Flames

"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 sn.i.g.g.e.r. 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 b.u.mped 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 pa.s.sage. 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 circ.u.mstances; 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 p.a.w.nshop. 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 t.i.tle 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.

"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 pa.s.s 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-circ.u.mstances with gas-filled bladders. Cuckoo knew the worst of things, and by the knowledge was confirmed in her mule"s att.i.tude 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 p.a.w.ned everything she could p.a.w.n, 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 pa.s.sion. 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.

Cuckoo got up from her chair with no show of emotion and moved towards her bedroom stonily to pack her box. She didn"t care. She was in a mood to lie down in the gutter and wait the last blow of Fate, living only in her one obstinate determination to do what the doctor had told her, the one thing Julian had asked of her. She did not any longer war with words against the purple and hard-breathing landlady. And her silence and her movement of obedience awed Mrs. Brigg for the moment into another mood.

She shuffled after Cuckoo into the bedroom.

"Eh? What is it?" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "What are you a-doing of?"

"Going," Cuckoo threw at her.

"Now?"

"Yes."

"Where to?"

No answer. Cuckoo was thrusting the few things still left to her into the only box she now possessed in the world. Mrs. Brigg stood in the folding doorway watching, and making mouths, as is the fashion of the elderly when emotional.

"What are you going for?" she said presently, as Cuckoo, bending down, stuffed a white petticoat into the depths.

"Can"t pay," snarled Cuckoo.

"It don"t matter--for a day or two," said Mrs. Brigg, reluctantly.

She stumped downstairs, torn by conflicting emotions. She had got accustomed to Cuckoo, and then both Julian and Valentine, Cuckoo"s visitors, had taught her the colour of the British sovereign. They had not been near 400 lately, but they might come again. And then Doctor Levillier. Cuckoo had some fine friends, who would surely do something for her. Mrs. Brigg had no other possible lodger in her eye. On the whole, prudence dictated a day or two"s patience, just a day or two, or a week"s, not more, not a moment more. Thus it came about that Cuckoo had now been another week beneath the roof of Mrs. Brigg without paying hard cash for the asylum. The previous evening the landlady had burst out again into fury, refusing to get in any more food for Cuckoo, and demanding the fortnight"s rent. She had even, carried away by cupidity and pa.s.sion, striven to drive Cuckoo out to her night"s work. A physical struggle had taken place between them, ending in the landlady"s hysterics. Other lodgers had been drawn by the noise from their floors to witness the row. Two of them had come, on the scene accompanied by men, and to them Mrs. Brigg had shrieked her wrongs and explanations of this swindling virtue of a woman who had formerly paid her way honestly from the street. The lodgers and their men had provided an accompaniment of jeering laughter to the Brigg solo, and Cuckoo, her clothes nearly torn from her back, had flung at last into her sitting-room and locked the door. That was last night--the past which she now reviewed in the morning twilight. What was she to do? She was without food. She was in debt, must leave Mrs. Brigg, no doubt, but must pay her first, had no means to pay for another lodging. She might apply to Doctor Levillier.

What held her back from taking that road was mainly this. She had the dumb desire to make a sacrifice for Julian, and the doctor had given her the idea of the only sacrifice she could make--retention of herself from the degradation that kept her free of debt. If she asked the doctor to pay the expenses of the sacrifice, whose would it be? His, not hers. So there was no banker in the world for Cuckoo. The dead-wall faced her.

The horizon was shut out. She lay there and tried to think--and tried to think. How to get some money? Something--the devil perhaps--prompted the sleeping Jessie to stir again at the bottom of the bed. Cuckoo felt the little dog"s back shift against her stretched-out toes, and suddenly a bitter flood of red ran over her thin, half-starved face, and she hid it in the tumbled pillow, pressing it down. The movement was the attempted physical negation of an abominable, treacherous thought which had just stabbed her mind. How could it have come to her, when she hated it so?

She burrowed further into the pillow, at the same time caressing the back of Jessie with little movements of her toes. Horrible, horrible thought!

It brought tears which stained the pillow. It brought a hard beating of the heart. And these manifestations showed plainly that Cuckoo had not dismissed it yet. She tried to dismiss it, shutting her eyes up tightly, shaking her head at the black, venomous thing. But it stayed and grew larger and more dominant. Then she took her head from the pillow, faced it, and examined it. It was a clear-cut, definite thought now, perfectly finished, coldly complete.

Jessie was embodied money, an embodied small sum of money.

Long ago Cuckoo had said to Julian with pride:

"She"s a show-dog. I wouldn"t part with her for nuts."

Now she remembered those words, and knew, could not help knowing, that a show-dog was worth more than nuts. At that moment she wished Jessie were worthless. Then the sting would be drawn from her horrible thought.

Meanwhile Jessie slept calmly on, warm and cosey.

Cuckoo was cold and trembling. She knew that she was on the verge of starvation. The doctor had said that one day she could help Julian, only she. So she must not starve. Love alone would not let her do that.

Between her and starvation lay Jessie, curved in sleep, unconscious that her small future was being debated with tears and with horror.

Long ago the little dog had entered Cuckoo"s heart to be cherished there. Many wretched London women own such a little dog, to whom they cling with a pa.s.sion such as more fortunate women lavish upon their children. A great many subtleties combine to elevate companions with tails to the best thrones the poor, the wicked, and the deserted can give them. A dog has such a rich nature to give to the woman who is poor, so much innocence at hand for the woman who is wicked, such completeness of attachment ready for the woman who is lonely. It is so beautifully humble upon its throne, abased in its own eyes before the shrine of its mistress, on whom it depends entirely for all its happiness. A little king, perhaps, it has the pretty manners of a little servitor. And even when it presumes to be determined in the expressed desire for the dryness of a biscuit or the warmth of a lap, with how small a word or glance can it be laid upon its back, in the abject renunciation of every pretension, anxious only for the forgiveness that n.o.body with a touch of tenderness could withhold. Ah, there is much to be thankful for in a companion with a tail! Jessie had winning ways, the deep heart of a dog. A toy dog she was, no doubt, but hers was no toy nature. Cuckoo could not have shed such tears as those she now shed over any toy. For she began to cry weakly at the mere thought that had come to her, although it was not yet become a resolve. Life with Jessie had been very sordid, very sad. What would life be without her? What would such a morning as this be, for instance? Cuckoo"s imagination set tempestuously to work, with physical aids--such as the following. She drew away her feet from the bottom of the bed, where they touched the little dog"s back. Doing this she said to herself, "Now, Jessie is gone." Curled up, she set herself to realize the lie. And perhaps she might have succeeded thoroughly in the sad attempt had not Jessie, in sleep missing the contact of her mistress, wriggled lazily on her side up the bed after Cuckoo"s feet, discovering which, she again composed herself to slumber. The renunciation was not to be complete in imagination. Jessie"s love, when present, was too frustrating. And Cuckoo, casting away her horrible thought in a sort of hasty panic, caught her companion with a tail in her arms, and made her rest beside her, close, close. Jessie was well content, but still sleepy.

She reposed her tiny head upon the pillow, lengthened herself between the sheets and dreamed again. And while she dreamed, the black thought about her came back to Cuckoo. It was a.s.sertive, and Cuckoo began to fear it.

The fear of a thought is a horrible thing; sometimes it is worse than the fear of death. This one made Cuckoo think herself more cruel than any woman since the world began. Yet she could not exorcise it. On the contrary, she grew familiar with it as the day marched on, until it put on a fatal expression of duty. All that day she revolved it. Mrs. Brigg attacked her again. Food was lacking. Cuckoo"s case became desperate. She turned over carefully all her few remaining possessions to see if there was any inanimate thing that she had omitted to turn into money. Jessie, poor innocent, a.s.sisted with animation at the forlorn inventory, nestling among the tumbled garments, leaping on and off the bed. Her ingenuous nature supposed some odd game to be in progress, and was anxious to play a princ.i.p.al and effective part in it. Yet she was quieted by the look Cuckoo cast upon her when the wardrobe had been pa.s.sed in review and no saleable thing was to be found. She shrank into a corner, ready for whimpering. That night Cuckoo did not sleep, and through all the long hours she held Jessie in her arms, and heard, as so often before, the regular breathing of this little companion of hers. And each drawn breath pierced her heart.

Next morning she got up early. She was faint with hunger and with a resolve that she had made. She dressed herself, then carried Jessie to the flannel-lined basket, put her into it and kissed her.

"Go bials," she said, with a raised finger. "Go bials."

Jessie winked her eyes pathetically, her chin resting on the basket edge.

Cuckoo went out into the pa.s.sage and called down to Mrs. Brigg.

"What is it?" cried Hades.

"I"m going to get some money."