by E. Nesbit
‘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 that 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 hypnotised 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 mobile 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 fitted in round him very closely.
‘What was it exactly that sent poor Vincent mad: you’ve never told me?’ Rose asked the question. She and Edward were looking out over the pines and tamarisks, across the blue Mediterranean. They were very happy, because it was their honeymoon.
He told her about the Musée Grévin and the wager, but he did not state the terms of it.
‘But why did he think you would be afraid?’
He told her why.
‘And then what happened?’
‘Why, I suppose he thought there was no time like the present – for his five pounds, you know – and he hid among the waxworks. And I missed my train, and I thought there was no time like the present. In fact, dear, I thought if I waited I should have time to make certain of funking it, so I hid there, too. And I put on my big black capuchon, and sat down right in one of the waxwork groups – they couldn’t see me from the passage where you walk. And after they put the lights out I simply went to sleep; and I woke up – and there was a light, and I heard someone say: “They’re only wax,” and it was Vincent. He thought I was one of the wax people, till I looked at him; and I expect he thought I was one of them even then, poor chap. And his match went out, and while I was trying to find my railway reading-lamp that I’d got near me, he began to scream, and the night watchman came running. And now he thinks everyone in the asylum is made of wax, and he screams if they come near him. They have to put his food beside him while he’s asleep. It’s horrible. I can’t help feeling as if it were my fault, somehow.’
‘Of course it’s not,’ said Rose. ‘Poor Vincent! Do you know I never really liked him.’ There was a pause. Then she said: ‘But how was it you weren’t frightened?’
‘I was,’ he said, ‘horribly frightened. I – I – it sounds idiotic, but I thought I should go mad at first – I did really: and yet I had to go through with it. And then I got among the figures of the people in the Catacombs, the people who died for – for things, don’t you know, died in such horrible ways. And there they were, so calm – and believing it was all all right. And I thought about what they’d gone through. It sounds awful rot I know, dear – but I expect I was sleepy. Those wax people, they sort of seemed as if they were alive, and were telling me there wasn’t anything to be frightened about. I felt as if I were one of them, and they were all my friends, and they’d wake me if anything went wrong, so I just went to sleep.’
‘I think I understand,’ she said. But she didn’t.
‘And the odd thing is,’ he went on, ‘I’ve never been afraid of the dark since. Perhaps his calling me a coward had something to do with it.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said she. And she was right. But she would never have understood how, nor why.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Edith Nesbit collected some of her ghost stories, produced during the frantic period when the Blands were on their uppers in the early 1880s, into two volumes published by A.D. Innes in 1893. The first to appear, Grim Tales, contained seven stories and is probably the more interesting; the second, Something Wrong, though it had eight stories, is not as striking as the first.
Neither of her major biographers seems to have discovered why, in 1910, Edith Nesbit issued a volume called Fear, published by Stanley Paul, which reprinted many of the stories from Grim Tales and Something Wrong (although at that time, the money must have been useful). As well as the old stories, she included several new ones, culled from previous magazine appearances.
The following stories appeared first in Grim Tales and then in Fear:
‘The Ebony Frame’
‘From the Dead’
‘John Charrington’s Wedding’
‘Man-Size in Marble’
‘Uncle Abraham’s Romance’
These stories appeared for the first time in Fear:
‘The Five Senses’
‘The Head’
‘In the Dark’
‘The Shadow’<
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‘The Three Drugs’
‘The Violet Car’
These stories appeared in Man and Maid (T. Fisher Unwin, 1906):
‘The Haunted Inheritance’
‘The House of Silence’
‘The Power of Darkness’
The remainder come from a variety of sources:
‘The Mystery of the Semi-Detached’: Grim Tales
‘Hurst of Hurstcote’: Something Wrong, later in Fear
‘The Letter in Brown Ink’: The Windsor Magazine, August 1899
‘No. 17’: The Strand Magazine, June 1910
‘The Haunted House’: The Strand Magazine, December 1913
‘The Detective’: The Christmas Spirit, first Christmas annual of the Toc. H Society, 1920
‘The Pavilion’: To the Adventurous (Hutchinson, 1923)
Edith Nesbit published other volumes of short stories which were not in the ghostly vein but are worth digging out: In Homespun (John Lane, 1896); Thirteen Ways Home (A. Treherne, 1901); and The Literary Sense (Methuen, 1903).
* * *
Biographical details have been gathered from various sources. There are two major biographies of Edith Nesbit. The first was Doris Langley Moore’s Edith Nesbit (Ernest Benn, 1933; revised edition 1967), of which the revised edition is the more informative. The further away from her lifetime, the more people were prepared to talk.
Julia Briggs’s excellent A Woman of Passion (Hutchinson, 1987) builds on the solid foundations laid by Doris Langley Moore and brings out even more of Edith Nesbit’s life and character, particularly sketching in finer detail her tangled home life and her relations with various writers of her day. Sadly, neither biographer is prepared to treat her tales of terror at any length, though Julia Briggs gives ‘Man-Size in Marble’ a good prodding.
Two other biographies – E. Nesbit by Anthea Bell (Bodley Head, 1960) and Magic and the Magician by Noel Streatfeild (Ernest Benn, 1958) – give valuable insights into, and much information on, her children’s works not covered in this selection.
It is interesting, but of how much significance I know not, that Edith Nesbit’s biographers have been exclusively women.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My very grateful thanks go to the late (and sadly missed) Richard Dalby, who not only supplied most of the magazine stories for this new edition of In the Dark, but came up with a copy of the elusive Man and Maid at just the right time.
And grateful thanks are due to the late Michael Cox, who first published In the Dark at Thorsons in 1988; and David Brawn and Georgie Cauthery at HarperCollins, for giving Edith Nesbit yet another airing.
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