Flames

by Robert Hichens

CHAPTER X

THE DANCE OF THE HOURS

Even so huge a city as London, full of so many varying personalities and clashing interests, assumes upon certain days of the year a particular and characteristic aspect, arising from a community of curiosity, of excitement, or of delight felt by its inhabitants. Such days are Derby day and boat-race day. On the latter more especially London is leavened by a huge mob of juveniles from the universities, and their female admirers from the country, who cast a pleasant spell over the frigid indifference of town-bred dullards, and wake even the most vacuous of the Piccadilly loungers into a certain vivacity and boyishness. The cabmen blossom cheerily in dark and light blue favours. The butcher-boys are partisans. Every gamin in the gutter is all for one boat or for the other, and dances excitedly to know the result. London, in fact, loses several wrinkles on boat-race day, and smiles itself into a very pleasant appearance of briskness and of youth. As a rule, Julian went to see the race and to lunch with his friends at Putney or elsewhere, without either abnormal experience of excitement or any unusual vivacity. He was naturally full of life, and had hot blood in his veins, loved a spectacle, and especially a struggle of youth against youth. But no boat-race day had ever stirred him as this one did—found him so attentive to outside influence, so receptive of common things. For Julian had recently been half-conscious that he was progressing, and with increasing rapidity, though he knew not in what exact direction. Simply, he had the feeling of motion, of journeying, and it seemed to him that he had been standing comparatively still for years. And this boat-race day came to him like a flashing milestone upon the road of life. He felt as if it held in its hours a climax of episodes or of emotions, as if upon it either his body or his mind must prepare to undergo some large experience, to meet the searching eyes of a face new and unfamiliar.

Possibly the reason of his own excitement lay in the excitement of another, in the curious preparations, which he had oddly shared, for the transformation of the unmistakable into the vague. For the transformation of Cuckoo Bright had been preparing apace, and Julian was looking forward like a schoolboy to the effect which her novel respectability of appearance would have upon Valentine. The rouge-box lay lonely and untouched in a drawer. Even the powder-puff suffered an unaccustomed neglect. The black gown had been tried on and taught to fit the thin young figure, and a hat—with only one feather—kept company with the discarded sarcophagus which had given to Cuckoo her original nickname. And Cuckoo herself was almost as excited as Francine when she received her muff. She had not seen Valentine since the day of the tea-party, yet her attitude of mind had undergone a change towards him, bent to it probably by her vanity. Ever since Julian had given her the invitation to the Empire she had displayed a furtive desire to meet him again, and was perpetually talking of him and asking questions about him. Nevertheless her fear of him had not died away. Even now she sometimes exclaimed against him almost with vehemence, and made Julian renew his promise not to leave her during the evening. But Julian could see that she longed, as well as dreaded, to meet him again. After all, had he not picked her out from all the girlhood of London as one to whom he wished, to do honour? Had he been the Minotaur, such a fact must have made her look upon him with desirous interest.

When the great day arrived poor Cuckoo had to struggle with a keen and a sore temptation. She longed to deck herself out in her usual borrowed plumage, to take the habitual brilliant complexion out of the accustomed drawer, to crown her frizzed head with feathers, and to look noisily dashing—her only idea of elegance and grace. Never before had she so desired to create an impression. Yet she had given Julian her most solemn promise, and she intended to keep it. As she slowly attired herself, however, she wondered very much why he was so set upon denuding her of her accustomed magnificence. Her mind was entirely unable to grasp his conception of beauty and of attractiveness. She thought all men preferred the peony to the violet. To-night it was very certain that she would be no peony, scarcely even a violet. Her new gown had been expensive, but it was terribly simple, and the skirt hung beautifully, but was surely most direfully sombre. Nevertheless, it rustled with a handsome sound, a melody of wealth, when she had put it on and promenaded about her dingy bedroom, with Jessie at her heels, pretending to worry it playfully. The black bodice had some trimming. But it was all black. Cuckoo wished it had been scarlet, or, at the least, orange—something to catch the eye and hold it. When she was fully attired, and was staring into her glass, between two boldly flaring gas-jets, she nearly resolved to break her promise to Julian. She even went so far as to paint her lips and eyes, and was charmed with the effect against the black. But then with a sudden fury she sponged her pale face clean, threw the new feather boa round her throat, and, without daring to glance again at her funereal image, turned out the gas, and went into the sitting-room. As usual, her last act was to ensconse the pensive Jessie in the flannel-lined basket, and to give her a kiss. To-night, as she did so, she let a tear fall on the little dog's head. She scarcely knew why she cried. Perhaps the quiet gown, the lack of paint and powder, the prospect of kind and even respectful treatment from at least Julian, if not from Valentine, gave to her heart a vision of some existence in which Piccadilly Circus had no part.

Jessie shivered as she felt the tear, and licked the face of her mistress eagerly. Then Cuckoo rustled forth, avoiding Mrs. Brigg, who might be heard laboriously ascending the kitchen stairs to view her in her gala attire. In the twinkling of an eye she was out in the street, and Mrs. Brigg returned, swearing gustily, to the lower regions.

Cuckoo was to join the young men in their box, of which she had received the number. She took a cab to the Empire, and was there in excellent time. As she paid the man, she saw several women going noisily in, dressed in bright colours and gigantic hats. She looked at them, and felt terribly mean and poor, and it was with no trace of her usual airy impudence that she asked her way of the towering attendant in uniform who stood at the bottom of the carpeted staircase.

Julian and Valentine were already there. They turned round as she came in, and stood up to receive her. Julian took her hand, but Valentine hesitated for a moment. Then he said:

"Is it—can it be really Miss Bright?"

"Sure enough it is," Cuckoo answered, with an effort after liveliness.

But her eyes were fixed on his. She had seen a curious expression of mingled annoyance and contempt flit across his face as she came in. Why, why had she allowed Julian to over-persuade her? She was looking horrible, a scarecrow, a ghost of a woman. She was certain of it. For a moment she felt almost angry with Julian for placing her in such a bitter position. But he was glowing with a consciousness of successful diplomacy, and was delighted with her neat black aspect, and with her smart, though small, hat. He was indeed surprised to find how really pretty she still was when she allowed her true face to be seen, and was only wishing that she had made a little less of her hair, which was more vigorously arranged even than usual. He glanced to see Valentine's surprise.

"You are so altered," the latter continued. "I scarcely recognized you."

Cuckoo's lips tightened.

"Altered or not, it's me, though," she said.

Valentine did not reply to this. He only made her come to the front of the box, and placed a chair for her. She sat down feeling like a dog just whipped. The young men were on each side of her, and the band played an overture. Cuckoo peered out over the bar of the box, shifting ever so little away from the side on which Valentine sat. In his presence all her original and extreme discomfort returned, with an added enmity caused by her secret certainty that he thought her looking her worst. She peered from the box and strove to interest herself in the huge crowd that thronged the house, and in her own dignified and elevated position in it. For Valentine had taken one of the big boxes next the stage on the first tier, and Cuckoo had never been in such a situation before. She could survey the endless rows of heads in the stalls with a completeness of bird's-eye observation never previously attained. What multitudes there were. Endless ranks of men, all staring in the same direction, all smoking, all with handkerchiefs peeping out of their cuffs, and gold rings on their little fingers. Some of them looked half asleep, others, who had evidently been dining, threw themselves back in their stalls, roaring with laughter, and leaning to tell each other stories that must surely have teemed with wit. Most of them were young. But here and there an elderly and lined figure-head appeared among them, a figure-head that had faced many sorts of weather in many shifting days and nights, and that must soon face eternity—instead of time. Yet at the gates of death it still sipped its brandy and soda, smiled over a French song with tired lips, and sat forward with a pale gleam dawning in its eyes to reconnoitre the charms of a ballet. And if it looked aside at youth and was pierced by the sword of tragedy, yet it was too well bred or too conventional to let even one of the world around witness the wound. There is much secret bravery in social life. But these elderly figure-heads were fewer than usual to-night. Youth seemed to have usurped the playing-grounds of pleasure, to have driven old age away into the shadows. With flag flying, with trumpet and drum, it gaily held the field. The lady of the feathers, Valentine, and Julian leaned out from their box as from the car of a balloon and saw below them a world of youth hand in hand with the world of pleasure the gods offer to youth as wine. It was yet early in the evening, and the hours were only tripping along, as women trip in the pictures of Albert Moore. They had not begun to dance, although the band was playing a laughing measure from an opera of Auber that foams with frivolity. Men kept dropping in, cigar in mouth, walking to their seats with that air of well-washed and stiff composure peculiar to British youth, grim with self-consciousness, but affecting the devil-may-care with a certain measure of success. Some of them escorted ladies, but by far the greater number were in couples, or in parties of three or four. The rose of health, or, in many cases, of repletion, sat enthroned upon their cheeks; on the upper lips of many the moustaches were budding delicately. These were just getting up on the box and gripping the reins for the great coach-drive. Little wonder if the veins in their eager hands stood out. Little wonder if they flourished the whip with an unnecessary vehemence. But for them, too, so far the hours were only tripping, a slow and a dainty measure, a formal minuet. And they were but watching. Only later would they rise up and join the great dance of the hours, large, complicated, alluring, through whose measures the feet of eventual saints have trod, whose music rings in the ears of many who, long after, try to pray and to forget. Some who were with women made conversation jocosely, putting on travesties of military airs, and a knowingness of expression that might have put the wisdom of the Sphinx to shame. Nor did they hesitate to appear amorous in the public eye. On the contrary, their attitudes of attention were purposely assumed silently to utter volumes. They lay, to all intents and purposes, at the feet of their houris, as Samson lay shorn at the feet of Delilah. In loud young voices they told the secrets of their hearts, until even the clash of the music could scarcely keep them hidden. And Delilah, who had shorn the locks of so many Samsons, and who had heard so many secrets, gave ear with a clever affectation of interested surprise that deceived these gay deceivers and set them high on the peaks of their own estimation. Two or three family parties, one obviously French, seemed out of place, indecently domestic in the midst of such a throng, in which matrimony was a Cinderella before the ball, cuffed in curl-papers rather than kissed in crystal slippers. They sat rather silent. One consisted of a father, a mother and two daughters, the latter in large flowered hats. The father smoked. The mother looked furtive in a bonnet, and the two daughters, with wide open eyes, examined the flirtations around them as a child examines a butterfly caught in a net. One of them blushed. But she did not turn away her eyes. Nor were her girlish ears inactive. Family life seemed suddenly to become dull to her. She wondered whether it were life at all. And the father still smoked domestically. He knew it all. That was the difference. And perhaps it was his knowledge that made him serenely content with domesticity and the three women who belonged to him. Two boys, who had come up from a public school for the race, and had forgotten to go back, sat at the end of a row in glistening white collars and neat ties, almost angrily observant of all that was going on around them. For them the dance of the hours was already begun, and already become a can-can. They watched it with an eager interest and excitement, and the calm self-possession with which some of the men near them made jokes to magnificently dressed women with diamond earrings struck them dumb with admiration. Yet, later on, they too were fated to join in the dance, when the stars affected to sleep on the clouds and the moon lay wearily inattentive to the pilgrims of the night, like an invalid in a blue boudoir. On the thick carpet by the wall attendants stood loaded with programmes. One of them, very trim and respectable, in a white cap, was named Clara and offered a drink by an impudent Oxonian. She giggled with all the vanity of sixteen, happily forgetful of her husband and of the seven children who called her mother. Yet the dance of the hours was a venerable saraband to her, and she often wished she was in bed as she stood listening to the familiar music. In the enclosure set apart for the orchestra the massed musicians earned their living violently in the midst of the gaily dressed idlers, who heard them with indifference, and saw them as wound-up marionettes. The drummer hammered on his blatant instrument with all the crude skill of his tribe, producing occasional terrific noises with darting fists, while his face remained as immovable as that of a Punchinello. A flautist piped romantically an Arcadian measure, while his prominent eyes stared about over the chattering audience as if in search of some one. Suddenly he gave a "couac." He had seen his sweetheart in the distance with a youth from Christ Church. The conductor turned on the estrade in the centre of the orchestra and scowled at him, and he hastened to become Arcadian once again, gazing at his flute as if the devil had entered into it. In a doorway shrouded with heavy curtains two acting managers talked warily, their hands in retreat behind their coat-tails. They surveyed the house and mentally calculated the amount of money in it, raising their eyes to the more distant promenade, at the back of which large hats covered with flowers and feathers moved steadily to and fro. One of them curled his lips and murmured the word "Chant." Then they both laughed and strolled out to the bar. More men passed in. Many could not get seats, and these stood, smoking and exchanging remarks in the broad space between the stalls and the wall. Some of them leaned nonchalantly against it and criticised the appearance of the seated audience, or nodded to acquaintances. Others gathered round the bar, and a few looked at the drop-curtain as if they thought their ascetic glances would cause it to roll up and disappear. The overture at length ended. The stage was disclosed, and a man came forward with a smirk, and a wriggle of gigantic feet, to sing a song.

But Cuckoo Bright, Valentine, and Julian, from their balloon-car, still surveyed the world. Cuckoo had heard the man before. She was no stranger to the upper regions of the Empire, but the fascination of knowing herself watched and commented on from the stalls was a new experience, and she wished to make the most of it. Forgetting that she was not painted and powdered, she stretched herself into view and believed she was creating a sensation. So absorbed was she in the grand effort of being seen, that when Valentine drew his chair a little closer to her she did not notice it. One of her hands lay on her lap, the other being on the ledge of the box supporting her chin. She returned eagerly the glances of the stalls. The hand that was in her lap felt another hand close on it. Instinctively Cuckoo turned towards Julian, ready to smile. But Julian was gazing absorbed at the crowd, and half abstractedly listening to the song of the man in the huge, distorted boots. It was Valentine who held her hand. She tried to draw it away. He merely tightened his grip on it and continued sitting in silence, not even looking towards her. And as he held her hand a sense of helplessness came over Cuckoo. Even through his kid glove she could feel the burning heat of his palm, of the fingers that clutched hers with the strength of an athlete. She gazed towards him through the new black veil that was drawn over her face, and it seemed even to her limited intelligence that the man who was so brutally holding her against her will could not be the man at whom she was now looking. For Valentine, whose profile was set towards her, was pale, calm, almost languid in appearance. His blue eyes were glancing quietly over the multitude, with an air of indifferent observation. His lips were slightly parted in a sort of dawning smile, and his whole attitude was that of a man lazily at ease and taking his pleasure in a desultory mood. Yet the hand on Cuckoo's knees was vicious in its grasp. This startling and silent contradiction threw her into a complete panic, but she did not dare to say anything in protest. She sat silently trembling, and drawing her lips together in growing perturbation, till Julian happened to turn towards them. Then Valentine's fingers relaxed their grasp quietly, and slipped away. At the same time he moved with an air of energy, and broke into gay conversation. His languor vanished. His blue eyes sparkled. Julian was astonished at his intense vivacity. He laughed, made jokes, became absolutely boyish.

"Why, Val, how gay you are!" Julian said.

"Every one is gay to-night."

He was interrupted by a roar of laughter. The man in the boots was becoming immoderately whimsical. His feet seemed to have escaped from control, and to be prancing in Paradise while he looked on in Purgatory.

"Every one is gay."

As Valentine repeated the words, and the huge theatre laughed like one enormous person, Julian felt again the strange thrill of overmastering excitement that had shaken him on the night when he and Valentine had leaned out of the Victoria Street window. The strength of the spring and of his long tended and repressed young instincts stirred within him mightily. Scales fell from his eyes. From the car of the balloon he gazed down, and it seemed to him that they—Valentine, Cuckoo, and himself—were drifting over a new country, of which all the inhabitants were young, gay, careless, rightly irresponsible. The rows of open-mouthed, laughing faces called to him to join in their mirth,—more, to join in their lives, and in the lives of the pirouetting hours. He moved in his chair as if he were impelled to get up and leave his seat. And as he moved a voice whispered in his ear:

"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."

Was it Valentine's voice? He turned round hastily, curiously perturbed.

"Val, was that you? Did you speak to me?"

"No."

Julian looked at Cuckoo. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes shone with dancing excitement.

"Did you, Cuckoo?"

"Not I, dearie. I say, ain't he funny to-night?"

Then the voice must have spoken in his own brain. He listened for it and fancied he could hear it again and again, driving him on like a phantom fate. But the voice was in timbre like the voice of Valentine, and he felt as if Valentine spoke with a strange insistence and reiteration. His heart, his whole being, made answer to the whisper.

"To-morrow we die. It is true. Ah, then, let us—let us eat and let us drink."

The man in the boots wriggled furiously into the wings, and the curtain rose on the ballet. Wenzel had ascended to the conductor's platform amid loud applause. The first weary melodies of "Faust" streamed plaintively from the orchestra, and a gravity came over the rows of faces in the stalls. Julian's face, too, was grave, but his excitement and his sense of his own power of youth grew as he looked on. The old Faust appeared, heavy with the years and with the trouble of useless thought, and Julian felt that he could sneer at him for his venerable age. As he watched the philosopher's grandiloquent pantomime of gesture, like a mist there floated over him the keen imagination of the hell of regret in which the old age, that never used to the full its irrevocable youth, must move, and a passion of desire to use his own youth rushed over him as fire rushes over a dry prairie. Even a sudden anger against Valentine came to him,—against Valentine for the protection he had given through so many years. For had he not been protecting Julian against joy? and does not the capacity for joy pass away with a tragic swiftness? As Faust was transformed into youth, and the ballet danced in the market-place, Julian turned to Valentine and said:

"We will live to-night."

Valentine laughed.

"You look excited."

"I feel excited. Don't you?"

Valentine answered:

"I may presently. We mustn't stay in here all the evening."

There was a knock at the door of the box. An attendant appeared to ask their orders. Valentine spoke some words to him, and in a few minutes he brought three long drinks to the box. Julian drank his mechanically. His eyes were always on the ballet. The betrayal of poor Margaret had now been accomplished and the soldiers were returning from the wars. Beyond the wall of the garden the tramp of their feet was heard, a vision of the tops of their passing weapons was seen. The orchestra played the fragment of a march. Cuckoo sipped her brandy and soda, and gazed sometimes at the stage indifferently, often at the audience eagerly, and then at Julian. When her eyes were on Julian's face a light came into them that made her expression young, and even pure. A simplicity hovered about her lips, and a queer dawning of something that was almost refinement spoke in her attitude. But if she chanced to meet the eyes of Valentine her face was full of fear.

And now the last great scene of the pageant approached, and the two schoolboys leant forward in their stalls in a passion of greedy excitement. Julian happened to see them, and instead of smiling at their frankly lustful attitudes with the superiority of the drilled man over the child, he was conscious of an eager sympathy with their vigour of enjoyment and of desire. His nature retrograded and became a schoolboy's nature, with the whole garden of life flowering before its feet. Suddenly there came to him the need of touching something human. He stole his arm closely around Cuckoo's waist. She glanced at him surprised. But his eyes were turned away to the stage. Valentine pushed his chair a little backwards. He was watching them, and when he saw the movement of Julian's arm, he laughed to himself. The classical Sabbath sprang into view, and it seemed to be just then that the feet of the hours first began to move in the opening steps of their great dance of that night. Was it the magnificent Cleopatra that gave them the signal? Or did Venus herself whisper in their ears that the time for their fête was come at length, that the paid vagaries of the stage demanded companionship, and that the audience, too, must move in great processions, whirl in demon circles, rise up in heart to the clash of cymbals, bow down before the goddesses of the night, the women who gave to modern men the modern heaven that they desire in our days? The stage was a waving sea of scarlet, through which one white woman floated, like a sin with pale cheeks in the midst of the rubicund virtues. She was, perhaps, not beautiful, but she was provocative and alluring, and her whiteness made her as voluptuous as innocence is when it moves through the habitations of the wicked. Julian watched her come to Faust and win him from the scarlet dancers and from the arms of Cleopatra, and the strange rejuvenation of this philosopher who had been old, and known decaying faculties, and the flight of the heart from the warm closes of the summer to the white and iron winter plains, filled him with sympathy. It must be easy to use your youth after you have known the enforced reserve of age. For age is a bitter lesson. The dance grew more wild and rattling. The frou-frou of the swinging scarlet skirts filled the great house with sound as the glitter of spangles filled it with a shimmering light. Faust was surrounded by fluttering women moving in complicated evolutions with a trained air of reckless devilry. And Julian gave himself to the illusion created by the skill of Katti Lanner, ignoring entirely the real care of the dancers, and choosing to consider them as merely driven by wild impulse, vagrant desires of furious motion, and the dashing gaiety of keen sensual sensation. They danced to fire a real Faust, and he was Faust for the moment. His arm closed more firmly round the waist of Cuckoo, and he could feel the throbbing of her heart against the palm of his hand. He did not look at her, and so he did not see the dawning anxiety with which she was beginning furtively to regard him. Entirely engrossed with the stage spectacle, the movement of his arm had been entirely mechanical, prompted by the hardening pressure of excitement in his mind. If he had actually crushed Cuckoo and hurt her he would have been unconscious that he was doing it.

And Valentine all this time leaned back in his chair, that stood in the shadow of the box, and looked at the enlaced figures before him with an unvarying smile.

Contrast and surprise are the essence of the successful "spectacle." Just as the scarlet dervish whirl was at its height the character of the music changed, slackened, softened, died from the angrily sensuous into an ethereal delicacy. The stage filled with clouds that faded in golden light, and a huge and glittering stairway rose towards the painted sky. On either side of it hung in the blue ether guardian angels with outstretched wings, and between their attentive ranks stood the radiant figure of the purified Margaret, at whose white feet the red crowd of women, even the majestic Cleopatra and pale voluptuous Venus, sank abashed. Harps sounded frostily, suggesting that crystal heaven of St. John, in which the beauties we know in nature are ousted by unbreathing jewels, the lifeless pearl and chrysolite. The air filled with thin and wintry light, that deepened, and began to glow, through lemon to amber and to rose. The angels swam in it, and then the huge stairway leading up to heaven shone with the violence of a gigantic star. Faust fell in repentance before the girl he had ruined and failed to ruin, the girl who bent as if to bless him upon this fiery ascent to heaven. And Julian, absorbed, devoured the wide and glowing scene with his eyes, which were attracted especially by the living flames that were half veiled and half revealed beneath the feet of Margaret. The music of the orchestra rippled faintly, and then it seemed to Julian that, as if in answer, there rippled up from the golden stairs and from the hidden company of flames that faint, thin riband of shadowy fire which had already so strangely been with him in the dawn and in the dusk. It came from beneath the pausing feet of the girl who blessed Faust, and trembled upwards slowly above her glittering hair. Julian felt a burning sensation at his heart, as if the tiny fire found its way there. He turned round sharply, withdrawing his arm from Cuckoo's waist with an abruptness that startled her.

"Valentine!" he exclaimed in a whisper. "There; now you see it."

Valentine leaned to him.

"See what?"

"The flame. It's no fancy. It's no chimera. Look, it is mounting up behind Margaret. Watch it, Valentine, and tell me what it is."

"I see nothing."

Julian stared into his eyes, as if to make certain that he really spoke the truth. Then Valentine asked of Cuckoo:

"Miss Bright, can you see this flame of which Julian speaks?"

Cuckoo answered, with the roughness that always came to her in the company of alarm:

"Not I. There ain't nothing, no more than there was that day when I had the coffee."

She added to Julian, reproachfully:

"You've been drinkin'. Now, dearie, you have."

Suddenly his two companions became intolerable to Julian. He thought them stupid, boorish, dense, devoid of the senses of common humanity, not to see what he saw, not to feel as he felt,—that this vague flame had a meaning and a message not yet interpreted, perhaps not even remotely divined. With an angry exclamation he sprang to his feet, turning once more to the stage. And as the curtain fell, he distinctly saw the flame glowing like a long and curiously shaped star above the head of Margaret.

And this man and woman would not see it! A sudden enmity to them both came to him in that moment. He abruptly opened the door of the box, and went out without another word to either of them. Cuckoo's voice shrilly calling to him to stop did not affect his resolution and desire to escape from them if only for a moment.

Out in the corridor at the back of the dress circle people were beginning to circulate, relieved from the tension of examining the ballet. Julian was instantly swallowed up in a noisy crowd, hot, flushed, loud-voiced, bright-eyed. Masses of excited young men lounged to and fro, smoking cigarettes, and making fervent remarks upon the gaily dressed women, who glided among them observantly. From the adjoining bar rose the music of popping corks and flowing liquids. The barmaids were besieged. Clouds of smoke hung in the air, and the heat was terrific. Julian felt it clinging to him as if with human arms as he slowly walked over the thick carpet, glancing about him. Humanity touched him on every side. At one moment an elderly woman, with yellow hair and a fat-lined face, enveloped him in her skirts of scarlet and black striped silk. The black chiffon that swept about her neck and heaving shoulders fluttered against his face. Her high-heeled boots trod on his. He seemed one with her. Then she had vanished, and instantly he was in the arms of a huge racing-man, who wore gigantic pink pearls in his shirt front, and bellowed the latest slang to a thin and dissipated companion. It seemed to Julian that he was kicked like a football from one life to another, and that from each life he drew away something as he bounded from it, the fragment of a thought, the thrill of a desire, the indrawn breath of a hope. Like a machine that winds in threads of various coloured silks, he wound in threads from the various coloured hearts about him,—red, white, coarse, and fine. And, half-unconsciously, was he not weaving them into a fabric? Never before had he understood the meaning of a crowd, that strange congregation of passions and of fates which speaks in movements and is melodious in attitudes, which quarrels in all its parts, silently, yet is swayed through and through by large impulses, and as an intellect far more keen and assertively critical than the intellect of any one person in it. And now, when Julian began to feel the meaning of this surging mob of men and women, the hours danced, and he and all the crowd danced with them. And the music that accompanied and directed the feet through the figures of that night's quadrille was the music of words and of laughter, of hissing enticements and of whispered replies. Irresistible was the performance of the hours and of the crowd that lived in them. Julian knew it when the dance began, marvelled at it for a little when the dance was ended. There was contagion in the air, furtive, but strong as the contagion of cholera,—the contagion of human creatures gathered together in the night. Only the youth who dwells—like Will-o'-the-Mill—forever by the lonely stream in the lonely mountain valley escapes it entirely. Aged saints look backward on their lives, and remember at least one night when it seized them in its embrace; and even the purest woman, through its spell, has caught sight of the vision behind the veil of our civilization, and although she has shrunk from it, has had a moment of wonder and of interest, never quite effaced from her memory.

On every side the Oxford and Cambridge boys laughed and shouted, pushed and elbowed. They had begun to cast off restraint, and the god that is rowdy on a rowdy throne compelled them to their annual obeisance at his feet. Some of them moved along singing, and interrupting their song with shouts. Friends, when they met in the crowd, yelled shrill recognitions at each other, and nicknames sang in the air like noisy birds. Rows of men linked arms, and, striding forward, compelled the throng to yield them difficult passage, swinging this way and that to make their progress more comprehensive. The attendants, standing by the wall like giants, calmly smiled on the growing uproar, into which they darted now and then with a sudden frenzy of dutiful agility to eject some rude wit who had transgressed their code of propriety. The very spirit of lusty youth was in this crowd of hot, careless, blatant, roving youths, mad to find themselves away from the cool and grey Oxford towers, and from the vacant banks of the Cam, in passionate Leicester Square, fired by the scarlet ballet, and the thunder of the orchestra, and the sight of smart women. Sudden emancipation is the most flaming torch to human passions that exists in the world. It flared through all that mob, urging it to conflagration, to the flames that burst up in hearts that are fresh and ardent, and that so curiously confuse joy with wickedness.

Flames! flames! The word ran in Julian's mind, and in his breast flames surely burned that night, for, when he suddenly ran against Valentine and Cuckoo in the throng, he caught Valentine by the arm and said:

"Val, you were right just now. There was no flame; there could have been no flame where Margaret stood. She was too pure. What can fire have to do with snow? Cuckoo, I was a fool. Catch hold of my arm."

He pulled her arm roughly through his, never noticing how pale the girl's face was, how horror-stricken were her eyes. He wanted to bathe himself, and her, and Valentine, in this crowd that influenced him and that he helped to influence. He felt as the diver feels, who, when he plunges, has a sacred passion for the depths. There are people who have an ardour for going down comparable to the ardour felt by those who mount. Tonight such an ardour took hold of Julian.

Valentine fell in with it, seeing the humour of his friend, and Cuckoo, prisoned between the two men, did not attempt to resist them. As they moved on Valentine said, in a voice he made loud that it might be heard:

"Now, you feel the strength of the spring, Julian. Is it not better than all my teachings of asceticism?"

"Yes, by ——, it is."

And as he made that answer, Julian, for the first time, forgot to look up to Valentine, and felt a splendid equality with him, the equality that men of the same age and temper feel when they are bent on the same pursuit. How can one of two Bacchanals stoop in adoration of the other, when both are bounding in the procession of Silenus? Valentine fell from his pedestal and became a comrade instead of a god. He was no longer the chaperon of the dancing hours, but their partner. And a new fire shone in his blue eyes, an unaccustomed red ran over his cheeks, as he heard Julian's answer to his question. From that moment he ceased to play what, it seemed, had been but a part, the empty ivory rôle of saint. For Julian was no longer conscious or observant of him, no longer able to wonder at his abrupt transformation. In a flash he cast off his habitual restraint and passed from the reserve of thought to the rowdyism of act.

He chattered unceasingly, dressing his English in all the slang embroidery of the day. He laughed and chaffed, exchanged repartees with the flowing multitude through which they passed, stopped to speak to the flaunting women and loaded them with extravagant compliments, elbowed loungers out of his way, and made the most personal remarks on those around him. Two men went by, and one of them exclaimed, with a surprised glance at Valentine:

"I'm damned! Why, there goes the Saint of Victoria Street."

"Saint!" said the other; "I should think devil the more appropriate name.
That chap looks up to anything."

"Ah, well; when a saint turns sinner—," answered the first speaker, with a laugh.

Valentine heard the words and burst into a roar of laughter. He drew Cuckoo to the left and Julian followed. They passed under an archway into the bar, which was crowded with men, drinking and talking at the tops of their voices. Valentine called for drinks in a voice so loud and authoritative that the barmaid hurried to serve him, deserting other customers, who protested vainly. He forced Cuckoo to drink, and Julian needed no urging. Clinking glasses noisily with them, he gave as a toast:

"To the dance of the hours!"

These words, uttered with almost strident force, attracted attention even amid the violent hubbub that was raging, and several young men pressed round Valentine as he stood with his back against the counter of the bar. They raised their glasses, too, half in ridicule, and shouting in chorus, "To the dance of the hours!" drained them to this toast, which they could not comprehend. Valentine dashed his glass down. It broke and was trodden under foot. The barmaid protested. He threw her a sovereign. The young men gathered round, broke theirs in imitation, and Julian, snatching Cuckoo's from her, flung it away. As he did so, Valentine thrust another, filled with champagne, into her hand, and again cried out the toast.

"What the deuce does he mean by it?" one youth called out. "The dance of the hours; what's that?"

"The dance of the hours! The dance of the hours!" echoed other voices, and glasses were drained wildly. There was something exciting in the mere sound of the words that seemed to set brains jigging, and feet moving, and the world spinning and bowing. For if Time itself danced, what could the most Puritan human being do but dance with it? Seeing the crowd round Valentine, men who were drinking at the other end of the bar joined it, and the toast passed quickly from mouth to mouth. Uttered by every variety of voice, with every variety of accent, it filled the stifling atmosphere, and tickled many an empty brain, like the catchword political that can set a nation behind one astute wire-puller. Boys yelled it, men murmured it, and an elderly woman in a plush gown and yellow feathers screamed it out in a piercing soprano that would have put many a trumpet-blast to shame. Glasses were emptied and filled again in its honour. Yet nobody knew what it meant, and apparently nobody cared, except the Oxford boy who had already expressed his desire to be better informed on the subject. He had gradually edged his way through the throng until he was close to Valentine, at whom he gazed with a sort of tipsy reverence.

"I say, you chap," he cried. "What are we drinking to—eh? What the devil's the dance of the hours?"

Valentine brought his glass down on the counter.

"What is it?" he exclaimed. "Why, the greatest dance in the world, the dance that youth sends out the invitations for, and women live for, and old men die with longing for. We set the hours dancing in the night, we—all who are gay and careless, who love life in the greatest way, and who laugh at death, and who aren't afraid of the devil. The devil's only a bogey to frighten old women and children. What do the hours care for him? Not a snap. It's only cowards who fear him. Brave men do what they will, and when the hours dance they dance with them, and drink with them all the night through. Who says there'll be another morning? I don't believe it. Curse the sunshine. Give me the night and the dancing hours!"

The youth gave a yell, which was echoed by some of his rowdy companions, and by the two little schoolboys who had joined the throng in a frenzy of childish excitement, which they thought manly.

"The dancing hours! The dancing hours!" they cried, and one who was with a girl suddenly caught her round the waist and broke into wild steps. Others joined in. The confusion became tremendous. Glasses were knocked over. Whiskies and sodas were poured out in libations upon the carpet. The protests of the barmaids were unheeded or unheard. Julian whirled Cuckoo into the throng, and Valentine, snapping his long white fingers like castanets, stamped his feet as if to the measure of a wild music. Against the wall some loungers looked on in contemptuous amusement, but by far the greater number of men present were young and eager for any absurdity, and not a few were half tipsy. These ardently welcomed anything in the nature of a row, and the romp became general and noisy. Men danced awkwardly with one another, roaring the latest music-hall tunes at the pitch of their voices. The women screamed with laughter, or giggled piercingly as they were banged and trodden on in the tumult. The noise, penetrating to the promenade, drew the attention of the audience, many of whom hurried to see what was going on, and the block round the archways quickly became impenetrable. One or two of the gigantic chuckers-out forced their way into the throng and seized the dancers nearest to them, but they were entirely unable to stay the ridiculous impulse which impelled this mob of young human beings to capering and yelling. Indeed they merely increased the scuffle, which rapidly developed towards a free fight. Hats were knocked off, dresses were torn. The women got frightened and began to scream. The men swore, and some lost their tempers and struck out right and left. Valentine watched the scene with laughing eyes as if he enjoyed it. Especially he watched Julian, who, with scarlet face and sparkling eyes, still forced Cuckoo round and round in the midst of the tumult. Cuckoo was white, and seemed to be half fainting. Her head rested helplessly against Julian's shoulder, and her eyes stared at him as if fascinated. Her dress was torn, and her black veil hung awry. If she danced with the hours it was without joy or desire.

But suddenly police appeared. The dancers, abruptly realizing that a joke was dying in a disaster, ceased to prance. Some violently assumed airs of indifference and of alarming respectability. Many sinuously wound their way out to the promenade. A few, who had completely lost their heads, hustled the police, and were promptly taken into custody. Julian would have been among these had it not been for the intervention of Valentine, who caught him by the shoulder, and drew him and Cuckoo away.

"No; you mustn't end to-night in a cell," he said in Julian's ear. "The dancing hours want you still. Julian, you are only beginning your real life to-night."

Julian, like a man in an excited dream, followed Valentine to the bottom of the broad stairs, on, through the blooming masses of flowers, to the entrance. Two or three cabs were waiting. Valentine put Cuckoo into one. She had not spoken a word, and was trembling as if with fear.

"Get in, Julian."

Julian obeyed, and Valentine, standing on the pavement, leaned forward and whispered to him:

"Take her home, Julian."

Suddenly Julian shouted Cuckoo's address to the cabman hoarsely.

The cab drove away.

Valentine walked slowly towards Piccadilly Circus, whistling softly,
"I want you, my honey; yes, I do."

BOOK III—THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

CHAPTER I

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

The thin afternoon light of an indefinite spring day shone over the Marylebone Road. A heavy warmth was in the air, and the weather was peculiarly windless, but the sun only shone fitfully, and the street looked sulky. The faces of the passers-by were hot and weary. Women trailed along under the weight of their parcels, and men returned from work grimmer than usual, and wondering almost with a fretfulness of passion why they were born predestined to toil. The cabmen about Baker Street Station dozed with nodding heads upon their perches, and the omnibus conductors forgot to chaff, and collected their tolls with a mechanical deliberation. At the crossings the policemen, helpless in their uniforms of the winter, became dictatorial more readily than on cooler days. Some sorts of weather incline every one to temper or to depression. The day after the boat-race lay under a malign spell. It seemed to feel all the weariness of reaction, and to fold all men and women in the embrace of its lassitude and heavy hopelessness.

At number 400, Jessie whined pitifully in her basket, and her arched back quivered perpetually as her minute body expanded and contracted in the effort of breathing. Her beady eyes were open and fixed furtively upon her mistress, as if in inquiry or alarm, and her whole soul was whirling in a turmoil set in motion by the first slap she had ever received in gravity at the hands of Cuckoo. Jessie's inner nature was stung by that slap. It knocked her world over, like a doll hit by a child. Her universe lay prone upon its back.

And Cuckoo's? She was sitting in the one arm-chair with her thin hands folded in her lap. She wore the black dress given to her by Julian, but she did not look prepared to go out, for her hair was standing up over her head in violent disorder, her cheeks were haggard and unwashed, and her boots—still muddy from the previous night's promenading—stood in a corner near the grate in the first position, as if directed by a dancing-mistress. Cuckoo was neither reading nor working. She was simply staring straight before her, without definite expression. Her face indeed wore a quite singularly blank look and her mouth was slightly open. Her feet, stuck out before her, rested on the edge of the fender, shoeless, and both her general appearance and attitude betokened a complete absence of self-consciousness, and that lack of expectation of any immediate event which is often dubbed stupidity. The lady of the feathers sitting in the horsehair-covered chair in the cheap sitting-room with the folding doors looked indeed stupid, pale, and heavy. Fatigue lay in the shadows of her eyes, but something more than ordinary fatigue hovered round her parted lips and spoke in her posture. A dull weariness, in which the mind took part with the body, held her in numbing captivity. She had only broken through it in some hours to repulse the anxious effort of Jessie to scramble into the nest of her lap. That slap given, she had again relapsed without a struggle into this waking sleep.

The sun came out with a sudden violence, and an organ began to play a frisky tune in the street. Jessie whined and whimpered, formed her mouth into the shape of an O, and, throwing up her head, emitted a vague and smothered howl. Below stairs, Mrs. Brigg, who was afflicted with a complaint that prompted her to perpetual anxious movement, laboured about the kitchen, doing nothing in particular, among her pots and pans. The occasional clatter of them mingled with the sound of the organ, and with the suffocated note of Jessie, in a depressing symphony. The sun went in again, and some dust, stirred into motion by a passing omnibus, floated in through the half-open window and settled in a light film upon the photograph of Marr. Presently the organ moved away, and faded gradually in pert tunes down the street. Jessie's nervous system, no longer played upon, ceased to spend its pain in sound, and a London silence fell round the little room. Then, at length, Cuckoo shifted in her chair, stretched her hands in her lap, and sat up slowly. The inward expression had not faded from her eyes yet, for, leaning forward, she still stared blankly before her, looking, as it seemed, straight at Marr's photograph. Gradually she woke to a consciousness of what she was looking at, and putting up one hand she took the photograph from its place, laid it in her lap, and, bending down, gazed at it long and earnestly. Then she shook her head as if puzzled.

"I don't know," she murmured; "I don't know."

Encouraged by the sound of her mistress's voice, Jessie stepped from her basket and gingerly approached, snuffling round Cuckoo's feet, and wriggling her body in token of anxious humility. Cuckoo picked her up and stroked her mechanically, but still with her eyes on the photograph. Two tears swam in them. She dashed the photograph down. It lay on the carpet, and was still there when a knock at the door was succeeded by the entrance of Julian.

He, too, looked pale and rather weary, but excited.

"Cuckoo," he said.

She sat still in the chair, looking at him.

"Well?" she said, and closed her lips tightly.

He came a step or two forward into the little room, and put his hat and stick down on the table.

"You expected me to come, didn't you?"

"I don't know as I did."

Her eyes were on Jessie now, and she stroked the little dog's back steadily up and down, alternately smoothing and ruffling its short coat. Julian came over and stood by the mantelpiece.

"I told you I should come."

"Did you?"

"Don't you remember?"

She shifted round in the chair till he could only see her shoulder, and the side of her head and neck, on which the loose hair was tumbling in ugly confusion. Sitting thus she threw back at him the sentence:

"I don't want to remember nothing. I don't want to remember."

Julian stood hesitating. He glanced at Cuckoo's hair and at the back of her thin hand moving to and fro above the little contented dog.

"Why not?" he said.

At first she made no answer to this question, and seemed as if she had not heard it, but presently it appeared that her silence had been caused by the effect of consideration, for at length she said, still retaining her aloof attitude:

"I don't want to remember, because it's like a beastly dream, and when I remember I know it ain't a dream."

Julian said nothing, and suddenly Cuckoo turned round to him, and took her hand from Jessie's back.

"I say. You were mad last night. Now, weren't you?"

The words came from her almost pleadingly, and her eyes rested on
Julian's insistently, as if demanding an affirmative.

"He'd made you mad," she continued.

"He," said Julian. "Who?"

"Your friend."

"Valentine! He had nothing to do with it."

"It was all his doing."

Her voice grew shrill with feeling.

"He's a devil," she said. "I hate him. I hate him worse than I hate that copper west side of Regent Street. And I hate you, too,—yes, I do,—to-day."

The tears gathered in her eyes and began to fall, tears of rage and shame and regret, tears of one who had lost a great possession. Julian looked embarrassed and pained, almost guilty, too. He put out his hand and tried to take Cuckoo's. But she drew hers away and went on crying. She spoke again with vehemence.

"I told you what I wanted you to be; yes, I did," she exclaimed. "Yes,
I told you. You said you only come here to talk to me."

"It was true."

"No; it wasn't. You're just like all the others. And I did so want to have a pal. I've never had one."

With the words the sense of her desolation seemed to strike her with stunning force. She leaned her head against the back of the chair, and cried bitterly, catching at the horsehair with violent hands, as if she longed to hurt something, to revenge her loss even upon an object without power of feeling. Julian sprang up and went over to the window. He looked out onto the road and watched the people moving by in the fitful sunshine beyond the dirty railings. That day, he, too, was in a tumult. He felt like a monk who had suddenly thrown off his habit, broken his vows, and come forth into the world. The cell and the cloister were left behind, were things to be forgotten, with the grating of the confessional and the dim routine of service and of asceticism. He had been borne on by the wave of a brilliant, a violent hour, away from them. Let the angelus bell ring; he no longer heard it. Let the drone of prayers and praises rise in a monotonous music by day and by night; he no longer had the will to heed them. For there was another music in his ears. Soon it would be in his heart. Imagine a Trappist suddenly transported from the desert of his long silence to a gay plage on which a brass band was playing. Julian was that Trappist in mind. And though he knew Cuckoo was sobbing at his back, and though his heart held a sense of pity for her trouble, yet he heard her grief with a strange cruelty, at which he wondered, without being able to soften it. That afternoon it seemed to him useless for anybody to cry. No grief was quite worth tears. The violence of life was present with him, gave him light and blinded him at the same time. He found delight in the thought of violence, because it held action in its grasp. Even cruelty was worth something. Was he cruel to Cuckoo?

He turned from the window and looked at her, with the observation of a nature not generally his own. He noted the desolation of her hair, and he noted, too, that she wore the gown he had given to her. Would she have put it on if she had hated him as she said she did? Somehow it scarcely seemed to suit her to-day. It looked draggled, and as if it had been up all night, he thought. The black back of it heaved as Cuckoo sobbed, like a little black wave. Was the eternal movement of the sea caused by some horrible, inward grief which, though secret, must come thus to the eye of God and of the world? Julian found himself wondering in an unreasonable abstraction as he contemplated the crying girl. Then suddenly his mind swerved to more normal paths; he was seized by the natural feeling of a man who has made a woman weep, and had the impulse to comfort.

"Don't cry, Cuckoo," he said, coming over to her and sitting on the edge of her chair. "You must not. Let us say I was mad last night. Perhaps I was. Men are often mad, surely. To-day I'm sane, and I want you to forgive me."

He put his arm round her shoulder. She glanced up at him. Then, with the odd penetration that so often gilds female ignorance till it dazzles and distracts, she said quickly:

"You don't mean what you say; you don't really care."

Julian was taken aback by her sharpness, and by the self-revelation that immediately stabbed him.

"You mustn't say that," he began. But she stopped him on the instant.

"You don't care; you think it's nothing. So it ought to be to me, I know."

That had perhaps actually been his thought, the thought of a mind unimaginative to-day, because deadened by the excitement of action. But if it was his thought he hastened to deny it.

"You know I don't think of you in that way," he said.

"You will now. You do."

That was the scourge that had lashed her all through this weary day of miserable reaction; that now stung her to a passion that was like the passion of purity. As she made this statement there was a question in her eyes, but it was a question of despair, that scarcely even asked for the negative which Julian hastened to give. He was both perplexed and troubled by the unexpected violence of her emotion, and blamed himself as the cause. But, though he blamed himself, his regret for what was irrevocable had none of the poignancy of Cuckoo's. For a long time he had gloried in living in a cloister with Valentine. Now he had left the cloister, he did not look back to it with the curious pathos which so often gathers like moss upon even a dull and vacant past. He did not, for the moment, look back at all. Action had lifted scales from his eyes, had stirred the youth in him, had stung him as if with bright fire, and given him, at a breath, a thousand thoughts, visions, curiosities. A sense of power came to him. He did not ask whether the power made for evil or for good. Simply, he was inclined to glory in it, as a man glories in his recovered strength when he wakes from a long sleep following fatigue. Cuckoo, with feeble hands, seemed tugging to hold back this power, with feeble voice seemed crying against it as a deadly thing. And Julian, though he strove to console her, scarcely sympathized with her fully. He could not, if he would, be quite unhappy to-day. Only in Cuckoo's grief he began to read a curious legend. In her tears there was a passion, in her anger a vehemence that could only spring from the depths of a nature. Julian began to suspect that through all her sins and degradations this girl, his lady of the feathers, had managed to keep shut one door, though all the others had been ruthlessly opened. And beyond this door was surely that holy of holies, an unspoiled woman's heart. From what other dwelling could rush forth such a passion for a man's respect, such a fury to be rightly and chivalrously considered? As he half vaguely realized something of the true position of Cuckoo and of himself, Julian felt stirred by the wonder of life, in which such strange blossoms flower out of the very dust. He looked at Cuckoo with new eyes. She looked back at him with the old ones of a girl who loves.

As he looked she stopped crying. Perhaps the sudden understanding in his gaze thrilled her. He put out his hand to touch hers, and again repeated his negative, but this time with greater conviction.

"I do not think of you in that way. I never shall," he said.

Her face was still full of doubt, and thin with anxiety. She was not reassured, that seemed apparent; for in her ignorance she had a strange knowledge of life, and especially a strange intuition which guided her instincts as to the instinctive proceedings of men.

"They always do," she murmured. "Why should you be different?"

"All men aren't alike," he said, pretending to laugh at her.

"Yes, in some things, though," she contradicted. "They all think dirt of you for doing what they want."

Seeing how unsatisfied she was, and how restlessly her anxiety paced up and down, Julian resolved on more plain-speaking.

"Look here, Cuckoo," he said, and his voice had never sounded more boyish, "last night I was drunk. Last night I woke up, and I'd been asleep for years."

"Eh?" she interrupted, looking puzzled, but he went on:

"I was emancipated, and I was mad. Mind, I didn't mean to do you any wrong, but if you have thought of me in a different way, I'm sorry. Tell me what you want me to be to you, and in future I'll be it."

Hope and eagerness sprang up in her eyes then.

"I say," she began,

"Yes."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

The dull blood rose in her tired face.

"I want just a—just a friend," she said, as if almost ashamed.

Julian smiled.

"Not a lover," he said, with a fleeting air of gallantry. She shrank visibly from the word, and hurriedly went on:

"Not I. I've had too much of love." The last word was spoken with a violence of contempt. "I want a man as likes me, just really likes me, as he might another man. See?"

"And you'll not love him?"

His eyes searched hers with a gaiety of inquiry that was almost laughter.
Cuckoo looked away.

"I'll not love him either," she said steadily. "I'll just like him too."

Seeing her earnestness and obvious emotion, Julian dropped his gently quizzing manner, and became earnest, too, in his degree.

"Then it's a bargain," he said. "You and I are to like each other thoroughly, never anything more, never anything less. Like two men, eh?"

She began at last to look relieved and happier.

"Yes, like that," she said. "Ain't it—ain't it truer than the other thing? There's something beastly about love; that's what I always think."

And she spoke with the sincerest conviction. When Julian left her that day, he shook hands with her by the door; she stood after he had done it as if still half expectant.

"There's a man's good-bye to a man," he said. "Better sort of thing than a man's good-bye to a woman, isn't it?"

"Rather!" she said hastily, and moved back into the sitting-room. She stepped on something, and bent down to pick it up. It was Marr's photograph.

"What's that?" Julian asked.

"Nothing," she said, concealing it. She had a foolish fancy that even the photograph of the creature she had feared and hated might spoil that good-bye of theirs. Yet even as it was, when Julian had gone she still seemed unsatisfied.

She was a woman after all, and woman is most feminine in her farewells.