f I had regarded myself as a
nobody. But ah! hadn'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 hadn't Henry Harland, as editor,
accepted my essay? And wasn't it to be in the very first number? At
Oxford I was still in statu pupillari. 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 couldn'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 prosaist