Such mingled music is
strange--strange as life. But to the doctor the music of this girl,
Cuckoo, in the dark seemed stranger and more eerie far. Her mind sang to
him of a thousand things in a moment, as is the fashion of women. Only
men normally hear but one, at most two or three, of the many feminine
melodies. And now Doctor Levillier heard them all, as a man may hear
those differing songs already recounted, simultaneously and clearly.
Degradation and the hopelessness that catches it by the hand, passion
and the strength and purity of passion, hatred, fear, physical fatigue,
ignorant nervousness, grossness of the gutter, which will cling even to
a soul capable of great devotion and noble effort, and accompany it on
the upward journey, very far and very high, resolve and shrinking, mere
street-boy virulence of enmity, and mere angel tenderness of pity--all
these sang their song from the mind and heart of Cuckoo to the mind and
heart of the doctor. It was a chorus of women in one woman, as it so
often is in the dearest women we know. In that choir a harlot sat,
hating, by a girl who was all love and reverence. And they sang out
of the same hymn-book. Jenny joined her voice with Susannah, Mary
Magdalene with Mary Mother, so near together in one thing, so far
apart in another--alike in this, that both were singing.
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