brute as to----

Again I examined the screed. 'Immajnari'--but here Soames was, no more
imaginary, alas! than I. And 'labud'--what on earth was that? (To this
day, I have never made out that word.) 'It's all very--baffling,' I at
length stammered.

Soames said nothing, but cruelly did not cease to look at me.

'Are you sure,' I temporised, 'quite sure you copied the thing out
correctly?'

'Quite.'

'Well, then it's this wretched Nupton who must have made--must be going
to make--some idiotic mistake.... Look here, Soames! you know me better
than to suppose that I.... After all, the name "Max Beerbohm" is not at
all an uncommon one, and there must be several Enoch Soameses running
around--or rather, "Enoch Soames" is a name that might occur to any
one writing a story. And I don't write stories: I'm an essayist, an
observer, a recorder.... I admit that it's an extraordinary coincidence.
But you must see----'

'I see the whole thing,' said Soames quietly. And he added, with a touch
of his old manner, but with more dignity than I had ever known in him,
'Parlons d'autre chose.'

I accepted that suggestion very promptly. I returned straight to the
more immediate future. I spent most of the long evening in renewed
appeals to Soames to slip away and seek refuge somewhere. I remember
saying at last that if indeed I was destined to write about him, the
supposed 'stauri' had better have at least a happy ending. Soames
repeated those last three words in a tone of intense scorn. 'In Life and
in Art,' he said, 'all that matters is an INEVITABLE ending.'

'But,' I urged, more hopefully than I felt, 'an ending that can be
avoided ISN'T inevitable.'

'You aren't an artist,' he rasped. 'And you're so hopelessly not an
artist that, so far from being able to imagine a thing and make it seem
true, you're going to make even a true thing seem as if you'd made it
up. You're a miserable bungler. And it's like my luck.'

I protested that the miserable bungler was not I--was not going to be
I--but T. K. Nupton; and we had a rather heated argument, in the thick
of which it suddenly seemed to me that Soames saw he was in the wrong:
he had quite physically cowered. But I wondered why--and now I guessed
with a cold throb just why--he stared so, past me. The bringer of that
'inevitable ending' filled the doorway.

I managed to turn in my chair and to say, not without a semblance of
lightness, 'Aha, come in!' Dread was indeed rather blunt