We were all emerging from a side-gallery when I pulled Anastasia back; for there, at the head of a party of Cook’s tourists, whom should I see but her enemy O’Flather. Luckily he did not notice her and she did not recognise him, so I held my tongue. But I thought:
“Ah, now if I were a writer of fantastic fiction, instead of a recorder of feeble fact, what a chance I should have here! Could I not in some way have left us in the darkness, all three together, our candles lost down one of those charnel pits? Then imagine: a battle in the dark between him and me, with the girl insensible between us. There in the black bowels of Paris how we smash at one another with naked femurs in our hands! How the bones and dust of death come toppling down on us! How, finally, I bowl him over with a chance-hurled skull. Then imagine how I wander there in the darkness with the girl in my arms! How we starve and nearly go mad! And how at last, on the following Saturday, the next batch of tourists finds us lying insensible at the foot of the great stairs!” As I thought of these things, by an absent-minded movement, I raised my candle. There was a fierce, frizzling noise. It was the feathers on the hat of the stout dame in front. They shrunk in a moment down to three weedy quills. Poor lady! she did not know, and I—I confess it with shame—had not the moral courage to tell her.
No sooner had we got into the open air again than I whirled my party off again to Montmartre. There was a matinée at the Grand Guignol, and I had taken seats in the low gallery. The pieces were more thrilling than usual and the three women screamed ecstatically.
For example: A father and son are left in charge of a solitary lighthouse. (You see the living-room of the lighthouse; you hear the howling of the storm.)
Then the son confesses to the father that he has been bitten by a rabid dog and that he feels the virus in his veins. He implores the father to kill him, but the old man refuses. The storm increases.
The son begins to go mad. He freezes, he burns, he raves, he weeps. Night is failing. It is time to light the lamps. The old man goes to do so: but the son is trying to kill himself and the father has to wrestle with him. The hoarse horn of a ship is heard in the growing storm.
There is no time to lose. The ship is close at hand, rushing on the rocks. The old man leaves his son and springs to the rope-ladder leading to the lights. He gets up it almost to the top, but the son is after him. With the blood-curdling snarl of a mad animal he seizes his father by the leg and buries his teeth in it. The old man kicks out, and the son, loosing his hold, tumbles crashing to the stage below. The curtain falls on the spectacle of the old man crouching over the dead body of his boy and the doomed ship crashing on the rocks.
This was one of the most cheerful pieces we saw, so that when we issued forth again we were all in excellent frame of mind for an apéritif at the Moulin Rouge. We had dinner at the Abbaye, and finished up by visiting those bizarre cabarets, Hell, Heaven and Annihilation.
“It’s been a lovely day you’ve arranged for us,” said Lorrimer as we broke up; “but one thing you missed to make it complete. Could you not have contrived a visit to the Morgue?”
“I tried,” I admitted mournfully, “but they’re not issuing permits any more.” However, I agreed with him; it had been one of the loveliest days I had ever spent.