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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.
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.
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.
"I thought I saw " He turned and went quickly across the garden into the hotel. Grimshaw called once, in a loud voice: "Waram!" But the doctor did not even turn his head. Grimshaw followed him, overtook him, touched his shoulder. Waram paid no attention. Going to the bureau he said to the proprietor: "You told me that a Monsieur Pilleux wished to see me." "Oui, monsieur.
Pilleux has addressed to us some new experiments on the same subject, made on the voltaic arc produced by a De Meritens alternating current machine.
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!
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.
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 cafés, 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.
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.
"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.
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