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.