‘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 tablecloth. 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 an impossible 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 repeating 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,’....