AN AWAKENING
That drive in the night was taken in silence. Julian, a crumpled heap of degraded humanity, slept. Cuckoo watched over him, half supporting him with one thin arm. Exultation shone in her eyes and beat in her heart. The glory of being alone with this drunken creature, his protector, his guide, lay round the girl like a glory of heaven. As she looked at his white face, and pressed her handkerchief against the blood that trickled from his forehead, wild tears of triumph, passionate tears of joy and determination, swam to her eyes. She felt at last the pride and the self-respect of one who possesses a will, and who has exercised it. That was a justification of life to her mind. Something had given even to her the power to snatch this man to herself from the jaws of dark London, to carry him off, a succoured prey, from the world laughing at his degradation. She bent over him in the rattling cab and touched his face with her lips. Was that a kiss? She, who had known so many kisses, wondered. It was the going forth of her soul to purify with flame the thing it loved.
The cab stopped; Cuckoo shook Julian. He stirred uneasily, opened his eyes and shut them again, relapsing into something that seemed rather a sort of fit than a slumber. She called to the cabman to come and help her. Between them they carried Julian into the house and laid him out upon the horsehair sofa.
"He'll come to all right, lady," said the cabby, with a pleasant grin of knowledge. "There's a many it takes like that. It ain't nothing."
He paused for his payment, and then Cuckoo remembered that she had no money. The thought did not worry her; it seemed too far off.
"I ain't got no money," she said.
Cabby's jaw dropped.
"Wait a second," she said. "Go out, I'll get some."
The man withdrew doubtfully, then Cuckoo robbed Julian. She, who had never yet taken money from him, stole the price of his fare to her protection. Then she let the cabman out, locked the street door, and returned. She sat down by Julian, who still appeared to sleep. And now suddenly she felt that she was starving. She looked round the room; there was nothing upon the table. Mrs. Brigg, an hour after her "Te Deum," had been seized in the claws of reaction, and had repented of her generosity. Suspicions and doubts obscured the previous rapture of her mind. She bethought herself that Cuckoo might chance to return alone, still penniless; she remembered the rent still owing. Her impulse to kill fatted calves suddenly struck her as the act of a mad woman. As locusts clear a smiling country of all that nourishes, she swept the table of Cuckoo clear, impounding to her larder with trembling, eager hands the food that might never have been paid for. Thereupon she went to bed, nodding her old head, and muttering to herself with pursed lips.
So the eyes of Cuckoo looked in vain for something to stay the bodily misery that stole upon her as she watched by Julian. Starvation stripped away all the mists from her soul and left it naked with the burdened soul it loved. Despite her increasing pain of body, Cuckoo was conscious gradually of a light and airy delicacy of sensation that was touched with something magical. This awful hunger made her feel strangely pure, as if her deeds, which for years had clung round her like a brood of filthy vampires, were falling away from her one by one. They dropped down into the night; she was mounting into freedom. And, despite faint agonies which at moments threatened to overwhelm her, she had never felt so happy. Instinct led her to get away from the consciousness of her body by leaning utterly upon her mind. She sat down by Julian, bent over him, absorbed herself in him. One of his hands she took gently in her own. The little act baptized him hers in her mind, and she was aware of a great rush of happiness never known before. For she had him there in her nest, she alone. And she loved him. Even in his drunken sleep, even in his massacred condition of ugliness and hatefulness, he was so beautiful to her that she could have wept from thankfulness. The world had taken from her everything, the very little that she had ever possessed, the purity that every creature has once, the innocence that she had never understood, left her this tipsy, degraded, abandoned, tragic atom of evil. And a great glory was hers. She could have fallen upon her knees in blessing and thankfulness, forgetful of all her tribe of sorrows, conscious only that she was a woman crowned and throned. By degrees she forgot that she was starving, forgot everything in an ecstasy of pure passion and pride, an ecstasy that brought food, rest, calm, to her.