Flames

by Robert Hichens

CHAPTER VIII

VALENTINE EXPOUNDS THE GOSPEL OF INFLUENCE TO THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

Valentine closed the door behind him and stood by it, looking at Cuckoo gravely. She had pushed herself up on the sofa, using her elbows as a lever, and in an awkward attitude, half sitting, half lying down, stared at him with startled eyes. Her unshod feet were drawn in towards her body, and her dyed hair hung in a thick tangle round her face and on her shoulders. She said nothing.

Valentine put his hat down on the table and began to take off his gloves.

"I am glad to find you at home," he said politely.

Cuckoo shifted a little farther back on the sofa. Now that she was actually shut up alone with Valentine, fear returned upon her and banished every other feeling, every desire except the desire to be away from him. She ran her tongue over her lips, which had suddenly become dry.

"What are you come for?" she asked, never taking her eyes from his.

"To see you. I have never yet returned your kind call upon me."

"Eh?"

Cuckoo spoke in the tone of one who had become deaf, and she felt as if the agitation of her mind actually clamoured within her like a crowd of human voices, deadening sounds from without. Valentine repeated his remark, adding:

"Won't you ask me to sit down?"

He put his hand on the back of a chair.

"May I?"

Cuckoo gave her body a jerk which brought her feet down to the floor, so that she was sitting upright. She pushed out one of her hands as if in protest.

"You can't sit here," she murmured.

"I? Why not?"

"I can't have you here, nor I won't either."

Her voice was growing louder and fiercer as the first paralysis of surprise died gradually away from her. After all, she had not buckled on her armour only to run away from the enemy in it. The street Arab impudence was not quite killed in her by the strange influence of this man. The mere fact of having her feet firmly planted upon the floor gave Cuckoo a certain fillip of courage, and she tossed her head with that old vulgar gesture of hers which suggested the harridan. She pointed to the door.

"Out you go!" she cried.

For her intrepidity had not risen to calm contemplation of an interview. She was only bracing herself up to the necessary momentary endurance of his presence, which followed upon Mrs. Brigg's admittance of him within the door.

Valentine heard the gentle hint unmoved, and replied to it by drawing a chair out from the table and sitting down upon it. A sort of rage, stirred by terror, ran over Cuckoo. She seized the back of his chair with both hands and shook it violently.

"No, you don't stay," she ejaculated; "I won't have it!"

It was characteristic of her to lose all sense of dignity at an instant, when dignity might have served her purpose. Her outburst might have been directed against a statue. Valentine neither moved nor looked in any way affected. Glancing at Cuckoo with a whimsical amusement, he said:

"What a child you are! When will you learn wisdom!"

Cuckoo took away her hands. A conviction pierced her that the weapons a woman may use with effect against an ordinary man could be of no service now, and with this man. She faded abruptly from anger and violence into fatigue, always closely accompanied by fear.

"I'm awfully tired to-night," she said. "Please do go! I'm home because
I'm tired."

"The walk from Harley Street was too much for you. You shouldn't make such exertions."

For the first time a sinister note rang in his voice.

"I shall go where I like," Cuckoo answered, and this time with some real sturdiness of manner. "It ain't nothin' to you where I go, nor what I do."

"How can you tell that?"

She laid her chin in the upturned palms of her two hands, planting her elbows on her knees.

"How can it be?" she said. "I'm nothin' to you, nor I ain't going to be either."

"That's what you say."

"And it's God's truth too!" she cried again with violence, as the sense of Valentine's inflexible power grew in her.

"I'm going to smoke if you will allow me," Valentine said.

Slowly he drew out and lit a cigarette, Cuckoo neither refusing nor permitting it. With protruding lips he threw the light smoke round him. Then speaking through it he said:

"Tell me why you go to Harley Street."

"I ain't goin' to talk to you."

"Tell me why. It lies out of your beat; it's a respectable thoroughfare."

The words were said to sting. Cuckoo let them go by. She had been stung too often, and repetition of cruelty sometimes kills what it repeats. She set her lips to silence, with a look of obstinacy not impressive, but merely mulish and childish.

"Well?" Valentine said.

She made no answer. He did not seem angry, but continued:

"You find few fish for your net there, I imagine. But perhaps you don't go for fish. What was the name you read upon the door while I watched you?"

This time Cuckoo, changing her mind, as she often did, with all the swiftness of a crude nature, answered him:

"You know well enough!"

"It was Dr. Levillier, wasn't it?"

She nodded her head silently.

"Why do you go to his door? What do you want with him?"

Cuckoo's quick woman's instinct detected a suspicion of something that was like anxiety in his voice as he said the words. In an instant the warm impulse that, in her silent meditation, had led her to buckle on her armour and to think, with a certain courage, that she was to fight one day, stirred and glowed and leaped up, an impulse greater than herself. The fear that had fallen upon her was lessened, for she felt that this man, too, might, nay did, know fear.

"What's that to you?"

She turned upon him boldly with the question, and he knew her for the first time as an antagonist, who might actively attack as well as passively hate. He leaned forward, and looked into her eyes searchingly, with a sort of rapture, of anxiety, too. It recalled something to Cuckoo. She tried to remember what, but for a moment could not. Then, as if reassured, he resigned his eager and nervous posture of inquiry. That second movement brought the light that Cuckoo's puzzled mind sought. It was Julian who had looked first into her eyes with that strange watchfulness. These men echoed one another in that glance which she could not understand. What they sought in her eyes she could not tell. If it were the same thing it could not be love. And it seemed to be a thing that they feared to find.

"Doctor Levillier is a great friend of mine," Valentine said. "He is a famous nerve-doctor. Seeing you hovering about his door led me to suppose you might be ill, and were going to consult him. I hope you are not ill."

"Not I!"

"Because he is away from home at present."

"Oh!"

"Do you want to see him?"

"I suppose I can see him, like any one else, if I've a mind to."

"Well! He's—he doesn't see quite every one. His practice is only among the richest and smartest people in town. Some one else might answer your purpose better."

He spoke suavely, but the words he said cemented Cuckoo's previously vague thought of trying, perhaps, to see Doctor Levillier into a sudden, strong determination. She divined that, for some reason, Valentine was anxious that she should not see him. That was enough. She would, at whatever cost, make his acquaintance.

"I'll see him if I like," she said hastily, lost to any appreciation of wisdom, through the desire of aiming an instant blow at Valentine.

"Of course! Why not?" was his reply.

"You don't want me to. I can see that," she went on, still more unadvisedly. "You needn't think as you can get over me so easily."

Valentine's smile showed a certain contempt that angered her.

"I know you," she cried.

"Do you?" he said. "I wonder if you would like to know me? Do you remember Marr?"

The lady of the feathers turned cold.

"Marr!" she faltered; "what of him?"

"You have not forgotten him."

"He's dead!"

A pause.

"He's dead, I say."

"Exactly! As dead as a strong man who has lived long in the world ever can be."

"What d'you mean? I say he's dead and buried and done with." Her voice was rather noisy and shrill.

"That's just where you make a mistake," Valentine said quite gravely, rather like a philosopher about to embark upon an argument. "He is not done with. Suppose you fear a man, you hate him, you kill him, you put him under the ground, you have not done with him."

"I didn't kill him! I didn't, I didn't!" Cuckoo cried out, shrilly, half rising from the sofa. A wild suspicion suddenly came over her that Valentine was pursuing her as an avenger of blood, under the mistaken idea that she had done Marr to death in the night.

"Hush! I know that. He died naturally, as a doctor would say, and he has been buried; and by now probably he is a shell that can only contain the darkness of his grave. Yet, for all that, he's not done with, Miss Bright."

"He is! he is!" she persisted.

The mention of Marr always woke terror in her. She sat, her eyes fixed on Valentine, her memory fixed on Marr. Perhaps for this reason what her memory saw and what her eyes saw seemed gradually to float together, and fuse and mingle, till eyes and memory mingled, too, into one sense, observant of one being only, neither wholly Marr nor wholly Valentine, but both in one. She had linked them together vaguely before, but never as now. Yet even now the clouds were floating round her and the vapours. She might think she saw, but she could not understand, and what she saw was rather a phantom standing in a land of mirage than a man standing in the world of men.

"Some day, perhaps, I will prove to you that he is not," Valentine said.

"Eh, how?"

She had lost all self-consciousness now, and in her eagerness of fear, wonder, and curiosity seemed tormented by the veil of yellow hair that was flopping in frizzy strands round her face and over her eyes. She seized it in her two hands, and with a few shooting gestures, in and out, wound it into a dishevelled lump, which she stuck to the back of her head with two or three pins. All the time she was looking at Valentine for an answer to her question.

"Perhaps I don't know how yet."

"Yes, you do, though. I can see you do. What have you got to do with him, with Marr?"

"I never said I had anything to do with him."

"Ah! but you have. I always knew it!"

"Many men are linked together by thin, perhaps invisible threads, impalpable and impossible to define."

The lady of the feathers was out of her depth in this sentence, so she only tossed her head and murmured:

"Oh, I dessay!" with an effort after contempt.

But Valentine's mood seemed to change. An abstracted gaiety stole over him. If it was simulated, the simulation was very perfect and complete. Sitting back in his chair, the cigarette smoke curling lightly round him, his large blue eyes glancing gravely now at Cuckoo crumpled up on the horsehair sofa, now meditatively at some object in the little room, or at the ceiling, he spoke in a low, clear, level voice, as if uttering his thoughts aloud, careless or oblivious of any listener.

"Every man who lives, and who has a personality, has something to do with many men whom he has never seen, whom he will never see. Messengers go from him as carrier-pigeons go from a ship. He may live alone, as a ship is alone in mid-ocean, but the messengers are winged, and their wings are strong. They fly high and they fly far, and wherever they pause and rest, that man has left a mark, has stamped himself, has uttered himself, has planted a seed of his will. Have you a religion?"

Valentine stopped abruptly after uttering this question, and waited for an answer. It was characteristic enough.

"What?" said the lady of the feathers, staring wide-eyed.

"I say, have you a religion?"

"Not I. How can I when I don't go to no church?"

"That is, no doubt, a convincing proof of heathendom. And yet I have a religion that never leads me to a church door. My religion is will, my gospel is the gospel of influence, and my god is power. Will binds the world into a net, whose strands are like iron. Will dies if it is weak, but if it is strong enough it becomes practically immortal. But, though it lives itself, it has the power to kill others. It can murder a soul in a man or a woman, and throw it into the grave to decay and go to dust, and in the man it can create a soul diametrically opposite to the corpse, and the world will say the man is the same; but he is not the same. He is another man. Or if the will is not strong enough actually to kill a soul"—at this point Valentine spoke more slowly, and there was a certain note of uneasiness, even almost of agitation, in his voice—"it can yet expel it from the body in which it resides, and drive it, like a new Ishmael, into the desert, where it must hover, useless, hopeless, degraded, and naked, because it has no body to work in. Yes! yes! that must be so! The soul can have no power divorced from the body! none! none!"

He got up from his chair, and began to pace the little room. Cuckoo watched him as a child might watch a wild animal in its cage. His face was hard and thin with deep thought, and hers was contorted under her yellow hair—contorted in a frantic effort to grasp and to understand what he was saying; for, stupid, ignorant as the lady of the feathers was, she had a sharp demon in her that often told her the truth, and this demon whispered now in her ear:

"Listen, and you may learn things that you long to know!"

And she listened motionless, her eyes bright and eager, her lips shut together, her slim body a-quiver with intensity, mental and physical.

"How can it?" Valentine went on. "What is a soul without a body? You cannot see it. You cannot hear it, and if you think you can, that is a vile trick of the mind, an hallucination. For if one man can see it, why not another? Here, let me look into your eyes again."

As he said the last words, he stopped opposite to Cuckoo, suddenly caught her chin in his two hands, which felt hard and cold, and forcibly pushed up her face towards his. She was terrified, beginning now to think him mad, and to fear personal injury. Gazing hard and furtively into her eyes, he said:

"No; it's a lie! It is not there. It never was! It is dead and finished with, and I won't fear it."

As if struck by the fatigue of some sudden reaction, he sank down again into his chair, and went on with his apparently fantastic monologue:

"And if it was ever alive, what could it do? A soul can't work, except through a body; it must fasten on a body, and bend the body to its will—man is such a creature that he can only be influenced through flesh and blood, nerves, sinews, eyes, things he can see, things that he can hear. He is so grovelling that nothing more delicate than these really appeals to him."

Again, and this time with less abstraction, and with a sort of contemptuous humour, he turned to the lady of the feathers, and continued, as if once more aware of her presence:

"Are you imbibing my gospel, the gospel of will and of influence? I see you are by your pretty attitude and by the engaging face you are making at me. Well, don't get it wrong. A gospel gone wrong in a mind is dangerous, and worse than no gospel at all. If you get this gospel wrong you may become conceited, and fancy yourself possessed of a power which you haven't a notion of. To use will in any really affective way, you must train your body, and take care of it, not ruin it, and let it run to seed, or grow disfigured, or a ghastly tell-tale, a truth-teller, a town-crier with a big bell going about and calling aloud all the silly or criminal things you do. Now you have forgotten this, or perhaps you never knew it, and so will could not work in you; not even, I believe, a malign will to do mischief. You have thrown your body to the wolves, and whoever looks upon you must see the marks of their teeth."

It was evident that he gloated on this idea that the body of the lady of the feathers was forever useless for good, and even powerless to do much effective evil. He seemed to revel in the notion that she was simply a thing powerless, negative, and totally vain.

"I was mad ever to imagine the contrary," he said. Then, glancing away from personality, he exclaimed with more energy:

"But sometimes a will is so great, so trained, so watchful of opportunities, so acute and ready, that, instead of passing away practically on the passing away of the body in which it has been born and has lived, and merely living and working through the emanations of itself that have clung to men and women in many different places, instead—in fact—of being diffused—you understand me?" he broke out, with an obvious delight in the grossness of her ignorance and the denseness of her bewilderment and misunderstanding of him—"which is a sort of death, it seizes, whole, as a body, with all the members sound, upon another home. It commits, in effect, a great act of brigandage. It lives on complete, powerful—even more powerful than ever before, because to all its original powers it adds a glory of deception, and is a living lie. If only you could understand me!"

Suddenly he burst into a peal of laughter that was a full stop to his philosophy. His cigarette had gone out. He threw it into the grate and stretched out his arms, still laughing. And Cuckoo gazing at him, as if fascinated, said silently to herself, "If only I could!"

For she felt as if Valentine were telling her a great secret, secure in the hideous knowledge that, though she heard it, it must remain a secret from her on account of her ignorance and of her stupidity. There was something in that feeling peculiarly maddening, yet Cuckoo displayed no irritation. The sharp little demon at her elbow whispered to her to be silent, told her that she might learn, might yet understand, if she would play a part, and be no more the wildcat, the foolishly impulsive lady of the feathers. Valentine struck his hand upon the table, and repeated:

"Why—why can't you understand?"

The piquancy of the situation evidently delighted his mind and his sense of mischief. He enjoyed playing the philosopher to a fool; and the more the fool became a fool, the higher soared his philosophy and his appreciation of it. There is always something paradoxical in wisdom instructing folly, for, after all, folly can never really learn, can never really understand. Valentine hugged that thought.

"Go on," the lady of the feathers said, apparently in gaping wonderment.

"Why? do you mean to tell me you are interested?"

"I'm listenin'! It sounds wonderful!"

"It is wonderful!" Valentine cried. "Every living lie is wonderful. But you don't know yet much about will. My gospel is full of secrets and of subtleties, and only a few people are beginning to guess at its far-reaching power, and to aim at learning its truths and sounding its depths. And many unbelievers play with it, and never know that they are playing with fire. A man did this once. Shall I tell you about him?"

"Yes!" said Cuckoo.

And her soul cried to the darkness in which she imagined some vague power to dwell; cried aloud for understanding. This silent cry was so intense that she lay back upon the hard sofa, almost exhausted, and as she lay there, something hot, like fire, seemed to make its nest in her heart, and to flame there, and to be alive, as a flame is alive, and to speak to her, but not aloud, as a flame speaks in the coals to the imagination of the watcher by the hearth. In that moment the lady of the feathers felt as if she were conscious of a new companion, a companion full of some intensity towards her, some anxiety about her, anxious and brilliant as a flame is, vital, keen, blazing, intense. Although she could not define her sensation thus, that lack of analytical power could not deprive her of it. She knew that her vision became clearer, that her mind became brighter, that a light illumined her, that she was, for the moment, greater than herself. But Valentine did not know it. He looked towards the sofa and saw spread upon it a thin, painted, haggard young creature curled into a position at once passionate, languid, and merely awkward, with relentless, thickly tangled hair, staring eyes, and half-opened lips, glowering in rouged stupidity and a coarseness of the gutter. He was a philosopher, with a beauty of the stars and of snows, with a refinement, white in its brilliance. She was an image of Regent Street, a ghastly idol of the town; and he was telling her strange things that she could never comprehend, in a jargon that was to her as Greek or as Hebrew. It was too absurd. Yet he loved to tell her, and he could scarcely tell why he loved it.

"Go on," said the lady of the feathers.

"This man," Valentine said, assuming a devout earnestness to trick her more, and watching for the puzzled expression to grow and to deepen in her eyes,—"this man had a holy nature, or I will say an unalterable will to do only things pure, reserved, refined—things that could not lead his body into difficulties, or his mind into quagmires. He was a saint without a religion. That is a possibility, I assure you; for a will can be amazingly independent. He had the peculiar grace that is said to belong to angels, a definite repugnance to sin. I know you understand me."

She nodded bluntly.

"I know—he couldn't go wrong, if it was ever so," she ejaculated.

"If it was ever so—as the housemaids say—you put the position of this man in a nutshell, and if this strange will of his had never relented, the transformation I am going to describe, or—" he paused for a moment as if in doubt, then continued—"or rather to hint at, would never have taken place. But he grew dissatisfied with his will. It bored him ever so little. He fancied he would like to change it, and to substitute for it the will of the world. And the will of the world, as you know well, my lady of the feathers, is to sin. For some time he longed, vaguely enough, to be different, to be, in fact, lower down in the scale than he was. But his longing to be able to desire sin did not lead him to desire it actually. One can force one's self to do a thing, you see, but one cannot force one's self to wish to do it, or to enjoy doing it. And this man, being a selfish saint—saints are very often very selfish—would not sin without desiring it. So it seemed that he must remain forever as he was, a human piece of flawless porcelain, wishing to be cracked and common delft."

"Whatever did he wish it for?" asked Cuckoo, with the surprise of a zany.

"Who can tell why one man wishes for one thing, another for another? That, too, is a mystery. The point is, that he did wish it, and that he did something more."

"What was that, eh?"

"He deliberately tried to weaken and to deface his will; to alter it. And he chose curious means, acting under suggestion from another will or influence that was more powerful than his own, because it was utterly self-satisfied and desired only to be what it was. I don't think I will tell you what the means were. But his original dissatisfaction with his own goodness was the weapon that brought about his own destruction. His will did not change, as he believed; but what do you think actually happened to it? I will tell you. It was expelled from his body. He lost it forever. He lost, in fact, his identity. For will is personality, soul, the ego, the man himself. And this soul, if you choose to call it so, was driven into the air. It went away in the darkness, like a bird. Do you see?"

He waved his hand upward, and lifted his eyes, as if following with them the flight that he described.

"It flew away!"

"Where did it go?" ejaculated Cuckoo.

Valentine seemed suddenly to become fully aware of the depth of her interest.

"Ah! even you are fascinated by my gospel, you who cannot understand it," he said. "But I cannot tell you where it went. I too have wondered."

He knit his brows rather moodily over this question of location. "I too have wondered. But I imagine that it died; that it ceased to be. Divorced from the body that was its home, degraded by dissatisfaction with itself, of what use could it be to any one? Even if it still continues to be, it is practically dead, for it can work neither harm nor good to any one, and the thing that cannot be good or evil, or turn others towards the one or the other, is dead. It is no more a will. It is no more an influence. It is a heart without a pulse in it; in fact, it is nothing."

A sort of joy had leapt into his face as he dwelt on this idea of nothingness, and he added:

"It is something like your soul, my lady of the feathers. Do you hear me?"

"Yes. I hear!"

"But the will that ousted it gained in power by that triumph. Totally self-satisfied, desirous of being only that which it is, having no enemy of yearning disappointment with itself in its camp, it can do what will never did before. It can lead captive the soul that was formerly the captive of the soul that it drove away to die. Like an enemy it has seized its opponent's camp, and the slave dwelling in that camp is now its slave forever."

As Valentine spoke he seemed to become almost intoxicated with the thoughts conjured up by his own words. His blue eyes blazed with a fury of shining excitement. His white cheeks were suffused with blood.

"I have made myself, my will, a god!" he exclaimed passionately.

At the words the lady of the feathers moved suddenly forward on the sofa.

"What—you!" she said.

The last word was uttered with an intensity that could surely only spring from something near akin to comprehension, if not from actual comprehension itself. It certainly startled Valentine, or seemed to startle him. His face showed an amazement like the amazement of a man raving to an image of wood, to whom, abruptly, the wood speaks with a tongue.

"What do you mean?" he said, and his voice faltered from its note of triumph and of exultation.

Cuckoo resumed her former position.

"Only was you the will, or the man, or whatever it all is?" she replied in the voice of one hopelessly muddled.

Valentine was reassured as to her stupidity.

"That has nothing to do with the story," he said.

"There was two of them, was there?" she persisted, but still with the accent of a hopeless dullard.

"Oh yes. One will must always work upon another, or else there could be no story worth the telling."

"Oh, I see; that's it."

Valentine again broke into laughter.

"You see, do you?" he said. "You see that, but do you see the truth of what I told you before about the connection of the will with the body? Do you see why you have no power now, can never have power again? Do you understand that the wreck of your body inevitably causes the wreck of your will, so that it really dies and ceases, because it can no more influence others? Do you understand that? I'll make you understand it now. Come here."

He got up from his chair and seized her two hands in his, dragging her almost violently up from the sofa. Her fear of him, always lurking near, came upon her with a rush at the contact of his hands, and she hung back, moved by an irresistible repulsion. The slight and momentary struggle between them caused her hair, carelessly turned up and loosely pinned, to come down. It fell all round her in a loose shock of unnatural colour. Valentine's hands were strong, and Cuckoo soon felt that resistance was useless. She let her body yield, and he drew her in front of the glass that stood over the mantelpiece. Pushing back the table behind them, he made her stand still in the unwinking glare of the three gas-jets, which she had herself turned up earlier in the evening.

"Look there!" he cried; "look at yourself well! How can you have power over anybody?"

Their two faces, set close together as in a frame, stared at them from the mirror, and Cuckoo—forced to obedience—examined them as if indeed they were a picture. She saw the man's face, fair, beautiful, refined, triumphant, full of the courage that is based upon experience of itself and of its deeds and possibilities, full of a strange excitement that filled the face with amazingly vivid expression. She saw the bright blue eyes gazing at her, the red lips of the mouth curved in a smile. There was health in the face as well as thought. And there was power, which is greater than health, more beautiful even than beauty. And then she turned her eyes to the face's companion. Thin, sharp, faded, it met her eyes, half-shrouded in the thick, tumbled hair that shone in the mirror with the peculiar frigid glare that can only be imparted by a chemical dye, and can never be simulated by nature. One cheek was chalk-white. The other, which had been pressed against the horsehair of the sofa, showed a harsh, scarlet patch. All the varying haggard expressions of the world seemed crowding in the eyes of this scarecrow, and peering beneath the thickly blackened eyelashes that struck a violent discord against the yellow hair. The thin lips of the mouth were pressed together in an expression of pain, fear, and weariness. Shadows slept under the eyes where the face had fallen into hollows. To-night there seemed no vestige of prettiness in those peaked features. Nothing of health, youth, gaiety, or even girlhood, was written in them, but only a terrible, a brutal record of spoliation and of wreckage, of plunder, and of despair. And the gaslight, striking the flat surface of the mirror, made the record glitter with a thin, cheap sparkle, like the tinsel trappings of the life whose story the mirror revealed in its reflection.

How, indeed, could such a creature have power over fellow man or woman for good or for evil? If weakness can be written without words, it seemed written in that wasted countenance, which Cuckoo examined with a creeping horror that numbed her like frost. As she did so, Valentine was watching the ungraciousness of her face in the glass deepen and glide, moment by moment, into greater ugliness, greater degradation. And as the little light there had ever been behind those unquiet eyes, faded gradually away, in his reflected eyes the light leaped up into fuller glare, sparkling to unbridled triumph. And his reflected lips smiled more defiantly, until the smile was no longer touched merely with triumph, but with something more vehement and more malign! Cuckoo did not see the change. She saw only herself, and her heart cried and wailed, What good—what good to love Julian? What good to hate Valentine? What good to fight for the man she loved against the man she loathed? As well set a doll to move its tense joints against an army, or a scarecrow to defy a god! Never before had she realized thoroughly the complete tragedy of her life. Hitherto she had assisted at it in fragments, coming in for a scene here, a scene there. Now she sat through the whole of the five acts, and the only thing she missed was the fall of the curtain. That remained up. But why? There was—there could be—nothing more to come, unless a dreary recapitulation of such dreary events as had already been displayed. Such a cup could hold no wine that was not foul, thick, and poisonous. And she had known herself so little as to imagine that she could really love, and that her love might fulfil itself in protection instead of sensual gratification. Yes, vaguely she had believed that. She had even believed that she could put on armour and do battle against—and at this point in her desperate meditation the lady of the feathers shifted her eyes from her own face mirrored to the face beside it. As she did so, a sudden cry escaped from her lips. For a moment she thought she saw the face of the dead Marr, and the hallucination was so vivid that when it was gone and the mirror once more revealed the face of Valentine, Cuckoo had no thought but that she had really seen Marr. She turned sharply round and cast a glance behind her. Then:

"Did you see him?" she whispered to Valentine.

"Whom?"

"Him—Marr! He's not dead; he's here; he's here, I tell you. I see him in the glass!"

She shivered. The room seemed spinning round with her, and the two faces danced and sprang in the mirror, as if a hand shook it up and down, from side to side.

"If he is here," Valentine said, "it is not in the way you fancy. Your imagination has played you a trick."

"Didn't you—didn't you see him? Don't you see him now?"

"I see only you and myself."

As if for a joke he bent his head and peered closely at the mirror, like a man endeavouring to discern some very pale and dim reflection there.

"No, he's—he's not there!" he murmured, "but—"

With a harsh exclamation he dashed his fist against the mirrored face of the lady of the feathers. The glass cracked and broke from top to bottom. Cuckoo cried out. Valentine's hand had blood upon it. He did not seem to know this, and swung round upon her with an almost savage fury.

"Don't—don't, for God's sake," she cried, fearing an attack.

But he made no movement against her. On the contrary, an expression of relief chased the anger from his lips and eyes.

"Ah!" he said, "that's a lying mirror! It lied to you and to me. I smashed it. Well, I'll give you another that is more truthful, and more ornamental too."

"What was it you saw?" she murmured.

"A silly vision, power where there is only weakness; a will, a soul, where there could not be one!"

"Eh? was it that you struck at?"

"Why do you ask?" he said with sudden suspicion.

"You struck where my face was," she said doggedly. "You did, you did!"

"Nonsense!"

"It ain't! Why did you do it, then?"

A gleam of hope had shot into her eyes, lit by his weird attack upon her mirrored image. After all, despite his sneers at her faded body, his gibes at her faded and decaying soul, he struck at her as a man strikes at the thing he fears. In that faded soul a wild hope and courage leaped up, banishing all the sick despair which had preceded it. The lady of the feathers faced Valentine with a deathless resolution of glance and of attitude.

"You've been telling lies," she said "you've been telling me damned lies!"

"What do you mean?"

"You said as I was—was done with."

A forced smile came like a hissing snake on Valentine's lips.

"So you are!"

"I ain't! I ain't! What's more, you know it!"

"You have broken yourself to pieces as I have broken that mirror!"

He spoke with an effort after scathing contempt, but she detected a quiver of agitation in his voice.

"If I have, I'll break you yet!" she cried.

"Me? What are you talking about?"

"You know well enough."

"But do you know—do you know that I—I am Marr?"

He almost whispered the last words! A chill of awe fell over the lady of the feathers. She did not understand what he meant, and yet she felt as if he spoke the truth, as if this inexplicable mystery were yet indeed no fiction, no phantasy, but stern fact, and as if, strangely, she had at the back of her mind divined it, known it when she first knew Valentine, yet only realized it now that he himself told her. She did not speak. She only looked at him, turning white slowly as she looked.

"I am Marr," he repeated. "Now do you understand my gospel? Understand it if you can, for you are bereft of the power that belongs of right only to the woman who is pure. Long ago, perhaps, you might have fought me. Who knows, you might even have conquered me? But you have thrown yourself to the wolves, and they have torn you till you are only a skeleton. And how can a soul dwell in a skeleton? Your soul, your will, is as useless as that vagrant soul of Valentine, which I expelled into the air and into the night. It can do nothing; you can do nothing either. If I have ever feared you, and hated you because I feared you, I have fooled myself. I have divined your thoughts. I have known your enmity against me, and your love—yours!—for Julian. But if the soul and the will of Valentine could not save Julian from my possession, how can yours? You are an outcast of the streets! Go back to the streets. Live in them! Die in them! They are your past, your present, your future. They are your hell, your heaven. They are everything to you. I tell you that you are as much of them as are the stones of the pavement that the feet of such women as you tread night after night. And what soul can a street thing have? What can be the will of a creature who gives herself to every man who beckons, and who follows every voice that calls? I feared you. I might as well have feared a shadow, an echo, a sigh of the wind, or the fall of an autumn leaf. I might as well have feared that personal devil whom men raise up for themselves as a bogey. Will is God! Will is the Devil! Will is everything! And you—you, having tossed your will away—are nothing."

He had spoken gravely, even sombrely. On the last word he was gone.

The lady of the feathers stood alone in the ugly little room, and heard the clock of the great church close by chime the hour of midnight. Her face was set and white under its rouge, in its frame of disordered canary-coloured hair. Her eyes were clouded with perplexity, with horror, and with awe. Yet she looked undaunted. Staring at the door through which the man men still called Valentine Cresswell had vanished, she whispered:

"It ain't true! It ain't! Nothin' does for a woman; not when she loves a man! Nothin'. Nothin'."

She fell down against the hard horsehair sofa, and stretched her arms upon it, and laid her head against them, as if she prayed.

BOOK IV—DOCTOR LEVILLIER

CHAPTER I

THE LADY VISITS DOCTOR LEVILLIER

The Russian Grand Duke, whose malady was mainly composed of two ingredients, unlimited wealth and almost unlimited power, was slow in recovering, and slower still in making up his mind to part with the little nerve-doctor whom he had summoned from England. And so London was beginning to fall into its misty autumn mood before Doctor Levillier was once more established in Harley Street. He had heard occasionally from both Valentine and Julian during his long absence, but their letters had not communicated much, and once or twice when he, in replying to them, had put one or two friendly questions as to their doings, those questions had remained unanswered. The doctor had been particularly reluctant to leave England at the time when the Grand Duke's summons reached him, as his interest and curiosity about Valentine had just been keenly and thoroughly roused. But fate fought for the moment against his curiosity. It remained entirely ungratified. He had not once seen Valentine since the afternoon in Victoria Street, when the lamentation of that thoroughfare's saint had struck consternation into the hearts of musical sinners. Nor had the doctor met any one who could give him news of the two youths over whose welfare his soul had learned to watch. Now, when he returned to London, he found that both Valentine and Julian were abroad. Only Rip, left in charge of Julian's servant, greeted him with joy; Rip, whose conduct had given the first strong impulse to his wonder and doubt about Valentine.

Doctor Levillier took up the threads of his long-forsaken practice, and gave himself to his work while autumn closed round London. One day he heard casually from a patient that Valentine and Julian had returned to town. He wondered that they had not let him know: the omission seemed curious and unfriendly.

During the day on which the news reached him he was, as usual, busily engaged from morning till evening in the reception of patients. His reputation was very great, and men and women thronged his consulting-rooms. Although his rule was that nobody could ever gain admission to him without an appointment, it was a rule made to be broken. He never had the heart to turn any one from his door in distress, and so it frequently happened that his working-day was prolonged by the admission of people who unexpectedly intruded themselves upon him. Great ladies, more especially, often came to him on the spur of the moment, prompted to seek his solace by sudden attacks of the nerves. A lover had used them ill, perhaps, or a husband had turned upon them and had rent a long dressmaker's bill into fragments, without paying it first. Or the ennui of an exquisite life of unbridled pleasure had suddenly sprung upon them like a grisly spectre, torn their hearts, shaken them into tears. Or—and this happened often—a fantastic recognition of the obvious fact that even butterflies must die, had abruptly started into their minds, obtruding a skeleton head above the billowing chiffons, rattling its bones until the dismal sound outvied the frou-frou of silk, the burr of great waving fans, the click of high heels from Paris. Then, in terror, they drove to Doctor Levillier's door and begged to see him, if only for a moment.

There was no doctor in London so universally sought by the sane lunatics of society as Dr. Levillier. He was no mad-doctor. He had no private asylum. He had never definitely aimed at becoming a famous specialist in lunacy. But the pretty lunatics came to him, nevertheless; the lunatics who live at afternoon parties, till the grave yawns at their feet, and they must go down the strange ways of another world, teacup in hand, scandal still fluttering upon their ashy lip; the lunatics who live for themselves, until their eyes are hollow as tombs and their mouths fall in from selfishness, and their cheeks are a greenish white from satiety, and lust's gratified flame beacons on their drawn cheeks and along their crawling wrinkles; the lunatics who seek to be what they can never be, the beauties of this world, the great Queens of the Sun, whose gaze shall glorify, whose smile shall crown and bless, whose touch shall call hearts to agony and to worship, whose word shall take a man from his plough and send him out to win renown, or snatch a leader from his ambition and set him creeping in the dust, like a white mouse prisoned by a scarlet silken thread; the lunatics who dandle religions like dolls, and play with faiths as a boy plays with marbles, until the moment comes when the game is over, and the player is faced by the terror of a great lesson; the lunatics who stare away their days behind prancing horses in the Park, who worship in the sacred groves of bonnets, who burn incense to rouged and powdered fashions, who turn literature into a "movement," and art into a cult, and humanity into a bogey, and love into an adulterous sensation; the lunatics who think that to "live" is only another word for to sin, that innocence is a prison and vice liberty; the lunatics who fill their boudoirs with false gods, and cry everlastingly, "Baal, hear us!" till the fire comes down from heaven, which is no painted ceiling presided over by a plaster god. These came to Doctor Levillier day by day, overtaken by sad moments, by sudden, dreary crises of the soul, that set them impotently wailing, like Job among the potsherds. Many of them did not "curse God," only because they did not believe in Him.

It is not the fashion in London to believe in God just now.

Dr. Levillier had always, since he was a youth, walking hospitals and searching the terror of life for all its secrets, felt a deep care, a deep solicitude, for each duet, body and soul, that walked the world. He had never set them apart, never lost sight of one in turning his gaze upon the other. This fact, no doubt, accounted partially for the fact that many looked upon him as the greatest nerve-doctor in London. For the nervous system is surely a network lacing the body to the soul, and vice versa. Every liaison has its connecting links, the links that have brought it into being. One lust stretches forth a hook and finds an eye in another, and there is union. So with faiths, with longings, with fine aspirations, with sordid grovellings. There is ever the hook seeking the appropriate eye. The body has a hook, the soul an eye. They meet at birth and part only at death.

Dr. Levillier was constantly, and ignorantly, entreated to adjust the one comfortably in the other. It is a delicate business, this adjustment, sometimes an impossible business. Half of the Harley Street patients came saying, "Make me well." What they really meant was, "Make me happy." Yet the most of them would have resented a valuable mixed prescription, advice for the hook, and advice for the eye. Such prescriptions had to be very deftly, sometimes very furtively, made up. Often the doctor felt an intense exhaustion steal over him towards the close of day. This tremendous and eternal procession passing onwards through his life, filing before him like a march-past of sick soldiers, saluting him with cries, and with questions, and with entreaties; this never-ceasing progress fatigued him. There were moments when he longed to hide his face, to turn away, to shut his ears to the murmuring voices, and his eyes to the pale, expressive faces, to put his great profession from him, as one puts a beggar into the night. But these were only moments, and they passed quickly. And the little doctor was always bitterly ashamed of them, as a brave man is ashamed of a secret tug of cowardice at his heart. For it seemed to him the greatest thing in all the world to help to make the unhappy rightly happier.

And this was, and had always been, his tireless endeavour. Upon this day one of these hated moments of mental and physical exhaustion had come upon him, and he struggled hard against his enemy. The procession of patients had been long, and more than once in the tiny interval between the exit of one and the entry of another, Dr. Levillier had peeped at his watch. His last appointment was at a quarter to five, then he would be free, and he said to himself that he would take a cab and drive down to Victoria Street. Valentine was often at home about six. The doctor put aside the little devil of pride that whispered, "You have been badly treated," and resolved to make the advance to this friend, who seemed to have forgotten him. In times of fatigue and depression he had often sought Valentine in order to be solaced by his music. But this solace was at an end, unless, indeed, the strange burden of musical impotence had been lifted from Valentine, and his talent had been restored to him.

The last patient came to the doctor's door punctually and was punctually dismissed as the clock chimed the quarter of an hour after five. The last prescription was written. The doctor drew in a deep breath of relief. He touched the bell and his servant appeared.

"There is no one waiting?" he asked.

"No, sir."

"I have made no other appointment for to-day, and I am going out almost immediately. If any patients should call casually tell them I cannot possibly see them to-day. Ask them to make an appointment. But I cannot see any one to-day under any circumstances."

"Yes, sir."

Dr. Levillier took his way upstairs, made a careful toilet, selected from his absurd array of boots a pair perfectly polished, put them on, took his hat and gloves, sighed once again heavily, almost as a dog sighs preparatory to its sleep, and turned to go downstairs. He forgot for the moment that he was prepared to watch Valentine. Perhaps, indeed, his long period of absence had dulled in his memory the recollection of any apparent change in his friend. For at this moment of fatigue he only recalled Valentine's expression of purity and high-souled health, and the atmosphere of lofty serenity in which he seemed habitually to dwell. The doctor wanted relief. How Valentine's presence would refresh him after this dreary array of patients, after the continuous murmurs of their plaintive voices! As he opened his bedroom door he perceived his man-servant mounting the stairs.

"Lawler, I can't see any one," he said, more hastily than usual. "I told you so distinctly. I am going out immediately."

The man paused. He had been with the doctor for many years, and both adored and understood him. The doctor looked at him.

"It is a patient, I suppose?" he asked.

"Well, sir, I can't exactly say."

"A lady?"

"Yes, sir. At least, sir—well, no, sir."

"What do you mean?"

"A female, sir."

"What does she want?"

"To see you, sir. I can't get her to go. I asked her to, sir; then I told her to."

"Well?"

"She only gave me this and said she'd come to see you, and if you were in she'd wait."

He handed a card to his master. The doctor took it and read:

"Cuckoo Bright, 400 Marylebone Road."

The words conveyed nothing to his mind, for neither Julian nor Valentine had ever talked to him of the lady of the feathers.

"Cuckoo Bright," he said. "An odd name! And an odd person, I suppose,
Lawler?"

Lawler pursed his lips rather primly.

"Very odd, sir. Not at all a usual sort of patient, sir."

"H'm. Go and ask her if she comes as a patient or on private business."

The man retreated and returned.

"The—lady says she's ill and must see you, sir, if only for a moment."

This was Cuckoo's ruse to get into the house, and was based upon Julian's long-ago remark that the doctor could never resist helping any one who was in trouble. Standing on the doorstep, she had histrionically simulated faintness for the special benefit of Lawler, who regarded her with deep suspicion.

"I suppose I must see her," the doctor said with a sigh. "Show her in,
Lawler."

Lawler departed, disapprovingly, to do so, and after a moment the doctor followed him. He walked into his consulting-room, where he found the lady of the feathers standing by the writing table. The autumn day was growing dark, and the street was full of deepening mist. Cuckoo was but a fantastic shadow in the room. Her dress rustled with an uneasy sound as the doctor came in. His first act was to turn on the electric light. In a flash the rustling shadow was converted into substance. Cuckoo and the doctor stood face to face, and Cuckoo's tired eyes fastened with a hungry, almost a wolfish, scrutiny upon this stranger. She wanted so much of him. The look was so full of intense meaning that, coming in a flash with the electric flash, it startled the doctor. Yet he had seen something like it before in the eyes of those who suspected that they carried death within them, and came to ask him if it were true. He was surprised, too, by her appearance. The women of the streets did not come to him, although if they had been able to read the writing in his heart many of them would surely have come. He shook hands with Cuckoo, told her to sit down, and sat down himself opposite to her.

"What is the matter? Please tell me your symptoms," he said gently.

"Eh?" was the reply, spoken in a thin and high voice.

"What has been troubling you?"

Cuckoo, who was wholly unaccustomed to answer a doctor's questions, started violently. She fancied from his words that he had divined the lie she had told when she said that she was ill, and knew that she came for a mental reason. Instinctively she connected the word "trouble" with the heart, in a way that was oddly and pathetically girlish. Acting upon this impulse she exclaimed:

"Then you know as I ain't ill?"

Doctor Levillier was still more surprised. Not understanding what was in her mind, he entirely failed to keep pace with its agility.

"Why do you come to me, then?" he asked.

"Oh," she returned, with a quickly gathering hesitation, "I thought as perhaps you knew."

"I! But we have never met before."

The doctor bent his eyes on her searchingly. For a moment he began to wonder whether his visitor was quite right in her head. Cuckoo shuffled under his gaze. The very kindliness of his face and gentleness of his voice made her feel hot and abashed. A prickly sensation ran over her body as she cleared her throat and said, monosyllabically:

"No."

The doctor waited.

"What is it?" he said at length. "Tell me why you have called. If you are not ill, what is it you want of me?"

"You'll laugh, p'r'aps."

"Laugh? Is it something funny, then?"

"Funny! Not it!"

The sound of her voice seemed to give her some courage, for she went on with more hardy resolution:

"Look here, you can see what I am—oh yes, you can—and you wonder what I'm doin' here. Well, if I tell you, will you promise as you won't laugh at me?"

This was Cuckoo's way of delicately sounding the doctor's depths. She thought it decidedly subtle.

"Yes, I'll promise that," the doctor said.

He looked at her faded young face and felt no inclination to laugh.

"Well, then," Cuckoo said, more excitedly, "you know Ju—Mr. Addison, don't you?"

The doctor began to see a ray of light.

"Certainly I do," he said.

"And Mr. Cresswell?"

"He is one of my most intimate friends."

The words were spoken with an unconscious warmth that chilled Cuckoo. For surely the man who spoke thus of the man she hated, must be her enemy. She faltered visibly, and a despairing expression crept into her eyes.

"I don't know as it's any use my sayin' it," she began as if half to herself.

The doctor saw that she was much troubled and the kindness of his nature was roused.

"Don't be afraid of me," he said. "You have come here to tell me something, tell it frankly. I am a friend of both the people you mention."

"You can't be that," she suddenly cried. "Nobody can't be that!"

"Why not?"

"You ought to know."

She said it fiercely. All her self-consciousness was suddenly gone, swept away by the flood of thought and of remembrance that was surging through her mind.

"Why can't you see what he is," she exclaimed, "any more than he can, than Julian—Mr. Addison, I mean? Any one'd think you was all mad, they would."

Doctor Levillier was glad he had admitted the lady of the feathers to his presence. Interest sprang up in him, alive and searching.

"Tell me what you mean," he said. "Are you talking about Mr. Cresswell?"

"Yes, I am; and I say of all the beasts in London he's the greatest."

Cuckoo did not choose her words carefully. She was highly excited and she wanted to be impressive. It seemed to her that to use strong language was the only way to be impressive. So she used it. The doctor's face grew graver.

"Surely you hardly know what you're saying," he said very quietly.

But his thoughts flew to that summer night when his mastiffs howled against Valentine, and he felt as if a mystery were deepening round him as the autumn mist of evening deepened in the street outside.

"I do," she reiterated. "I do. But nobody won't see it. And it's no use what I see. How can it be?"

The words were almost a wail.

"Tell me what you see."

Cuckoo looked into the doctor's sincere eyes, and a sudden rush of hope came to her.

"That's what I want to. But if you like him you'll only be angry."

"No, I shall not."

"Well, then. I see as he's ruinin' his friend."

"Ruining Mr. Addison?"

"Yes."

It struck the doctor as very strange that such a girl as Cuckoo obviously was should cry out in such a passionate way against the ruin of any young man. Was it not her fate to ruin others as she herself had been ruined? He wondered what her connection with the two youths was, and perhaps his face showed something of his wonder, for Cuckoo added, after a long glance at him:

"It's true; yes, it is," as if she read his doubts.

"How do you come to know it?" the doctor said, not at all unkindly, but as if anxious to elucidate matters.

"Why, I tell you I can see it plain. Besides," and here she dropped her voice, "Valentine, as he calls himself—though he ain't—as good as told me. He did tell me, only I couldn't understand. He knew I couldn't—d'you see? That's why he told me. Oh, if he'd only tell you!"

Fragments of Valentine's exposition of his deeds and of his strange gospel were floating through Cuckoo's mind as fragments of broken wood float by on a stream, fragments of broken wood that were part of a puzzle, that should be rescued by some strong hand from the stream, and fitted together into a perfect whole.

"Valentine! You say he told you that he was ruining Julian?"

Unconsciously the doctor used the Christian names. His doing so set
Cuckoo more at her ease.

"Yes. Not like that. But he told me. He ain't what you think, nor what Julian thinks. He's somebody else, and you can't tell it. He's laughing at you all."

Thus the gospel came forth from the painted lips of Cuckoo, crude and garbled, yet true gospel. The doctor was completely puzzled. All he gathered from this announcement was that Valentine seemed in some way to have been confiding in this girl of the streets. Such a fact was sufficiently astounding. That they should ever have been associated together in any way was almost incredible to any one who knew Valentine. Yet it was quite obvious that they did know each other, and in no ordinary manner.

"Do you know Mr. Cresswell well?" the doctor said.

He saw that he could only make the tangle clear by being to some extent judicial. Humanity merely excited Cuckoo to something that was violently involved, passionate, and almost hysterical.

"Well enough."

"And Mr. Addison?"

Cuckoo flushed slowly.

"Yes, I know him—quite well."

An almost similar answer, but given with such a change of manner as would be possible only in a woman. It told the doctor much of the truth and gave him the first page of a true reading of Cuckoo's character. But he went on with apparently unconscious quietude:

"And you came here to tell me, who know and like them both, that the one is ruining the other. What made you come to me?"

"Why, somethin' Julian said once. He thinks a lot of you. I was afraid to come, but I—I thought I would. It's seein' them—at least Julian—since they got back made me come."

"I haven't seen them yet," the doctor said, and there was an interrogation in the accent with which he spoke. Something in Cuckoo's intense manner roused both wonder and alarm in him. She evidently spoke driven by tremendous impulse. What vision had given that impulse life?

"Ah!" she said, and fell suddenly into a dense silence, touching her left cheek mechanically with her hand, which was covered by a long, black silk glove. She alternately pressed the fingers of it against the cheek bone and withdrew them, as one who marks the progress of a tune, hummed or played on some instrument. Her eyes were staring downwards upon the carpet. The doctor watched her, and the wonder and fear grew in him.

"Have you nothing more to tell me?" he said at last.

"Eh?"

She put down her hand slowly and turned her eyes on him.

"What do you wish me to do?" he said, "I do not know yet what may—" he checked himself and substituted, "I must go and see my friends."

"Yes, go."

She nodded her head slowly, and then she shivered as she sat in the chair.

"Go, and do somethin'," she said. "I would—I want to—but I can't. It's true, I suppose, what he said. I'm nearly done with, I'm spoilt. I say, you're a doctor, aren't you? You know things? Tell me then, do, what's the good of goin' on being able to feel—I mean to feel just like anybody, anybody as hasn't gone down, you know—if you can't do anythin' the same as they can, get round anybody to make 'em go right? I could send him right, I could, as well as any girl, if feelin' 'd only do it. But feelin' ain't a bit of good. It's looks, I suppose. Everythin' 's looks."

"No, not everything," the doctor said.

Cuckoo's speech both interested and touched him. Its confused wistfulness came straight from the heart. And then it recalled to the doctor a conversation he had had with Valentine, when they talked over the extraordinary influence that the mere appearance—will working through features—of one man or woman can have over another. The doctor could only at present rather dimly apprehend the feeling entertained for Julian by Cuckoo. But as he glanced at her, he understood very well the pathos of the contest raging at present between her heart and the painted shell which held it.

"Nobody who feels goodness is utterly bereft of the power of bringing good to another," he said. "For we can seldom really feel what we can never really be."

Light shone through the shadows of the tired face at the words.

"He said different from that," she exclaimed.

"He—who?"

"Him as you call Valentine. That's why he told me all about it, because he knew as I shouldn't understand, and because he thinks I can't do nothin' for any one. But I say, you do somethin' for Julian, will you, will you?"

There was a passion of pleading in her voice. She had lost her fear of him, and, stretching out her hand, touched the sleeve of his coat.

"I don't understand it all," the doctor said. "I don't like to accept what you say about Mr. Cresswell, even in thought. But I will go and see him, and Julian. The dogs," he added in a low and secret voice to himself. "There is something terribly strange in all this."

He fell into a silence of consideration that lasted longer than he knew. The lady of the feathers began to fidget in it uneasily. She felt that her mission was perhaps accomplished and that she ought to go. She looked across at the doctor, pulled her silk gloves up on her thin arms, and kicked one foot against the other. He did not seem to notice. She glanced towards the window. The fog was pressing its face against the glass like a dreary and terrible person looking upon them with haggard eyes. It was time, she supposed, for her to drift out into the arms that belonged to that dreary and terrible face. She got up.

"I'll go now," she said.

The doctor did not hear.

"I'll go now, please," she repeated.

This time he heard and got up. He looked at her and said, "I have your address. I will see you again."

If misery chanced to stand once in his path, he seldom lost sight of it till he had at least tried to bring a smile to its lips, a ray of hope to its eyes. But in the instance of Cuckoo he had other reasons, or might have other reasons, for seeing her in the future.

"You are sure you have nothing more to say to me?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"No, I don't think," she murmured.

"Then good-bye."

He held out his hand. She put hers in it, with an action that was oddly ladylike for Cuckoo. Then she went out, rather awkwardly, in a reaction, to the hall, the doctor following. He opened the door for her, and the mist crawled instantly in.

"It's a gloomy night," he said. "Very autumnal."

"Yes, ain't it? I do hate the nights."

She spoke the words with an accent that was venemous.

"C-r-r!" she said.

And with that ejaculation, half an uttered shiver, half a muttered curse, she gave herself to the fog, and was gone.

Doctor Levillier stood for a moment looking into the vague and dreamy darkness. Then he put on his coat and hat, caught up a cab whistle, and with a breath, sent a shrill and piercing note into the night. Long and mournfully it sounded. And only the moist silence answered like that paradox—a voice that is dumb. Again and again the cry went forth, and at last there was an answering rattle. Two bright eyes advanced in the fog very slowly, looking for the sound, it seemed, as for a thing visible. The doctor got into the cab, and set forth in the fog to visit Valentine.