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....