Seven Men | Page 9

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