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.”