CHAPTER VII
BATTLE ARRAY
When Julian left the Marylebone Road that night it was nearly ten o'clock. He was quite sober, and looked preternaturally grave as he opened the little gate and stepped out into the frost-bound street. In the lighted aperture of the doorway behind him Cuckoo stood like a shadow half revealed peeping after him, and he turned and waved his hand to her. Then he walked away slowly, meditating. That night the fight for the possession of his will, his soul, had begun in deadly earnest. He did not know it, yet he was vaguely aware that he began to move in the midst of unwonted circumstances. Cuckoo had not been able wholly to conceal from him her strong mental excitement. Since her conversation with the doctor she had become a different woman. For the one word had been spoken which could change weakness into strength, utter self-distrust into something that at least resembled self-reliance. The doctor had broken Valentine's spell over Cuckoo with that word. He believed in her. He told her to fight. He assumed that she had some power, even more power for Julian than he had. "Only you can do it," he had said. The sentence armed her from head to foot, put weapons in her hands, light in her hollow eyes, a leaping exultation in her heart. The flickering power that she had marvelled at, and then despaired of, burnt up at last into a strong flame. That evening it had dazzled Julian's eyes. He seemed to see a new Cuckoo, and he was thinking of her as he walked along now in the frost under the stars. His meditation was not very intellectual or very profound, for since the change in his life Julian had put his old intellectualities away from him. Passion, so long guarded, so bravely repressed, once it had broken loose stormed all the heights of his nature, and drove every sentiment that tried to oppose it into exile. The animalism that is so generally present in a boy physically strong took possession of him, and would not tolerate any divided allegiance. It declined to permit his life to be a thing of mingled enjoyments, now rejoicing in the leaping desires of the body, now disregarding them for the aspirations and clear contentments of the mind. It seemed vengeful, like a man long kept fasting against his will, and having at last come into its empire made that empire an autocracy, a tyranny. Julian had passed at a step from one extreme to another, and had already so lost the habit of following any mental process to a conclusion that he could no longer think clearly with ease, or observe himself with any acuteness. He was for the time all body, knew his muscles, his flesh, his limbs, like intimates; his mind only distantly, like a stranger. With passion, with greed, he had seized on all those pleasures which he had previously feared and shunned, until his brain was heavy as is the brain of a glutton and a drunkard, and his mind stepped in any direction with a languid lethargy. So to-night he had the face of a man puzzled as he walked in the frost under the stars.
Once the hint of some power lurking in Cuckoo had thrilled and awed him, as only a certain clearness—a certain receptive, appreciative clearness—can be thrilled and awed. Now the abrupt development of that power almost distressed, because it confused him. He had gone down lower in the interval between the two possibilities of sensation.
"What the devil's come over Cuckoo?" so ran his thought with a schoolboy gait. That something had come over her he recognized. She was no longer the girl he had stared at in Piccadilly, the creature he had pitied in the twilight hour of their first friendly interview. Nor was she the woman whose soul he had injured by his cruel whim, the woman who had beaten him with reproaches, and made him for an instant almost ashamed of his lusts. All these humanities perhaps slept, or woke, in her still. Yet it was not they which heavily concerned him on his way to the Marble Arch. There is a vitality about power of whatever kind that makes itself instantly felt, even when it is not understood, even when it is neither beloved nor appreciated. Julian was confused by his dull and sudden recognition of power in Cuckoo. No longer did it flash upon him, a mystery of flame in her eyes, moving him to the awe and the constraint that a man may feel at sight of an unearthly thing, a phantom, or a vision of the night. (He had looked for the flame in her eyes, and he had not found it.) But it glowed upon him more steadily, with a warmth of humanity, of something inherent, rooted, not detached, and merely for the moment and as if by chance prisoned in some particular place, from which at a breath it might escape. It drew him to Cuckoo, and at the same time it slightly repelled him, the latter—though Julian did not know it—by the sharp abruptness of its novelty. For the doctor had lit a blaze of strength in the girl by a word. Julian's eyes were dazzled by the blaze. Custom might teach them to face it more calmly. At present he could look at the stars with greater ease. Indeed, as he walked, he did look at them, and thought of the eyes of Cuckoo, and then of the eyes of all women, and of their strange intensities of suggestion and of realization, of their language of the devil and of the clouds, of their kindling vigours. But the eyes of Cuckoo were no longer as the eyes of any other woman. Julian glanced at a girl who watched him from the corner of the street. He knew that Cuckoo looked each night at men as that girl looked at him. He knew it, yet he felt that he did not believe it. For to him she was dressed already in the fillet of some priestess, in the robes of one tending some strange and unnamed altar. She woke in him a little of the uneasy fear and uneasy attraction that a creature whom a man feels to be greater than himself often wakes in him. That evening, while Julian sat with her, he had been seized with curious conflicting desires to fall before her or to strike her, to draw her close or to fend her off from him, all dull, too, and vague as in heaviness of dreaming. Those feelings, vague in the house, were scarcely clearer in the cold and in the open spaces of the night, and Julian was conscious of a sense of irritation, of anger against himself. He felt as if he were an oaf, a lout. Was it, could it be, Cuckoo who had made him feel so? After all, what was she? Julian tried to hug and soothe himself in the unworthy remembrance of Cuckoo's monotonous life and piteous deeds, to reinstate himself in contented animalism by thoughts of the animalism of this priestess! He laughed aloud under the stars, but the laugh rang hollow. He could not reinstate himself. He could only wearily repeat, "What the devil's come over Cuckoo?" with an iteration of dull, moody petulance.
A hansom suddenly pulled up beside him and a voice called:
"Julian! Julian, where are you coming from?"
It was Valentine. He was muffled in a fur coat, and stretched himself over the wooden apron to attract his friend's attention.
"I have been to your rooms," he continued. "Don't you remember we had arranged to dine together?"
Julian looked at him without animation.
"I had forgotten it," he answered.
"Your memory is becoming very treacherous," Valentine said. "Where are you off to? Get in. I will drive you."
"I hadn't any plan," Julian said, getting into the cab.
"Drive to the Savoy," Valentine called to the cabman. "I want some supper," he added.
"I can't come in. I'm not dressed."
"We will have a private room, then. Have you dined?"
"I? No."
Valentine looked at him narrowly.
"Have you been in the Marylebone Road again?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
The answer was the bald truth. In making it Julian experienced a slight feeling of relief. He was putting into words the vagueness that perplexed him. He wondered why he did go to see Cuckoo.
"But you must know. You must have a reason," said Valentine.
"If I have I don't know what it is. I wish you would tell me, old fellow."
"I can't supply you with reasons for all your actions."
"And I can't supply myself with reasons for any of them," Julian said slowly. The words were leading him to a dawning wonder at his own way of life, a dawning desire to know if there were really any reasons for the things he did. But Valentine did not accept the reply as satisfactory. On the contrary, it evidently irritated him still more, for he said with unusual warmth:
"Your reason for dropping your engagements, throwing me over and wasting my evenings is quite obvious. The blessed damozel of the feathers is attractive to you. Her freshness captivates you. Her brilliant conversation entertains you. She is the powdered and painted reason of these irrelevant escapades."
"Don't sneer at her, Val."
The words came quickly, like a bolt. Valentine frowned, and a deepening suspicion flashed in his eyes.
"I did not think you were so easily flattered," he continued.
"Flattered?"
"Yes. Cuckoo Bright admires you, and you go to number 400 to smell the rather rank fumes of the incense which she burns at your shrine."
"Nonsense!" Julian cried warmly.
"What other reason can you have? She has no beauty; she has no conversation, no gaiety, no distinction, no manners—she has nothing. She is nothing."
"Ah, it's there you're wrong."
"Wrong!"
"When you say she is nothing."
"I say it again," Valentine reiterated almost fiercely.
"The lady of the feathers is nothing, nothing at all. God and the devil—they have completely forgotten her. A creature like that is neither good, nor would I call her really evil, for she is evil merely that she may go on living, not because she has a fine pleasure in sin. But if you sell your will for bread and butter, you slip out of the world, the world that must be reckoned with. I say, Cuckoo Bright is nothing."
"And I tell you she is something extraordinary."
As Julian spoke the words the cab stopped at the Savoy. Valentine sprang out and paid the man. His face was flushed as if with heat, despite the piercing cold of the night.
"A private room and supper for two," he said to the man in the vestibule. "Take my coat," and he drew himself with obvious relief from the embrace of his huge coat. Julian and he said nothing more until they were sitting opposite to one another at a small oval table in a small and strongly decorated room, whose windows faced the Thames Embankment. The waiter uncorked a bottle of champagne with the air of one performing a religious rite. The electric light gleamed and a fire chased the frost from recollection. Julian had already forgotten what they had been talking about in the cab. The first sip of champagne swept the heavy meditativeness from him. But Valentine, unfolding his napkin slowly, and with his eyes on the menu, said:
"In what way is she something extraordinary?"
"H'm?" Julian muttered.
"Surely you can define it."
"What, Val?"
"The peculiarity of Cuckoo Bright that you laid so much stress on just now."
"Oh, yes, now I remember. No, I can't define it. How good this soup is.
The soup here—"
"Yes, yes; our coming here again and again to eat it proves our appreciation. Julian, do endeavour to answer my question. I am really interested to know exactly what it is that has taken you again to Marylebone Road."
Julian drank some more champagne. His eyes began to sparkle.
"Can you give a reason for everything you do?" he asked.
"I think I certainly could for every act that I reiterate."
"Then you're built differently from me. But I've told you all I can.
I like Cuckoo. She's a damned nice girl."
Valentine's lip curled.
"I can't agree with you, Julian."
"You don't know her as I do."
"Not quite."
Julian reddened.
"Come, now," he began, and then checked himself and laughed good-naturedly. "You can't play the saint any more, you know, Val," he said.
"I have no wish to. I discovered long ago that a saint is only the corpse of a man, not a living man at all. But we are talking about this corpse of a woman."
"Cuckoo's no corpse. By Jove, no. I believe she's got a power that no other woman has."
"How so? You haven't been imagining that absurd flame in her eyes again?"
Valentine spoke with furtive uneasiness. He was scarcely eating or drinking, but Julian was doing ample justice to the wine, and displayed a very tolerable appetite. He lifted his glass to his lips and put it down before he answered:
"No. It's gone."
Valentine seemed relieved.
"Of course. I knew it was an hallucination. You went to satisfy yourself,
I suppose. And now—"
"Since it's gone Cuckoo seems to me—I don't know—changed somehow. Val, there must be a few people in the world with great power over others. You are one. Marr was another, and—" He paused.
"And what?" Valentine said rather loudly.
"Well," Julian paused again, as if conscious that he was about to say something that would seem ridiculous, "Cuckoo—"
"Is a third! You think it reasonable to bracket me with a woman like that, to compare my will, mine, who have lived the life of thought as well as the life of action, who have trained my powers to the highest point, and offered up sacrifices—yes, sacrifices—to my will, to that degraded, powerless creature! Julian!"
He stopped, clenching his hand as it lay upon the table. Never before had Julian seen him so profoundly moved. All his normal calm and self-possession seemed deserting him. His lips worked like those of a man in the very extremity of rage, and the red glow in his cheeks faded into the grey of suppressed passion. Julian was utterly taken aback by such an exhibition of feeling.
"My dear fellow," he stammered, "I didn't mean—I had no idea—"
"You did mean that. You do. And I—I have been fool enough to believe that you relied upon me, on my judgment; that you looked up to me; that—good God, how absurd!"
He lay back in his chair and burst into a paroxysm of loud and mirthless laughter, while Julian, holding his champagne-glass between his fingers, and twisting it stealthily round and round, regarded him with a blank stare of utter confusion and perplexity. Valentine continued to laugh so long that it seemed as if he were seized in the grip of a horrible hysteria. But just as the situation was becoming actually intolerable, he suddenly controlled himself with an obvious and painful effort. After remaining perfectly silent for two or three minutes, he said, in a voice that struggled to be calm and succeeded in being icy:
"Julian, you have torn the veil of the Holy of Holies from the top to the bottom with a vengeance. But why have you kept up the deception so long, when, after all, there was nothing behind the veil? That was surely unnecessary."
"What is the matter with you, Val? I don't understand you."
"Nor I you. And yet we say that we are intimate friends. There's an irony."
At this point the waiter came in with an omelette, and the conversation ceased, checked by his peripatetic presence. As soon as he had retreated, with all the hushed activity of a mute rolling on casters, Julian exclaimed:
"It's not an irony. You choose to make it so. You're not yourself to-night, Valentine. I do not compare you with poor Cuckoo. How could I? She's down in the dirt and you are far away from the dirt. And of course your power over any one must be a thousand times greater than hers."
"If it came to a battle? If it came to a battle?" interrupted Valentine.
"You say that, Julian?"
"A battle! of what?"
"Of wills, naturally, Cuckoo Bright's will against mine?"
"But what a strange idea—"
"You haven't answered my question."
"Because I don't see the force of it."
"Answer it nevertheless."
"Then Cuckoo would be beaten at once," Julian said. But there was no ring of conviction in his voice, and he fell at once into silence after he had spoken the words. Valentine saw by his frowning face and puckered forehead that the idea of such a battle had set in motion a train of thought in his mind.
"You are wondering, Julian," Valentine said.
Julian looked up.
"Who doesn't wonder in this beastly world?" he said morosely.
"I never do. I prefer to act. Drink some more champagne?"
He pushed the bottle over and went on:
"You are wondering why I spoke of a battle between Cuckoo Bright and me. Well, I'll tell you. I spoke because I see that there is to be such a battle."
Julian drank his champagne and looked definitely and increasingly astonished, as Valentine continued:
"There is to be such a battle. I have seen it for a long time. Julian, you may think you know women. You don't. I said just now that a woman like Cuckoo Bright is nothing, but I said it for the sake of uttering a paradox. No woman is ever nothing in a world that is full of the things called men. No woman's ever nothing so long as there is a bottle of hair-dye, a rouge-pot, a dressmaker, and—a man within reach. She may be in the very gutter. That doesn't matter. For from the very gutter she can see—not the stars, but the twinkling vanities of men, and they will light her on her way to Mayfair drawing-rooms, even, perhaps, to Court. Who knows? And God—or the devil—has given to every woman the knowledge of her possibilities. Men have only the ignorance of theirs."
"What has this to do with Cuckoo and me?" Julian said. "This bottle is empty, Valentine."
Valentine rang hastily for another.
"And what on earth has it got to do with a battle between you and
Cuckoo?"
"Everything. She hates me. She has told you so again and again."
Julian looked expressively uncomfortable.
"I've always stood up for you," he began.
"I believe it. She hates me not because I am myself, but simply because I am your closest friend. Hush, Julian. It's much better all this should be said once for all. Many women are intensely jealous of the men friends of men whom they either love, or who they mean shall love them. Look at the wives who drive their husbands' old chums from intimacy into the outer darkness of acquaintanceship. Wedding-days break, as well as bind, faith. And you have had your wedding-day with Cuckoo."
"That was an accident. She loathes to think of it."
"She may say so. But it puts a fine edge on her hatred of me, nevertheless."
"No, Valentine, no. Her dislike of you is simply silly—instinctive."
"She tells you so. Ah! I was wrong to call her nothing. But it is her hatred of me that must bring us to battle unless—"
"Unless what?"
"You give her up now, once and for all."
"Give Cuckoo up!"
The words came slowly, and the voice that uttered them sounded startled and even shocked. Valentine began to gauge the new power of the lady of the feathers from that moment.
"That's a—a strong thing to do, Val."
"It won't hurt you to do a strong thing for once in your life."
"Even if it didn't hurt me I think it would hurt her very much. For, Valentine, I believe you said the truth when you said to me once, 'That girl loves you.' Do you remember?"
"Perfectly. Loves you, your birth, your position, your money, your good looks, perhaps your standpoint above the gutter. I can well believe that Miss Bright, like all her sisterhood, loves with undying love that combination of flesh-pots, her notion of the ego of a man."
"She has never accepted a halfpenny from me."
"Because she means eventually to have twenty-one shillings in the pound.
Have some more champagne."
"Yes. You are wrong, Val, utterly wrong. Cuckoo's not mercenary. If such a girl could be good, she is good."
There was just a touch of the maudlin in Julian's voice. He went on very earnestly, and nodding his head emphatically over even his conjunctions.
"And if she were what you say, she would have no influence over me, and I should hate her. But to me she is just what a good girl might be. Why, even the doctor—"
"Was he there to-night?" Valentine cried, with a sudden inspiration.
"Of course he was. And you know what a particular little chap he is."
"Why was he there?"
"Just to see Cuckoo, you know, in a friendly way."
Valentine realized then that the battle had begun. He divined the meaning of the doctor's visit. He guessed what it had done for the lady of the feathers. And he sat silent while Julian went on drinking more champagne.
"I believe he likes Cuckoo, Val. I am sure he does. And he behaved quite as if—quite as if he—you know—respected her. And it's all nonsense her hating you, and having a battle, and all that kind of thing, with you. She's only fanciful. She's not—"
"Would you give her up if I asked you to? Mind, Julian, I don't say I ever shall ask you. But if I do?"
"Don't ask me to, don't ask me. Poor Cuckoo, poor girl, she's got no friends, money, or—or anything. Poor Cuckoo. Poor Cuck—Cuck—"
He fell back in his chair, nodding his head, and reiterating his commiseration for the lady of the feathers in a faint and recurring hiccough. Valentine got up and rang the bell.
"The bill, please, waiter."
"Yes, sir."
The man glanced at Julian with the shadow of a pleasing, and apparently also pleased, smile and withdrew. Valentine stood for a moment looking at the leaning figure on the chair, relaxed in the first throes of a drunken slumber. His anger and almost unbridled emotion completely died away as he looked.
"Can it be called a battle after all?" he said to himself. "They may not know it, but it is practically won already."
The waiter re-entered. Valentine paid the bill, and the breath of the frost shortly revived Julian into an attempt at conversation.
"Don't ask me to give her up, Val; don't, don't ask me. Poor girl. Poor, poor Cuck—Cuck."
The name of the lady of the feathers seemed a good one for a tipsy tongue to play with.