Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (101 page)

"But,"
I
urged,
more
hopeful
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
Vingtième
again. Ever since that
night I have avoided Greek Street altogether. And for years I did not set foot
even in Soho Square, because on that same night it was there that I paced and
loitered, long and long, with some such dull sense of hope as a man has in not
straying far from the place where he has lost something. . . . "Round and
round the shut-ter'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 step-mother" 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 override the present. Poor vanished Soames!

And
for myself, too, I began to be troubled. What had I better do? Would there be a
hue and cry—Mysterious Disappearance of an Author, and all that? He had last
been seen lunching and dining in my company. Hadn't I better get a hansom and
drive straight to Scotland Yard? . . . They would think I was a lunatic. After
all, I reassured myself, London was a very large place, and one very dim figure
might easily drop out of it unobserved—now especially, in the blinding glare of
the near Jubilee. Better say nothing at all, I thought.