The pilgrimages were resumed. Cuckoo visited dressmakers, bonnet-shops, ABC establishments, with no success. Her face, even when unpainted, told its tale. Nature can write down the truth of a sin better than art. Cuckoo learnt that fact by her walks. But still she trudged, learning each day more truths, one of which—a finale to the long sermon, it seemed—was that there is no army on earth more difficult to enlist in, under certain circumstances her own, than the army of good working-girls. The day she thoroughly understood that finale Cuckoo went home and had a violent row with Mrs. Brigg. A cold scrag of mutton was supposed to be the bone of contention, but that was only supposition. Cuckoo was really cursing Mrs. Brigg because the world is full of close boroughs, not at all because cold mutton has not learnt how to achieve eternal life, while at the same time fulfilling its duties as an edible. Not understanding this subtlety of emotion, Mrs. Brigg let herself loose in sarcasm.
"Why don't yer go out of a night?" she screamed, battering with one hand on a tea-tray, held perpendicularly, to emphasize her words. "What's come to yer? Go out; go out of a night."
"Shan't."
"Turned pious, 'ave yer?" sneered the landlady. "Or waitin' for a 'usband? Which is it to be? Mr. H'Addison, I dessey! Hee, hee, hee."
She burst into a bitter snigger. Cuckoo flushed scarlet and uttered words of the pavement. Any one hearing her then must have put her down as utterly unredeemed and irredeemable, a harridan to bandy foul language with a cabman, or to outvie a street-urchin bumped against by a rival in the newspaper trade. She covered Mrs. Brigg with abuse, prompted by the gnawings at her heart, the hunger of mind and body, fear of the future, wonder at the impossibilities of life. Her own greatness—for her love and following obstinate unselfishness, without religious prompting or self-respect, as it was, might be called great—turned sour within her heart at such a moment. Her very virtue became as vinegar. Mrs. Brigg was drowned in epithets and finally pushed furiously out into the passage. Cuckoo turned from the door to Jessie yelping, and directed a kick at the little dog. Jessie wailed, as only a toy dog can, like the "mixture" stop of an organ, wailed and ran as one that runs to meet an unknown future. Then Cuckoo pursued, caught her, and burst into tears over her. The little creature's domed skull and india-rubber ears were wet with the tears of her mistress. And she whimpered, too, but with much relief, for she was back in her world of Cuckoo's lap; and could not be quite unhappy there. But in what a world was Cuckoo!
It will be said that Dr. Levillier knew of her circumstances; but anxiously kind and thoughtful though he was, he did not yet realize the effect of his advice given to the lady of the feathers during the drive on the Hampstead Heights. He had told her to prove her will by doing the thing that Julian had asked of her. But he did not know what Julian had asked. And he did not comprehend the bitter fruit that her following of his further advice to keep from low and loveless actions must bring to the ripening. When he spoke, as the sun went down on London, he was carried on by excitement, and was thinking rather of the fate of Julian, the diablerie of Valentine, than of the individual life of the girl at his side. He was arming her for the battle. But he dreamed of weapons, not of rations, like many an enthusiast. He forgot that the soldier must be fed as well as armed. He said to Cuckoo: "Fight! Use your woman's wit; use your heart; wake up, and throw yourself into this battle." And she, filled with determination, and with a puzzled, pent ardour to do something, did not know what to do except—starve. So she began to starve for Julian's sake, and because the doctor had fired her heart. He had said: "Do what Julian asked you to do, and show Julian that you have done it." But something within Cuckoo forbade her to fulfil this last injunction. She could give up the street, but an extraordinary shyness, false shame, and awkwardness had so far prevented her from letting Julian know it. If he knew it, he would understand what it meant for her, and would force money on her, and Cuckoo, having once made up her mind that money and Julian should never be linked together in her relations with him, stuck to secrecy on this subject with her normal dull pertinacity. So matters move slowly towards a deadlock. The lady of the feathers did not neglect the pawnshop. Her few trinkets went there very soon. Then things that were not trinkets, that green evening dress, for instance, the imitation lace, and one day a sale took place. Cuckoo disposed, for an absurd sum, of her title deed, the headgear that had given birth to her nickname. She was no longer the lady of the feathers. The hat that had seen so much of her life reposed upon the head of virtue, and knew Piccadilly no more. But Julian's present remained with her, and indeed came into every-day use. And still Jessie sported her yellow riband. Later there came a terrible time, when the eyes of Cuckoo—appraising everything on which they looked—fell with that fateful expression, not merely upon Jessie's yellow riband, but upon Jessie herself. But that time was not quite yet.
While Cuckoo endured this fate, Dr. Levillier was in a perplexity of another kind. The first round of that battle had ended in apparent decisive defeat of Valentine's accusers. During the evening the fortunes of war had certainly wavered to the doctor's side. Julian had displayed sudden strong signs of an awakening; but the sitting had thrown him back into his dream, had pushed him more firmly beneath the yoke of his master. The doctor did not understand why, although he recognized the fact; he could not divine the exact effect that disappointment would have upon sudden suspicious eagerness. Julian had been waked to wonder, to observe Valentine for an instant with new eyes, to look the mystery of the great change in him in the face, and know it as a mystery. Yes, he had even thought of Valentine as a stranger, and said to himself, "Where, then, is my friend?" The new Valentine had risen out of the ashes of sleep. Julian pressed forward the sitting as a means, the only one, of searching among these ashes. In the old days each sitting had quickened his senses into a strange life, as the last sitting quickened the senses of the doctor. But to Julian this last sitting brought nothing but disappointment; the thing which had been alive was dead, and so the sudden hope which had come with the new wonder died too. He supposed that he had been the prey of an absurd fancy created by the idle words of the doctor, or by an idiotic movement of his mind, which had cried to him on a sudden: "If the Valentine you love and revere is really gone away, what are you worshipping now?" Now, in his heavy disappointment he thought of this cry as a mad exclamation, and he sought to drown all memory of it, and every memory in fresh vices, and in his fatal habit of absinthe-drinking. He lay down under the yoke beneath which he had previously wept, and so succeeded in going still lower. So that night Valentine had won his intended triumph, although for a while it had been in jeopardy.
Doctor Levillier was in perplexity; he had been brought to the very threshold of revelation, and then thrust back into an every-day world of thwarted hopes and broken ambitions. But the memory of magic was still with him, and gave him a feeling of unrest, and a pertinacity that was not to be without reward forever. Valentine's triumph held for the conqueror a poison seed from which a flower was to spring. The doctor's determination to continue the fight was frustrated at this time by Julian, rather than by Valentine. Julian's disappointment plunged him in a deep sea of indifference, from which he declined to be rescued. The doctor's invitations to him remained unanswered. If he called, Julian was never at home. Several times the doctor met Valentine, who, with a deprecating smile, told him that Julian was away on some mad errand.
"I seldom see him now," he even added upon one occasion. "He has gone beyond me. Julian is living so fast that my poor agility cannot keep pace with him."
It seemed as if the whole affair was going completely out of the doctor's knowledge, and that even Cuckoo had no longer any power of attraction for Julian. The doctor wrote to her and received an ill-spelt answer, telling him that Julian had not been near her since the last night of the year. In this event the doctor's only hope lay in keeping closely in touch with Valentine. To do this proved an easy matter. Valentine responded readily to his invitations, asked him out in return, seemed glad to be with him. The doctor believed he read the reason of this joy in Valentine's anxiety to prove the depth of Julian's degradation. He had now begun to play devilishly upon a pathetic stop, and sought every occasion to descant upon the social ruin that was overtaking Julian, and his deep concern in the matter. This hypocrisy was so transparent and so offensive that there were moments when it stank in the doctor's nostrils, and he could scarcely repress his horror and disgust. Yet to show them would be not only impolitic, but would only add fuel to the flames of Valentine's pyre of triumph. So the doctor, too, sought to play his part, and never wearied in seeking Julian, although his quest was in vain. From Valentine he gathered that Julian was now dropped even by the gay world; that his clubs looked askance at him; that men began to shun him, and to whisper against him.