The Power of Darkness | Page 6

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 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 hypnotized 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 bright 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