That night was warm and gentle, with a full moon riding in clear heavens. The season was growing towards its full height, and the streets were thronged with carriages till a late hour. There is one long pavement that is generally trodden by many feet at every time of the year, and in almost every hour of the wheeling twenty-four. It is the pavement on which the legend of London's disgrace is written in bold characters of defiance. Men from distant lands, having made the pilgrimage to our Mecca, the queen, by right of magnitude at least, of the world's cities, stare aghast upon the legend, almost as Belshazzar stared upon the writing on the wall. Colonists seeking for the first time the comfortable embrace of that mother country which has been the fable of their childhood and the dream of their laborious years of maturity, gaze with withering hearts at this cancer in her bosom. Pure women turn their eyes from it. Children seek it that they may learn in one sharp moment the knowledge of good and evil. The music of the feet on that pavement has called women to despair and men to destruction; has sung in the ears of innocence till they grew deaf to virtue, and murmured round the heart of love till it became the heart of lust. And that pavement is the camping-ground of the army of the bats. On wet nights they flit drearily through the rain. In winter they glide like shadows among the revealing snows. But in the time of flowers and of soft airs, when the moon at the full swims calmly above the towers of Westminster, and the Thames rests rocked in a silver dream among the ebony wharves and barges, the flight of the bats is gay and their number is legion. And their circle is joined by many who are but recruits, or as camp-followers, treading in the track of those whose names are on the roll-call.
The lady of the feathers rarely failed to join the evening flight of the bats. Her acquaintance with Julian, even her curious passion for his respect and distant treatment, had not won her to different evenings, or to a new mode of life. But her feeling for Julian led her to ignore now the fact of this fate of hers. She chose to set him aside from it, to keep him for a friend, as an innocent peasant-girl might keep some recluse wandering after peace into her solitude. Julian was to be the one man who looked on her with quiet, habitual eyes, who touched her with calm, gentle hand, who spoke to her with the voice of friendship, demanding nothing, and thought of her with a feeling that was neither greed nor contempt. And that one fatal night in which Cuckoo's private and secluded heart was so bitterly wounded she put out of her recollection with a strength of determination soldier-like and almost fierce. It lay in the past, but she did not treat the past as a woman treats a drawer full of old, used things, opening it in quiet moments and turning over its contents with a lingering and a loving hand. She shut it, locked it almost angrily, and never, never looked into it. Julian was to be her friend of leisure, never associated in any way with her tragic hours. All other men were the same, stamped with a similar hall-mark. He only was unstamped and was beautiful.
On this evening of summer, Cuckoo, as usual, joined the flight of the bats with a tired wing. The heat tried her. Her cheeks were white as ivory under their cloud of rouge. Her mouth was more plaintive even than usual, and her heart felt dull and heavy. As she got out of the omnibus at the Circus one of her ankles turned, and she gave an awkward jump that set all the feathers on her hat in commotion, and made the newspaper boys laugh at her scornfully. They knew her by sight, and joked her every evening when she arrived. At first—that was a long while ago—she had resented their remarks, still more their shrewd unboyish questions, and had answered them with angry bitterness. But—well, that was a long while ago. Now she simply recovered her footing, paused a moment on the kerbstone to arrange her dress, and then drifted away into the crowd slowly, without even glancing at her nightly critics, who were aware of a new bow on her gown, recognized with imperturbable sang-froid the change in a trimming or the alteration of a waist-belt.
Slowly she walked along. Piccadilly bats fly slowly. The moon went up. She had not met her fate. In the throng she saw Valentine pass. He looked at her with a smile. She turned her eyes hastily away. She had met him on several evenings of late, but had never told Julian so, for she began to understand now his reverence for Valentine, and a new-born, ladylike instinct taught her not to hurt that reverence. Valentine disappeared. He had not tried to speak with her. Once, on encountering her, he had paused, but Cuckoo glided behind two large Frenchwomen and escaped with the adroitness of a snake in the grass. Apparently he recognized her movement as one of retreat, and was resolved to leave her alone, for he had never followed her since that day, although he always lifted his hat when he saw her. The crowd grew thicker. It was very heterogeneous, but Cuckoo did not thread it with the attention of a psychologist, or examine it with the pains of a philosopher of the dark hours. She stared listlessly at the faces of the men, and if they stared back at her, smiled mechanically with a thin and stereotyped coquetry, moving on vacantly the while in a sort of dream, such as a tired journalist may fall into as he drives his pen over the paper, leaving a train of familiar words and phrases behind it. There are many dreamers like Cuckoo on the thin riband of that pavement, moving in a maze created by everlasting custom, beneath their flowers, half senseless to life, and yet alive to the least human notice, behind the stretched barriers of their veils. She walked from the Circus to Hyde Park corner and back again; then turned, with an ever-growing lassitude, to repeat the desolate experience. By this time the playhouses had vomited their patrons into the night, and locomotion was becoming more difficult. Sometimes there was a block, and Cuckoo found herself "hung up," as she called it, squashed in a mass of people, all intent on some scheme of their own, and resentful of the enforced interruption to their movement. Then, by some unknown and mysterious means, the human knot was untied, and all the atoms murmured on again through the ocean of the town. And still Cuckoo was alone, and still the mechanical smile came and went upon her lips, and her feet seemed to grow heavier and heavier, till they were as cannon-balls to be lifted and dragged by her protesting muscles. And still her senses seem to become more and more drugged by the familiarity of it all, the familiarity of smile, of tired limbs, of incessant slow motion, of staring faces and watchful eyes; the familiarity of the cabs rolling home towards Knightsbridge and farther Kensington, with a dull, harsh noise; the familiarity of personal, intense loneliness and longing for quiet; the familiarity of the knowledge that quiet could only be earned by failure, and that failure meant lack of food, debt, and deeper degradation.
At last—perhaps it was owing to the unusual heat of the night—Cuckoo became so over-fatigued that she was scarcely conscious what she was doing. Her smile was utterly devoid of meaning, and had she been suddenly asked, she could not have told whether she was at the Regent Street end of Piccadilly, at Hyde Park Corner, or midway between the two. Once more there was a block. The people were pressed, or surged of their own will, together, and Cuckoo found herself leaning against some stranger. This sudden support gave to her an equally sudden knowledge of the extent to which she was fatigued, and when the block ceased and the stranger—unconscious that he was being used as a species of pillow—moved away, Cuckoo almost fell to the ground. Stretching out her hands to save herself, she caught hold of a man's arm, and as she did so her eyes moved to his face. It was Julian, and, before her grasp had time to fix all his attention on her, Cuckoo saw why he was in Piccadilly. In an instant all her lassitude was gone; all the fatigue, so passionless and complete, vanished. An extraordinary warmth, that of fire, not of summer, swept into her heart. She stood still and trembled, as if from the accession of the abrupt strength that flows from an energy purely nervous.
"Hulloh, Cuckoo!" Julian said.
She nodded at him. He looked down at her, not quite knowing what to say, for he knew, by this time, that she objected to any hint from him on the subject of her proceedings of the night. That was ignored between them, and when they met the situation was that of a lodger in the Marylebone Road holding friendly intercourse with a dweller in Mayfair, nothing more and nothing less.
"Taking a stroll?" Julian said at last. "Isn't it a lovely night?"
"Yes. I say, I'm tired," she answered.
"Shall I take you somewhere?" he asked.