Waram stayed where he was, on his knees. He tore his eyes away from the grotesque dead face and fixed them on Grimshaw. He told me that the force of his desire must have spoken in that look because Grimshaw started and stepped back a pace, gripping his cane. Then he laughed. "Why not?" he said. "Let this be me. And I'll go on, with that clanking hardware store around my neck. It can be done, can't it? Better for you and for Dagmar. I'm not being philanthropic. I'm looking, not for a reprieve, but for release. No one knows this fellow in Salvan—he probably came up from the Rhone and was on his way to Chamonix. What d'you think was the matter with him?"
"Heart," Doctor Waram answered.
"Well, what d'you say? This pedlar and I are social outcasts. And there is Dagmar in England, weeping her eyes out because of divorce courts and more public washing of dirty linen. You love her. I don't! Why not carry this fellow to the rochers, to-night after dark? To-morrow, when I have changed clothes with him, we can throw him into the valley. It's a good thousand feet or more. Would there be much left of that face, for purposes of identification? I think not. You can take the mutilated body back to England and I can go on to Chamonix, as he would have gone." Grimshaw touched the pedlar with his foot. "Free."
That is exactly what they did. The body, hidden near the roadside until nightfall, was carried through the woods to the rochers du soir, that little plateau on the brink of the tremendous wall of rock which rises from the Rhone valley to the heights near Salvan. There the two men left it and returned to their hotel to sleep.
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.