"Oh, doctor, I forgot the light. Do you mind turning it out?"
The doctor obeyed, felt his way to the chair opposite Cuckoo and sat down.
Almost at the moment he turned out the light the bells that rang, "Le roi est mort, vive le roi," ceased. Cuckoo was directed to lay her hands on the table, and to touch with her fingers the fingers of her companions. She did so, trembling. This was a new experience to her, and her entire lack of knowledge of what was expected to happen filled the darkness with immoderate possibilities, and her soul with awe and with confusion. Then, to sit between the man she loved and the man she loathed, thus in the blackness, was a nerve-shaking experience which her preceding fainting-fit did not deprive of its normal terrors. The hand of Valentine and the hand of Julian were as ice and as fire to her. The darkness seemed crowded with nameless things. She could fancy that she heard it whisper incessantly in her ear.
But the real interest of this sitting, to any little demon gifted with a miraculous power of pushing its detective way into the minds of the sitters, would have lain, perhaps, chiefly in the mind of Doctor Levillier. It has been said that, suddenly struck to the soul by the conviction with which the instinctive Cuckoo pronounced those words, "From Marr," Doctor Levillier entered into a new world, abandoning old landmarks. He remained in this new world of the senses certainly, but already he was becoming accustomed to it, clear-headed, keen-sighted, even reasonable in it. Moved by some strange conviction that he was in the presence of an inexplicable mystery, he no longer tried to explain it in some ordinary fashion. He abandoned his theory of insanity, or it abandoned him. In any case, it was dead, buried, whether he would or no. He recognized a mystery at present beyond his capacity to understand or to explain. Having got thus far, and having entered, at Julian's word, into this present circumstance of sitting, table-turning, or rapping, or whatever you may choose to call it, he cleared any ordinary furniture of doctor's prejudices right out of his mind—made a clean sweep of them. That done—and the doing of it required some strong effort—his mind was receptive, ready for anything, odd or ordinary, that might come along. There he sat with his empty room waiting to be filled—the only reasonable way of waiting for that of which we have no knowledge. He did not clamour "I won't," or "I will." He said nothing at all, only waited with the strict desire and intention of recognizing things to be what they truly were, neither dressing them up nor tearing their garments off their backs. When he put out the light and sat down, what he expected—so far as he expected anything—was this, that the addition of darkness would add a cloud to his mind, and endeavour to give various finishing-touches to any spurious excitement created in him, however much against his will, by the enemy's doings. In this expectation he was entirely deceived. The falling of darkness drew a veil from his mind, leaving his mental sight singularly, even preternaturally, clear. The falling of silence gave an amazing acuteness to his inner sense of hearing. Certain people are so made that they can, under certain conditions, and at certain moments, hear the workings of their neighbours' minds, as you and I can hear the whirr of machinery, or the cry of a child in the street. An ordinary man or woman can only hear a mind when lips, teeth, and tongue utter it with living sounds that set the air in vibration. These abnormal people hear, in these abnormal moments, the silent murmurs of the mind making no effort at all to utter itself through the usual speech apparatus. Till this moment the doctor had supposed himself to be an entirely normal man, but he had been sitting only a very short time before he began to become aware of the silent murmurs of these three minds around him. The darkness set his own mind free from clouds of excitement and from mists of unreason. That was the first step. But it did more. It developed in him this marvellous faculty of the hearing of silence, called by some divination. All his senses were rendered amazingly acute. A perfectly distinct impression of the precise feelings of Cuckoo, of Valentine, and of Julian respectively came to him as he sat there, although he could neither see nor hear them. Each of them seemed to pour his or her thoughts into the doctor's mind. Thus, at first, did his empty room become furnished with the thoughts of his companions. He was sitting in the circle between Julian and Valentine and held their hands. And it was Valentine who forged the first link in this strange chain of unuttered communication. As the darkness cleared the doctor's mind, and set him once more on his feet—although in a new world—an aroma of triumph floated to him softly, like a scent in a damp wood at night. He heard then the mind of Valentine murmuring in the stillness the Litany of its glory, a long and an ornate Litany, deep and full, and he knew that he had been right in supposing that Valentine had invited him to witness that glory. But the doctor became aware, too, that at moments the Litany faltered, hesitated, as if the mind of Valentine grew uncertain or was assailed by vague fears. And these fears ran like little pale furtive things to Valentine from the lady of the feathers. By degrees the doctor could imagine that he actually saw them stealing back and forth. Now one would come alone as if to listen to the Litany, and then another would follow, and another, and, growing brave, they would combine against it. Then Valentine would waver and become uneasy, as one who hears little voices crying against him in the night, and knows not whence they come or from whom. But the Litany would begin again, and Valentine would triumph over the pale fears and they would shrink away. And in the Litany one name recurred again and again—the name of Julian. Over him was the triumph. In his ruin and fall and ultimate destruction the glory lived. To witness the complete possibility of this ruin, the complete sovereignty of this glory, the doctor and the lady of the feathers were there. And the doctor grew to feel that only some outside circumstance, alarming Valentine to anxiety and waking Julian to a new observation, had hindered the intended triumph. What circumstance was that? He looked back along the past evening and found it in himself, in his theory that a soul expelled was not necessarily a soul dead. The rift in the glory of the Litany came with that. Valentine was trying to close it by this act of sitting, to impress the strength of his will upon his companions in the darkness. The doctor felt his effort like a continually repeated blow, stealthy and hard and merciless.
And now, in the darkness and in the silence, the doctor heard the mind of Julian. Another scent floated through that imagined damp and breathing wood from another—but how different—soul-flower. No Litany of triumph murmured in the blackness where Julian sat, but a hoarse and broken solo, part despair, part fear, part anger, and all perplexed and flooded with bewilderment and with excitement. The doctor drew into him the murmur of Julian's mind until it seemed to become, for the time, the murmur of his own mind. He was conscious of a dreadful turmoil of doubt, and dread and perplexity, so strong, so painful, that it lay upon him like a dense and a suffocating burden. In that moment he knew utterly that the greatest load in the world laid on any man is the load of his own, perhaps beloved, sin. He was staggering wearily with Julian away from the light. His eyes were dim—with the eyes of Julian. His ears, like Julian's, were assailed with the dastard clamour of the calling sin. "Listen! Listen! you want me. I am here. Take me! Take me!" And the weltering seas of heavy flooding impotence rolled round him as they rolled round Julian. He grew numb and vacant and inert, then—alive ever to the murmur of Julian's mind—caught a glimpse, through the waters of that whelming sea, of far-away light, and heard that the voices of the importunate sins grew fainter. But whether the voices were loud or low, whether the seas flowed above his head or sank and failed, he was always conscious of the dominating mood of almost wild perplexity and a madness of bewilderment. For Julian stirred under the yoke that Valentine had laid upon him, as if at last conscious distinctly that it was indeed a yoke, and that it galled him; as if at last conscious, too, that without that yoke was freedom. And he shot against Valentine in the darkness arrows of inquiry. But always he lived in doubt and almost in terror.
And then, detaching himself from the triumph, touched with anxiety, of Valentine, and from the wild turmoil of Julian, Dr. Levillier opened the door of his mind wide, and the lady of the feathers entered in.
He heard the thoughts of a woman.
That was strangest of all—the most fantastic, eerie, wayward, wonderful music the doctor had dreamed of.
Have you listened to far-off and mingling melodies at night—melodies of things opposed and differing, yet drawn together, in strange places far from your home? Have you heard a woman wailing over some abominable sorrow in a dark house, and an organ—before which filthy children dance fantastically—playing a merry Neapolitan tune in front of it, while the mutter of scowling men comes from the blazing corner where the gin-palace faces the night? There you have sorrow, sunshine, crime, singing together in a great city. Or have you stood in a land not your own, and gleaned the whisper of an ancient river, the sough of a desert wind, the hoarse and tuneless song of a black man at a waterwheel, the soprano ballad of a warbling hotel English lady, and the remote and throbbing roar of a savage Soudanese hymn and beaten drums from the golden Eastern night? There you have nature, toil, shrill civilization and war claiming you with one effort in a sad and sweet country. Or have you, in a bright and dewy morning, heard the "murmur of folk at their prayers," the drone of a church organ, and, beyond the hedgerow, two graceless lovers quarrelling, and an atheist, leaning over the church gate, sneering to his fellow at the devotion of deluded Sabbath-keepers? There you have love of the hidden and faith, love of the visible and distrust, hatred of hidden love and faithlessness, making a symphony for you. Such mingled music is strange—strange as life. But to the doctor the music of this girl, Cuckoo, in the dark seemed stranger and more eerie far. Her mind sang to him of a thousand things in a moment, as is the fashion of women. Only men normally hear but one, at most two or three, of the many feminine melodies. And now Doctor Levillier heard them all, as a man may hear those differing songs already recounted, simultaneously and clearly. Degradation and the hopelessness that catches it by the hand, passion and the strength and purity of passion, hatred, fear, physical fatigue, ignorant nervousness, grossness of the gutter, which will cling even to a soul capable of great devotion and noble effort, and accompany it on the upward journey, very far and very high, resolve and shrinking, mere street-boy virulence of enmity, and mere angel tenderness of pity—all these sang their song from the mind and heart of Cuckoo to the mind and heart of the doctor. It was a chorus of women in one woman, as it so often is in the dearest women we know. In that choir a harlot sat, hating, by a girl who was all love and reverence. And they sang out of the same hymn-book. Jenny joined her voice with Susannah, Mary Magdalene with Mary Mother, so near together in one thing, so far apart in another—alike in this, that both were singing. And in that choir—celestial and infernal—sang the jealous woman with grey cheeks and haggard eyes, and the timorous woman, and she of the fearless face, and the woman who could scale the stars for the creature she worshipped, and the woman who could lie down in the mud and let the world see her there, and the woman who had sold her soul for food, and a thin woman, such a thin, almost transparent, wistful creature, who was facing the thing men call with bated breath—starvation. She sang too, but, of all these women, she was the only one the doctor could not rightly hear nor rightly see. For she, as yet, was remote, far down the level line of that choir, hardly perhaps one with it yet, faint of voice, dim of outline.
The doctor heard the choir sing, and then—