‘Splendid. Ripping. A1.’ The words sprang to Mr Diehl’s lips … and stayed there. The other man was speaking, and in a low, thin, untroubled voice.
‘That’s me,’ he said, ‘with the ladder. And that Dog in the gutter – that’s him she threw me over for. She was Mrs Dog, her that was to have been Mrs April Vane. But I loved her. That’s her leanin’ out of their bedroom window. And when the fire broke out, where was he? In heaven, where he’d got the right to be by the marriage lines? Not him! He was in the public silly drunk. When I come along, he was crying – crying there in front of the house where she was a-burning, crying, and shivering, and saying, “Oh, I shall be burnt, I know I shall.” And she was screaming, “For God’s sake save the child!”
‘What did you do?’ Mr Diehl’s voice was tactfully attuned.
‘Knocked him down, of course. Thought I’d killed him. Wish I had. Then, when I’d got the ladder, and set it up against the window, I was three-quarters up it, when the window-frame went – burnt from underneath. I never see’d him again. He went to London, I’ve heard say. But I’ve made his face. You go in an’ look, and you’ll see the man I wish I’d swung for. If he’d been where he ought to a bin … but he left her all alone, along of the kid that wasn’t three days old.’
Again Morris wrung his hand. The vision of attractive headlines had faded, grown dim, vanished in the red glow of the burning village.
He walked gingerly into the picture, and looked closely at the wax puppets. Perfect in every detail, each little effigy was in itself a finer work of art even than the tableau which included them all.
‘It’s … it’s beautiful,’ said Morris Diehl. ‘I never saw anything like it.’
‘It’s taken me my life to make,’ said its maker.
‘But why did you make it so small – why not life-size? There’d have been room – for part of it, anyway.’
‘Money,’ came sharply the reply. ‘I’ve only got the house and the croft, and thirty pound a year that come to me from an uncle – too late for me to marry her.’
‘The whole thing’s a marvel. You ought to have been a sculptor, with a proper studio and all that,’ said the guest.
‘I ought to have been a married man with kids of my own,’ said the host.
‘Wouldn’t you like to make all this show life-size?’ Morris Diehl asked gently.
‘I’m putting by every week for that very thing.’
‘I could advance you the money,’ said the man who took his living where he found it.
‘No, I won’t be beholden to nobody.’ The tone was decisive.
‘You needn’t be beholden. Come to London. I’ll find you a fine big room, twice the size of this; you shall make the things life-size – the best materials money can buy. We’ll charge a shilling a head to come in and see it. You’ll pay me back in no time, and make your fortune besides.’
‘I don’t want to make my fortune,’ said the old man, staring with his young eyes at the blazing village street. ‘I want to get alongside of him.’
‘Well,’ said Mr Diehl, ‘you’re much more likely to do that in London than here, you know. Suppose he saw the outside of our show, having been in a fire himself, it’s a million to one he’d turn in to have a look – and then you could tell him what you thought of him.’
‘Do you think he would? Do you?’
‘Certain of it,’ said Mr Diehl, who thought nothing less likely.
‘Then I’ll do it. All life-size – life-size.’
‘You could have men to help you.’
‘Not with the faces. The houses and that, I don’t say. Not the faces.’
‘Of course not the faces,’ Mr Diehl assented cordially. ‘Let’s come back to the fire, and talk it over. And tomorrow we’ll get the agreement signed – and Tottie de Vere can go to the deuce. This is a big thing we’re in now.’
‘Eh?’ the other party to the agreement queried. He had not heard. All his senses were deep plunged in the joy of his masterpiece. He sighed at last, and spoke.
‘There ought to be noise,’ he said – ‘that’s the worst thing about a fire; when it’s taking hold, it’s as quiet as a mouse. When it’s got hold, it roars like a lion, and screams – like a woman.’
‘We’ll make it scream and roar. This thing’s got to go. And it will go,’ said Morris Diehl.
2
It did go. The whole picture – graduated houses, the little figures of wood, and wax, and paper, the ingenious lanterns that lighted, the tinsel flames that gleamed – all was taken to London, and set up in a big attic in Fitzroy Street. Mr Diehl brought men to see it. Men with shiny hats and fur coats, and cigars like his own. And when they had seen, they went away and drank brandy and soda at marble-topped tables, while Morris Diehl talked. And they ‘came into it’ with him, as he had known they would. April Vane was shy and moody at first; would have no help; but when he saw the life-sized body, produced by a trained workman from one of his own little models, he drew a long breath. ‘You may go ahead,’ he said. ‘I’ll have more time for the faces.’
It cost the enterprising Mr Diehl a great deal of patience, and his enterprising friends a great deal of money. The big fight was over the subject of the tableau. Vane wanted to reproduce the village scene, exactly as it had been burnt on his mind. Diehl wanted the Great Fire of London, with old London Bridge, and the heads of the traitors above the gate. But though Vane had been the other man’s slave, since the night he had thought he had seen the other man’s heart, he was obstinate till Diehl said: ‘More people will come to the Great Fire of London than just to a village fire; you’ve got more chance of seeing him.’
Then Vane yielded.
No expense was spared. The best scene-painters and carpenters that the Syndicate could buy for money were bought. An eminent archaeologist was fee’d to advise; an expert in acoustics solved the problem of the roar of fire triumphant. The thing was boomed a month in advance by all the venal press. A big place in the West End, that had failed as an Art Gallery, was hired for this that should not fail. Vane was often wearied, often disheartened.
‘I like the other best,’ he said; ‘that was mine. This will be everybody’s.’
‘Wait till you see the real thing all put together,’ Diehl urged continually. He was very gentle and patient. It was important to him to keep the old man’s adoration alive. ‘That will be yours, and you’ll never be able to leave it. You mark my words.’
The old man marked them, and they came true.
The thing caught on. ‘Have you seen the Great Fire of London?’ people asked each other between dances and during dinners, in the train and on the tops of omnibuses. ‘Like Madame Tussaud’s? Oh, no, not in the least. It’s absolutely thrilling. Just for the moment, you can hardly believe it’s not real. You must go!’
And everybody went. And it was not like Madame Tussaud’s, nor like any waxwork show that ever was before. To the making of Madame Tussaud’s goes, perhaps, talent. To the making of the Musée Grévin, certainly, genius. But to the making of this went the heart and soul of a man.
And from the first moment, when he saw the completed picture perfect, from the life-size figures in the foreground to the little paper figures in the far distance, he gave himself up to it, as to his real life. The interludes, when he showed it to visitors mechanically warned not to pass its low barrier, explained it in a monologue learned by heart – these were dull dreams. The real moments were those when he was alone – could overstep the barriers, clap the hurrying soldier on the back, whisper encouragement to the old woman hastening away on her son’s strong arm, calling shrilly by name these images of dead citizens, who had been alive and furious in flight under the horror of that great blaze. For to him they were not strangers out of the time of the Second Charles. Each wore the face of some man or woman in the Derbyshire village. But to his own effigy he never spoke – nor to the woman whose face looked out of the burning window, nor to the corpse that lay at the feet of the ladder-bearer. F
or now there was no room for doubt that it was the figure of a corpse. That change he had made without consulting Mr Diehl and the Syndicate. Its mouth was bloody, as had been the mouth of the little effigy in the Derbyshire cellar, and the mouth of the man whom he had struck down long ago under the eyes of the deserted wife. Only now the throat too was bloody.
‘Oh, let him alone,’ said Mr Diehl, when one of the Syndicate remarked that by Jove it was just a bit too ghastly; ‘it pleases him, and you can’t lay the horror on too thick for the B. P.’
April Vane slept at his lodgings, but he did nothing else there, and not that every night. Sometimes he slept in the gallery on one of the red velvet seats, and always he ate and drank there, talking to the figures whenever he was alone with them. ‘They’re company for me,’ he said, when Diehl tried remonstrance. And Diehl noted curiously that the life-sized figures did not hold for their maker the horror that, in the first little figures, had driven him to sleep in barn or croft – anywhere but in the house that held them.
It was in August, when the crowd had worn thin, that Vane stayed away for one day. ‘I’ve seen him,’ he told Diehl, standing by his bedside very early, for he had told the hotel people that it was a matter of life and death. ‘I must have a day off; I must try to find him.’
‘But who’s to run the show?’ asked Diehl, in his blue silk pyjamas and blue jowl.
‘I must have my day off,’ said Vane. ‘I don’t want to worry you, but I must have one day off. Shut the show up, or run it yourself.’
The show was, that day, run by Mr Diehl. The takings were two bags of silver only that day – and that day the head was stolen. It was the head of the corpse, broken off sharp at the neck, where the blood began. It was stolen, and the careless, silk-hatted custodian knew no more than you or I who had done it.
Vane had not found the man he sought – but when he found out that theft he forgot the fruitless search. His grief was like that of a mother who loses her child, a woman who loses her lover.
‘But it’s all right,’ Diehl told him again and again. ‘Throw the corner of the mantle up – so – and it’ll never show. Or leave it as it is – it’s pretty average ghastly like that.’
It was. But – ‘I want his face,’ Vane said, again and again.
‘Well, then, for God’s sake make his face’ – Diehl was losing patience a little at last. ‘Make his face again, and have done with it!’ he said, and lit one of his eternal cigars; ‘you can do it at home in the evenings.’
‘I can’t do it,’ said Vane, very low. ‘I’ve been trying – I can’t see his face.’
‘You sleep on it,’ said Mr Diehl cheerfully; ‘it’ll come back to you all right in the morning. Besides, you’ve got the little one.’
‘I cut the face off that,’ said Vane gently; ‘I cut it off a little bit at a time, to see if it would bleed. I can’t remember his face.’
‘That head must have been stolen for a lark,’ said Diehl. ‘Look here! I’ll advertise for it, and we’ll get it back all right.’
‘Yes –’ said Vane, with trembling eagerness. ‘Get it back. I must see his face.’
He saw it next day on the shoulders of a living man – a tall, thick-set man, with dirty hands and a ready-made suit, who knocked at the gallery door, just as it was being closed. The same face, but not the same expression.
‘You were advertising for a head,’ said the man.
‘Yes,’ said Vane. ‘Come in,’ and he shut the door on the two of them.
‘Well, I ain’t a-goin’ to name no names, but a pal of mine come in here day before yesterday, and one of your blasted dolls had got my pal’s face – so he pinched it.’
‘Why?’ Vane softly asked.
‘Well, if a man ain’t got a right to his own chump, what has he got a right to? But he’ll let you have it back, but not for the fiver you offers. I take it if you offers five, you’ll give twenty. Say the word, and put it down in writing to prevent mistakes, and I guarantee you shall have the head.’
‘Yes,’ said Vane. ‘I shall have the head.’
He advanced on the other man, and now, for the first time, his own face showed plainly.
‘Great God,’ – the man repeated, his hands held out as if to keep off something; and now he looked like the head that he had stolen. ‘My great God, it’s April Vane.’
‘Yes, you’d better call on your God. It’s April Vane,’ April Vane said, and came at him.
It must have been a couple of days later that Diehl strolled in at closing time with that member of the Syndicate who had felt so squeamish about the cut throat. The lights were low. There was no blaze to light up the picture, and the machine was silent that, in the day, roared and screamed in the very voice of fire.
‘So you’ve got the head all right; you remember I told you you would,’ said Mr Diehl, glancing at the corpse.
‘Yes,’ said April. ‘I’ve got the head – I remembered.’
Mr Diehl went into the enclosure, and the cinders crunched under his boots.
‘By Jove,’ he said, ‘you’re an artist, Vane. I say, Montague, look at the corpse, the thing you didn’t like – why, it’s the best of the lot. You’ve improved it, Vane, old chap. It’s just the old expression, but by George it’s more lifelike than ever. What is it? something in the lie of the body, I suppose. It’s just like life, isn’t it now, Monty?’
‘It is more like death,’ said Montague. ‘I don’t like it, and it’s stuffy in here and the place is as quiet as a churchyard. Come along out.’
‘You’re a schoolgirl, Montague, a silly schoolgirl! I believe you’re frightened of the thing.’ Mr Diehl kicked it contemptuously and without violence. ‘Good night, Vane. Why don’t you go to one of the Halls and have a gay evening. I’ll stand treat.’
‘You’re always kind,’ said Vane gratefully, ‘but all the evenings will be gay now. I have got the head. I have remembered.’
The two members of the Great Fire Syndicate went out into the light of Regent Street.
‘Ugh,’ said Montague, ‘that place gives me the horrors.’
‘It’s jolly well meant to,’ said Diehl, taking out his cigar-case. ‘That corpse … ’
‘It’s not canny,’ said Montague and he laughed, not quite easily. ‘Why, it makes me fancy … I say, what’s that on your boot? Good God, man, it’s blood, as the chap says in the story.’
‘Don’t talk rot,’ said Diehl. He did not see that his right foot had stained the pavement.
Montague stopped.
‘But – it is blood,’ he said.
In the Dark
It may have been a form of madness. Or it may be that he really was what is called haunted. Or it may – though I don’t pretend to understand how – have been the development, through intense suffering, of a sixth sense in a very nervous, highly-strung nature. Something certainly led him where They were. And to him They were all one.
He told me the first part of the story, and the last part of it I saw with my own eyes.
1
Haldane and I were friends even in our school-days. What first brought us together was our common hatred of Visger, who came from our part of the country. His people knew our people at home, so he was put on to us when he came. He was the most intolerable person, boy and man, that I have ever known. He would not tell a lie. And that was all right. But he didn’t stop at that. If he were asked whether any other chap had done anything – been out of bounds, or up to any sort of lark – he would always say, ‘I don’t know, sir, but I believe so.’ He never did know – we took care of that. But what he believed was always right. I remember Haldane twisting his arm to say how he knew about that cherry tree business, and he only said, ‘I don’t know – I just feel sure. And I was right, you see.’ What can you do with a boy like that?
We grew up to be men. At least Haldane and I did. Visger grew up to be a prig. He was a vegetarian and a teetotaller, and an all-wooler and Christian Scientist, and all the things that prigs are
– but he wasn’t a common prig. He knew all sorts of things that he oughtn’t to have known, that he couldn’t have known in any ordinary decent way. It wasn’t that he found things out. He just knew them. Once, when I was very unhappy, he came into my rooms – we were all in our last year at Oxford – and talked about things I hardly knew myself. That was really why I went to India that winter. It was bad enough to be unhappy, without having that beast knowing all about it.
I was away over a year. Coming back, I thought a lot about how jolly it would be to see old Haldane again. If I thought about Visger at all, I wished he was dead. But I didn’t think about him much.
I did want to see Haldane. He was always such a jolly chap – gay, and kindly, and simple, honourable, upright, and full of practical sympathies. I longed to see him, to see the smile in his jolly blue eyes, looking out from the net of wrinkles that laughing had made round them, to hear his jolly laugh, and feel the good grip of his big hand. I went straight from the docks to his chambers in Grey’s Inn, and I found him cold, pale, anaemic, with dull eyes and a limp hand, and pale lips that smiled without mirth, and uttered a welcome without gladness.
He was surrounded by a litter of disordered furniture and personal effects half packed. Some big boxes stood corded, and there were cases of books, filled and waiting for the enclosing boards to be nailed on.
‘Yes, I’m moving,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand these rooms. There’s something rum about them – something devilish rum. I clear out tomorrow.’
The autumn dusk was filling the corners with shadows. ‘You got the furs,’ I said, just for something to say, for I saw the big case that held them lying corded among the others.