Man and Maid

“I say!” said Edward, and the head on the pike seemed to sway before his eyes.

“Madame de Lamballe. Good thing, isn’t it?” said Vincent.

“It’s altogether too much of a good thing,” said Edward. “Look here – I’ve had enough of this.”

“Oh, you must just see the Catacombs,” said Vincent; “nothing bloody, you know. Only Early Christians being married and baptized, and all that.”

He led the way, down some clumsy steps to the cellars which the genius of a great artist has transformed into the exact semblance of the old Catacombs at Rome. The same rough hewing of rock, the same sacred tokens engraved strongly and simply; and among the arches of these subterranean burrowings the life of the Early Christians, their sacraments, their joys, their sorrows – all expressed in groups of wax-work as like life as Death is.

“But this is very fine, you know,” said Edward, getting his breath again after Madame de Lamballe, and his imagination loved the thought of the noble sufferings and refrainings of these first lovers of the Crucified Christ.

“Yes,” said Vincent for the third time; “isn’t it?”

They passed the baptism and the burying and the marriage. The tableaux were sufficiently lighted, but little light strayed to the narrow passage where the two men walked, and the darkness seemed to press, tangible as a bodily presence, against Edward’s shoulder. He glanced backward.

“Come,” he said, “I’ve had enough.”

“Come on, then,” said Vincent.

They turned the corner – and a blaze of Italian sunlight struck at their eyes with positive dazzlement. There lay the Coliseum – tier on tier of eager faces under the blue sky of Italy. They were level with the arena. In the arena were crosses; from them drooped bleeding figures. On the sand beasts prowled, bodies lay. They saw it all through bars. They seemed to be in the place where the chosen victims waited their turn, waited for the lions and the crosses, the palm and the crown. Close by Edward was a group – an old man, a woman – children. He could have touched them with his hand. The woman and the man stared in an agony of terror straight in the eyes of a snarling tiger, ten feet long, that stood up on its hind feet and clawed through the bars at them. The youngest child, only, unconscious of the horror, laughed in the very face of it. Roman soldiers, unmoved in military vigilance, guarded the group of martyrs. In a low cage to the left more wild beasts cringed and seemed to growl, unfed. Within the grating on the wide circle of yellow sand lions and tigers drank the blood of Christians. Close against the bars a great lion sucked the chest of a corpse on whose blood-stained face the horror of the death-agony was printed plain.

“Good God!” said Edward. Vincent took his arm suddenly, and he started with what was almost a shriek.

“What a nervous chap you are!” said Vincent complacently, as they regained the street where the lights were, and the sound of voices and the movement of live human beings – all that warms and awakens nerves almost paralysed by the life in death of waxen immobility.

“I don’t know,” said Edward. “Let’s have a vermouth, shall we? There’s something uncanny about those wax things. They’re like life – but they’re much more like death. Suppose they moved? I don’t feel at all sure that they don’t move, when the lights are all out, and there’s no one there.” He laughed. “I suppose you were never frightened, Vincent?”

“Yes, I was once,” said Vincent, sipping his absinthe. “Three other men and I were taking turns by twos to watch a dead man. It was a fancy of his mother’s. Our time was up, and the other watch hadn’t come. So my chap – the one who was watching with me, I mean – went to fetch them. I didn’t think I should mind. But it was just like you say.”

“How?”

“Why, I kept thinking: suppose it should move – it was so like life. And if it did move, of course it would have been because it was alive, and I ought to have been glad, because the man was my friend. But all the same, if it had moved I should have gone mad.”

“Yes,” said Edward; “that’s just exactly it.”

Vincent called for a second absinthe.

“But a dead body’s different to wax-works,” he said. “I can’t understand any one being frightened of them.”

“Oh, can’t you?” The contempt in the other’s tone stung him. “I bet you wouldn’t spend a night alone in that place.”

“I bet you five pounds I do!”

“Done!” said Edward briskly. “At least, I would if you’d got five pounds.”

“But I have. I’m simply rolling. I’ve sold my Dejanira, didn’t you know? I shall win your money, though, anyway. But you couldn’t do it, old man. I suppose you’ll never outgrow that childish scare.”

“You might shut up about that,” said Edward shortly.

“Oh, it’s nothing to be ashamed of; some women are afraid of mice or spiders. I say, does Rose know you’re a coward?”

“Vincent!”

“No offence, old boy. One may as well call a spade a spade. Of course, you’ve got tons of moral courage, and all that. But you are afraid of the dark – and wax-works!”

“Are you trying to quarrel with me?”

“Heaven in its mercy forbid; but I bet you wouldn’t spend a night in the Musée Grévin and keep your senses.”

“What’s the stake?”

“Anything you like.”

“Make it, that if I do, you’ll never speak to Rose again – and what’s more, that you’ll never speak to me,” said Edward, white-hot, knocking down a chair as he rose.

“Done!” said Vincent; “but you’ll never do it. Keep your hair on. Besides, you’re off home.”

“I shall be back in ten days. I’ll do it then,” said Edward, and was off before the other could answer.

Then Vincent, left alone, sat still, and over his third absinthe remembered how, before she had known Edward, Rose had smiled on him; more than on the others, he had thought. He thought of her wide, lovely eyes, her wild-rose cheeks, the scented curves of her hair, and then and there the devil entered into him.

In ten days Edward would undoubtedly try to win his wager. He would try to spend the night in the Musée Grévin. Perhaps something could be arranged before that. If one knew the place thoroughly! A little scare would serve Edward right for being the man to whom that last glance of Rose’s had been given.

Vincent dined lightly, but with conscientious care – and as he dined, he 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.