O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 by Various

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I went to Vienna, and lost track of him for several years. Then I
heard that he had married a dear friend of mine--Lady Dagmar Cooper,
one of the greatest beauties and perhaps the sternest prude in
England. She wrote me, soon after that unbelievable mating: "I have
married Cecil Grimshaw. I know you won't approve; I do not altogether
approve myself. He is not like the men I have known--not at all
_English_. But he intrigues me; there is a sense of power behind his
awfulness--you see I know that he is awful! I think I will be able to
make him look at things--I mean visible, material things--my way. We
have taken a house in town and he has promised to behave--no more
Chelsea parties, no dancers, no yellow waistcoats and chrysanthemums.
That was all very well for his 'student' days. Now that he is a
personage, it will scarcely do. I am tremendously interested and
happy...."

Interested and happy! She was a typical product of Victoria's reign, a
beautiful creature whose faith was pinned to the most unimportant
things--class, position, a snobbish religion, a traditional morality
and her own place in an intricate little world of ladies and
gentlemen. God save us! What was Cecil Grimshaw going to do in an
atmosphere of titled bores, bishops, military men, and cautious
statesmen? I could fancy him in his new town house, struggling through
some endless dinner party--his cynical, stone-gray eyes sweeping up
and down the table, his lips curled in that habitual sneer, his mind,
perhaps, gone back to the red-and-blue room in Chelsea, where he had
been wont to stand astride before the black mantel, bellowing
indecencies into the ears of witty modernists. Could he bellow any
longer?

Apparently not. I heard of him now and then from this friend and that.
He was indeed "behaving" well. He wrote nothing to shock the
sensibilities of his wife's world--a few fantastic short stories,
touched with a certain childish spirituality, and that was all. They
say that he bent his manners to hers--a tamed centaur grazing with a
milk-white doe. He grew a trifle fat. Quite like a model English
husband, he called Dagmar "My dear" and drove with her in the Park at
the fashionable hour, his hands crossed on the head of his cane, his
eyes half closed. She wrote me: "I am completely happy. So is Cecil.
Surely he can have made no mistake in marrying me."

You all know that this affectation of respectability did not last
long--not more than five years; long enough for the novelty to wear
off. The genius or the devil that was in Cecil Grimshaw made its
reappearance. He was tossed out of Dagmar's circle like a burning rock
hurled from the mouth of a crater; he fell into Chelsea again. Esther
Levenson had come back from the States and was casting about for a
play. She sought out Grimshaw and with her presence, her grace and
pallor and seduction, lured him into his old ways. "The leaves are
yellow," he said to her, "but still they dance in a south wind. The
altar fires are ash and grass has grown upon the temple floor---- I
have been away too long. Get me my pipe, you laughing dryad, and I
will play for you."

He played for her and all England heard. Dagmar heard and pretended
acquiescence. According to her lights, she was magnificent--she
invited Esther Levenson to Broadenham, the Grimshaw place in Kent, nor
did she wince when the actress accepted. When I got back to England,
Dagmar was fighting for his soul with all the weapons she had. I went
to see her in her cool little town house, that house so typical of
her, so untouched by Grimshaw. And, looking at me with steady eyes,
she said: "I'm sorry Cecil isn't here. He's writing again--a play--for
Esther Levenson, who was Simonetta, you remember?"

I promised you a ghost story. If it is slow in coming, it is because
all these things have a bearing on the mysterious, the extraordinary
things that happened----

You probably know about the last phase of Grimshaw's career--who
doesn't? There is something fascinating about the escapades of a
famous man, but when he happens also to be a great poet, we cannot
forget his very human sins--in them he is akin to us.

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
Argentieres. 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.

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