O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 by Various

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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.
Epouvantable, 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.

"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 cafe in the Rue Carnot,
left his pack as security, and went to Paris. Can you imagine him in
the theatre--it was the Odeon, 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 cafes, 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 cafe to cafe, 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 cafe 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 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 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.

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