thought. Something might be done by tying a string to one of the
figures, and making it move, when Edward was going through that
impossible night among the effigies that are so like life--so like
death. Something that was not the devil said: "You may frighten him out
of his wits." And the devil answered: "Nonsense! do him good. He
oughtn't to be such a schoolgirl."
Anyway, the five pounds might as well be won to-night as any other
night. He would take a great coat, sleep sound in the place of horrors,
and the people who opened it in the morning to sweep and dust would bear
witness that he had passed the night there. He thought he might trust to
the French love of a sporting wager to keep him from any bother with the
authorities.
So he went in among the crowd, and looked about among the wax-works for
a place to hide in. He was not in the least afraid of these lifeless
images. He had always been able to control his nervous tremors. He was
not even afraid of being frightened, which, by the way, is the worst
fear of all. As one looks at the room of the poor little Dauphin, one
sees a door to the left. It opens out of the room on to blackness. There
were few people in the gallery. Vincent watched, and in a moment when he
was alone he stepped over the barrier and through this door. A narrow
passage ran round behind the wall of the room. Here he hid, and when the
gallery was deserted he looked out across the body of little Capet to
the gaolers at the window. There was a soldier at the window, too.
Vincent amused himself with the fancy that this soldier might walk round
the passage at the back of the room and tap him on the shoulder in the
darkness. Only the head and shoulders of the soldier and the gaoler
showed, so, of course, they could not walk, even if they were something
that was not wax-work.
Presently he himself went along the passage and round to the window
where they were. He found that they had legs. They were full-sized
figures dressed completely in the costume of the period.
"Thorough the beggars are, even the parts that don't show--artists, upon
my word," said Vincent, and went back to his doorway, thinking of the
hidden carving behind the capitols of Gothic cathedrals.
But the idea of the soldier who might come behind him in the dark stuck
in his mind. Though still a few visitors strolled through the gallery,
the closing hour was near. He supposed it would be quite dark then. And
now he had allowed himself to be amused by the thought of something that
should creep up behind him in the dark, he might possibly be nervous in
that passage round which, if wax-works could move, the soldier might
have come.
"By Jove!" he said, "one might easily frighten oneself by just fancying
things. Suppose there were a back way from Marat's bath-room, and
instead of the soldier Marat came out of his bath, with his wet towels
stained with blood, and dabbed them against your neck."
When next the gallery was empty he crept out. Not because he was
nervous, he told himself, but because one might be, and because the
passage was draughty, and he meant to sleep.
He went down the steps into the Catacombs, and here he spoke the truth
to himself.
"Hang it all!" he said, "I _was_ nervous. That fool Edward must have
infected me. Mesmeric influences, or something."
"Chuck it and go home," said Commonsense.
"I'm damned if I do!" said Vincent.
There were a good many people in the Catacombs at the moment--live
people. He sucked confidence from their nearness, and went up and down
looking for a hiding-place.
Through rock-hewn arches he saw a burial scene--a corpse on a bier
surrounded by mourners; a great pillar cut off half the still, lying
figure. It was all still and unemotional as a Sunday School oleograph.
He waited till no one was near, then slipped quickly through the
mourning group and hid behind the pillar. Surprising--heartening too--to
find a plain rushed chair there, doubtless set for the resting of tired
officials. He sat down in it, comforted his hand with the commonplace
lines of its rungs and back. A shrouded waxen figure just behind him to
the left of his pillar worried him a little, but the corpse left him
unmoved as itself. A far better place this than that draughty passage
where the soldier with legs kept intruding on the darkness that is
always behind one.
Custodians went along the passages issuing orders. A stillness fell.
Then suddenly all the lights went out.
"That's all right," said Vincent, and composed himself to sleep.
But he seemed to have forgotten what sleep was like. He firmly fixed his
thoughts on pleasant things--the sale of his picture, dances with Rose,
merry evenings with Edward and the others. But the thoughts rushed by
him like motes in sunbeams--he could not hold a single one of them, and
presently it seemed that he had thought of every pleasant thing that had
ever happened to him, and that now, if he thought at all, he must think
of the things one wants most to forget. And there would be time in this
long night to think much of many things. But now he found that he could
no longer think.
The draped effigy just behind him worried him again. He had been trying,
at the back of his mind, behind the other thoughts, to strangle the
thought of it. But it was there--very close to him. Suppose it put out
its hand, its wax hand, and touched him. But it was of wax: it could not
move. No, of course not. But suppose it _did_?
He laughed aloud, a short, dry laugh that echoed through the vaults. The
cheering effect of laughter has been over-estimated, perhaps. Anyhow, he
did not laugh again.
The silence was intense, but it was a silence thick with rustlings and
breathings, and movements that his ear, strained to the uttermost, could
just not hear. Suppose, as Edward had said, when all the lights were
out, these things did move. A corpse was a thing that had moved--given a
certain condition--Life. What if there were a condition, given which
these things could move? What if such conditions were present now? What
if all of them--Napoleon, yellow-white from his death sleep--the beasts
from the Amphitheatre, gore dribbling from their jaws--that soldier with
the legs--all were drawing near to him in this full silence? Those
death masks of Robespierre and Mirabeau, they might float down through
the darkness till they touched his face. That head of Madame de Lamballe
on the pike might be thrust at him from behind the pillar. The silence
throbbed with sounds that could not quite be heard.
"You fool," he said to himself, "your dinner has disagreed with you,
with a vengeance. Don't be an ass. The whole lot are only a set of big
dolls."
He felt for his matches, and lighted a cigarette. The gleam of the match
fell on the face of the corpse in front of him. The light was brief, and
it seemed, somehow, impossible to look, by that light, in every corner
where one would have wished to look. The match burnt his fingers as it
went out; and there were only three more matches in the box.
It was dark again, and the image left on the darkness was that of the
corpse in front of him. He thought of his dead friend. When the
cigarette was smoked out, he thought of him more and more, till it
seemed that what lay on the bier was not wax. His hand reached forward,
and drew back more than once. But at last he made it touch the bier,
and through the blackness travel up along a lean, rigid arm to the wax
face that lay there so still. The touch was not reassuring. Just so, and
not otherwise, had his dead friend's face felt, to the last touch of his
lips: cold, firm, waxen. People always said the dead were "waxen." How
true that was! He had never thought of it before. He thought of it now.
He sat still, so still that every muscle ached, because if you wish to
hear the sounds that infest silence, you must be very still indeed. He
thought of Edward, and of the string he had meant to tie to one of the
figures.
"That wouldn't be needed," he told himself. And his ears ached with
listening--listening for the sound that, it seemed, _must_ break at last
from that crowded silence.
He never knew how long he sat there. To move, to go up, to batter at the
door and clamour to be let out--that one could have done if one had had
a lantern, or even a full matchbox. But in the dark, not knowing the
turnings, to feel one's way among these things that were so like life
and yet were not alive--to touch, perhaps, these faces that were not
dead, and yet felt like death. His heart beat heavily in his throat at
the thought.
No, he must sit still till morning. He had been hypnotised into this
state, he told himself, by Edward, no doubt; it was not natural to him.
Then suddenly the silence was shattered. In the dark something moved.
And, after those sounds that the silence teemed with, the noise seemed
to him thunder-loud. Yet it was only a very, very little sound, just the
rustling of drapery, as though something had turned in its sleep. And
there was a sigh--not far off.
Vincent's muscles and tendons tightened like fine-drawn wire. He
listened. There was nothing more: only the silence, the thick silence.
The sound had seemed to come from a part of the vault where, long ago,
when there was light, he had seen a grave being dug for the body of a
young girl martyr.
"I will get up and go out," said Vincent. "I have three matches. I am
off my head. I shall really be nervous presently if I don't look out."
He got up and struck a match, refused his eyes the sight of the corpse
whose waxen face he had felt in the blackness, and made his way through
the crowd of figures. By the match's flicker they seemed to make way for
him, to turn their heads to look after him. The match lasted till he got
to a turn of the rock-hewn passage. His next match showed him the burial
scene: the little, thin body of the martyr, palm in hand, lying on the
rock floor in patient waiting, the grave-digger, the mourners. Some
standing, some kneeling, one crouched on the ground.
This was where that sound had come from, that rustle, that sigh. He had
thought he was going away from it: instead, he had come straight to the
spot where, if anywhere, his nerves might be expected to play him false.
"Bah!" he said, and he said it aloud, "the silly things are only wax.
Who's afraid?" His voice sounded loud in the silence that lives with the
wax people. "They're only wax," he said again, and touched with his
foot, contemptuously, the crouching figure in the mantle.
And, as he touched it, it raised its head and looked vacantly at him,
and its eyes were mobile and alive. He staggered back against another
figure, and dropped the match. In the new darkness he heard the
crouching figure move towards him. Then the darkness fitted in round him
very closely.
* * * * *
"What was it exactly that sent poor Vincent mad: you've never told me?"
Rose asked the question. She and Edward were looking out over the pines
and tamarisks, across the blue Mediterranean. They were very happy,
because it was their honeymoon.
He told her about the Musee Grevin and the wager, but he did not state
the terms of it.
"But why did he think you would be afraid?"
He told her why.
"And then what happened?"
"Why, I suppose he thought there was no time like the present--for his
five pounds, you know--and he hid among the wax-works. And I missed my
train, and _I_ thought there was no time like the present. In fact,
dear, I thought if I waited I should have time to make certain of
funking it, so I hid there, too. And I put on my big black capuchon, and
sat down right in one of the wax-work groups--they couldn't see me from
the passage where you walk. And after they put the lights out I simply
went to sleep; and I woke up--and there was a light, and I heard some
one say: 'They're only wax,' and it was Vincent. He thought I was one of
the wax people, till I looked at him; and I expect he thought I was one
of them even then, poor chap. And his match went out, and while I was
trying to find my railway reading-lamp that I'd got near me, he began to
scream, and the night watchman came running. And now he thinks every one
in the asylum is made of wax, and he screams if they come near him. They
have to put his food beside him while he's asleep. It's horrible. I
can't help feeling as if it were my fault, somehow."
"Of course it's not," said Rose. "Poor Vincent! Do you know I never
_really_ liked him." There was a pause. Then she said: "But how was it
_you_ weren't frightened?"
"I was," he said, "horribly frightened. I--I--it sounds idiotic, but I
thought I should go mad at first--I did really: and yet I _had_ to go
through with it. And then I got among the figures of the people in the
Catacombs, the people who died for--for things, don't you know, died in
such horrible ways. And there they were, so calm--and believing it was
all all right. And I thought about what they'd gone through. It sounds
awful rot I know, dear--but I expect I was sleepy. Those wax people,
they sort of seemed as if they were alive, and were telling me there
wasn't anything to be frightened about. I felt as if I were one of them,
and they were all my friends, and they'd wake me if anything went wrong,
so I just went to sleep."
"I think I understand," she said. But she didn't.
"And the odd thing is," he went on, "I've never been afraid of the dark
since. Perhaps his calling me a coward had something to do with it."
"I don't think so," said she. And she was right. But she would never
have understood how, nor why.
III
THE STRANGER WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN OBSERVED
"There he goes--isn't he simply detestable!" She spoke suddenly, after a
silence longer than was usual to her; she was tired, and her voice was a
note or two above its habitual key. She blushed, a deep pink blush of
intense annoyance, as the young man passed down the long platform among
the crowd of city men and typewriting girls, patiently waiting for the
belated train to allow them to go home from work.
"Oh, do you think he heard? Oh, Molly--I believe he did!"
"Nonsense!" said Molly briskly, "of course he didn't. And I must say I
don't think he's so bad. If he didn't look so sulky he wouldn't be
_half_ bad, really. If his eyebrows weren't tied up into knots, I
believe he'd look quite too frightfully sweet for anything."
"He's exactly like that Polish model we had last week. Oh, Molly, he's
coming back again."
Again he passed the two girls. His expression was certainly not amiable.
"How long have you known him?" Molly asked.
"I _don't_ know him. I tell you I only see him on the platform at Mill
Vale. He and I seem to be the only people--the only decent
people--who've found out the new station. He goes up by the 9.1 every
day, and so do I. And the train's always late, so we have the platform
and the booking office to ourselves. And there we sit, or stand, or
walk, morning after morning like two stuck pigs in a trough of silence."
"Don't jumble your metaphors, though you very nearly carried it off with
the trough, I own. Stuck pigs don't walk--in troughs, or anywhere else."
"Well, you know what I mean----"
"But what do you want the wretched man to do? He can't speak to you: it
wouldn't be proper----"
"Proper--why not? We're human beings, not wild beasts. At least, I'm a
human being."
"And he's a beast--I see."
"I wish I were a man," said Nina. "There he is again. His nose goes up
another half inch every time he passes me. What's he got to be so
superior about? If I were a man I'd certainly pass the time of day with
a fellow-creature if I were condemned to spend from ten to forty minutes
with it six days out of the seven."
"I expect he's afraid you'd want to marry him. My brother Cecil says men
are always horribly frightened about that."
"Your brother Cecil!" said Nina scornfully. "Yes; that's just the sort
of thing anybody's brother Cecil _would_ say. He simply looks down on me
because I go third. He only goes second himself, too. Here's the
train----"
The two Art students climbed into their third-class carriage, and their
talk, leaving Nina's fellow-traveller, washed like a babbling brook
about the feet of great rocks, busied itself with the old Italian
Masters, painting as a mission, and the aims of Art--presently running
through flatter country and lapping round perspective, foreshortening,
tones, values high lights and the preposterous lisp of the anatomy
lecturer.
Arrived at Mill Vale the Slade students jumped from their carriage to
meet a wind that swept grey curtains of rain across the bleak length of
the platform.
"And we haven't so much as a rib of an umbrella between us," sighed
Molly, putting her white handkerchief over the "best" hat which
signalised her Saturday to Monday with her friend. "You're right: that
man is a pig. There he goes with an umbrella big enough for all three of
us. Oh, it's too bad! He's putting it down--he's running. He runs rather
well. He's exactly like the cast of the Discobolus in the Antique Room."
"Only his manners have not that repose that stamps the cast. Come
on--don't stand staring after him like that. We'd better run, too."
"He'll think we're running after him. Oh, bother----"
A moment of indecision, and Nina had turned her skirt over her head, and
the two ran home to the little rooms where Nina lived--in the house of
an old servant. Nina had no world of relations--she was alone. In the
world of Art she had many friends, and in the world of Art she meant to
make her mark. For the present she was content to make the tea, and then
to set feet on the fender for a cosy evening.
"Did you see him coming out of church?" Nina asked next day. "He looked
sulkier than ever."
"I can't think why you bother about him," said the other girl. "He's not
really interesting. What do you call him?"
"Nothing."
"Why, everything has a name, even a pudding. _I_ made a name for him at
once. It is 'the stranger who might have been observed----'"
They laughed. After the early dinner they went for a walk. None of your
strolls, but a good steady eight miles. Coming home, they met the
stranger: and then they talked about him again. For, fair reader, I
cannot conceal from you that there are many girls who do think and talk
about young men, even when they have not been introduced to them. Not
really nice girls like yourself, fair reader--but ordinary, commonplace
girls who have not your delicate natures, and who really do sometimes
experience a fleeting sensation of interest even in the people whose
names they don't know.
Next morning they saw him at the station. The 9.1 took the bit in its
teeth, and instead of being, as usual, the 9.30 something, became merely
the 9.23. So for some twenty odd minutes the stranger not only might
have been, but was, observed by four bright and critical eyes. I don't
mean that my girls stared, of course. Perhaps you do not know that there
are ways of observing strangers other than by the stare direct. He
looked sulkier than ever: but he also had eyes. Yet he, too, was far
from staring, so far that the indignant Nina broke out in a distracted
whisper: "There! you see! I'm not important enough for him even to
perceive my existence. I'm always expecting him to walk on me. I wonder
whether he'd apologise when he found I wasn't the station door-mat?"
The stranger shrugged his shoulders all to himself in his second-class
carriage when the train had started.
"'Simply detestable!' But how one talks prose without knowing it, all
along the line! How can I ever have come enough into her line of vision
to be distinguished by an epithet! And why this one? Detestable!"
The epithet, however distinguishing, seemed somehow to lack charm.
At Cannon Street Station the stranger looked sulkier than Nina had ever
seen him. She said so, adding: "Than I've ever seen him? Oh--I'm
wandering. He looks sulkier than I've ever seen any one--sulkier than
I've ever dreamed possible. Pig----"
Through the week, painting at the school and black and white work in the
evenings filled Nina's mind to the exclusion even of strangers who
might, in more leisured moments, seem worthy of observation. She was
aware of the sulky one on platforms, of course, but talking about him to
Molly was more amusing somehow than merely thinking of him. When it came
to thinking, the real, the earnest things of life--the Sketch Club, the
chance of the Melville Nettleship Prize, the intricate hideousness of
bones and muscles--took the field and kept it, against strangers and
acquaintances alike.
Saturday, turning this week's scribbled page to the fair, clear page of
next week, brought the stranger back to her thoughts, and to eyes now
not obscured by close realities.
He passed her on the platform, with a dozen bunches of violets in his
hands.
Outside, on the railway bridge, the red and green lamps glowed dully
through deep floods of yellow fog. The platform was crowded, the train
late. When at last it steamed slowly in, the crowd surged towards it.
The third-class carriages were filled in the moment. Nina hurried along
the platform peering into the second-class carriages. Full also.
Then the guard opened the way for her into the blue-cloth Paradise of a
first-class carriage; and, just as the train gave the shudder of disgust
which heralds its shame-faced reluctant departure, the door opened
again, and the guard pushed in another traveller--the "stranger who
might----" of course. The door banged, the train moved off with an air
of brisk determination. A hundred yards from the platform it stopped
dead.
There were no other travellers in that carriage. When the train had
stood still for ten minutes or so, the stranger got up and put his head
out of the window. At that instant the train decided to move again. It
did it suddenly, and, exhausted by the effort, stopped after half a
dozen yards' progress with so powerful a turn of the brake that the
stranger was flung sideways against Nina, and his elbow nearly knocked
her hat off.
He raised his own apologetically--but he did not speak even then.
"The wretch!" said Nina hotly; "he might at least have begged my
pardon."
The stranger sat down again, and began to read the _Spectator_. Nina had
no papers. The train moved on an inch or two, and the reddening yellow
of the fog seemed like a Charity blanket pressed against each window.
Three of the bunches of violets shook and vibrated and slipped, the
train moved again and they fell on the floor of the carriage. Nina
watched their trembling in an agony of irritation induced by the fog,
the delay, and the persistent silence of her companion. When the flowers
fell, she spoke.
"You've dropped your flowers," she said. Again a bow, a silent bow, and
the flowers were picked up.
"Oh, I'm desperate!" Nina said inwardly. "He must be mad--or dumb--or
have a vow of silence--I wonder which?"
The train had not yet reached the next station, though it had left the
last nearly an hour before.
"Which is it? Mad, dumb, or a monk? I _will_ find out. Well, it's his
own fault; he shouldn't be so aggravating. I'm going to speak to him.
I've made up my mind."
In the interval between decision and action the train in a sudden brief
access of nervous energy got itself through a station, and paused a
furlong down the line exhausted by the effort.
The stranger had put down his _Spectator_ and was gazing gloomily out at
the fog.
Nina drew a deep breath, and said--at least she nearly said: "What a
dreadful fog!"
But she stopped. That seemed a dull beginning. If she said that he would
think she was commonplace, and she had that sustaining inward
consciousness, mercifully vouchsafed even to the dullest of us, of being
really rather nice, and not commonplace at all. But what should she say?
If she said anything about the colour of the fog and Turner or Whistler,
it might be telling, but it would be of the shop shoppy. If she began
about books--the _Spectator_ suggested this--she would stand as a prig
confessed. If she spoke of politics she would be an ignorant impostor
soon exposed. If----But Nina took out her watch and resolved: "When the
little hand gets to the quarter I _will_ speak. Whatever I say, I'll
say something."
And when the big hand did get to the quarter Nina did speak.
"Why shouldn't we talk?" she said.
He looked at her; and he seemed to be struggling silently with some
emotion too deep for words.