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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Seven Men, by Max Beerbohm
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Seven Men
+
+Author: Max Beerbohm
+
+Posting Date: September 15, 2008 [EBook #1306]
+Release Date: May, 1998
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEVEN MEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tom Weiss
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN MEN
+
+by Max Beerbohm
+
+
+
+
+  Transcriber's Note:
+  From the version of "Seven Men" published in 1919 by William
+  Heinemann (London).  Two of the stories have been omitted
+  ("James Pethel" and "A.V. Laider") since they are available
+  separately from Project Gutenberg.
+
+  In this plain ASCII version, emphasis and syllable
+  stress italics have been converted to capitals; foreign italics and accents
+  have been removed
+
+  In "Enoch Soames:"
+  I added a missing closing quotation mark in the following
+  phrase: 'Ten past two,' he said.
+
+  In "Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton:"
+  I changed the opening double quote to a single quote in:
+  'I wondered what old Mr. Abraham Hayward...
+  and
+  'I knew that if I leaned forward...
+
+
+
+
+ENOCH SOAMES
+
+
+
+
+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 life-time, 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 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 Cafe 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 fidele,' he told Rothenstein, 'a la
+sorciere 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.' He 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.
+
+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, waving 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.
+
+'Why were you so determined not to draw him?' I asked.
+
+'Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn't exist?'
+
+'He is dim,' I admitted. But my mot juste fell flat. Rothenstein
+repeated that Soames was non-existent.
+
+Still, Soames had written a book. I asked if Rothenstein had read
+'Negations.' He said he had looked into it, 'but,' he added crisply,
+'I don't profess to know anything about writing.' A reservation very
+characteristic of the period! Painters would not then allow that any one
+outside their own order had a right to any opinion about painting. This
+law (graven on the tablets brought down by Whistler from the summit of
+Fujiyama) imposed certain limitations. If other arts than painting were
+not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practised them,
+the law tottered--the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did not hold good.
+Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book without warning
+you at any rate that his opinion was worthless. No one is a better judge
+of literature than Rothenstein; but it wouldn't have done to tell him
+so in those days; and I knew that I must form an unaided judgment on
+'Negations.'
+
+Not to buy a book of which I had met the author face to face would
+have been for me in those days an impossible act of self-denial. When
+I returned to Oxford for the Christmas Term I had duly secured
+'Negations.' I used to keep it lying carelessly on the table in my room,
+and whenever a friend took it up and asked what it was about I would
+say 'Oh, it's rather a remarkable book. It's by a man whom I know.' Just
+'what it was about' I never was able to say. Head or tail was just what
+I hadn't made of that slim green volume. I found in the preface no clue
+to the exiguous labyrinth of contents, and in that labyrinth nothing to
+explain the preface.
+
+
+'Lean near to life. Lean very near--nearer.
+
+'Life is web, and therein nor warp nor woof is, but web only.
+
+'It is for this I am Catholick in church and in thought, yet do let
+swift Mood weave there what the shuttle of Mood wills.'
+
+
+These were the opening phrases of the preface, but those which followed
+were less easy to understand. Then came 'Stark: A Conte,' about a
+midinette who, so far as I could gather, murdered, or was about to
+murder, a mannequin. It was rather like a story by Catulle Mendes in
+which the translator had either skipped or cut out every alternate
+sentence. Next, a dialogue between Pan and St. Ursula--lacking, I felt,
+in 'snap.' Next, some aphorisms (entitled 'Aphorismata' [spelled in
+Greek]). Throughout, in fact, there was a great variety of form; and
+the forms had evidently been wrought with much care. It was rather the
+substance that eluded me. Was there, I wondered, any substance at all?
+It did now occur to me: suppose Enoch Soames was a fool! Up cropped a
+rival hypothesis: suppose _I_ was! I inclined to give Soames the benefit
+of the doubt. I had read 'L'Apres-midi d'un Faune' without extracting a
+glimmer of meaning. Yet Mallarme--of course--was a Master. How was I to
+know that Soames wasn't another? There was a sort of music in his
+prose, not indeed arresting, but perhaps, I thought, haunting, and laden
+perhaps with meanings as deep as Mallarme's own. I awaited his poems
+with an open mind.
+
+And I looked forward to them with positive impatience after I had had a
+second meeting with him. This was on an evening in January. Going into
+the aforesaid domino room, I passed a table at which sat a pale man with
+an open book before him. He looked from his book to me, and I looked
+back over my shoulder with a vague sense that I ought to have recognised
+him. I returned to pay my respects. After exchanging a few words, I said
+with a glance to the open book, 'I see I am interrupting you,' and was
+about to pass on, but 'I prefer,' Soames replied in his toneless voice,
+'to be interrupted,' and I obeyed his gesture that I should sit down.
+
+I asked him if he often read here. 'Yes; things of this kind I read
+here,' he answered, indicating the title of his book--'The Poems of
+Shelley.'
+
+'Anything that you really'--and I was going to say 'admire?' But I
+cautiously left my sentence unfinished, and was glad that I had done so,
+for he said, with unwonted emphasis, 'Anything second-rate.'
+
+I had read little of Shelley, but 'Of course,' I murmured, 'he's very
+uneven.'
+
+'I should have thought evenness was just what was wrong with him. A
+deadly evenness. That's why I read him here. The noise of this place
+breaks the rhythm. He's tolerable here.' Soames took up the book and
+glanced through the pages. He laughed. Soames' laugh was a short, single
+and mirthless sound from the throat, unaccompanied by any movement of
+the face or brightening of the eyes. 'What a period!' he uttered, laying
+the book down. And 'What a country!' he added.
+
+I asked rather nervously if he didn't think Keats had more or less held
+his own against the drawbacks of time and place. He admitted that there
+were 'passages in Keats,' but did not specify them. Of 'the older men,'
+as he called them, he seemed to like only Milton. 'Milton,' he said,
+'wasn't sentimental.' Also, 'Milton had a dark insight.' And again, 'I
+can always read Milton in the reading-room.'
+
+'The reading-room?'
+
+'Of the British Museum. I go there every day.'
+
+'You do? I've only been there once. I'm afraid I found it rather a
+depressing place. It--it seemed to sap one's vitality.'
+
+'It does. That's why I go there. The lower one's vitality, the more
+sensitive one is to great art. I live near the Museum. I have rooms in
+Dyott Street.'
+
+'And you go round to the reading-room to read Milton?'
+
+'Usually Milton.' He looked at me. 'It was Milton,' he certificatively
+added, 'who converted me to Diabolism.'
+
+'Diabolism? Oh yes? Really?' said I, with that vague discomfort and that
+intense desire to be polite which one feels when a man speaks of his own
+religion. 'You--worship the Devil?'
+
+Soames shook his head. 'It's not exactly worship,' he qualified, sipping
+his absinthe. 'It's more a matter of trusting and encouraging.'
+
+'Ah, yes.... But I had rather gathered from the preface to "Negations"
+that you were a--a Catholic.'
+
+'Je l'etais a cette epoque. Perhaps I still am. Yes, I'm a Catholic
+Diabolist.'
+
+This profession he made in an almost cursory tone. I could see that what
+was upmost in his mind was the fact that I had read 'Negations.' His
+pale eyes had for the first time gleamed. I felt as one who is about to
+be examined, viva voce, on the very subject in which he is shakiest. I
+hastily asked him how soon his poems were to be published. 'Next week,'
+he told me.
+
+'And are they to be published without a title?'
+
+'No. I found a title, at last. But I shan't tell you what it is,' as
+though I had been so impertinent as to inquire. 'I am not sure that
+it wholly satisfies me. But it is the best I can find. It suggests
+something of the quality of the poems.... Strange growths, natural and
+wild, yet exquisite,' he added, 'and many-hued, and full of poisons.'
+
+I asked him what he thought of Baudelaire. He uttered the snort that
+was his laugh, and 'Baudelaire,' he said, 'was a bourgeois malgre lui.'
+France had had only one poet: Villon; 'and two-thirds of Villon were
+sheer journalism.' Verlaine was 'an epicier malgre lui.' Altogether,
+rather to my surprise, he rated French literature lower than English.
+There were 'passages' in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. But 'I,' he summed up,
+'owe nothing to France.' He nodded at me. 'You'll see,' he predicted.
+
+I did not, when the time came, quite see that. I thought the author of
+'Fungoids' did--unconsciously, of course--owe something to the young
+Parisian decadents, or to the young English ones who owed something to
+THEM. I still think so. The little book--bought by me in Oxford--lies
+before me as I write. Its pale grey buckram cover and silver lettering
+have not worn well. Nor have its contents. Through these, with a
+melancholy interest, I have again been looking. They are not much. But
+at the time of their publication I had a vague suspicion that they MIGHT
+be. I suppose it is my capacity for faith, not poor Soames' work, that
+is weaker than it once was....
+
+
+              TO A YOUNG WOMAN.
+
+     Thou art, who hast not been!
+         Pale tunes irresolute
+         And traceries of old sounds
+         Blown from a rotted flute
+     Mingle with noise of cymbals rouged with rust,
+     Nor not strange forms and epicene
+         Lie bleeding in the dust,
+             Being wounded with wounds.
+
+             For this it is
+         That in thy counterpart
+             Of age-long mockeries
+         Thou hast not been nor art!
+
+
+There seemed to me a certain inconsistency as between the first and last
+lines of this. I tried, with bent brows, to resolve the discord. But I
+did not take my failure as wholly incompatible with a meaning in Soames'
+mind. Might it not rather indicate the depth of his meaning? As for the
+craftsmanship, 'rouged with rust' seemed to me a fine stroke, and 'nor
+not' instead of 'and' had a curious felicity. I wondered who the Young
+Woman was, and what she had made of it all. I sadly suspect that Soames
+could not have made more of it than she. Yet, even now, if one doesn't
+try to make any sense at all of the poem, and reads it just for the
+sound, there is a certain grace of cadence. Soames was an artist--in so
+far as he was anything, poor fellow!
+
+It seemed to me, when first I read 'Fungoids,' that, oddly enough, the
+Diabolistic side of him was the best. Diabolism seemed to be a cheerful,
+even a wholesome, influence in his life.
+
+
+                  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.
+
+Failure, if it be a plain, unvarnished, complete failure, and even
+though it be a squalid failure, has always a certain dignity. I avoided
+Soames because he made me feel rather vulgar. John Lane had published,
+by this time, two little books of mine, and they had had a pleasant
+little success of esteem. I was a--slight but definite--'personality.'
+Frank Harris had engaged me to kick up my heels in The Saturday Review,
+Alfred Harmsworth was letting me do likewise in The Daily Mail. I was
+just what Soames wasn't. And he shamed my gloss. Had I known that he
+really and firmly believed in the greatness of what he as an artist
+had achieved, I might not have shunned him. No man who hasn't lost his
+vanity can be held to have altogether failed. Soames' dignity was an
+illusion of mine. One day in the first week of June, 1897, that illusion
+went. But on the evening of that day Soames went too.
+
+I had been out most of the morning, and, as it was too late to reach
+home in time for luncheon, I sought 'the Vingtieme.' This little
+place--Restaurant du Vingtieme Siecle, to give it its full title--had
+been discovered in '96 by the poets and prosaists, but had now been more
+or less abandoned in favour of some later find. I don't think it lived
+long enough to justify its name; but at that time there it still was, in
+Greek Street, a few doors from Soho Square, and almost opposite to that
+house where, in the first years of the century, a little girl, and with
+her a boy named De Quincey, made nightly encampment in darkness and
+hunger among dust and rats and old legal parchments. The Vingtieme was
+but a small whitewashed room, leading out into the street at one end and
+into a kitchen at the other. The proprietor and cook was a Frenchman,
+known to us as Monsieur Vingtieme; the waiters were his two daughters,
+Rose and Berthe; and the food, according to faith, was good. The tables
+were so narrow, and were set so close together, that there was space for
+twelve of them, six jutting from either wall.
+
+Only the two nearest to the door, as I went in, were occupied. On one
+side sat a tall, flashy, rather Mephistophelian man whom I had seen from
+time to time in the domino room and elsewhere. On the other side sat
+Soames. They made a queer contrast in that sunlit room--Soames sitting
+haggard in that hat and cape which nowhere at any season had I seen him
+doff, and this other, this keenly vital man, at sight of whom I more
+than ever wondered whether he were a diamond merchant, a conjurer, or
+the head of a private detective agency. I was sure Soames didn't want my
+company; but I asked, as it would have seemed brutal not to, whether
+I might join him, and took the chair opposite to his. He was smoking
+a cigarette, with an untasted salmi of something on his plate and a
+half-empty bottle of Sauterne before him; and he was quite silent. I
+said that the preparations for the Jubilee made London impossible. (I
+rather liked them, really.) I professed a wish to go right away till
+the whole thing was over. In vain did I attune myself to his gloom. He
+seemed not to hear me nor even to see me. I felt that his behaviour made
+me ridiculous in the eyes of the other man. The gangway between the two
+rows of tables at the Vingtieme was hardly more than two feet wide (Rose
+and Berthe, in their ministrations, had always to edge past each other,
+quarrelling in whispers as they did so), and any one at the table
+abreast of yours was practically at yours. I thought our neighbour was
+amused at my failure to interest Soames, and so, as I could not explain
+to him that my insistence was merely charitable, I became silent.
+Without turning my head, I had him well within my range of vision. I
+hoped I looked less vulgar than he in contrast with Soames. I was sure
+he was not an Englishman, but what WAS his nationality? Though his
+jet-black hair was en brosse, I did not think he was French. To Berthe,
+who waited on him, he spoke French fluently, but with a hardly native
+idiom and accent. I gathered that this was his first visit to the
+Vingtieme; but Berthe was off-hand in her manner to him: he had not made
+a good impression. His eyes were handsome, but--like the Vingtieme's
+tables--too narrow and set too close together. His nose was predatory,
+and the points of his moustache, waxed up beyond his nostrils, gave
+a fixity to his smile. Decidedly, he was sinister. And my sense of
+discomfort in his presence was intensified by the scarlet waistcoat
+which tightly, and so unseasonably in June, sheathed his ample chest.
+This waistcoat wasn't wrong merely because of the heat, either. It was
+somehow all wrong in itself. It wouldn't have done on Christmas morning.
+It would have struck a jarring note at the first night of 'Hernani.'
+I was trying to account for its wrongness when Soames suddenly and
+strangely broke silence. 'A hundred years hence!' he murmured, as in a
+trance.
+
+'We shall not be here!' I briskly but fatuously added.
+
+'We shall not be here. No,' he droned, 'but the Museum will still be
+just where it is. And the reading-room, just where it is. And people
+will be able to go and read there.' He inhaled sharply, and a spasm as
+of actual pain contorted his features.
+
+I wondered what train of thought poor Soames had been following. He did
+not enlighten me when he said, after a long pause, 'You think I haven't
+minded.'
+
+'Minded what, Soames?'
+
+'Neglect. Failure.'
+
+'FAILURE?' I said heartily. 'Failure?' I repeated vaguely.
+'Neglect--yes, perhaps; but that's quite another matter. Of course you
+haven't been--appreciated. But what then? Any artist who--who gives--'
+What I wanted to say was, 'Any artist who gives truly new and great
+things to the world has always to wait long for recognition'; but the
+flattery would not out: in the face of his misery, a misery so genuine
+and so unmasked, my lips would not say the words.
+
+And then--he said them for me. I flushed. 'That's what you were going to
+say, isn't it?' he asked.
+
+'How did you know?'
+
+'It's what you said to me three years ago, when "Fungoids" was
+published.' I flushed the more. I need not have done so at all, for
+'It's the only important thing I ever heard you say,' he continued.
+'And I've never forgotten it. It's a true thing. It's a horrible truth.
+But--d'you remember what I answered? I said "I don't care a sou for
+recognition." And you believed me. You've gone on believing I'm above
+that sort of thing. You're shallow. What should YOU know of the feelings
+of a man like me? You imagine that a great artist's faith in himself and
+in the verdict of posterity is enough to keep him happy.... You've never
+guessed at the bitterness and loneliness, the'--his voice broke; but
+presently he resumed, speaking with a force that I had never known in
+him. 'Posterity! What use is it to ME? A dead man doesn't know that
+people are visiting his grave--visiting his birthplace--putting up
+tablets to him--unveiling statues of him. A dead man can't read the
+books that are written about him. A hundred years hence! Think of it!
+If I could come back to life then--just for a few hours--and go to the
+reading-room, and READ! Or better still: if I could be projected, now,
+at this moment, into that future, into that reading-room, just for this
+one afternoon! I'd sell myself body and soul to the devil, for
+that! Think of the pages and pages in the catalogue: "SOAMES,
+ENOCH" endlessly--endless editions, commentaries, prolegomena,
+biographies'--but here he was interrupted by a sudden loud creak of the
+chair at the next table. Our neighbour had half risen from his place. He
+was leaning towards us, apologetically intrusive.
+
+'Excuse--permit me,' he said softly. 'I have been unable not to hear.
+Might I take a liberty? In this little restaurant-sans-facon'--he spread
+wide his hands--'might I, as the phrase is, "cut in"?'
+
+I could but signify our acquiescence. Berthe had appeared at the kitchen
+door, thinking the stranger wanted his bill. He waved her away with his
+cigar, and in another moment had seated himself beside me, commanding a
+full view of Soames.
+
+'Though not an Englishman,' he explained, 'I know my London well, Mr.
+Soames. Your name and fame--Mr. Beerbohm's too--very known to me. Your
+point is: who am _I_?' He glanced quickly over his shoulder, and in a
+lowered voice said 'I am the Devil.'
+
+I couldn't help it: I laughed. I tried not to, I knew there was nothing
+to laugh at, my rudeness shamed me, but--I laughed with increasing
+volume. The Devil's quiet dignity, the surprise and disgust of his
+raised eyebrows, did but the more dissolve me. I rocked to and fro, I
+lay back aching. I behaved deplorably.
+
+'I am a gentleman, and,' he said with intense emphasis, 'I thought I was
+in the company of GENTLEMEN.'
+
+'Don't!' I gasped faintly. 'Oh, don't!'
+
+'Curious, nicht wahr?' I heard him say to Soames. 'There is a type of
+person to whom the very mention of my name is--oh-so-awfully-funny! In
+your theatres the dullest comedian needs only to say "The Devil!" and
+right away they give him "the loud laugh that speaks the vacant mind."
+Is it not so?'
+
+I had now just breath enough to offer my apologies. He accepted them,
+but coldly, and re-addressed himself to Soames.
+
+'I am a man of business,' he said, 'and always I would put things
+through "right now," as they say in the States. You are a poet. Les
+affaires--you detest them. So be it. But with me you will deal, eh? What
+you have said just now gives me furiously to hope.'
+
+Soames had not moved, except to light a fresh cigarette. He sat crouched
+forward, with his elbows squared on the table, and his head just above
+the level of his hands, staring up at the Devil. 'Go on,' he nodded. I
+had no remnant of laughter in me now.
+
+'It will be the more pleasant, our little deal,' the Devil went on,
+'because you are--I mistake not?--a Diabolist.'
+
+'A Catholic Diabolist,' said Soames.
+
+The Devil accepted the reservation genially. 'You wish,' he resumed, 'to
+visit now--this afternoon as-ever-is--the reading-room of the British
+Museum, yes? but of a hundred years hence, yes? Parfaitement. Time--an
+illusion. Past and future--they are as ever-present as the present, or
+at any rate only what you call "just-round-the-corner." I switch you
+on to any date. I project you--pouf! You wish to be in the reading-room
+just as it will be on the afternoon of June 3, 1997? You wish to find
+yourself standing in that room, just past the swing-doors, this very
+minute, yes? and to stay there till closing time? Am I right?'
+
+Soames nodded.
+
+The Devil looked at his watch. 'Ten past two,' he said. 'Closing time in
+summer same then as now: seven o'clock. That will give you almost five
+hours. At seven o'clock--pouf!--you find yourself again here, sitting
+at this table. I am dining to-night dans le monde--dans le higlif. That
+concludes my present visit to your great city. I come and fetch you
+here, Mr. Soames, on my way home.'
+
+'Home?' I echoed.
+
+'Be it never so humble!' said the Devil lightly.
+
+'All right,' said Soames.
+
+'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,'....
+
+
+Was there NO way of helping him--saving him? A bargain was a bargain,
+and I was the last man to aid or abet any one in wriggling out of a
+reasonable obligation. I wouldn't have lifted a little finger to save
+Faust. But poor Soames!--doomed to pay without respite an eternal price
+for nothing but a fruitless search and a bitter disillusioning....
+
+Odd and uncanny it seemed to me that he, Soames, in the flesh, in the
+waterproof cape, was at this moment living in the last decade of the
+next century, poring over books not yet written, and seeing and seen by
+men not yet born. Uncannier and odder still, that to-night and evermore
+he would be in Hell. Assuredly, truth was stranger than fiction.
+
+Endless that afternoon was. Almost I wished I had gone with Soames--not
+indeed to stay in the reading-room, but to sally forth for a brisk
+sight-seeing walk around a new London. I wandered restlessly out of the
+Park I had sat in. Vainly I tried to imagine myself an ardent tourist
+from the eighteenth century. Intolerable was the strain of the
+slow-passing and empty minutes. Long before seven o'clock I was back at
+the Vingtieme.
+
+I sat there just where I had sat for luncheon. Air came in listlessly
+through the open door behind me. Now and again Rose or Berthe appeared
+for a moment. I had told them I would not order any dinner till Mr.
+Soames came. A hurdy-gurdy began to play, abruptly drowning the noise
+of a quarrel between some Frenchmen further up the street. Whenever the
+tune was changed I heard the quarrel still raging. I had bought another
+evening paper on my way. I unfolded it. My eyes gazed ever away from it
+to the clock over the kitchen door....
+
+Five minutes, now, to the hour! I remembered that clocks in restaurants
+are kept five minutes fast. I concentrated my eyes on the paper. I vowed
+I would not look away from it again. I held it upright, at its full
+width, close to my face, so that I had no view of anything but it....
+Rather a tremulous sheet? Only because of the draught, I told myself.
+
+My arms gradually became stiff; they ached; but I could not drop
+them--now. I had a suspicion, I had a certainty. Well, what then?...
+What else had I come for? Yet I held tight that barrier of newspaper.
+Only the sound of Berthe's brisk footstep from the kitchen enabled me,
+forced me, to drop it, and to utter:
+
+'What shall we have to eat, Soames?'
+
+'Il est souffrant, ce pauvre Monsieur Soames?' asked Berthe.
+
+'He's only--tired.' I asked her to get some wine--Burgundy--and whatever
+food might be ready. Soames sat crouched forward against the table,
+exactly as when last I had seen him. It was as though he had never
+moved--he who had moved so unimaginably far. Once or twice in the
+afternoon it had for an instant occurred to me that perhaps his journey
+was not to be fruitless--that perhaps we had all been wrong in our
+estimate of the works of Enoch Soames. That we had been horribly right
+was horribly clear from the look of him. But 'Don't be discouraged,' I
+falteringly said. 'Perhaps it's only that you--didn't leave enough time.
+Two, three centuries hence, perhaps--'
+
+'Yes,' his voice came. 'I've thought of that.'
+
+'And now--now for the more immediate future! Where are you going to
+hide? How would it be if you caught the Paris express from Charing
+Cross? Almost an hour to spare. Don't go on to Paris. Stop at Calais.
+Live in Calais. He'd never think of looking for you in Calais.'
+
+'It's like my luck,' he said, 'to spend my last hours on earth with
+an ass.' But I was not offended. 'And a treacherous ass,' he strangely
+added, tossing across to me a crumpled bit of paper which he had been
+holding in his hand. I glanced at the writing on it--some sort of
+gibberish, apparently. I laid it impatiently aside.
+
+'Come, Soames! pull yourself together! This isn't a mere matter of life
+and death. It's a question of eternal torment, mind you! You don't mean
+to say you're going to wait limply here till the Devil comes to fetch
+you?'
+
+'I can't do anything else. I've no choice.'
+
+'Come! This is "trusting and encouraging" with a vengeance! This is
+Diabolism run mad!' I filled his glass with wine. 'Surely, now that
+you've SEEN the brute--'
+
+'It's no good abusing him.'
+
+'You must admit there's nothing Miltonic about him, Soames.'
+
+'I don't say he's not rather different from what I expected.'
+
+'He's a vulgarian, he's a swell-mobsman, he's the sort of man who hangs
+about the corridors of trains going to the Riviera and steals ladies'
+jewel-cases. Imagine eternal torment presided over by HIM!'
+
+'You don't suppose I look forward to it, do you?'
+
+'Then why not slip quietly out of the way?'
+
+Again and again I filled his glass, and always, mechanically, he emptied
+it; but the wine kindled no spark of enterprise in him. He did not eat,
+and I myself ate hardly at all. I did not in my heart believe that any
+dash for freedom could save him. The chase would be swift, the capture
+certain. But better anything than this passive, meek, miserable waiting.
+I told Soames that for the honour of the human race he ought to make
+some show of resistance. He asked what the human race had ever done for
+him. 'Besides,' he said, 'can't you understand that I'm in his power?
+You saw him touch me, didn't you? There's an end of it. I've no will.
+I'm sealed.'
+
+I made a gesture of despair. He went on repeating the word 'sealed.'
+I began to realise that the wine had clouded his brain. No wonder!
+Foodless he had gone into futurity, foodless he still was. I urged him
+to eat at any rate some bread. It was maddening to think that he, who
+had so much to tell, might tell nothing. 'How was it all,' I asked,
+'yonder? Come! Tell me your adventures.'
+
+'They'd make first-rate "copy," wouldn't they?'
+
+'I'm awfully sorry for you, Soames, and I make all possible allowances;
+but what earthly right have you to insinuate that I should make "copy,"
+as you call it, out of you?'
+
+The poor fellow pressed his hands to his forehead. 'I don't know,' he
+said. 'I had some reason, I know.... I'll try to remember.'
+
+'That's right. Try to remember everything. Eat a little more bread. What
+did the reading-room look like?'
+
+'Much as usual,' he at length muttered.
+
+'Many people there?'
+
+'Usual sort of number.'
+
+'What did they look like?'
+
+Soames tried to visualise them. 'They all,' he presently remembered,
+'looked very like one another.'
+
+My mind took a fearsome leap. 'All dressed in Jaeger?'
+
+'Yes. I think so. Greyish-yellowish stuff.'
+
+'A sort of uniform?' He nodded. 'With a number on it, perhaps?--a number
+on a large disc of metal sewn on to the left sleeve? DKF 78,910--that
+sort of thing?' It was even so. 'And all of them--men and women
+alike--looking very well-cared-for? very Utopian? and smelling rather
+strongly of carbolic? and all of them quite hairless?' I was right every
+time. Soames was only not sure whether the men and women were hairless
+or shorn. 'I hadn't time to look at them very closely,' he explained.
+
+'No, of course not. But----'
+
+'They stared at ME, I can tell you. I attracted a great deal of
+attention.' At last he had done that! 'I think I rather scared them.
+They moved away whenever I came near. They followed me about at a
+distance, wherever I went. The men at the round desk in the middle
+seemed to have a sort of panic whenever I went to make inquiries.'
+
+'What did you do when you arrived?'
+
+Well, he had gone straight to the catalogue, of course--to the S
+volumes, and had stood long before SN--SOF, unable to take this volume
+out of the shelf, because his heart was beating so.... At first,
+he said, he wasn't disappointed--he only thought there was some new
+arrangement. He went to the middle desk and asked where the catalogue of
+TWENTIETH-century books was kept. He gathered that there was still only
+one catalogue. Again he looked up his name, stared at the three little
+pasted slips he had known so well. Then he went and sat down for a long
+time....
+
+'And then,' he droned, 'I looked up the "Dictionary of National
+Biography" and some encyclopedias.... I went back to the middle desk
+and asked what was the best modern book on late nineteenth-century
+literature. They told me Mr. T. K. Nupton's book was considered the
+best. I looked it up in the catalogue and filled in a form for it. It
+was brought to me. My name wasn't in the index, but--Yes!' he said with
+a sudden change of tone. 'That's what I'd forgotten. Where's that bit of
+paper? Give it me back.'
+
+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 to-night. 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, publishd
+bi 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
+departmnt 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 temporised, '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 shirt-front, 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 Vingtieme 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 boy-friend; and presently I
+blamed myself for letting the past over-ride 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 be only 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 realise 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 3, 1997. You realise, 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 forever. 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 Vingtieme. 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+HILARY MALTBY AND STEPHEN BRAXTON
+
+
+People still go on comparing Thackeray and Dickens, quite cheerfully.
+But the fashion of comparing Maltby and Braxton went out so long ago as
+1795. No, I am wrong. But anything that happened in the bland old days
+before the war does seem to be a hundred more years ago than actually
+it is. The year I mean is the one in whose spring-time we all went
+bicycling (O thrill!) in Battersea Park, and ladies wore sleeves that
+billowed enormously out from their shoulders, and Lord Rosebery was
+Prime Minister.
+
+In that Park, in that spring-time, in that sea of sleeves, there was
+almost as much talk about the respective merits of Braxton and Maltby as
+there was about those of Rudge and Humber. For the benefit of my younger
+readers, and perhaps, so feeble is human memory, for the benefit of
+their elders too, let me state that Rudge and Humber were rival makers
+of bicycles, that Hilary Maltby was the author of 'Ariel in Mayfair,'
+and Stephen Braxton of 'A Faun on the Cotswolds.'
+
+'Which do you think is REALLY the best--"Ariel" or "A Faun"?' Ladies
+were always asking one that question. 'Oh, well, you know, the two are
+so different. It's really very hard to compare them.' One was always
+giving that answer. One was not very brilliant perhaps.
+
+The vogue of the two novels lasted throughout the summer. As both were
+'firstlings,' and Great Britain had therefore nothing else of Braxton's
+or Maltby's to fall back on, the horizon was much scanned for what
+Maltby, and what Braxton, would give us next. In the autumn Braxton
+gave us his secondling. It was an instantaneous failure. No more was he
+compared with Maltby. In the spring of '96 came Maltby's secondling.
+Its failure was instantaneous. Maltby might once more have been compared
+with Braxton. But Braxton was now forgotten. So was Maltby.
+
+This was not kind. This was not just. Maltby's first novel, and
+Braxton's, had brought delight into many thousands of homes. People
+should have paused to say of Braxton "Perhaps his third novel will be
+better than his second," and to say as much for Maltby. I blame people
+for having given no sign of wanting a third from either; and I blame
+them with the more zest because neither 'A Faun on the Cotswolds' nor
+'Ariel in Mayfair' was a merely popular book: each, I maintain, was a
+good book. I don't go so far as to say that the one had 'more of natural
+magic, more of British woodland glamour, more of the sheer joy of life
+in it than anything since "As You Like It,"' though Higsby went so far
+as this in the Daily Chronicle; nor can I allow the claim made for the
+other by Grigsby in the Globe that 'for pungency of satire there has
+been nothing like it since Swift laid down his pen, and for sheer
+sweetness and tenderness of feeling--ex forti dulcedo--nothing to be
+mentioned in the same breath with it since the lute fell from the tired
+hand of Theocritus.' These were foolish exaggerations. But one must not
+condemn a thing because it has been over-praised. Maltby's 'Ariel' was
+a delicate, brilliant work; and Braxton's 'Faun,' crude though it was
+in many ways, had yet a genuine power and beauty. This is not a mere
+impression remembered from early youth. It is the reasoned and seasoned
+judgment of middle age. Both books have been out of print for many
+years; but I secured a second-hand copy of each not long ago, and found
+them well worth reading again.
+
+From the time of Nathaniel Hawthorne to the outbreak of the war, current
+literature did not suffer from any lack of fauns. But when Braxton's
+first book appeared fauns had still an air of novelty about them. We had
+not yet tired of them and their hoofs and their slanting eyes and their
+way of coming suddenly out of woods to wean quiet English villages from
+respectability. We did tire later. But Braxton's faun, even now, seems
+to me an admirable specimen of his class--wild and weird, earthy,
+goat-like, almost convincing. And I find myself convinced altogether by
+Braxton's rustics. I admit that I do not know much about rustics,
+except from novels. But I plead that the little I do know about them by
+personal observation does not confirm much of what the many novelists
+have taught me. I plead also that Braxton may well have been right about
+the rustics of Gloucestershire because he was (as so many interviewers
+recorded of him in his brief heyday) the son of a yeoman farmer at Far
+Oakridge, and his boyhood had been divided between that village and the
+Grammar School at Stroud. Not long ago I happened to be staying in the
+neighbourhood, and came across several villagers who might, I assure
+you, have stepped straight out of Braxton's pages. For that matter,
+Braxton himself, whom I met often in the spring of '95, might have
+stepped straight out of his own pages.
+
+I am guilty of having wished he would step straight back into them. He
+was a very surly fellow, very rugged and gruff. He was the antithesis of
+pleasant little Maltby. I used to think that perhaps he would have been
+less unamiable if success had come to him earlier. He was thirty years
+old when his book was published, and had had a very hard time since
+coming to London at the age of sixteen. Little Maltby was a year
+older, and so had waited a year longer; but then, he had waited under
+a comfortable roof at Twickenham, emerging into the metropolis for no
+grimmer purpose than to sit and watch the fashionable riders and
+walkers in Rotten Row, and then going home to write a little, or to play
+lawn-tennis with the young ladies of Twickenham. He had been the only
+child of his parents (neither of whom, alas, survived to take pleasure
+in their darling's sudden fame). He had now migrated from Twickenham and
+taken rooms in Ryder Street. Had he ever shared with Braxton the bread
+of adversity--but no, I think he would in any case have been pleasant.
+And conversely I cannot imagine that Braxton would in any case have been
+so.
+
+No one seeing the two rivals together, no one meeting them at Mr.
+Hookworth's famous luncheon parties in the Authors' Club, or at Mrs.
+Foster-Dugdale's not less famous garden parties in Greville Place,
+would have supposed off-hand that the pair had a single point in common.
+Dapper little Maltby--blond, bland, diminutive Maltby, with his monocle
+and his gardenia; big black Braxton, with his lanky hair and his square
+blue jaw and his square sallow forehead. Canary and crow. Maltby had a
+perpetual chirrup of amusing small-talk. Braxton was usually silent, but
+very well worth listening to whenever he did croak. He had distinction,
+I admit it; the distinction of one who steadfastly refuses to adapt
+himself to surroundings. He stood out. He awed Mr. Hookworth. Ladies
+were always asking one another, rather intently, what they thought of
+him. One could imagine that Mr. Foster-Dugdale, had he come home from
+the City to attend the garden parties, might have regarded him as
+one from whom Mrs. Foster-Dugdale should be shielded. But the casual
+observer of Braxton and Maltby at Mrs. Foster-Dugdale's or elsewhere was
+wrong in supposing that the two were totally unlike. He overlooked one
+simple and obvious point. This was that he had met them both at Mrs.
+Foster-Dugdale's or elsewhere. Wherever they were invited, there
+certainly, there punctually, they would be. They were both of them
+gluttons for the fruits and signs of their success.
+
+Interviewers and photographers had as little reason as had hostesses to
+complain of two men so earnestly and assiduously 'on the make' as Maltby
+and Braxton. Maltby, for all his sparkle, was earnest; Braxton, for all
+his arrogance, assiduous.
+
+'A Faun on the Cotswolds' had no more eager eulogist than the author of
+'Ariel in Mayfair.' When any one praised his work, Maltby would lightly
+disparage it in comparison with Braxton's--'Ah, if I could write like
+THAT!' Maltby won golden opinions in this way. Braxton, on the
+other hand, would let slip no opportunity for sneering at Maltby's
+work--'gimcrack,' as he called it. This was not good for Maltby.
+Different men, different methods.
+
+'The Rape of the Lock' was 'gimcrack,' if you care to call it so; but it
+was a delicate, brilliant work; and so, I repeat, was Maltby's 'Ariel.'
+Absurd to compare Maltby with Pope? I am not so sure. I have read
+'Ariel,' but have never read 'The Rape of the Lock.' Braxton's
+opprobrious term for 'Ariel' may not, however, have been due to jealousy
+alone. Braxton had imagination, and his rival did not soar above fancy.
+But the point is that Maltby's fancifulness went far and well. In
+telling how Ariel re-embodied himself from thin air, leased a small
+house in Chesterfield Street, was presented at a Levee, played the part
+of good fairy in a matter of true love not running smooth, and worked
+meanwhile all manner of amusing changes among the aristocracy before he
+vanished again, Maltby showed a very pretty range of ingenuity. In one
+respect, his work was a more surprising achievement than Braxton's. For
+whereas Braxton had been born and bred among his rustics, Maltby knew
+his aristocrats only through Thackeray, through the photographs and
+paragraphs in the newspapers, and through those passionate excursions
+of his to Rotten Row. Yet I found his aristocrats as convincing as
+Braxton's rustics. It is true that I may have been convinced wrongly.
+That is a point which I could settle only by experience. I shift my
+ground, claiming for Maltby's aristocrats just this: that they pleased
+me very much.
+
+Aristocrats, when they are presented solely through a novelist's sense
+of beauty, do not satisfy us. They may be as beautiful as all that,
+but, for fear of thinking ourselves snobbish, we won't believe it. We do
+believe it, however, and revel in it, when the novelist saves his face
+and ours by a pervading irony in the treatment of what he loves. The
+irony must, mark you, be pervading and obvious. Disraeli's great ladies
+and lords won't do, for his irony was but latent in his homage, and
+thus the reader feels himself called on to worship and in duty bound
+to scoff. All's well, though, when the homage is latent in the irony.
+Thackeray, inviting us to laugh and frown over the follies of Mayfair,
+enables us to reel with him in a secret orgy of veneration for those
+fools.
+
+Maltby, too, in his measure, enabled us to reel thus. That is mainly
+why, before the end of April, his publisher was in a position to state
+that 'the Seventh Large Impression of "Ariel in Mayfair" is almost
+exhausted.' Let it be put to our credit, however, that at the same
+moment Braxton's publisher had 'the honour to inform the public that
+an Eighth Large Impression of "A Faun on the Cotswolds" is in instant
+preparation.'
+
+Indeed, it seemed impossible for either author to outvie the other in
+success and glory. Week in, week out, you saw cancelled either's every
+momentary advantage. A neck-and-neck race. As thus:--Maltby appears as
+a Celebrity At Home in the World (Tuesday). Ha! No, Vanity
+Fair (Wednesday) has a perfect presentment of Braxton by 'Spy.'
+Neck-and-neck! No, Vanity Fair says 'the subject of next week's cartoon
+will be Mr. Hilary Maltby.' Maltby wins! No, next week Braxton's in the
+World.
+
+Throughout May I kept, as it were, my eyes glued to my field-glasses.
+On the first Monday in June I saw that which drew from me a hoarse
+ejaculation.
+
+Let me explain that always on Monday mornings at this time of year, when
+I opened my daily paper, I looked with respectful interest to see what
+bevy of the great world had been entertained since Saturday at Keeb
+Hall. The list was always august and inspiring. Statecraft and Diplomacy
+were well threaded there with mere Lineage and mere Beauty, with Royalty
+sometimes, with mere Wealth never, with privileged Genius now and then.
+A noble composition always. It was said that the Duke of Hertfordshire
+cared for nothing but his collection of birds' eggs, and that the
+collections of guests at Keeb were formed entirely by his young
+Duchess. It was said that he had climbed trees in every corner of every
+continent. The Duchess' hobby was easier. She sat aloft and beckoned
+desirable specimens up.
+
+The list published on that first Monday in June began ordinarily enough,
+began with the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador and the Portuguese Minister.
+Then came the Duke and Duchess of Mull, followed by four lesser Peers
+(two of them Proconsuls, however) with their Peeresses, three Peers
+without their Peeresses, four Peeresses without their Peers, and a dozen
+bearers of courtesy-titles with or without their wives or husbands. The
+rear was brought up by 'Mr. A. J. Balfour, Mr. Henry Chaplin, and Mr.
+Hilary Maltby.'
+
+Youth tends to look at the darker side of things. I confess that my
+first thought was for Braxton.
+
+I forgave and forgot his faults of manner. Youth is generous. It does
+not criticise a strong man stricken.
+
+And anon, so habituated was I to the parity of those two strivers, I
+conceived that there might be some mistake. Daily newspapers are printed
+in a hurry. Might not 'Henry Chaplin' be a typographical error for
+'Stephen Braxton'? I went out and bought another newspaper. But Mr.
+Chaplin's name was in that too.
+
+'Patience!' I said to myself. 'Braxton crouches only to spring. He will
+be at Keeb Hall on Saturday next.'
+
+My mind was free now to dwell with pleasure on Maltby's great
+achievement. I thought of writing to congratulate him, but feared this
+might be in bad taste. I did, however, write asking him to lunch with
+me. He did not answer my letter. I was, therefore, all the more sorry,
+next Monday, at not finding 'and Mr. Stephen Braxton' in Keeb's week-end
+catalogue.
+
+A few days later I met Mr. Hookworth. He mentioned that Stephen Braxton
+had left town. 'He has taken,' said Hookworth, 'a delightful bungalow on
+the east coast. He has gone there to WORK.' He added that he had a great
+liking for Braxton--'a man utterly UNSPOILT.' I inferred that he, too,
+had written to Maltby and received no answer.
+
+That butterfly did not, however, appear to be hovering from flower
+to flower in the parterres of rank and fashion. In the daily lists of
+guests at dinners, receptions, dances, balls, the name of Maltby figured
+never. Maltby had not caught on.
+
+Presently I heard that he, too, had left town. I gathered that he had
+gone quite early in June--quite soon after Keeb. Nobody seemed to know
+where he was. My own theory was that he had taken a delightful bungalow
+on the west coast, to balance Braxton. Anyhow, the parity of the two
+strivers was now somewhat re-established.
+
+In point of fact, the disparity had been less than I supposed. While
+Maltby was at Keeb, there Braxton was also--in a sense.... It was a
+strange story. I did not hear it at the time. Nobody did. I heard it
+seventeen years later. I heard it in Lucca.
+
+
+Little Lucca I found so enchanting that, though I had only a day or two
+to spare, I stayed there a whole month. I formed the habit of walking,
+every morning, round that high-pitched path which girdles Lucca, that
+wide and tree-shaded path from which one looks down over the city wall
+at the fertile plains beneath Lucca. There were never many people there;
+but the few who did come came daily, so that I grew to like seeing them
+and took a mild personal interest in them.
+
+One of them was an old lady in a wheeled chair. She was not less than
+seventy years old, and might or might not have once been beautiful.
+Her chair was slowly propelled by an Italian woman. She herself was
+obviously Italian. Not so, however, the little gentleman who walked
+assiduously beside her. Him I guessed to be English. He was a very stout
+little gentleman, with gleaming spectacles and a full blond beard, and
+he seemed to radiate cheerfulness. I thought at first that he might be
+the old lady's resident physician; but no, there was something subtly
+un-professional about him: I became sure that his constancy was
+gratuitous, and his radiance real. And one day, I know not how, there
+dawned on me a suspicion that he was--who?--some one I had known--some
+writer--what's-his-name--something with an M--Maltby--Hilary Maltby of
+the long-ago!
+
+At sight of him on the morrow this suspicion hardened almost to
+certainty. I wished I could meet him alone and ask him if I were not
+right, and what he had been doing all these years, and why he had left
+England. He was always with the old lady. It was only on my last day in
+Lucca that my chance came.
+
+I had just lunched, and was seated on a comfortable bench outside my
+hotel, with a cup of coffee on the table before me, gazing across the
+faded old sunny piazza and wondering what to do with my last afternoon.
+It was then that I espied yonder the back of the putative Maltby. I
+hastened forth to him. He was buying some pink roses, a great bunch of
+them, from a market-woman under an umbrella. He looked very blank, he
+flushed greatly, when I ventured to accost him. He admitted that his
+name was Hilary Maltby. I told him my own name, and by degrees he
+remembered me. He apologised for his confusion. He explained that he had
+not talked English, had not talked to an Englishman, 'for--oh, hundreds
+of years.' He said that he had, in the course of his long residence in
+Lucca, seen two or three people whom he had known in England, but that
+none of them had recognised him. He accepted (but as though he were
+embarking on the oddest adventure in the world) my invitation that
+he should come and sit down and take coffee with me. He laughed with
+pleasure and surprise at finding that he could still speak his native
+tongue quite fluently and idiomatically. 'I know absolutely nothing,' he
+said, 'about England nowadays--except from stray references to it in the
+Corriere della Sera; nor did he show the faintest desire that I should
+enlighten him. 'England,' he mused, '--how it all comes back to me!'
+
+'But not you to it?'
+
+'Ah, no indeed,' he said gravely, looking at the roses which he had laid
+carefully on the marble table. 'I am the happiest of men.'
+
+He sipped his coffee, and stared out across the piazza, out beyond it
+into the past.
+
+'I am the happiest of men,' he repeated. I plied him with the spur of
+silence.
+
+'And I owe it all to having once yielded to a bad impulse. Absurd, the
+threads our destinies hang on!'
+
+Again I plied him with that spur. As it seemed not to prick him, I
+repeated the words he had last spoken. 'For instance?' I added.
+
+'Take,' he said, 'a certain evening in the spring of '95. If, on that
+evening, the Duchess of Hertfordshire had had a bad cold; or if she
+had decided that it WOULDN'T be rather interesting to go on to that
+party--that Annual Soiree, I think it was--of the Inkwomen's Club; or
+again--to go a step further back--if she hadn't ever written that one
+little poem, and if it HADN'T been printed in "The Gentlewoman," and if
+the Inkwomen's committee HADN'T instantly and unanimously elected her an
+Honorary Vice-President because of that one little poem; or if--well,
+if a million-and-one utterly irrelevant things hadn't happened,
+don't-you-know, I shouldn't be here.... I might be THERE,' he smiled,
+with a vague gesture indicating England.
+
+'Suppose,' he went on, 'I hadn't been invited to that Annual Soiree; or
+suppose that other fellow,--
+
+'Braxton?' I suggested. I had remembered Braxton at the moment of
+recognising Maltby.
+
+'Suppose HE hadn't been asked.... But of course we both were. It
+happened that I was the first to be presented to the Duchess.... It was
+a great moment. I hoped I should keep my head. She wore a tiara. I had
+often seen women in tiaras, at the Opera. But I had never talked to
+a woman in a tiara. Tiaras were symbols to me. Eyes are just a human
+feature. I fixed mine on the Duchess's. I kept my head by not looking
+at hers. I behaved as one human being to another. She seemed very
+intelligent. We got on very well. Presently she asked whether I should
+think her VERY bold if she said how PERFECTLY divine she thought my
+book. I said something about doing my best, and asked with animation
+whether she had read "A Faun on the Cotswolds." She had. She said it was
+TOO wonderful, she said it was TOO great. If she hadn't been a Duchess,
+I might have thought her slightly hysterical. Her innate good-sense
+quickly reasserted itself. She used her great power. With a wave of her
+magic wand she turned into a fact the glittering possibility that had
+haunted me. She asked me down to Keeb.
+
+'She seemed very pleased that I would come. Was I, by any chance, free
+on Saturday week? She hoped there would be some amusing people to meet
+me. Could I come by the 3.30? It was only an hour-and-a-quarter from
+Victoria. On Saturday there were always compartments reserved for people
+coming to Keeb by the 3.30. She hoped I would bring my bicycle with me.
+She hoped I wouldn't find it very dull. She hoped I wouldn't forget to
+come. She said how lovely it must be to spend one's life among clever
+people. She supposed I knew everybody here to-night. She asked me to
+tell her who everybody was. She asked who was the tall, dark man, over
+there. I told her it was Stephen Braxton. She said they had promised to
+introduce her to him. She added that he looked rather wonderful. "Oh, he
+is, very," I assured her. She turned to me with a sudden appeal: "DO you
+think, if I took my courage in both hands and asked him, he'd care to
+come to Keeb?"
+
+'I hesitated. It would be easy to say that Satan answered FOR me; easy
+but untrue; it was I that babbled: "Well--as a matter of fact--since you
+ask me--if I were you--really I think you'd better not. He's very odd in
+some ways. He has an extraordinary hatred of sleeping out of London. He
+has the real Gloucestershire LOVE of London. At the same time, he's very
+shy; and if you asked him he wouldn't very well know how to refuse. I
+think it would be KINDER not to ask him."
+
+'At that moment, Mrs. Wilpham--the President--loomed up to us, bringing
+Braxton. He bore himself well. Rough dignity with a touch of mellowness.
+I daresay you never saw him smile. He smiled gravely down at the
+Duchess, while she talked in her pretty little quick humble way. He made
+a great impression.
+
+'What I had done was not merely base: it was very dangerous. I was in
+terror that she might rally him on his devotion to London. I didn't dare
+to move away. I was immensely relieved when at length she said she must
+be going.
+
+'Braxton seemed loth to relax his grip on her hand at parting. I feared
+she wouldn't escape without uttering that invitation. But all was
+well.... In saying good night to me, she added in a murmur, "Don't
+forget Keeb--Saturday week--the 3.30." Merely an exquisite murmur.
+But Braxton heard it. I knew, by the diabolical look he gave me, that
+Braxton had heard it.... If he hadn't, I shouldn't be here.
+
+'Was I a prey to remorse? Well, in the days between that Soiree and that
+Saturday, remorse often claimed me, but rapture wouldn't give me up.
+Arcady, Olympus, the right people, at last! I hadn't realised how good
+my book was--not till it got me this guerdon; not till I got it this
+huge advertisement. I foresaw how pleased my publisher would be. In some
+great houses, I knew, it was possible to stay without any one knowing
+you had been there. But the Duchess of Hertfordshire hid her light under
+no bushel. Exclusive she was, but not of publicity. Next to Windsor
+Castle, Keeb Hall was the most advertised house in all England.
+
+'Meanwhile, I had plenty to do. I rather thought of engaging a valet,
+but decided that this wasn't necessary. On the other hand, I felt a need
+for three new summer suits, and a new evening suit, and some new white
+waistcoats. Also a smoking suit. And had any man ever stayed at Keeb
+without a dressing-case? Hitherto I had been content with a pair of
+wooden brushes, and so forth. I was afraid these would appal the footman
+who unpacked my things. I ordered, for his sake, a large dressing-case,
+with my initials engraved throughout it. It looked compromisingly new
+when it came to me from the shop. I had to kick it industriously, and
+throw it about and scratch it, so as to avert possible suspicion. The
+tailor did not send my things home till the Friday evening. I had to sit
+up late, wearing the new suits in rotation.
+
+'Next day, at Victoria, I saw strolling on the platform many people,
+male and female, who looked as if they were going to Keeb--tall,
+cool, ornate people who hadn't packed their own things and had reached
+Victoria in broughams. I was ornate, but not tall nor cool. My porter
+was rather off-hand in his manner as he wheeled my things along to
+the 3.30. I asked severely if there were any compartments reserved for
+people going to stay with the Duke of Hertfordshire. This worked an
+instant change in him. Having set me in one of those shrines, he seemed
+almost loth to accept a tip. A snob, I am afraid.
+
+'A selection of the tall, the cool, the ornate, the intimately
+acquainted with one another, soon filled the compartment. There I
+was, and I think they felt they ought to try to bring me into the
+conversation. As they were all talking about a cotillion of the previous
+night, I shouldn't have been able to shine. I gazed out of the window,
+with middle-class aloofness. Presently the talk drifted on to the topic
+of bicycles. But by this time it was too late for me to come in.
+
+'I gazed at the squalid outskirts of London as they flew by. I doubted,
+as I listened to my fellow-passengers, whether I should be able to shine
+at Keeb. I rather wished I were going to spend the week-end at one of
+those little houses with back-gardens beneath the railway-line. I was
+filled with fears.
+
+'For shame! thought I. Was I nobody? Was the author of "Ariel in
+Mayfair" nobody?
+
+'I reminded myself how glad Braxton would be if he knew of my
+faint-heartedness. I thought of Braxton sitting, at this moment, in his
+room in Clifford's Inn and glowering with envy of his hated rival in the
+3.30. And after all, how enviable I was! My spirits rose. I would acquit
+myself well....
+
+'I much admired the scene at the little railway station where we
+alighted. It was like a fete by Lancret. I knew from the talk of my
+fellow-passengers that some people had been going down by an earlier
+train, and that others were coming by a later. But the 3.30 had brought
+a full score of us. Us! That was the final touch of beauty.
+
+'Outside there were two broughams, a landau, dog-carts, a phaeton, a
+wagonette, I know not what. But almost everybody, it seemed, was going
+to bicycle. Lady Rodfitten said SHE was going to bicycle. Year after
+year, I had seen that famous Countess riding or driving in the Park.
+I had been told at fourth hand that she had a masculine intellect and
+could make and unmake Ministries. She was nearly sixty now, a trifle
+dyed and stout and weather-beaten, but still tremendously handsome, and
+hard as nails. One would not have said she had grown older, but merely
+that she belonged now to a rather later period of the Roman Empire. I
+had never dreamed of a time when one roof would shelter Lady Rodfitten
+and me. Somehow, she struck my imagination more than any of these
+others--more than Count Deym, more than Mr. Balfour, more than the
+lovely Lady Thisbe Crowborough.
+
+'I might have had a ducal vehicle all to myself, and should have liked
+that; but it seemed more correct that I should use my bicycle. On the
+other hand, I didn't want to ride with all these people--a stranger in
+their midst. I lingered around the luggage till they were off, and then
+followed at a long distance.
+
+'The sun had gone behind clouds. But I rode slowly, so as to be sure not
+to arrive hot. I passed, not without a thrill, through the massive
+open gates into the Duke's park. A massive man with a cockade saluted
+me--hearteningly--from the door of the lodge. The park seemed endless.
+I came, at length, to a long straight avenue of elms that were almost
+blatantly immemorial. At the end of it was--well, I felt like a gnat
+going to stay in a public building.
+
+'If there had been turnstiles--IN and OUT--and a shilling to pay,
+I should have felt easier as I passed into that hall--that
+Palladio-Gargantuan hall. Some one, some butler or groom-of-the-chamber,
+murmured that her Grace was in the garden. I passed out through the
+great opposite doorway on to a wide spectacular terrace with lawns
+beyond. Tea was on the nearest of these lawns. In the central group of
+people--some standing, others sitting--I espied the Duchess. She sat
+pouring out tea, a deft and animated little figure. I advanced firmly
+down the steps from the terrace, feeling that all would be well so soon
+as I had reported myself to the Duchess.
+
+'But I had a staggering surprise on my way to her. I espied in one of
+the smaller groups--whom d'you think? Braxton.
+
+'I had no time to wonder how he had got there--time merely to grasp the
+black fact that he WAS there.
+
+'The Duchess seemed really pleased to see me. She said it was TOO
+splendid of me to come. "You know Mr. Maltby?" she asked Lady Rodfitten,
+who exclaimed "Not Mr. HILARY Maltby?" with a vigorous grace that
+was overwhelming. Lady Rodfitten declared she was the greatest of my
+admirers; and I could well believe that in whatever she did she excelled
+all competitors. On the other hand, I found it hard to believe she was
+afraid of me. Yet I had her word for it that she was.
+
+'Her womanly charm gave place now to her masculine grip. She
+eulogised me in the language of a seasoned reviewer on the staff of a
+long-established journal--wordy perhaps, but sound. I revered and loved
+her. I wished I could give her my undivided attention. But, whilst I sat
+there, teacup, in hand, between her and the Duchess, part of my brain
+was fearfully concerned with that glimpse I had had of Braxton. It
+didn't so much matter that he was here to halve my triumph. But suppose
+he knew what I had told the Duchess! And suppose he had--no, surely if
+he HAD shown me up in all my meanness she wouldn't have received me
+so very cordially. I wondered where she could have met him since that
+evening of the Inkwomen. I heard Lady Rodfitten concluding her review
+of "Ariel" with two or three sentences that might have been framed
+specially to give the publisher an easy "quote." And then I heard myself
+asking mechanically whether she had read "A Faun on the Cotswolds." The
+Duchess heard me too. She turned from talking to other people and said
+"I did like Mr. Braxton so VERY much."
+
+'"Yes," I threw out with a sickly smile, "I'm so glad you asked him to
+come."
+
+'"But I didn't ask him. I didn't DARE."
+
+'"But--but--surely he wouldn't be--be HERE if--" We stared at each other
+blankly. "Here?" she echoed, glancing at the scattered little groups of
+people on the lawn. I glanced too. I was much embarrassed. I explained
+that I had seen Braxton "standing just over there" when I arrived, and
+had supposed he was one of the people who came by the earlier train.
+"Well," she said with a slightly irritated laugh, "you must have
+mistaken some one else for him." She dropped the subject, talked to
+other people, and presently moved away.
+
+'Surely, thought I, she didn't suspect me of trying to make fun of her?
+On the other hand, surely she hadn't conspired with Braxton to make a
+fool of ME? And yet, how could Braxton be here without an invitation,
+and without her knowledge? My brain whirled. One thing only was clear.
+I could NOT have mistaken anybody for Braxton. There Braxton had
+stood--Stephen Braxton, in that old pepper-and-salt suit of his, with
+his red tie all askew, and without a hat--his hair hanging over his
+forehead. All this I had seen sharp and clean-cut. There he had stood,
+just beside one of the women who travelled down in the same compartment
+as I; a very pretty woman in a pale blue dress; a tall woman--but I had
+noticed how small she looked beside Braxton. This woman was now walking
+to and fro, yonder, with M. de Soveral. I had seen Braxton beside her as
+clearly as I now saw M. de Soveral.
+
+'Lady Rodfitten was talking about India to a recent Viceroy. She seemed
+to have as firm a grip of India as of "Ariel." I sat forgotten. I wanted
+to arise and wander off--in a vague search for Braxton. But I feared
+this might look as if I were angry at being ignored. Presently Lady
+Rodfitten herself arose, to have what she called her "annual look
+round." She bade me come too, and strode off between me and the
+recent Viceroy, noting improvements that had been made in the grounds,
+suggesting improvements that might be made, indicating improvements that
+MUST be made. She was great on landscape-gardening. The recent Viceroy
+was less great on it, but great enough. I don't say I walked forgotten:
+the eminent woman constantly asked my opinion; but my opinion, though of
+course it always coincided with hers, sounded quite worthless, somehow.
+I longed to shine. I could only bother about Braxton.
+
+'Lady Rodfitten's voice sounded over-strong for the stillness of
+evening. The shadows lengthened. My spirits sank lower and lower, with
+the sun. I was a naturally cheerful person, but always, towards sunset,
+I had a vague sense of melancholy: I seemed always to have grown weaker;
+morbid misgivings would come to me. On this particular evening there was
+one such misgiving that crept in and out of me again and again... a very
+horrible misgiving as to the NATURE of what I had seen.
+
+'Well, dressing for dinner is a great tonic. Especially if one shaves.
+My spirits rose as I lathered my face. I smiled to my reflection in
+the mirror. The afterglow of the sun came through the window behind
+the dressing-table, but I had switched on all the lights. My new
+silver-topped bottles and things made a fine array. To-night _I_ was
+going to shine, too. I felt I might yet be the life and soul of the
+party. Anyway, my new evening suit was without a fault. And meanwhile
+this new razor was perfect. Having shaved "down," I lathered myself
+again and proceeded to shave "up." It was then that I uttered a sharp
+sound and swung round on my heel.
+
+'No one was there. Yet this I knew: Stephen Braxton had just looked over
+my shoulder. I had seen the reflection of his face beside mine--craned
+forward to the mirror. I had met his eyes.
+
+'He had been with me. This I knew.
+
+'I turned to look again at that mirror. One of my cheeks was all covered
+with blood. I stanched it with a towel. Three long cuts where the razor
+had slipped and skipped. I plunged the towel into cold water and held it
+to my cheek. The bleeding went on--alarmingly. I rang the bell. No one
+came. I vowed I wouldn't bleed to death for Braxton. I rang again. At
+last a very tall powdered footman appeared--more reproachful-looking
+than sympathetic, as though I hadn't ordered that dressing-case
+specially on his behalf. He said he thought one of the housemaids would
+have some sticking-plaster. He was very sorry he was needed downstairs,
+but he would tell one of the housemaids. I continued to dab and to
+curse. The blood flowed less. I showed great spirit. I vowed Braxton
+should not prevent me from going down to dinner.
+
+'But--a pretty sight I was when I did go down. Pale but determined, with
+three long strips of black sticking-plaster forming a sort of Z on my
+left cheek. Mr. Hilary Maltby at Keeb. Literature's Ambassador.
+
+'I don't know how late I was. Dinner was in full swing. Some servant
+piloted me to my place. I sat down unobserved. The woman on either side
+of me was talking to her other neighbour. I was near the Duchess' end of
+the table. Soup was served to me--that dark-red soup that you pour cream
+into--Bortsch. I felt it would steady me. I raised the first spoonful to
+my lips, and--my hand gave a sudden jerk.
+
+'I was aware of two separate horrors--a horror that had been, a horror
+that was. Braxton had vanished. Not for more than an instant had he
+stood scowling at me from behind the opposite diners. Not for more than
+the fraction of an instant. But he had left his mark on me. I gazed down
+with a frozen stare at my shirtfront, at my white waistcoat, both dark
+with Bortsch. I rubbed them with a napkin. I made them worse.
+
+'I looked at my glass of champagne. I raised it carefully and drained
+it at one draught. It nerved me. But behind that shirtfront was a broken
+heart.
+
+'The woman on my left was Lady Thisbe Crowborough. I don't know who was
+the woman on my right. She was the first to turn and see me. I thought
+it best to say something about my shirtfront at once. I said it to her
+sideways, without showing my left cheek. Her handsome eyes rested on the
+splashes. She said, after a moment's thought, that they looked "rather
+gay." She said she thought the eternal black and white of men's
+evening clothes was "so very dreary." She did her best.... Lady Thisbe
+Crowborough did her best, too, I suppose; but breeding isn't proof
+against all possible shocks: she visibly started at sight of me and my
+Z. I explained that I had cut myself shaving. I said, with an attempt at
+lightness, that shy men ought always to cut themselves shaving: it
+made such a good conversational opening. "But surely," she said after a
+pause, "you don't cut yourself on purpose?" She was an abysmal fool. I
+didn't think so at the time. She was Lady Thisbe Crowborough. This fact
+hallowed her. That we didn't get on at all well was a misfortune
+for which I blamed only myself and my repulsive appearance and--the
+unforgettable horror that distracted me. Nor did I blame Lady Thisbe for
+turning rather soon to the man on her other side.
+
+'The woman on my right was talking to the man on HER other side; so that
+I was left a prey to secret memory and dread. I wasn't wondering, wasn't
+attempting to explain; I was merely remembering--and dreading. And--how
+odd one is!--on the top-layer of my consciousness I hated to be seen
+talking to no one. Mr. Maltby at Keeb. I caught the Duchess' eye once
+or twice, and she nodded encouragingly, as who should say "You do look
+rather awful, and you do seem rather out of it, but I don't for a moment
+regret having asked you to come." Presently I had another chance of
+talking. I heard myself talk. My feverish anxiety to please rather
+touched ME. But I noticed that the eyes of my listener wandered. And
+yet I was sorry when the ladies went away. I had a sense of greater
+exposure. Men who hadn't seen me saw me now. The Duke, as he came round
+to the Duchess' end of the table, must have wondered who I was. But he
+shyly offered me his hand as he passed, and said it was so good of me
+to come. I had thought of slipping away to put on another shirt and
+waistcoat, but had decided that this would make me the more ridiculous.
+I sat drinking port--poison to me after champagne, but a lulling
+poison--and listened to noblemen with unstained shirtfronts talking
+about the Australian cricket match....
+
+'Is Rubicon Bezique still played in England? There was a mania for it at
+that time. The floor of Keeb's Palladio-Gargantuan hall was dotted with
+innumerable little tables. I didn't know how to play. My hostess told me
+I must "come and amuse the dear old Duke and Duchess of Mull," and led
+me to a remote sofa on which an old gentleman had just sat down beside
+an old lady. They looked at me with a dim kind interest. My hostess had
+set me and left me on a small gilt chair in front of them. Before going
+she had conveyed to them loudly--one of them was very deaf--that I was
+"the famous writer." It was a long time before they understood that I
+was not a political writer. The Duke asked me, after a troubled pause,
+whether I had known "old Mr. Abraham Hayward." The Duchess said I was
+too young to have known Mr. Hayward, and asked if I knew her "clever
+friend Mr. Mallock." I said I had just been reading Mr. Mallock's new
+novel. I heard myself shouting a confused precis of the plot. The place
+where we were sitting was near the foot of the great marble staircase.
+I said how beautiful the staircase was. The Duchess of Mull said she had
+never cared very much for that staircase. The Duke, after a pause, said
+he had "often heard old Mr. Abraham Hayward hold a whole dinner table."
+There were long and frequent pauses--between which I heard myself
+talking loudly, frantically, sinking lower and lower in the esteem of my
+small audience. I felt like a man drowning under the eyes of an elderly
+couple who sit on the bank regretting that they can offer NO assistance.
+Presently the Duke looked at his watch and said to the Duchess that it
+was "time to be thinking of bed."
+
+'They rose, as it were from the bank, and left me, so to speak, under
+water. I watched them as they passed slowly out of sight up the marble
+staircase which I had mispraised. I turned and surveyed the brilliant,
+silent scene presented by the card-players.
+
+'I wondered what old Mr. Abraham Hayward would have done in my place.
+Would he have just darted in among those tables and "held" them? I
+presumed that he would not have stolen silently away, quickly and
+cravenly away, up the marble staircase--as _I_ did.
+
+'I don't know which was the greater, the relief or the humiliation of
+finding myself in my bedroom. Perhaps the humiliation was the greater.
+There, on a chair, was my grand new smoking-suit, laid out for me--what
+a mockery! Once I had foreseen myself wearing it in the smoking-room
+at a late hour--the centre of a group of eminent men entranced by the
+brilliancy of my conversation. And now--! I was nothing but a small,
+dull, soup-stained, sticking-plastered, nerve-racked recluse. Nerves,
+yes. I assured myself that I had not seen--what I had seemed to see. All
+very odd, of course, and very unpleasant, but easily explained. Nerves.
+Excitement of coming to Keeb too much for me. A good night's rest: that
+was all I needed. To-morrow I should laugh at myself.
+
+'I wondered that I wasn't tired physically. There my grand new silk
+pyjamas were, yet I felt no desire to go to bed... none while it was
+still possible for me to go. The little writing-table at the foot of my
+bed seemed to invite me. I had brought with me in my portmanteau a sheaf
+of letters, letters that I had purposely left unanswered in order that I
+might answer them on KEEB HALL note-paper. These the footman had neatly
+laid beside the blotting-pad on that little writing-table at the foot
+of the bed. I regretted that the notepaper stacked there had no ducal
+coronet on it. What matter? The address sufficed. If I hadn't yet made a
+good impression on the people who were staying here, I could at any rate
+make one on the people who weren't. I sat down. I set to work. I wrote a
+prodigious number of fluent and graceful notes.
+
+'Some of these were to strangers who wanted my autograph. I was always
+delighted to send my autograph, and never perfunctory in the manner of
+sending it.... "Dear Madam," I remember writing to somebody that night,
+"were it not that you make your request for it so charmingly, I should
+hesitate to send you that which rarity alone can render valuable.--Yours
+truly, Hilary Maltby." I remember reading this over and wondering
+whether the word "render" looked rather commercial. It was in the act
+of wondering thus that I raised my eyes from the note-paper and saw,
+through the bars of the brass bedstead, the naked sole of a large human
+foot--saw beyond it the calf of a great leg; a nightshirt; and the face
+of Stephen Braxton. I did not move.
+
+
+'I thought of making a dash for the door, dashing out into the corridor,
+shouting at the top of my voice for help. I sat quite still.
+
+'What kept me to my chair was the fear that if I tried to reach the door
+Braxton would spring off the bed to intercept me. If I sat quite still
+perhaps he wouldn't move. I felt that if he moved I should collapse
+utterly.
+
+'I watched him, and he watched me. He lay there with his body
+half-raised, one elbow propped on the pillow, his jaw sunk on his
+breast; and from under his black brows he watched me steadily.
+
+'No question of mere nerves now. That hope was gone. No mere optical
+delusion, this abiding presence. Here Braxton was. He and I were
+together in the bright, silent room. How long would he be content to
+watch me?
+
+'Eleven nights ago he had given me one horrible look. It was this look
+that I had to meet, in infinite prolongation, now, not daring to shift
+my eyes. He lay as motionless as I sat. I did not hear him breathing,
+but I knew, by the rise and fall of his chest under his nightshirt,
+that he was breathing heavily. Suddenly I started to my feet. For he had
+moved. He had raised one hand slowly. He was stroking his chin. And
+as he did so, and as he watched me, his mouth gradually slackened to a
+grin. It was worse, it was more malign, this grin, than the scowl that
+remained with it; and its immediate effect on me was an impulse that was
+as hard to resist as it was hateful. The window was open. It was nearer
+to me than the door. I could have reached it in time....
+
+'Well, I live to tell the tale. I stood my ground. And there dawned on
+me now a new fact in regard to my companion. I had all the while been
+conscious of something abnormal in his attitude--a lack of ease in his
+gross possessiveness. I saw now the reason for this effect. The pillow
+on which his elbow rested was still uniformly puffed and convex; like
+a pillow untouched. His elbow rested but on the very surface of it,
+not changing the shape of it at all. His body made not the least furrow
+along the bed.... He had no weight.
+
+'I knew that if I leaned forward and thrust my hand between those brass
+rails, to clutch his foot, I should clutch--nothing. He wasn't tangible.
+He was realistic. He wasn't real. He was opaque. He wasn't solid.
+
+'Odd as it may seem to you, these certainties took the edge off my
+horror. During that walk with Lady Rodfitten, I had been appalled by the
+doubt that haunted me. But now the very confirmation of that doubt gave
+me a sort of courage: I could cope better with anything to-night than
+with actual Braxton. And the measure of the relief I felt is that I sat
+down again on my chair.
+
+'More than once there came to me a wild hope that the thing might be an
+optical delusion, after all. Then would I shut my eyes tightly, shaking
+my head sharply; but, when I looked again, there the presence was, of
+course. It--he--not actual Braxton but, roughly speaking, Braxton--had
+come to stay. I was conscious of intense fatigue, taut and alert though
+every particle of me was; so that I became, in the course of that
+ghastly night, conscious of a great envy also. For some time before the
+dawn came in through the window, Braxton's eyes had been closed; little
+by little now his head drooped sideways, then fell on his forearm and
+rested there. He was asleep.
+
+'Cut off from sleep, I had a great longing for smoke. I had cigarettes
+on me, I had matches on me. But I didn't dare to strike a match. The
+sound might have waked Braxton up. In slumber he was less terrible,
+though perhaps more odious. I wasn't so much afraid now as indignant.
+"It's intolerable," I sat saying to myself, "utterly intolerable!"
+
+'I had to bear it, nevertheless. I was aware that I had, in some degree,
+brought it on myself. If I hadn't interfered and lied, actual Braxton
+would have been here at Keeb, and I at this moment sleeping soundly. But
+this was no excuse for Braxton. Braxton didn't know what I had done. He
+was merely envious of me. And--wanly I puzzled it out in the dawn--by
+very force of the envy, hatred, and malice in him he had projected
+hither into my presence this simulacrum of himself. I had known that he
+would be thinking of me. I had known that the thought of me at Keeb Hall
+would be of the last bitterness to his most sacred feelings. But--I had
+reckoned without the passionate force and intensity of the man's nature.
+
+'If by this same strength and intensity he had merely projected himself
+as an invisible guest under the Duchess' roof--if his feat had been
+wholly, as perhaps it was in part, a feat of mere wistfulness and
+longing--then I should have felt really sorry for him; and my conscience
+would have soundly rated me in his behalf. But no; if the wretched
+creature HAD been invisible to me, I shouldn't have thought of Braxton
+at all--except with gladness that he wasn't here. That he was visible to
+me, and to me alone, wasn't any sign of proper remorse within me. It was
+but the gauge of his incredible ill-will.
+
+'Well, it seemed to me that he was avenged--with a vengeance. There I
+sat, hot-browed from sleeplessness, cold in the feet, stiff in the legs,
+cowed and indignant all through--sat there in the broadening daylight,
+and in that new evening suit of mine with the Braxtonised shirtfront
+and waistcoat that by day were more than ever loathsome. Literature's
+Ambassador at Keeb.... I rose gingerly from my chair, and caught
+sight of my face, of my Braxtonised cheek, in the mirror. I heard
+the twittering of birds in distant trees. I saw through my window the
+elaborate landscape of the Duke's grounds, all soft in the grey bloom of
+early morning. I think I was nearer to tears than I had ever been since
+I was a child. But the weakness passed. I turned towards the personage
+on my bed, and, summoning all such power as was in me, WILLED him to be
+gone. My effort was not without result--an inadequate result. Braxton
+turned in his sleep.
+
+'I resumed my seat, and... and... sat up staring and blinking, at a tall
+man with red hair. "I must have fallen asleep," I said. "Yessir," he
+replied; and his toneless voice touched in me one or two springs
+of memory: I was at Keeb; this was the footman who looked after me.
+But--why wasn't I in bed? Had I--no, surely it had been no nightmare.
+Surely I had SEEN Braxton on that white bed.
+
+'The footman was impassively putting away my smoking-suit. I was too
+dazed to wonder what he thought of me. Nor did I attempt to stifle a
+cry when, a moment later, turning in my chair, I beheld Braxton leaning
+moodily against the mantelpiece. "Are you unwell sir?" asked the footman.
+"No," I said faintly, "I'm quite well."--"Yessir. Will you wear the blue
+suit or the grey?"--"The grey."--"Yessir."--It seemed almost incredible
+that HE didn't see Braxton; HE didn't appear to me one whit more solid
+than the night-shirted brute who stood against the mantelpiece and
+watched him lay out my things.--"Shall I let your bath-water run
+now sir?"--"Please, yes."--"Your bathroom's the second door to the left
+sir."--He went out with my bath-towel and sponge, leaving me alone with
+Braxton.
+
+'I rose to my feet, mustering once more all the strength that was in
+me. Hoping against hope, with set teeth and clenched hands, I faced him,
+thrust forth my will at him, with everything but words commanded him to
+vanish--to cease to be.
+
+'Suddenly, utterly, he vanished. And you can imagine the truly exquisite
+sense of triumph that thrilled me and continued to thrill me till I went
+into the bathroom and found him in my bath.
+
+'Quivering with rage, I returned to my bedroom. "Intolerable," I heard
+myself repeating like a parrot that knew no other word. A bath was just
+what I had needed. Could I have lain for a long time basking in very
+hot water, and then have sponged myself with cold water, I should have
+emerged calm and brave; comparatively so, at any rate. I should have
+looked less ghastly, and have had less of a headache, and something of
+an appetite, when I went down to breakfast. Also, I shouldn't have been
+the very first guest to appear on the scene. There were five or six
+round tables, instead of last night's long table. At the further end
+of the room the butler and two other servants were lighting the little
+lamps under the hot dishes. I didn't like to make myself ridiculous by
+running away. On the other hand, was it right for me to begin breakfast
+all by myself at one of these round tables? I supposed it was. But
+I dreaded to be found eating, alone in that vast room, by the first
+downcomer. I sat dallying with dry toast and watching the door. It
+occurred to me that Braxton might occur at any moment. Should I be able
+to ignore him?
+
+'Some man and wife--a very handsome couple--were the first to appear.
+They nodded and said "good morning" when they noticed me on their way to
+the hot dishes. I rose--uncomfortably, guiltily--and sat down again. I
+rose again when the wife drifted to my table, followed by the husband
+with two steaming plates. She asked me if it wasn't a heavenly morning,
+and I replied with nervous enthusiasm that it was. She then ate kedgeree
+in silence. "You just finishing, what?" the husband asked, looking at
+my plate. "Oh, no--no--only just beginning," I assured him, and helped
+myself to butter. He then ate kedgeree in silence. He looked like some
+splendid bull, and she like some splendid cow, grazing. I envied them
+their eupeptic calm. I surmised that ten thousand Braxtons would not
+have prevented THEM from sleeping soundly by night and grazing steadily
+by day. Perhaps their stolidity infected me a little. Or perhaps what
+braced me was the great quantity of strong tea that I consumed. Anyhow
+I had begun to feel that if Braxton came in now I shouldn't blench nor
+falter.
+
+'Well, I wasn't put to the test. Plenty of people drifted in, but
+Braxton wasn't one of them. Lady Rodfitten--no, she didn't drift, she
+marched, in; and presently, at an adjacent table, she was drawing a
+comparison, in clarion tones, between Jean and Edouard de Reszke. It
+seemed to me that her own voice had much in common with Edouard's. Even
+more was it akin to a military band. I found myself beating time to it
+with my foot. Decidedly, my spirits had risen. I was in a mood to face
+and outface anything. When I rose from the table and made my way to the
+door, I walked with something of a swing--to the tune of Lady Rodfitten.
+
+'My buoyancy didn't last long, though. There was no swing in my walk
+when, a little later, I passed out on to the spectacular terrace. I had
+seen my enemy again, and had beaten a furious retreat. No doubt I should
+see him yet again soon--here, perhaps, on this terrace. Two of the
+guests were bicycling slowly up and down the long paven expanse, both of
+them smiling with pride in the new delicious form of locomotion. There
+was a great array of bicycles propped neatly along the balustrade. I
+recognised my own among them. I wondered whether Braxton had projected
+from Clifford's Inn an image of his own bicycle. He may have done so;
+but I've no evidence that he did. I myself was bicycling when next I saw
+him; but he, I remember, was on foot.
+
+'This was a few minutes later. I was bicycling with dear Lady Rodfitten.
+She seemed really to like me. She had come out and accosted me heartily
+on the terrace, asking me, because of my sticking-plaster, with whom I
+had fought a duel since yesterday. I did not tell her with whom, and
+she had already branched off on the subject of duelling in general. She
+regretted the extinction of duelling in England, and gave cogent
+reasons for her regret. Then she asked me what my next book was to be.
+I confided that I was writing a sort of sequel--"Ariel Returns to
+Mayfair." She shook her head, said with her usual soundness that sequels
+were very dangerous things, and asked me to tell her "briefly" the lines
+along which I was working. I did so. She pointed out two or three weak
+points in my scheme. She said she could judge better if I would let
+her see my manuscript. She asked me to come and lunch with her next
+Friday--"just our two selves"--at Rodfitten House, and to bring my
+manuscript with me. Need I say that I walked on air?
+
+'"And now," she said strenuously, "let us take a turn on our bicycles."
+By this time there were a dozen riders on the terrace, all of them
+smiling with pride and rapture. We mounted and rode along together. The
+terrace ran round two sides of the house, and before we came to the end
+of it these words had provisionally marshalled themselves in my mind:
+
+
+                      TO
+                    ELEANOR
+             COUNTESS OF RODFITTEN
+           THIS BOOK WHICH OWES ALL
+             TO HER WISE COUNSEL
+          AND UNWEARYING SUPERVISION
+            IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED
+                BY HER FRIEND
+                  THE AUTHOR
+
+
+'Smiled to masonically by the passing bicyclists, and smiling
+masonically to them in return, I began to feel that the rest of my visit
+would run smooth, if only--
+
+'"Let's go a little faster. Let's race!" said Lady Rodfitten; and we did
+so--"just our two selves." I was on the side nearer to the balustrade,
+and it was on that side that Braxton suddenly appeared from nowhere,
+solid-looking as a rock, his arms akimbo, less than three yards ahead
+of me, so that I swerved involuntarily, sharply, striking broadside the
+front wheel of Lady Rodfitten and collapsing with her, and with a crash
+of machinery, to the ground.
+
+'I wasn't hurt. She had broken my fall. I wished I was dead. She
+was furious. She sat speechless with fury. A crowd had quickly
+collected--just as in the case of a street accident. She accused me now
+to the crowd. She said I had done it on purpose. She said such terrible
+things of me that I think the crowd's sympathy must have veered towards
+me. She was assisted to her feet. I tried to be one of the assistants.
+"Don't let him come near me!" she thundered. I caught sight of Braxton
+on the fringe of the crowd, grinning at me. "It was all HIS fault,"
+I madly cried, pointing at him. Everybody looked at Mr. Balfour,
+just behind whom Braxton was standing. There was a general murmur
+of surprise, in which I have no doubt Mr. Balfour joined. He gave a
+charming, blank, deprecating smile. "I mean--I can't explain what I
+mean," I groaned. Lady Rodfitten moved away, refusing support, limping
+terribly, towards the house. The crowd followed her, solicitous. I stood
+helplessly, desperately, where I was.
+
+'I stood an outlaw, a speck on the now empty terrace. Mechanically
+I picked up my straw hat, and wheeled the two bent bicycles to the
+balustrade. I suppose Mr. Balfour has a charming nature. For he
+presently came out again--on purpose, I am sure, to alleviate my misery.
+He told me that Lady Rodfitten had suffered no harm. He took me for a
+stroll up and down the terrace, talking thoughtfully and enchantingly
+about things in general. Then, having done his deed of mercy, this Good
+Samaritan went back into the house. My eyes followed him with gratitude;
+but I was still bleeding from wounds beyond his skill. I escaped down
+into the gardens. I wanted to see no one. Still more did I want to be
+seen by no one. I dreaded in every nerve of me my reappearance among
+those people. I walked ever faster and faster, to stifle thought; but in
+vain. Why hadn't I simply ridden THROUGH Braxton? I was aware of being
+now in the park, among great trees and undulations of wild green ground.
+But Nature did not achieve the task that Mr. Balfour had attempted; and
+my anguish was unassuaged.
+
+'I paused to lean against a tree in the huge avenue that led to the huge
+hateful house. I leaned wondering whether the thought of re-entering
+that house were the more hateful because I should have to face my
+fellow-guests or because I should probably have to face Braxton. A
+church bell began ringing somewhere. And anon I was aware of another
+sound--a twitter of voices. A consignment of hatted and parasoled ladies
+was coming fast adown the avenue. My first impulse was to dodge behind
+my tree. But I feared that I had been observed; so that what was left to
+me of self-respect compelled me to meet these ladies.
+
+'The Duchess was among them. I had seen her from afar at breakfast,
+but not since. She carried a prayer-book, which she waved to me as I
+approached. I was a disastrous guest, but still a guest, and nothing
+could have been prettier than her smile. "Most of my men this week,"
+she said, "are Pagans, and all the others have dispatch-boxes to go
+through--except the dear old Duke of Mull, who's a member of the Free
+Kirk. You're Pagan, of course?"
+
+'I said--and indeed it was a heart-cry--that I should like very much to
+come to church. "If I shan't be in the way," I rather abjectly added.
+It didn't strike me that Braxton would try to intercept me. I don't know
+why, but it never occurred to me, as I walked briskly along beside the
+Duchess, that I should meet him so far from the house. The church was in
+a corner of the park, and the way to it was by a side path that branched
+off from the end of the avenue. A little way along, casting its shadow
+across the path, was a large oak. It was from behind this tree, when we
+came to it, that Braxton sprang suddenly forth and tripped me up with
+his foot.
+
+'Absurd to be tripped up by the mere semblance of a foot? But remember,
+I was walking quickly, and the whole thing happened in a flash of
+time. It was inevitable that I should throw out my hands and come down
+headlong--just as though the obstacle had been as real as it looked.
+Down I came on palms and knee-caps, and up I scrambled, very much hurt
+and shaken and apologetic. "POOR Mr. Maltby! REALLY--!" the Duchess
+wailed for me in this latest of my mishaps. Some other lady chased my
+straw hat, which had bowled far ahead. Two others helped to brush me.
+They were all very kind, with a quaver of mirth in their concern for me.
+I looked furtively around for Braxton, but he was gone. The palms of my
+hands were abraded with gravel. The Duchess said I must on no account
+come to church NOW. I was utterly determined to reach that sanctuary. I
+marched firmly on with the Duchess. Come what might on the way, I wasn't
+going to be left out here. I was utterly bent on winning at least one
+respite.
+
+'Well, I reached the little church without further molestation. To be
+there seemed almost too good to be true. The organ, just as we entered,
+sounded its first notes. The ladies rustled into the front pew. I,
+being the one male of the party, sat at the end of the pew, beside the
+Duchess. I couldn't help feeling that my position was a proud one. But I
+had gone through too much to take instant pleasure in it, and was beset
+by thoughts of what new horror might await me on the way back to
+the house. I hoped the Service would not be brief. The swelling and
+dwindling strains of the "voluntary" on the small organ were strangely
+soothing. I turned to give an almost feudal glance to the simple
+villagers in the pews behind, and saw a sight that cowed my soul.
+
+'Braxton was coming up the aisle. He came slowly, casting a tourist's
+eye at the stained-glass windows on either side. Walking heavily, yet
+with no sound of boots on the pavement, he reached our pew. There,
+towering and glowering, he halted, as though demanding that we should
+make room for him. A moment later he edged sullenly into the pew.
+Instinctively I had sat tight back, drawing my knees aside, in a shudder
+of revulsion against contact. But Braxton did not push past me. What he
+did was to sit slowly and fully down on me.
+
+'No, not down ON me. Down THROUGH me--and around me. What befell me
+was not mere ghastly contact with the intangible. It was inclusion,
+envelopment, eclipse. What Braxton sat down on was not I, but the seat
+of the pew; and what he sat back against was not my face and chest, but
+the back of the pew. I didn't realise this at the moment. All I knew was
+a sudden black blotting-out of all things; an infinite and impenetrable
+darkness. I dimly conjectured that I was dead. What was wrong with me,
+in point of fact, was that my eyes, with the rest of me, were inside
+Braxton. You remember what a great hulking fellow Braxton was. I
+calculate that as we sat there my eyes were just beneath the roof of his
+mouth. Horrible!
+
+'Out of the unfathomable depths of that pitch darkness, I could yet hear
+the "voluntary" swelling and dwindling, just as before. It was by this
+I knew now that I wasn't dead. And I suppose I must have craned my head
+forward, for I had a sudden glimpse of things--a close quick downward
+glimpse of a pepper-and-salt waistcoat and of two great hairy hands
+clasped across it. Then darkness again. Either I had drawn back my head,
+or Braxton had thrust his forward; I don't know which. "Are you all
+right?" the Duchess' voice whispered, and no doubt my face was ashen.
+"Quite," whispered my voice. But this pathetic monosyllable was the last
+gasp of the social instinct in me. Suddenly, as the "voluntary" swelled
+to its close, there was a great sharp shuffling noise. The congregation
+had risen to its feet, at the entry of choir and vicar. Braxton had
+risen, leaving me in daylight. I beheld his towering back. The Duchess,
+beside him, glanced round at me. But I could not, dared not, stand up
+into that presented back, into that great waiting darkness. I did but
+clutch my hat from beneath the seat and hurry distraught down the aisle,
+out through the porch, into the open air.
+
+'Whither? To what goal? I didn't reason. I merely fled--like Orestes;
+fled like an automaton along the path we had come by. And was followed?
+Yes, yes. Glancing back across my shoulder, I saw that brute some
+twenty yards behind me, gaining on me. I broke into a sharper run. A few
+sickening moments later, he was beside me, scowling down into my face.
+
+'I swerved, dodged, doubled on my tracks, but he was always at me. Now
+and again, for lack of breath, I halted, and he halted with me. And
+then, when I had got my wind, I would start running again, in the insane
+hope of escaping him. We came, by what twisting and turning course
+I know not, to the great avenue, and as I stood there in an agony of
+panting I had a dazed vision of the distant Hall. Really I had quite
+forgotten I was staying at the Duke of Hertfordshire's. But Braxton
+hadn't forgotten. He planted himself in front of me. He stood between me
+and the house.
+
+'Faint though I was, I could almost have laughed. Good heavens! was THAT
+all he wanted: that I shouldn't go back there? Did he suppose I wanted
+to go back there--with HIM? Was I the Duke's prisoner on parole? What
+was there to prevent me from just walking off to the railway station? I
+turned to do so.
+
+'He accompanied me on my way. I thought that when once I had passed
+through the lodge gates he might vanish, satisfied. But no, he didn't
+vanish. It was as though he suspected that if he let me out of his
+sight I should sneak back to the house. He arrived with me, this quiet
+companion of mine, at the little railway station. Evidently he meant to
+see me off. I learned from an elderly and solitary porter that the next
+train to London was the 4.3.
+
+'Well, Braxton saw me off by the 4.3. I reflected, as I stepped up into
+an empty compartment, that it wasn't yet twenty-four hours ago since I,
+or some one like me, had alighted at that station.
+
+'The guard blew his whistle; the engine shrieked, and the train jolted
+forward and away; but I did not lean out of the window to see the last
+of my attentive friend.
+
+'Really not twenty-four hours ago? Not twenty-four years?'
+
+
+Maltby paused in his narrative. 'Well, well,' he said, 'I don't want you
+to think I overrate the ordeal of my visit to Keeb. A man of stronger
+nerve than mine, and of greater resourcefulness, might have coped
+successfully with Braxton from first to last--might have stayed on till
+Monday, making a very favourable impression on every one all the while.
+Even as it was, even after my manifold failures and sudden flight, I
+don't say my position was impossible. I only say it seemed so to me. A
+man less sensitive than I, and less vain, might have cheered up after
+writing a letter of apology to his hostess, and have resumed his normal
+existence as though nothing very terrible had happened, after all. I
+wrote a few lines to the Duchess that night; but I wrote amidst the
+preparations for my departure from England: I crossed the Channel next
+morning. Throughout that Sunday afternoon with Braxton at the Keeb
+railway station, pacing the desolate platform with him, waiting in
+the desolating waiting-room with him, I was numb to regrets, and was
+thinking of nothing but the 4.3. On the way to Victoria my brain worked
+and my soul wilted. Every incident in my stay at Keeb stood out clear
+to me; a dreadful, a hideous pattern. I had done for myself, so far as
+THOSE people were concerned. And now that I had sampled THEM, what cared
+I for others? "Too low for a hawk, too high for a buzzard." That homely
+old saying seemed to sum me up. And suppose I COULD still take pleasure
+in the company of my own old upper-middle class, how would that class
+regard me now? Gossip percolates. Little by little, I was sure, the
+story of my Keeb fiasco would leak down into the drawing-room of Mrs.
+Foster-Dugdale. I felt I could never hold up my head in any company
+where anything of that story was known. Are you quite sure you never
+heard anything?'
+
+I assured Maltby that all I had known was the great bare fact of his
+having stayed at Keeb Hall.
+
+'It's curious,' he reflected. 'It's a fine illustration of the loyalty
+of those people to one another. I suppose there was a general agreement
+for the Duchess' sake that nothing should be said about her queer guest.
+But even if I had dared hope to be so efficiently hushed up, I couldn't
+have not fled. I wanted to forget. I wanted to leap into some void,
+far away from all reminders. I leapt straight from Ryder Street into
+Vaule-la-Rochette, a place of which I had once heard that it was
+the least frequented seaside-resort in Europe. I leapt leaving no
+address--leapt telling my landlord that if a suit-case and a portmanteau
+arrived for me he could regard them, them and their contents, as his own
+for ever. I daresay the Duchess wrote me a kind little letter, forcing
+herself to express a vague hope that I would come again "some other
+time." I daresay Lady Rodfitten did NOT write reminding me of my promise
+to lunch on Friday and bring "Ariel Returns to Mayfair" with me. I
+left that manuscript at Ryder Street; in my bedroom grate; a shuffle of
+ashes. Not that I'd yet given up all thought of writing. But I certainly
+wasn't going to write now about the two things I most needed to forget.
+I wasn't going to write about the British aristocracy, nor about any
+kind of supernatural presence.... I did write a novel--my last--while I
+was at Vaule. "Mr. and Mrs. Robinson." Did you ever come across a copy
+of it?
+
+I nodded gravely.
+
+'Ah; I wasn't sure,' said Maltby, 'whether it was ever published. A
+dreary affair, wasn't it? I knew a great deal about suburban life.
+But--well, I suppose one can't really understand what one doesn't love,
+and one can't make good fun without real understanding. Besides, what
+chance of virtue is there for a book written merely to distract
+the author's mind? I had hoped to be healed by sea and sunshine and
+solitude. These things were useless. The labour of "Mr. and Mrs.
+Robinson" did help, a little. When I had finished it, I thought I might
+as well send it off to my publisher. He had given me a large sum of
+money, down, after "Ariel," for my next book--so large that I was rather
+loth to disgorge. In the note I sent with the manuscript, I gave no
+address, and asked that the proofs should be read in the office. I
+didn't care whether the thing were published or not. I knew it would be
+a dead failure if it were. What mattered one more drop in the foaming
+cup of my humiliation? I knew Braxton would grin and gloat. I didn't
+mind even that.'
+
+'Oh, well,' I said, 'Braxton was in no mood for grinning and gloating.
+"The Drones" had already appeared.'
+
+Maltby had never heard of 'The Drones'--which I myself had remembered
+only in the course of his disclosures. I explained to him that it was
+Braxton's second novel, and was by way of being a savage indictment
+of the British aristocracy; that it was written in the worst possible
+taste, but was so very dull that it fell utterly flat; that Braxton
+had forthwith taken, with all of what Maltby had called 'the passionate
+force and intensity of his nature,' to drink, and had presently gone
+under and not re-emerged.
+
+Maltby gave signs of genuine, though not deep, emotion, and cited two
+or three of the finest passages from 'A Faun on the Cotswolds.' He even
+expressed a conviction that 'The Drones' must have been misjudged. He
+said he blamed himself more than ever for yielding to that bad impulse
+at that Soiree.
+
+'And yet,' he mused, 'and yet, honestly, I can't find it in my heart
+to regret that I did yield. I can only wish that all had turned out as
+well, in the end, for Braxton as for me. I wish he could have won out,
+as I did, into a great and lasting felicity. For about a year after I
+had finished "Mr. and Mrs. Robinson" I wandered from place to place,
+trying to kill memory, shunning all places frequented by the English.
+At last I found myself in Lucca. Here, if anywhere, I thought, might a
+bruised and tormented spirit find gradual peace. I determined to move
+out of my hotel into some permanent lodging. Not for felicity, not for
+any complete restoration of self-respect, was I hoping; only for peace.
+A "mezzano" conducted me to a noble and ancient house, of which, he
+told me, the owner was anxious to let the first floor. It was in much
+disrepair, but even so seemed to me very cheap. According to the simple
+Luccan standard, I am rich. I took that first floor for a year, had it
+repaired, and engaged two servants. My "padrona" inhabited the ground
+floor. From time to time she allowed me to visit her there. She was
+the Contessa Adriano-Rizzoli, the last of her line. She is the Contessa
+Adriano-Rizzoli-Maltby. We have been married fifteen years.'
+
+Maltby looked at his watch. He rose and took tenderly from the table
+his great bunch of roses. 'She is a lineal descendant,' he said, 'of the
+Emperor Hadrian.'
+
+
+
+
+
+'SAVONAROLA' BROWN
+
+
+I like to remember that I was the first to call him so, for, though he
+always deprecated the nickname, in his heart he was pleased by it, I
+know, and encouraged to go on.
+
+Quite apart from its significance, he had reason to welcome it. He had
+been unfortunate at the font. His parents, at the time of his birth,
+lived in Ladbroke Crescent, XV. They must have been an extraordinarily
+unimaginative couple, for they could think of no better name for their
+child than Ladbroke. This was all very well for him till he went to
+school. But you can fancy the indignation and delight of us boys at
+finding among us a newcomer who, on his own confession, had been named
+after a Crescent. I don't know how it is nowadays, but thirty-five years
+ago, certainly, schoolboys regarded the possession of ANY Christian name
+as rather unmanly. As we all had these encumbrances, we had to wreak our
+scorn on any one who was cumbered in a queer fashion. I myself, bearer
+of a Christian name adjudged eccentric though brief, had had much to put
+up with in my first term. Brown's arrival, therefore, at the beginning
+of my second term, was a good thing for me, and I am afraid I was very
+prominent among his persecutors. Trafalgar Brown, Tottenham Court Brown,
+Bond Brown--what names did we little brutes NOT cull for him from
+the London Directory? Except how miserable we made his life, I do not
+remember much about him as he was at that time, and the only important
+part of the little else that I do recall is that already he showed
+a strong sense for literature. For the majority of us Carthusians,
+literature was bounded on the north by Whyte Melville, on the south by
+Hawley Smart, on the east by the former, and on the west by the latter.
+Little Brown used to read Harrison Ainsworth, Wilkie Collins, and other
+writers whom we, had we assayed them, would have dismissed as 'deep.' It
+has been said by Mr. Arthur Symons that 'all art is a mode of escape.'
+The art of letters did not, however, enable Brown to escape so far from
+us as he would have wished. In my third term he did not reappear among
+us. His parents had in some sort atoned. Unimaginative though they
+were, it seems they could understand a tale of woe laid before them
+circumstantially, and had engaged a private tutor for their boy. Fifteen
+years elapsed before I saw him again.
+
+This was at the second night of some play. I was dramatic critic for the
+Saturday Review, and, weary of meeting the same lot of people over and
+over again at first nights, had recently sent a circular to the managers
+asking that I might have seats for second nights instead. I found that
+there existed as distinct and invariable a lot of second-nighters as of
+first-nighters. The second-nighters were less 'showy'; but then, they
+came rather to see than to be seen, and there was an air, that I liked,
+of earnestness and hopefulness about them. I used to write a great deal
+about the future of the British drama, and they, for their part, used
+to think and talk a great deal about it. People who care about books
+and pictures find much to interest and please them in the present. It
+is only the students of the theatre who always fall back, or rather
+forward, on the future. Though second-nighters do come to see, they
+remain rather to hope and pray. I should have known anywhere, by the
+visionary look in his eyes, that Brown was a confirmed second-nighter.
+
+What surprises me is that I knew he was Brown. It is true that he
+had not grown much in those fifteen years: his brow was still
+disproportionate to his body, and he looked young to have become
+'confirmed' in any habit. But it is also true that not once in the past
+ten years, at any rate, had he flitted through my mind and poised on my
+conscience.
+
+I hope that I and those other boys had long ago ceased from recurring to
+him in nightmares. Cordial though the hand was that I offered him, and
+highly civilised my whole demeanour, he seemed afraid that at any moment
+I might begin to dance around him, shooting out my lips at him and
+calling him Seven-Sisters Brown or something of that kind. It was only
+after constant meetings at second nights, and innumerable entr'acte
+talks about the future of the drama, that he began to trust me. In
+course of time we formed the habit of walking home together as far as
+Cumberland Place, at which point our ways diverged. I gathered that he
+was still living with his parents, but he did not tell me where, for
+they had not, as I learned by reference to the Red Book, moved from
+Ladbroke Crescent.
+
+I found his company restful rather than inspiring. His days were
+spent in clerkship at one of the smaller Government Offices, his
+evenings--except when there was a second night--in reading and writing.
+He did not seem to know much, or to wish to know more, about life. Books
+and plays, first editions and second nights, were what he cared for. On
+matters of religion and ethics he was as little keen as he seemed to be
+on human character in the raw; so that (though I had already suspected
+him of writing, or meaning to write, a play) my eyebrows did rise when
+he told me he meant to write a play about Savonarola.
+
+He made me understand, however, that it was rather the name than the
+man that had first attracted him. He said that the name was in itself a
+great incentive to blank-verse. He uttered it to me slowly, in a voice
+so much deeper than his usual voice, that I nearly laughed. For the
+actual bearer of the name he had no hero-worship, and said it was by a
+mere accident that he had chosen him as central figure. He had
+thought of writing a tragedy about Sardanapalus; but the volume of the
+"Encyclopedia Britannica" in which he was going to look up the main
+facts about Sardanapalus happened to open at Savonarola. Hence a sudden
+and complete peripety in the student's mind. He told me he had read the
+Encyclopedia's article carefully, and had dipped into one or two of
+the books there mentioned as authorities. He seemed almost to wish he
+hadn't. 'Facts get in one's way so,' he complained. 'History is one
+thing, drama is another. Aristotle said drama was more philosophic than
+history because it showed us what men WOULD do, not just what they DID.
+I think that's so true, don't you? I want to show what Savonarola WOULD
+have done if--' He paused.
+
+'If what?'
+
+'Well, that's just the point. I haven't settled that yet. When I've
+thought of a plot, I shall go straight ahead.'
+
+I said I supposed he intended his tragedy rather for the study than for
+the stage. This seemed to hurt him. I told him that what I meant was
+that managers always shied at anything without 'a strong feminine
+interest.' This seemed to worry him. I advised him not to think about
+managers. He promised that he would think only about Savonarola.
+
+I know now that this promise was not exactly kept by him; and he may
+have felt slightly awkward when, some weeks later, he told me he had
+begun the play. 'I've hit on an initial idea,' he said, 'and that's
+enough to start with. I gave up my notion of inventing a plot in
+advance. I thought it would be a mistake. I don't want puppets on wires.
+I want Savonarola to work out his destiny in his own way. Now that I
+have the initial idea, what I've got to do is to make Savonarola LIVE.
+I hope I shall be able to do this. Once he's alive, I shan't interfere
+with him. I shall just watch him. Won't it be interesting? He isn't
+alive yet. But there's plenty of time. You see, he doesn't come on at
+the rise of the curtain. A Friar and a Sacristan come on and talk about
+him. By the time they've finished, perhaps he'll be alive. But they
+won't have finished yet. Not that they're going to say very much. But I
+write slowly.'
+
+I remember the mild thrill I had when, one evening, he took me aside and
+said in an undertone, 'Savonarola has come on. Alive!' For me the MS.
+hereinafter printed has an interest that for you it cannot have, so
+a-bristle am I with memories of the meetings I had with its author
+throughout the nine years he took over it. He never saw me without
+reporting progress, or lack of progress. Just what was going on, or
+standing still, he did not divulge. After the entry of Savonarola,
+he never told me what characters were appearing. 'All sorts of people
+appear,' he would say rather helplessly. 'They insist. I can't prevent
+them.' I used to say it must be great fun to be a creative artist; but
+at this he always shook his head: 'I don't create. THEY do. Savonarola
+especially, of course. I just look on and record. I never know what's
+going to happen next.' He had the advantage of me in knowing at any rate
+what had happened last. But whenever I pled for a glimpse he would again
+shake his head:
+
+'The thing MUST be judged as a whole. Wait till I've come to the end of
+the Fifth Act.'
+
+So impatient did I become that, as the years went by, I used rather to
+resent his presence at second nights. I felt he ought to be at his
+desk. His, I used to tell him, was the only drama whose future ought
+to concern him now. And in point of fact he had, I think, lost the true
+spirit of the second-nighter, and came rather to be seen than to see.
+He liked the knowledge that here and there in the auditorium, when he
+entered it, some one would be saying 'Who is that?' and receiving the
+answer 'Oh, don't you know? That's "Savonarola" Brown.' This sort of
+thing, however, did not make him cease to be the modest, unaffected
+fellow I had known. He always listened to the advice I used to offer
+him, though inwardly he must have chafed at it. Myself a fidgety and
+uninspired person, unable to begin a piece of writing before I know just
+how it shall end, I had always been afraid that sooner or later Brown
+would take some turning that led nowhither--would lose himself and come
+to grief. This fear crept into my gladness when, one evening in the
+spring of 1909, he told me he had finished the Fourth Act. Would he win
+out safely through the Fifth?
+
+He himself was looking rather glum; and, as we walked away from the
+theatre, I said to him, 'I suppose you feel rather like Thackeray when
+he'd "killed the Colonel": you've got to kill the Monk.'
+
+'Not quite that,' he answered. 'But of course he'll die very soon now. A
+couple of years or so. And it does seem rather sad. It's not merely that
+he's so full of life. He has been becoming much more HUMAN lately. At
+first I only respected him. Now I have a real affection for him.'
+
+This was an interesting glimpse at last, but I turned from it to my
+besetting fear.
+
+'Haven't you,' I asked, 'any notion of HOW he is to die?'
+
+Brown shook his head.
+
+'But in a tragedy,' I insisted, 'the catastrophe MUST be led up to,
+step by step. My dear Brown, the end of the hero MUST be logical and
+rational.'
+
+'I don't see that,' he said, as we crossed Piccadilly Circus. 'In actual
+life it isn't so. What is there to prevent a motor-omnibus from knocking
+me over and killing me at this moment?'
+
+At that moment, by what has always seemed to me the strangest of
+coincidences, and just the sort of thing that playwrights ought to
+avoid, a motor-omnibus knocked Brown over and killed him.
+
+He had, as I afterwards learned, made a will in which he appointed me
+his literary executor. Thus passed into my hands the unfinished play by
+whose name he had become known to so many people.
+
+
+I hate to say that I was disappointed in it, but I had better confess
+quite frankly that, on the whole, I was. Had Brown written it quickly
+and read it to me soon after our first talk about it, it might in some
+ways have exceeded my hopes. But he had become for me, by reason of that
+quiet and unhasting devotion to his work while the years came and went,
+a sort of hero; and the very mystery involving just what he was about
+had addicted me to those ideas of magnificence which the unknown is said
+always to foster.
+
+Even so, however, I am not blind to the great merits of the play as it
+stands. It is well that the writer of poetic drama should be a dramatist
+and a poet. Here is a play that abounds in striking situations, and I
+have searched it vainly for one line that does not scan. What I nowhere
+feel is that I have not elsewhere been thrilled or lulled by the same
+kind of thing. I do not go so far as to say that Brown inherited his
+parents' deplorable lack of imagination. But I do wish he had been less
+sensitive than he was to impressions, or else had seen and read fewer
+poetic dramas ancient and modern. Remembering that visionary look in
+his eyes, remembering that he was as displeased as I by the work of all
+living playwrights, and as dissatisfied with the great efforts of the
+Elizabethans, I wonder that he was not more immune from influences.
+
+Also, I cannot but wish still that he had faltered in his decision
+to make no scenario. There is much to be said for the theory that a
+dramatist should first vitalise his characters and then leave them
+unfettered; but I do feel that Brown's misused the confidence he reposed
+in them. The labour of so many years has somewhat the air of being
+a mere improvisation. Savonarola himself, after the First Act or so,
+strikes me as utterly inconsistent. It may be that he is just complex,
+like Hamlet. He does in the Fourth Act show traces of that Prince. I
+suppose this is why he struck Brown as having become 'more human.' To me
+he seems merely a poorer creature.
+
+But enough of these reservations. In my anxiety for poor Brown's sake
+that you should not be disappointed, perhaps I have been carrying
+tactfulness too far and prejudicing you against that for which I
+specially want your favour. Here, without more ado, is
+
+
+
+
+SAVONAROLA
+
+A TRAGEDY
+
+By L. Brown
+
+
+  ACT I
+
+  SCENE:    A Room in the Monastery of San Marco, Florence.
+  TIME: 1490, A.D.  A summer morning.
+
+  Enter the SACRISTAN and a FRIAR.
+
+  SACR.
+  Savonarola looks more grim to-day
+  Than ever.  Should I speak my mind, I'd say
+  That he was fashioning some new great scourge
+  To flay the backs of men.
+
+  FRI.
+                             'Tis even so.
+  Brother Filippo saw him stand last night
+  In solitary vigil till the dawn
+  Lept o'er the Arno, and his face was such
+  As men may wear in Purgatory--nay,
+  E'en in the inmost core of Hell's own fires.
+
+  SACR.
+  I often wonder if some woman's face,
+  Seen at some rout in his old worldling days,
+  Haunts him e'en now, e'en here, and urges him
+  To fierier fury 'gainst the Florentines.
+
+  FRI.
+  Savonarola love-sick!  Ha, ha, ha!
+  Love-sick?  He, love-sick?  'Tis a goodly jest!
+  The CONfirm'd misogyn a ladies' man!
+  Thou must have eaten of some strange red herb
+  That takes the reason captive.  I will swear
+  Savonarola never yet hath seen
+  A woman but he spurn'd her.  Hist!  He comes.
+
+  [Enter SAVONAROLA, rapt in thought.]
+
+  Give thee good morrow, Brother.
+
+  SACR.
+                                   And therewith
+  A multitude of morrows equal-good
+  Till thou, by Heaven's grace, hast wrought the work
+  Nearest thine heart.
+
+  SAV.
+                        I thank thee, Brother, yet
+  I thank thee not, for that my thankfulness
+  (An such there be) gives thanks to Heaven alone.
+
+  FRI. [To SACR.]
+  'Tis a right answer he hath given thee.
+  Had Sav'narola spoken less than thus,
+  Methinks me, the less Sav'narola he.
+  As when the snow lies on yon Apennines,
+  White as the hem of Mary Mother's robe,
+  And insusceptible to the sun's rays,
+  Being harder to the touch than temper'd steel,
+  E'en so this great gaunt monk white-visaged
+  Upstands to Heaven and to Heav'n devotes
+  The scarped thoughts that crown the upper slopes
+  Of his abrupt and AUStere nature.
+
+  SACR.
+                                     Aye.
+
+  [Enter LUCREZIA BORGIA, ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI, and LEONARDO
+   DA VINCI.  LUC. is thickly veiled.]
+
+  ST. FRAN.
+  This is the place.
+
+  LUC. [Pointing at SAV.]
+                      And this the man! [Aside.] And I--
+  By the hot blood that courses i' my veins
+  I swear it ineluctably--the woman!
+
+  SAV.
+  Who is this wanton?
+  [LUC. throws back her hood, revealing her face.  SAV. starts back,
+  gazing at her.]
+
+  ST. FRAN.
+                       Hush, Sir!  'Tis my little sister
+  The poisoner, right well-belov'd by all
+  Whom she as yet hath spared.  Hither she came
+  Mounted upon another little sister of mine--
+  A mare, caparison'd in goodly wise.
+  She--I refer now to Lucrezia--
+  Desireth to have word of thee anent
+  Some matter that befrets her.
+
+  SAV. [To LUC.]
+                                 Hence!  Begone!
+  Savonarola will not tempted be
+  By face of woman e'en tho' 't be, tho' 'tis,
+  Surpassing fair.  All hope abandon therefore.
+  I charge thee: Vade retro, Satanas.
+
+  LEONARDO
+  Sirrah, thou speakst in haste, as is the way
+  Of monkish men.  The beauty of Lucrezia
+  Commends, not discommends, her to the eyes
+  Of keener thinkers than I take thee for.
+  I am an artist and an engineer,
+  Giv'n o'er to subtile dreams of what shall be
+  On this our planet.  I foresee a day
+  When men shall skim the earth i' certain chairs
+  Not drawn by horses but sped on by oil
+  Or other matter, and shall thread the sky
+  Birdlike.
+
+  LUC.
+             It may be as thou sayest, friend,
+  Or may be not. [To SAV.] As touching this our errand,
+  I crave of thee, Sir Monk, an audience
+  Instanter.
+
+  FRI.
+              Lo!  Here Alighieri comes.
+  I had methought me he was still at Parma.
+
+  [Enter DANTE.]
+
+  ST. FRAN. [To DAN.]
+  How fares my little sister Beatrice?
+
+  DAN.
+  She died, alack, last sennight.
+
+  ST. FRAN.
+                                   Did she so?
+  If the condolences of men avail
+  Thee aught, take mine.
+
+  DAN.
+                          They are of no avail.
+
+  SAV. [To LUC.]
+  I do refuse thee audience.
+
+  LUC.
+                              Then why
+  Didst thou not say so promptly when I ask'd it?
+
+  SAV.
+  Full well thou knowst that I was interrupted
+  By Alighieri's entry.
+  [Noise without.  Enter Guelfs and Ghibellines fighting.]
+                         What is this?
+
+  LUC.
+  I did not think that in this cloister'd spot
+  There would be so much doing.  I had look'd
+  To find Savonarola all alone
+  And tempt him in his uneventful cell.
+  Instead o' which--Spurn'd am I?  I am I.
+  There was a time, Sir, look to 't!  O damnation!
+  What is 't?  Anon then!  These my toys, my gauds,
+  That in the cradle--aye, 't my mother's breast--
+  I puled and lisped at,--'Tis impossible,
+  Tho', faith, 'tis not so, forasmuch as 'tis.
+  And I a daughter of the Borgias!--
+  Or so they told me.  Liars!  Flatterers!
+  Currying lick-spoons!  Where's the Hell of 't then?
+  'Tis time that I were going.  Farewell, Monk,
+  But I'll avenge me ere the sun has sunk.
+  [Exeunt LUC., ST. FRAN., and LEONARDO, followed by DAN.  SAV., having
+  watched LUC. out of sight, sinks to his knees, sobbing.  FRI. and SACR.
+  watch him in amazement.  Guelfs and Ghibellines continue fighting as
+  the Curtain falls.]
+
+
+  ACT II
+
+  TIME: Afternoon of same day.
+  SCENE:    Lucrezia's Laboratory.  Retorts, test-tubes, etc.  On small
+  Renaissance table, up c., is a great poison-bowl, the contents of
+  which are being stirred by the FIRST APPRENTICE.  The SECOND APPRENTICE
+  stands by, watching him.
+
+  SECOND APP.
+  For whom is the brew destin'd?
+
+  FIRST APP.
+                                  I know not.
+  Lady Lucrezia did but lay on me
+  Injunctions as regards the making of 't,
+  The which I have obey'd.  It is compounded
+  Of a malignant and a deadly weed
+  Found not save in the Gulf of Spezia,
+  And one small phial of 't, I am advis'd,
+  Were more than 'nough to slay a regiment
+  Of Messer Malatesta's condottieri
+  In all their armour.
+
+  SECOND APP.
+                        I can well believe it.
+  Mark how the purple bubbles froth upon
+  The evil surface of its nether slime!
+
+  [Enter LUC.]
+
+  LUC. [To FIRST APP.]
+  Is 't done, Sir Sluggard?
+
+  FIRST APP.
+                             Madam, to a turn.
+
+  LUC.
+  Had it not been so, I with mine own hand
+  Would have outpour'd it down thy gullet, knave.
+  See, here's a ring of cunningly-wrought gold
+
+  That I, on a dark night, did purchase from
+  A goldsmith on the Ponte Vecchio.
+  Small was his shop, and hoar of visage he.
+  I did bemark that from the ceiling's beams
+  Spiders had spun their webs for many a year,
+  The which hung erst like swathes of gossamer
+  Seen in the shadows of a fairy glade,
+  But now most woefully were weighted o'er
+  With gather'd dust.  Look well now at the ring!
+  Touch'd here, behold, it opes a cavity
+  Capacious of three drops of yon fell stuff.
+  Dost heed?  Whoso then puts it on his finger
+  Dies, and his soul is from his body rapt
+  To Hell or Heaven as the case may be.
+  Take thou this toy and pour the three drops in.
+
+  [Hands ring to FIRST APP. and comes down c.]
+
+  So, Sav'narola, thou shalt learn that I
+  Utter no threats but I do make them good.
+  Ere this day's sun hath wester'd from the view
+  Thou art to preach from out the Loggia
+  Dei Lanzi to the cits in the Piazza.
+  I, thy Lucrezia, will be upon the steps
+  To offer thee with phrases seeming-fair
+  That which shall seal thine eloquence for ever.
+  O mighty lips that held the world in spell
+  But would not meet these little lips of mine
+  In the sweet way that lovers use--O thin,
+  Cold, tight-drawn, bloodless lips, which natheless I
+  Deem of all lips the most magnifical
+  In this our city--
+
+  [Enter the Borgias' FOOL.]
+
+                      Well, Fool, what's thy latest?
+
+  FOOL
+  Aristotle's or Zeno's, Lady--'tis neither latest nor last.  For,
+  marry, if the cobbler stuck to his last, then were his latest his last
+  in rebus ambulantibus.  Argal, I stick at nothing but cobble-stones,
+  which, by the same token, are stuck to the road by men's fingers.
+
+  LUC.
+  How many crows may nest in a grocer's jerkin?
+
+  FOOL
+  A full dozen at cock-crow, and something less under the dog-star, by
+  reason of the dew, which lies heavy on men taken by the scurvy.
+
+  LUC. [To FIRST APP.]
+  Methinks the Fool is a fool.
+
+  FOOL
+  And therefore, by auricular deduction, am I own twin to the Lady
+  Lucrezia!
+
+  [Sings.]
+
+  When pears hang green on the garden wall
+    With a nid, and a nod, and a niddy-niddy-o
+  Then prank you, lads and lasses all,
+      With a yea and a nay and a niddy-o.
+
+  But when the thrush flies out o' the frost
+    With a nid, [etc.]
+  'Tis time for loons to count the cost,
+      With a yea [etc.]
+
+  [Enter the PORTER.]
+
+  PORTER
+  O my dear Mistress, there is one below
+  Demanding to have instant word of thee.
+  I told him that your Ladyship was not
+  At home.  Vain perjury!  He would not take
+  Nay for an answer.
+
+  LUC.
+                      Ah?  What manner of man
+  Is he?
+
+  PORTER
+          A personage the like of whom
+  Is wholly unfamiliar to my gaze.
+  Cowl'd is he, but I saw his great eyes glare
+  From their deep sockets in such wise as leopards
+  Glare from their caverns, crouching ere they spring
+  On their reluctant prey.
+
+  LUC.
+                            And what name gave he?
+
+  PORTER [After a pause.]
+  Something-arola.
+
+  LUC.
+                    Savon-? [PORTER nods.] Show him up.  [Exit PORTER.]
+
+  FOOL
+  If he be right astronomically, Mistress, then is he the greater dunce
+  in respect of true learning, the which goes by the globe.  Argal,
+  'twere better he widened his wind-pipe.
+
+  [Sings.]
+  Fly home, sweet self,
+  Nothing's for weeping,
+  Hemp was not made
+  For lovers' keeping, Lovers' keeping,
+  Cheerly, cheerly, fly away.
+  Hew no more wood
+  While ash is glowing,
+  The longest grass
+  Is lovers' mowing,
+  Lovers' mowing,
+  Cheerly, [etc.]
+
+  [Re-enter PORTER, followed by SAV.  Exeunt PORTER, FOOL, and FIRST and
+  SECOND APPS.]
+
+  SAV.
+  I am no more a monk, I am a man
+  O' the world.
+  [Throws off cowl and frock, and stands forth in the costume of a
+  Renaissance nobleman.  LUCREZIA looks him up and down.]
+
+  LUC.
+                 Thou cutst a sorry figure.
+
+  SAV.
+                                             That
+  Is neither here nor there.  I love you, Madam.
+
+  LUC.
+  And this, methinks, is neither there nor here,
+  For that my love of thee hath vanished,
+  Seeing thee thus beprankt.  Go pad thy calves!
+  Thus mightst thou, just conceivably, with luck,
+  Capture the fancy of some serving-wench.
+
+  SAV.
+  And this is all thou hast to say to me?
+
+  LUC.
+  It is.
+
+  SAV.
+          I am dismiss'd?
+
+  LUC.
+                           Thou art.
+
+  SAV.
+                                      'Tis well.
+  [Resumes frock and cowl.]
+  Savonarola is himself once more.
+
+  LUC.
+  And all my love for him returns to me
+  A thousandfold!
+
+  SAV.
+                   Too late!  My pride of manhood
+  Is wounded irremediably.  I'll
+  To the Piazza, where my flock awaits me.
+  Thus do we see that men make great mistakes
+  But may amend them when the conscience wakes.
+  [Exit.]
+
+  LUC.
+  I'm half avenged now, but only half:
+  'Tis with the ring I'll have the final laugh!
+  Tho' love be sweet, revenge is sweeter far.
+  To the Piazza!  Ha, ha, ha, ha, har!
+  [Seizes ring, and exit.  Through open door are heard, as the Curtain
+  falls, sounds of a terrific hubbub in the Piazza.]
+
+
+  ACT III
+
+  SCENE:    The Piazza.
+  TIME: A few minutes anterior to close of preceding Act.
+
+  The Piazza is filled from end to end with a vast seething crowd that
+  is drawn entirely from the lower orders.  There is a sprinkling of
+  wild-eyed and dishevelled women in it.  The men are lantern-jawed,
+  with several days' growth of beard.  Most of them carry rude weapons--
+  staves, bill-hooks, crow-bars, and the like--and are in as excited a
+  condition as the women.  Some of them are bare-headed, others affect a
+  kind of Phrygian cap.  Cobblers predominate.
+
+  Enter LORENZO DE MEDICI and COSIMO DE MEDICI.  They wear cloaks of scarlet
+  brocade, and, to avoid notice, hold masks to their faces.
+
+  COS.
+  What purpose doth the foul and greasy plebs
+  Ensue to-day here?
+
+  LOR.
+                      I nor know nor care.
+
+  COS.
+  How thrall'd thou art to the philosophy
+  Of Epicurus!  Naught that's human I
+  Deem alien from myself. [To a COBBLER.] Make answer, fellow!
+  What empty hope hath drawn thee by a thread
+  Forth from the OBscene hovel where thou starvest?
+
+  COB.
+  No empty hope, your Honour, but the full
+  Assurance that to-day, as yesterday,
+  Savonarola will let loose his thunder
+  Against the vices of the idle rich
+  And from the brimming cornucopia
+  Of his immense vocabulary pour
+  Scorn on the lamentable heresies
+  Of the New Learning and on all the art
+  Later than Giotto.
+
+  COS.
+                      Mark how absolute
+  The knave is!
+
+  LOR.
+                 Then are parrots rational
+  When they regurgitate the thing they hear!
+  This fool is but an unit of the crowd,
+  And crowds are senseless as the vasty deep
+  That sinks or surges as the moon dictates.
+  I know these crowds, and know that any man
+  That hath a glib tongue and a rolling eye
+  Can as he willeth with them.
+  [Removes his mask and mounts steps of Loggia.]
+                                Citizens!
+  [Prolonged yells and groans from the crowd.]
+  Yes, I am he, I am that same Lorenzo
+  Whom you have nicknamed the Magnificent.
+  [Further terrific yells, shakings of fists, brandishings of bill-
+  hooks, insistent cries of 'Death to Lorenzo!' 'Down with the
+  Magnificent!' Cobblers on fringe of crowd, down c., exhibit especially
+  all the symptoms of epilepsy, whooping-cough, and other ailments.]
+  You love not me.
+  [The crowd makes an ugly rush.  LOR. appears likely to be dragged down
+  and torn limb from limb, but raises one hand in nick of time, and
+  continues:]
+                    Yet I deserve your love.
+  [The yells are now variegated with dubious murmurs.  A cobbler down c.
+  thrusts his face feverishly in the face of another and repeats, in a
+  hoarse interrogative whisper, 'Deserves our love?']
+  Not for the sundry boons I have bestow'd
+  And benefactions I have lavished
+  Upon Firenze, City of the Flowers,
+  But for the love that in this rugged breast
+  I bear you.
+  [The yells have now died away, and there is a sharp fall in dubious
+  murmurs.  The cobbler down c. says, in an ear-piercing whisper, 'The
+  love he bears us,' drops his lower jaw, nods his head repeatedly, and
+  awaits in an intolerable state of suspense the orator's next words.]
+               I am not a blameless man,
+  [Some dubious murmurs.]
+  Yet for that I have lov'd you passing much,
+  Shall some things be forgiven me.
+  [Noises of cordial assent.]
+                                     There dwells
+  In this our city, known unto you all,
+  A man more virtuous than I am, and
+  A thousand times more intellectual;
+  Yet envy not I him, for--shall I name him?--
+  He loves not you.  His name? I will not cut
+  Your hearts by speaking it.  Here let it stay
+  On tip o' tongue.
+  [Insistent clamour.]
+                     Then steel you to the shock!--
+  Savonarola.
+  [For a moment or so the crowd reels silently under the shock.  Cobbler
+  down c. is the first to recover himself and cry 'Death to Savonarola!'
+  The cry instantly becomes general.  LOR. holds up his hand and
+  gradually imposes silence.]
+               His twin bug-bears are
+  Yourselves and that New Learning which I hold
+  Less dear than only you.
+  [Profound sensation.  Everybody whispers 'Than only you' to everybody
+  else.  A woman near steps of Loggia attempts to kiss hem of LOR.'s
+  garment.]
+                            Would you but con
+  With me the old philosophers of Hellas,
+  Her fervent bards and calm historians,
+  You would arise and say 'We will not hear
+  Another word against them!'
+  [The crowd already says this, repeatedly, with great emphasis.]
+                               Take the Dialogues
+  Of Plato, for example.  You will find
+  A spirit far more truly Christian
+  In them than in the ravings of the sour-soul'd
+  Savonarola.
+  [Prolonged cries of 'Death to the Sour-Souled Savonarola!'  Several
+  cobblers detach themselves from the crowd and rush away to read the
+  Platonic Dialogues.  Enter SAVONAROLA.  The crowd, as he makes his way
+  through it, gives up all further control of its feelings, and makes a
+  noise for which even the best zoologists might not find a good
+  comparison.  The staves and bill-hooks wave like twigs in a storm.
+  One would say that SAV. must have died a thousand deaths already.  He
+  is, however, unharmed and unruffled as he reaches the upper step of
+  the Loggia.  LOR. meanwhile has rejoined COS. in the Piazza.]
+
+  SAV.
+              Pax vobiscum, brothers!
+  [This does but exacerbate the crowd's frenzy.]
+
+  VOICE OF A COBBLER
+  Hear his false lips cry Peace when there is no
+  Peace!
+
+  SAV.
+          Are not you ashamed, O Florentines,
+  [Renewed yells, but also some symptoms of manly shame.]
+  That hearken'd to Lorenzo and now reel
+  Inebriate with the exuberance
+  Of his verbosity?
+  [The crowd makes an obvious effort to pull itself together.]
+                     A man can fool
+  Some of the people all the time, and can
+  Fool all the people sometimes, but he cannot
+  Fool ALL the people ALL the time.
+  [Loud cheers.  Several cobblers clap one another on the back.  Cries
+  of 'Death to Lorenzo!'  The meeting is now well in hand.]
+                                     To-day
+  I must adopt a somewhat novel course
+  In dealing with the awful wickedness
+  At present noticeable in this city.
+  I do so with reluctance.  Hitherto
+  I have avoided personalities.
+  But now my sense of duty forces me
+  To a departure from my custom of
+  Naming no names.  One name I must and shall
+  Name.
+  [All eyes are turned on LOR., who smiles uncomfortably.]
+         No, I do not mean Lorenzo.  He
+  Is 'neath contempt.
+  [Loud and prolonged laughter, accompanied with hideous grimaces at LOR.
+  Exeunt LOR. and COS.]
+                       I name a woman's name,
+  [The women in the crowd eye one another suspiciously.]
+  A name known to you all--four-syllabled,
+  Beginning with an L.
+  [Pause.  Enter hurriedly LUC., carrying the ring.  She stands,
+  unobserved by any one, on outskirt of crowd.  SAV. utters the name:]
+                        Lucrezia!
+
+  LUC. [With equal intensity.]
+  Savonarola!
+  [SAV. starts violently and stares in direction of her voice.]
+               Yes, I come, I come!
+  [Forces her way to steps of Loggia.  The crowd is much bewildered, and
+  the cries of 'Death to Lucrezia Borgia!' are few and sporadic.]
+  Why didst thou call me?
+  [SAV. looks somewhat embarrassed.]
+                           What is thy distress?
+  I see it all!  The sanguinary mob
+  Clusters to rend thee!  As the antler'd stag,
+  With fine eyes glazed from the too-long chase,
+  Turns to defy the foam-fleck'd pack, and thinks,
+  In his last moment, of some graceful hind
+  Seen once afar upon a mountain-top,
+  E'en so, Savonarola, didst thou think,
+  In thy most dire extremity, of me.
+  And here I am!  Courage!  The horrid hounds
+  Droop tail at sight of me and fawn away
+  Innocuous.
+  [The crowd does indeed seem to have fallen completely under the sway
+  of LUC.'s magnetism, and is evidently convinced that it had been about
+  to make an end of the monk.]
+              Take thou, and wear henceforth,
+  As a sure talisman 'gainst future perils,
+  This little, little ring.
+  [SAV. makes awkward gesture of refusal.  Angry murmurs from the crowd.
+  Cries of 'Take thou the ring!' 'Churl!' 'Put it on!' etc.
+  Enter the Borgias' FOOL and stands unnoticed on fringe of crowd.]
+                             I hoped you 'ld like it--
+  Neat but not gaudy.  Is my taste at fault?
+  I'd so look'd forward to--
+ [Sob.] No, I'm not crying,
+  But just a little hurt.
+  [Hardly a dry eye in the crowd.  Also swayings and snarlings
+  indicative that SAV.'s life is again not worth a moment's purchase.
+  SAV. makes awkward gesture of acceptance, but just as he is about to
+  put ring on finger, the FOOL touches his lute and sings:--]
+
+  Wear not the ring,
+  It hath an unkind sting,
+      Ding, dong, ding.
+  Bide a minute,
+  There's poison in it,
+    Poison in it,
+      Ding-a-dong, dong, ding.
+
+  LUC.
+                           The fellow lies.
+  [The crowd is torn with conflicting opinions.  Mingled cries of  'Wear
+  not the ring!' 'The fellow lies!'  'Bide a minute!'  'Death to the
+  Fool!'  'Silence for the Fool!'  'Ding-a-dong, dong, ding!' etc.]
+
+  FOOL [Sings.]
+  Wear not the ring,
+  For Death's a robber-king,
+      Ding, [etc.]
+  There's no trinket
+  Is what you think it,
+    What you think it,
+      Ding-a-dong, [etc.]
+
+  [SAV. throws ring in LUC.'s face.  Enter POPE JULIUS II, with Papal
+  army.]
+  POPE
+  Arrest that man and woman!
+  [Re-enter Guelfs and Ghibellines fighting.  SAV. and LUC. are arrested
+  by Papal officers.  Enter MICHAEL ANGELO.  ANDREA DEL SARTO appears for a
+  moment at a window.  PIPPA passes.  Brothers of the Misericordia go by,
+  singing a Requiem for Francesca da Rimini.  Enter BOCCACCIO, BENVENUTO
+  CELLINI, and many others, making remarks highly characteristic of
+  themselves but scarcely audible through the terrific thunderstorm
+  which now bursts over Florence and is at its loudest and darkest
+  crisis as the Curtain falls.]
+
+
+  ACT IV
+
+  TIME: Three hours later.
+  SCENE:    A Dungeon on the ground-floor of the Palazzo Civico.
+
+  The stage is bisected from top to bottom by a wall, on one side of
+  which is seen the interior of LUCREZIA'S cell, on the other that of
+  SAVONAROLA'S.
+
+  Neither he nor she knows that the other is in the next cell.  The
+  audience, however, knows this.
+
+  Each cell (because of the width and height of the proscenium) is of
+  more than the average Florentine size, but is bare even to the point
+  of severity, its sole amenities being some straw, a hunk of bread, and
+  a stone pitcher.  The door of each is facing the audience.  Dimish
+  light.
+
+  LUCREZIA wears long and clanking chains on her wrists, as does also
+  SAVONAROLA.  Imprisonment has left its mark on both of them.  SAVONAROLA'S
+  hair has turned white.  His whole aspect is that of a very old, old
+  man.  LUCREZIA looks no older than before, but has gone mad.
+
+  SAV.
+  Alas, how long ago this morning seems
+  This evening!  A thousand thousand eons
+  Are scarce the measure of the gulf betwixt
+  My then and now.  Methinks I must have been
+  Here since the dim creation of the world
+  And never in that interval have seen
+  The tremulous hawthorn burgeon in the brake,
+  Nor heard the hum o' bees, nor woven chains
+  Of buttercups on Mount Fiesole
+  What time the sap lept in the cypresses,
+  Imbuing with the friskfulness of Spring
+  Those melancholy trees.  I do forget
+  The aspect of the sun.  Yet I was born
+  A freeman, and the Saints of Heaven smiled
+  Down on my crib.  What would my sire have said,
+  And what my dam, had anybody told them
+  The time would come when I should occupy
+  A felon's cell?  O the disgrace of it
+  The scandal, the incredible come-down!
+  It masters me.  I see i' my mind's eye
+  The public prints--'Sharp Sentence on a Monk.'
+  What then?  I thought I was of sterner stuff
+  Than is affrighted by what people think.
+  Yet thought I so because 'twas thought of me,
+  And so 'twas thought of me because I had
+  A hawk-like profile and a baleful eye.
+  Lo!  my soul's chin recedes, soft to the touch
+  As half-churn'd butter.  Seeming hawk is dove,
+  And dove's a gaol-bird now.  Fie out upon 't!
+
+  LUC.
+  How comes it?  I am Empress Dowager
+  Of China--yet was never crown'd.  This must
+  Be seen to.
+  [Quickly gathers some straw and weaves a crown, which she puts on.]
+
+  SAV.
+               O, what a degringolade!
+  The great career I had mapp'd out for me--
+  Nipp'd i' the bud.  What life, when I come out,
+  Awaits me?  Why, the very Novices
+  And callow Postulants will draw aside
+  As I pass by, and say 'That man hath done
+  Time!'  And yet shall I wince?  The worst of Time
+  Is not in having done it, but in doing 't.
+
+  LUC.
+  Ha, ha, ha, ha!  Eleven billion pig-tails
+  Do tremble at my nod imperial,--
+  The which is as it should be.
+
+  SAV.
+                                 I have heard
+  That gaolers oft are willing to carouse
+  With them they watch o'er, and do sink at last
+  Into a drunken sleep, and then's the time
+  To snatch the keys and make a bid for freedom.
+  Gaoler!  Ho, Gaoler!
+  [Sounds of lock being turned and bolts withdrawn.  Enter the Borgias'
+  FOOL, in plain clothes, carrying bunch of keys.]
+                        I have seen thy face
+  Before.
+
+  FOOL
+           I saved thy life this afternoon, Sir.
+
+  SAV.
+  Thou art the Borgias' Fool?
+
+  FOOL
+                               Say rather, was.
+  Unfortunately I have been discharg'd
+  For my betrayal of Lucrezia,
+  So that I have to speak like other men--
+  Decasyllabically, and with sense.
+  An hour ago the gaoler of this dungeon
+  Died of an apoplexy.  Hearing which,
+  I ask'd for and obtain'd his billet.
+
+  SAV.
+                                        Fetch
+  A stoup o' liquor for thyself and me.
+  [Exit GAOLER.]
+  Freedom!  there's nothing that thy votaries
+  Grudge in the cause of thee.  That decent man
+  Is doom'd by me to lose his place again
+  To-morrow morning when he wakes from out
+  His hoggish slumber.  Yet I care not.
+  [Re-enter GAOLER with a leathern bottle and two glasses.]
+                                         Ho!
+  This is the stuff to warm our vitals, this
+  The panacea for all mortal ills
+  And sure elixir of eternal youth.
+  Drink, bonniman!
+  [GAOLER drains a glass and shows signs of instant intoxication.  SAV.
+  claps him on shoulder and replenishes glass.  GAOLER drinks again, lies
+  down on floor, and snores.  SAV. snatches the bunch of keys, laughs
+  long but silently, and creeps out on tip-toe, leaving door ajar.
+  LUC. meanwhile has lain down on the straw in her cell, and fallen
+  asleep.
+  Noise of bolts being shot back, jangling of keys, grating of lock, and
+  the door of LUC.'S cell flies open.  SAV. takes two steps across the
+  threshold, his arms outstretched and his upturned face transfigured
+  with a great joy.]
+                     How sweet the open air
+  Leaps to my nostrils!  O the good brown earth
+  That yields once more to my elastic tread
+  And laves these feet with its remember'd dew!
+  [Takes a few more steps, still looking upwards.]
+  Free!--I am free!  O naked arc of heaven,
+  Enspangled with innumerable--no,
+  Stars are not there.  Yet neither are there clouds!
+  The thing looks like a ceiling! [Gazes downward.] And this thing
+  Looks like a floor. [Gazes around.] And that white bundle yonder
+  Looks curiously like Lucrezia.
+  [LUC. awakes at sound of her name, and sits up sane.]
+  There must be some mistake.
+
+  LUC. [Rises to her feet.]
+                               There is indeed!
+  A pretty sort of prison I have come to,
+  In which a self-respecting lady's cell
+  Is treated as a lounge!
+
+  SAV.
+                           I had no notion
+  You were in here.  I thought I was out there.
+  I will explain--but first I'll make amends.
+  Here are the keys by which your durance ends.
+  The gate is somewhere in this corridor,
+  And so good-bye to this interior!
+  [Exeunt SAV. and LUC.  Noise, a moment later, of a key grating in a
+  lock, then of gate creaking on its hinges; triumphant laughs of
+  fugitives; loud slamming of gate behind them.
+  In SAV.'s cell the GAOLER starts in his sleep, turns his face to the
+  wall, and snores more than ever deeply.  Through open door comes a
+  cloaked figure.]
+
+  CLOAKED FIGURE
+  Sleep on, Savonarola, and awake
+  Not in this dungeon but in ruby Hell!
+  [Stabs Gaoler, whose snores cease abruptly. Enter POPE JULIUS II, with
+  Papal retinue carrying torches.  MURDERER steps quickly back into
+  shadow.]
+
+  POPE [To body of GAOLER.]
+  Savonarola, I am come to taunt
+  Thee in thy misery and dire abjection.
+  Rise, Sir, and hear me out.
+
+  MURD. [Steps forward.]
+                               Great Julius,
+  Waste not thy breath.  Savonarola's dead.
+  I murder'd him.
+
+  POPE
+                   Thou hadst no right to do so.
+  Who art thou, pray?
+
+  MURD.
+                       Cesare Borgia,
+  Lucrezia's brother, and I claim a brother's
+  Right to assassinate whatever man
+  Shall wantonly and in cold blood reject
+  Her timid offer of a poison'd ring.
+
+  POPE
+  Of this anon.
+  [Stands over body of GAOLER.]
+                 Our present business
+  Is general woe.  No nobler corse hath ever
+  Impress'd the ground.  O let the trumpets speak it!
+  [Flourish of trumpets.]
+  This was the noblest of the Florentines.
+  His character was flawless, and the world
+  Held not his parallel.  O bear him hence
+  With all such honours as our State can offer.
+  He shall interred be with noise of cannon,
+  As doth befit so militant a nature.
+  Prepare these obsequies.
+  [Papal officers lift body of GAOLER.]
+
+  A PAPAL OFFICER
+                            But this is not
+  Savonarola.  It is some one else.
+
+  CESARE
+  Lo!  'tis none other than the Fool that I
+  Hoof'd from my household but two hours agone.
+  I deem'd him no good riddance, for he had
+  The knack of setting tables on a roar.
+  What shadows we pursue!  Good night, sweet Fool,
+  And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
+
+  POPE
+  Interred shall he be with signal pomp.
+  No honour is too great that we can pay him.
+  He leaves the world a vacuum.  Meanwhile,
+  Go we in chase of the accursed villain
+  That hath made escapado from this cell.
+  To horse!  Away!  We'll scour the country round
+  For Sav'narola till we hold him bound.
+  Then shall you see a cinder, not a man,
+  Beneath the lightnings of the Vatican!
+  [Flourish, alarums and excursions, flashes of Vatican lightning, roll
+  of drums, etc.  Through open door of cell is led in a large milk-white
+  horse, which the POPE mounts as the Curtain falls.]
+
+
+Remember, please, before you formulate your impressions, that saying
+of Brown's: 'The thing must be judged as a whole.' I like to think that
+whatever may seem amiss to us in these Four Acts of his would have been
+righted by collation with that Fifth which he did not live to achieve.
+
+I like, too, to measure with my eyes the yawning gulf between stage and
+study. Very different from the message of cold print to our imagination
+are the messages of flesh and blood across footlights to our eyes and
+ears. In the warmth and brightness of a crowded theatre 'Savonarola'
+might, for aught one knows, seem perfect. 'Then why,' I hear my gentle
+readers asking, 'did you thrust the play on US, and not on a theatrical
+manager?'
+
+That question has a false assumption in it. In the course of the past
+eight years I have thrust 'Savonarola' on any number of theatrical
+managers. They have all of them been (to use the technical phrase) 'very
+kind.' All have seen great merits in the work; and if I added
+together all the various merits thus seen I should have no doubt that
+'Savonarola' was the best play never produced. The point on which all
+the managers are unanimous is that they have no use for a play without
+an ending. This is why I have fallen back, at last, on gentle readers,
+whom now I hear asking why I did not, as Brown's literary executor, try
+to finish the play myself. Can they never ask a question without a false
+assumption in it? I did try, hard, to finish 'Savonarola.'
+
+Artistically, of course, the making of such an attempt was indefensible.
+Humanly, not so. It is clear throughout the play--especially perhaps in
+Acts III and IV--that if Brown had not steadfastly in his mind the hope
+of production on the stage, he had nothing in his mind at all. Horrified
+though he would have been by the idea of letting me kill his Monk,
+he would rather have done even this than doom his play to everlasting
+unactedness. I took, therefore, my courage in both hands, and made out a
+scenario....
+
+Dawn on summit of Mount Fiesole. Outspread view of Florence (Duomo,
+Giotto's Tower, etc.) as seen from that eminence.--NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI,
+asleep on grass, wakes as sun rises. Deplores his exile from Florence,
+LORENZO'S unappeasable hostility, etc. Wonders if he could not somehow
+secure the POPE'S favour. Very cynical. Breaks off: But who are these
+that scale the mountain-side? | Savonarola and Lucrezia | Borgia!--Enter
+through a trap-door, back c. [trap-door veiled from audience by a
+grassy ridge], SAV. and LUC. Both gasping and footsore from their climb.
+[Still, with chains on their wrists? or not?]--MACH. steps unobserved
+behind a cypress and listens.--SAV. has a speech to the rising sun--Th'
+effulgent hope that westers from the east | Daily. Says that his hope,
+on the contrary, lies in escape To that which easters not from out
+the west, | That fix'd abode of freedom which men call | America! Very
+bitter against POPE.--LUC. says that she, for her part, means To start
+afresh in that uncharted land | Which austers not from out the antipod,
+| Australia!--Exit MACH., unobserved, down trap-door behind ridge, to
+betray LUC. and SAV.--Several longish speeches by SAV. and LUC. Time is
+thus given for MACH. to get into touch with POPE, and time for POPE and
+retinue to reach the slope of Fiesole. SAV., glancing down across ridge,
+sees these sleuth-hounds, points them out to LUC. and cries Bewray'd!
+LUC. By whom? SAV. I know not, but suspect | The hand of that sleek
+serpent Niccolo | Machiavelli.--SAV. and LUC. rush down c., but find
+their way barred by the footlights.--LUC. We will not be ta'en Alive.
+And here availeth us my lore | In what pertains to poison. Yonder herb
+| [points to a herb growing down r.] Is deadly nightshade. Quick,
+Monk! Pluck we it!--SAV. and LUC. die just as POPE appears over ridge,
+followed by retinue in full cry.--POPE'S annoyance at being foiled
+is quickly swept away on the great wave of Shakespearean chivalry and
+charity that again rises in him. He gives SAV. a funeral oration similar
+to the one meant for him in Act IV, but even more laudatory and more
+stricken. Of LUC., too, he enumerates the virtues, and hints that the
+whole terrestrial globe shall be hollowed to receive her bones. Ends
+by saying: In deference to this our double sorrow | Sun shall not shine
+to-day nor shine to-morrow.--Sun drops quickly back behind eastern
+horizon, leaving a great darkness on which the Curtain slowly falls.
+
+
+All this might be worse, yes. The skeleton passes muster. But in the
+attempt to incarnate and ensanguine it I failed wretchedly. I saw that
+Brown was, in comparison with me, a master. Thinking I might possibly
+fare better in his method of work than in my own, I threw the skeleton
+into a cupboard, sat down, and waited to see what Savonarola and those
+others would do.
+
+They did absolutely nothing. I sat watching them, pen in hand, ready to
+record their slightest movement. Not a little finger did they raise.
+Yet I knew they must be alive. Brown had always told me they were quite
+independent of him. Absurd to suppose that by the accident of his
+own death they had ceased to breathe.... Now and then, overcome with
+weariness, I dozed at my desk, and whenever I woke I felt that these
+rigid creatures had been doing all sorts of wonderful things while my
+eyes were shut. I felt that they disliked me. I came to dislike them in
+return, and forbade them my room.
+
+Some of you, my readers, might have better luck with them than I. Invite
+them, propitiate them, watch them! The writer of the best Fifth Act sent
+to me shall have his work tacked on to Brown's; and I suppose I could
+get him a free pass for the second night.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Seven Men, by Max Beerbohm
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