ENOCH SOAMES




When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by
Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for
SOAMES, ENOCH. I had feared he would not be there. He was not there.
But everybody else was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or
remembered but faintly, lived again for me, they and their work, in Mr.
Holbrook Jackson’s pages. The book was as thorough as it was brilliantly
written. And thus the omission found by me was an all the deadlier
record of poor Soames’ failure to impress himself on his decade.

I daresay I am the only person who noticed the omission. Soames had
failed so piteously as all that! Nor is there a counterpoise in the
thought that if he had had some measure of success he might have passed,
like those others, out of my mind, to return only at the historian’s
beck. It is true that had his gifts, such as they were, been
acknowledged in his life-time, he would never have made the bargain I
saw him make--that strange bargain whose results have kept him always in
the foreground of my memory. But it is from those very results that the
full piteousness of him glares out.

Not my compassion, however, impels me to write of him. For his sake,
poor fellow, I should be inclined to keep my pen out of the ink. It is
ill to deride the dead. And how can I write about Enoch Soames without
making him ridiculous? Or rather, how am I to hush up the horrid fact
that he WAS ridiculous? I shall not be able to do that. Yet, sooner or
later, write about him I must. You will see, in due course, that I have
no option. And I may as well get the thing done now.


In the Summer Term of ‘93 a bolt from the blue flashed down on Oxford.
It drove deep, it hurtlingly embedded itself in the soil. Dons and
undergraduates stood around, rather pale, discussing nothing but it.
Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. Its name? Will Rothenstein.
Its aim? To do a series of twenty-four portraits in lithograph. These
were to be published from the Bodley Head, London. The matter was
urgent. Already the Warden of A, and the Master of B, and the Regius
Professor of C, had meekly ‘sat.’ Dignified and doddering old men, who
had never consented to sit to any one, could not withstand this dynamic
little stranger. He did not sue: he invited; he did not invite: he
commanded. He was twenty-one years old. He wore spectacles that flashed
more than any other pair ever seen. He was a wit. He was brimful of
ideas. He knew Whistler. He knew Edmond de Goncourt. He knew every one
in Paris. He knew them all by heart. He was Paris in Oxford. It was
whispered that, so soon as he had polished off his selection of dons,
he was going to include a few undergraduates. It was a proud day for me
when I--I--was included. I liked Rothenstein not less than I feared him;
and there arose between us a friendship that has grown ever warmer, and
been more and more valued by me, with every passing year.

At the end of Term he settled in--or rather, meteoritically
into--London. It was to him I owed my first knowledge of that forever
enchanting little world-in-itself, Chelsea, and my first acquaintance
with Walter Sickert and other august elders who dwelt there. It was
Rothenstein that took me to see, in Cambridge Street, Pimlico, a young
man whose drawings were already famous among the few--Aubrey Beardsley,
by name. With Rothenstein I paid my first visit to the Bodley Head.
By him I was inducted into another haunt of intellect and daring, the
domino room of the Cafe Royal.

There, on that October evening--there, in that exuberant vista of
gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those opposing mirrors and
upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the painted
and pagan ceiling, and with the hum of presumably cynical conversation
broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of dominoes shuffled
on marble tables, I drew a deep breath, and ‘This indeed,’ said I to
myself, ‘is life!’

It was the hour before dinner. We drank vermouth. Those who knew
Rothenstein were pointing him out to those who knew him only by name.
Men were constantly coming in through the swing-doors and wandering
slowly up and down in search of vacant tables, or of tables occupied by
friends. One of these rovers interested me because I was sure he wanted
to catch Rothenstein’s eye. He had twice passed our table, with a
hesitating look; but Rothenstein, in the thick of a disquisition on
Puvis de Chavannes, had not seen him. He was a stooping, shambling
person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair. He had
a thin vague beard--or rather, he had a chin on which a large number
of hairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its retreat. He was an
odd-looking person; but in the ‘nineties odd apparitions were more
frequent, I think, than they are now. The young writers of that era--and
I was sure this man was a writer--strove earnestly to be distinct in
aspect. This man had striven unsuccessfully. He wore a soft black hat
of clerical kind but of Bohemian intention, and a grey waterproof cape
which, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed to be romantic. I
decided that ‘dim’ was the mot juste for him. I had already essayed to
write, and was immensely keen on the mot juste, that Holy Grail of the
period.

The dim man was now again approaching our table, and this time he made
up his mind to pause in front of it. ‘You don’t remember me,’ he said in
a toneless voice.

Rothenstein brightly focussed him. ‘Yes, I do,’ he replied after a
moment, with pride rather than effusion--pride in a retentive memory.
‘Edwin Soames.’

‘Enoch Soames,’ said Enoch.

‘Enoch Soames,’ repeated Rothenstein in a tone implying that it was
enough to have hit on the surname. ‘We met in Paris two or three times
when you were living there. We met at the Cafe Groche.’

‘And I came to your studio once.’

‘Oh yes; I was sorry I was out.’

‘But you were in. You showed me some of your paintings, you know.... I
hear you’re in Chelsea now.’

‘Yes.’

I almost wondered that Mr. Soames did not, after this monosyllable, pass
along. He stood patiently there, rather like a dumb animal, rather like
a donkey looking over a gate. A sad figure, his. It occurred to me that
‘hungry’ was perhaps the mot juste for him; but--hungry for what? He
looked as if he had little appetite for anything. I was sorry for him;
and Rothenstein, though he had not invited him to Chelsea, did ask him
to sit down and have something to drink.

Seated, he was more self-assertive. He flung back the wings of his cape
with a gesture which--had not those wings been waterproof--might
have seemed to hurl defiance at things in general. And he ordered an
absinthe. ‘Je me tiens toujours fidele,’ he told Rothenstein, ‘a la
sorciere glauque.’

‘It is bad for you,’ said Rothenstein dryly.

‘Nothing is bad for one,’ answered Soames. ‘Dans ce monde il n’y a ni de
bien ni de mal.’

‘Nothing good and nothing bad? How do you mean?’

‘I explained it all in the preface to “Negations.”’

‘“Negations”?’

‘Yes; I gave you a copy of it.’

‘Oh yes, of course. But did you explain--for instance--that there was no
such thing as bad or good grammar?’

‘N-no,’ said Soames. ‘Of course in Art there is the good and the evil.
But in Life--no.’ He was rolling a cigarette. He had weak white hands,
not well washed, and with finger-tips much stained by nicotine. ‘In Life
there are illusions of good and evil, but’--his voice trailed away to a
murmur in which the words ‘vieux jeu’ and ‘rococo’ were faintly audible.
I think he felt he was not doing himself justice, and feared that
Rothenstein was going to point out fallacies. Anyhow, he cleared his
throat and said ‘Parlons d’autre chose.’

It occurs to you that he was a fool? It didn’t to me. I was young, and
had not the clarity of judgment that Rothenstein already had. Soames was
quite five or six years older than either of us. Also, he had written a
book.

It was wonderful to have written a book.

If Rothenstein had not been there, I should have revered Soames. Even as
it was, I respected him. And I was very near indeed to reverence when
he said he had another book coming out soon. I asked if I might ask what
kind of book it was to be.

‘My poems,’ he answered. Rothenstein asked if this was to be the title
of the book. The poet meditated on this suggestion, but said he rather
thought of giving the book no title at all. ‘If a book is good in
itself--’ he murmured, waving his cigarette.

Rothenstein objected that absence of title might be bad for the sale
of a book. ‘If,’ he urged, ‘I went into a bookseller’s and said simply
“Have you got?” or “Have you a copy of?” how would they know what I
wanted?’

‘Oh, of course I should have my name on the cover,’ Soames answered
earnestly. ‘And I rather want,’ he added, looking hard at Rothenstein,
‘to have a drawing of myself as frontispiece.’ Rothenstein admitted
that this was a capital idea, and mentioned that he was going into the
country and would be there for some time. He then looked at his watch,
exclaimed at the hour, paid the waiter, and went away with me to dinner.
Soames remained at his post of fidelity to the glaucous witch.

‘Why were you so determined not to draw him?’ I asked.

‘Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn’t exist?’

‘He is dim,’ I admitted. But my mot juste fell flat. Rothenstein
repeated that Soames was non-existent.

Still, Soames had written a book. I asked if Rothenstein had read
‘Negations.’ He said he had looked into it, ‘but,’ he added crisply,
‘I don’t profess to know anything about writing.’ A reservation very
characteristic of the period! Painters would not then allow that any one
outside their own order had a right to any opinion about painting. This
law (graven on the tablets brought down by Whistler from the summit of
Fujiyama) imposed certain limitations. If other arts than painting were
not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practised them,
the law tottered--the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did not hold good.
Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book without warning
you at any rate that his opinion was worthless. No one is a better judge
of literature than Rothenstein; but it wouldn’t have done to tell him
so in those days; and I knew that I must form an unaided judgment on
‘Negations.’

Not to buy a book of which I had met the author face to face would
have been for me in those days an impossible act of self-denial. When
I returned to Oxford for the Christmas Term I had duly secured
‘Negations.’ I used to keep it lying carelessly on the table in my room,
and whenever a friend took it up and asked what it was about I would
say ‘Oh, it’s rather a remarkable book. It’s by a man whom I know.’ Just
‘what it was about’ I never was able to say. Head or tail was just what
I hadn’t made of that slim green volume. I found in the preface no clue
to the exiguous labyrinth of contents, and in that labyrinth nothing to
explain the preface.


‘Lean near to life. Lean very near--nearer.

‘Life is web, and therein nor warp nor woof is, but web only.

‘It is for this I am Catholick in church and in thought, yet do let
swift Mood weave there what the shuttle of Mood wills.’


These were the opening phrases of the preface, but those which followed
were less easy to understand. Then came ‘Stark: A Conte,’ about a
midinette who, so far as I could gather, murdered, or was about to
murder, a mannequin. It was rather like a story by Catulle Mendes in
which the translator had either skipped or cut out every alternate
sentence. Next, a dialogue between Pan and St. Ursula--lacking, I felt,
in ‘snap.’ Next, some aphorisms (entitled ‘Aphorismata’ [spelled in
Greek]). Throughout, in fact, there was a great variety of form; and
the forms had evidently been wrought with much care. It was rather the
substance that eluded me. Was there, I wondered, any substance at all?
It did now occur to me: suppose Enoch Soames was a fool! Up cropped a
rival hypothesis: suppose _I_ was! I inclined to give Soames the benefit
of the doubt. I had read ‘L’Apres-midi d’un Faune’ without extracting a
glimmer of meaning. Yet Mallarme--of course--was a Master. How was I to
know that Soames wasn’t another? There was a sort of music in his
prose, not indeed arresting, but perhaps, I thought, haunting, and laden
perhaps with meanings as deep as Mallarme’s own. I awaited his poems
with an open mind.

And I looked forward to them with positive impatience after I had had a
second meeting with him. This was on an evening in January. Going into
the aforesaid domino room, I passed a table at which sat a pale man with
an open book before him. He looked from his book to me, and I looked
back over my shoulder with a vague sense that I ought to have recognised
him. I returned to pay my respects. After exchanging a few words, I said
with a glance to the open book, ‘I see I am interrupting you,’ and was
about to pass on, but ‘I prefer,’ Soames replied in his toneless voice,
‘to be interrupted,’ and I obeyed his gesture that I should sit down.

I asked him if he often read here. ‘Yes; things of this kind I read
here,’ he answered, indicating the title of his book--‘The Poems of
Shelley.’

‘Anything that you really’--and I was going to say ‘admire?’ But I
cautiously left my sentence unfinished, and was glad that I had done so,
for he said, with unwonted emphasis, ‘Anything second-rate.’

I had read little of Shelley, but ‘Of course,’ I murmured, ‘he’s very
uneven.’

‘I should have thought evenness was just what was wrong with him. A
deadly evenness. That’s why I read him here. The noise of this place
breaks the rhythm. He’s tolerable here.’ Soames took up the book and
glanced through the pages. He laughed. Soames’ laugh was a short, single
and mirthless sound from the throat, unaccompanied by any movement of
the face or brightening of the eyes. ‘What a period!’ he uttered, laying
the book down. And ‘What a country!’ he added.

I asked rather nervously if he didn’t think Keats had more or less held
his own against the drawbacks of time and place. He admitted that there
were ‘passages in Keats,’ but did not specify them. Of ‘the older men,’
as he called them, he seemed to like only Milton. ‘Milton,’ he said,
‘wasn’t sentimental.’ Also, ‘Milton had a dark insight.’ And again, ‘I
can always read Milton in the reading-room.’

‘The reading-room?’

‘Of the British Museum. I go there every day.’

‘You do? I’ve only been there once. I’m afraid I found it rather a
depressing place. It--it seemed to sap one’s vitality.’

‘It does. That’s why I go there. The lower one’s vitality, the more
sensitive one is to great art. I live near the Museum. I have rooms in
Dyott Street.’

‘And you go round to the reading-room to read Milton?’

‘Usually Milton.’ He looked at me. ‘It was Milton,’ he certificatively
added, ‘who converted me to Diabolism.’

‘Diabolism? Oh yes? Really?’ said I, with that vague discomfort and that
intense desire to be polite which one feels when a man speaks of his own
religion. ‘You--worship the Devil?’

Soames shook his head. ‘It’s not exactly worship,’ he qualified, sipping
his absinthe. ‘It’s more a matter of trusting and encouraging.’

‘Ah, yes.... But I had rather gathered from the preface to “Negations”
 that you were a--a Catholic.’

‘Je l’etais a cette epoque. Perhaps I still am. Yes, I’m a Catholic
Diabolist.’

This profession he made in an almost cursory tone. I could see that what
was upmost in his mind was the fact that I had read ‘Negations.’ His
pale eyes had for the first time gleamed. I felt as one who is about to
be examined, viva voce, on the very subject in which he is shakiest. I
hastily asked him how soon his poems were to be published. ‘Next week,’
he told me.

‘And are they to be published without a title?’

‘No. I found a title, at last. But I shan’t tell you what it is,’ as
though I had been so impertinent as to inquire. ‘I am not sure that
it wholly satisfies me. But it is the best I can find. It suggests
something of the quality of the poems.... Strange growths, natural and
wild, yet exquisite,’ he added, ‘and many-hued, and full of poisons.’

I asked him what he thought of Baudelaire. He uttered the snort that
was his laugh, and ‘Baudelaire,’ he said, ‘was a bourgeois malgre lui.’
France had had only one poet: Villon; ‘and two-thirds of Villon were
sheer journalism.’ Verlaine was ‘an epicier malgre lui.’ Altogether,
rather to my surprise, he rated French literature lower than English.
There were ‘passages’ in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. But ‘I,’ he summed up,
‘owe nothing to France.’ He nodded at me. ‘You’ll see,’ he predicted.

I did not, when the time came, quite see that. I thought the author of
‘Fungoids’ did--unconsciously, of course--owe something to the young
Parisian decadents, or to the young English ones who owed something to
THEM. I still think so. The little book--bought by me in Oxford--lies
before me as I write. Its pale grey buckram cover and silver lettering
have not worn well. Nor have its contents. Through these, with a
melancholy interest, I have again been looking. They are not much. But
at the time of their publication I had a vague suspicion that they MIGHT
be. I suppose it is my capacity for faith, not poor Soames’ work, that
is weaker than it once was....


              TO A YOUNG WOMAN.

     Thou art, who hast not been!
         Pale tunes irresolute
         And traceries of old sounds
         Blown from a rotted flute
     Mingle with noise of cymbals rouged with rust,
     Nor not strange forms and epicene
         Lie bleeding in the dust,
             Being wounded with wounds.

             For this it is
         That in thy counterpart
             Of age-long mockeries
         Thou hast not been nor art!


There seemed to me a certain inconsistency as between the first and last
lines of this. I tried, with bent brows, to resolve the discord. But I
did not take my failure as wholly incompatible with a meaning in Soames’
mind. Might it not rather indicate the depth of his meaning? As for the
craftsmanship, ‘rouged with rust’ seemed to me a fine stroke, and ‘nor
not’ instead of ‘and’ had a curious felicity. I wondered who the Young
Woman was, and what she had made of it all. I sadly suspect that Soames
could not have made more of it than she. Yet, even now, if one doesn’t
try to make any sense at all of the poem, and reads it just for the
sound, there is a certain grace of cadence. Soames was an artist--in so
far as he was anything, poor fellow!

It seemed to me, when first I read ‘Fungoids,’ that, oddly enough, the
Diabolistic side of him was the best. Diabolism seemed to be a cheerful,
even a wholesome, influence in his life.


                  NOCTURNE.

     Round and round the shutter’d Square
     I stroll’d with the Devil’s arm in mine.
     No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was there
     And the ring of his laughter and mine.
         We had drunk black wine.

     I scream’d, ‘I will race you, Master!’
     ‘What matter,’ he shriek’d, ‘to-night
     Which of us runs the faster?
     There is nothing to fear to-night
         In the foul moon’s light!’

     Then I look’d him in the eyes,
     And I laugh’d full shrill at the lie he told
     And the gnawing fear he would fain disguise.
     It was true, what I’d time and again been told:
         He was old--old.


There was, I felt, quite a swing about that first stanza--a joyous
and rollicking note of comradeship. The second was slightly hysterical
perhaps. But I liked the third: it was so bracingly unorthodox, even
according to the tenets of Soames’ peculiar sect in the faith. Not much
‘trusting and encouraging’ here! Soames triumphantly exposing the Devil
as a liar, and laughing ‘full shrill,’ cut a quite heartening figure,
I thought--then! Now, in the light of what befell, none of his poems
depresses me so much as ‘Nocturne.’

I looked out for what the metropolitan reviewers would have to say. They
seemed to fall into two classes: those who had little to say and those
who had nothing. The second class was the larger, and the words of the
first were cold; insomuch that

    Strikes a note of modernity throughout....  These tripping
    numbers.--Preston Telegraph

was the only lure offered in advertisements by Soames’ publisher. I had
hopes that when next I met the poet I could congratulate him on having
made a stir; for I fancied he was not so sure of his intrinsic greatness
as he seemed. I was but able to say, rather coarsely, when next I did
see him, that I hoped ‘Fungoids’ was ‘selling splendidly.’ He looked at
me across his glass of absinthe and asked if I had bought a copy. His
publisher had told him that three had been sold. I laughed, as at a
jest.

‘You don’t suppose I CARE, do you?’ he said, with something like a
snarl. I disclaimed the notion. He added that he was not a tradesman. I
said mildly that I wasn’t, either, and murmured that an artist who gave
truly new and great things to the world had always to wait long for
recognition. He said he cared not a sou for recognition. I agreed that
the act of creation was its own reward.

His moroseness might have alienated me if I had regarded myself as a
nobody. But ah! hadn’t both John Lane and Aubrey Beardsley suggested
that I should write an essay for the great new venture that was
afoot--‘The Yellow Book’? And hadn’t Henry Harland, as editor, accepted
my essay? And wasn’t it to be in the very first number? At Oxford I
was still in statu pupillari. In London I regarded myself as very much
indeed a graduate now--one whom no Soames could ruffle. Partly to show
off, partly in sheer good-will, I told Soames he ought to contribute to
‘The Yellow Book.’ He uttered from the throat a sound of scorn for that
publication.

Nevertheless, I did, a day or two later, tentatively ask Harland if he
knew anything of the work of a man called Enoch Soames. Harland paused
in the midst of his characteristic stride around the room, threw up his
hands towards the ceiling, and groaned aloud: he had often met ‘that
absurd creature’ in Paris, and this very morning had received some poems
in manuscript from him.

‘Has he NO talent?’ I asked.

‘He has an income. He’s all right.’ Harland was the most joyous of men
and most generous of critics, and he hated to talk of anything about
which he couldn’t be enthusiastic. So I dropped the subject of Soames.
The news that Soames had an income did take the edge off solicitude. I
learned afterwards that he was the son of an unsuccessful and deceased
bookseller in Preston, but had inherited an annuity of 300 pounds from
a married aunt, and had no surviving relatives of any kind. Materially,
then, he was ‘all right.’ But there was still a spiritual pathos about
him, sharpened for me now by the possibility that even the praises of
The Preston Telegraph might not have been forthcoming had he not been
the son of a Preston man. He had a sort of weak doggedness which I
could not but admire. Neither he nor his work received the slightest
encouragement; but he persisted in behaving as a personage: always
he kept his dingy little flag flying. Wherever congregated the
jeunes feroces of the arts, in whatever Soho restaurant they had just
discovered, in whatever music-hall they were most frequenting, there was
Soames in the midst of them, or rather on the fringe of them, a dim but
inevitable figure. He never sought to propitiate his fellow-writers,
never bated a jot of his arrogance about his own work or of his contempt
for theirs. To the painters he was respectful, even humble; but for the
poets and prosaists of ‘The Yellow Book,’ and later of ‘The Savoy,’ he
had never a word but of scorn. He wasn’t resented. It didn’t occur to
anybody that he or his Catholic Diabolism mattered. When, in the autumn
of ‘96, he brought out (at his own expense, this time) a third book, his
last book, nobody said a word for or against it. I meant, but forgot, to
buy it. I never saw it, and am ashamed to say I don’t even remember
what it was called. But I did, at the time of its publication, say to
Rothenstein that I thought poor old Soames was really a rather
tragic figure, and that I believed he would literally die for want of
recognition. Rothenstein scoffed. He said I was trying to get credit for
a kind heart which I didn’t possess; and perhaps this was so. But at the
private view of the New English Art Club, a few weeks later, I beheld a
pastel portrait of ‘Enoch Soames, Esq.’ It was very like him, and very
like Rothenstein to have done it. Soames was standing near it, in his
soft hat and his waterproof cape, all through the afternoon. Anybody who
knew him would have recognised the portrait at a glance, but nobody who
didn’t know him would have recognised the portrait from its bystander:
it ‘existed’ so much more than he; it was bound to. Also, it had not
that expression of faint happiness which on this day was discernible,
yes, in Soames’ countenance. Fame had breathed on him. Twice again in
the course of the month I went to the New English, and on both occasions
Soames himself was on view there. Looking back, I regard the close of
that exhibition as having been virtually the close of his career. He had
felt the breath of Fame against his cheek--so late, for such a little
while; and at its withdrawal he gave in, gave up, gave out. He, who had
never looked strong or well, looked ghastly now--a shadow of the shade
he had once been. He still frequented the domino room, but, having lost
all wish to excite curiosity, he no longer read books there. ‘You read
only at the Museum now?’ asked I, with attempted cheerfulness. He said
he never went there now. ‘No absinthe there,’ he muttered. It was the
sort of thing that in the old days he would have said for effect; but it
carried conviction now. Absinthe, erst but a point in the ‘personality’
he had striven so hard to build up, was solace and necessity now. He no
longer called it ‘la sorciere glauque.’ He had shed away all his French
phrases. He had become a plain, unvarnished, Preston man.

Failure, if it be a plain, unvarnished, complete failure, and even
though it be a squalid failure, has always a certain dignity. I avoided
Soames because he made me feel rather vulgar. John Lane had published,
by this time, two little books of mine, and they had had a pleasant
little success of esteem. I was a--slight but definite--‘personality.’
Frank Harris had engaged me to kick up my heels in The Saturday Review,
Alfred Harmsworth was letting me do likewise in The Daily Mail. I was
just what Soames wasn’t. And he shamed my gloss. Had I known that he
really and firmly believed in the greatness of what he as an artist
had achieved, I might not have shunned him. No man who hasn’t lost his
vanity can be held to have altogether failed. Soames’ dignity was an
illusion of mine. One day in the first week of June, 1897, that illusion
went. But on the evening of that day Soames went too.

I had been out most of the morning, and, as it was too late to reach
home in time for luncheon, I sought ‘the Vingtieme.’ This little
place--Restaurant du Vingtieme Siecle, to give it its full title--had
been discovered in ‘96 by the poets and prosaists, but had now been more
or less abandoned in favour of some later find. I don’t think it lived
long enough to justify its name; but at that time there it still was, in
Greek Street, a few doors from Soho Square, and almost opposite to that
house where, in the first years of the century, a little girl, and with
her a boy named De Quincey, made nightly encampment in darkness and
hunger among dust and rats and old legal parchments. The Vingtieme was
but a small whitewashed room, leading out into the street at one end and
into a kitchen at the other. The proprietor and cook was a Frenchman,
known to us as Monsieur Vingtieme; the waiters were his two daughters,
Rose and Berthe; and the food, according to faith, was good. The tables
were so narrow, and were set so close together, that there was space for
twelve of them, six jutting from either wall.

Only the two nearest to the door, as I went in, were occupied. On one
side sat a tall, flashy, rather Mephistophelian man whom I had seen from
time to time in the domino room and elsewhere. On the other side sat
Soames. They made a queer contrast in that sunlit room--Soames sitting
haggard in that hat and cape which nowhere at any season had I seen him
doff, and this other, this keenly vital man, at sight of whom I more
than ever wondered whether he were a diamond merchant, a conjurer, or
the head of a private detective agency. I was sure Soames didn’t want my
company; but I asked, as it would have seemed brutal not to, whether
I might join him, and took the chair opposite to his. He was smoking
a cigarette, with an untasted salmi of something on his plate and a
half-empty bottle of Sauterne before him; and he was quite silent. I
said that the preparations for the Jubilee made London impossible. (I
rather liked them, really.) I professed a wish to go right away till
the whole thing was over. In vain did I attune myself to his gloom. He
seemed not to hear me nor even to see me. I felt that his behaviour made
me ridiculous in the eyes of the other man. The gangway between the two
rows of tables at the Vingtieme was hardly more than two feet wide (Rose
and Berthe, in their ministrations, had always to edge past each other,
quarrelling in whispers as they did so), and any one at the table
abreast of yours was practically at yours. I thought our neighbour was
amused at my failure to interest Soames, and so, as I could not explain
to him that my insistence was merely charitable, I became silent.
Without turning my head, I had him well within my range of vision. I
hoped I looked less vulgar than he in contrast with Soames. I was sure
he was not an Englishman, but what WAS his nationality? Though his
jet-black hair was en brosse, I did not think he was French. To Berthe,
who waited on him, he spoke French fluently, but with a hardly native
idiom and accent. I gathered that this was his first visit to the
Vingtieme; but Berthe was off-hand in her manner to him: he had not made
a good impression. His eyes were handsome, but--like the Vingtieme’s
tables--too narrow and set too close together. His nose was predatory,
and the points of his moustache, waxed up beyond his nostrils, gave
a fixity to his smile. Decidedly, he was sinister. And my sense of
discomfort in his presence was intensified by the scarlet waistcoat
which tightly, and so unseasonably in June, sheathed his ample chest.
This waistcoat wasn’t wrong merely because of the heat, either. It was
somehow all wrong in itself. It wouldn’t have done on Christmas morning.
It would have struck a jarring note at the first night of ‘Hernani.’
I was trying to account for its wrongness when Soames suddenly and
strangely broke silence. ‘A hundred years hence!’ he murmured, as in a
trance.

‘We shall not be here!’ I briskly but fatuously added.

‘We shall not be here. No,’ he droned, ‘but the Museum will still be
just where it is. And the reading-room, just where it is. And people
will be able to go and read there.’ He inhaled sharply, and a spasm as
of actual pain contorted his features.

I wondered what train of thought poor Soames had been following. He did
not enlighten me when he said, after a long pause, ‘You think I haven’t
minded.’

‘Minded what, Soames?’

‘Neglect. Failure.’

‘FAILURE?’ I said heartily. ‘Failure?’ I repeated vaguely.
‘Neglect--yes, perhaps; but that’s quite another matter. Of course you
haven’t been--appreciated. But what then? Any artist who--who gives--’
What I wanted to say was, ‘Any artist who gives truly new and great
things to the world has always to wait long for recognition’; but the
flattery would not out: in the face of his misery, a misery so genuine
and so unmasked, my lips would not say the words.

And then--he said them for me. I flushed. ‘That’s what you were going to
say, isn’t it?’ he asked.

‘How did you know?’

‘It’s what you said to me three years ago, when “Fungoids” was
published.’ I flushed the more. I need not have done so at all, for
‘It’s the only important thing I ever heard you say,’ he continued.
‘And I’ve never forgotten it. It’s a true thing. It’s a horrible truth.
But--d’you remember what I answered? I said “I don’t care a sou for
recognition.” And you believed me. You’ve gone on believing I’m above
that sort of thing. You’re shallow. What should YOU know of the feelings
of a man like me? You imagine that a great artist’s faith in himself and
in the verdict of posterity is enough to keep him happy.... You’ve never
guessed at the bitterness and loneliness, the’--his voice broke; but
presently he resumed, speaking with a force that I had never known in
him. ‘Posterity! What use is it to ME? A dead man doesn’t know that
people are visiting his grave--visiting his birthplace--putting up
tablets to him--unveiling statues of him. A dead man can’t read the
books that are written about him. A hundred years hence! Think of it!
If I could come back to life then--just for a few hours--and go to the
reading-room, and READ! Or better still: if I could be projected, now,
at this moment, into that future, into that reading-room, just for this
one afternoon! I’d sell myself body and soul to the devil, for
that! Think of the pages and pages in the catalogue: “SOAMES,
ENOCH” endlessly--endless editions, commentaries, prolegomena,
biographies’--but here he was interrupted by a sudden loud creak of the
chair at the next table. Our neighbour had half risen from his place. He
was leaning towards us, apologetically intrusive.

‘Excuse--permit me,’ he said softly. ‘I have been unable not to hear.
Might I take a liberty? In this little restaurant-sans-facon’--he spread
wide his hands--‘might I, as the phrase is, “cut in”?’

I could but signify our acquiescence. Berthe had appeared at the kitchen
door, thinking the stranger wanted his bill. He waved her away with his
cigar, and in another moment had seated himself beside me, commanding a
full view of Soames.

‘Though not an Englishman,’ he explained, ‘I know my London well, Mr.
Soames. Your name and fame--Mr. Beerbohm’s too--very known to me. Your
point is: who am _I_?’ He glanced quickly over his shoulder, and in a
lowered voice said ‘I am the Devil.’

I couldn’t help it: I laughed. I tried not to, I knew there was nothing
to laugh at, my rudeness shamed me, but--I laughed with increasing
volume. The Devil’s quiet dignity, the surprise and disgust of his
raised eyebrows, did but the more dissolve me. I rocked to and fro, I
lay back aching. I behaved deplorably.

‘I am a gentleman, and,’ he said with intense emphasis, ‘I thought I was
in the company of GENTLEMEN.’

‘Don’t!’ I gasped faintly. ‘Oh, don’t!’

‘Curious, nicht wahr?’ I heard him say to Soames. ‘There is a type of
person to whom the very mention of my name is--oh-so-awfully-funny! In
your theatres the dullest comedian needs only to say “The Devil!” and
right away they give him “the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind.”
 Is it not so?’

I had now just breath enough to offer my apologies. He accepted them,
but coldly, and re-addressed himself to Soames.

‘I am a man of business,’ he said, ‘and always I would put things
through “right now,” as they say in the States. You are a poet. Les
affaires--you detest them. So be it. But with me you will deal, eh? What
you have said just now gives me furiously to hope.’

Soames had not moved, except to light a fresh cigarette. He sat crouched
forward, with his elbows squared on the table, and his head just above
the level of his hands, staring up at the Devil. ‘Go on,’ he nodded. I
had no remnant of laughter in me now.

‘It will be the more pleasant, our little deal,’ the Devil went on,
‘because you are--I mistake not?--a Diabolist.’

‘A Catholic Diabolist,’ said Soames.

The Devil accepted the reservation genially. ‘You wish,’ he resumed, ‘to
visit now--this afternoon as-ever-is--the reading-room of the British
Museum, yes? but of a hundred years hence, yes? Parfaitement. Time--an
illusion. Past and future--they are as ever-present as the present, or
at any rate only what you call “just-round-the-corner.” I switch you
on to any date. I project you--pouf! You wish to be in the reading-room
just as it will be on the afternoon of June 3, 1997? You wish to find
yourself standing in that room, just past the swing-doors, this very
minute, yes? and to stay there till closing time? Am I right?’

Soames nodded.

The Devil looked at his watch. ‘Ten past two,’ he said. ‘Closing time in
summer same then as now: seven o’clock. That will give you almost five
hours. At seven o’clock--pouf!--you find yourself again here, sitting
at this table. I am dining to-night dans le monde--dans le higlif. That
concludes my present visit to your great city. I come and fetch you
here, Mr. Soames, on my way home.’

‘Home?’ I echoed.

‘Be it never so humble!’ said the Devil lightly.

‘All right,’ said Soames.

‘Soames!’ I entreated. But my friend moved not a muscle.

The Devil had made as though to stretch forth his hand across the table
and touch Soames’ forearm; but he paused in his gesture.

‘A hundred years hence, as now,’ he smiled, ‘no smoking allowed in the
reading-room. You would better therefore----’

Soames removed the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it into his
glass of Sauterne.

‘Soames!’ again I cried. ‘Can’t you’--but the Devil had now stretched
forth his hand across the table. He brought it slowly down on--the
tablecloth. Soames’ chair was empty. His cigarette floated sodden in his
wine-glass. There was no other trace of him.

For a few moments the Devil let his hand rest where it lay, gazing at me
out of the corners of his eyes, vulgarly triumphant.

A shudder shook me. With an effort I controlled myself and rose from my
chair. ‘Very clever,’ I said condescendingly. ‘But--“The Time Machine”
 is a delightful book, don’t you think? So entirely original!’

‘You are pleased to sneer,’ said the Devil, who had also risen, ‘but it
is one thing to write about an impossible machine; it is a quite other
thing to be a Supernatural Power.’ All the same, I had scored.

Berthe had come forth at the sound of our rising. I explained to her
that Mr. Soames had been called away, and that both he and I would be
dining here. It was not until I was out in the open air that I began to
feel giddy. I have but the haziest recollection of what I did, where I
wandered, in the glaring sunshine of that endless afternoon. I remember
the sound of carpenters’ hammers all along Piccadilly, and the bare
chaotic look of the half-erected ‘stands.’ Was it in the Green Park, or
in Kensington Gardens, or WHERE was it that I sat on a chair beneath a
tree, trying to read an evening paper? There was a phrase in the leading
article that went on repeating itself in my fagged mind--‘Little is
hidden from this august Lady full of the garnered wisdom of sixty years
of Sovereignty.’ I remember wildly conceiving a letter (to reach Windsor
by express messenger told to await answer):


‘MADAM,--Well knowing that your Majesty is full of the garnered wisdom
of sixty years of Sovereignty, I venture to ask your advice in the
following delicate matter. Mr. Enoch Soames, whose poems you may or may
not know,’....


Was there NO way of helping him--saving him? A bargain was a bargain,
and I was the last man to aid or abet any one in wriggling out of a
reasonable obligation. I wouldn’t have lifted a little finger to save
Faust. But poor Soames!--doomed to pay without respite an eternal price
for nothing but a fruitless search and a bitter disillusioning....

Odd and uncanny it seemed to me that he, Soames, in the flesh, in the
waterproof cape, was at this moment living in the last decade of the
next century, poring over books not yet written, and seeing and seen by
men not yet born. Uncannier and odder still, that to-night and evermore
he would be in Hell. Assuredly, truth was stranger than fiction.

Endless that afternoon was. Almost I wished I had gone with Soames--not
indeed to stay in the reading-room, but to sally forth for a brisk
sight-seeing walk around a new London. I wandered restlessly out of the
Park I had sat in. Vainly I tried to imagine myself an ardent tourist
from the eighteenth century. Intolerable was the strain of the
slow-passing and empty minutes. Long before seven o’clock I was back at
the Vingtieme.

I sat there just where I had sat for luncheon. Air came in listlessly
through the open door behind me. Now and again Rose or Berthe appeared
for a moment. I had told them I would not order any dinner till Mr.
Soames came. A hurdy-gurdy began to play, abruptly drowning the noise
of a quarrel between some Frenchmen further up the street. Whenever the
tune was changed I heard the quarrel still raging. I had bought another
evening paper on my way. I unfolded it. My eyes gazed ever away from it
to the clock over the kitchen door....

Five minutes, now, to the hour! I remembered that clocks in restaurants
are kept five minutes fast. I concentrated my eyes on the paper. I vowed
I would not look away from it again. I held it upright, at its full
width, close to my face, so that I had no view of anything but it....
Rather a tremulous sheet? Only because of the draught, I told myself.

My arms gradually became stiff; they ached; but I could not drop
them--now. I had a suspicion, I had a certainty. Well, what then?...
What else had I come for? Yet I held tight that barrier of newspaper.
Only the sound of Berthe’s brisk footstep from the kitchen enabled me,
forced me, to drop it, and to utter:

‘What shall we have to eat, Soames?’

‘Il est souffrant, ce pauvre Monsieur Soames?’ asked Berthe.

‘He’s only--tired.’ I asked her to get some wine--Burgundy--and whatever
food might be ready. Soames sat crouched forward against the table,
exactly as when last I had seen him. It was as though he had never
moved--he who had moved so unimaginably far. Once or twice in the
afternoon it had for an instant occurred to me that perhaps his journey
was not to be fruitless--that perhaps we had all been wrong in our
estimate of the works of Enoch Soames. That we had been horribly right
was horribly clear from the look of him. But ‘Don’t be discouraged,’ I
falteringly said. ‘Perhaps it’s only that you--didn’t leave enough time.
Two, three centuries hence, perhaps--’

‘Yes,’ his voice came. ‘I’ve thought of that.’

‘And now--now for the more immediate future! Where are you going to
hide? How would it be if you caught the Paris express from Charing
Cross? Almost an hour to spare. Don’t go on to Paris. Stop at Calais.
Live in Calais. He’d never think of looking for you in Calais.’

‘It’s like my luck,’ he said, ‘to spend my last hours on earth with
an ass.’ But I was not offended. ‘And a treacherous ass,’ he strangely
added, tossing across to me a crumpled bit of paper which he had been
holding in his hand. I glanced at the writing on it--some sort of
gibberish, apparently. I laid it impatiently aside.

‘Come, Soames! pull yourself together! This isn’t a mere matter of life
and death. It’s a question of eternal torment, mind you! You don’t mean
to say you’re going to wait limply here till the Devil comes to fetch
you?’

‘I can’t do anything else. I’ve no choice.’

‘Come! This is “trusting and encouraging” with a vengeance! This is
Diabolism run mad!’ I filled his glass with wine. ‘Surely, now that
you’ve SEEN the brute--’

‘It’s no good abusing him.’

‘You must admit there’s nothing Miltonic about him, Soames.’

‘I don’t say he’s not rather different from what I expected.’

‘He’s a vulgarian, he’s a swell-mobsman, he’s the sort of man who hangs
about the corridors of trains going to the Riviera and steals ladies’
jewel-cases. Imagine eternal torment presided over by HIM!’

‘You don’t suppose I look forward to it, do you?’

‘Then why not slip quietly out of the way?’

Again and again I filled his glass, and always, mechanically, he emptied
it; but the wine kindled no spark of enterprise in him. He did not eat,
and I myself ate hardly at all. I did not in my heart believe that any
dash for freedom could save him. The chase would be swift, the capture
certain. But better anything than this passive, meek, miserable waiting.
I told Soames that for the honour of the human race he ought to make
some show of resistance. He asked what the human race had ever done for
him. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘can’t you understand that I’m in his power?
You saw him touch me, didn’t you? There’s an end of it. I’ve no will.
I’m sealed.’

I made a gesture of despair. He went on repeating the word ‘sealed.’
I began to realise that the wine had clouded his brain. No wonder!
Foodless he had gone into futurity, foodless he still was. I urged him
to eat at any rate some bread. It was maddening to think that he, who
had so much to tell, might tell nothing. ‘How was it all,’ I asked,
‘yonder? Come! Tell me your adventures.’

‘They’d make first-rate “copy,” wouldn’t they?’

‘I’m awfully sorry for you, Soames, and I make all possible allowances;
but what earthly right have you to insinuate that I should make “copy,”
 as you call it, out of you?’

The poor fellow pressed his hands to his forehead. ‘I don’t know,’ he
said. ‘I had some reason, I know.... I’ll try to remember.’

‘That’s right. Try to remember everything. Eat a little more bread. What
did the reading-room look like?’

‘Much as usual,’ he at length muttered.

‘Many people there?’

‘Usual sort of number.’

‘What did they look like?’

Soames tried to visualise them. ‘They all,’ he presently remembered,
‘looked very like one another.’

My mind took a fearsome leap. ‘All dressed in Jaeger?’

‘Yes. I think so. Greyish-yellowish stuff.’

‘A sort of uniform?’ He nodded. ‘With a number on it, perhaps?--a number
on a large disc of metal sewn on to the left sleeve? DKF 78,910--that
sort of thing?’ It was even so. ‘And all of them--men and women
alike--looking very well-cared-for? very Utopian? and smelling rather
strongly of carbolic? and all of them quite hairless?’ I was right every
time. Soames was only not sure whether the men and women were hairless
or shorn. ‘I hadn’t time to look at them very closely,’ he explained.

‘No, of course not. But----’

‘They stared at ME, I can tell you. I attracted a great deal of
attention.’ At last he had done that! ‘I think I rather scared them.
They moved away whenever I came near. They followed me about at a
distance, wherever I went. The men at the round desk in the middle
seemed to have a sort of panic whenever I went to make inquiries.’

‘What did you do when you arrived?’

Well, he had gone straight to the catalogue, of course--to the S
volumes, and had stood long before SN--SOF, unable to take this volume
out of the shelf, because his heart was beating so.... At first,
he said, he wasn’t disappointed--he only thought there was some new
arrangement. He went to the middle desk and asked where the catalogue of
TWENTIETH-century books was kept. He gathered that there was still only
one catalogue. Again he looked up his name, stared at the three little
pasted slips he had known so well. Then he went and sat down for a long
time....

‘And then,’ he droned, ‘I looked up the “Dictionary of National
Biography” and some encyclopedias.... I went back to the middle desk
and asked what was the best modern book on late nineteenth-century
literature. They told me Mr. T. K. Nupton’s book was considered the
best. I looked it up in the catalogue and filled in a form for it. It
was brought to me. My name wasn’t in the index, but--Yes!’ he said with
a sudden change of tone. ‘That’s what I’d forgotten. Where’s that bit of
paper? Give it me back.’

I, too, had forgotten that cryptic screed. I found it fallen on the
floor, and handed it to him.

He smoothed it out, nodding and smiling at me disagreeably. ‘I found
myself glancing through Nupton’s book,’ he resumed. ‘Not very easy
reading. Some sort of phonetic spelling.... All the modern books I saw
were phonetic.’

‘Then I don’t want to hear any more, Soames, please.’

‘The proper names seemed all to be spelt in the old way. But for that, I
mightn’t have noticed my own name.’

‘Your own name? Really? Soames, I’m VERY glad.’

‘And yours.’

‘No!’

‘I thought I should find you waiting here to-night. So I took the
trouble to copy out the passage. Read it.’

I snatched the paper. Soames’ handwriting was characteristically dim.
It, and the noisome spelling, and my excitement, made me all the slower
to grasp what T. K. Nupton was driving at.

The document lies before me at this moment. Strange that the words
I here copy out for you were copied out for me by poor Soames just
seventy-eight years hence....


From p. 234 of ‘Inglish Littracher 1890-1900’ bi T. K. Nupton, publishd
bi th Stait, 1992:

‘Fr egzarmpl, a riter ov th time, naimd Max Beerbohm, hoo woz stil alive
in th twentieth senchri, rote a stauri in wich e pautraid an immajnari
karrakter kauld “Enoch Soames”--a thurd-rait poit hoo beleevz imself
a grate jeneus an maix a bargin with th Devvl in auder ter no wot
posterriti thinx ov im! It iz a sumwot labud sattire but not without
vallu az showing hou seriusli the yung men ov th aiteen-ninetiz took
themselvz. Nou that the littreri profeshn haz bin auganized az a
departmnt of publik servis, our riters hav found their levvl an hav
lernt ter doo their duti without thort ov th morro. “Th laibrer iz
werthi ov hiz hire,” an that iz aul. Thank hevvn we hav no Enoch
Soameses amung us to-dai!’


I found that by murmuring the words aloud (a device which I commend to
my reader) I was able to master them, little by little. The clearer they
became, the greater was my bewilderment, my distress and horror. The
whole thing was a nightmare. Afar, the great grisly background of what
was in store for the poor dear art of letters; here, at the table,
fixing on me a gaze that made me hot all over, the poor fellow
whom--whom evidently... but no: whatever down-grade my character might
take in coming years, I should never be such a brute as to----

Again I examined the screed. ‘Immajnari’--but here Soames was, no more
imaginary, alas! than I. And ‘labud’--what on earth was that? (To this
day, I have never made out that word.) ‘It’s all very--baffling,’ I at
length stammered.

Soames said nothing, but cruelly did not cease to look at me.

‘Are you sure,’ I temporised, ‘quite sure you copied the thing out
correctly?’

‘Quite.’

‘Well, then it’s this wretched Nupton who must have made--must be going
to make--some idiotic mistake.... Look here, Soames! you know me better
than to suppose that I.... After all, the name “Max Beerbohm” is not at
all an uncommon one, and there must be several Enoch Soameses running
around--or rather, “Enoch Soames” is a name that might occur to any
one writing a story. And I don’t write stories: I’m an essayist, an
observer, a recorder.... I admit that it’s an extraordinary coincidence.
But you must see----’

‘I see the whole thing,’ said Soames quietly. And he added, with a touch
of his old manner, but with more dignity than I had ever known in him,
‘Parlons d’autre chose.’

I accepted that suggestion very promptly. I returned straight to the
more immediate future. I spent most of the long evening in renewed
appeals to Soames to slip away and seek refuge somewhere. I remember
saying at last that if indeed I was destined to write about him, the
supposed ‘stauri’ had better have at least a happy ending. Soames
repeated those last three words in a tone of intense scorn. ‘In Life and
in Art,’ he said, ‘all that matters is an INEVITABLE ending.’

‘But,’ I urged, more hopefully than I felt, ‘an ending that can be
avoided ISN’T inevitable.’

‘You aren’t an artist,’ he rasped. ‘And you’re so hopelessly not an
artist that, so far from being able to imagine a thing and make it seem
true, you’re going to make even a true thing seem as if you’d made it
up. You’re a miserable bungler. And it’s like my luck.’

I protested that the miserable bungler was not I--was not going to be
I--but T. K. Nupton; and we had a rather heated argument, in the thick
of which it suddenly seemed to me that Soames saw he was in the wrong:
he had quite physically cowered. But I wondered why--and now I guessed
with a cold throb just why--he stared so, past me. The bringer of that
‘inevitable ending’ filled the doorway.

I managed to turn in my chair and to say, not without a semblance of
lightness, ‘Aha, come in!’ Dread was indeed rather blunted in me by
his looking so absurdly like a villain in a melodrama. The sheen of his
tilted hat and of his shirt-front, the repeated twists he was giving to
his moustache, and most of all the magnificence of his sneer, gave token
that he was there only to be foiled.

He was at our table in a stride. ‘I am sorry,’ he sneered witheringly,
‘to break up your pleasant party, but--’

‘You don’t: you complete it,’ I assured him. ‘Mr. Soames and I want
to have a little talk with you. Won’t you sit? Mr. Soames got
nothing--frankly nothing--by his journey this afternoon. We don’t wish
to say that the whole thing was a swindle--a common swindle. On the
contrary, we believe you meant well. But of course the bargain, such as
it was, is off.’

The Devil gave no verbal answer. He merely looked at Soames and pointed
with rigid forefinger to the door. Soames was wretchedly rising from
his chair when, with a desperate quick gesture, I swept together two
dinner-knives that were on the table, and laid their blades across
each other. The Devil stepped sharp back against the table behind him,
averting his face and shuddering.

‘You are not superstitious!’ he hissed.

‘Not at all,’ I smiled.

‘Soames!’ he said as to an underling, but without turning his face, ‘put
those knives straight!’

With an inhibitive gesture to my friend, ‘Mr. Soames,’ I said
emphatically to the Devil, ‘is a CATHOLIC Diabolist’; but my poor friend
did the Devil’s bidding, not mine; and now, with his master’s eyes again
fixed on him, he arose, he shuffled past me. I tried to speak. It was
he that spoke. ‘Try,’ was the prayer he threw back at me as the Devil
pushed him roughly out through the door, ‘TRY to make them know that I
did exist!’

In another instant I too was through that door. I stood staring all
ways--up the street, across it, down it. There was moonlight and
lamplight, but there was not Soames nor that other.

Dazed, I stood there. Dazed, I turned back, at length, into the little
room; and I suppose I paid Berthe or Rose for my dinner and luncheon,
and for Soames’: I hope so, for I never went to the Vingtieme again.
Ever since that night I have avoided Greek Street altogether. And for
years I did not set foot even in Soho Square, because on that same night
it was there that I paced and loitered, long and long, with some such
dull sense of hope as a man has in not straying far from the place where
he has lost something.... ‘Round and round the shutter’d Square’--that
line came back to me on my lonely beat, and with it the whole stanza,
ringing in my brain and bearing in on me how tragically different from
the happy scene imagined by him was the poet’s actual experience of that
prince in whom of all princes we should put not our trust.

But--strange how the mind of an essayist, be it never so stricken, roves
and ranges!--I remember pausing before a wide doorstep and wondering if
perchance it was on this very one that the young De Quincey lay ill and
faint while poor Ann flew as fast as her feet would carry her to Oxford
Street, the ‘stony-hearted stepmother’ of them both, and came back
bearing that ‘glass of port wine and spices’ but for which he might, so
he thought, actually have died. Was this the very doorstep that the old
De Quincey used to revisit in homage? I pondered Ann’s fate, the cause
of her sudden vanishing from the ken of her boy-friend; and presently I
blamed myself for letting the past over-ride the present. Poor vanished
Soames!

And for myself, too, I began to be troubled. What had I better do? Would
there be a hue and cry--Mysterious Disappearance of an Author, and all
that? He had last been seen lunching and dining in my company. Hadn’t I
better get a hansom and drive straight to Scotland Yard?... They would
think I was a lunatic. After all, I reassured myself, London was a
very large place, and one very dim figure might easily drop out of it
unobserved--now especially, in the blinding glare of the near Jubilee.
Better say nothing at all, I thought.

And I was right. Soames’ disappearance made no stir at all. He was
utterly forgotten before any one, so far as I am aware, noticed that he
was no longer hanging around. Now and again some poet or prosaist may
have said to another, ‘What has become of that man Soames?’ but I never
heard any such question asked. The solicitor through whom he was paid
his annuity may be presumed to have made inquiries, but no echo of
these resounded. There was something rather ghastly to me in the general
unconsciousness that Soames had existed, and more than once I caught
myself wondering whether Nupton, that babe unborn, were going to be
right in thinking him a figment of my brain.

In that extract from Nupton’s repulsive book there is one point which
perhaps puzzles you. How is it that the author, though I have here
mentioned him by name and have quoted the exact words he is going to
write, is not going to grasp the obvious corollary that I have invented
nothing? The answer can be only this: Nupton will not have read the
later passages of this memoir. Such lack of thoroughness is a serious
fault in any one who undertakes to do scholar’s work. And I hope these
words will meet the eye of some contemporary rival to Nupton and be the
undoing of Nupton.

I like to think that some time between 1992 and 1997 somebody will have
looked up this memoir, and will have forced on the world his inevitable
and startling conclusions. And I have reasons for believing that this
will be so. You realise that the reading-room into which Soames was
projected by the Devil was in all respects precisely as it will be on
the afternoon of June 3, 1997. You realise, therefore, that on that
afternoon, when it comes round, there the self-same crowd will be, and
there Soames too will be, punctually, he and they doing precisely what
they did before. Recall now Soames’ account of the sensation he made.
You may say that the mere difference of his costume was enough to make
him sensational in that uniformed crowd. You wouldn’t say so if you had
ever seen him. I assure you that in no period could Soames be anything
but dim. The fact that people are going to stare at him, and follow him
around, and seem afraid of him, can be explained only on the hypothesis
that they will somehow have been prepared for his ghostly visitation.
They will have been awfully waiting to see whether he really would come.
And when he does come the effect will of course be--awful.

An authentic, guaranteed, proven ghost, but--only a ghost, alas! Only
that. In his first visit, Soames was a creature of flesh and blood,
whereas the creatures into whose midst he was projected were but ghosts,
I take it--solid, palpable, vocal, but unconscious and automatic ghosts,
in a building that was itself an illusion. Next time, that building and
those creatures will be real. It is of Soames that there will be but
the semblance. I wish I could think him destined to revisit the world
actually, physically, consciously. I wish he had this one brief escape,
this one small treat, to look forward to. I never forget him for long.
He is where he is, and forever. The more rigid moralists among you may
say he has only himself to blame. For my part, I think he has been
very hardly used. It is well that vanity should be chastened; and Enoch
Soames’ vanity was, I admit, above the average, and called for special
treatment. But there was no need for vindictiveness. You say he
contracted to pay the price he is paying; yes; but I maintain that he
was induced to do so by fraud. Well-informed in all things, the Devil
must have known that my friend would gain nothing by his visit to
futurity. The whole thing was a very shabby trick. The more I think of
it, the more detestable the Devil seems to me.

Of him I have caught sight several times, here and there, since that day
at the Vingtieme. Only once, however, have I seen him at close quarters.
This was in Paris. I was walking, one afternoon, along the Rue d’Antin,
when I saw him advancing from the opposite direction--over-dressed as
ever, and swinging an ebony cane, and altogether behaving as though
the whole pavement belonged to him. At thought of Enoch Soames and the
myriads of other sufferers eternally in this brute’s dominion, a great
cold wrath filled me, and I drew myself up to my full height. But--well,
one is so used to nodding and smiling in the street to anybody whom one
knows that the action becomes almost independent of oneself: to prevent
it requires a very sharp effort and great presence of mind. I was
miserably aware, as I passed the Devil, that I nodded and smiled to him.
And my shame was the deeper and hotter because he, if you please, stared
straight at me with the utmost haughtiness.

To be cut--deliberately cut--by HIM! I was, I still am, furious at
having had that happen to me.
