Edith Nesbit - Man and Maid

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 Musée Grévin 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.”