had been the first to have a share.
It was a wintry afternoon when the doctor came. Frost clung stealthily round the grimy black trees, outlining their naked boughs with meagre lines of white sewn with smuts. Above the frost hung the fog as if in charge of the town, a despondent and gloomy sentinel. During the morning the sun had lain in the fog like a faint blood-red jewel in a thick and awkward sulphur setting, but with the afternoon the jewel faded to a distant dim phantom, from that to blank nothingness. As if satisfied with this piteous exit, the fog drew closer, keeping especially heavy watch upon the long and bleak line of the Marylebone Road, and taking the high and narrow house in which Cuckoo dwelt under its severest protection. Twilight wanted to come as the afternoon drew on, but it had been forestalled and was practically already there. Doubtless it did come, but no one was much the wiser. The lamps had been alight all day, and no procession of gloomy things, advancing from whithersoever, could have added much to the volume of the crowding darkness, or have appreciably increased its density. In the darkness the cold gathered, and the frost began to take a harder grip of everything,—of desolate, solitary pumps in tiny and squalid back yards, of pipes that crawled like liver-coloured snakes over the unpresentable sides of houses, of pools thick with orange-brown mud, and vagrant bushes creaking above the grimy earth in places that children named gardens.
Fog and frost had taken a strong grip, too, upon the heart of the lady of the feathers. Somewhere about eleven o'clock in the morning she had stirred wearily in her bed, had stretched out her arms to the stagnant air of the room, and crouched up on her pillow in a grotesque hump. For a while the hump remained motionless. Then Cuckoo rolled round and extended a bare thin leg to test the atmosphere. The leg was quickly withdrawn, the atmosphere having been evidently tried in the balance and found wanting. Cuckoo's bell rang, and Mrs. Brigg was called for tea and toast, while once more the hump decorated the upper part of the disordered bed. Jessie, awakened in her basket at the foot of the bed, joined the hump, whining a greeting, and wriggling furiously in an effort to tunnel her way to the ultimate depths of sheets and blankets. Then Mrs. Brigg, of yellowish and bleak aspect, beneath a tumbled appurtenance that she called a cap, appeared with a tray.
"Going to stop abed?" she asked, in a husky voice, in which the smuts seemed floating.
"Yes. What's there to get up for?" Cuckoo groaned.
"Nothun' as I know of."
And Mrs. Brigg was gone about her business.
All the morning Cuckoo lay staring at the blank square of the window, and Jessie snored under the blankets. The tea was drunk, the toast lay about in fragments. One bit, hard and many cornered as it seemed, somehow gained entrance to the bed, and greeted Cuckoo's every movement with uncompromising grittiness. No shaking of coverlet and sheet, no beating of pillow, no kicks and scufflings could expel it. The bed seemed full of hard bits of toast, and Cuckoo felt as if an additional burden were laid upon her by this slight evil. But, indeed, the horror of her existence reached a culminating point to-day,—a point of loneliness, vacant dreariness, squalor, and degradation that could not be surpassed. The preceding night had been peculiarly horrible, and as Cuckoo now lay on the tumbled bed, in the dim, cold room, with the fog gazing in, the leaden hours of winter crawling by, she felt as if she could bear no more. She could bear no more addition to her sick weariness; no more addition to her useless hunger of love for Julian, that could never be crowned with anything but despair; no more addition to her bodily fatigue, born of tramping monotony succeeded by yet more enervating weariness of the flesh. She could bear no more. Yes, but she must bear more. For Cuckoo knew that she was not dying, was not even ill. She was only tired in body, prostrate in heart, deserted in life, and forced to witness the quick and running ruin of the man she had the farcical absurdity to love. Imaginative, for once, in her morbid fatigue, she began to wish that she could fade away and become part of the fog that lay about London, be drawn into its murkiness, with all her murky recollections, her fiendish knowledge, her mechanical wiles of the streets, her thin and ghostly despairs and desires. For they seemed thin and ghostly, they too, to-day, fit food for the fog, as indeed the whole of her was. How could such as she evaporate into sweet air, a clear heaven?
She caught at the hand-glass, leaning far out on the bed, as the blessed damozel o'er the bright bar of heaven, and tried to see, with staring eyes, how the new hair-dye that she was now using became her. Her mind was vagrant, coming and going miserably, from that love of hers which was strangely strong and subtle, to the powder-box with its arsenic-green lid, or the rouge-pot of dirty white china. And by each event it paused and sank, as if benumbed by the increasing frost. Leaning again to put back the hand-glass she fell over too far and dropped it. The glass fell face downwards and was smashed. Cuckoo laughed aloud, revelling feebly in the additional misery a superstitious mind now began to promise her. The fragments of broken glass actually pleased her, and, on a sudden, she resolved to set her feet in them, that she might be cut and wounded, that she might bleed outwardly as she had been bleeding inwardly for so long. She swung her legs over the breadth of the bed, disorganizing Jessie, planted her feet in the array of glass and stood up. As she did so the doctor mounted her doorstep, plied the knocker and rang the bell. Cuckoo stood listening. A fragment of glass had really penetrated the bare sole of her foot, which bled a little gently on the carpet. But she scarcely knew it. She heard Mrs. Brigg go by, and then steps sounding in the passage. Then there came to her ears a quiet voice with a very characteristic note of bright calmness in it. Standing in her frilled nightdress among the bits of glass, Cuckoo flushed scarlet all over her face and neck. She knew who the visitor was. With one dart she reached the washhand-stand. Sponges, brushes, combs, all her weapons of the toilet, were immediately in commotion, and when Mrs. Brigg opened her door, the room was a whirlpool of quick activities, in the midst of which, as on a frouzy throne, Jessie stood upon the bed barking excitedly. Mrs. Brigg came in and closed the door. Her thin lips were pursed.
"Light the fire!" Cuckoo called at her from the basin.
"What do you want the doctor for?"
Mrs. Brigg uttered the words with some suspicion.
"Hurry up and light the fire!"
Cuckoo turned round, her hands darting in her hair, and actually laughed with a touch of merriment.
"You old owl! He's not come to doctor me, only to see me."
Mrs. Brigg looked relieved, but still surprised.
"Oh," she said. "That's it, is it?"
She paused as if in consideration.
Suddenly Cuckoo sprang on her, twisted her round, and spun her out into the cold passage. "Light the fire, I tell you!"
She banged the bedroom door and went on with her rapid toilet.
When she came into the sitting-room an uneasy fire was sputtering in the grate, one gas-jet flared, and Doctor Levillier was standing by the window looking out at the fog. He turned to greet her.
"I thought you'd forgotten—or didn't mean to come," Cuckoo said; "they often do—people that say they will to me, I mean."
The doctor held out his hand with a smile.
"No. Am I interrupting you?"
"Me!" said Cuckoo, in amazement, thinking of her empty days. "Lord, no."
Her accent was convincing. The little doctor sat down by the fire and put his hat and gloves on the table.
"Mrs. Brigg thought I was ill—you bein' a doctor," Cuckoo said, with an attempt at a laugh. She felt nervous now, and was not sustained today by the strung-up enthusiasm which had supported her in Harley Street. "Funny there bein' a fog again this time, ain't it?"
"Yes. I hope we shall meet some day in clear weather."
As the doctor said that, following a tender thought of the girl, he glanced round the room and at Cuckoo. "I hope so," he repeated. Then, rather abruptly:
"Two or three nights ago I went to dine with Mr. Addison. He was out. He was here with you."
Cuckoo got red. She could still be very sensitive with a few people, and perhaps Mrs. Brigg and her kind had trained her into irritable suspicion of suspicion in others.
"Only for a friendly visit," she said hastily. "Nothin' else. He would stop."
"I understand perfectly," the doctor said gently. Cuckoo was reassured.
"Did he say as he'd been?"
"Yes."
Cuckoo looked at the doctor and a world of reproach dawned in her eyes.
"I say," she said, "you haven't done nothin'. He's worse than ever. He's gettin'—oh, he's gettin' cruel bad."
Tears came up over the world of reproach.
"It's all him, all Valentine," she said.
And Doctor Levillier was moved to cast reticence, the usual loyalty of one man to another who has been his friend, away. Somehow the dead body of Rip lying in the snow put that old friendship far off. And also an inward thrill caught him near to Cuckoo. An impulse, swift and vital, thrust his mind to hers.
"You are right," he answered. "I believe that it is all Valentine."
"There! Didn't I tell you?" Cuckoo cried with eyes of triumph. "It's been him from the first. Oh, get him—get Julian away."
The doctor laid his hand upon Cuckoo's, which was stretched upon the tablecloth, very gently, almost abstractedly.
"Will you tell me something?" he said.
"What's it?"
"You love Julian?"
"Me!" the lady of the feathers said.
Her voice trembled over the word. She stole a hasty, hunted glance at the doctor. Was he, too, going to jeer at her? Would no one allow her to have a clean corner in her heart?
"You're laughin' at me. What's the good of such as me doin' a thing like that—lovin' a man?"
"I think you must love Julian. If you do, perhaps you are meant to protect and save him."
A secret voice prompted the doctor with the words he spoke, gave them to him, bent him irresistibly to repeat them. Never before had he felt what it is to be between the strong hands of destiny.
"Me! Me save any one!" Cuckoo said, trembling.
"Yes, you. There is something in you—I feel it and I can't tell you why, nor what it is—something that has hold of Julian. He told us so the other night. Don't you know what it is?"
"Eh?"
"Perhaps he feels that you love him—purely, cleanly."
"I do—oh! I do that!" Cuckoo cried.
A wonder as to the relations between Julian and this girl shot through the doctor. He was the last man in the world to think evil of any one, but just then, as Cuckoo moved, the gaslight struck fully on her. The dye on her hair shone crudely. The red and white of her face burned as on the face of a clown. And then even the doctor's good heart wondered. Cuckoo knew it in an instant, and her face hardened and looked older.
"Oh, go on," she said rudely. "Think as the others do. Damn you men! Damn you! Damn you!"
And without warning she put her head down on the table and broke into a wild passion of tears. She sobbed, and as she sobbed she cursed and clenched her hands. She lost herself in fury and in despair. The Fates had stung her too hard this time, and she must blaspheme against them with her voice of the streets, her language of the streets, her poor heart—not quite of the streets. The Fates had stung her too hard, for they had put a flaw even in this one self-respect of hers. That one night accused her whenever she thought of Julian, whenever she saw the dissipation deepen round his eyes. She was not to have even one thing that she could be quite proud of; not one thing of which she could say, "This has been always pure." And then she turned on the doctor and cried:
"Go on—think it—think it! Think what you like! But I'll tell you the truth. There was only once I did him any harm, and that wasn't my fault. I never wanted to. I hated it. I told him I hated it. I didn't want him to be that, like the others. And that was Valentine, too. And now—just because of that I'm no use. And you'd said I might be, you'd said I might be."
"And I say you shall be."
The wail died in Cuckoo's throat. The tears were arrested as by a spell. Dr. Levillier had got upon his feet. All the truth and tenderness of his heart was roused and quickened. He knew real passion, real grief, and from that moment he knew and trusted the lady of the feathers. And by the strength of her bitterness, even by the broken curses that would have shocked so many of the elect of this world, he measured the width and the depth of her possibilities. She had sent to damnation—what? The vile cruelty, the loathsome, unspeakable, dastardly mercilessness of the world. To damnation with it! That was the loud echo in his man's heart.
"That one night is nothing," he said. "Or rather it is something that you must redeem. It is good to have to pay for a thing. It is that makes one work. There is a work for you to do, a work which I believe no one else can do. You love Julian. Love him more. Make him love you. My will cannot fight the will of Valentine over him. No man's will can. A woman's may. Yours may, shall."
His pale, small, delicate face flamed with excitement as he spoke. Few of his patients looking upon him just then would have known their calm little doctor. But Cuckoo had cried to him out of the very depths, and out of the very depths he answered her, still prompted—though now he knew it not—by that secret voice which sometimes rules a man, at which he wonders ignorantly, the voice of some soul, some great influence, hidden from him in the spaces of the air, the voice of a flame, warm, keen, alive, and power-prompting.
And Cuckoo, as she listened to the doctor, had once again a hint of her own strength, a thrill of hope, a sense that she, even she, was not broken quite in pieces upon the cruel wheel of the world.
"Whatever can I do?" she said; "Valentine's got him."
As she spoke, the doctor, restless, as men are in excitement, had moved over to the mantelpiece, and stood with one foot upon the edge of the fender. Thinking deeply, he glanced over the photographs of Cuckoo's acquaintance, without actually seeing them. But presently one, at which he had looked long and fixedly, dawned upon him, cruelly, powerfully. It was the face of Marr.
"Who is that?" he said abruptly to Cuckoo.
"That?" She too got up and came near to him, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. "That's really him."
"Him?"
"Valentine."
The doctor looked at her in blank astonishment.
"Yes, it is," Cuckoo reiterated, and nodding her head with the obstinacy of a child.
"That—Valentine! It has no resemblance to him."
The doctor took up the photograph, and examined it closely. "This is not
Valentine."
"He told me it was. It's Marr—and somehow it's him now."
"Marr," said the doctor, sharply. "Why, he is dead. Julian told me so.
He died—he died in the Euston Road on the night of Valentine's trance.
Ah, but you know nothing about that. Did you know Marr, then?"
"Yes, I knew him."
Cuckoo hesitated. But something taught her to be perfectly frank with the doctor. So she added:
"I'd been with him at that hotel the night he died."
"You were the woman! But, then, how can you say that this (he touched the photograph with his finger) is Valentine?"
"He says he's really Marr."
Cuckoo spoke in the most mulish manner, following her habit when she was completely puzzled, but sticking to what she believed to be the truth.
"Marr and Valentine one man! He told you that?"
"He says to me—'I'm Marr.'"
Cuckoo repeated the words steadily, but like a parrot. The doctor said nothing, only looked at her and at the photograph. He was thinking now of his suspicion as to Valentine's sanity. Had he, perhaps in his madness, been playing on the ignorance of the lady of the feathers? She went on:
"It was on the night he told me all that. I couldn't understand what he is and what he's doing. And he said that the real Valentine had gone. And then he said—'I am Marr.'"
"The real Valentine gone. Yes," said the doctor, gravely, "that is true. Does he then know that he is—?" "Mad" was on his lips, but he checked himself.
"What else did he say that night?" he asked. "Can you remember? If you succeed, you may help Julian."
Cuckoo frowned till her long, broad eyebrows nearly met. The grimace gave her the aspect of a sinister boy, bold and audacious. For she protruded her under lip, too, and the graces of ardent feeling, of pain and of passion, died out of her eyes. But this abrupt and hard mask was only caused by the effort she was making after thought, after understanding. She pressed her feet upon the ground, and the toes inside her worn shoes curved themselves inwards. What had Valentine said? What—what? She stared dully at the doctor under her corrugated brows.
"What did he say?" she murmured in an inward voice, "Well—he didn't want me to see you. He came here about that—my seeing you."
"Yes."
"And—and Marr's not dead, he says, at least not done with. Yes, that was it—he says as no strong man who's lived long's done with when he's put away. See?"
Her face lighted up a little. She was beginning to trust her memory.
"The influence of men lives after them," the doctor said. "Marr's too.
Yes. He said that?"
She nodded. Then with a flash of understanding, a flash of that smouldering power which she had felt in loneliness and longed to tear out from its prison, she cried:
"That's it. That's how he's Marr, then."
She hesitated.
"Isn't it?" she said, flushing with the thought that she might be showing herself a fool. For she scarcely understood what she really meant.
"Valentine, no longer himself, but endowed with the influence of Marr," the doctor muttered; "she means that he told her something like that. The phantasy of an unsteady brain."—"Go on," he added to her.
But Cuckoo was relapsing into confusion already.
"And then he talked a lot about will, as he called it. Can't remember what he said."
"Try to."
She was silent, knitting her brows.
"It's no use. I can't," she said, despairingly. "But I know he says that he's really Marr and that he's killed Valentine. He said that; I know he did."
She glanced eagerly at the doctor, in the obvious hope that his cleverness, which she believed to be unlimited and profound, would in a flash divine all the strange secret from this exposition of her disjointed recollection. With each word she spoke, however, the doctor became more and more convinced that Valentine had only been cruelly amusing himself with her, or weaving for her benefit some intricate web of vain madness. And Cuckoo, noticing this now, and recollecting the momentary clearness of comprehension which had seized her at one point in Valentine's wild sermon to her, was mad with herself for not being able to seize again that current of inspiration, almost mad with the doctor for not unravelling the mystery. This excess of feeling finally drowned and swept away as a corpse the memory of the gospel of influence.
"I can't remember no more," she said stolidly. "There was ever such a lot about—about some one as was good and didn't want to be good any more, and so it was driven away—I don't know. P'rhaps he was only gamin' me."
She stared moodily at her feet, which she had stuck out from under her dress. The doctor said nothing, but at her last speech his face had lit up with a sort of excitement. For had she not described in those few ill-chosen words the very mental position of the former Valentine? A saint at first with his will, a saint at last against his will—and now a saint no more. That was, perhaps, the key to the whole matter. A good man prays to be no longer good. His prayer is granted. His grievous desire is fulfilled. And then he may pray forever in vain to be as he once was. Yet the change in Valentine was more even than this, more than the gliding from white purity to black sin. There was something.
As Cuckoo and the doctor sat in silence, she staring vacantly and empty of thought, being now utterly and chaotically puzzled, he thinking deeply, the door bell rang. In a moment Mrs. Brigg appeared, went to Cuckoo and muttered in her ear:
"Mr. Haddison wants to come in. I told him you was busy."
"Oh," said Cuckoo, "I say—wait," and then to the doctor, "It's him. It's
Julian."
"Let him in," the doctor said quickly.
To see Cuckoo and Julian together might tell him much.
Julian came in, stumbling rather heavily at the entrance of the room.