His moroseness might have alienated me if I had regarded myself as a nobody. 🔊 But ah! had n'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 had n't Henry Harland, as editor, accepted my essay? 🔊 And was n't it to be in the very first number? 🔊 At Oxford I was still in statu pupillary. 🔊 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 toward 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 could n'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 afterward that he was the son of an unsuccessful and deceased bookseller in Preston, but had inherited an annuity of three hundred 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 frequently, 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 was n't resented. 🔊 It did n'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 do n'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 did n'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. 🔊