Chapter 14

Not all you have heard and read about Grimshaw's career is true. But the best you can say of him is bad enough. He squandered his own fortune first--on Esther Levenson and the production of "The Sunken City"--and then stole ruthlessly from Dagmar; that is, until she found legal ways to put a stop to it. We had passed into Edward's reign and the decadence which ended in the war had already set in--Grimshaw was the last of the "pomegranate school," the first of the bolder, more sinister futurists. A frank hedonist. An intellectual voluptuary. He set the pace, and a whole tribe of idolaters and imitators panted at his heels. They copied his yellow waistcoats, his chrysanthemums, his eye-glass, his bellow. Nice young men, otherwise sane, let their hair grow long like their idol's and professed themselves unbelievers. Unbelievers in what? God save us! Ten years later most of them were wading through the mud of Flanders, believing something pretty definite----

One night I was called to the telephone by the Grimshaws' physician. I'll tell you his name, because he has a lot to do with the rest of the story--Doctor Waram, Douglas Waram--an Australian.

"Grimshaw has murdered a man," he said briefly. "I want you to help me. Come to Cheyne Walk. Take a cab. Hurry."

Of course I went, with a very clear vision of the future of Dagmar, Lady Cooper, to occupy my thoughts during that lurching drive through the slippery streets. I knew that she was at Broadenham, holding up her head in seclusion.

Grimshaw's house was one of a row of red brick buildings not far from the river. Doctor Waram himself opened the door to me.

"I say, this is an awful mess," he said, in a shocked voice. "The woman sent for me--Levenson, that actress. There's some mystery. A man dead--his head knocked in. And Grimshaw sound asleep. It may be hysterical, but I can't wake him. Have a look before I get the police."

I followed him into the studio, the famous Pompeian room, on the second floor. I shall never forget the frozen immobility of the three actors in the tragedy. Esther Levenson, wrapped in peacock-blue scarves, stood upright before the black mantel, her hands crossed on her breast. Cecil Grimshaw was lying full length on a brick-red satin couch, his head thrown back, his eyes closed. The dead man sprawled on the floor, face down, between them. Two lamps made of sapphire glass swung from the gilded ceiling.... Bowls of perfumed, waxen flowers. A silver statuette of a nude girl. A tessellated floor strewn with rugs. Orange trees in tubs. Cigarette smoke hanging motionless in the still, overheated air....

I stooped over the dead man. "Who is he?"

"Tucker. Leading man in 'The Sunken City.' Look at Grimshaw, will you? We mustn't be too long--"

I went to the poet. The inevitable monocle was still caught and held by the yellow thatch of his thick brow. He was breathing slowly.

"Grimshaw," I said, touching his forehead, "open your eyes."

He did so, and I was startled by the expression of despair in their depths. "Ah," he-said, "it's the psychopathologist."

"How did this happen?"

He sat up--I am convinced that he had been faking that drunken sleep--and stared at the sprawling figure on the floor. "Tucker quarrelled with me," he said. "I knocked him down and his forehead struck against the table. Then he crawled over here and died. From fright, d'you think?" He shuddered. "Take him away, Waram, will you? I've got work to do."

Suddenly Esther Levenson spoke in a flat voice, without emotion: "It isn't true! He struck him with that silver statuette. Like this----" She made a violent gesture with both arms. "And before God in heaven, I'll make him pay for it. I will! I will! I will!"

"Keep still," I said sharply.

Grimshaw looked up at her. He made a gesture of surrender. Then he smiled. "Simonetta," he said, "you are no better than the rest."

She sobbed, ran over to him, and went down on her knees, twisting her arms about his waist. There was a look of distaste in Grimshaw's eyes; he stared into her distraught face a moment, then he freed himself from her arms and got to his feet.

"I think I'll telephone to Dagmar," he said.

But Waram shook his head. "I'll do that. I'm sorry, Grimshaw; the police will have to know. While we're waiting for them, you might write a letter to Mrs. Grimshaw. I'll see that she gets it in the morning."

I don't remember whether the poet wrote to Dagmar then or not. But surely you remember how she stayed by him during the trial--still Victorian in her black gown and veil, mourning for the hope that was dead, at least! You remember his imprisonment; the bitter invective of his enemies; the defection of his followers; the dark scandals that filled the newspapers, offended public taste, and destroyed Cecil Grimshaw's popularity in an England that had worshipped him!

Esther Levenson lied to save him. That was the strangest thing of all. She denied what she had told us that night of the tragedy. Tucker, she said, had been in love with her; he followed her to Grimshaw's house in Chelsea and quarrelled violently with the poet. His death was an accident. Grimshaw had not touched the statuette. When he saw what had happened, he telephoned to Doctor Waram and then lay down on the couch--apparently fainted there, for he did not speak until Doctor Fenton came. Waram perjured himself, too--for Dagmar's sake. He had not, he swore, heard the actress speak of a silver statuette, or of revenge before God.... And since there was nothing to prove how the blow had been struck, save the deep dent in Tucker's forehead, Grimshaw was set free.

He had been a year in prison. He drove away from the jail in a cab with Doctor Waram, and when the crowd saw that he was wearing the old symbol--a yellow chrysanthemum--a hiss went up that was like a geyser of contempt and ridicule. Grimshaw's pallid face flushed. But he lifted his hat and smiled into the host of faces as the cab jerked forward.

He went at once to Broadenham. Years later, Waram told me about the meeting between those two--the centaur and the milk-white doe! Dagmar received him standing and she remained standing all during the interview. She had put aside her mourning for a dress made of some clear blue stuff, and Waram said that as she stood in the breakfast room, with a sun-flooded window behind her, she was very lovely indeed.

Grimshaw held out his hands, but she ignored them. Then Grimshaw smiled and shrugged his shoulders and said: "I have made two discoveries this past year: That conventionalized religion is the most shocking evil of our day, and that you, my wife, are in love with Doctor Waram."

Dagmar held her ground. There was in her eyes a look of inevitable security. She was mistress of the house, proprietor of the land, conscious of tradition, prerogative, position. The man she faced had nothing except his tortured imagination. For the first time in her life she was in a position to hurt him. So she looked away from him to Waram and confirmed his discovery with a smile full of pride and happiness.

"My dear fellow," Grimshaw shouted, clapping Waram on the back, "I'm confoundedly pleased! We'll arrange a divorce for Dagmar. Good heaven, she deserves a decent future. I'm not the sort for her. I hate the things she cares most about. And now I'm done for in England. Just to make it look conventional--nice, Victorian, _English_, you understand--you and I can go off to the Continent together while Dagmar's getting rid of me. There'll be no trouble about that. I'm properly dished. Besides, I want freedom. A new life. Beauty, without having to buck this confounded distrust of beauty. Sensation, without being ashamed of sensation. I want to drop out of sight. Reform? No! I am being honest."

So they went off together, as friendly as you please, to France. Waram was still thinking of Dagmar; Grimshaw was thinking only of himself. He swaggered up and down the Paris boulevards showing his tombstone teeth and staring at the women. "The Europeans admire me," he said to Waram. "May England go to the devil." He groaned. "I despise respectability, my dear Waram. You and Dagmar are well rid of me. I see I'm offending you here in Paris--you look nauseated most of the time. Let's go on to Switzerland and climb mountains."

Waram _was_ nauseated. They went to Salvan and there a curious thing happened.

They were walking one afternoon along the road to Martigny. The valley was full of shadows like a deep green cup of purple wine. High above them the mountains were tipped with flame. Grimshaw walked slowly--he was a man of great physical laziness--slashing his cane at the tasselled tips of the crowding larches. Once, when a herd of little goats trotted by, he stood aside and laughed uproariously, and the goatherd's dog, bristling, snapped in passing at his legs.

Waram was silent, full of bitterness and disgust. They went on again, and well down the springlike coils of the descent of Martigny they came upon the body of a man--one of those wandering vendors of pocket-knives and key-rings, scissors and cheap watches. He lay on his back on a low bank by the roadside. His hat had rolled off into a pool of muddy water. Doctor Waram saw, as he bent down to stare at the face, that the fellow looked like Grimshaw. Not exactly, of course. The nose was coarser--it had not that Wellington spring at the bridge, nor the curved nostrils. But it might have been a dirty, unshaven, dead Grimshaw lying there. Waram told me that he felt a shock of gratification before he heard the poet's voice behind him: "What's this? A drunkard?" He shook his head and opened the dead man's shirt to feel for any possible flutter of life in the heart. There was none. And he thought: "If this were only Grimshaw! If the whole miserable business were only done with."

"By Jove!" Grimshaw said. "The chap looks like me! I thought I was the ugliest man in the world. I know better... D'you suppose he's German, or Lombardian? His hands are warm. He must have been alive when the goatherd passed just now. Nothing you can do?"

Waram stayed where he was, on his knees. He tore his eyes away from the grotesque dead face and fixed them on Grimshaw. He told me that the force of his desire must have spoken in that look because Grimshaw started and stepped back a pace, gripping his cane. Then he laughed. "Why not?" he said. "Let this be me. And I'll go on, with that clanking hardware store around my neck. It can be done, can't it? Better for you and for Dagmar. I'm not being philanthropic. I'm looking, not for a reprieve, but for release. No one knows this fellow in Salvan--he probably came up from the Rhone and was on his way to Chamonix. What d'you think was the matter with him?"

"Heart," Doctor Waram answered.

"Well, what d'you say? This pedlar and I are social outcasts. And there is Dagmar in England, weeping her eyes out because of divorce courts and more public washing of dirty linen. You love her. I don't! Why not carry this fellow to the _rochers_, to-night after dark? To-morrow, when I have changed clothes with him, we can throw him into the valley. It's a good thousand feet or more. Would there be much left of that face, for purposes of identification? I think not. You can take the mutilated body back to England and I can go on to Chamonix, as he would have gone." Grimshaw touched the pedlar with his foot. "Free."

That is exactly what they did. The body, hidden near the roadside until nightfall, was carried through the woods to the _rochers du soir_, that little plateau on the brink of the tremendous wall of rock which rises from the Rhone valley to the heights near Salvan. There the two men left it and returned to their hotel to sleep.

In the morning they set out, taking care that the proprietor of the hotel and the professional guide who hung about the village should know that they were going to attempt the descent of the "wall" to the valley. The proprietor shook his head and said: "_Bonne chance, messieurs_!" The guide, letting his small blue eyes rest for a moment on Grimshaw's slow-moving hulk, advised them gravely to take the road. "The tall gentleman will not arrive," he remarked.

"Nonsense," Grimshaw answered.

They went off together, laughing. Grimshaw was wearing his conspicuous climbing clothes--tweed jacket, yellow suede waistcoat, knickerbockers, and high-laced boots with hob-nailed soles. His green felt hat, tipped at an angle, was ornamented with a little orange feather. He was in tremendous spirits. He bellowed, made faces at scared peasant children in the village, swung his stick. They stopped at a barber shop in the place and those famous hyacinthine locks were clipped. Waram insisted upon this, he told me, because the pedlar's hair was fairly short and they had to establish some sort of a tonsorial alibi. When the floor of the little shop was thick with the sheared "petals," Grimshaw shook his head, brushed off his shoulders, and smiled. "It took twenty years to create that visible personality--and behold, a Swiss barber destroys it in twenty minutes! I am no longer a living poet. I am already an immortal--halfway up the flowery slopes of Olympus, impatient to go the rest of the way.

"Shall we be off?"

"By all means," Waram said.

They found the body where they had hidden it the night before, and in the shelter of a little grove of larches Grimshaw stripped and then reclothed himself in the pedlar's coarse and soiled under-linen, the worn corduroy trousers, the flannel shirt, short coat, and old black velvet hat. Waram was astounded by the beauty and strength of Grimshaw's body. Like the pedlar, he was blonde-skinned, thin-waisted, broad of back.

Grimshaw shuddered as he helped to clothe the dead pedlar in his own fashionable garments. "Death," he said. "Ugh! How ugly. How terrifying. How abominable."

They carried the body across the plateau. The height where they stood was touched by the sun, but the valley below was still immersed in shadow, a broad purple shadow threaded by the shining Rhone.

"Well?" Waram demanded. "Are you eager to die? For this means death for you, you know."

"A living death," Grimshaw said. He glanced down at the replica of himself. A convulsive shudder passed through him from head to foot; his face twisted; his eyes dilated. He made a strong effort to control himself and whispered: "I understand. Go ahead. Do it. I can't. It is like destroying me myself.... I can't. Do it--"

Waram lifted the dead body and pushed it over the edge. Grimshaw, trembling violently, watched it fall. I think, from what Doctor Waram told me many years later, that the poet must have suffered the violence and terror of that plummet drop, must have felt the tearing clutch of pointed rocks in the wall face, must have known the leaping upward of the earth, the whine of wind in his bursting ears, the dizzy spinning, the rending, obliterating impact at last....

The pedlar lay in the valley. Grimshaw stood on the brink of the "wall." He turned, and saw Doctor Waram walking quickly away across the plateau without a backward glance. They had agreed that Waram was to return at once to the village and report the death of "his friend, Mr. Grimshaw." The body, they knew, would be crushed beyond recognition--a bruised and broken fragment, like enough to Cecil Grimshaw to pass whatever examination would be given it. Grimshaw himself was to go through the wood to the highroad, then on to Finhaut and Chamonix and into France. He was never again to write to Dagmar, to return to England, or to claim his English property....

Can you imagine his feelings--deprived of his arrogant personality, his fame, his very identity, clothed in another man's dirty garments, wearing about his neck a clattering pedlar's outfit, upon his feet the clumsy boots of a peasant? Grimshaw--the exquisite futurist, the daffodil, apostle of the aesthetic!

He stood for a moment looking after Douglas Waram. Once, in a panic, he called. But Waram disappeared between the larches, without, apparently, having heard. Grimshaw wavered, unable to decide upon the way to the highroad. He could not shake off a sense of loneliness and terror, as if he himself had gone whirling down to his death. Like a man who comes slowly back from the effects of ether, he perceived, one by one, the familiar aspects of the landscape--the delicate flowers powdering the plateau, the tasselled larches on the slope, the lofty snow-peaks still suffused with rosy morning light. This, then, was the world. This clumsy being, moving slowly toward the forest, was himself--not Cecil Grimshaw but another man. His mind sought clumsily for a name. Pierre--no, not Pierre; too common-place! Was he still fastidious? No. Then Pierre, by all means! Pierre Pilleux. That would do. Pilleux. A name suggestive of a good amiable fellow, honest and slow. When he got down into France he would change his identity again--grow a beard, buy some decent clothes. A boulevardier... gay, perverse, witty.... The thought delighted him and he hurried through the forest, anxious to pass through Salvan before Doctor Waram got there. He felt extraordinarily light and exhilarated now, intoxicated, vibrant. His spirit soared; almost he heard the rushing of his old self forward toward some unrecognizable and beautiful freedom.

When he struck the road the sun was high and it was very hot. Little spirals of dust kicked up at his heels. He was not afraid of recognition. Happening to glance at his hands, he became aware of their whiteness, and stooping, rubbed them in the dust.

Then a strange thing happened. Another herd of goats trotted down from the grassy slopes and spilled into the road-way. And another dog with lolling tongue and wagging tail wove in and out, shepherding the little beasts. They eddied about Grimshaw, brushing against him, their moon-stone eyes full of a vague terror of that barking guardian at their heels. The dog drove them ahead, circled, and with a low whine came back to Grimshaw, leaping up to lick his hand.

Grimshaw winced, for he had never had success with animals. Then, with a sudden change of mood, he stooped and caressed the dog's head.

"A good fellow," he said in French to the goatherd.

The goatherd looked at him curiously. "Not always," he answered. "He is an unpleasant beast with most strangers. For you, he seems to have taken a fancy.... What have you got there--any two-bladed knives?"

Grimshaw started and recovered himself with: "Knives. Yes. All sorts."

The goatherd fingered his collection, trying the blades on his broad thumb.

"You come from France," he said.

Grimshaw nodded. "From Lyons."

"I thought so. You speak French like a gentleman."

Grimshaw shrugged. "That is usual in Lyons."

The peasant paid for the knife he fancied, placing two francs in the poet's palm. Then he whistled to the dog and set off after his flock. But the dog, whining and trembling, followed Grimshaw, and would not be shaken off until Grimshaw had pelted him with small stones. I think the poet was strangely flattered by this encounter. He passed through Salvan with his head in the air, challenging recognition. But there was no recognition. The guide who had said "The tall monsieur will not arrive" now greeted him with a fraternal: "How is trade?"

"Very good, thanks," Grimshaw said.

Beyond the village he quickened his pace, and easing the load on his back by putting his hands under the leather straps, he swung toward Finhaut. Behind him he heard the faint ringing of the church bells in Salvan. Waram had reported the "tragedy." Grimshaw could fancy the excitement--the priest hurrying toward the "wall" with his crucifix in his hands; the barber, a-quiver with morbid excitement; the stolid guide, not at all surprised, rather gratified, preparing to make the descent to recover the body of that "tall monsieur" who had, after all, "arrived." The telegraph wires were already humming with the message. In a few hours Dagmar would know.

He laughed aloud. The white road spun beneath him. His hands, pressed against his body by the weight of the leather straps, were hot and wet; he could feel the loud beating of his heart.

His senses were acute; he had never before felt with such gratification the warmth of the sun or known the ecstasy of motion. He saw every flower in the roadbank, every small glacial brook, every new conformation of the snow clouds hanging above the ragged peaks of the Argentières. He sniffed with delight the pungent wind from off the glaciers, the short, warm puffs of grass-scented air from the fields in the Valley of Trient. He noticed the flight of birds, the lazy swinging of pine boughs, the rainbow spray of waterfalls. Once he shouted and ran, mad with exuberance. Again he flung himself down by the roadside and, lying on his back, sang outrageous songs and laughed and slapped his breast with both hands.

That night he came to Chamonix and got lodging in a small hotel on the skirts of the town. His spirits fell when he entered the room. He put his pedlar's pack on the floor and sat down on the narrow bed, suddenly conscious of an enormous fatigue. His feet burned, his legs ached, his back was raw where the heavy pack had rested. He thought: "What am I doing here? I have nothing but the few hundred pounds Waram gave me. I'm alone. Dead and alive."

He scarcely looked up when the door opened and a young girl came in, carrying a pitcher of water and a coarse towel. She hesitated and said rather prettily: "You'll be tired, perhaps?"

Grimshaw felt within him the tug of the old personality. He stared at her, suddenly conscious that she was a woman and that she was smiling at him. Charming, in her way. Bare arms. A little black bodice laced over a white waist. Straight blonde hair, braided thickly and twisted around her head. A peasant, but pretty.... You see, his desire was to frighten her, as he most certainly would have frightened her had he been true to Cecil Grimshaw. But the impulse passed, leaving him sick and ashamed. He heard her saying: "A sad thing occurred to-day down the valley. A gentleman.... Salvan ... a very famous gentleman.... And they have telegraphed his wife.... I heard it from Simon Ravanel.... It seems that the gentleman was smashed to bits--_brise en morceau. Épouvantable, n'est ce pas_?"

Grimshaw began to tremble. "Yes, yes," he said irritably. "But I am tired, little one. Go out, and shut the door!"

The girl gave him a startled glance, frightened at last, but for nothing more than the lost look in his eyes. He raised his arms, and she fled with a little scream.

Grimshaw sat for a moment staring at the door. Then with a violent gesture he threw himself back on the bed, buried his face in the dirty pillow and wept as a child weeps, until, just before dawn, he fell asleep....

As far as the public knows, Cecil Grimshaw perished on the "wall"--perished and was buried at Broadenham beneath a pyramid of chrysanthemums. Perished, and became an English immortal--his sins erased by his unconscious sacrifice. Perished, and was forgiven by Dagmar. Yet hers was the victory--he belonged to her at last. She had not buried his body at Broadenham, but she had buried his work there. He could never write again....

During those days of posthumous whitewashing he read the papers with a certain contemptuous eagerness. Some of them he crumpled between his hands and threw away. He hated his own image, staring balefully from the first page of the illustrated reviews. He despised England for honouring him. Once, happening upon a volume of the "Vision of Helen"--the first edition illustrated by Beardsley--in a book-stall at Aix-les-Bains, he read it from cover to cover.