O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 27

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 peac.o.c.k-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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.... 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 ta.s.selled 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 pa.s.sing 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 coa.r.s.er--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 pa.s.sed 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 coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sed 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--"