The Time Traveler's Almanac (90 page)

“Yes, but he said—”

“No, that’s fine,” Manoir interrupted. “I’m a bit too old to be a cousin.”

“And we’ll play, right? Like you said. I cleaned my room just so we could.”

“Leave Jean-Pierre alone. Here, have some quince cheese. You, too, Jean-Pierre. Help yourself.”

Man and boy started in. The pieces were a bit sticky. Jean-Jacques licked his fingers. Manoir hesitated, then, giving him a complicit glance, did the same.

“Maman?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Am I going back to school today?”

“Well … not this morning, at least.”

“Not this afternoon, either!”

“We’ll see. I’ll see. Oh, the tea’s ready.” Jeanne had taken out two bowls. Jean-Jacques didn’t much like herbal tea, and he’d just had breakfast. It didn’t stop him from digging into the quince paste. For his part, Manoir was dying to have seconds but didn’t dare.

“Help yourself, Jean-Pierre! Really!”

“With pleasure. It’s delicious.” He took a broken piece from the plate.

*   *   *

“Hey, are you coming back?”

They were in Jean-Jacques’ room. Jeanne was working below. Jean-Jacques was lying on the linoleum near his toy chest. Manoir set down the little tin airplane he’d been studying.

“Of course, if your mother wants me to.”

“She does, I know she does!”

“And why is that?”

“Because you’re family. When you’ve got family, you visit, right?”

“I suppose so. I don’t really know. I don’t have any – except you two.”

“Just like us – all we have is you.”

Manoir leaned over the chest, and reached for a box of cubes. “But sometimes you live too far away to visit often.”

“Do you live far away? In the free zone?”

“That’s right. In the free zone.”

“So we won’t be able to see each other.”

Manoir had opened the box of cubes. He’d already found three faces that represented parts of a single picture. A rodeo scene, no doubt.

“I’m moving.”

“Really? Neat! So we’ll see each other often, then? We could go boating. Maman won’t take me. But you will, right?”

“We’ll go everywhere! The circus, and the zoo, and the Ferris wheel at the fair.”

“The Ferris wheel! It makes me scared to look around even when we haven’t left the ground yet!”

“You won’t be scared with me, right?”

“No! Definitely not!”

Suddenly the sirens screamed. Man and boy froze.

“Hear that? It’s the bomb warning!”

Manoir checked his watch and nodded. Jeanne’s urgent voice reached them from below.

“Jean-Jacques! Jean-Pierre! The sirens!”

“Come.”

On the threshold, before closing the door, Manoir took one last look at his childhood room. The red eiderdown on the bed, the white mouse nibbling at the bars of its cage, the plaster coin bank in the shape of a dog on the dresser, the Kipling poem in its gilded pitchpine frame. Good-bye, good-bye forever this time.

They went down. Jeanne was waiting for them at the foot of the stairs. She wasn’t alone. The neighbor stood next to her. Curiosity had brought her over, and the sirens surprised her on the front step.

“Hurry up! Didn’t you hear the warning!”

“Yes, but it’s not for us. I bet they’re going to bomb the station.”

“We’re just next door! Come over, my cellar’s deeper underground, and my husband did a good job shoring it up.”

“We don’t have time,” Manoir cut in. “Listen – they’ve started!”

The engines’ roar had grown louder. In a few moments, the squadron would pass right over the town. Muffled explosions broke out.

“It’s the AA guns,” Jean-Jacques shouted. “Blam! Blam! Vrrr! Vrrr! Blammm!”

“Hurry, downstairs!”

Jeanne grabbed the boy. She opened the cellar door and headed down the steps. Manoir stepped aside to let the neighbor by.

*   *   *

Jeanne lit a small lamp. They were seated on old crates. The ground trembled without stopping. With each detonation, shockwaves shook the walls. In a corner of the cellar, empty bottles clinked.

“They’re bombing the station. We have nothing to fear.”

“If you say so!” The neighbor was missing her reinforced shelter and her sandbags. Jeanne was quiet. After a momentary brush with fear, Jean-Jacques had regained confidence before “Uncle Jean-Pierre’s” demeanor. Manoir smiled. He felt great peace within. Events once gone astray were about to resume their rightful course.

Above, a bomber had been hit. It veered, losing altitude. To lighten the load, the pilot ordered all bombs to be dropped. For a moment, the bombs rocked in the air as though uncertain, then the wind on their fins stabilized them. They were falling straight down now, with a whistling that grew ever higher in pitch. The first ripped the street open two hundred yards from the house. The second crushed a gas truck at the corner of the street. In the cellar, the neighbor, the bearer of bad news, opened her mouth to cry out. Jean-Jacques pressed himself against Jeanne, his face buried in her breast. Manoir rose, threw himself upon them, and held them.

ENOCH SOAMES: A MEMORY OF THE EIGHTEEN-NINETIES

Max Beerbohm

Max Beerbohm’s full name was Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm, once he accepted the knighthood from King George VI in 1939. An English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist, his first short story was published in 1897 (“The Happy Hypocrite”), and his novel
Zuleika Dobson
was published in 1911, although most of his written works were nonfiction. “Enoch Soames” plays with time travel via a deal with the Devil. It was first published in 1916 in
Century Magazine.

When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for Soames, Enoch. It was as I feared: he was not there. But everybody else was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or remembered but faintly, lived again for me, they and their work, in Mr. Holbrook Jackson’s pages. The book was as thorough as it was brilliantly written. And thus the omission found by me was an all the deadlier record of poor Soames’s failure to impress himself on his decade.

I dare say I am the only person who noticed the omission. Soames had failed so piteously as all that! Nor is there a counterpoise in the thought that if he had had some measure of success he might have passed, like those others, out of my mind, to return only at the historian’s beck. It is true that had his gifts, such as they were, been acknowledged in his lifetime, he would never have made the bargain I saw him make – that strange bargain whose results have kept him always in the foreground of my memory. But it is from those very results that the full piteousness of him glares out.

Not my compassion, however, impels me to write of him. For his sake, poor fellow, I should be inclined to keep my pen out of the ink. It is ill to deride the dead. And how can I write about Enoch Soames without making him ridiculous? Or, rather, how am I to hush up the horrid fact that he WAS ridiculous? I shall not be able to do that. Yet, sooner or later, write about him I must. You will see in due course that I have no option. And I may as well get the thing done now.

In the summer term of ’93 a bolt from the blue flashed down on Oxford. It drove deep; it hurtlingly embedded itself in the soil. Dons and undergraduates stood around, rather pale, discussing nothing but it.

Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. Its name? Will Rothenstein. Its aim? To do a series of twenty-four portraits in lithograph. These were to be published from the Bodley Head, London.

The matter was urgent. Already the warden of A, and the master of B, and the Regius Professor of C had meekly “sat.” Dignified and doddering old men who had never consented to sit to anyone could not withstand this dynamic little stranger. He did not sue; he invited: he did not invite; he commanded. He was twenty-one years old. He wore spectacles that flashed more than any other pair ever seen. He was a wit. He was brimful of ideas. He knew Whistler. He knew Daudet and the Goncourts. He knew everyone in Paris. He knew them all by heart. He was Paris in Oxford. It was whispered that, so soon as he had polished off his selection of dons, he was going to include a few undergraduates. It was a proud day for me when I – I was included. I liked Rothenstein not less than I feared him; and there arose between us a friendship that has grown ever warmer, and been more and more valued by me, with every passing year.

*   *   *

At the end of term he settled in, or, rather, meteoritically into, London. It was to him I owed my first knowledge of that forever-enchanting little world-in-itself, Chelsea, and my first acquaintance with Walter Sickert and other August elders who dwelt there. It was Rothenstein that took me to see, in Cambridge Street, Pimlico, a young man whose drawings were already famous among the few – Aubrey Beardsley by name. With Rothenstein I paid my first visit to the Bodley Head. By him I was inducted into another haunt of intellect and daring, the domino-room of the Cafe Royal.

There, on that October evening – there, in that exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those opposing mirrors and upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the painted and pagan ceiling, and with the hum of presumably cynical conversation broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of dominoes shuffled on marble tables, I drew a deep breath and, “This indeed,” said I to myself, “is life!” (Forgive me that theory. Remember the waging of even the South African War was not yet.)

It was the hour before dinner. We drank vermuth. Those who knew Rothenstein were pointing him out to those who knew him only by name. Men were constantly coming in through the swing-doors and wandering slowly up and down in search of vacant tables or of tables occupied by friends. One of these rovers interested me because I was sure he wanted to catch Rothenstein’s eye. He had twice passed our table, with a hesitating look; but Rothenstein, in the thick of a disquisition on Puvis de Chavannes, had not seen him. He was a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair. He had a thin, vague beard, or, rather, he had a chin on which a large number of hairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its retreat. He was an odd-looking person; but in the nineties odd apparitions were more frequent, I think, than they are now. The young writers of that era – and I was sure this man was a writer – strove earnestly to be distinct in aspect. This man had striven unsuccessfully. He wore a soft black hat of clerical kind, but of Bohemian intention, and a gray waterproof cape which, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed to be romantic. I decided that “dim” was the mot juste for him. I had already essayed to write, and was immensely keen on the mot juste, that Holy Grail of the period.

The dim man was now again approaching our table, and this time he made up his mind to pause in front of it.

“You don’t remember me,” he said in a toneless voice.

Rothenstein brightly focused him.

“Yes, I do,” he replied after a moment, with pride rather than effusion – pride in a retentive memory. “Edwin Soames.”

“Enoch Soames,” said Enoch.

“Enoch Soames,” repeated Rothenstein in a tone implying that it was enough to have hit on the surname. “We met in Paris a few times when you were living there. We met at the Cafe Groche.”

“And I came to your studio once.”

“Oh, yes; I was sorry I was out.”

“But you were in. You showed me some of your paintings, you know. I hear you’re in Chelsea now.”

“Yes.”

I almost wondered that Mr. Soames did not, after this monosyllable, pass along. He stood patiently there, rather like a dumb animal, rather like a donkey looking over a gate. A sad figure, his. It occurred to me that “hungry” was perhaps the mot juste for him; but – hungry for what? He looked as if he had little appetite for anything. I was sorry for him; and Rothenstein, though he had not invited him to Chelsea, did ask him to sit down and have something to drink.

Seated, he was more self-assertive. He flung back the wings of his cape with a gesture which, had not those wings been waterproof, might have seemed to hurl defiance at things in general. And he ordered an absinthe. “Je me tiens toujours fidele,” he told Rothenstein, “a la sorciere glauque.”

“It is bad for you,” said Rothenstein, dryly.

“Nothing is bad for one,” answered Soames. “Dans ce monde il n’y a ni bien ni mal.”

“Nothing good and nothing bad? How do you mean?”

“I explained it all in the preface to ‘Negations.’”

“‘Negations’?”

“Yes, I gave you a copy of it.”

“Oh, yes, of course. But, did you explain, for instance, that there was no such thing as bad or good grammar?”

“N-no,” said Soames. “Of course in art there is the good and the evil. But in life – no.” He was rolling a cigarette. He had weak, white hands, not well washed, and with finger-tips much stained with nicotine. “In life there are illusions of good and evil, but” – his voice trailed away to a murmur in which the words “vieux jeu” and “rococo” were faintly audible. I think he felt he was not doing himself justice, and feared that Rothenstein was going to point out fallacies. Anyhow, he cleared his throat and said, “Parlons d’autre chose.”

It occurs to you that he was a fool? It didn’t to me. I was young, and had not the clarity of judgment that Rothenstein already had. Soames was quite five or six years older than either of us. Also – he had written a book. It was wonderful to have written a book.

If Rothenstein had not been there, I should have revered Soames. Even as it was, I respected him. And I was very near indeed to reverence when he said he had another book coming out soon. I asked if I might ask what kind of book it was to be.

“My poems,” he answered. Rothenstein asked if this was to be the title of the book. The poet meditated on this suggestion, but said he rather thought of giving the book no title at all. “If a book is good in itself—” he murmured, and waved his cigarette.

Rothenstein objected that absence of title might be bad for the sale of a book.

“If,” he urged, “I went into a bookseller’s and said simply, ‘Have you got?’ or, ‘Have you a copy of?’ how would they know what I wanted?”