"The stone is going down in the sea," Valentine said.
"Who threw it into the sea?" the doctor asked. "Tell me that."
Valentine shrugged whimsical shoulders.
"Fate, I suppose," he answered. "Fate is a mischievous boy, and is always throwing stones. Is the lady of the feathers disconsolate?"
The doctor did not trust himself to reply, but was silent, plotting another meeting to sit. For he had begun, still magic-bound perhaps, to divine some possible salvation in that act which he had once condemned, led, as he thought, by knowledge and by experience, of the nervous system forsooth! Now he was led unscientifically by pure feeling, like a child by a warm, close hand. The instinct that had guided Cuckoo seemed to stretch out fingers to him. He must respond. But how to reach Julian? While he strove to solve this problem it was solved for him in a manner utterly surprising to him, although engineered by words of his.
Cuckoo wrought a strange work with the skeleton hands of hunger and of pain.
CHAPTER VI
THE SELLING OF JESSIE
One chill morning of earliest February, a stirring of Jessie at the foot of her bed wakened Cuckoo from a short and uneasy sleep. She opened her eyes to the faint light that filtered through the green Venetian blind. Jessie moved again, slowly rotating like a drowsy top, then suddenly dropped into the warm centre of a nest of bedclothes, breathing a big dog-sigh of satisfaction that shook her tiny frame. She slept. But she had wakened her mistress, who lay with her head resting on one hand, deep in thought while the day grew outside. Cuckoo, having directed her steps down a blind-alley had, not unnaturally, reached a dead-wall, blotting out the horizon. Lying there, she faced it. She stared at the wall, and the wall seemed to stare back at her. Perhaps for that reason a dull blankness flowed over and filled her mind, and made her widely opened eyes almost as expressionless as the eyes of a corpse. For a long time she lay in this alive stupor. Then Jessie stirred again, and Cuckoo, as she had been before spurred into wakefulness, was stirred into thoughtfulness. She began to pass the near past, the present, eventually the future, in review. The past was a crescendo, solitude growing louder each night, poverty growing louder, obstinacy growing louder, Mrs. Brigg growing louder. What an orchestra! Cuckoo had not seen Julian once. She had seen the doctor, to be told of his baffled efforts, of Julian's escape from all his friends, of Valentine's declaration of the stone going down in the sea, of utter deadlock, utter stagnation. For the doctor treated Cuckoo frankly as a brave woman, not deceitfully as a timid child to be buoyed on the waves of ill-circumstances with gas-filled bladders. Cuckoo knew the worst of things, and by the knowledge was confirmed in her mule's attitude which so weighed upon Mrs. Brigg. Her hands were tied in every direction except one. She could only dumbly prove that Valentine was wrong; that her will was not dead, by exercising it to the detriment of her worldly situation. Doggedly then she put her whole past behind her, despite the ever-increasing curses of the landlady. She had given up her pilgrimages in search of honest work. They were too hopeless. She had pawned everything she could pawn, and sold every trifle that was saleable. Even Jessie's broad band of yellow satin had been included in a heterogeneous parcel of odds and ends purchased by a phlegmatic German with eyes like marbles and the manner of a stone image. Living less and less well, doing without fires, sitting often in the dark at night to save the expense of gas, Cuckoo had managed to pay her rent until a week ago. Then money had failed, and the great earthquake had at length tossed and swallowed the wretched Mrs. Brigg. The scene had been tropical. Mrs. Brigg was really moved to the very depths of her being. For days she had been, as it were, eating and drinking apprehension. Now apprehension choked her. She was shot up in the air by the cannon of climax. Limbs and mind were in the extreme of commotion. From her point of view it must be acknowledged that the situation was unduly exasperating. For Cuckoo would give no reason whatever for her reiterated formula of refusal to earn any money. And now she could not pay her week's rent, plunging Mrs. Brigg into the further circle of an inferno, and yet sat within doors day after day. Mrs. Brigg approached apoplexy by way of persuasion, was by turns pathetic and paralytic with passion. She coaxed with the ardour of an executioner inveigling the victim's neck to the noose and in haste to be off to breakfast. She threatened like Jove in curl-papers. Cuckoo was inexorable.
"Then out you go!" said Mrs. Brigg at last. "Out of my house you pack, you—" Nameless words followed.