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 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
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 Café
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 Café 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 fidèle,"
he told Rothenstein, "à la sorcière 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 Mendès 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 [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'Après-midi d'un faune" without extracting a glimmer of
meaning; yet Mallarmé, 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
Mallarmé'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'étais à
cette époque. 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 malgré lui." France
had had only one poet--Villon; "and two thirds of Villon were sheer
journalism." Verlaine was "an épicier malgré 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.
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.
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 féroces 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
sorcière 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 Vingtième. This little place--Restaurant du Vingtième Siècle, 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 Vingtième 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 Vingtième; 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 Vingtième 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
Vingtième; but Berthe was offhand in her manner to him: he had not made a good
impression. His eyes were handsome, but, like the Vingtième'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-façon--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 comédien 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 Vingtième.
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 Vingtième 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 Vingtième. 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.