O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 29

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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 pet.i.te_."

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, a.s.sailed 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 gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 d.a.m.ned place--dark as h.e.l.l.... 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 cafe slammed behind them, m.u.f.fling 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 ca_. 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 pa.s.sion 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 Ma.r.s.eilles. 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 pa.s.sed 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 appet.i.te, 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 h.e.l.l. 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d. 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 ca.n.a.l. And both of them left letters addressed to Pilleux--enough to d.a.m.n 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.