‘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-façon’ – 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 comédien 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 readdressed 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 3rd, 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 table-cloth. 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 a not possible 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 repe
ating 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 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 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’m sure … 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 visualize 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 vo
lume 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 …
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1 Page 63
