The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1

by Philip Hensher

  ‘And then,’ he droned, ‘I looked up the “Dictionary of National Biography” and some encyclopædias … 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, published 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 department 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 shirtfront, 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 Vingtième again. Ever since that night I have avoided Greek Street altogether. And for years I did not set foot even in Soho Square, because on that same night it was there that I paced and loitered, long and long, with some such dull sense of hope as a man has in not straying far from the place where he has lost something … ‘Round and round the shutter’d Square’ – that line came back to me on my lonely beat, and with it the whole stanza, ringing in my brain and bearing in on me how tragically different from the happy scene imagined by him was the poet’s actual experience of that prince in whom of all princes we should put not our trust.

  But – s
trange 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 but be 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 3rd, 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 Vingtième. 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.

  Arnold Bennett

  The Matador of the Five Towns

  I

  Mrs Brindley looked across the lunch-table at her husband with glinting, eager eyes, which showed that there was something unusual in the brain behind them.

  ‘Bob,’ she said, factitiously calm. ‘You don’t know what I’ve just remembered!’

  ‘Well?’ said he.

  ‘It’s only grandma’s birthday to-day!’

  My friend Robert Brindley, the architect, struck the table with a violent fist, making his little boys blink, and then he said quietly:

  ‘The deuce!’

  I gathered that grandmamma’s birthday had been forgotten and that it was not a festival that could be neglected with impunity. Both Mr and Mrs Brindley had evidently a humorous appreciation of crises, contretemps, and those collisions of circumstances which are usually called ‘junctures’ for short. I could have imagined either of them saying to the other: ‘Here’s a funny thing! The house is on fire!’ And then yielding to laughter as they ran for buckets. Mrs Brindley, in particular, laughed now; she gazed at the table-cloth and laughed almost silently to herself; though it appeared that their joint forgetfulness might result in temporary estrangement from a venerable ancestor who was also, birthdays being duly observed, a continual fount of rich presents in specie.

  Robert Brindley drew a time-table from his breast-pocket with the rapid gesture of habit. All men of business in the Five Towns seem to carry that time-table in their breast-pockets. Then he examined his watch carefully.

  ‘You’ll have time to dress up your progeny and catch the 2.5. It makes the connection at Knype for Axe.’

  The two little boys, aged perhaps four and six, who had been ladling the messy contents of specially deep plates on to their bibs, dropped their spoons and began to babble about grea’-granny, and one of them insisted several times that he must wear his new gaiters.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Brindley to her husband, after reflection. ‘And a fine old crowd there’ll be in the train – with this football match!’

  ‘Can’t be helped! … Now, you kids, hook it upstairs to nurse.’

  ‘And what about you?’ asked Mrs Brindley.

  ‘You must tell the old lady I’m kept by business.’

  ‘I told her that last year, and you know what happened.’

  ‘Well,’ said Brindley. ‘Here Loring’s just come. You don’t expect me to lea
ve him, do you? Or have you had the beautiful idea of taking him over to Axe to pass a pleasant Saturday afternoon with your esteemed grandmother?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Brindley. ‘Hardly that!’

  ‘Well, then?’

  The boys, having first revolved on their axes, slid down from their high chairs as though from horses.

  ‘Look here,’ I said. ‘You mustn’t mind me. I shall be all right.’

  ‘Ha-ha!’ shouted Brindley. ‘I seem to see you turned loose alone in this amusing town on a winter afternoon. I seem to see you!’

  ‘I could stop in and read,’ I said, eyeing the multitudinous books on every wall of the dining-room. The house was dadoed throughout with books.

  ‘Rot!’ said Brindley.

  This was only my third visit to his home and to the Five Towns, but he and I had already become curiously intimate. My first two visits had been occasioned by official pilgrimages as a British Museum expert in ceramics. The third was for a purely friendly week-end, and had no pretext. The fact is, I was drawn to the astonishing district and its astonishing inhabitants. The Five Towns, to me, was like the East to those who have smelt the East: it ‘called.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what we could do,’ said Mrs Brindley. ‘We could put him on to Dr Stirling.’

  ‘So we could!’ Brindley agreed. ‘Wife, this is one of your bright, intelligent days. We’ll put you on to the doctor, Loring. I’ll impress on him that he must keep you constantly amused till I get back, which I fear it won’t be early. This is what we call manners, you know – to invite a fellow-creature to travel a hundred and fifty miles to spend two days here, and then to turn him out before he’s been in the house an hour. It’s us, that is! But the truth of the matter is, the birthday business might be a bit serious. It might easily cost me fifty quid and no end of diplomacy. If you were a married man you’d know that the ten plagues of Egypt are simply nothing in comparison with your wife’s relations. And she’s over eighty, the old lady.’