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.