The Treasury Of The Fantastic

by David Sandner

  “Take good care of the tree, for its health and yours are bound together. It will never bear again, but if you tend it well it will live long. Water its roots once in each hour every night—and do it yourself; it must not be done by proxy, and to do it in daylight will not answer. If you fail only once in any night, the tree will die, and you likewise. Do not go home to your own country any more—you would not reach there; make no business or pleasure engagements which require you to go outside your gate at night—you cannot afford the risk; do not rent or sell this place—it would be injudicious.”

  The foreigner was proud and wouldn’t beg, but I thought he looked as if he would like to. While he stood gazing at Satan we vanished away and landed in Ceylon.

  I was sorry for that man; sorry Satan hadn’t been his customary self and killed him or made him a lunatic. It would have been a mercy. Satan overheard the thought, and said:

  “I would have done it but for his wife, who has not offended me. She is coming to him presently from their native land, Portugal. She is well, but has not long to live, and has been yearning to see him and persuade him to go back with her next year. She will die without knowing he can’t leave that place.”

  “He won’t tell her?”

  “He? He will not trust that secret with anyone; he will reflect that it could be revealed in sleep, in the hearing of some Portuguese guest’s servant some time or other.”

  “Did none of those natives understand what you said to him?”

  “None of them understood, but he will always be afraid that some of them did. That fear will be torture to him, for he has been a harsh master to them. In his dreams he will imagine them chopping his tree down. That will make his days uncomfortable—I have already arranged for his nights.”

  It grieved me, though not sharply, to see him take such a malicious satisfaction in his plans for this foreigner.

  “Does he believe what you told him, Satan?”

  “He thought he didn’t, but our vanishing helped. The tree, where there had been no tree before—that helped. The insane and uncanny variety of fruits—the sudden withering—all these things are helps. Let him think as he may, reason as he may, one thing is certain, he will water the tree. But between this and night he will begin his changed career with a very natural precaution—for him.”

  “What is that?”

  “He will fetch a priest to cast out the tree’s devil. You are such a humorous race—and don’t suspect it.”

  “Will he tell the priest?”

  “No. He will say a juggler from Bombay created it, and that he wants the juggler’s devil driven out of it, so that it will thrive and be fruitful again. The priest’s incantations will fail; then the Portuguese will give up that scheme and get his watering pot ready.”

  “But the priest will burn the tree. I know it; he will not allow it to remain.”

  “Yes, and anywhere in Europe he would burn the man, too. But in India the people are civilized, and these things will not happen. The man will drive the priest away and take care of the tree.”

  I reflected a little, then said, “Satan, you have given him a hard life, I think.”

  “Comparatively. It must not be mistaken for a holiday.”

  We flitted from place to place around the world as we had done before, Satan showing me a hundred wonders, most of them reflecting in some way the weakness and triviality of our race. He did this now every few days—not out of malice—I am sure of that—it only seemed to amuse and interest him, just as a naturalist might be amused and interested by a collection of ants.

  CHAPTER XI

  For as much as a year Satan continued these visits, but at last he came less often, and then for a long time he did not come at all. This always made me lonely and melancholy. I felt that he was losing interest in our tiny world and might at any time abandon his visits entirely. When one day he finally came to me I was overjoyed, but only for a little while. He had come to say goodbye, he told me, and for the last time. He had investigations and undertakings in other corners of the universe, he said, that would keep him busy for a longer period than I could wait for his return.

  “And you are going away, and will not come back any more?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We have comraded long together, and it has been pleasant—pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall not see each other any more.”

  “In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely?”

  Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, “There is no other.”

  A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible words might be true—even must be true.

  “Have you never suspected this, Theodor?”

  “No. How could I? But if it can only be true—”

  “It is true.”

  A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before it could issue in words, and I said, “But—but—we have seen that future life— seen it in its actuality, and so—”

  “It was a vision—it had no existence.”

  I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me. “A vision?—a vi—”

  “Life itself is only a vision, a dream.”

  It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!

  “Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!”

  “I!”

  “And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream—your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me....

  “I am perishing already—I am failing—I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!

  “Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages, eons ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...

  “You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

  “It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but
you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”

  He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.

  MAX BEERBOHM

  Enoch Soames:

  A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties

  Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) was an English cartoonist, caricaturist, satirist, essayist, and writer. A man of great wit and something of a dandy, Max Beerbohm was a friend and contemporary of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and George Bernard Shaw, who dubbed him “The Incomparable Max.” His fiction and nonfiction were marked by their intelligence and humor. Beerbohm’s caricatures appeared in such magazines as The Strand and now are collected in such galleries as the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum. His most famous work of fiction is his novel Zuleika Dobson.

  Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames” first appeared in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1916, then later was published in the collection Seven Men in 1919. Like his caricatures, “Enoch Soames” reflects the time and has notable London places and characters in it (including himself), but it also has the devil, time travel, and other fantasy elements that bewilder and amuse the reader in a tour-de-force tragicomic fantasia on modern life.

  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. It was as I feared: 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’s failure to impress himself on his decade.

  I dare say 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 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 Daudet and the Goncourts. 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 Café 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!” (Forgive me that theory. Remember the waging of even the South African War was not yet.)

  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 gray 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 focused 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 a few 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, “á la 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 bien ni 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.” He was rolling a cigarette. He had weak, white hands, not well washed, and with finger-tips much stained with 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. It was wonderful to have written a book.

  If Rothenstein had not been there, I should have revered Soames. Even as it was, I respected him. And I was very near indeed to reverence when he said he had another book coming out soon. I asked if I might ask what kind of book it was to be.

  “My poems,” he answered. Rothenstein asked if this was to be the title of the book. The poet meditated on this suggestion, but said he rather thought of giving the book no title at all. “If a book is good in itself—” he murmured, and waved his cigarette.

  Rothenstein objected that absence of title might be bad for the sale of a book.

  “If,” he urged, “I went into a bookseller’s and said simply, ‘Have you got?’ or, ‘Have you a copy of?’ how would they know what I wanted?”

  “Oh, of course I should have my name on the cover,” Soames answered earnestly. “And I rather want,” he added, looking hard at Rothenstein, “to have a drawing of myself as frontispiece.” Rothenstein admitted that this was a capital idea, and mentioned that he was going into the country and would be there for some time. He then looked at his watch, exclaimed at the hour, paid the waiter, and went away with me to dinner. Soames remained at his post of fidelity to the glaucous witch.