Flames Part 57

"Perhaps you're right. But how will you help me?"

Valentine seemed to think and consider for a moment. Then he exclaimed:

"I'll tell you. By making you join with me in putting this life, this old life--new enough to both of us--through its paces. Why should each of us do it alone? We are friends. We can trust one another. You know me through and through. You know the--chilliness I'll call it--of my nature, my natural bookishness--my bias towards contemning people too readily, and avoiding what all men ought to know. And I know you. Without you I believe I should never go any distance. Without me you might go too far.

Together we will strike the happy medium. For us life shall go through all his paces, but he shall never lame us with a kick, like a vicious horse, or give us a furtive bite when we're not looking. Men carry such bites and kicks, the wounds from them, to their graves. We'll be more careful. But we'll see the great play in all--all its acts. And, when we've seen it, we'll be as we were, only we'll be no longer blind. And we'll never forget our grand power of rejecting and refusing."

"Ah!" said Julian. "Perhaps I haven't that power."

"But I have."

"Yes, you have."

"And I'll share my power with you. We are friends and comrades. We ought to share everything."

"Yes," exclaimed Julian, carried away. "Yes, by Jove, yes!"

"And as to this flame--"

"Ah!"

"We'll soon know if it's a vision or a reality. But it's a vision. You saw it in a woman's eyes."

"I'll swear I did."

"Then that proves it's a fraud. The flame in a woman's eyes never burnt true yet--never, Julian, since the days of Delilah."

CHAPTER V

JULIAN FEARS THE FLAME

Although Cuckoo knew well that Julian carried out his intention of going home after he left her in Piccadilly, the fact of his being there, of his making one of that crowd, that slowly-moving crowd, troubled her.

Valentine and Julian had argued the question of her real feeling about the matter. Cuckoo did not argue it. She never deliberately thought to herself, "I feel this or that. Why do I feel it?" She knew as much about astronomy as introspection, and that was simply nothing at all. Instead of diving into the depths of her mind and laboriously tracing every labelled and tabulated subtlety to its source, she sat in the squalid Marylebone Road sitting-room, with the folding doors open into the bedroom to temper the heat of summer with draughts from the frigid zone of the back area, and babbled her sensations to Jessie, who riggled in response to every pa.s.sing shadow that stole across the heart of her mistress.

Jessie had learned much about Julian in these latter days. Into her p.r.i.c.ked and pointed ear, leaf-shaped and the hue of India-rubber, had been whispered a strange tale of the dawning of love in a battered heart, of the blossoming of respect in a warped mind. She had heard of the meeting in Piccadilly, of the meal at the Monico, of the farewell on the kerbstone. And she alone knew--or ought to have known--the mingling of intense jealousy and of a grander feeling that burned in Cuckoo's breast whenever she thought of Julian's life, the greater part of it that lay beyond her knowledge, her sight, or keeping.

For the lady of the feathers, in most things a strange mixture, had never driven two more contrasted pa.s.sions in double harness than those which she drove around the circle of which Julian was the core, the centre. One was a pa.s.sion of jealousy; the other a curious pa.s.sion of protection.

Each backed up the other, urged it to its work. It would have been a hard task, indeed, to tell at first which was the greater of the two. Cuckoo neither knew nor cared. She did not even differentiate the two pa.s.sions or say to herself that there were two. That was not her way. She felt quickly and strongly, and she acted on her feelings with the peculiar and almost wild prompt.i.tude that such a life as hers seems to breed in woman's nature. It is the French lady of the feathers who scatters vitriol in the streets of Paris, the Italian or Spanish lady of the feathers who s.n.a.t.c.hes the dagger from her hair to stab an enemy. The wind of Cuckoo's feelings blew her about like a dancing mote, and the feelings awakened by Julian were the strongest her nature was capable of.

Only Jessie knew that at present, unless indeed Valentine had divined it, as seemed possible from his words to Julian.

And these twin pa.s.sions were fed full by the peculiar circ.u.mstances of Cuckoo's relation to Julian, and by the depth of her knowledge concerning a certain side of life.

She went home, that night of their meeting, very late, and in the weariness of the morning succeeding it, and of many following mornings, she began to brood over the change in Julian that she had intuitively divined. Her street-woman's instinct could not be at fault with a boy.

For Julian was little more than a boy. She knew that when she first met him, when they made toast together on the foggy afternoon that she could never forget, Julian was unshadowed by the darkness that envelopes the steps of so much human nature. Lively, bright, full of youth, strength, energy, as he was, Cuckoo knew that then he had been free from the bondage of sense which demands and obtains the sacrifice of so many lives like hers. And she knew that now he was not free from that bondage, and that she, by an irony of fate, had, with her own hands, fastened the first fetter upon him.

Valentine had plotted that.

Cuckoo's belief said so; but surely her curious instinct against Valentine must have tricked her here!

It was this knowledge of her unwilling action against Julian's peace that first woke in her the strong protective feeling towards him, a feeling almost akin to the maternal instinct. It was her strange love for him that prompted the fiery antagonism against his relations with others that could only be called jealousy. And though one of her pa.s.sions was n.o.ble, the other pitiable, they could but work together for the same end, aim at a similar salvation.

Yet how could any salvation for a man come out of that dreary house in the Marylebone Road, from that piteous rouged agent of the devil?

Cuckoo never stopped to ask such a question as that. She was a girl, and she began to understand love. She had no time to stop. And each pa.s.sing day soon began to give fresh vitality to the vision of Julian's need.

Between him and her there had sprung up on the ruins of one night's folly a tower of comrades.h.i.+p. Its foundations were not of sand. Even Cuckoo, despite her ceaseless jealously, felt that. But, after all, she had only come into his life as a desolate waif drifts into a settled community.

She was neither of his cla.s.s, his understanding, or his education. She was in the gutter; in the gutter to an extent that no man, as women feel at present, can ever be. And though through her inspiration he had not to come into the gutter to find her and to be with her, yet she sometimes writhed with the thought that he was so far above her. Nevertheless, her position never once tempted her, in the struggle that the future quickly brought with it, to shrink from effort, to fail in fight, to despair in endeavour for him.

There are flames that burn the dross from humanity and reveal the gold.

There are flames in the eyes and in the hearts of women.

Julian's visits to Cuckoo were irregular but fairly frequent. He always came in the afternoon, an hour or two before the psychological moment of her start out for the evening's duty. Sometimes he would take her out to tea at a small Italian restaurant near Baker Street Station. More often they would make tea together in the little sitting-room, with the ecstatic a.s.sistance of Jessie. And Rip, Valentine's dog, generally made one of the party. He and Jessie got on excellently together, and devoutly shared the sc.r.a.ps that fell from the Marylebone Road table. The first time that Julian brought Rip to number 400, Cuckoo fell in love with him.

"Why, you never said you had a dog," she exclaimed.

"Rip's not mine," Julian answered.

"Isn't he? Whose is he?"

"Valentine's."

"Then why d'you have him with you?" asked Cuckoo, suddenly and rather roughly pus.h.i.+ng away Rip, who was swirling in her lap like a whirlpool.

"Oh, he's taken a stupid dislike to Valentine," Julian answered thoughtlessly. "He won't stay with him."

In a moment Cuckoo had caught the little dog back.

"That's funny," she said.

"Yes, isn't it?" said Julian.

Then, seeing her thoughtful gaze, and the odd way in which she suddenly caressed the dog, he was angry with himself for having told her anything about the matter.

"Rip's a little fool," he said. "Perhaps Jessie will take a dislike to you some day, Cuckoo."

"Not she, never!" said Cuckoo, with conviction. And, after that, she could never spoil Rip enough.

These visits and teas ought to have been pleasant functions, bright oases in the desert of Cuckoo's life, but a cloud fell over them at the beginning and deepened as the days went by. For Cuckoo, with her sharpness of the _gamin_ and her quick instinct of the London streets, was perpetually watching for and noting the signs in Julian's face, manner, or language, that fed those two pa.s.sions of jealousy and of protection within her. And, at first, she allowed Julian to see what she was doing.

One day, as they sat at the table in the middle of the room, Julian said to her:

"I say, Cuckoo, why d'you look at me like that?"