Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (97 page)

"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):

M
adam
,—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
Vingtième.