far away, the wild eerie ones of yard engines, the deeper, throatier
tones of factories. It was the end. Montgomery City!
Slowly Martin addressed the envelope, and as the big bore came to a
stop, evaded the thronging crowds and sought the railroad mail box. He
raised the letter....
"Mr. Garrity!" He turned. The day agent was running toward him. "Mr.
Garrity, Mr. Barstow wants to see you. He's here--in the station. He
came to see the finish."
So the execution must be a personal one! The letter was crunched into
a pocket. Dimly, soddenly, Martin followed the agent. As through a
haze he saw the figure of Barstow, and felt that person tug at his
sleeve.
"Come over here, where we can talk in private!" There was a queer ring
in the voice and Martin obeyed. Then--"Shake, Old Kid!"
Martin knew that a hand was clasping his. But why?
"You made it! I knew you would. Didn't I tell you we'd get our pound
of flesh?"
"But--but the contract----"
"To thunder with the contract!" came the happy answer of Barstow. "If
you had only answered the 'phone, you wouldn't be so much in the dark.
What do I care about mail contracts now--with the best two lines in
Missouri under my supervision? Don't you understand? This was the hole
that I had prayed for this O.R. & T. bunch to get into from the first
minute I saw that snow. They would have been tied up for a week
longer--if it hadn't been for us. Can't you see? It was the argument I
needed--that politics isn't what counts--it's brains and doing things!
Now do you understand? Well"--and Barstow stood off and laughed--"if I
have to diagram things for you, the money interests behind the O.R. &
T. have seen the light. I'll admit it took about three hours of
telephoning to New York to cause the illumination; but they've seen
it, and that's enough. They also have agreed to buy the Ozark Central
and to merge the two. Further, they have realized that the only
possible president of the new lines is a man with brains like, for
instance, Lemuel C. Barstow, who has working directly with him a
general superintendent--and don't overlook that general part--a
_general_ superintendent named Martin Garrity!"
STRANGER THINGS
By MILDRED CRAM
From _Metropolitan Magazine_
We were seated in the saloon of a small steamer which plies between
Naples and Trieste on irregular schedule. Outside, the night was
thickly black and a driving rain swept down the narrow decks.
"You Englishmen laugh at ghosts," the Corsican merchant said. "In my
country, we are less pretentious. Frankly, we are afraid. You, too,
are afraid, and so you laugh! A difference, it seems to me, which
lies, not in the essence but in the manner."
Doctor Fenton smiled queerly. "Perhaps. What do any of us know about
it, one way or the other? Ticklish business! We poke a little too far
beyond our ken and get a shock that withers our souls. Cosmic force!
We stumble forward, bleating for comfort, and fall over a charged
cable. It may have been put there to hold us out--or in."
Aldobrandini, the Italian inventor, was playing cards with a German
engineer. He lost the game to his opponent, and turning about in his
chair, came into the conversation.
"You are talking about ghosts. I have seen them. Once in the Carso.
Again on the campagna near Rome. I met a company of Caesar's
legionaries tramping through a bed of asphodels. The asphodels lay
down beneath those crushing sandals, and then stood upright again,
unharmed."
The engineer shuffled the cards between short, capable fingers.
"Ghosts. Yes, I agree; there are such things. Created out of our
subconscious selves; mirages of the mind; photographic spiritual
projections; hereditary memories. There are always explanations."
Doctor Fenton poked into the bowl of his pipe with a broad thumb. "Did
any of you happen to know the English poet, Cecil Grimshaw? No? I'll
tell you a story about him if you care to listen. A long story, I warn
you. Very curious. Very suggestive. I cannot vouch for the entire
truth of it, since I got the tale from many sources--a word here, a
chance encounter there, and at last only the puzzling reports of men
who saw Grimshaw out in Africa. He wasn't a friend of mine, or I
wouldn't tell these things."
Aldobrandini's dark eyes softened. He leaned forward. "Cecil Grimshaw
... We Latins admire his work more than that of any modern
Englishman."
The doctor tipped his head back against the worn red velvet of the
lounge. An oil lamp, swinging from the ceiling, seemed to isolate him
in a pool of light. Outside, the invisible sea raced astern, hissing
slightly beneath the driving impact of the rain.
I first heard of Grimshaw [the doctor began] in my student days in
London. He was perhaps five years my senior, just beginning to be
famous, not yet infamous, but indiscreet enough to get himself talked
about. He had written a little book of verse, "Vision of Helen," he
called it, I believe.... The oblique stare of the hostile Trojans.
Helen coifed with flame. Menelaus. Love ... Greater men than Grimshaw
had written of Priam's tragedy. His audacity called attention to his
imperfect, colourful verse, his love of beauty, his sense of the
exotic, the strange, the unhealthy. People read his book on the sly
and talked about it in whispers. It was indecent, but it was
beautiful. At that time you spoke of Cecil Grimshaw with disapproval,
if you spoke of him at all, or, if you happened to be a prophet, you
saw in him the ultimate bomb beneath the Victorian literary edifice.
And so he was.
I saw him once at the Alhambra--poetry in a top hat! He wore evening
clothes that were a little too elaborate, a white camellia in his
buttonhole, and a thick-lensed monocle on a black ribbon. During the
entr'acte he stood up and surveyed the house from pit to gallery, as
if he wanted to be seen. He was very tall and the ugliest man in
England. Imagine the body of a Lincoln, the hands of a woman, the jaw
and mouth of Disraeli, an aristocratic nose, unpleasant eyes, and then
that shock of yellow hair--hyacinthine--the curly locks of an insane
virtuoso or a baby prodigy.
"Who is that?" I demanded.
"Grimshaw. The chap who wrote the book about naughty Helen. _La belle
Hélène_ and the shepherd boy."
I stared. Everyone else stared. The pit stopped shuffling and giggling
to gaze at that prodigious monstrosity, and people in the boxes turned
their glasses on him. Grimshaw seemed to be enjoying it. He spoke to
someone across the aisle and smiled, showing a set of huge white
teeth, veritable tombstones.
"Abominable," I said.
But I got his book and read it. He was the first Englishman to dare
break away from literary conventions. Of course he shocked England. He
was a savage aesthete. I read the slim volume through at one sitting;
I was horrified and fascinated.
I met Grimshaw a year later. He was having a play produced at the
Lyceum--"The Labyrinth"--with Esther Levenson as Simonetta. She
entertained for him at her house in Chelsea and I got myself invited
because I wanted to see the atrocious genius at close range. He wore a
lemon-coloured vest and lemon-yellow spats.
"How d'you do?" he said, gazing at me out of those queer eyes of his.
"I hear that you admire my work."
"You have been misinformed," I replied. "Your work interests me,
because I am a student of nervous and mental diseases."
"Ah. Psychotherapy."
"All of the characters in your poem, 'The Vision of Helen,' are
neurotics. They suffer from morbid fears, delusions, hysteria, violent
mental and emotional complexities. A text-book in madness."
Grimshaw laughed. "You flatter me. I am attracted by neurotic types.
Insanity has its source in the unconscious, and we English are afraid
of looking inward." He glanced around the crowded room with an amused
and cynical look. "Most of these people are as bad as my Trojans,
Doctor Fenton. Only they conceal their badness, and it isn't good for
them."
We talked for a few moments. I amused him, I think, by my diagnosis of
his Helen's mental malady. But he soon tired of me and his restless
gaze went over my head, searching for admiration. Esther Levenson
brought Ellen Terry over and he forgot me entirely in sparkling for
the good lady--showing his teeth, shaking his yellow locks, bellowing
like a centaur.
"The fellow's an ass," I decided.
But when "The Labyrinth" was produced, I changed my mind. There again
was that disturbing loveliness. It was a story of the passionate
Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Esther Levenson drifted
through the four long acts against a background of Tuscan walls,
scarlet hangings, oaths, blood-spilling, dark and terrible vengeance.
Grimshaw took London by the throat and put it down on its knees.
Then for a year or two he lived on his laurels, lapping up admiration
like a drunkard in his cups. Unquestionably, Esther Levenson was his
mistress, since she presided over his house in Cheyne Walk. They say
she was not the only string to his lute. A Jewess, a Greek poetess,
and a dancer from Stockholm made up his amorous medley at that time.
Scandalized society flocked to his drawing-room, there to be received
by Simonetta herself, wearing the blanched draperies and tragic pearls
of the labyrinth he had made for her. Grimshaw offered no apologies.
He was the uncrowned laureate and kings can do no wrong. He was
painted by the young Sargent, of course, and by the aging
Whistler--you remember the butterfly's portrait of him in a yellow
kimono leaning against a black mantel? I, for one, think he was vastly
amused by all this fury of admiration; he despised it and fed upon it.
If he had been less great, he would have been utterly destroyed by it,
even then.
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?"