Julian stared at him with strong excitement.
"And what are you, then, Valentine? Where do you come from?" he said slowly.
"From Marr."
The words came from the divan, from the dry lips of Cuckoo. Doctor Levillier knew not why, but he was thrilled to the very soul by them, as by a revelation throwing strong light upon the depths of things. Whether it was the influence of this strange scented room, in which strange things had happened, or the influence of the hour and the climax and death of the year, or a voice in his heart speaking to him with authority, he could not tell. Only he knew that on a sudden all his guiding reason, all his knowledge, all his cool contemplation of the physician and common sense of the man, were swept entirely away. His theory of insanity seemed in a moment the theory of a dwarf intellect trying to stick wretched, absurd pins through angels—white or black—that it thought butterflies. His conversation with Cuckoo on the Hampstead Heights seemed the vain babble of a tricked and impotent observer. His mind fell on its knees before the mind of the lady of the feathers. Reason was stricken by instinct. The confused feeling of the woman had conquered the logical inferences of the man. From that moment the doctor secretly abandoned the old landmarks which had guided him all his life, and entered into a new world—a world in which he would not have dreamed of permitting any of his patients to walk if he could help it. A strange magic floated round him like a mist blotting out the crude familiarities of the normal world. The tentroom, with its shadowy tulips, its scented warmth, its pale twilight, its quick silences when voices ceased, was a temple of wonder and a home of the miraculous. And those gathered in it, what were they? Men and a woman? Bodies? Earthly creatures? No. To his mind they were stripped bare of the clothes in which man—governed by decrees of some hidden power—must make his life pilgrimage. They were stripped bare and naked of their bodies. They were warm, stirring, disembodied things—they were flames leaping, waving, contending, aspiring. And he remembered the night when he sat alone in the drawing-room of Valentine, and saw the red walls glow, and the light deepen, and saw the stillness grow to movement, and the shadows come away from their background, and take forms—the forms of flames. Was that night a night of prophesy? Were those flames silent voices speaking to the ear of his mind? He looked around him like a man in a strange country, who takes a long breath and liberates his soul in wonder. He looked around, and the shadowy, thin girl leaning forward on the divan, with one arm outstretched as if she gave a message, was among the other flames as a flame upon an altar. At least his instinct had not played him false with regard to her. He knew it now. In the wild and sad streets, where feet of men tread ever, where tears of women flow ever, grow flowers of Paradise, strange flowers, leap flames from the eternal fires of heaven. And the voice of Cuckoo thrilled him as the voice of revelation.
Valentine turned upon the lady of the feathers, hearing her cry.
"Marr!" he said, "your lover who died! Ah!"
The brutality of the remark was so unexpected, so savage, that it struck all those who heard it like a whip. Cuckoo shrank back among her cushions trembling. Julian made a slight forward movement as if to stop Valentine. The doctor laid his hands on the arms of his chair and pressed them hard. He felt a need of physical energy. In the sudden silence Valentine touched the electric bell. Before any one spoke it was answered by Wade, who carried a tray on which stood various bottles and glasses.
"We must counteract the exciting effects of our café noir," Valentine said, addressing his guests in a group. "Otherwise we shall be strung up to a pitch of tension that will make us think the requiem of church bells, which we shall hear in a few minutes, the voices of spirits or of spectres. Julian, here is your absinthe. What will you drink, Miss Bright? Brandy, lemonade, whiskey?"
"Lemonade, please," Cuckoo said, almost in a whisper.
The tears were crowding in her eyes. She dared not look Julian in the face. Never before had her past risen up before her painted in such grim and undying colours. The reprise of Valentine had been as the reprise of a Maxim gun to a volley fired by a child from an air-tube. So Cuckoo felt. But how greatly was she deceived! Perhaps physical conditions played a subtle part in the terrible desolation that seized her now, after her outburst of daring and of excitement. The warmth and smallness of the room, the penetrating scent that filled it, even the movements of her companions, the sound of their voices, suddenly became almost insupportable to Cuckoo. She was the victim of a reaction that was so swift and so intense as to be unnatural. And in it both her mind and body were bound in chains. Then she was petrified. Her very heart felt cold and cramped, and then hard, icy, inhuman. Her tears did not fall, but were dried up in her eyes, like dew by a scorching sun. She looked at Julian, and felt as indifferent towards him as if he had been a shadow on the grass in the evening time. Then he became remote, with a removedness attained by no shadow even. For a shadow is in the world, and Julian seemed beyond the world to Cuckoo. She thought, even repeated, with tiny lip-movements, the cruel words of Valentine, and they seemed to her no longer cruel, or of any meaning, bad or good. For they came from too far away. They were as a cry of shrill music from a cave leagues onward beyond the caves of any winds.