Enoch Soames
by
Max Beerbohm
Enoch Soames
A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties
By MAX BEERBOHM
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. It was as I feared: 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's failure to impress himself on his decade.
I dare say 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 lifetime, 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 withtand 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 Daudet and the
Goncourts. 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!" (Forgive me that theory. Remember the waging of even
the South African War was not yet.)
It was the hour before dinner. We drank vermuth. 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 gray
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 focused 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 a few 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 bien ni 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 with 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, and waved 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 Fuji-yama) imposed certain limitations. If other arts than painting
were not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practiced
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 of "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 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 rather thought, 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 not 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 had passed a table at which sat
a pale man with an open book before him. He had looked from his book
to me, and I looked back over my shoulder with a vague sense that I
ought to have recognized 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's 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."
"I see, yes. I had rather gathered from the preface to 'Negations'
that you were a--a Catholic."
"Je l'etais a cette epoque. In fact, I still am.
I am a Catholic diabolist."
But 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 sha'n'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-gray 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's
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's 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 strolled 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's 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 other 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. . . . These tripping numbers.--"The
Preston Telegraph."
was the only lure offered in advertisements by Soames's publisher. I had
hoped 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 toward 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 afterward that he was the son of an unsuccessful and
deceased bookseller in Preston, but had inherited an annuity of three
hundred 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 frequently, 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 recognized the portrait
at a glance, but nobody who didn't know him would have recognized 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
that day was discernible, yes, in Soames's 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?" I
asked, with attempted cheerfulness. He said he never went there now.
"No absinthe there," he muttered. It was the sort of thing that in 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's 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 favor 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 each
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 or even to see me. I felt that his behavior 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, quarreling in whispers as they did so), and any one at the
table abreast of yours was virtually at yours. I thought our neighbor 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 offhand 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 mustache, waxed up behind 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 flushed at all. "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 crack of the chair at the
next table. Our neighbor had half risen from his place. He was leaning
toward 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--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 theaters the dullest comedien
needs only to say 'The devil!' and right away they give him 'the loud
laugh what 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, 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 table-cloth. Soames's 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 an 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 farther 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 draft, 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 or 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 mobs-man, 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 honor 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 realize 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. He sat plunged in thought.
"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 visualize them.
"They all," he presently remembered, "looked very like one
another."
My mind took a fearsome leap.
"All dressed in sanitary woolen?"
"Yes, I think so. Grayish-yellowish stuff."
"A sort of uniform?" He nodded. "With a number on it perhaps--a
number on a large disk of metal strapped round the left arm? D. K. F.
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's 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 eighty-two years hence!
From page 234 of "Inglish Littracher 1890-1900" bi T. K. Nupton,
publishd bi th Stait, 1992.
Fr egzarmpl, a riter ov th time, naimed Max Beerbohm, hoo woz
stil alive in th twentith 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 th 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 temporized, "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 come 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
mustache, 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's; 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 door-step 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 door-step
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 override 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's 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. As for his landlady in Dyott Street,
no doubt he had paid her weekly, and what possessions he may have had
in his rooms were enough to save her from fretting. 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 reason for believing that
this will be so. You realize 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 realize, therefore, that on that afternoon,
when it comes round, there the selfsame crowd will be, and there Soames
will be, punctually, he and they doing precisely what they did before.
Recall now Soames's 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, and I assure you that in no period would 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, proved ghost, but; only a ghost, alas!
Only that. In his first visit Soames was a creature of flesh and blood,
whereas the creatures among whom 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's
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 a couple of years ago, in Paris. I was walking
one afternoon along the rue d'Antin, and I saw him advancing from the
opposite direction, overdressed 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.
Back to Full Books
|