Enoch Soames | Page 9

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?" I
asked, with attempted cheerfulness. He said he never went there now.
"No absinthe there," he muttered. It was the sort of thing that in 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's 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 favor 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 each 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 or even to see me. I felt that his
behavior made me ridiculous in the eyes of the other man. The
gangway between the two rows of tables at the Vingtieme was hardly
more than two feet wide (Rose and Berthe, in their ministrations, had
always to edge past each other, quarreling in whispers as they did so),
and any one at the table abreast of yours was virtually at yours. I
thought our neighbor was amused at my failure to interest Soames, and
so, as I could not explain to him that my insistence was merely
charitable, I became silent. Without turning my head, I had him well
within my range of vision. I hoped I looked less vulgar