“I’ll turn in here on the floor, if you don’t mind,” said Edward. “I know it’s beastly rot, but I can’t stand it. The room they’ve put me into, it’s an attic as big as a barn—and there’s a great door at the end, eight feet high—raw oak it is—and it leads into a sort of horror-hole—bare beams and rafters, and black as Hell. I know I’m an abject duffer, but there it is—I can’t face it.”
Vincent was sympathetic, though he had never known a night-terror that could not be exorcised by pipe, book, and candle.
“I know, old chap. There’s no reasoning about these things,” said he, and so on.
“You can’t despise me more than I despise myself,” Edward said. “I feel a crawling hound. But it is so. I had a scare when I was a kid, and it seems to have left a sort of brand on me. I’m branded ‘coward,’ old man, and the feel of it’s not nice.”
Again Vincent was sympathetic, and the poor little tale came out. How Edward, eight years old, and greedy as became his little years, had sneaked down, night-clad, to pick among the outcomings of a dinner-party, and how, in the hall, dark with the light of an “artistic” coloured glass lantern, a white figure had suddenly faced him—leaned towards him it seemed, pointed lead-white hands at his heart. That next day, finding him weak from his fainting fit, had shown the horror to be but a statue, a new purchase of his father’s, had mattered not one whit.
Edward had shared Vincent’s room, and Vincent, alone of all men, shared Edward’s secret.
And now, in Paris, Rose speeding away towards Cannes, Vincent said: “Let’s look in at the Musée Grévin.”
The Musée Grévin is a wax-work show. Your mind, at the word, flies instantly to the excellent exhibition founded by the worthy Madame Tussaud, and you think you know what wax-works mean. But you are wrong. The exhibition of Madame Tussaud—in these days, at any rate—is the work of bourgeois for a bourgeois class. The Musée Grévin contains the work of artists for a nation of artists. Wax, modelled and retouched till it seems as near life as death is: this is what one sees at the Musée Grévin.
“Let’s look in at the Musée Grévin,” said Vincent. He remembered the pleasant thrill the Musée had given him, and wondered what sort of a thrill it would give his friend.
“I hate museums,” said Edward.