‘I went on living,’ said the other man, and now his voice was no longer stretched wire, but like the sharp, unyielding blade of a steel poignard. ‘I went on living because …’
There was a silence. Diehl could almost hear his heart beat, so sure he was that there was here material for headlines – so keen was he to secure it.
He sighed elaborately. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it is a relief to tell your troubles to some one who understands.’
He was quite right to say it. He really sometimes had a wonderful flair for the things to be said and not to say.
‘Does it really?’ asked the man with the young eyes – ‘relief, I mean? I’ve lived here ten years, and never a word except when I bought the things I needed. Does talking help? Are you sure? Doesn’t it open the old wounds wide till the blood squirts out of them? Don’t you wish afterwards that you’d held your silly tongue? Aren’t you ashamed, and afraid, and sick with yourself for every word that’s passed your lips about her?’
‘No,’ said Diehl slowly, stretching his feet towards the ashes’ red centre, ‘no; but then I’ve never told my story before to anyone but you. There’s something about you – I don’t know what it is – that makes me feel I can trust you. So I’m glad I’ve told you my story. If it’s not bored you?’
The last five words were a false lead, but the other man did not notice it.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘you may be right; and perhaps if I told someone I could trust, my brain and heart would leave off feeling as though they were going to burst, and make my clean floor all in a mess. You don’t think I’m mad, do you?’
It was just what he was thinking, so, suddenly very anxious to be alone, with a locked door between him and his host, he said hastily:
‘Not at all. But I see I’ve awakened painful memories with my talk. Will you let me sleep here – on the settle – on the floor – anywhere – I don’t want a bed. I won’t give an ounce of trouble. May I?’
‘May you what?’
‘Spend the night,’ said Diehl and laboriously explaining, added, ‘Sleep here, you know.’
‘In this house?’
‘Of course.’
‘Yes.’ The answer was very strong, very definite. ‘You shall sleep here in this house – if you can. But first I should like to show you the reason why I never sleep in this house. I sleep in the croft when it’s warm, and, when it’s winter, in the barn. But I keep the lights burning all night in every room.’
‘I don’t half like this,’ Morris Diehl told himself, and perceived that attractive headlines may be bought too dearly. Aloud he said: ‘I’m so tired, I could sleep anywhere. I believe I’m almost asleep now. Won’t you show me whatever it is tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow may never come,’ said the host cheerfully. ‘I’ll go first – just to turn the lights full up and that. Then you shall see.’
He went out, quite quietly and soberly, and Mr Diehl shivered. Now that he was warm and gin-filled, the bleak, windy hillside, in the chessboard of those confounded stone walls, seemed a safety lightly thrown away.
‘Alone with a lunatic,’ he mused, ‘in a house a hundred miles from anywhere.’ He fingered a short broad knife, whose sheath fitted closely against his hip.
‘If the worst comes to the worst – in self-defence,’ he assured himself. ‘But all the same, I jolly well wish I was jolly well out of it. Silly lunatic!’
‘Come, now!’ said the voice of the silly lunatic, and said it so trustfully, yet so compellingly, that Mr Diehl rose and followed it, half reassured, half curious, and wholly overmastered.
‘It’s in the cellar,’ said the voice; ‘people do pry so.’
Mr Diehl drew back; he could not help it.
‘You’re not afraid of a cellar,’ said the voice; ‘besides, it’s what we call a basement in London.’
Morris Diehl felt his knife’s comforting weight and followed the voice.
The stairs were of stone, broad and shallow – there were many of them. The wavering, yellow light of the lamp the other man carried showed the stairs neatly yellowed, as the Mid Country lovingly yellows the stones which make the floors to its homes.
The stairs ended in a flagged passage, with doors. Outside the right-hand door the lamp-bearer paused.
‘You told me your story with words,’ said he. ‘I never heard so many words all different in all my born days. I haven’t got no power of jaw like that there. You told me your story; and it’s the same as my story. That’s why I’m a-going to show you my story. ’Cause I can’t use my tongue worth tuppence – but my hands I can. Now, don’t you be frightened; it ain’t real.’
Mr Diehl reassured himself with a laugh.
‘I’m not so easily frightened,’ he said.
‘Nor don’t you laugh neither,’ said the old man, with sudden, breathless intensity. ‘I couldn’t answer for myself what I should do, if you was to laugh in there. It’s the work of my hands. And I love the work of my hands, same as Almighty God did. Don’t you go to laugh in there, sir, or it’ll be the worse for both of us. But you wouldn’t,’ his voice grew suddenly tender, ‘ain’t you showed me your ’eart – put it into my ’and to look at? Don’t I know you?’
The dramatic instinct told Mr Diehl to hold out his hand, in the dim lamplight, and press the other man’s, with a fine show of manly emotion.
‘I was a stone-mason by trade,’ said the host, ‘apprenticed in the King’s Road, Chelsea, I was; that’s how I got the hang of it.’
Mr Diehl had a sudden, swift vision of an elaborate monument erected in the cellar, over the body of the victim of homicidal mania.
‘Now,’ said the other, and flung open the door.
Mr Diehl was prepared for a shock of some sort, but he was not prepared for the shock he got.
The opened door disclosed a village street, lit warm and red, a village street at night. It was the village where the Inn was that he wished he had stayed at – where the lights were, and the voices, and the drinks. There, by the same token was the Inn, its sign emblazoned with the arms of the local landowner, lit redly by the flames of conflagration. There was the square church tower, flushed against a dark sky, the tombstones in the raised churchyard, gleaming rosy beneath the yew shadows. There was a crowd in the street – men with pails and cans of water. This side of the Inn, half the street was in flames; from the window of a burning house a girl leaned out; below, a man, holding a ladder, was in act to plant it against the window. At his feet lay a body – a dead man, as it seemed, but not dead by burning. Blood showed at mouth and nose. The whole thing was worked out, with wax and wood and paint and paper, and a dozen odd, yet adequate, materials, at much less than half life-size, but so perfect were the perspective and the proportion, that the scene would have appeared to a spectator half-way up the village street just as, and not otherwise than, it now appeared to the spectator at the cellar door. The peculiar and desperate terror – the mad, splendid heroism that fire engenders – these were here visible to the onlooker.
‘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 t
he 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.
II
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-size 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 in 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. For 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 – anywh
ere 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.’