O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 — Stranger Things

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.