Salome and the Head/Chapter 14

would you do, dear reader, if at midnight and alone, in a house with no address, you found yourself before your toilet-table, with its neat, familiar furniture of cut glass and silver, and in your hands the head of a dead man?

You might scream and go mad, and be found in the morning a harmless lunatic fondling the dead thing in, heaven knows what, merciful delusion. Such things have been! There is a story of a dead hand, but it is not this story.

Or you might drop the head and run screaming out of the house and tell the first policeman you met your incredible tale.

Or you might just conceivably, if you were very strong indeed, be strong enough to hold onto your sanity and your self control. But I venture to affirm that not one in a hundred women could achieve this.

Sandra did. But then she was the chief among ten thousand—strong, self-reliant, brave. All her life’s training had been a training in self-reliance, in strength, in courage.

In the old days of the New Forest Denny and the old nurse had depended on her for all the things that make life endurable. It was she who schemed and planned to secure happiness and a measure of freedom for all three. Uncle Moses had seemed to manage every detail of the life they had led in London. It was he who had given her the romantic entourage of The House With No Address—had launched her, and wrought on the robe of her fame the embroidery of mystery that should enhance and adorn it. But under and through all this her own desire and intention stood firm as a rock. She had made up her mind that night at the Mount, when her grandfather lay dead, and she stood looking down on his quiet face for a long hour, examining her conscience, questioning her memory, and at last deciding that to his memory she owed nothing. All that he had done for her, in feeding her, clothing her, teaching her—or rather paying others to feed, teach and clothe—all this he had taken payment for, full measure, in the neglect of years and in the final cruelty of that “school for delicate and backward girls.” It was on that night that she had decided what to do. She would go to London and make a home for herself and her old nurse—give Denny a chance to give to the world the music that was in him. She would dance to thousands, and be a stranger to them all. She would fence herself round with a wall impassable. She would “keep herself to herself,” and no one should have more of her than the sight of her dancing. She had planned her white-haired disguise before she met Uncle Moses, and found in him that vein of romance which rhymed so well with hers. He had done for her what she had determined to do for herself—and if he had not done it, she would have done. There was a vein of hardness in her, running beside the vein of romance—as there is in all those who make their dreams come true.

She stood there, with a dead man’s head in her hands, perfectly motionless, perfectly silent.

A man who has fallen from a cliff and is caught by some kindly stone or bush projecting from the cliff-face, feels at first nothing but the whirling sense that all is lost, and that he is but delayed an instant on the headlong way to death. But before he can feel this more superficially he realises that, if all his thought, all his strength, all his wit and will are raised to their highest power, he may yet live. At first the thought, the strength, the wit and the will concentrate on one thing: not to move—not to precipitate the disaster. Help may come. But when, presently, he has drawn breath, and feels that his support is firm, he will, since no help comes, dare to shift his position a little—raise a hand a thousandth part of an inch at a time, to feel, very slowly, very cautiously, for some hold for that hand. He grasps a piece of the rock, tries it, finds it firm and trustworthy. Then with his foot he reaches out for some support, finds it, ventures to open his eyes, to consider whether, and how, he may change those supports for others—finds a way growing clearer—difficult, dangerous, but still a way—up the cliff face; and so, straining to its utmost every power of mind and body, he slowly, slowly, slowly climbs up, and at last throws himself, half-insensible indeed, but alive, on the smooth safe turf, where the scent of the wild thyme is, and the skylarks sing—and there is a footpath by which living men go home across the fields. So Sandra.

The first thought was: “The wax head has changed to this: I knew it was a horrible thing to do that dance, and the wax head has changed to this: that means I am mad. It is not really the head of a dead man. It only seems so to me.”

But quite soon she knew that what she held had never been wax. And when she knew this—certainly knew what it was that she held in her hand—her thought was:

“It is all over. Now I shall go mad.”

The next: “If I can hold out another moment against this horror that is closing round me, something may happen, some help may come. I may not go mad. It is horrible to go mad. Hold on to your senses, Sandra—hold on, hold on!”

Then the certainty that no help would come—that she was alone—and that if she were to be saved she must be her own saviour.

And, growing, growing, the knowledge that if she could only move her mind—give it some support to cling to—it might yet be saved from the abyss over which it hung, as by a thread.

Her mind reached out for something to hold on to. Red roses? No. Someone had made a horrible joke about roses—a long time ago. Something else—something else——

And all the time the horror was tightening boa-constrictor folds round her mind, in a pressure more and more difficult to resist. And all the while she held the head, and gazed at it, immobile as itself. That was when she felt that if she moved it would be to give the signal for the sluice gates to be raised and the flood of madness let loose to overflow her soul.

“Hold on!” she said, “hold on!” Slowly her intelligence reached out, caught at the silver brushes. By thinking very hard of silver brushes—yes, they were sold in shops, where crowds of people went in and out, and the sun shone in at the door. Yes, and there were other shops—Hamley’s, with the masks. They were not real faces. No—that support would not bear yet. The world was full of people—full of people all kind and friendly. No one could have done such a thing as this. “Yes, keep on thinking; think hard—it’s your only chance.”

“It isn’t a real head,” she said aloud, and got her eyes away from it.

She was almost at the top of the cliff now. She had got her eyes away from the head, but the room was horrible to her—more horrible now than the head itself.

“Hold on,” she said, “hold on! You’ll do it yet.”

She did not lay the head down while she fetched something to cover it. She knew well enough that she could never have gone back to it. She carried it to the washhand-stand and wrapped the towels round it. Every nerve crisped, she walked slowly—it was so necessary not to hurry, or one would run; and if one ran, one would never stop: one would run round and round forever, up one staircase and down the other, till one dropped dead. And then heads and heads and heads would come crowding out of the darkness and look at one as one lay.

“If I could get downstairs,” she told herself, “and turn on all the lights.”

She moved with the exaggerated caution of a man who knows that he is very drunk, and is determined not to act otherwise than as sober men act.

She had the bundle of towels in her arms.

“Now,” she told herself, “open the door—quite slowly; go down the stairs and turn on the lights as you go. There is no one in the house. Nothing can leap out at you or come up behind, and—no, don’t think of that—go right on—that’s right!—light all the lights. You can leave them burning when you go up to bed. That’s it!—only one more flight. Steady!—here’s the sitting-room. You’re doing it—you’re doing it. You’re not beaten.”

She got into the room, shutting the door behind her, to be sure. Quite steadily and quietly she went to the Buhl cabinet, opened it, and put the head in its wrappings on the red velvet-covered shelf, shut the door quickly—it was the first quick movement she had permitted herself—turned the ornate brass key, and drew a long breath, holding the key in her hands.

Then she turned to the door—to go upstairs again to her room to lock herself in, to be safe away from that.

But. . . it was unthinkable; this room where the head was, became in that instant a place of refuge from that room upstairs where it had been, where the blood lay on the letters and on her quilt, and the red roses smelt so strong and sweet and sickly. With an instinct of fortifying what had suddenly become a sanctuary from her terror, she locked the door. She wished there had been a door between this and the next rooms. It was not nice to think that behind that curtain was darkness, the same darkness that was in the room upstairs. She made herself draw back the curtain—its rings were noisy and set her heart beating again,—turned on all the lights in the dining-room and, further, in the mirrored room, where someone that she used to be had danced that afternoon. As the light awoke, her own white shape leaped at her from the mirrors like a crowd of ghosts. She got back to the room where the head was, and again it seemed to her less horrible than any other place in that house.

So far, the head had been to her only the head of a dead man. Now, like a cold hand on her heart, came the question—whose? She had felt that it was dead—she had seen that it was dead—but the long hair had fallen over its face and she had not seen the features. Constricting her heart, came the thought that had come to her while she danced that night with that thing in her hands—that thing which was perhaps looking at her through the enwrapping towels—through the inlaid brass and turtle-shell of the cabinet door. Dead men could see through doors, perhaps.

The thought, the ghastly thought, clamoured for recognition. She held her breath a moment, clenched her hands, and let it come. If that head should be her lover’s, disguised with flowing hair—the work of some madman—mad with desire and jealousy? Such things had happened. Jealousy did make men murderers. She had read of such things. Some of her letters had breathed hints of such things. And there had been vague threats. That man—— But he was dead—and pneumonia keeps you out of mischief for a little while before you die. She had not really seen the face. . ..

She had not looked through her letters to see if there were one from her lover. The letters were lying on that bed—red and white and black and white, like the cards in the forest a very long time ago. She could not go back into that room—even for His letter.

And perhaps there was no letter. Perhaps that was why he had not come—that, in the cabinet.

Love was a very faint emotion—like a little candle in face of the fire of terror that burned her. But, also, it was a different thing. She had loved Edmund—she was sure of it. If she were a different girl, like other girls, the thought of his love would sustain her.

But how could his love sustain her if He were now only It—behind the locked door of the cabinet?

Unless you have ever been frightened as she was, you will never understand how she found at last the desperate courage to put that key into the key-hole of the Buhl cabinet. I cannot explain it to you. I am not at all sure that it was not the wild hope that the terror she felt might melt into grief—thus becoming bearable—if she should find that the head was the head of her lover. Isabella and the Pot of Basil showed for an instant, like a magic lantern picture against the blankness of her fear.

She looked round: there must be some help?

She found it—in the half of the second bottle of champagne that Uncle Moses had opened. So few minutes had passed, as clocks count time, that the wine was still fresh and bright. She poured out a glassful and drank it. Another.

“They say it helps when you are afraid,” she told herself, and some comic phrase about “Dutch courage” drove her shrinking from a laugh that would have been the knell of her self-control.

She did open the cabinet; she got out the head, laid it on the table, and folded back the towels. The black hair was all over the face. The neck, where it had been cut off, was tarred, and the tar had cracked, and the accumulated blood oozed through.

“I shall go mad presently,” she told herself, “but I will know first.”

She caught at the long black hair and pulled fiercely. It came away in her hand, and she shuddered as it came. The beard, too. . . it was of the same texture. It, too, yielded—and under the brilliant, blazing crystal chandelier, with its score of electric lamps, she saw the face of the dead man.

It was not her lover: it was her husband. Her husband—someone had murdered him. But her husband had died of pneumonia—and yet he had been murdered. No one could believe that unless they were mad. Then it had happened. She was mad—and nothing mattered.

Now she could do what she had wanted to do all the time. She could scream. Nothing mattered now, so why deny one’s strongest desire? Mad people might scream as much as they liked.

Have you ever heard a hare scream just before the dogs get it? It is one of the most exciting moments in the sport of coursing. It is a sound that goes to the hearts of the weak stomached sportsman, and sends him home swearing. It is so like the cry of a baby suddenly and terribly hurt.

Just such a cry was Sandra’s—a very little cry, for lips and tongue and throat were parched.

Quite a little cry; yet the echo of it came to her ears, and it seemed to her that it had been echoed by every one of the reflections of her that she had seen in the looking-glass room.

The head lay there on the table—terrible, accusing. She had wished him dead. Well—he was dead. His eyes were closed—his mouth calm. It was a better face than the living man had had.

How did one go mad? When one had screamed? What ought one to do next?

She swayed to and fro, slowly, rhythmically, and the head lay there. What next—what next?

It was then that the knock came—a knock on the room door. A knock, urgent, insistent, in The House With No Address—the house where she was alone.