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....