Chapter 15

"Poor stuff," he said to the bookseller, tossing it down again. "Give me 'Ars ne Lupin'." And he paid two sous for a paper-covered, dog-eared, much-thumbed copy of the famous detective story, not because he intended to read it, but in payment for his hour of disillusionment. Then he slung his pack over his shoulders and tramped out into the country. He laughed aloud at the thought of Helen and her idolaters. A poetic hoax. Overripe words. Seductive sounds. Nonsense!

"Surely I can do better than that to-day," he thought.

He saw two children working in a field, and called to them.

"If you will give me a cup of cold water," he said, "I'll tell you a story."

"Gladly, monsieur."

The boy put down his spade, went to a brook which threaded the field and came back with an earthenware jug full to the brim. The little girl stared gravely at Grimshaw while he drank. Grimshaw wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"What story shall it be?" he demanded.

The little girl said quickly: "The black king and the white princess and the beast who lived in the wood."

"Not that one," the boy cried. "Tell us about a battle."

"I will sing about life," Grimshaw said.

It was hot in the field. A warm, sweet smell rose from the spaded earth and near by the brook rustled through the grass like a beautiful silver serpent. Grimshaw sat cross-legged on the ground and words spun from his lips--simple words. And he sang of things he had recently learned--the gaiety of birds, the strength of his arms, the scent of dusk, the fine crystal of a young moon, wind in a field of wheat....

At first the children listened. Then, because he talked so long, the little girl leaned slowly over against his shoulder and fell asleep, while the boy fingered the knives, jangled the key-rings, clipped grass stalks with the scissors, and wound the watches one after the other. The sun was low before Grimshaw left them. "When you are grown up," he said, "remember that Pierre Pilleux sang to you of life."

"_Oui, monsieur_," the boy said politely. "But I should like a watch."

Grimshaw shook his head. "The song is enough."

Thereafter he sang to any one who would listen to him. I say that he sang--I mean, of course, that he spoke his verses; it was a minstrel's simple improvisation. But there are people in the villages of southern France who still recall that ungainly, shambling figure. He had grown a beard; it crinkled thickly, hiding his mouth and chin. He laughed a great deal. He was not altogether clean. And he slept wherever he could find a bed--in farmhouses, cheap hotels, haylofts, stables, open fields. Waram's few hundred pounds were gone. The poet lived by his wits and his gift of song. And for the first time in his remembrance he was happy.

Then one day he read in _Le Matin_ that Ada Rubenstein was to play "The Labyrinth" in Paris. Grimshaw was in Poitiers. He borrowed three hundred francs from the proprietor of a small café in the Rue Carnot, left his pack as security, and went to Paris. Can you imagine him in the theatre--it was the Odéon, I believe--conscious of curious, amused glances--a peasant, bulking conspicuously in that scented auditorium?

When the curtain rose, he felt again the familiar pain of creation. A rush of hot blood surged around his heart. His temples throbbed. His eyes filled with tears. Then the flood receded and left him trembling with weakness. He sat through the rest of the performance without emotion of any sort. He felt no resentment, no curiosity.

This was the last time he showed any interest in his old existence. He went back to Poitiers, and then took to the road again. People who saw him at that time have said that there was always a pack of dogs at his heels. Once a fashionable spaniel followed him out of Lyons and he was arrested for theft. You understand, he never made any effort to attract the little fellows--they joined on, as it were, for the journey. And it was a queer fact that after a few miles they always whined, as if they were disappointed about something, and turned back....

He finally heard that Dagmar had married Waram. She had waited a decent interval--Victorian to the end! A man who happened to be in Marseilles at the time told me that "that vagabond poet, Pilleux, appeared in one of the cafés, roaring drunk, and recited a marriage poem--obscene, vicious, terrific. A crowd came in from the street to listen. Some of them laughed. Others were frightened. He was an ugly brute--well over six feet tall, with a blonde beard, a hooked nose, and a pair of eyes that saw beyond reality. He was fascinating. He could turn his eloquence off and on like a tap. He sat in a drunken stupor, glaring at the crowd, until someone shouted: "_Eh bien, Pilleux_--you were saying?" Then the deluge! He had a peasant's acceptance of the elemental facts of life--it was raw, that hymn of his! The women of the streets who had crowded into the caf listened with a sort of terror; they admired him. One of them said: "Pilleux's wife betrayed him." He lifted his glass and drank. "No, _ma petite_," he said politely, "she buried me."

That night his pack was stolen from him. He was too drunk to know or to care. They say that he went from café to café, paying for wine with verse, and getting it, too! At his heels a crowd of loafers, frowsy women and dogs. His hat gone. His eyes mad. A trickle of wine through his beard. Bellowing. Bellowing again--the untamed centaur cheated of the doe!

And now, perhaps, I can get back to the reasons for this story. And I am almost at the end of it....

In the most obscure alley in Marseilles there is a caf frequented by sailors, riff-raff from the waterfront and thieves. Grimshaw appeared there at midnight. A woman clung to his arm. She had no eyes for any one else. Her name, I believe, was Marie--a very humble Magdalen of that tragic back-water of civilization. Putting her cheek against Grimshaw's arm, she listened to him with a curious patience as one listens to the eloquence of the sea.

"This is no place for thee," he said to her. "Leave me now, _ma petite_."

But she laughed and went with him. Imagine that room--foul air, sanded floor, kerosene lamps, an odour of bad wine, tobacco, and stale humanity. Grimshaw pushed his way to a table and sat down with a surly Gascon and an enormous Negro from some American ship in the harbour.

They brought the poet wine but he did not drink it--sat staring at the smoky ceiling, assailed by a sudden sharp vision of Dagmar and Waram at Broadenham, alone together for the first time, perhaps on the terrace in the starlight, perhaps in Dagmar's bright room which had always been scented, warm, remote----

He had been reciting, of course, in French. Now he broke abruptly into English. No one but the American Negro understood. The proprietor shouted: "Hi, there, Pilleux--no gibberish!" The woman, her eyes on Grimshaw's face, said warningly: "Ssh! He speaks English. He is clever, this poet! Pay attention." And the Negro, startled, jerked his drunken body straight and listened.

I don't know what Grimshaw said. It must have been a poem of home, the bitter longing of an exile for familiar things. At any rate, the Negro was touched--he was a Louisianian, a son of New Orleans. He saw the gentleman, where you and I, perhaps, would have seen only a maudlin savage. There is no other explanation for the thing that happened....

The Gascon, it seems, hated poetry. He tipped over Grimshaw's glass, spilling the wine into the woman's lap. She leaped back, trembling with rage, swearing in the manner of her kind.

"Quiet," Grimshaw said. And her fury receded before his glance; she melted, acquiesced, smiled. Then Grimshaw smiled, too, and putting the glass to rights with a leisurely gesture, said, "Cabbage. Son of pig," and flipped the dregs into the Gascon's face.

The fellow groaned and leaped. Grimshaw didn't stir--he was too drunk to protect himself. But the Negro saw what was in the Gascon's hand. He kicked back his chair, stretched out his arms--too late. The Gascon's knife, intended for Grimshaw, sliced into his heart. He coughed, looked at the man he had saved with a strange questioning, and collapsed.

Grimshaw was sobered instantly. They say that he broke the Gascon's arm before the crowd could separate them. Then he knelt down by the dying Negro, turned him gently over and lifted him in his arms, supporting that ugly bullet head against his knee. The Negro coughed again, and whispered: "I saw it comin', boss." Grimshaw said simply: "Thank you."

"I'm scared, boss."

"That's all right. I'll see you through."

"I'm dyin', boss."

"Is it hard?"

"Yessir."

"Hold my hand. That's right. Nothing to be afraid of."

The Negro's eyes fixed themselves on Grimshaw's face--a sombre look came into their depths. "I'm goin', boss."

Grimshaw lifted him again. As he did so, he was conscious of feeling faint and dizzy. The Negro's blood was warm on his hands and wrists, but it was not wholly that--He had a sensation of rushing forward; of pressure against his ear-drums; a violent nausea; the crowd of curious faces blurred, disappeared--he was drowning in a noisy darkness.... He gasped, struggled, struck out with his arms, shouted, went down in that suffocating flood of unconsciousness....

Opening his eyes after an indeterminate interval, he found himself in the street. The air was cool after the fetid staleness of that room. He was still holding the Negro's hand. And above them the stars burned, remote and calm, like beacon lamps in a dark harbour....

The Negro whimpered: "I don't know the way, boss. I'm lost."

"Where is your ship?"

"In the _Vieux Port_, near the fort."

They walked together through the silent streets. I say that they walked. It was rather that Grimshaw found himself on the quay, the Negro still at his side. A few prowling sailors passed them. But for the most part the waterfront was deserted. The ships lay side by side--an intricate tangle of bowsprits and rigging, masts and chains. Around them the water was black as basalt, only that now and again a spark of light was struck by the faint lifting of the current against the immovable hulls.

The Negro shuffled forward, peering. A lantern flashed on one of the big schooners. Looking up, Grimshaw saw the name: "_Anne Beebe, New Orleans_." A querulous voice, somewhere on the deck, demanded: "That you, Richardson?" And then, angrily: "This damned place--dark as hell.... Who's there?"

Grimshaw answered: "One of your crew."

The man on deck stared down at the quay a moment. Then, apparently having seen nothing, he turned away, and the lantern bobbed aft like a drifting ember. The Negro moaned. Holding both hands over the deep wound in his breast, he slowly climbed the side ladder, turned once, to look at Grimshaw, and disappeared....

Grimshaw felt again the rushing darkness. Again he struggled. And again, opening his eyes after a moment of blankness, he found himself kneeling on the sanded floor of the cafe, holding the dead Negro in his arms. He glanced down at the face, astounded by the look of placid satisfaction in those wide-open eyes, the smile of recognition, of gratification, of some nameless and magnificent content....

The woman Marie touched his shoulder. "The fellow's dead, _m'sieur_. We had better go."

Grimshaw followed her into the street. He noticed that there were no stars. A bitter wind, forerunner of the implacable _mistral_, had come up. The door of the café slammed behind them, muffling a sudden uproar of voices that had burst out with his going....

Grimshaw had a room somewhere in the Old Town; he went there, followed by the woman. He thought: "I am mad! Mad!" He was frightened, not by what had happened to him, but because he could not understand. Nor can I make it clear to you, since no explanation is final when we are dealing with the inexplicable....

When they reached his room, Marie lighted the kerosene lamp and, smoothing down her black hair with both hands, said simply: "I stay with you."

"You must not," Grimshaw answered.

"I love you," she said. "You are a great man. _C'est ça_. That is that! Besides, I must love someone--I mean, do for someone. You think that I like pleasure. Ah! Perhaps. I am young. But my heart follows you. I stay here."

Grimshaw stared at her without hearing. "I opened the door. I went beyond.... I am perhaps mad. Perhaps privileged. Perhaps what they have always called me--an incorrigible poet." Suddenly he jumped to his feet and shouted: "I went a little way with his soul! Victory! Eternity!"

The woman Marie put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back into his chair again. She thought, of course, that he was drunk. So she attempted a simple seduction, striving to call attention to herself by the coquetries of her kind. Grimshaw pushed her aside and lay down on the bed with his arms crossed over his eyes. Had he witnessed a soul's first uncertain steps into a new state? One thing he knew--he had himself suffered the confusion of death, and had shared the desperate struggle to penetrate the barrier between the mortal and the immortal, the known and the unknown, the real and the incomprehensible. With that realization, he stepped finally out of his personality into that of the mystic philosopher, Pierre Pilleux. He heard the woman Marie saying: "Let me stay. I am unhappy." And without opening his eyes, simply making a brief gesture, he said: "_Eh bien_." And she stayed.

She never left him again. In the years that followed, wherever Grimshaw was, there also was Marie--little, swarthy, broad of cheek and hip, unimaginative, faithful. She had a passion for service. She cooked for Grimshaw, knitted woollen socks for him, brushed and mended his clothes, watched out for his health--often, I am convinced, she stole for him. As for Grimshaw, he didn't know that she existed, beyond the fact that she was there and that she made material existence endurable. He never again knew physical love. That I am sure of, for I have talked with Marie. "He was good to me," she said. "But he never loved me." And I believe her.

That night of the Negro's death Grimshaw stood in a wilderness of his own. He emerged from it a believer in life after death. He preached this belief in the slums of Marseilles. It began to be said of him that his presence made death easy, that the touch of his hand steadied those who were about to die. Feverish, terrified, reluctant, they became suddenly calm, wistful, and passed quietly as one falls asleep. "Send for Pierre Pilleux" became a familiar phrase in the Old Town.

I do not believe that he could have touched these simple people had he not looked the part of prophet and saint. The old Grimshaw was gone. In his place an emaciated fanatic, unconscious of appetite, unaware of self, with burning eyes and tangled beard! That finished ugliness turned spiritual--a self-flagellated aesthete. He claimed that he could enter the shadowy confines of the "next world." Not heaven. Not hell. A neutral ground between the familiar earth and an inexplicable territory of the spirit. Here, he said, the dead suffered bewilderment; they remembered, desired, and regretted the life they had just left, without understanding what lay ahead. So far he could go with them. So far and no farther....

Personal immortality is the most alluring hope ever dangled before humanity. All of us secretly desire it. None of us really believe in it. As you say, all of us are afraid and some of us laugh to hide our fear. Grimshaw wasn't afraid. Nor did he laugh. He _knew_. And you remember his eloquence--seductive words, poignant, delicious, memorable words! In his Chelsea days, he had made you sultry with hate. Now, as Pierre Pilleux, he made you believe in the shining beauty of the indestructible, the unconquerable dead. You saw them, a host of familiar figures, walking fearlessly away from you toward the brightness of a distant horizon. You heard them, murmuring together, as they passed out of sight, going forward to share the common and ineffable experience.

Well.... The pagan had disappeared in the psychic! Cecil Grimshaw's melancholy and pessimism, his love of power, his delight in cruelty, in beauty, in the erotic, the violent, the strange, had vanished! Pierre Pilleux was a humanitarian. Cecil Grimshaw never had been. Grimshaw had revolted against ugliness as a dilettante objects to the mediocre in art. Pierre Pilleux was conscious of social ugliness. Having become aware of it, he was a potent rebel. He began to write in French, spreading his revolutionary doctrine of facile spiritual reward. He splintered purgatory into fragments; what he offered was an earthly paradise--humanity given eternal absolution, freed of fear, prejudice, hatred--above all, of fear--and certain of endless life.

Now that we have entered the cosmic era, we look back at him with understanding. Then, he was a radical and an atheist.

Of course he had followers--seekers after eternity who drank his promises like thirsty wanderers come upon a spring in the desert. To some of them he was a god. To some, a mystic. To some, a healer. To some--and they were the ones who finally controlled his destiny--he was simply a dangerous lunatic.

Two women in Marseilles committed suicide--they were followers, disciples, whatever you choose to call them. At any rate, they believed that where it was so simple a matter to die, it was foolish to stay on in a world that had treated them badly. One had lost a son, the other a lover. One shot herself; the other drowned herself in the canal. And both of them left letters addressed to Pilleux--enough to damn him in the eyes of authority. He was told that he might leave France, or take the consequences--a mild enough warning, but it worked. He dared not provoke an inquiry into his past. So he shipped on board a small Mediterranean steamer as fireman, and disappeared, no one knew where.

Two years later he reappeared in Africa. Marie was with him. They were living in a small town on the rim of the desert near Biskra. Grimshaw occupied a native house--a mere hovel, flat-roofed, sun-baked, bare as a hermit's cell. Marie had hired herself out as _femme de chambre_ in the only hotel in the place. "I watched over him," she told me. "And believe me, _monsieur_, he needed care! He was thin as a ghost. He had starved more than once during those two years. He told me to go back to France, to seek happiness for myself. But for me happiness was with him. I laughed and stayed. I loved him--magnificently, _monsieur_."

Grimshaw was writing again--in French--and his work began to appear in the Parisian journals, a strange poetic prose impregnated with mysticism. It was Grimshaw, sublimated. I saw it myself, although at that time I had not heard Waram's story. The French critics saw it. "This Pilleux is as picturesque as the English poet, Grimshaw. The style is identical." Waram saw it. He read everything that Pilleux wrote--with eagerness, with terror. Finally, driven by curiosity, he went to Paris, got Pilleux's address from the editor of _Gil Blas_, and started for Africa.

Grimshaw is a misty figure at the last. You see him faintly--an exile, racially featureless, wearing a dirty white native robe, his face wrinkled by exposure to the sun, his eyes burning. Marie says that he prowled about the village at night, whispering to himself, his head thrown back, pointing his beard at the stars. He wrote in the cool hours before dawn, and later, when the village quivered in heat fumes and he slept, Marie posted what he had written to Paris.

One day he took her head between his hands and said very gently: "Why don't you get a lover? Take life while you can."

"You say there is eternal life," she protested.

"_N'en doutez-pas_! But you must be rich in knowledge. Put flowers in your hair. And place your palms against a lover's palms and kiss him with generosity, _ma petite_. I am not a man; I am a shadow."

Marie slipped her arms around him and, standing on tiptoe, put her lips against his. "_Je t'aime_," she said simply.

His eyes deepened. There flashed into them the old, mad humour, the old vitality, the old passion for beauty. The look faded, leaving his eyes "like flames that are quenched." Marie shivered, covered her face with her hands, and ran out. "There was no blood in him," she told me. "He was like a spirit--a ghost. So meagre! So wan! Waxen hands. Yellow flesh. And those eyes, in which, _monsieur_, the flame was quenched!"

And this is the end of the curious story.... Waram went to Biskra and from there to the village where Grimshaw lived. Grimshaw saw him in the street one evening and followed him to the hotel. He lingered outside until Waram had registered at the _bureau_ and had gone to his room. Then he went in and sent word that "Pierre Pilleux was below and ready to see Doctor Waram."

He waited in the "garden" at the back of the hotel. No one was about. A cat slept on the wall. Overhead the arch of the sky was flooded with orange light. Dust lay on the leaves of the potted plants and bushes. It was breathless, hot, quiet. He thought: "Waram has come because Dagmar is dead. Or the public has found me out!"

Waram came immediately. He stood in the doorway a moment, staring at the grotesque figure which faced him. He made a terrified gesture, as if he would shut out what he saw. Then he came into the garden, steadying himself by holding on to the backs of the little iron garden chairs. The poet saw that Waram had not changed so very much--a little gray hair in that thick, black mop, a few wrinkles, a rather stodgy look about the waist. No more. He was still Waram, neat, self-satisfied, essentially English.... Grimshaw strangled a feeling of aversion and said quietly: "Well, Waram. How d'you do? I call myself Pilleux now."

Waram ignored his hand. Leaning heavily on one of the chairs, he stared with a passionate intentness. "Grimshaw?" he said at last.

"Why, yes," Grimshaw answered. "Didn't you know?"

Waram licked his lips. In a whisper he said: "I killed you in Switzerland six years ago. Killed you, you understand."

Grimshaw touched his breast with both hands. "You lie.

"Here I am."

"You are dead."

"Dead?"

"Before God, I swear it."

"Dead?"

Grimshaw felt once more the on-rushing flood of darkness. His thoughts flashed back over the years. The "wall." His suffering. The dog. The song in the field. The Negro. The door that opened. The stars. His own flesh, fading into spirit, into shadows....

"Dead?" he demanded again.

Waram's eyes wavered. He laughed unsteadily and looked behind him. "Strange," he said. "I thought I saw----" He turned and went quickly across the garden into the hotel. Grimshaw called once, in a loud voice: "Waram!" But the doctor did not even turn his head. Grimshaw followed him, overtook him, touched his shoulder. Waram paid no attention. Going to the _bureau_ he said to the proprietor: "You told me that a Monsieur Pilleux wished to see me."

"_Oui, monsieur_. He was waiting for you in the garden."

"He is not there now."

"But just a moment ago----"

"I am _here_," Grimshaw interrupted.

The proprietor brushed past Waram and peered into the garden. It was twilight out there now. The cat still slept on the wall. Dust on the leaves. Stillness....

"I'm sorry, _monsieur_. He seems to have disappeared."

Doctor Waram straightened his shoulders. "Ah," he said. "Disappeared. Exactly." And passing Grimshaw without a glance he went upstairs.

Grimshaw spoke to the proprietor. But the little man bent over the desk, and began to write in an account book. His pen went on scratching, inscribing large, flourishing numbers in a neat column....

Grimshaw shrugged and went into the street. The crowds paid no attention to him--but then, they never had. A dog sniffed at his heels, whined, and thrust a cold nose into his hand.