Chapter 38

VALENTINE INVITES HIS GUESTS

Valentine and Julian sat together in the tentroom at night, as they sat together many months ago, when Julian confessed his secret and Valentine expressed his strange desire to have a different soul. Now it was deep winter. The year was old. In three days it must die. It lay in the snow, like some abandoned beggar waiting for the inevitable end. Some, who were happy, would fain have succoured it and kept it with them. Others, who were sad, said: "Let it go--this beggar. Already it has taken too many alms from us." But neither the happy nor the sad could affect its fate. So it lay in the snow and in the wind, upon its deathbed.

The tentroom had not been altered. Still the green draperies, veiled walls, windows and door, meeting in a point at the ceiling. The fire danced and shone. The electric moons gleamed with a twilight softness. Only Rip was gone from the broad and cushioned divan upon which he had loved to lie, half sleeping, half awake, while his master talked and Julian listened or replied. The room was the same, and this very fact emphasized the transformation of the two men who sat in it. They leaned in their low chairs on each side of the fire, thinly veiled from time to time in cigarette-smoke. No sound of London reached them in this small room. Even the voice of the winter wind whispered and sang in vain. Stifled by the thick draperies, it failed in its effort to gain their attention, and sighed among the chimney-tops the chagrin of its soul. The face of Julian was drawn and heavy. His eyes were downcast. His arms hung over the cushioned elbows of his chair, in which he sat very low, in the shrivelled posture of one desperately fatigued. From time to time he opened his lips in a sort of dull gape, then shut his teeth tightly as if he ground them together. The drooping lids of his eyes were covered with little lines, and there were deeper lines at the corners of his mouth. The colour of his face was the colour of the misty cloud that haunts the steps of evening on an autumn day--grey, as if it clothed processes of decay and desolation. Years seemed to crouch upon him like lean dogs upon a doorstep. Within a few months he had stepped from boyhood to the creaking threshold of premature age.

The change in Valentine was far less marked to a careless eye. There was still a peculiar cleanness in his large blue eyes, a white delicacy in his features. The lips of his mouth were red and soft, not dry, as were the lips of Julian. The crisp gold of his hair caught the light, and his lithe figure rested in his chair in a calm posture of pleasant ease. Yet he, too, was changed. Expression of a new nature now no longer lurked furtively in his face, but boldly, even triumphantly, asserted itself. It did not shrink behind a soft smile, or glide and pass in a fleeting gaiety, but stared upon the world with something of the hard and fixed immobility of a mask. Every mask, whatever expression be painted upon it, wears a certain aspect of shamelessness. Valentine's was a hard and shameless face, although his features, if coarser than of old, were still noble, and, in line, a silent legend of almost priestly intellectuality.

He was looking across at Julian, who held idly between his lax fingers a letter written with violet ink upon pink paper, which had a little bird stamped in the left-hand corner.

"When did you get it?" he said.

"Two or three days ago, I think. I can't remember. I can't remember anything now," Julian answered heavily.

"And you have had two since?"

"Yes. And to-day she called."

"You were out?"

"Yes."

"She shows herself very exigent all of a sudden. She is afraid of losing you. I told you long ago she cherished absurd ambitions with regard to you. Do you intend to answer her notes?"

"Oh yes," Julian said. "Cuckoo has always been very fond of me; very fond."

He glanced at the absurdly vulgar little bird in the corner of the letter. "And that's something," he added slowly.

"You are weighed down with gratitude? No wonder. Are you grateful to others who have always cared for you in a different way--unselfishly, that is?"

"I don't seem to feel very much about anybody now," Julian said. "I do such a lot. The more you do, the less you feel. Damnable life! All cruelty. I can't feel satisfied. But there must be something; something I haven't tried. I must find it," he said, almost fiercely, and, stirring in a sudden energy, "I must find it--or--curse you, Val, why don't you find it for me?"

Valentine laughed.

"The last novelty has failed? You are a very discontented sinner, Julian. And yet London begins to think you too enterprising. I hear that Lady Crichton is the last person to shut her doors against you. What did she hear of?"

"How should I know?"

He laughed bitterly.

"She oughtn't to be particular. She used to receive Marr. I met him first in her yellow drawing-room."

"London had not discussed him, perhaps. You are rapidly becoming a legend and a warning. That is fame. To be the accepted warning for others."

"Or infamy; which is much the same thing."

"But you are only at the first posting-station of your journey," Valentine continued, looking at him with a smile. "If you are dissatisfied, it is because you have not tasted yet half that strength of the spring we once talked of. You have not completely thrown off the foolish yoke of public opinion. The chains still jangle about you. Cast them away and you will yet be happy."

"Shall I? Shall I, Valentine?"

The exhausted, worn, and weary figure leaned abruptly forward in its chair. Julian's tired eyes glittered greedily.

"To be happy, I'd commit any crime," he said.

"Crime is merely opinion," Valentine answered. "Everything is opinion. You will commit crimes probably. Most brave men do."

"But shall I be happy?"

"You are greedy, Julian, greedy of everything, knowledge of life, lust, joy. You are never satisfied. That's because you and I fasted for so long; and the greedy man is never quite happy while he is eating, for he is always anticipating the next course. And, let philosophers say what they will, happiness does not lie in anticipation. Go on eating. Pass on from course to course. At last there will come a time, a beautiful time, when your appetite will be satisfied and you will rest contented. But, remember, not till you have journeyed through the whole _menu_, played with your dessert and even drunk your black coffee. Go on, only go on. Men and women are unhappy. They think it is because they have done too much. They reproach themselves for a thousand things that they have done. Fools! They are unhappy because they have not done enough. The text which will haunt me on my deathbed will be: 'I have left undone those things which I ought to have done.' Yes, during my long cursed years of inaction, when I was called the Saint of Victoria Street. Ah! Julian, you and I slept; we are awake now. You and I were dead; we are now alive. But we are only at the beginning of our lives. We have those years, those white and empty years, to drown in the waters of Lethe. They are like monstrous children that should have been strangled almost ere they were born, white, vacant children. And now, day by day, we are pressing them down in the waters with our hands. At last they will sink. The waves will flow over their haggard faces. The waves will sweep them away. Then we shall be happy. We shall redeem those years on which the locust fed, and we shall be happy."

"Yes, by God, we shall be happy, we will--we will be happy. Only teach me to be happy, Valentine, anywhere, anyhow."

"Not with the lady of the feathers. She will not make you happy."

"Cuckoo? No! For she's terribly unhappy herself. Poor old Cuckoo. I wonder what she's doing now."

"Searching in the snow for her fate," Valentine said, with a sneer.

* * * * *

It was not so. Cuckoo was sitting alone in the little room of the Marylebone Road looking a new spectre in the face, the spectre of hunger, only shadowy as yet, scarcely defined, scarcely visible. And the lady of the feathers wondered, as she gazed, if she and the spectre must become better acquainted, clasp hands, kiss lips, be day-fellows and night-fellows.

* * * * *

"I am going to write to Cuckoo," Julian said a day later. "What shall I say?"

Valentine hesitated.

"What have you thought of saying?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know. First one thing, then another. Good-bye among the number. That's what you wish me to say, Val, isn't it?"

He spoke in a listless voice, monotonous in inflection and lifeless in timbre. The dominion of Valentine over him since the supper at the Savoy had increased, consolidating itself into an undoubted tyranny, which Julian accepted, carelessly, thoughtlessly, a prey to the internal degradation of his mind. Once he had only been nobly susceptible, a fine power. Now he was drearily weak, an ungracious disability. But with his weakness came, as is usual, a certain lassitude which even resembled despair, an indifference peculiar to the slave, how opposed to the indifference peculiar to the autocrat. Valentine recognized in the voice the badge of serfdom, even more than in the question, and he smiled with a cold triumph. He had intended telling Julian now, once for all, to break with the lady of the feathers, of whom even yet he stood in vague fear. But the question, the voice of Julian, gave him pause, slid into his soul a new and bizarre desire, child of the strange intoxication of power which was beginning to grip him, and which the doctor had remarked. If Julian broke with Cuckoo, repulsed her forever into the long street that was her pent and degraded world, would not the sharp salt of Valentine's triumph be taken from him? Would not the wheels of his Juggernaut car fail to do their office in his sight--there was the point!--upon a precious victim? The lady of the feathers thus deliberately abandoned by Julian would suffer perhaps almost to the limit of her capability of pain, but Valentine would have lost sight of her in the dark, and though he would have conquered that spectral opposition which she had whimsically offered to him--he laughed to himself now, thinking of his fear of it--he would not see that greatest vision, the flight of his enemy. These thoughts flashed through his mind, moving him to an answer that astonished Julian.

"Good-bye!" he said. "Why should I wish that?"

"You said the other day at the Savoy that she hated you; that you and she must have a battle unless I chose between you."

"I was laughing."

The lifelessness left Julian's voice as he exclaimed:

"Valentine! But you were--"

"Sober, and you were not. Can you deny it?"

Julian was silent.

"I so little meant that nonsense," Valentine continued, "that I have conceived a plan. To-morrow is the last night of the old year. The doctor asked us to spend it with him. We refused. Providence directed that refusal, for now we are at liberty to celebrate the proper occasion for burying hatchets by burying our particular hatchet. The lady of the feathers, your friend, my enemy, shall see the new year in here, in this tentroom, where long ago we--you and I--with how ill success, sought to exchange our souls."

Julian looked utterly astonished at this proposition.

"Cuckoo wouldn't come here," he began.

"So you said once before. But she came then, and she will come now."

"And then the doctor! If he gets to hear of it! We said we were dining out."

Valentine's hard smile grew yet harder, and his eyes sparkled eagerly.

"I'll arrange that," he said. "The doctor shall come here too."

It seemed indeed as if he meant that his triumph should culminate on this final night of the year, his year. He laughed Julian's astonishment at this vagary aside, sat down and wrote the two notes of invitation, and then went out with Julian, saying:

"Julian, come out with me. You remember what I said about the greedy man? Come; Fate shall present you with another course, one more step towards your _café noir_ and--happiness. _Voilà!_"

Valentine was right in his supposition that both the lady of the feathers and the doctor would accept his invitation, but he did not understand the precise motive which prompted their acceptance. Nor did he much care to understand it. Cuckoo, Doctor Levillier! After all, what were they to him now? Spectators of his triumph. Interesting, therefore, to a certain extent, as an unpaying audience may be interesting to an actor. Interesting, inasmuch as they could contribute to swell the bladder of his vanity, and follow in procession behind his chariot wheels. But he no longer cared to divine the shades of their emotions, or to busy himself in fathoming their exact mental attitudes in relation to himself. So he thought, touched perhaps with a certain delirium, though not with the delirium of insanity attributed to him by Doctor Levillier.

The doctor had intended celebrating the last night of the year in Harley Street with Cuckoo and the two young men. The refusal of the latter put an end to the opening of his plan of campaign in this strange battle, and he was greatly astonished when he received Valentine's invitation. Still, he had no hesitation in accepting it.

"So," he said to himself, as he read the note, "we join issue within the very wall of the enemy. Poor, deluded, twisted Valentine! that I should have to call him, to think of him as an enemy! We begin the fight within the shadow of our opponent's tent."

Literally that was the fact.

Cuckoo's thoughts were less definite, more tinged with passion, less shaped by the hands of intellect. They were as clouds, looming large, yet misty, hanging loose in torn fragments now, and now merging into indistinguishable fog that yet seemed pregnant with possibilities. Poor thoughts, vague thoughts; yet they pressed upon her brain until her tired head ached. And they stole down to her heart, and that ached too, and hoped and then despaired--then hoped again.