Cuckoo had at first cursed him plainly in the market-place and upon the house-top. But that was before she had learned wisdom. Slowly she learnt it on these hot days and nights, when the London dust filtered over the paint upon her cheeks and lips, clung round the shadows in the hollows beneath her eyes, and slept in the artificial primrose of her elaborate cloud of hair. Slowly she learnt it in many vague and struggling mental arguments, in which logic was a dwarf and passion a giant, in which instinct strangled reason, and love wandered as a shamefaced fairy with tear-dimmed eyes.
Julian's prolonged absence and silence first taught the lady of the feathers the slow necessity of wisdom, otherwise, perhaps, her vehement ignorance could never have absorbed the precious thing. Women of her training and vile experience, nerve-ridden, and clothed in hysteria as in a garment, often think to gain what they want by the mere shrillness of outcry, the mere grabbing of ostentatious, eager hands and frenzy of body. Their lives lead them through a wonder of knowledge and of danger to the demeanour of babyhood, and they cry for every rattle, much more for every moon. So Cuckoo had thrown her feelings down before Julian. She had dashed her hatred of Valentine in his face; she had cried her fears of his downfall to that which she consorted with eternally and loathed—when she had still the energy to loathe it, which was not always—in his ears with the ardent shrillness of a boatswain's whistle. She had, in fact, done all that her instinct prompted her to do, and the result was the exit of Julian from her life. This set her, always in her sharp and yet childish way, sometimes oddly clear sighted, often muddled and distressed, to turn upon instinct with a contempt not known before, to discard it with the fury still of a child. And instinct thus forsaken by an essentially instinctive creature opened the gates of distress and of confusion.
By day Cuckoo sat in her stuffy little parlour brooding wearily. She waited in day after day, always hoping that Julian would return, full of resolutions, prompted by fear, to be gentle, even lively, to him when he did come, full of excited intention which could not be fulfilled; for he did not come. And by night, while she tramped the streets, still Cuckoo's anxious mind revolved the question of her behaviour in the future. For she would not, passionately would not, allow herself to contemplate the possibility that Julian's anger against her would keep him forever beyond reach either of her fury or of her tenderness. She insisted on contemplating his ultimate reappearance, and her wits were at work to devise means to win him from Valentine's influence without stirring his horror at any thought of disloyalty to his friend. Cuckoo, in fact, wanted to be subtle, intended to be subtle, and sought intensely the right way of subtlety. She sought it as she walked, as she hovered at street corners in the night, while the hours ran by, sometimes till the streets were nearly deserted, sometimes even till the dawn sang in the sky to the wail of the hungry woman beneath it. She sought it even in the company of those strangers who stepped for a night into her life as into a public room, and stepped from it on the morrow with a careless and everlasting adieu, half-drowned in the chink of money.
And sometimes she thought, with a sick dreariness, that she would never find it, and sometimes courage failed her, and, despite her passionate resolution, she did for a moment say to herself, "If he should never come again." There were moments, too, when every other feeling was drowned by sheer jealousy of Julian, when the tiger-cat woke in this street-girl who had always had to fight, when her thin frame shivered with the shaking violence of the soul it held. Then she clenched her hands, and longed to plant her nails in the faces of those other women, divined, though never seen,—those French women who had sung him, like sirens, to Paris, away from the sea of her greedy love. Her similes were commonplace. In her heart she called such sirens hussies. Had she met them the battle of words would have been strong and singularly unclean. That she herself was a hussy to other men, not to Julian, did not trouble her. She did not realize it. Human nature has always one blind eye, even when the other does not squint. This passion of jealousy, circling round an absent man, seized her at the strangest, the most inopportune moments. Sometimes it came upon her in the street, and the meditation of it was so vital and complete that Cuckoo could not go on walking, lest she should, by movement, miss the keenest edge of the agony. Then she would stop wherever she was, lean against the down-drawn shutter of a shop, or the corner of a public house, among the gaping loungers, let her powdered chin drop upon her breast, and sink into a fit of desperate detective duty, during which she followed Julian like a shadow through imagined wanderings, and watched him committing all those imagined actions that could cause her to feel the wildest and most inhuman despair.
One night, when she was thus sunk and swallowed up in the maw of miserable inward contemplation, a young man, who was walking by, observed her. He was very young and eager, fresh from Cambridge, ardent after the mysteries and the subtleties of life, as is the fashion of clever modern youth. The sight of this painted girl leaning, motionless as some doll or puppet, against the iron shutters of the vacant house, her head drooped, and her hands, as if the strings to manipulate her had fallen loose from the grasp that guided them, caught and eventually fascinated him. It was a late hour of night. He passed on and returned, shooting each time a devouring, analytical glance upon Cuckoo. Again he came back, walking a little nearer to the houses. His heart beat quicker as he approached the puppet. Its complete immobility was almost appalling, and each time he came within view of it he examined it violently to see if a limb was displaced. No; one might almost suppose that it was the body of some one struck dead so suddenly against the shop that she had not had time to fall, and so remained leaning thus. With shorter and shorter revolutions, like a dog working itself up to approach some motionless but strange object, the youth went by Cuckoo, hesitating more and more each time he came in front of her with strange feelings of one being vaguely criminal. He longed to touch the puppet, to see if any quiver would convulse its limbs, any light flicker into its eyes. And he was so fascinated and interested that at last he did furtively stop precisely in front of it. For a second both of them were motionless, he from contemplation of the outward, she of the inward. Then Cuckoo's thoughtful jealousy came to a ghastly crisis. Her imagination had shown her frightful things and herself an utterly helpless and compelled spectator. The puppet opened its red lips to utter a sob, lifted up its white and heavy eyelids to let loose tears upon its unnaturally bright cheeks, stirred its hanging hands to clasp them in a crude gesture of dull fury. The youth started as at a corpse showing suddenly the pangs of life. His movement shot Cuckoo like a bullet into her real world. Through her tears she saw a man regarding her. In a flash, old habit brought to her a smile, a turned head of coquetry, an entreating hand, a hackneyed phrase that reiteration rendered parrot-like in intonation. The youth shrank back and fled away in the darkness. Long afterwards that incident haunted him as an epitome of all the horrors of cruel London.
And Cuckoo, thus roused and deserted, put aside for the moment her nightmare, and started once more upon her promenade of the night.
At last she began to fear that Julian would never come back, and by a sudden impulse she wrote to him a short, very ill-spelt letter, hoping he would come to tea with her on a certain afternoon. On the day mentioned she waited in an agony of expectation. She had put on his black dress, removed all traces of paint and powder from her face, remembering his former request and her experiment, tricked Jessie out in a bright yellow satin riband twisted into a bow almost larger than herself, and bought flowers—large ones, sunflowers—to give to her dingy room an air of refinement and of gaiety. Amid all this brilliancy of yellow satin and yellow flowers she waited uneasily in her simple black gown. The day was dull, not wet, but brooding and severe, iron-grey, like a hard-featured Puritan, and still with the angry peace of coming thunder. The window was open to let in air, but no air seemed to enter, only the weariful and incessant street noises. Jessie wriggled about, biting sideways with animation to get at her yellow adornment, and pattering around the furniture seeking stray crumbs, which sometimes eluded her for a while and, lying in hidden nooks and corners, unexpectedly rewarded her desultory and impromptu search. Cuckoo leaned her arms across the table, glanced at the tea things for two, and listened. A cab stopped presently. She twisted in her chair to face the window. It had drawn up next door, and she subsided again into her fever of attention. Jessie found a crumb and swallowed it with as much action and large air of tasting it as if it had been a city dinner. The hands of the clock drew to the hour named in Cuckoo's note, touched it, passed it. A sickness of despair began to creep upon her like a thousand little biting insects. She shuffled in her seat, glanced this way and that, pressed her lips together, and, taking her arms from the table, clasped her hands tightly in her lap. Then she sat straight up and counted the tickings of the clock, the spots on the tablecloth, the gold stars upon the wallpaper of the room. She counted and counted until her head began to swim. And all the time she waited, the lady of the feathers was learning wisdom. The lesson was harsh, as the lessons of time usually are; the lesson was bitter as Marah waters. And she thought the lesson was going to be a cross too heavy for her narrow shoulders to bear when the iron gate of the garden sang its invariable little note of protest on being opened. Cuckoo's head turned slowly to one side. Her haggard eyes swept the view of the path. Julian was walking up it.
She met him very quietly, almost seriously, and he shook hands with her as if they had been together quite recently and parted the best of friends. Only, as he held her hand, she noticed that he cast a hasty, and as she fancied a fearful, glance into her eyes. Then he seemed reassured and they sat down to tea. Cuckoo supposed that he had for the moment dreaded what she called another row, and was satisfied by her expression of good temper. They drank their tea, and after a short interval of constraint began chattering together very much as usual. At first Cuckoo had hardly dared to look much at Julian, lest he should see the joy she felt at his coming, but when she was pouring out his second cup she let her eyes rest fully on his face, and only then did she realize that a shadow lay upon it, a shadow from which it had been free before.
With a trembling hand she filled the cup and stared upon the shadow. She knew its brethren so well. In dead days she herself had helped to manufacture such shadows upon the faces of men. She had seen them come, thin, faint, delicate, impalpable as a veil of mist before morning. Only morning light never followed them. And she had seen them stay and grow and deepen and darken. Shadow over the eyes of the man, shadow round his lips, shadow like a cloud upon the forehead, shadow over the picture painted by the soul, working through the features, that we call expression. Many times had she seen the journey taken by a man's face to that haunted bourne, arrived at which it is scarcely any more a man's face, but only a mask expressive of one, or of many, sins. Had Julian then definitely set foot upon that journey? As yet the shadow that lay over him was no more than the lightest film, suggestive of a slightly unnatural and forbidding fatigue. Yet Cuckoo shrank from it as from a ghost.
"Why, Cuckoo, your hand is trembling!" Julian said.