Stranger Things

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."

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