The questions rose, but there was no time to satisfy them, for the nerves of sight and hearing were too insistent for me to think of anything else. There had, once again, been sound and movement. I looked, I listened, with all my power. The sleeping man was sitting up in his bed, that bell-like resonance vibrated in the air, the syllables of my name still echoed. I saw the figure, half upright, like some awful deity upon its throne, and the same second, the first instant of paralysis having passed, I had sprung to my feet. And it was at this moment, as I dashed across the carpet, that I heard a cock crow in the distance, and knew that it was early morning.
"Come to me, come quickly," rang the bell-like voice, "before I leave. Let the useless questions go. Just come to me."
I was already beside the bed. He was sitting up, leaning back upon his hands. I had the extraordinary impression he was going to rise and take the air. The radiance in his eyes and face and skin was marvellous. I saw a dark blue stain glow out upon his right temple, then fade away. It was like a bullet wound. All memory of my questions had wholly vanished. "Dying—you mean?" came automatically from my lips. "Is it—death?"
And then he laughed. His eyes ran over my face, the eyes I had been told to avoid.
"My second death. There are so many. This is the life I owed de
Frasne. All the lives are simultaneous--------- "
A flow of words that rushed on I cannot remember, even if I registered them. They held no meaning for me—in the instant of utterance, that is, they held a meaning I understood, as in a timeless flash, but meaning and understanding were gone again as soon as born. Only the shattering effect remained, as of something better left untold, unknown. The laughter, too, unnerved me, that sweet, careless, unearthly laughter that seemed to break up and destroy whatever was left of coherence in me.
"Tell us," I believe I cried, "tell me—before you go." I know that something of the sort burst from me. I can still hear my hoarse, breathless cry saying this. I was shaking with terror at the same time lest he touch me, for his hand came groping towards me where I stood against the bed. It seemed to me that if he touched me, my being somehow must dissolve. It seemed my very self was threatened, while yet that threatened self, trembling in the balance, understood why "life must be lost to find it," and that my courage failed. The awful yearning and the awful dread were there. It was the bell-like voice, with its sound of death or freedom, that caught me back into my pitiful restricted cage again, though not before I had realised something of the loneliness, the deific beauty and glory in that loss of self without which no heaven is attainable.
"Stop thinking," was what I caught of his answer. "Behind thought lies the entrance. Reason and thinking hold us in the life of least importance. Go behind both to find the beginning—behind the mind —into a different way. You will find several lives together and at once—and more than one kind of death. . . ."
His meaning, at the moment, flashed like lightning across my understanding, but his eyes were now holding mine, and I could not speak. Did his conditions flow over into me? Did I borrow some faint reflection of what he knew, of where he was, of a difference he tried to convey? I cannot say. Words left my mind, for they were useless, vain, meaningless. No words existed anywhere—the few he used are reported as feebly, inaccurately, as those I fought to choose for myself. The mind, as an instrument, lay helpless, withered. His eyes held mine. I looked, that is, straight into his own. And I understood—oh, so easily and clearly and simply then—that my full earth-life was but a fraction, a trivial rivulet, that ran parallel with numerous other streams that were deeper, mightier, more important. It was a question of focusing upon this little rivulet, or spreading attention and consciousness over them all, yet simultaneously. In his eyes I read this fantastic but literal certainty. I became aware of stresses of a kind never before experienced. No mental or emotional tension life had brought me hitherto, either by way of love, hate, passion, yearning, fear, was akin to it. I was stretched and altered, altered above all, in my deepest essential being, and yet such alteration was easy, natural, right, while entirely new, and different to anything I could, imaginatively or intellectually, have even supposed possible. For above all I noticed this—that it was unlike anything my mind could have even imagined. .
I watched him, and as I watched the light I had already noticed in the room increased a little, as though it came closer. Its origin I had not guessed, though I certainly had not fancied it, and it was, I knew, external to himself. Both bed and occupant became a shade clearer. I stared with intense and feverish attention. I could have sworn there was a change, the flutter of a change. That was the word—it fluttered, then was gone. But it returned, this faint, fluttering difference. I noticed it a second time. It was lost again. Something touched the face, there was a change upon the features. It vanished. With it came over me a rushing instinct that I must be quick, I must act instantly, or the opportunity would be lost for ever. This certainty swept me like an icy wind, and the ghostly dread I could not lay moved down the air. What Vronski feared might happen was on the way, closer, nearer, even imminent. I must plunge in as best I could, and I made the effort, as the hundred questions flew past me in their glittering series. I picked one out, then another, and another, but could not speak them, could not utter even a sound, for all were useless, meaningless, and the awful flutter, meanwhile, had re-appeared, this time lingering. Thought froze in me. I closed my eyes a second. It was his quiet laughter that made me open them again the next moment. The light had come closer than before, and the ghastly signature upon his face, I saw, had deepened. I actually saw it spring back, this fluttering alteration, to settle like a great bright insect on the face. He was speaking, but the bell-like note had left the voice, and then the lips stopped moving, the eyes lost their terrible radiance, the whole skin paled, the arms supporting the body sagged.
"Christ!" I heard my voice with a stifled shriek, his curious light laughter still audible across it. It was that same happy, careless laughter, no pain, not even anxiety, possible with such a sound, a laughter of relief rather. And the voice came with it as a bell ringing across great distances: "Ah, that above all else, the way of light," reached my ears faintly, brokenly, a profound wavering sigh accompanying it. "I will tell you, tell all I can—show you the escaping
way—the why---- " the syllables dying into incoherence then, so
that I bent over to catch the scarcely audible whisper that almost
stopped my heart. Though confused, words running into each other,
their meaning penetrated: "a moment—a moment only—I must first
pay back the stolen years—now and here. After that I will tell---- "
The whisper died out because the lips through which it came were gone already. I remember an odd sound behind me, an increase of light as well, but it was impossible to turn my head. The horror of what Vronski's cryptic words had suggested was nothing to the horror of what I saw. I stared. The whole dreadful sight came, it seemed, in a single second. Twenty-five years rushed on him in a single moment. He did not stare back because the eyes, following the lips, were no longer there to stare with. The features all ran away together. In the space of a few seconds, fifteen perhaps at most, Sydney Mantravers aged twenty-five years, became a quarter of a century older. The accumulation of this period's decay was upon him, all over him, with an abrupt, appalling rush. The skin grew loose and wrinkled, changing, even hiding the eyes so that it seemed they disappeared; the muscles slackened, sprayed, sagged away, chin and neck showing it most clearly. There was a ghastly crumpling together of the entire physical frame. The shrivelling seemed intensified by its swiftness. I remember that no comprehensible feeling was in me, horror having passed into something else, and similarly, no thought took the brain. Tire "bends" rose as a picture, because probably my mind contained it as the only comparable human experience, the hideous "bends" that divers know on rising too rapidly from deep waters before the decompression can be applied, or, when caugh
t unawares in too great depths, the frame is jellied, the entire body crammed up into the helmet. There rose another picture too—of a mummy exposed suddenly to air and damp becoming a little heap of dust soon after. These awful pictures rose, then vanished, as though the mind automatically searched for a parallel.
Though it was not quite so, the body none the less collapsed in a dreadful, stupid heap before my eyes, the last detail to suffer change being the small red bruise that glowed in the right temple before it too was gone. One feeble breath rose from the huddled shape upon the sheets, one last fluttering breath escaped the dried and shrunken flesh that had been lips, bearing with extreme faintness a ghost of happy laughter, and just reaching my ears as I bent closer above the dissolving face: "a moment . . . only a moment . . . and I will tell you . . . escaping way . . . elsewhere and otherwise . . ."
Loud and quite clear behind my back, as the light came closer suddenly, was the piteous, convulsive sound of Vronski's sobbing, beyond which again, the faint clear note as of a ringing bell that died away into the silence.
From Seven Men, copyright 1920, by Max Beerbohm. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, William Heinemann Ltd., London.
Enoch. Soames
By MAX BEERBOHM
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 lifetime, he would never have made the bargain m 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 Café Groche."
"And I came to your studio once."
"Oh yes; I was sorry I was out."
"But you were in. You showed me some of your paintings, you know. ... I hear you're in Chelsea now." "Yes."
I almost wondered that Mr. Soames did not, after this monosyllable, pass along. He stood patiently there, rather like a dumb animal, rather like a donkey looking over a gate. A sad figure, his. It occurred to me that "hungry" was perhaps the mot juste for him; but—hungry for what? He looked as if he had little appetite for anything. I was sorry for him; and Rothenstein, though he had not invited him to Chelsea, did ask him to sit down and have something to drink.
Seated, he was more self-assertive. He flung back the wings of his cape with a gesture which—had not those wings been waterproof —might have seemed to hurl defiance at things in general. And he ordered an absinthe. "Je me tiens toujours fidèle," he told Rothenstein, "à Ja sorcière glauque."
"It is bad for you," said Rothenstein dryly.
"Nothing is bad for one," answered Soames. "Dans ce monde il n'y a ni 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." lie 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.
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