Seven Men | Page 8

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