As if struck by the fatigue of some sudden reaction, he sank down again into his chair, and went on with his apparently fantastic monologue:
"And if it was ever alive, what could it do? A soul can"t work, except through a body; it must fasten on a body, and bend the body to its will--man is such a creature that he can only be influenced through flesh and blood, nerves, sinews, eyes, things he can see, things that he can hear. He is so grovelling that nothing more delicate than these really appeals to him."
Again, and this time with less abstraction, and with a sort of contemptuous humour, he turned to the lady of the feathers, and continued, as if once more aware of her presence:
"Are you imbibing my gospel, the gospel of will and of influence? I see you are by your pretty att.i.tude and by the engaging face you are making at me. Well, don"t get it wrong. A gospel gone wrong in a mind is dangerous, and worse than no gospel at all. If you get this gospel wrong you may become conceited, and fancy yourself possessed of a power which you haven"t a notion of. To use will in any really affective way, you must train your body, and take care of it, not ruin it, and let it run to seed, or grow disfigured, or a ghastly tell-tale, a truth-teller, a town-crier with a big bell going about and calling aloud all the silly or criminal things you do. Now you have forgotten this, or perhaps you never knew it, and so will could not work in you; not even, I believe, a malign will to do mischief. You have thrown your body to the wolves, and whoever looks upon you must see the marks of their teeth."
It was evident that he gloated on this idea that the body of the lady of the feathers was forever useless for good, and even powerless to do much effective evil. He seemed to revel in the notion that she was simply a thing powerless, negative, and totally vain.
"I was mad ever to imagine the contrary," he said. Then, glancing away from personality, he exclaimed with more energy:
"But sometimes a will is so great, so trained, so watchful of opportunities, so acute and ready, that, instead of pa.s.sing away practically on the pa.s.sing away of the body in which it has been born and has lived, and merely living and working through the emanations of itself that have clung to men and women in many different places, instead--in fact--of being diffused--you understand me?" he broke out, with an obvious delight in the grossness of her ignorance and the denseness of her bewilderment and misunderstanding of him--"which is a sort of death, it seizes, whole, as a body, with all the members sound, upon another home. It commits, in effect, a great act of brigandage.
It lives on complete, powerful--even more powerful than ever before, because to all its original powers it adds a glory of deception, and is a living lie. If only you could understand me!"
Suddenly he burst into a peal of laughter that was a full stop to his philosophy. His cigarette had gone out. He threw it into the grate and stretched out his arms, still laughing. And Cuckoo gazing at him, as if fascinated, said silently to herself, "If only I could!"
For she felt as if Valentine were telling her a great secret, secure in the hideous knowledge that, though she heard it, it must remain a secret from her on account of her ignorance and of her stupidity. There was something in that feeling peculiarly maddening, yet Cuckoo displayed no irritation. The sharp little demon at her elbow whispered to her to be silent, told her that she might learn, might yet understand, if she would play a part, and be no more the wildcat, the foolishly impulsive lady of the feathers. Valentine struck his hand upon the table, and repeated:
"Why--why can"t you understand?"
The piquancy of the situation evidently delighted his mind and his sense of mischief. He enjoyed playing the philosopher to a fool; and the more the fool became a fool, the higher soared his philosophy and his appreciation of it. There is always something paradoxical in wisdom instructing folly, for, after all, folly can never really learn, can never really understand. Valentine hugged that thought.
"Go on," the lady of the feathers said, apparently in gaping wonderment.
"Why? do you mean to tell me you are interested?"
"I"m listenin"! It sounds wonderful!"
"It is wonderful!" Valentine cried. "Every living lie is wonderful.
But you don"t know yet much about will. My gospel is full of secrets and of subtleties, and only a few people are beginning to guess at its far-reaching power, and to aim at learning its truths and sounding its depths. And many unbelievers play with it, and never know that they are playing with fire. A man did this once. Shall I tell you about him?"
"Yes!" said Cuckoo.
And her soul cried to the darkness in which she imagined some vague power to dwell; cried aloud for understanding. This silent cry was so intense that she lay back upon the hard sofa, almost exhausted, and as she lay there, something hot, like fire, seemed to make its nest in her heart, and to flame there, and to be alive, as a flame is alive, and to speak to her, but not aloud, as a flame speaks in the coals to the imagination of the watcher by the hearth. In that moment the lady of the feathers felt as if she were conscious of a new companion, a companion full of some intensity towards her, some anxiety about her, anxious and brilliant as a flame is, vital, keen, blazing, intense. Although she could not define her sensation thus, that lack of a.n.a.lytical power could not deprive her of it. She knew that her vision became clearer, that her mind became brighter, that a light illumined her, that she was, for the moment, greater than herself. But Valentine did not know it. He looked towards the sofa and saw spread upon it a thin, painted, haggard young creature curled into a position at once pa.s.sionate, languid, and merely awkward, with relentless, thickly tangled hair, staring eyes, and half-opened lips, glowering in rouged stupidity and a coa.r.s.eness of the gutter. He was a philosopher, with a beauty of the stars and of snows, with a refinement, white in its brilliance. She was an image of Regent Street, a ghastly idol of the town; and he was telling her strange things that she could never comprehend, in a jargon that was to her as Greek or as Hebrew. It was too absurd. Yet he loved to tell her, and he could scarcely tell why he loved it.
"Go on," said the lady of the feathers.
"This man," Valentine said, a.s.suming a devout earnestness to trick her more, and watching for the puzzled expression to grow and to deepen in her eyes,--"this man had a holy nature, or I will say an unalterable will to do only things pure, reserved, refined--things that could not lead his body into difficulties, or his mind into quagmires. He was a saint without a religion. That is a possibility, I a.s.sure you; for a will can be amazingly independent. He had the peculiar grace that is said to belong to angels, a definite repugnance to sin. I know you understand me."
She nodded bluntly.
"I know--he couldn"t go wrong, if it was ever so," she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.
"If it was ever so--as the housemaids say--you put the position of this man in a nutsh.e.l.l, and if this strange will of his had never relented, the transformation I am going to describe, or--" he paused for a moment as if in doubt, then continued--"or rather to hint at, would never have taken place. But he grew dissatisfied with his will. It bored him ever so little. He fancied he would like to change it, and to subst.i.tute for it the will of the world. And the will of the world, as you know well, my lady of the feathers, is to sin. For some time he longed, vaguely enough, to be different, to be, in fact, lower down in the scale than he was.
But his longing to be able to desire sin did not lead him to desire it actually. One can force one"s self to do a thing, you see, but one cannot force one"s self to wish to do it, or to enjoy doing it. And this man, being a selfish saint--saints are very often very selfish--would not sin without desiring it. So it seemed that he must remain forever as he was, a human piece of flawless porcelain, wishing to be cracked and common delft."
"Whatever did he wish it for?" asked Cuckoo, with the surprise of a zany.
"Who can tell why one man wishes for one thing, another for another?
That, too, is a mystery. The point is, that he did wish it, and that he did something more."
"What was that, eh?"
"He deliberately tried to weaken and to deface his will; to alter it.
And he chose curious means, acting under suggestion from another will or influence that was more powerful than his own, because it was utterly self-satisfied and desired only to be what it was. I don"t think I will tell you what the means were. But his original dissatisfaction with his own goodness was the weapon that brought about his own destruction. His will did not change, as he believed; but what do you think actually happened to it? I will tell you. It was expelled from his body. He lost it forever. He lost, in fact, his ident.i.ty. For will is personality, soul, the ego, the man himself. And this soul, if you choose to call it so, was driven into the air. It went away in the darkness, like a bird.
Do you see?"
He waved his hand upward, and lifted his eyes, as if following with them the flight that he described.
"It flew away!"
"Where did it go?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Cuckoo.
Valentine seemed suddenly to become fully aware of the depth of her interest.
"Ah! even you are fascinated by my gospel, you who cannot understand it,"
he said. "But I cannot tell you where it went. I too have wondered."
He knit his brows rather moodily over this question of location. "I too have wondered. But I imagine that it died; that it ceased to be. Divorced from the body that was its home, degraded by dissatisfaction with itself, of what use could it be to any one? Even if it still continues to be, it is practically dead, for it can work neither harm nor good to any one, and the thing that cannot be good or evil, or turn others towards the one or the other, is dead. It is no more a will. It is no more an influence. It is a heart without a pulse in it; in fact, it is nothing."
A sort of joy had leapt into his face as he dwelt on this idea of nothingness, and he added:
"It is something like your soul, my lady of the feathers. Do you hear me?"
"Yes. I hear!"
"But the will that ousted it gained in power by that triumph. Totally self-satisfied, desirous of being only that which it is, having no enemy of yearning disappointment with itself in its camp, it can do what will never did before. It can lead captive the soul that was formerly the captive of the soul that it drove away to die. Like an enemy it has seized its opponent"s camp, and the slave dwelling in that camp is now its slave forever."
As Valentine spoke he seemed to become almost intoxicated with the thoughts conjured up by his own words. His blue eyes blazed with a fury of shining excitement. His white cheeks were suffused with blood.
"I have made myself, my will, a G.o.d!" he exclaimed pa.s.sionately.
At the words the lady of the feathers moved suddenly forward on the sofa.
"What--_you_!" she said.
The last word was uttered with an intensity that could surely only spring from something near akin to comprehension, if not from actual comprehension itself. It certainly startled Valentine, or seemed to startle him. His face showed an amazement like the amazement of a man raving to an image of wood, to whom, abruptly, the wood speaks with a tongue.
"What do you mean?" he said, and his voice faltered from its note of triumph and of exultation.
Cuckoo resumed her former position.
"Only was you the will, or the man, or whatever it all is?" she replied in the voice of one hopelessly muddled.
Valentine was rea.s.sured as to her stupidity.
"That has nothing to do with the story," he said.
"There was two of them, was there?" she persisted, but still with the accent of a hopeless dullard.