NOCTURNE.
Round and round the shutter’d Square
I stroll’d with the Devil’s arm in mine.
No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was there
And the ring of his laughter and mine.
We had drunk black wine.
I scream’d, ‘I will race you, Master!’
‘What matter,’ he shriek’d, ‘to-night
Which of us runs the faster?
There is nothing to fear to-night
In the foul moon’s light!’
Then I look’d him in the eyes,
And I laugh’d full shrill at the lie he told
And the gnawing fear he would fain disguise.
It was true, what I’d time and again been told:
He was old—old.
There was, I felt, quite a swing about that first stanza—a joyous and rollicking note of comradeship. The second was slightly hysterical perhaps. But I liked the third: it was so bracingly unorthodox, even according to the tenets of Soames’ peculiar sect in the faith. Not much ‘trusting and encouraging’ here! Soames triumphantly exposing the Devil as a liar, and laughing ‘full shrill,’ cut a quite heartening figure, I thought—then! Now, in the light of what befell, none of his poems depresses me so much as ‘Nocturne.’
I looked out for what the metropolitan reviewers would have to say. They seemed to fall into two classes: those who had little to say and those who had nothing. The second class was the larger, and the words of the first were cold; insomuch that
Strikes a note of modernity throughout.... These tripping
numbers.—Preston Telegraph
was the only lure offered in advertisements by Soames’ publisher. I had hopes that when next I met the poet I could congratulate him on having made a stir; for I fancied he was not so sure of his intrinsic greatness as he seemed. I was but able to say, rather coarsely, when next I did see him, that I hoped ‘Fungoids’ was ‘selling splendidly.’ He looked at me across his glass of absinthe and asked if I had bought a copy. His publisher had told him that three had been sold. I laughed, as at a jest.
‘You don’t suppose I CARE, do you?’ he said, with something like a snarl. I disclaimed the notion. He added that he was not a tradesman. I said mildly that I wasn’t, either, and murmured that an artist who gave truly new and great things to the world had always to wait long for recognition. He said he cared not a sou for recognition. I agreed that the act of creation was its own reward.
His moroseness might have alienated me if I had regarded myself as a nobody. But ah! hadn’t both John Lane and Aubrey Beardsley suggested that I should write an essay for the great new venture that was afoot—‘The Yellow Book’? And hadn’t Henry Harland, as editor, accepted my essay? And wasn’t it to be in the very first number? At Oxford I was still in statu pupillari. In London I regarded myself as very much indeed a graduate now—one whom no Soames could ruffle. Partly to show off, partly in sheer good-will, I told Soames he ought to contribute to ‘The Yellow Book.’ He uttered from the throat a sound of scorn for that publication.
Nevertheless, I did, a day or two later, tentatively ask Harland if he knew anything of the work of a man called Enoch Soames. Harland paused in the midst of his characteristic stride around the room, threw up his hands towards the ceiling, and groaned aloud: he had often met ‘that absurd creature’ in Paris, and this very morning had received some poems in manuscript from him.
‘Has he NO talent?’ I asked.
‘He has an income. He’s all right.’ Harland was the most joyous of men and most generous of critics, and he hated to talk of anything about which he couldn’t be enthusiastic. So I dropped the subject of Soames. The news that Soames had an income did take the edge off solicitude. I learned afterwards that he was the son of an unsuccessful and deceased bookseller in Preston, but had inherited an annuity of 300 pounds from a married aunt, and had no surviving relatives of any kind. Materially, then, he was ‘all right.’ But there was still a spiritual pathos about him, sharpened for me now by the possibility that even the praises of The Preston Telegraph might not have been forthcoming had he not been the son of a Preston man. He had a sort of weak doggedness which I could not but admire. Neither he nor his work received the slightest encouragement; but he persisted in behaving as a personage: always he kept his dingy little flag flying. Wherever congregated the jeunes feroces of the arts, in whatever Soho restaurant they had just discovered, in whatever music-hall they were most frequenting, there was Soames in the midst of them, or rather on the fringe of them, a dim but inevitable figure. He never sought to propitiate his fellow-writers, never bated a jot of his arrogance about his own work or of his contempt for theirs. To the painters he was respectful, even humble; but for the poets and prosaists of ‘The Yellow Book,’ and later of ‘The Savoy,’ he had never a word but of scorn. He wasn’t resented. It didn’t occur to anybody that he or his Catholic Diabolism mattered. When, in the autumn of ‘96, he brought out (at his own expense, this time) a third book, his last book, nobody said a word for or against it. I meant, but forgot, to buy it. I never saw it, and am ashamed to say I don’t even remember what it was called. But I did, at the time of its publication, say to Rothenstein that I thought poor old Soames was really a rather tragic figure, and that I believed he would literally die for want of recognition. Rothenstein scoffed. He said I was trying to get credit for a kind heart which I didn’t possess; and perhaps this was so. But at the private view of the New English Art Club, a few weeks later, I beheld a pastel portrait of ‘Enoch Soames, Esq.’ It was very like him, and very like Rothenstein to have done it. Soames was standing near it, in his soft hat and his waterproof cape, all through the afternoon. Anybody who knew him would have recognised the portrait at a glance, but nobody who didn’t know him would have recognised the portrait from its bystander: it ‘existed’ so much more than he; it was bound to. Also, it had not that expression of faint happiness which on this day was discernible, yes, in Soames’ countenance. Fame had breathed on him. Twice again in the course of the month I went to the New English, and on both occasions Soames himself was on view there. Looking back, I regard the close of that exhibition as having been virtually the close of his career. He had felt the breath of Fame against his cheek—so late, for such a little while; and at its withdrawal he gave in, gave up, gave out. He, who had never looked strong or well, looked ghastly now—a shadow of the shade he had once been. He still frequented the domino room, but, having lost all wish to excite curiosity, he no longer read books there. ‘You read only at the Museum now?’ asked I, with attempted cheerfulness. He said he never went there now. ‘No absinthe there,’ he muttered. It was the sort of thing that in the old days he would have said for effect; but it carried conviction now. Absinthe, erst but a point in the ‘personality’ he had striven so hard to build up, was solace and necessity now. He no longer called it ‘la sorciere glauque.’ He had shed away all his French phrases. He had become a plain, unvarnished, Preston man.