When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for SOAMES, ENOCH. I had feared he would not be there. He was not there. But everybody else was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or remembered but faintly, lived again for me, they and their work, in Mr. Holbrook Jackson’s pages. The book was as thorough as it was brilliantly written. And thus the omission found by me was an all the deadlier record of poor Soames’ failure to impress himself on his decade.
I daresay I am the only person who noticed the omission. Soames had failed so piteously as all that! Nor is there a counterpoise in the thought that if he had had some measure of success he might have passed, like those others, out of my mind, to return only at the historian’s beck. It is true that had his gifts, such as they were, been acknowledged in his life-time, he would never have made the bargain I saw him make—that strange bargain whose results have kept him always in the foreground of my memory. But it is from those very results that the full piteousness of him glares out.
Not my compassion, however, impels me to write of him. For his sake, poor fellow, I should be inclined to keep my pen out of the ink. It is ill to deride the dead. And how can I write about Enoch Soames without making him ridiculous? Or rather, how am I to hush up the horrid fact that he WAS ridiculous? I shall not be able to do that. Yet, sooner or later, write about him I must. You will see, in due course, that I have no option. And I may as well get the thing done now.
In the Summer Term of ‘93 a bolt from the blue flashed down on Oxford. It drove deep, it hurtlingly embedded itself in the soil. Dons and undergraduates stood around, rather pale, discussing nothing but it. Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. Its name? Will Rothenstein. Its aim? To do a series of twenty-four portraits in lithograph. These were to be published from the Bodley Head, London. The matter was urgent. Already the Warden of A, and the Master of B, and the Regius Professor of C, had meekly ‘sat.’ Dignified and doddering old men, who had never consented to sit to any one, could not withstand this dynamic little stranger. He did not sue: he invited; he did not invite: he commanded. He was twenty-one years old. He wore spectacles that flashed more than any other pair ever seen. He was a wit. He was brimful of ideas. He knew Whistler. He knew Edmond de Goncourt. He knew every one in Paris. He knew them all by heart. He was Paris in Oxford. It was whispered that, so soon as he had polished off his selection of dons, he was going to include a few undergraduates. It was a proud day for me when I—I—was included. I liked Rothenstein not less than I feared him; and there arose between us a friendship that has grown ever warmer, and been more and more valued by me, with every passing year.
At the end of Term he settled in—or rather, meteoritically into—London. It was to him I owed my first knowledge of that forever enchanting little world-in-itself, Chelsea, and my first acquaintance with Walter Sickert and other august elders who dwelt there. It was Rothenstein that took me to see, in Cambridge Street, Pimlico, a young man whose drawings were already famous among the few—Aubrey Beardsley, by name. With Rothenstein I paid my first visit to the Bodley Head. By him I was inducted into another haunt of intellect and daring, the domino room of the Cafe Royal.
There, on that October evening—there, in that exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those opposing mirrors and upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the painted and pagan ceiling, and with the hum of presumably cynical conversation broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of dominoes shuffled on marble tables, I drew a deep breath, and ‘This indeed,’ said I to myself, ‘is life!’
It was the hour before dinner. We drank vermouth. Those who knew Rothenstein were pointing him out to those who knew him only by name. Men were constantly coming in through the swing-doors and wandering slowly up and down in search of vacant tables, or of tables occupied by friends. One of these rovers interested me because I was sure he wanted to catch Rothenstein’s eye. He had twice passed our table, with a hesitating look; but Rothenstein, in the thick of a disquisition on Puvis de Chavannes, had not seen him. He was a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair. He had a thin vague beard—or rather, he had a chin on which a large number of hairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its retreat. He was an odd-looking person; but in the ‘nineties odd apparitions were more frequent, I think, than they are now. The young writers of that era—and I was sure this man was a writer—strove earnestly to be distinct in aspect. This man had striven unsuccessfully. He wore a soft black hat of clerical kind but of Bohemian intention, and a grey waterproof cape which, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed to be romantic. I decided that ‘dim’ was the mot juste for him. I had already essayed to write, and was immensely keen on the mot juste, that Holy Grail of the period.
The dim man was now again approaching our table, and this time he made up his mind to pause in front of it. ‘You don’t remember me,’ he said in a toneless voice.
Rothenstein brightly focussed him. ‘Yes, I do,’ he replied after a moment, with pride rather than effusion—pride in a retentive memory. ‘Edwin Soames.’
‘Enoch Soames,’ said Enoch.
‘Enoch Soames,’ repeated Rothenstein in a tone implying that it was enough to have hit on the surname. ‘We met in Paris two or three times when you were living there. We met at the Cafe Groche.’
‘And I came to your studio once.’
‘Oh yes; I was sorry I was out.’
‘But you were in. You showed me some of your paintings, you know.... I hear you’re in Chelsea now.’
‘Yes.’
I almost wondered that Mr. Soames did not, after this monosyllable, pass along. He stood patiently there, rather like a dumb animal, rather like a donkey looking over a gate. A sad figure, his. It occurred to me that ‘hungry’ was perhaps the mot juste for him; but—hungry for what? He looked as if he had little appetite for anything. I was sorry for him; and Rothenstein, though he had not invited him to Chelsea, did ask him to sit down and have something to drink.
Seated, he was more self-assertive. He flung back the wings of his cape with a gesture which—had not those wings been waterproof—might have seemed to hurl defiance at things in general. And he ordered an absinthe. ‘Je me tiens toujours fidele,’ he told Rothenstein, ‘a la sorciere glauque.’
‘It is bad for you,’ said Rothenstein dryly.
‘Nothing is bad for one,’ answered Soames. ‘Dans ce monde il n’y a ni de bien ni de mal.’
‘Nothing good and nothing bad? How do you mean?’
‘I explained it all in the preface to “Negations.”’
‘“Negations”?’
‘Yes; I gave you a copy of it.’
‘Oh yes, of course. But did you explain—for instance—that there was no such thing as bad or good grammar?’
‘N-no,’ said Soames. ‘Of course in Art there is the good and the evil. But in Life—no.’ He was rolling a cigarette. He had weak white hands, not well washed, and with finger-tips much stained by nicotine. ‘In Life there are illusions of good and evil, but’—his voice trailed away to a murmur in which the words ‘vieux jeu’ and ‘rococo’ were faintly audible. I think he felt he was not doing himself justice, and feared that Rothenstein was going to point out fallacies. Anyhow, he cleared his throat and said ‘Parlons d’autre chose.’
It occurs to you that he was a fool? It didn’t to me. I was young, and had not the clarity of judgment that Rothenstein already had. Soames was quite five or six years older than either of us. Also, he had written a book.
It was wonderful to have written a book.
If Rothenstein had not been there, I should have revered Soames. Even as it was, I respected him. And I was very near indeed to reverence when he said he had another book coming out soon. I asked if I might ask what kind of book it was to be.
‘My poems,’ he answered. Rothenstein asked if this was to be the title of the book. The poet meditated on this suggestion, but said he rather thought of giving the book no title at all. ‘If a book is good in itself—’ he murmured, waving his cigarette.
Rothenstein objected that absence of title might be bad for the sale of a book. ‘If,’ he urged, ‘I went into a bookseller’s and said simply “Have you got?” or “Have you a copy of?” how would they know what I wanted?’
‘Oh, of course I should have my name on the cover,’ Soames answered earnestly. ‘And I rather want,’ he added, looking hard at Rothenstein, ‘to have a drawing of myself as frontispiece.’ Rothenstein admitted that this was a capital idea, and mentioned that he was going into the country and would be there for some time. He then looked at his watch, exclaimed at the hour, paid the waiter, and went away with me to dinner. Soames remained at his post of fidelity to the glaucous witch.
‘Why were you so determined not to draw him?’ I asked.
‘Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn’t exist?’
‘He is dim,’ I admitted. But my mot juste fell flat. Rothenstein repeated that Soames was non-existent.
Still, Soames had written a book. I asked if Rothenstein had read ‘Negations.’ He said he had looked into it, ‘but,’ he added crisply, ‘I don’t profess to know anything about writing.’ A reservation very characteristic of the period! Painters would not then allow that any one outside their own order had a right to any opinion about painting. This law (graven on the tablets brought down by Whistler from the summit of Fujiyama) imposed certain limitations. If other arts than painting were not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practised them, the law tottered—the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did not hold good. Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book without warning you at any rate that his opinion was worthless. No one is a better judge of literature than Rothenstein; but it wouldn’t have done to tell him so in those days; and I knew that I must form an unaided judgment on ‘Negations.’
Not to buy a book of which I had met the author face to face would have been for me in those days an impossible act of self-denial. When I returned to Oxford for the Christmas Term I had duly secured ‘Negations.’ I used to keep it lying carelessly on the table in my room, and whenever a friend took it up and asked what it was about I would say ‘Oh, it’s rather a remarkable book. It’s by a man whom I know.’ Just ‘what it was about’ I never was able to say. Head or tail was just what I hadn’t made of that slim green volume. I found in the preface no clue to the exiguous labyrinth of contents, and in that labyrinth nothing to explain the preface.
‘Lean near to life. Lean very near—nearer.
‘Life is web, and therein nor warp nor woof is, but web only.
‘It is for this I am Catholick in church and in thought, yet do let swift Mood weave there what the shuttle of Mood wills.’
These were the opening phrases of the preface, but those which followed were less easy to understand. Then came ‘Stark: A Conte,’ about a midinette who, so far as I could gather, murdered, or was about to murder, a mannequin. It was rather like a story by Catulle Mendes in which the translator had either skipped or cut out every alternate sentence. Next, a dialogue between Pan and St. Ursula—lacking, I felt, in ‘snap.’ Next, some aphorisms (entitled ‘Aphorismata’ [spelled in Greek]). Throughout, in fact, there was a great variety of form; and the forms had evidently been wrought with much care. It was rather the substance that eluded me. Was there, I wondered, any substance at all? It did now occur to me: suppose Enoch Soames was a fool! Up cropped a rival hypothesis: suppose I was! I inclined to give Soames the benefit of the doubt. I had read ‘L’Apres-midi d’un Faune’ without extracting a glimmer of meaning. Yet Mallarme—of course—was a Master. How was I to know that Soames wasn’t another? There was a sort of music in his prose, not indeed arresting, but perhaps, I thought, haunting, and laden perhaps with meanings as deep as Mallarme’s own. I awaited his poems with an open mind.
And I looked forward to them with positive impatience after I had had a second meeting with him. This was on an evening in January. Going into the aforesaid domino room, I passed a table at which sat a pale man with an open book before him. He looked from his book to me, and I looked back over my shoulder with a vague sense that I ought to have recognised him. I returned to pay my respects. After exchanging a few words, I said with a glance to the open book, ‘I see I am interrupting you,’ and was about to pass on, but ‘I prefer,’ Soames replied in his toneless voice, ‘to be interrupted,’ and I obeyed his gesture that I should sit down.
I asked him if he often read here. ‘Yes; things of this kind I read here,’ he answered, indicating the title of his book—‘The Poems of Shelley.’
‘Anything that you really’—and I was going to say ‘admire?’ But I cautiously left my sentence unfinished, and was glad that I had done so, for he said, with unwonted emphasis, ‘Anything second-rate.’
I had read little of Shelley, but ‘Of course,’ I murmured, ‘he’s very uneven.’
‘I should have thought evenness was just what was wrong with him. A deadly evenness. That’s why I read him here. The noise of this place breaks the rhythm. He’s tolerable here.’ Soames took up the book and glanced through the pages. He laughed. Soames’ laugh was a short, single and mirthless sound from the throat, unaccompanied by any movement of the face or brightening of the eyes. ‘What a period!’ he uttered, laying the book down. And ‘What a country!’ he added.
I asked rather nervously if he didn’t think Keats had more or less held his own against the drawbacks of time and place. He admitted that there were ‘passages in Keats,’ but did not specify them. Of ‘the older men,’ as he called them, he seemed to like only Milton. ‘Milton,’ he said, ‘wasn’t sentimental.’ Also, ‘Milton had a dark insight.’ And again, ‘I can always read Milton in the reading-room.’
‘The reading-room?’
‘Of the British Museum. I go there every day.’
‘You do? I’ve only been there once. I’m afraid I found it rather a depressing place. It—it seemed to sap one’s vitality.’
‘It does. That’s why I go there. The lower one’s vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art. I live near the Museum. I have rooms in Dyott Street.’
‘And you go round to the reading-room to read Milton?’
‘Usually Milton.’ He looked at me. ‘It was Milton,’ he certificatively added, ‘who converted me to Diabolism.’
‘Diabolism? Oh yes? Really?’ said I, with that vague discomfort and that intense desire to be polite which one feels when a man speaks of his own religion. ‘You—worship the Devil?’
Soames shook his head. ‘It’s not exactly worship,’ he qualified, sipping his absinthe. ‘It’s more a matter of trusting and encouraging.’
‘Ah, yes.... But I had rather gathered from the preface to “Negations” that you were a—a Catholic.’
‘Je l’etais a cette epoque. Perhaps I still am. Yes, I’m a Catholic Diabolist.’
This profession he made in an almost cursory tone. I could see that what was upmost in his mind was the fact that I had read ‘Negations.’ His pale eyes had for the first time gleamed. I felt as one who is about to be examined, viva voce, on the very subject in which he is shakiest. I hastily asked him how soon his poems were to be published. ‘Next week,’ he told me.
‘And are they to be published without a title?’
‘No. I found a title, at last. But I shan’t tell you what it is,’ as though I had been so impertinent as to inquire. ‘I am not sure that it wholly satisfies me. But it is the best I can find. It suggests something of the quality of the poems.... Strange growths, natural and wild, yet exquisite,’ he added, ‘and many-hued, and full of poisons.’
I asked him what he thought of Baudelaire. He uttered the snort that was his laugh, and ‘Baudelaire,’ he said, ‘was a bourgeois malgre lui.’ France had had only one poet: Villon; ‘and two-thirds of Villon were sheer journalism.’ Verlaine was ‘an epicier malgre lui.’ Altogether, rather to my surprise, he rated French literature lower than English. There were ‘passages’ in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. But ‘I,’ he summed up, ‘owe nothing to France.’ He nodded at me. ‘You’ll see,’ he predicted.
I did not, when the time came, quite see that. I thought the author of ‘Fungoids’ did—unconsciously, of course—owe something to the young Parisian decadents, or to the young English ones who owed something to THEM. I still think so. The little book—bought by me in Oxford—lies before me as I write. Its pale grey buckram cover and silver lettering have not worn well. Nor have its contents. Through these, with a melancholy interest, I have again been looking. They are not much. But at the time of their publication I had a vague suspicion that they MIGHT be. I suppose it is my capacity for faith, not poor Soames’ work, that is weaker than it once was....
TO A YOUNG WOMAN.
Thou art, who hast not been!
Pale tunes irresolute
And traceries of old sounds
Blown from a rotted flute
Mingle with noise of cymbals rouged with rust,
Nor not strange forms and epicene
Lie bleeding in the dust,
Being wounded with wounds.
For this it is
That in thy counterpart
Of age-long mockeries
Thou hast not been nor art!
There seemed to me a certain inconsistency as between the first and last lines of this. I tried, with bent brows, to resolve the discord. But I did not take my failure as wholly incompatible with a meaning in Soames’ mind. Might it not rather indicate the depth of his meaning? As for the craftsmanship, ‘rouged with rust’ seemed to me a fine stroke, and ‘nor not’ instead of ‘and’ had a curious felicity. I wondered who the Young Woman was, and what she had made of it all. I sadly suspect that Soames could not have made more of it than she. Yet, even now, if one doesn’t try to make any sense at all of the poem, and reads it just for the sound, there is a certain grace of cadence. Soames was an artist—in so far as he was anything, poor fellow!
It seemed to me, when first I read ‘Fungoids,’ that, oddly enough, the Diabolistic side of him was the best. Diabolism seemed to be a cheerful, even a wholesome, influence in his life.
NOCTURNE.
Round and round the shutter’d Square
I stroll’d with the Devil’s arm in mine.
No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was there
And the ring of his laughter and mine.
We had drunk black wine.
I scream’d, ‘I will race you, Master!’
‘What matter,’ he shriek’d, ‘to-night
Which of us runs the faster?
There is nothing to fear to-night
In the foul moon’s light!’
Then I look’d him in the eyes,
And I laugh’d full shrill at the lie he told
And the gnawing fear he would fain disguise.
It was true, what I’d time and again been told:
He was old—old.
There was, I felt, quite a swing about that first stanza—a joyous and rollicking note of comradeship. The second was slightly hysterical perhaps. But I liked the third: it was so bracingly unorthodox, even according to the tenets of Soames’ peculiar sect in the faith. Not much ‘trusting and encouraging’ here! Soames triumphantly exposing the Devil as a liar, and laughing ‘full shrill,’ cut a quite heartening figure, I thought—then! Now, in the light of what befell, none of his poems depresses me so much as ‘Nocturne.’
I looked out for what the metropolitan reviewers would have to say. They seemed to fall into two classes: those who had little to say and those who had nothing. The second class was the larger, and the words of the first were cold; insomuch that
Strikes a note of modernity throughout.... These tripping
numbers.—Preston Telegraph
was the only lure offered in advertisements by Soames’ publisher. I had hopes that when next I met the poet I could congratulate him on having made a stir; for I fancied he was not so sure of his intrinsic greatness as he seemed. I was but able to say, rather coarsely, when next I did see him, that I hoped ‘Fungoids’ was ‘selling splendidly.’ He looked at me across his glass of absinthe and asked if I had bought a copy. His publisher had told him that three had been sold. I laughed, as at a jest.
‘You don’t suppose I CARE, do you?’ he said, with something like a snarl. I disclaimed the notion. He added that he was not a tradesman. I said mildly that I wasn’t, either, and murmured that an artist who gave truly new and great things to the world had always to wait long for recognition. He said he cared not a sou for recognition. I agreed that the act of creation was its own reward.
His moroseness might have alienated me if I had regarded myself as a nobody. But ah! hadn’t both John Lane and Aubrey Beardsley suggested that I should write an essay for the great new venture that was afoot—‘The Yellow Book’? And hadn’t Henry Harland, as editor, accepted my essay? And wasn’t it to be in the very first number? At Oxford I was still in statu pupillari. In London I regarded myself as very much indeed a graduate now—one whom no Soames could ruffle. Partly to show off, partly in sheer good-will, I told Soames he ought to contribute to ‘The Yellow Book.’ He uttered from the throat a sound of scorn for that publication.
Nevertheless, I did, a day or two later, tentatively ask Harland if he knew anything of the work of a man called Enoch Soames. Harland paused in the midst of his characteristic stride around the room, threw up his hands towards the ceiling, and groaned aloud: he had often met ‘that absurd creature’ in Paris, and this very morning had received some poems in manuscript from him.
‘Has he NO talent?’ I asked.
‘He has an income. He’s all right.’ Harland was the most joyous of men and most generous of critics, and he hated to talk of anything about which he couldn’t be enthusiastic. So I dropped the subject of Soames. The news that Soames had an income did take the edge off solicitude. I learned afterwards that he was the son of an unsuccessful and deceased bookseller in Preston, but had inherited an annuity of 300 pounds from a married aunt, and had no surviving relatives of any kind. Materially, then, he was ‘all right.’ But there was still a spiritual pathos about him, sharpened for me now by the possibility that even the praises of The Preston Telegraph might not have been forthcoming had he not been the son of a Preston man. He had a sort of weak doggedness which I could not but admire. Neither he nor his work received the slightest encouragement; but he persisted in behaving as a personage: always he kept his dingy little flag flying. Wherever congregated the jeunes feroces of the arts, in whatever Soho restaurant they had just discovered, in whatever music-hall they were most frequenting, there was Soames in the midst of them, or rather on the fringe of them, a dim but inevitable figure. He never sought to propitiate his fellow-writers, never bated a jot of his arrogance about his own work or of his contempt for theirs. To the painters he was respectful, even humble; but for the poets and prosaists of ‘The Yellow Book,’ and later of ‘The Savoy,’ he had never a word but of scorn. He wasn’t resented. It didn’t occur to anybody that he or his Catholic Diabolism mattered. When, in the autumn of ‘96, he brought out (at his own expense, this time) a third book, his last book, nobody said a word for or against it. I meant, but forgot, to buy it. I never saw it, and am ashamed to say I don’t even remember what it was called. But I did, at the time of its publication, say to Rothenstein that I thought poor old Soames was really a rather tragic figure, and that I believed he would literally die for want of recognition. Rothenstein scoffed. He said I was trying to get credit for a kind heart which I didn’t possess; and perhaps this was so. But at the private view of the New English Art Club, a few weeks later, I beheld a pastel portrait of ‘Enoch Soames, Esq.’ It was very like him, and very like Rothenstein to have done it. Soames was standing near it, in his soft hat and his waterproof cape, all through the afternoon. Anybody who knew him would have recognised the portrait at a glance, but nobody who didn’t know him would have recognised the portrait from its bystander: it ‘existed’ so much more than he; it was bound to. Also, it had not that expression of faint happiness which on this day was discernible, yes, in Soames’ countenance. Fame had breathed on him. Twice again in the course of the month I went to the New English, and on both occasions Soames himself was on view there. Looking back, I regard the close of that exhibition as having been virtually the close of his career. He had felt the breath of Fame against his cheek—so late, for such a little while; and at its withdrawal he gave in, gave up, gave out. He, who had never looked strong or well, looked ghastly now—a shadow of the shade he had once been. He still frequented the domino room, but, having lost all wish to excite curiosity, he no longer read books there. ‘You read only at the Museum now?’ asked I, with attempted cheerfulness. He said he never went there now. ‘No absinthe there,’ he muttered. It was the sort of thing that in the old days he would have said for effect; but it carried conviction now. Absinthe, erst but a point in the ‘personality’ he had striven so hard to build up, was solace and necessity now. He no longer called it ‘la sorciere glauque.’ He had shed away all his French phrases. He had become a plain, unvarnished, Preston man.
Failure, if it be a plain, unvarnished, complete failure, and even though it be a squalid failure, has always a certain dignity. I avoided Soames because he made me feel rather vulgar. John Lane had published, by this time, two little books of mine, and they had had a pleasant little success of esteem. I was a—slight but definite—‘personality.’ Frank Harris had engaged me to kick up my heels in The Saturday Review, Alfred Harmsworth was letting me do likewise in The Daily Mail. I was just what Soames wasn’t. And he shamed my gloss. Had I known that he really and firmly believed in the greatness of what he as an artist had achieved, I might not have shunned him. No man who hasn’t lost his vanity can be held to have altogether failed. Soames’ dignity was an illusion of mine. One day in the first week of June, 1897, that illusion went. But on the evening of that day Soames went too.
I had been out most of the morning, and, as it was too late to reach home in time for luncheon, I sought ‘the Vingtieme.’ This little place—Restaurant du Vingtieme Siecle, to give it its full title—had been discovered in ‘96 by the poets and prosaists, but had now been more or less abandoned in favour of some later find. I don’t think it lived long enough to justify its name; but at that time there it still was, in Greek Street, a few doors from Soho Square, and almost opposite to that house where, in the first years of the century, a little girl, and with her a boy named De Quincey, made nightly encampment in darkness and hunger among dust and rats and old legal parchments. The Vingtieme was but a small whitewashed room, leading out into the street at one end and into a kitchen at the other. The proprietor and cook was a Frenchman, known to us as Monsieur Vingtieme; the waiters were his two daughters, Rose and Berthe; and the food, according to faith, was good. The tables were so narrow, and were set so close together, that there was space for twelve of them, six jutting from either wall.
Only the two nearest to the door, as I went in, were occupied. On one side sat a tall, flashy, rather Mephistophelian man whom I had seen from time to time in the domino room and elsewhere. On the other side sat Soames. They made a queer contrast in that sunlit room—Soames sitting haggard in that hat and cape which nowhere at any season had I seen him doff, and this other, this keenly vital man, at sight of whom I more than ever wondered whether he were a diamond merchant, a conjurer, or the head of a private detective agency. I was sure Soames didn’t want my company; but I asked, as it would have seemed brutal not to, whether I might join him, and took the chair opposite to his. He was smoking a cigarette, with an untasted salmi of something on his plate and a half-empty bottle of Sauterne before him; and he was quite silent. I said that the preparations for the Jubilee made London impossible. (I rather liked them, really.) I professed a wish to go right away till the whole thing was over. In vain did I attune myself to his gloom. He seemed not to hear me nor even to see me. I felt that his behaviour made me ridiculous in the eyes of the other man. The gangway between the two rows of tables at the Vingtieme was hardly more than two feet wide (Rose and Berthe, in their ministrations, had always to edge past each other, quarrelling in whispers as they did so), and any one at the table abreast of yours was practically at yours. I thought our neighbour was amused at my failure to interest Soames, and so, as I could not explain to him that my insistence was merely charitable, I became silent. Without turning my head, I had him well within my range of vision. I hoped I looked less vulgar than he in contrast with Soames. I was sure he was not an Englishman, but what WAS his nationality? Though his jet-black hair was en brosse, I did not think he was French. To Berthe, who waited on him, he spoke French fluently, but with a hardly native idiom and accent. I gathered that this was his first visit to the Vingtieme; but Berthe was off-hand in her manner to him: he had not made a good impression. His eyes were handsome, but—like the Vingtieme’s tables—too narrow and set too close together. His nose was predatory, and the points of his moustache, waxed up beyond his nostrils, gave a fixity to his smile. Decidedly, he was sinister. And my sense of discomfort in his presence was intensified by the scarlet waistcoat which tightly, and so unseasonably in June, sheathed his ample chest. This waistcoat wasn’t wrong merely because of the heat, either. It was somehow all wrong in itself. It wouldn’t have done on Christmas morning. It would have struck a jarring note at the first night of ‘Hernani.’ I was trying to account for its wrongness when Soames suddenly and strangely broke silence. ‘A hundred years hence!’ he murmured, as in a trance.
‘We shall not be here!’ I briskly but fatuously added.
‘We shall not be here. No,’ he droned, ‘but the Museum will still be just where it is. And the reading-room, just where it is. And people will be able to go and read there.’ He inhaled sharply, and a spasm as of actual pain contorted his features.
I wondered what train of thought poor Soames had been following. He did not enlighten me when he said, after a long pause, ‘You think I haven’t minded.’
‘Minded what, Soames?’
‘Neglect. Failure.’
‘FAILURE?’ I said heartily. ‘Failure?’ I repeated vaguely. ‘Neglect—yes, perhaps; but that’s quite another matter. Of course you haven’t been—appreciated. But what then? Any artist who—who gives—’ What I wanted to say was, ‘Any artist who gives truly new and great things to the world has always to wait long for recognition’; but the flattery would not out: in the face of his misery, a misery so genuine and so unmasked, my lips would not say the words.
And then—he said them for me. I flushed. ‘That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?’ he asked.
‘How did you know?’
‘It’s what you said to me three years ago, when “Fungoids” was published.’ I flushed the more. I need not have done so at all, for ‘It’s the only important thing I ever heard you say,’ he continued. ‘And I’ve never forgotten it. It’s a true thing. It’s a horrible truth. But—d’you remember what I answered? I said “I don’t care a sou for recognition.” And you believed me. You’ve gone on believing I’m above that sort of thing. You’re shallow. What should YOU know of the feelings of a man like me? You imagine that a great artist’s faith in himself and in the verdict of posterity is enough to keep him happy.... You’ve never guessed at the bitterness and loneliness, the’—his voice broke; but presently he resumed, speaking with a force that I had never known in him. ‘Posterity! What use is it to ME? A dead man doesn’t know that people are visiting his grave—visiting his birthplace—putting up tablets to him—unveiling statues of him. A dead man can’t read the books that are written about him. A hundred years hence! Think of it! If I could come back to life then—just for a few hours—and go to the reading-room, and READ! Or better still: if I could be projected, now, at this moment, into that future, into that reading-room, just for this one afternoon! I’d sell myself body and soul to the devil, for that! Think of the pages and pages in the catalogue: “SOAMES, ENOCH” endlessly—endless editions, commentaries, prolegomena, biographies’—but here he was interrupted by a sudden loud creak of the chair at the next table. Our neighbour had half risen from his place. He was leaning towards us, apologetically intrusive.
‘Excuse—permit me,’ he said softly. ‘I have been unable not to hear. Might I take a liberty? In this little restaurant-sans-facon’—he spread wide his hands—‘might I, as the phrase is, “cut in”?’
I could but signify our acquiescence. Berthe had appeared at the kitchen door, thinking the stranger wanted his bill. He waved her away with his cigar, and in another moment had seated himself beside me, commanding a full view of Soames.
‘Though not an Englishman,’ he explained, ‘I know my London well, Mr. Soames. Your name and fame—Mr. Beerbohm’s too—very known to me. Your point is: who am I?’ He glanced quickly over his shoulder, and in a lowered voice said ‘I am the Devil.’
I couldn’t help it: I laughed. I tried not to, I knew there was nothing to laugh at, my rudeness shamed me, but—I laughed with increasing volume. The Devil’s quiet dignity, the surprise and disgust of his raised eyebrows, did but the more dissolve me. I rocked to and fro, I lay back aching. I behaved deplorably.
‘I am a gentleman, and,’ he said with intense emphasis, ‘I thought I was in the company of GENTLEMEN.’
‘Don’t!’ I gasped faintly. ‘Oh, don’t!’
‘Curious, nicht wahr?’ I heard him say to Soames. ‘There is a type of person to whom the very mention of my name is—oh-so-awfully-funny! In your theatres the dullest comedian needs only to say “The Devil!” and right away they give him “the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind.” Is it not so?’
I had now just breath enough to offer my apologies. He accepted them, but coldly, and re-addressed himself to Soames.
‘I am a man of business,’ he said, ‘and always I would put things through “right now,” as they say in the States. You are a poet. Les affaires—you detest them. So be it. But with me you will deal, eh? What you have said just now gives me furiously to hope.’
Soames had not moved, except to light a fresh cigarette. He sat crouched forward, with his elbows squared on the table, and his head just above the level of his hands, staring up at the Devil. ‘Go on,’ he nodded. I had no remnant of laughter in me now.
‘It will be the more pleasant, our little deal,’ the Devil went on, ‘because you are—I mistake not?—a Diabolist.’
‘A Catholic Diabolist,’ said Soames.
The Devil accepted the reservation genially. ‘You wish,’ he resumed, ‘to visit now—this afternoon as-ever-is—the reading-room of the British Museum, yes? but of a hundred years hence, yes? Parfaitement. Time—an illusion. Past and future—they are as ever-present as the present, or at any rate only what you call “just-round-the-corner.” I switch you on to any date. I project you—pouf! You wish to be in the reading-room just as it will be on the afternoon of June 3, 1997? You wish to find yourself standing in that room, just past the swing-doors, this very minute, yes? and to stay there till closing time? Am I right?’
Soames nodded.
The Devil looked at his watch. ‘Ten past two,’ he said. ‘Closing time in summer same then as now: seven o’clock. That will give you almost five hours. At seven o’clock—pouf!—you find yourself again here, sitting at this table. I am dining to-night dans le monde—dans le higlif. That concludes my present visit to your great city. I come and fetch you here, Mr. Soames, on my way home.’
‘Home?’ I echoed.
‘Be it never so humble!’ said the Devil lightly.
‘All right,’ said Soames.
‘Soames!’ I entreated. But my friend moved not a muscle.
The Devil had made as though to stretch forth his hand across the table and touch Soames’ forearm; but he paused in his gesture.
‘A hundred years hence, as now,’ he smiled, ‘no smoking allowed in the reading-room. You would better therefore——’
Soames removed the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it into his glass of Sauterne.
‘Soames!’ again I cried. ‘Can’t you’—but the Devil had now stretched forth his hand across the table. He brought it slowly down on—the tablecloth. Soames’ chair was empty. His cigarette floated sodden in his wine-glass. There was no other trace of him.
For a few moments the Devil let his hand rest where it lay, gazing at me out of the corners of his eyes, vulgarly triumphant.
A shudder shook me. With an effort I controlled myself and rose from my chair. ‘Very clever,’ I said condescendingly. ‘But—“The Time Machine” is a delightful book, don’t you think? So entirely original!’
‘You are pleased to sneer,’ said the Devil, who had also risen, ‘but it is one thing to write about an impossible machine; it is a quite other thing to be a Supernatural Power.’ All the same, I had scored.
Berthe had come forth at the sound of our rising. I explained to her that Mr. Soames had been called away, and that both he and I would be dining here. It was not until I was out in the open air that I began to feel giddy. I have but the haziest recollection of what I did, where I wandered, in the glaring sunshine of that endless afternoon. I remember the sound of carpenters’ hammers all along Piccadilly, and the bare chaotic look of the half-erected ‘stands.’ Was it in the Green Park, or in Kensington Gardens, or WHERE was it that I sat on a chair beneath a tree, trying to read an evening paper? There was a phrase in the leading article that went on repeating itself in my fagged mind—‘Little is hidden from this august Lady full of the garnered wisdom of sixty years of Sovereignty.’ I remember wildly conceiving a letter (to reach Windsor by express messenger told to await answer):
‘MADAM,—Well knowing that your Majesty is full of the garnered wisdom of sixty years of Sovereignty, I venture to ask your advice in the following delicate matter. Mr. Enoch Soames, whose poems you may or may not know,’....
Was there NO way of helping him—saving him? A bargain was a bargain, and I was the last man to aid or abet any one in wriggling out of a reasonable obligation. I wouldn’t have lifted a little finger to save Faust. But poor Soames!—doomed to pay without respite an eternal price for nothing but a fruitless search and a bitter disillusioning....
Odd and uncanny it seemed to me that he, Soames, in the flesh, in the waterproof cape, was at this moment living in the last decade of the next century, poring over books not yet written, and seeing and seen by men not yet born. Uncannier and odder still, that to-night and evermore he would be in Hell. Assuredly, truth was stranger than fiction.
Endless that afternoon was. Almost I wished I had gone with Soames—not indeed to stay in the reading-room, but to sally forth for a brisk sight-seeing walk around a new London. I wandered restlessly out of the Park I had sat in. Vainly I tried to imagine myself an ardent tourist from the eighteenth century. Intolerable was the strain of the slow-passing and empty minutes. Long before seven o’clock I was back at the Vingtieme.
I sat there just where I had sat for luncheon. Air came in listlessly through the open door behind me. Now and again Rose or Berthe appeared for a moment. I had told them I would not order any dinner till Mr. Soames came. A hurdy-gurdy began to play, abruptly drowning the noise of a quarrel between some Frenchmen further up the street. Whenever the tune was changed I heard the quarrel still raging. I had bought another evening paper on my way. I unfolded it. My eyes gazed ever away from it to the clock over the kitchen door....
Five minutes, now, to the hour! I remembered that clocks in restaurants are kept five minutes fast. I concentrated my eyes on the paper. I vowed I would not look away from it again. I held it upright, at its full width, close to my face, so that I had no view of anything but it.... Rather a tremulous sheet? Only because of the draught, I told myself.
My arms gradually became stiff; they ached; but I could not drop them—now. I had a suspicion, I had a certainty. Well, what then?... What else had I come for? Yet I held tight that barrier of newspaper. Only the sound of Berthe’s brisk footstep from the kitchen enabled me, forced me, to drop it, and to utter:
‘What shall we have to eat, Soames?’
‘Il est souffrant, ce pauvre Monsieur Soames?’ asked Berthe.
‘He’s only—tired.’ I asked her to get some wine—Burgundy—and whatever food might be ready. Soames sat crouched forward against the table, exactly as when last I had seen him. It was as though he had never moved—he who had moved so unimaginably far. Once or twice in the afternoon it had for an instant occurred to me that perhaps his journey was not to be fruitless—that perhaps we had all been wrong in our estimate of the works of Enoch Soames. That we had been horribly right was horribly clear from the look of him. But ‘Don’t be discouraged,’ I falteringly said. ‘Perhaps it’s only that you—didn’t leave enough time. Two, three centuries hence, perhaps—’
‘Yes,’ his voice came. ‘I’ve thought of that.’
‘And now—now for the more immediate future! Where are you going to hide? How would it be if you caught the Paris express from Charing Cross? Almost an hour to spare. Don’t go on to Paris. Stop at Calais. Live in Calais. He’d never think of looking for you in Calais.’
‘It’s like my luck,’ he said, ‘to spend my last hours on earth with an ass.’ But I was not offended. ‘And a treacherous ass,’ he strangely added, tossing across to me a crumpled bit of paper which he had been holding in his hand. I glanced at the writing on it—some sort of gibberish, apparently. I laid it impatiently aside.
‘Come, Soames! pull yourself together! This isn’t a mere matter of life and death. It’s a question of eternal torment, mind you! You don’t mean to say you’re going to wait limply here till the Devil comes to fetch you?’
‘I can’t do anything else. I’ve no choice.’
‘Come! This is “trusting and encouraging” with a vengeance! This is Diabolism run mad!’ I filled his glass with wine. ‘Surely, now that you’ve SEEN the brute—’
‘It’s no good abusing him.’
‘You must admit there’s nothing Miltonic about him, Soames.’
‘I don’t say he’s not rather different from what I expected.’
‘He’s a vulgarian, he’s a swell-mobsman, he’s the sort of man who hangs about the corridors of trains going to the Riviera and steals ladies’ jewel-cases. Imagine eternal torment presided over by HIM!’
‘You don’t suppose I look forward to it, do you?’
‘Then why not slip quietly out of the way?’
Again and again I filled his glass, and always, mechanically, he emptied it; but the wine kindled no spark of enterprise in him. He did not eat, and I myself ate hardly at all. I did not in my heart believe that any dash for freedom could save him. The chase would be swift, the capture certain. But better anything than this passive, meek, miserable waiting. I told Soames that for the honour of the human race he ought to make some show of resistance. He asked what the human race had ever done for him. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘can’t you understand that I’m in his power? You saw him touch me, didn’t you? There’s an end of it. I’ve no will. I’m sealed.’
I made a gesture of despair. He went on repeating the word ‘sealed.’ I began to realise that the wine had clouded his brain. No wonder! Foodless he had gone into futurity, foodless he still was. I urged him to eat at any rate some bread. It was maddening to think that he, who had so much to tell, might tell nothing. ‘How was it all,’ I asked, ‘yonder? Come! Tell me your adventures.’
‘They’d make first-rate “copy,” wouldn’t they?’
‘I’m awfully sorry for you, Soames, and I make all possible allowances; but what earthly right have you to insinuate that I should make “copy,” as you call it, out of you?’
The poor fellow pressed his hands to his forehead. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I had some reason, I know.... I’ll try to remember.’
‘That’s right. Try to remember everything. Eat a little more bread. What did the reading-room look like?’
‘Much as usual,’ he at length muttered.
‘Many people there?’
‘Usual sort of number.’
‘What did they look like?’
Soames tried to visualise them. ‘They all,’ he presently remembered, ‘looked very like one another.’
My mind took a fearsome leap. ‘All dressed in Jaeger?’
‘Yes. I think so. Greyish-yellowish stuff.’
‘A sort of uniform?’ He nodded. ‘With a number on it, perhaps?—a number on a large disc of metal sewn on to the left sleeve? DKF 78,910—that sort of thing?’ It was even so. ‘And all of them—men and women alike—looking very well-cared-for? very Utopian? and smelling rather strongly of carbolic? and all of them quite hairless?’ I was right every time. Soames was only not sure whether the men and women were hairless or shorn. ‘I hadn’t time to look at them very closely,’ he explained.
‘No, of course not. But——’
‘They stared at ME, I can tell you. I attracted a great deal of attention.’ At last he had done that! ‘I think I rather scared them. They moved away whenever I came near. They followed me about at a distance, wherever I went. The men at the round desk in the middle seemed to have a sort of panic whenever I went to make inquiries.’
‘What did you do when you arrived?’
Well, he had gone straight to the catalogue, of course—to the S volumes, and had stood long before SN—SOF, unable to take this volume out of the shelf, because his heart was beating so.... At first, he said, he wasn’t disappointed—he only thought there was some new arrangement. He went to the middle desk and asked where the catalogue of TWENTIETH-century books was kept. He gathered that there was still only one catalogue. Again he looked up his name, stared at the three little pasted slips he had known so well. Then he went and sat down for a long time....
‘And then,’ he droned, ‘I looked up the “Dictionary of National Biography” and some encyclopedias.... I went back to the middle desk and asked what was the best modern book on late nineteenth-century literature. They told me Mr. T. K. Nupton’s book was considered the best. I looked it up in the catalogue and filled in a form for it. It was brought to me. My name wasn’t in the index, but—Yes!’ he said with a sudden change of tone. ‘That’s what I’d forgotten. Where’s that bit of paper? Give it me back.’
I, too, had forgotten that cryptic screed. I found it fallen on the floor, and handed it to him.
He smoothed it out, nodding and smiling at me disagreeably. ‘I found myself glancing through Nupton’s book,’ he resumed. ‘Not very easy reading. Some sort of phonetic spelling.... All the modern books I saw were phonetic.’
‘Then I don’t want to hear any more, Soames, please.’
‘The proper names seemed all to be spelt in the old way. But for that, I mightn’t have noticed my own name.’
‘Your own name? Really? Soames, I’m VERY glad.’
‘And yours.’
‘No!’
‘I thought I should find you waiting here to-night. So I took the trouble to copy out the passage. Read it.’
I snatched the paper. Soames’ handwriting was characteristically dim. It, and the noisome spelling, and my excitement, made me all the slower to grasp what T. K. Nupton was driving at.
The document lies before me at this moment. Strange that the words I here copy out for you were copied out for me by poor Soames just seventy-eight years hence....
From p. 234 of ‘Inglish Littracher 1890-1900’ bi T. K. Nupton, publishd bi th Stait, 1992:
‘Fr egzarmpl, a riter ov th time, naimd Max Beerbohm, hoo woz stil alive in th twentieth senchri, rote a stauri in wich e pautraid an immajnari karrakter kauld “Enoch Soames”—a thurd-rait poit hoo beleevz imself a grate jeneus an maix a bargin with th Devvl in auder ter no wot posterriti thinx ov im! It iz a sumwot labud sattire but not without vallu az showing hou seriusli the yung men ov th aiteen-ninetiz took themselvz. Nou that the littreri profeshn haz bin auganized az a departmnt of publik servis, our riters hav found their levvl an hav lernt ter doo their duti without thort ov th morro. “Th laibrer iz werthi ov hiz hire,” an that iz aul. Thank hevvn we hav no Enoch Soameses amung us to-dai!’
I found that by murmuring the words aloud (a device which I commend to my reader) I was able to master them, little by little. The clearer they became, the greater was my bewilderment, my distress and horror. The whole thing was a nightmare. Afar, the great grisly background of what was in store for the poor dear art of letters; here, at the table, fixing on me a gaze that made me hot all over, the poor fellow whom—whom evidently... but no: whatever down-grade my character might take in coming years, I should never be such a brute as to——
Again I examined the screed. ‘Immajnari’—but here Soames was, no more imaginary, alas! than I. And ‘labud’—what on earth was that? (To this day, I have never made out that word.) ‘It’s all very—baffling,’ I at length stammered.
Soames said nothing, but cruelly did not cease to look at me.
‘Are you sure,’ I temporised, ‘quite sure you copied the thing out correctly?’
‘Quite.’
‘Well, then it’s this wretched Nupton who must have made—must be going to make—some idiotic mistake.... Look here, Soames! you know me better than to suppose that I.... After all, the name “Max Beerbohm” is not at all an uncommon one, and there must be several Enoch Soameses running around—or rather, “Enoch Soames” is a name that might occur to any one writing a story. And I don’t write stories: I’m an essayist, an observer, a recorder.... I admit that it’s an extraordinary coincidence. But you must see——’
‘I see the whole thing,’ said Soames quietly. And he added, with a touch of his old manner, but with more dignity than I had ever known in him, ‘Parlons d’autre chose.’
I accepted that suggestion very promptly. I returned straight to the more immediate future. I spent most of the long evening in renewed appeals to Soames to slip away and seek refuge somewhere. I remember saying at last that if indeed I was destined to write about him, the supposed ‘stauri’ had better have at least a happy ending. Soames repeated those last three words in a tone of intense scorn. ‘In Life and in Art,’ he said, ‘all that matters is an INEVITABLE ending.’
‘But,’ I urged, more hopefully than I felt, ‘an ending that can be avoided ISN’T inevitable.’
‘You aren’t an artist,’ he rasped. ‘And you’re so hopelessly not an artist that, so far from being able to imagine a thing and make it seem true, you’re going to make even a true thing seem as if you’d made it up. You’re a miserable bungler. And it’s like my luck.’
I protested that the miserable bungler was not I—was not going to be I—but T. K. Nupton; and we had a rather heated argument, in the thick of which it suddenly seemed to me that Soames saw he was in the wrong: he had quite physically cowered. But I wondered why—and now I guessed with a cold throb just why—he stared so, past me. The bringer of that ‘inevitable ending’ filled the doorway.
I managed to turn in my chair and to say, not without a semblance of lightness, ‘Aha, come in!’ Dread was indeed rather blunted in me by his looking so absurdly like a villain in a melodrama. The sheen of his tilted hat and of his shirt-front, the repeated twists he was giving to his moustache, and most of all the magnificence of his sneer, gave token that he was there only to be foiled.
He was at our table in a stride. ‘I am sorry,’ he sneered witheringly, ‘to break up your pleasant party, but—’
‘You don’t: you complete it,’ I assured him. ‘Mr. Soames and I want to have a little talk with you. Won’t you sit? Mr. Soames got nothing—frankly nothing—by his journey this afternoon. We don’t wish to say that the whole thing was a swindle—a common swindle. On the contrary, we believe you meant well. But of course the bargain, such as it was, is off.’
The Devil gave no verbal answer. He merely looked at Soames and pointed with rigid forefinger to the door. Soames was wretchedly rising from his chair when, with a desperate quick gesture, I swept together two dinner-knives that were on the table, and laid their blades across each other. The Devil stepped sharp back against the table behind him, averting his face and shuddering.
‘You are not superstitious!’ he hissed.
‘Not at all,’ I smiled.
‘Soames!’ he said as to an underling, but without turning his face, ‘put those knives straight!’
With an inhibitive gesture to my friend, ‘Mr. Soames,’ I said emphatically to the Devil, ‘is a CATHOLIC Diabolist’; but my poor friend did the Devil’s bidding, not mine; and now, with his master’s eyes again fixed on him, he arose, he shuffled past me. I tried to speak. It was he that spoke. ‘Try,’ was the prayer he threw back at me as the Devil pushed him roughly out through the door, ‘TRY to make them know that I did exist!’
In another instant I too was through that door. I stood staring all ways—up the street, across it, down it. There was moonlight and lamplight, but there was not Soames nor that other.
Dazed, I stood there. Dazed, I turned back, at length, into the little room; and I suppose I paid Berthe or Rose for my dinner and luncheon, and for Soames’: I hope so, for I never went to the Vingtieme again. Ever since that night I have avoided Greek Street altogether. And for years I did not set foot even in Soho Square, because on that same night it was there that I paced and loitered, long and long, with some such dull sense of hope as a man has in not straying far from the place where he has lost something.... ‘Round and round the shutter’d Square’—that line came back to me on my lonely beat, and with it the whole stanza, ringing in my brain and bearing in on me how tragically different from the happy scene imagined by him was the poet’s actual experience of that prince in whom of all princes we should put not our trust.
But—strange how the mind of an essayist, be it never so stricken, roves and ranges!—I remember pausing before a wide doorstep and wondering if perchance it was on this very one that the young De Quincey lay ill and faint while poor Ann flew as fast as her feet would carry her to Oxford Street, the ‘stony-hearted stepmother’ of them both, and came back bearing that ‘glass of port wine and spices’ but for which he might, so he thought, actually have died. Was this the very doorstep that the old De Quincey used to revisit in homage? I pondered Ann’s fate, the cause of her sudden vanishing from the ken of her boy-friend; and presently I blamed myself for letting the past over-ride the present. Poor vanished Soames!
And for myself, too, I began to be troubled. What had I better do? Would there be a hue and cry—Mysterious Disappearance of an Author, and all that? He had last been seen lunching and dining in my company. Hadn’t I better get a hansom and drive straight to Scotland Yard?... They would think I was a lunatic. After all, I reassured myself, London was a very large place, and one very dim figure might easily drop out of it unobserved—now especially, in the blinding glare of the near Jubilee. Better say nothing at all, I thought.
And I was right. Soames’ disappearance made no stir at all. He was utterly forgotten before any one, so far as I am aware, noticed that he was no longer hanging around. Now and again some poet or prosaist may have said to another, ‘What has become of that man Soames?’ but I never heard any such question asked. The solicitor through whom he was paid his annuity may be presumed to have made inquiries, but no echo of these resounded. There was something rather ghastly to me in the general unconsciousness that Soames had existed, and more than once I caught myself wondering whether Nupton, that babe unborn, were going to be right in thinking him a figment of my brain.
In that extract from Nupton’s repulsive book there is one point which perhaps puzzles you. How is it that the author, though I have here mentioned him by name and have quoted the exact words he is going to write, is not going to grasp the obvious corollary that I have invented nothing? The answer can be only this: Nupton will not have read the later passages of this memoir. Such lack of thoroughness is a serious fault in any one who undertakes to do scholar’s work. And I hope these words will meet the eye of some contemporary rival to Nupton and be the undoing of Nupton.
I like to think that some time between 1992 and 1997 somebody will have looked up this memoir, and will have forced on the world his inevitable and startling conclusions. And I have reasons for believing that this will be so. You realise that the reading-room into which Soames was projected by the Devil was in all respects precisely as it will be on the afternoon of June 3, 1997. You realise, therefore, that on that afternoon, when it comes round, there the self-same crowd will be, and there Soames too will be, punctually, he and they doing precisely what they did before. Recall now Soames’ account of the sensation he made. You may say that the mere difference of his costume was enough to make him sensational in that uniformed crowd. You wouldn’t say so if you had ever seen him. I assure you that in no period could Soames be anything but dim. The fact that people are going to stare at him, and follow him around, and seem afraid of him, can be explained only on the hypothesis that they will somehow have been prepared for his ghostly visitation. They will have been awfully waiting to see whether he really would come. And when he does come the effect will of course be—awful.
An authentic, guaranteed, proven ghost, but—only a ghost, alas! Only that. In his first visit, Soames was a creature of flesh and blood, whereas the creatures into whose midst he was projected were but ghosts, I take it—solid, palpable, vocal, but unconscious and automatic ghosts, in a building that was itself an illusion. Next time, that building and those creatures will be real. It is of Soames that there will be but the semblance. I wish I could think him destined to revisit the world actually, physically, consciously. I wish he had this one brief escape, this one small treat, to look forward to. I never forget him for long. He is where he is, and forever. The more rigid moralists among you may say he has only himself to blame. For my part, I think he has been very hardly used. It is well that vanity should be chastened; and Enoch Soames’ vanity was, I admit, above the average, and called for special treatment. But there was no need for vindictiveness. You say he contracted to pay the price he is paying; yes; but I maintain that he was induced to do so by fraud. Well-informed in all things, the Devil must have known that my friend would gain nothing by his visit to futurity. The whole thing was a very shabby trick. The more I think of it, the more detestable the Devil seems to me.
Of him I have caught sight several times, here and there, since that day at the Vingtieme. Only once, however, have I seen him at close quarters. This was in Paris. I was walking, one afternoon, along the Rue d’Antin, when I saw him advancing from the opposite direction—over-dressed as ever, and swinging an ebony cane, and altogether behaving as though the whole pavement belonged to him. At thought of Enoch Soames and the myriads of other sufferers eternally in this brute’s dominion, a great cold wrath filled me, and I drew myself up to my full height. But—well, one is so used to nodding and smiling in the street to anybody whom one knows that the action becomes almost independent of oneself: to prevent it requires a very sharp effort and great presence of mind. I was miserably aware, as I passed the Devil, that I nodded and smiled to him. And my shame was the deeper and hotter because he, if you please, stared straight at me with the utmost haughtiness.
To be cut—deliberately cut—by HIM! I was, I still am, furious at having had that happen to me.
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