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....

Personal immortality is the most alluring hope ever dangled before
humanity. All of us secretly desire it. None of us really believe in
it. As you say, all of us are afraid and some of us laugh to hide our
fear. Grimshaw wasn't afraid. Nor did he laugh. He _knew_. And you
remember his eloquence--seductive words, poignant, delicious,
memorable words! In his Chelsea days, he had made you sultry with
hate. Now, as Pierre Pilleux, he made you believe in the shining
beauty of the indestructible, the unconquerable dead. You saw them, a
host of familiar figures, walking fearlessly away from you toward the
brightness of a distant horizon. 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.
Grimshaw had revolted against ug