Seven Men | Page 6

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