Seven Men

`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.