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 tonight. 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 by 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 temporized, ‘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—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 boyfriend; and presently I blamed myself for letting the past override 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 realize 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 realize, 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 for ever. 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.
The Tail of the Sphinx
Ambrose Bierce (born 1842), American journalist and short-story writer, is noted for his imagination and brilliant cynicism, as displayed in Can Such Things Be? (1893) and The Devil’s Dictionary (1906). Tired of life, he disappeared in Mexico some time in 1913.
A Dog of a taciturn disposition said to his Tail:
‘Whenever I am angry you rise and bristle; when I am pleased you wag; when I am alarmed you tuck yourself in out of danger. You are too mercurial—you disclose all my emotions. My notion is that tails are given to conceal thought. It is my dearest ambition to be as impassive as the Sphinx.’
‘My friend, you must recognize the laws and limitations of your being,’ replied the Tail, with flexions appropriate to the sentiments uttered, ‘and try to be great some other way. The Sphinx has one hundred and fifty qualifications for impassiveness which you lack.’
‘What are they?’ the Dog asked.
‘One hundred and forty-nine tons of sand on its tail.’
‘And—?’
‘A stone tail.’
The Squid in Its Own Ink
Adolfo Bioy Casares, Argentine writer born in Buenos Aires. Author of La invención de Morel (1940); Plan de evasión (1945); La Trama celeste (1948); El sueño de los héroes (1954); Historia prodigiosa (1955); Guirnalda con amores (1959); El lado de la sombra (1962).
More has happened in this town during the last few days than in the whole of the rest of its history. In order fully to appreciate what I am saying, remember that I’m talking about one of the oldest towns in the province, one that has witnessed countless outstanding events: its foundation in the middle of the nineteenth century; cholera some time later—an outbreak which luckily did not reach major proportions; and the threat of a surprise attack by the Indians, which although it never actually happened, kept people in check for five years, when farms near the border were troubled by Indians. Leaving behind heroic times, I shall skip several visits by governors, members of parliament, candidates of every kind, as well as comics and one or two big names in sport, and, to come full circle, I shall end this short list with the Foundation Centenary party, a genuine pageant of homage and homilies.
As I am about to recount an event of great importance, let me first present my credentials to the reader. Of broad mind and advanced ideas, I devour any book I can get my hands on in my Spanish friend Villarroel’s bookshop, from Doctor Jung to Hugo, Walter Scott and Goldoni, not forgetting the last little volume of Scenes of Madrid. My objective is culture, but I’m already approaching those ‘damned thirty years’ and I’m afraid I have more to learn than I already know. In short, I try to carry on and to illuminate my neighbours—all lovely, beautiful people, though overly fond of the siesta, a custom passed down from the Middle Ages and Obscurantism. I’m a teacher—primary school—and journalist. I practise my skill as a writer in modest local publications, now factotum for The Sunflower (a badly chosen title, giving ris
e to taunts and attracting an enormous amount of mistaken correspondence, since we are taken for a cereal publication), now for Nueva Patria.
The subject-matter of this chronicle has a special peculiarity I cannot omit: not only did the event in question take place in my home town, but it happened in the block where my whole life unfolded, where were my home, my school—my second home—and a hotel bar opposite the station, where we restless local youths would go night after night, very late. The epicentre of the phenomenon, or focus, if you like, was Juan Camargo’s yard, the bottom of which adjoined the hotel on the east side and our yard on the north. And the phenomenon itself was heralded by a couple of circumstances which not everyone would have linked together: I mean the request for books and the withdrawal of the sprinkler.
Las Margaritas, don Juan’s private petit-hotel, a real chalet with a flowery garden on to the street, takes up half the front and a small part of the bottom of the yard, where innumerable things were piled up, such as relics from ships at the bottom of the sea. As to the sprinkler, it always turned in the garden, so much so that it was one of the oldest traditions and one of the most interesting peculiarities in our town.
One Sunday, early in the month, the sprinkler mysteriously went missing. Since it hadn’t reappeared by the end of the week, the garden began to fade. Whilst many watched without seeing, there was one who was beset by curiosity from the first moment. This person infected the others, and at night, in the bar opposite the station, the lads would be bubbling with questions and comments. To the extent that, itching with natural, naive curiosity, we uncovered something about which little was natural and which turned out to be quite a surprise.
The Book of Fantasy Page 7