CHAPTER VI
THE SELLING OF JESSIE
One chill morning of earliest February, a stirring of Jessie at the foot of her bed wakened Cuckoo from a short and uneasy sleep. She opened her eyes to the faint light that filtered through the green Venetian blind. Jessie moved again, slowly rotating like a drowsy top, then suddenly dropped into the warm centre of a nest of bedclothes, breathing a big dog-sigh of satisfaction that shook her tiny frame. She slept. But she had wakened her mistress, who lay with her head resting on one hand, deep in thought while the day grew outside. Cuckoo, having directed her steps down a blind-alley had, not unnaturally, reached a dead-wall, blotting out the horizon. Lying there, she faced it. She stared at the wall, and the wall seemed to stare back at her. Perhaps for that reason a dull blankness flowed over and filled her mind, and made her widely opened eyes almost as expressionless as the eyes of a corpse. For a long time she lay in this alive stupor. Then Jessie stirred again, and Cuckoo, as she had been before spurred into wakefulness, was stirred into thoughtfulness. She began to pass the near past, the present, eventually the future, in review. The past was a crescendo, solitude growing louder each night, poverty growing louder, obstinacy growing louder, Mrs. Brigg growing louder. What an orchestra! Cuckoo had not seen Julian once. She had seen the doctor, to be told of his baffled efforts, of Julian's escape from all his friends, of Valentine's declaration of the stone going down in the sea, of utter deadlock, utter stagnation. For the doctor treated Cuckoo frankly as a brave woman, not deceitfully as a timid child to be buoyed on the waves of ill-circumstances with gas-filled bladders. Cuckoo knew the worst of things, and by the knowledge was confirmed in her mule's attitude which so weighed upon Mrs. Brigg. Her hands were tied in every direction except one. She could only dumbly prove that Valentine was wrong; that her will was not dead, by exercising it to the detriment of her worldly situation. Doggedly then she put her whole past behind her, despite the ever-increasing curses of the landlady. She had given up her pilgrimages in search of honest work. They were too hopeless. She had pawned everything she could pawn, and sold every trifle that was saleable. Even Jessie's broad band of yellow satin had been included in a heterogeneous parcel of odds and ends purchased by a phlegmatic German with eyes like marbles and the manner of a stone image. Living less and less well, doing without fires, sitting often in the dark at night to save the expense of gas, Cuckoo had managed to pay her rent until a week ago. Then money had failed, and the great earthquake had at length tossed and swallowed the wretched Mrs. Brigg. The scene had been tropical. Mrs. Brigg was really moved to the very depths of her being. For days she had been, as it were, eating and drinking apprehension. Now apprehension choked her. She was shot up in the air by the cannon of climax. Limbs and mind were in the extreme of commotion. From her point of view it must be acknowledged that the situation was unduly exasperating. For Cuckoo would give no reason whatever for her reiterated formula of refusal to earn any money. And now she could not pay her week's rent, plunging Mrs. Brigg into the further circle of an inferno, and yet sat within doors day after day. Mrs. Brigg approached apoplexy by way of persuasion, was by turns pathetic and paralytic with passion. She coaxed with the ardour of an executioner inveigling the victim's neck to the noose and in haste to be off to breakfast. She threatened like Jove in curl-papers. Cuckoo was inexorable.
"Then out you go!" said Mrs. Brigg at last. "Out of my house you pack, you—" Nameless words followed.
Cuckoo got up from her chair with no show of emotion and moved towards her bedroom stonily to pack her box. She didn't care. She was in a mood to lie down in the gutter and wait the last blow of Fate, living only in her one obstinate determination to do what the doctor had told her, the one thing Julian had asked of her. She did not any longer war with words against the purple and hard-breathing landlady. And her silence and her movement of obedience awed Mrs. Brigg for the moment into another mood. She shuffled after Cuckoo into the bedroom.
"Eh? What is it?" she ejaculated. "What are you a-doing of?"
"Going," Cuckoo threw at her.
"Now?"
"Yes."
"Where to?"
No answer. Cuckoo was thrusting the few things still left to her into the only box she now possessed in the world. Mrs. Brigg stood in the folding doorway watching, and making mouths, as is the fashion of the elderly when emotional.
"What are you going for?" she said presently, as Cuckoo, bending down, stuffed a white petticoat into the depths.
"Can't pay," snarled Cuckoo.
"It don't matter—for a day or two," said Mrs. Brigg, reluctantly.
She stumped downstairs, torn by conflicting emotions. She had got accustomed to Cuckoo, and then both Julian and Valentine, Cuckoo's visitors, had taught her the colour of the British sovereign. They had not been near 400 lately, but they might come again. And then Doctor Levillier. Cuckoo had some fine friends, who would surely do something for her. Mrs. Brigg had no other possible lodger in her eye. On the whole, prudence dictated a day or two's patience, just a day or two, or a week's, not more, not a moment more. Thus it came about that Cuckoo had now been another week beneath the roof of Mrs. Brigg without paying hard cash for the asylum. The previous evening the landlady had burst out again into fury, refusing to get in any more food for Cuckoo, and demanding the fortnight's rent. She had even, carried away by cupidity and passion, striven to drive Cuckoo out to her night's work. A physical struggle had taken place between them, ending in the landlady's hysterics. Other lodgers had been drawn by the noise from their floors to witness the row. Two of them had come, on the scene accompanied by men, and to them Mrs. Brigg had shrieked her wrongs and explanations of this swindling virtue of a woman who had formerly paid her way honestly from the street. The lodgers and their men had provided an accompaniment of jeering laughter to the Brigg solo, and Cuckoo, her clothes nearly torn from her back, had flung at last into her sitting-room and locked the door. That was last night—the past which she now reviewed in the morning twilight. What was she to do? She was without food. She was in debt, must leave Mrs. Brigg, no doubt, but must pay her first, had no means to pay for another lodging. She might apply to Doctor Levillier. What held her back from taking that road was mainly this. She had the dumb desire to make a sacrifice for Julian, and the doctor had given her the idea of the only sacrifice she could make—retention of herself from the degradation that kept her free of debt. If she asked the doctor to pay the expenses of the sacrifice, whose would it be? His, not hers. So there was no banker in the world for Cuckoo. The dead-wall faced her. The horizon was shut out. She lay there and tried to think—and tried to think. How to get some money? Something—the devil perhaps—prompted the sleeping Jessie to stir again at the bottom of the bed. Cuckoo felt the little dog's back shift against her stretched-out toes, and suddenly a bitter flood of red ran over her thin, half-starved face, and she hid it in the tumbled pillow, pressing it down. The movement was the attempted physical negation of an abominable, treacherous thought which had just stabbed her mind. How could it have come to her, when she hated it so? She burrowed further into the pillow, at the same time caressing the back of Jessie with little movements of her toes. Horrible, horrible thought! It brought tears which stained the pillow. It brought a hard beating of the heart. And these manifestations showed plainly that Cuckoo had not dismissed it yet. She tried to dismiss it, shutting her eyes up tightly, shaking her head at the black, venomous thing. But it stayed and grew larger and more dominant. Then she took her head from the pillow, faced it, and examined it. It was a clear-cut, definite thought now, perfectly finished, coldly complete.
Jessie was embodied money, an embodied small sum of money.
Long ago Cuckoo had said to Julian with pride:
"She's a show-dog. I wouldn't part with her for nuts."
Now she remembered those words, and knew, could not help knowing, that a show-dog was worth more than nuts. At that moment she wished Jessie were worthless. Then the sting would be drawn from her horrible thought. Meanwhile Jessie slept calmly on, warm and cosey.
Cuckoo was cold and trembling. She knew that she was on the verge of starvation. The doctor had said that one day she could help Julian, only she. So she must not starve. Love alone would not let her do that. Between her and starvation lay Jessie, curved in sleep, unconscious that her small future was being debated with tears and with horror.
Long ago the little dog had entered Cuckoo's heart to be cherished there. Many wretched London women own such a little dog, to whom they cling with a passion such as more fortunate women lavish upon their children. A great many subtleties combine to elevate companions with tails to the best thrones the poor, the wicked, and the deserted can give them. A dog has such a rich nature to give to the woman who is poor, so much innocence at hand for the woman who is wicked, such completeness of attachment ready for the woman who is lonely. It is so beautifully humble upon its throne, abased in its own eyes before the shrine of its mistress, on whom it depends entirely for all its happiness. A little king, perhaps, it has the pretty manners of a little servitor. And even when it presumes to be determined in the expressed desire for the dryness of a biscuit or the warmth of a lap, with how small a word or glance can it be laid upon its back, in the abject renunciation of every pretension, anxious only for the forgiveness that nobody with a touch of tenderness could withhold. Ah, there is much to be thankful for in a companion with a tail! Jessie had winning ways, the deep heart of a dog. A toy dog she was, no doubt, but hers was no toy nature. Cuckoo could not have shed such tears as those she now shed over any toy. For she began to cry weakly at the mere thought that had come to her, although it was not yet become a resolve. Life with Jessie had been very sordid, very sad. What would life be without her? What would such a morning as this be, for instance? Cuckoo's imagination set tempestuously to work, with physical aids—such as the following. She drew away her feet from the bottom of the bed, where they touched the little dog's back. Doing this she said to herself, "Now, Jessie is gone." Curled up, she set herself to realize the lie. And perhaps she might have succeeded thoroughly in the sad attempt had not Jessie, in sleep missing the contact of her mistress, wriggled lazily on her side up the bed after Cuckoo's feet, discovering which, she again composed herself to slumber. The renunciation was not to be complete in imagination. Jessie's love, when present, was too frustrating. And Cuckoo, casting away her horrible thought in a sort of hasty panic, caught her companion with a tail in her arms, and made her rest beside her, close, close. Jessie was well content, but still sleepy. She reposed her tiny head upon the pillow, lengthened herself between the sheets and dreamed again. And while she dreamed, the black thought about her came back to Cuckoo. It was assertive, and Cuckoo began to fear it. The fear of a thought is a horrible thing; sometimes it is worse than the fear of death. This one made Cuckoo think herself more cruel than any woman since the world began. Yet she could not exorcise it. On the contrary, she grew familiar with it as the day marched on, until it put on a fatal expression of duty. All that day she revolved it. Mrs. Brigg attacked her again. Food was lacking. Cuckoo's case became desperate. She turned over carefully all her few remaining possessions to see if there was any inanimate thing that she had omitted to turn into money. Jessie, poor innocent, assisted with animation at the forlorn inventory, nestling among the tumbled garments, leaping on and off the bed. Her ingenuous nature supposed some odd game to be in progress, and was anxious to play a principal and effective part in it. Yet she was quieted by the look Cuckoo cast upon her when the wardrobe had been passed in review and no saleable thing was to be found. She shrank into a corner, ready for whimpering. That night Cuckoo did not sleep, and through all the long hours she held Jessie in her arms, and heard, as so often before, the regular breathing of this little companion of hers. And each drawn breath pierced her heart.
Next morning she got up early. She was faint with hunger and with a resolve that she had made. She dressed herself, then carried Jessie to the flannel-lined basket, put her into it and kissed her.
"Go bials," she said, with a raised finger. "Go bials."
Jessie winked her eyes pathetically, her chin resting on the basket edge.
Cuckoo went out into the passage and called down to Mrs. Brigg.
"What is it?" cried Hades.
"I'm going to get some money."
Mrs. Brigg ran out.
"Money!" she said in a keen treble. "Where are you going to git it?"
"Never you mind," said Cuckoo, in a dull voice.
She turned from Mrs. Brigg's flooding ejaculations and was gone. In her peregrinations about London she had sometimes encountered in a certain thoroughfare a broad old man with a face marked with small-pox, who wore a fur cap and leggings. This individual conveyed upon his thickest person certain clinging rats, which crawled about him in the public view while he walked, and he led in strings three or four terriers, sometimes a pup or two. Cuckoo had seen him more than once in conversation with some young swell, even with gaily-dressed women, had noticed that his terriers here to-day were often gone to-morrow, replaced by other dogs, pugs perhaps, or a waddling, bow-legged dachshund. She drew her own conclusions. And she had seen that the old man's eyes, in his poacher face, were kindly, that his trotting dogs often aimed their sharp, or blunt, noses at his hands and seemed to claim his notice. Her morning errand was to him.
She walked a long time in search of him, trembling with the fear of finding him, inconsistently. Her mind, reacting on her ill-fed body, planted a crawling weariness there, and at last she had to stop and examine her pockets. She came upon two or three pence, went into a shop, bought a bun, and ate it sitting by a marble-topped table. It nearly choked her. Yet she knew she needed it badly. With one penny the less she resumed her pilgrimage. But nowhere could she see the old man in his leggings, and suddenly a sort of joyful spasm shook her superstitiously. Fate opposed her cruel resolution. In a rush of eager contrition she started for home, walking as quickly as her abnormal fatigue would allow her. She had left the street in which the old man generally walked, and took care, as she turned its corner, not to cast one glance behind her. She passed through the next street, and the next, and was far away from his neighbourhood, rejoicing, when suddenly she saw him coming straight towards her slowly, the rats resting on his shoulders, various small dogs in strings pattering on each side of him.
Cuckoo's heart gave a great thump, and then for an appreciable fragment of time stopped beating. She muttered a bad word under her breath and had an impulse to flee as from an enemy. She did not flee, but stood still like one condemned, while the old man stolidly approached with his menagerie. When he reached her she lifted her head and looked him in the face. The little dogs were jumping to reach his hands. Evidently they loved him.
"I say," Cuckoo said huskily.
The old gentleman stopped, lifted a rat from his shoulder, placed it on his breast, like a man who arranged his necktie, clicked his tongue against his teeth, and remarked:
"Parding, lydy."
Cuckoo swallowed. She felt as if she had a ball in her throat shifting up and down.
"I say," she repeated. "You buy toy dogs, eh?"
"I buys 'em and I sells 'em," answered the old man, with a large accent on the conjunction. "Buys 'em dear and sells 'em cheap. There's a wy to mike a living, lydy!"
His small eyes twinkled with humour as he spoke.
Cuckoo swallowed again. The ball in her throat was getting larger.
"Want to buy one this morning?" she asked. "A show little dog, eh?"
She choked.
The old man did not appear to notice it. He looked at her with sharp consideration.
"Oh, you means selling!" he remarked. "Where is it, then?"
"What?"
"The show little dawg?"
Cuckoo gulped out her address. All this time the old man had been summing her up, and drawing his own conclusions from her thin figure and haggard face. He scented a possible bargain.
"Trot along, lydy," he said, turning on his heels with all his little dogs in commotion. "Trot along. I'm with yer."
Cuckoo heard muffled drums of a dead-march as she walked. She, who had lived a life so shameless, shivered with shame at the thought of what she was going to do. Her treachery laid her out in its winding-sheet. The old man tried to entertain her, as they went, by chatting about his profession, declaiming the merits of his rats, and spreading before her mind a verbal panorama of the canine life that had defiled through his changeful existence. Cuckoo did not hear a word—they turned into the Marylebone Road. She walked slower and slower, yet never had the street in which she lived seemed so short. At length the iron gate of number 400 was reached. Cuckoo stopped.
"In 'ere, lydy?" said the old man.
She nodded, unable to speak. He turned in with his crowd of pattering dogs, and proceeded jauntily up the narrow path. Cuckoo followed slowly and with a furtive step. She longed to open the front door, let him in, and then run away herself. Anywhere, anywhere, only to be away, out of sight and hearing of the cruel scene that was coming.
Now they were on the doorstep. The old man waited. She fumbled for her latchkey, found it, thrust it into the door. Instantly the shrill bark of Jessie was heard. Cuckoo's guilty shining eyes met the twinkling eyes of the old man.
"That she a-barkin'?" he inquired, with a professional air.
Cuckoo nodded again.
"A nice little pype," he rejoined. "This wy, is it?"
The patter of feet in the oil-clothed passage roused Jessie to a frenzied excitement. When the two opened the door of the sitting-room, the little creature, planted tree-like upon her four tiny feet, was barking her dog life into the air. Cuckoo, entering first, snatched her up and gave her a sudden, vehement kiss.
It was good-bye.
Then she turned and faced the old man, who had paused in the doorway. She held Jessie silently towards him. Transferring the strings held in his right hand to his left, he took the wriggling dog from Cuckoo, lifted her up and down as if considering her weight, ran his eyes over her points with the quick decision of knowledge.
"'Ardly a show dawg, lydy," he said.
Cuckoo flamed at him.
"She is, she is," she cried vehemently, all her passion trying to find a vent in the words. "You shan't have her, you shan't have her, you shan't if—"
"Neow, neow; I ain't sying nothink ag'in 'er," he interposed. "She's a pretty dawg, a very pretty dawg. 'Ow much do yer sy, lydy?"
Cuckoo sickened. She looked away. She could not have met the eyes of
Jessie at that moment.
"'Ow much, then?" repeated the old man, still weighing the whining Jessie up and down.
"I dunno; you say."
The old man mentioned a price. It was bigger than Cuckoo had expected. She nodded, moving her tongue across her lips. Then she looked away out of the window. She heard the chink of money.
"Put it on the table," she murmured.
He did so, looking steadily at her.
"You feels the parting, lydy," he began. "Very nat'ral, very. I knows what it is."
He extended Jessie, now whining furiously, towards Cuckoo.
"Want to sy good-bye, lydy?" he said.
Cuckoo shook her head. The old man popped Jessie into one of the capacious side-pockets of his coat and buttoned the flap down.
"Mornin', lydy," he said, turning towards the door.
Cuckoo made no reply. Her chest was heaving and her lips were working. The old man went out. Cuckoo heard the pattering feet of the little army of dogs on the oilcloth of the passage. The hall door opened and shut. A pause. The iron gate clicked. She had never moved. The money lay on the table. At last Cuckoo went out into the passage, and called in a strange voice:
"Mrs. Brigg."
The landlady came with hasty alacrity.
"Come here," said Cuckoo, leading the way into the sitting-room.
"There—there's some money for you."
Mrs. Brigg pounced on it with a vulture's eagerness.
"'Owever did yer—" she began.
But Cuckoo had rushed into the bedroom. The landlady stood with the money in her hand, and heard the key turned in the lock of the door.