Part 3 (1/2)

”Soames!” I entreated. But my friend moved not a muscle.

The devil had made as though to stretch forth his hand across the table, but he paused in his gesture.

”A hundred years hence, as now,” he smiled, ”no smoking allowed in the reading-room. You would better therefore--”

Soames removed the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it into his gla.s.s of Sauterne.

”Soames!” again I cried. ”Can't you”--but the devil had now stretched forth his hand across the table. He brought it slowly down on the table-cloth. Soames's chair was empty. His cigarette floated sodden in his wine-gla.s.s. There was no other trace of him.

For a few moments the devil let his hand rest where it lay, gazing at me out of the corners of his eyes, vulgarly triumphant.

A shudder shook me. With an effort I controlled myself and rose from my chair. ”Very clever,” I said condescendingly. ”But--'The Time Machine' is a delightful book, don't you think? So entirely original!”

”You are pleased to sneer,” said the devil, who had also risen, ”but it is one thing to write about an impossible machine; it is a quite other thing to be a supernatural power.” All the same, I had scored.

Berthe had come forth at the sound of our rising. I explained to her that Mr. Soames had been called away, and that both he and I would be dining here. It was not until I was out in the open air that I began to feel giddy. I have but the haziest recollection of what I did, where I wandered, in the glaring suns.h.i.+ne of that endless afternoon. I remember the sound of carpenters' hammers all along Piccadilly and the bare chaotic look of the half-erected ”stands.” Was it in the Green Park or in Kensington Gardens or WHERE was it that I sat on a chair beneath a tree, trying to read an evening paper? There was a phrase in the leading article that went on repeating itself in my f.a.gged mind: ”Little is hidden from this August Lady full of the garnered wisdom of sixty years of Sovereignty.” I remember wildly conceiving a letter (to reach Windsor by an express messenger told to await answer): ”Madam: Well knowing that your Majesty is full of the garnered wisdom of sixty years of Sovereignty, I venture to ask your advice in the following delicate matter. Mr. Enoch Soames, whose poems you may or may not know--” Was there NO way of helping him, saving him? A bargain was a bargain, and I was the last man to aid or abet any one in wriggling out of a reasonable obligation. I wouldn't have lifted a little finger to save Faust. But poor Soames! Doomed to pay without respite an eternal price for nothing but a fruitless search and a bitter disillusioning.

Odd and uncanny it seemed to me that he, Soames, in the flesh, in the waterproof cape, was at this moment living in the last decade of the next century, poring over books not yet written, and seeing and seen by men not yet born. Uncannier and odder still that to-night and evermore he would be in h.e.l.l. a.s.suredly, truth was stranger than fiction.

Endless that afternoon was. Almost I wished I had gone with Soames, not, indeed, to stay in the reading-room, but to sally forth for a brisk sight-seeing walk around a new London. I wandered restlessly out of the park I had sat in. Vainly I tried to imagine myself an ardent tourist from the eighteenth century. Intolerable was the strain of the slow-pa.s.sing and empty minutes. Long before seven o'clock I was back at the Vingtieme.

I sat there just where I had sat for luncheon. Air came in listlessly through the open door behind me. Now and again Rose or Berthe appeared for a moment. I had told them I would not order any dinner till Mr.

Soames came. A hurdy-gurdy began to play, abruptly drowning the noise of a quarrel between some Frenchmen farther up the street. Whenever the tune was changed I heard the quarrel still raging. I had bought another evening paper on my way. I unfolded it. My eyes gazed ever away from it to the clock over the kitchen door.

Five minutes now to the hour! I remembered that clocks in restaurants are kept five minutes fast. I concentrated my eyes on the paper. I vowed I would not look away from it again. I held it upright, at its full width, close to my face, so that I had no view of anything but it.

Rather a tremulous sheet? Only because of the draft, I told myself.

My arms gradually became stiff; they ached; but I could not drop them--now. I had a suspicion, I had a certainty. Well, what, then?

What else had I come for? Yet I held tight that barrier of newspaper.

Only the sound of Berthe's brisk footstep from the kitchen enabled me, forced me, to drop it, and to utter:

”What shall we have to eat, Soames?”

”Il est souffrant, ce pauvre Monsieur Soames?” asked Berthe.

”He's only--tired.” I asked her to get some wine--Burgundy--and whatever food might be ready. Soames sat crouched forward against the table exactly as when last I had seen him. It was as though he had never moved--he who had moved so unimaginably far. Once or twice in the afternoon it had for an instant occurred to me that perhaps his journey was not to be fruitless, that perhaps we had all been wrong in our estimate of the works of Enoch Soames. That we had been horribly right was horribly clear from the look of him. But, ”Don't be discouraged,” I falteringly said. ”Perhaps it's only that you--didn't leave enough time. Two, three centuries hence, perhaps--”

”Yes,” his voice came; ”I've thought of that.”

”And now--now for the more immediate future! Where are you going to hide? How would it be if you caught the Paris express from Charing Cross? Almost an hour to spare. Don't go on to Paris. Stop at Calais. Live in Calais. He'd never think of looking for you in Calais.”

”It's like my luck,” he said, ”to spend my last hours on earth with an a.s.s.” But I was not offended. ”And a treacherous a.s.s,” he strangely added, tossing across to me a crumpled bit of paper which he had been holding in his hand. I glanced at the writing on it--some sort of gibberish, apparently. I laid it impatiently aside.

”Come, Soames, pull yourself together! This isn't a mere matter of life or death. It's a question of eternal torment, mind you! You don't mean to say you're going to wait limply here till the devil comes to fetch you.”

”I can't do anything else. I've no choice.”

”Come! This is 'trusting and encouraging' with a vengeance! This is diabolism run mad!” I filled his gla.s.s with wine. ”Surely, now that you've SEEN the brute--”

”It's no good abusing him.”