The Power of Darkness | Page 5

something that should creep up behind him in the dark--he might possibly be nervous in that passage round which, if waxworks 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 bathroom, 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 deserted 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 common sense.
'I'm hanged 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 rush-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 overestimated 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 Mme 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 its 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