We are scattered now, the friends of the late
Mr Oliver Offord;
but whenever we chance to meet I think we are conscious of a certain
esoteric respect for each other. ‘Yes, you too have been in
Arcadia,’
we seem not too grumpily to allow. When I pass the house in
Mansfield Street
I remember that Arcadia was there. I don’t know who has it now,
and I don’t want to know; it’s enough to be so sure that
if I should ring the bell there would be no such luck for me as that
Brooksmith
should open the door. Mr Offord, the most agreeable, the most lovable of
bachelors, was a retired diplomatist, living on his pension, confined by his
infirmities to his fireside and delighted to be found there any afternoon in
the year by such visitors as Brooksmith allowed to come up. Brooksmith was his
butler and his most intimate friend, to whom we all stood, or I should say sat,
in the same relation in which the subject of the sovereign finds himself to the
prime minister. By having been for years, in foreign lands, the most delightful
Englishman any one had ever known, Mr Offord had, in my opinion, rendered
signal service to his country. But I suppose he had been too much liked –
liked even by those who didn’t like it – so that as people
of that sort never get
titles or dotations for the horrid things they have not done, his
principal reward was simply that we went to see him.
Oh, we went perpetually, and it was not our fault if
he was not overwhelmed with this particular honour. Any visitor who came once
came again – to come merely once was a slight which nobody, I am sure,
had ever put upon him. His circle, therefore, was essentially composed of
habitués,
who were
habitués
for each other as well as for him, as those of a happy
salon
should be. I remember vividly every element of the place, down to the
intensely Londonish look of the
grey
opposite houses, in the gap of the white curtains of the high windows, and
the exact spot where, on a particular afternoon, I put down my tea-cup for
Brooksmith, lingering an instant, to gather it up as if he were plucking a
flower. Mr Offord’s drawing-room was indeed Brooksmith’s
garden, his pruned and tended human
parterre,
and if we all flourished there and grew well in our places it was largely
owing to his supervision.
Many persons have heard much, though most have doubtless
seen little, of the famous institution of the
salon,
and many are born to the depression of knowing that this finest flower
of social life refuses to bloom where the English tongue is spoken. The
explanation is usually that our women have not the skill to cultivate it
– the art to direct, between suggestive shores, the course of the
stream of talk. My affectionate, my pious memory of Mr Offord
contradicts this induction only, I fear, more insidiously to confirm it.
The very sallow and slightly smoked drawing-room in which he spent so
large a portion of the last years of his life certainly deserved the
distinguished name; but on the other hand it could not be said at all
to owe its stamp to the soft pressure of the
indispensable sex. The dear man had indeed been capable of one of those
sacrifices to which women are deemed peculiarly apt; he had recognised
(under the influence, in some degree, it is true, of physical infirmity),
that if you wished people to find you at home you must manage not to be
out. He had in short accepted the fact which many dabblers in the social
art are slow to learn, that you must really, as they say, take a line and
that the only way to be at home is to stay at home. Finally his own fireside
had become a summary of his habits. Why should he ever have left it? –
since this would have been leaving what was notoriously pleasantest in
London, the compact charmed cluster (thinning away indeed into casual
couples), round the fine old last century chimney-piece which, with the
exception of the remarkable collection of miniatures, was the best thing
the place contained. Mr Offord was not rich; he had nothing but his
pension and the use for life of the somewhat superannuated house.
When I am reminded by some uncomfortable contrast of
to-day how perfectly we were all handled there I ask myself once more what
had been the secret of such perfection. One had taken it for granted at the
time, for anything that is supremely good produces more acceptance than
surprise. I felt we were all happy, but I didn’t consider how our
happiness was managed. And yet there were questions to be asked, questions
that strike me as singularly obvious now that there is nobody to answer them.
Mr Offord had solved the insoluble; he had, without feminine help (save
in the sense that ladies were dying to come to him and he saved the lives of
several), established a
salon;
but I might have guessed that there was a method in his madness – a law
in his success. He had not hit it off by a mere fluke. There
was an art in it all, and how was the art so hidden? Who, indeed, if it came
to that, was the occult artist? Launching this inquiry the other day, I had
already got hold of the tail of my reply. I was helped by the very wonder of
some of the conditions that came back to me – those that used to seem as
natural as sunshine in a fine climate.
How was it, for instance, that we never were a crowd, never
either too many or too few, always the right people with the right
people (there must really have been no wrong people at all), always coming and
going, never sticking fast nor overstaying, yet never popping in or out with an
indecorous familiarity? How was it that we all sat where we wanted and moved
when we wanted and met whom we wanted and escaped whom we wanted; joining,
according to the accident of inclination, the general circle or falling in with
a single talker on a convenient sofa? Why were all the sofas so convenient, the
accidents so happy, the talkers so ready, the listeners so willing, the
subjects presented to you in a rotation as quickly fore-ordained as the courses
at dinner? A dearth of topics would have been as unheard of as a lapse in the
service. These speculations couldn’t fail to lead me to the fundamental
truth that Brooksmith had been somehow at the bottom of the mystery. If he had
not established the
salon
at least he had carried it on. Brooksmith, in short, was the artist!
We felt this, covertly, at the time, without formulating
it, and were conscious, as an ordered and prosperous community, of his
evenhanded justice, untainted with flunkeyism. He had none of that vulgarity
– his touch was infinitely fine. The delicacy of it was clear to me on the
first occasion my eyes rested, as they were so often to rest again, on the
domestic revealed, in the
turbid light of the street, by the opening of the house-door. I saw on the
spot that though he had plenty of school he carried it without arrogance
– he had remained articulate and human.
L’Ecole Anglaise,
Mr Offord used to call him, laughing, when, later, it happened more
than once that we had some conversation about him. But I remember accusing
Mr Offord of not doing him quite ideal justice. That he was not one of
the giants of the school, however, my old friend, who really understood him
perfectly and was devoted to him, as I shall show, quite admitted; which
doubtless poor Brooksmith had himself felt, to his cost, when his value in
the market was originally determined. The utility of his class in general is
estimated by the foot and the inch, and poor Brooksmith had only about five
feet two to put into circulation. He acknowledged the inadequacy of this
provision, and I am sure was penetrated with the everlasting fitness of the
relation between service and stature. If he had been Mr Offord he
certainly would have found Brooksmith wanting, and indeed the laxity of his
employer on this score was one of many things which he had had to condone and
to which he had at last indulgently adapted himself.
I remember the old man’s saying to me: “Oh, my
servants, if they can live with me a fortnight they can live with me for ever.
But it’s the first fortnight that tries ’em.” It was in the
first fortnight, for instance, that Brooksmith had had to learn that he was
exposed to being addressed as ‘my dear fellow’ and ‘my poor
child’. Strange and deep must such a probation have been to him, and he
doubtless emerged from it tempered and purified. This was written to a certain
extent in his appearance; in his spare, brisk little person, in his cloistered
white face and extraordinarily polished hair,
which told of responsibility, looked as if it were kept up to the same high
standard as the plate; in his small, clear, anxious eyes, even in the
permitted, though not exactly encouraged tuft on his chin. “He thinks
me rather mad, but I’ve broken him in, and now he likes the place, he
likes the company,” said the old man. I embraced this fully after I had
become aware that Brooksmith’s main characteristic was a deep and shy
refinement, though I remember I was rather puzzled when, on another occasion,
Mr Offord remarked: “What he likes is the talk – mingling in
the conversation.” I was conscious that I had never seen Brooksmith
permit himself this freedom, but I guessed in a moment that what Mr Offord
alluded to was a participation more intense than any speech could have
represented – that of being perpetually present on a hundred legitimate
pretexts, errands, necessities, and breathing the very atmosphere of criticism,
the famous criticism of life. “Quite an education, sir, isn’t it,
sir?” he said to me one day at the foot of the stairs, when he was letting
me out; and I have always remembered the words and the tone as the first sign
of the quickening drama of poor Brooksmith’s fate. It was indeed an
education, but to what was this sensitive young man of thirty-five, of the
servile class, being educated?
Practically and inevitably, for the time, to companionship,
to the perpetual, the even exaggerated reference and appeal of a person brought
to dependence by his time of life and his infirmities and always addicted
moreover (this was the exaggeration) to the art of giving you pleasure by
letting you do things for him. There were certain things Mr Offord was
capable of pretending he liked you to do, even when he didn’t, if he
thought you liked them. If it happened that you didn’t either
(this
was rare, but it might be), of course there were cross-purposes; but
Brooksmith was there to prevent their going very far. This was precisely the
way he acted as moderator: he averted misunderstandings or cleared them up. He
had been capable, strange as it may appear, of acquiring for this purpose an
insight into the French tongue, which was often used at Mr Offord’s;
for besides being habitual to most of the foreigners, and they were many, who
haunted the place or arrived with letters (letters often requiring a little
worried consideration, of which Brooksmith always had cognisance), it had
really become the primary language of the master of the house. I don’t
know if all the
malentendus
were in French, but almost all the explanations were, and this didn’t
a bit prevent Brooksmith from following them. I know Mr Offord used to
read passages to him from
Montaigne
and
Saint-Simon,
for he read perpetually when he was alone – when they were alone, I
should say – and Brooksmith was always about. Perhaps you’ll
say no wonder Mr Offord’s butler regarded him as ‘rather
mad’. However, if I’m not sure what he thought about Montaigne
I’m convinced he admired Saint-Simon. A certain feeling for letters
must have rubbed off on him from the mere handling of his master’s
books, which he was always carrying to and fro and putting back in their
places.
I often noticed that if an anecdote or a quotation, much
more a lively discussion, was going forward, he would, if busy with the fire or
the curtains, the lamp or the tea, find a pretext for remaining in the room
till the point should be reached. If his purpose was to catch it you were not
discreet to call him off, and I shall never forget the look, a hard, stony
stare (I caught it in its passage), which, one day when there were a good many
people in the room, he fastened upon the footman who was helping him in
the service and who, in an undertone, had asked him some irrelevant question.
It was the only manifestation of harshness that I ever observed on
Brooksmith’s part, and at first I wondered what was the matter. Then I
became conscious that Mr Offord was relating a very curious anecdote,
never before perhaps made so public, and imparted to the narrator by an
eye-witness of the fact, bearing upon
Lord Byron’s
life in Italy. Nothing would induce me to reproduce it here; but Brooksmith
had been in danger of losing it. If I ever should venture to reproduce it I
shall feel how much I lose in not having my fellow-auditor to refer to.
The first day Mr Offord’s door was closed was
therefore a dark date in contemporary history. It was raining hard and my
umbrella was wet, but Brooksmith took it from me exactly as if this were a
preliminary for going upstairs. I observed however that instead of putting it
away he held it poised and trickling over the rug, and then I became aware that
he was looking at me with deep, acknowledging eyes – his air of universal
responsibility. I immediately understood; there was scarcely need of the
question and the answer that passed between us. When I did understand that the
old man had given up, for the first time, though only for the occasion, I
exclaimed dolefully: “What a difference it will make – and to how
many people!”
“I shall be one of them, sir!” said Brooksmith;
and that was the beginning of the end.
Mr Offord came down again, but the spell was broken,
and the great sign of it was that the conversation was, for the first time, not
directed. It wandered and stumbled, a little frightened, like a lost child
– it had let go
the nurse’s hand. “The worst of it is that now we shall talk about
my health –
c’est la fin du tout,”
Mr Offord said, when he reappeared; and then I recognised what a sign of
change that would be – for he had never tolerated anything so provincial.
The talk became ours, in a word – not his; and as ours, even when
he talked, it could only be inferior. In this form it was a distress
to Brooksmith, whose attention now wandered from it altogether: he had so much
closer a vision of his master’s intimate conditions than our
superficialities represented. There were better hours, and he was more in and
out of the room, but I could see that he was conscious that the great
institution was falling to pieces. He seemed to wish to take counsel with me
about it, to feel responsible for its going on in some form or other. When for
the second period – the first had lasted several days – he had to
tell me that our old friend didn’t receive, I half expected to hear him
say after a moment: “Do you think I ought to, sir, in his place?”
– as he might have asked me, with the return of autumn, if I thought he
had better light the drawing-room fire.
He had a resigned philosophic sense of what his guests –
our guests, as I came to regard them in our colloquies – would expect. His
feeling was that he wouldn’t absolutely have approved of himself as a
substitute for the host; but he was so saturated with the religion of habit
that he would have made, for our friends, the necessary sacrifice to the
divinity. He would take them on a little further, till they could look about
them. I think I saw him also mentally confronted with the opportunity to deal
– for once in his life – with some of his own dumb preferences, his
limitations of sympathy, weeding a little, in prospect, and returning
to a purer tradition. It was not unknown to me that he considered that toward
the end of Mr Offord’s career a certain laxity of selection had crept
in.
At last it came to be the case that we all found the closed
door more often than the open one; but even when it was closed Brooksmith
managed a crack for me to squeeze through; so that practically I never turned
away without having paid a visit. The difference simply came to be that the
visit was to Brooksmith. It took place in the hall, at the familiar foot of the
stairs, and we didn’t sit down – at least Brooksmith didn’t;
moreover it was devoted wholly to one topic and always had the air of being
already over – beginning, as it were, at the end. But it was always
interesting – it always gave me something to think about. It is true that
the subject of my meditation was ever the same – ever ‘It’s all
very well, but what will become of Brooksmith?’ Even my private
answer to this question left me still unsatisfied. No doubt Mr Offord
would provide for him, but what would he provide? that was the great
point. He couldn’t provide society; and society had become a necessity of
Brooksmith’s nature. I must add that he never showed a symptom of what I
may call sordid solicitude – anxiety on his own account. He was rather
livid and intensely grave, as befitted a man before whose eyes the
‘shade of that which once was great’
was passing away. He had the solemnity of a person winding up, under depressing
circumstances, a long established and celebrated business; he was a kind of
social executor or liquidator. But his manner seemed to testify exclusively
to the uncertainty of our future. I couldn’t in those days have
afforded it – I lived in two rooms in
Jermyn Street
and didn’t ‘keep a man’; but even if my income had permitted
I shouldn’t have ventured to say to Brooksmith (emulating Mr Offord),
‘My dear
fellow, I’ll take you on.’ The whole tone of our intercourse was so
much more an implication that it was I who should now want a lift.
Indeed there was a tacit assurance in Brooksmith’s whole attitude that
he would have me on his mind.
One of the most assiduous members of our circle had been
Lady Kenyon, and I remember his telling me one day that her ladyship had, in
spite of her own infirmities, lately much aggravated, been in person to
inquire. In answer to this I remarked that she would feel it more than any one.
Brooksmith was silent a moment; at the end of which he said, in a certain tone
(there is no reproducing some of his tones), “I’ll go and see
her.” I went to see her myself, and I learned that he had waited upon her;
but when I said to her, in the form of a joke but with a core of earnest, that
when all was over some of us ought to combine, to club together to set
Brooksmith up on his own account, she replied a trifle disappointingly:
“Do you mean in a
public-house?”
I looked at her in a way that I think Brooksmith himself would have approved,
and then I answered: “Yes, the Offord Arms.” What I had meant, of
course, was that, for the love of art itself, we ought to look to it that
such a peculiar faculty and so much acquired experience should not be wasted.
I really think that if we had caused a few
black-edged cards
to be struck off and circulated – ‘Mr Brooksmith will continue
to receive on the old premises from four to seven; business carried on as
usual during the alterations’ – the majority of us would have
rallied.
Several times he took me upstairs – always by
his own proposal – and our dear old friend, in bed, in curious
flowered and brocaded
casaque
which made him, especially as his head was tied up in a handkerchief to
match, look, to my imagination, like the dying
Voltaire,
held for ten minutes a sadly shrunken little
salon.
I felt indeed each time, as if I were attending the last
coucher
of some social sovereign. He was royally whimsical about his sufferings and not
at all concerned – quite as if the Constitution provided for the case –
about his successor. He glided over our sufferings charmingly, and
none of his jokes – it was a gallant abstention, some of them would have
been so easy – were at our expense. Now and again, I confess, there was
one at Brooksmith’s, but so pathetically sociable as to make the excellent
man look at me in a way that seemed to say: ‘Do exchange a glance with me,
or I sha’n’t be able to stand it.’ What he was not able to stand
was not what Mr Offord said about him, but what he wasn’t able to say
in return. His notion of conversation, for himself, was giving you the
convenience of speaking to him; and when he went to ‘see’ Lady
Kenyon, for instance, it was to carry her the tribute of his receptive silence.
Where would the speech of his betters have been if proper service had been a
manifestation of sound? In that case the fundamental difference would have had
to be shown by their dumbness, and many of them, poor things, were
dumb enough without that provision. Brooksmith took an unfailing interest in
the preservation of the fundamental difference; it was the thing he had most on
his conscience.
What had become of it, however, when Mr Offord passed
away like any inferior person – was relegated to eternal stillness like a
butler upstairs? His aspect for several days after the expected event may be
imagined, and the multiplication by funereal observance of the things he
didn’t say. When everything was over – it was late the same day
– I knocked at the door of the
house of mourning as I so often had done
before. I could never call on Mr Offord again, but I had come, literally,
to call on Brooksmith. I wanted to ask him if there was anything I could do for
him, tainted with vagueness as this inquiry could only be. My wild dream of
taking him into my own service had died away: my service was not worth his
being taken into. My offer to him could only be to help him to find another
place, and yet there was an indelicacy, as it were, in taking for granted that
his thoughts would immediately be fixed on another. I had a hope that he would
be able to give his life a different form – though certainly not the form,
the frequent result of such bereavements, of his setting up a little shop. That
would have been dreadful; for I should have wished to further any enterprise
that he might embark in, yet how could I have brought myself to go and pay him
shillings and take back coppers over a counter? My visit then was simply an
intended compliment. He took it as such, gratefully and with all the tact in
the world. He knew I really couldn’t help him and that I knew he knew I
couldn’t, but we discussed the situation – with a good deal of
elegant generality – at the foot of the stairs, in the hall already
dismantled, where I had so often discussed other situations with him. The
executors were in possession, as was still more apparent when he made me pass
for a few minutes into the dining-room, where various objects were muffled up
for removal.
Two definite facts, however, he had to communicate; one
being that he was to leave the house for ever that night (servants, for some
mysterious reason, seem always to depart by night), and the other – he
mentioned it only at the last, with hesitation – that he had already been
informed his late master had left him a legacy of
eighty pounds.
“I’m very glad.” I said, and Brooksmith rejoined: “It was
so like him to think of me.” This was all that passed between us on the
subject, and I know nothing of his judgement of Mr Offord’s memento.
Eighty pounds are always eighty pounds, and no one has ever left me an
equal sum; but, all the same, for Brooksmith, I was disappointed. I don’t
know what I had expected – in short I was disappointed. Eighty pounds might
stock a little shop – a very little shop; but, I repeat, I
couldn’t bear to think of that. I asked my friend if he had been able to
save a little, and he replied: “No, sir; I have had to do things.”
I didn’t inquire what things he had had to do; they were his own affair,
and I took his word for them as assentingly as if he had had the greatness of
an ancient house to keep up; especially as there was something in his manner
that seemed to convey a prospect of further sacrifice.
“I shall have to turn round a bit, sir – I
shall have to look about me,” he said; and then he added, indulgently,
magnanimously: “If you should happen to hear of anything for
me—”
I couldn’t let him finish; this was, in its essence,
too much in the really grand manner. It would be a help to my getting him off
my mind to be able to pretend I could find the right place, and that
help he wished to give me, for it was doubtless painful to him to see me in so
false a position. I interposed with a few words to the effect that I was well
aware that wherever he should go, whatever he should do, he would miss our old
friend terribly – miss him even more than I should, having been with him
so much more. This led him to make the speech that I have always remembered as
the very text of the whole episode.
“Oh, sir, it’s sad for you, very sad,
indeed, and for a
great many gentlemen and ladies; that it is, sir. But for me, sir, it is,
if I may say so, still graver even than that: it’s just the loss of
something that was everything. For me, sir,” he went on, with rising
tears, “he was just all, if you know what I mean, sir. You have
others, sir, I daresay – not that I would have you understand me to
speak of them as in any way tantamount. But you have the pleasures of society,
sir; if it’s only in talking about him, sir, as I daresay you do freely
– for all his blessed memory has to fear from it – with gentlemen and
ladies who have had the same honour. That’s not for me, sir, and I have to
keep my associations to myself. Mr Offord was my society, and now
I have no more. You go back to conversation, sir, after all, and I go back to
my place,” Brooksmith stammered, without exaggerated irony or dramatic
bitterness, but with a flat, unstudied veracity and his hand on the knob of the
street-door. He turned it to let me out and then he added: “I just go
downstairs, sir, again, and I stay there.”
“My poor child,” I replied, in my emotion, quite
as Mr Offord used to speak, “my dear fellow, leave it to me;
we’ll look after you, we’ll all do something for you.”
“Ah, if you could give me some one like him!
But there ain’t two in the world,” said Brooksmith as we parted.
He had given me his address – the place where he would
be to be heard of. For a long time I had no occasion to make use of the
information; for he proved indeed, on trial, a very difficult case. In a word
the people who knew him and had known Mr Offord, didn’t want to take
him, and yet I couldn’t bear to try to thrust him among people who
didn’t know him. I spoke to
many of our old friends about him, and I found them all governed by the odd
mixture of feelings of which I myself was conscious, and disposed, further,
to entertain a suspicion that he was ‘spoiled’, with which I then
would have nothing to do. In plain terms a certain embarrassment, a sensible
awkwardness, when they thought of it, attached to the idea of using him as a
menial: they had met him so often in society. Many of them would have asked
him, and did ask him, or rather did ask me to ask him, to come and see them;
but a mere visiting-list was not what I wanted for him. He was too short for
people who were very particular; nevertheless I heard of an opening in a
diplomatic household which led me to write him a note, though I was looking
much less for something grand than for something human. Five days later I
heard from him. The secretary’s wife had decided, after keeping him
waiting till then, that she couldn’t take a servant out of a house in
which there had not been a lady. The note had a P.S.: ‘It’s a good
job there wasn’t, sir, such a lady as some.’
A week later he came to see me and told me he was
‘suited’ – committed to some highly respectable people (they
were something very large in
the City),
who lived on the
Bayswater side of the Park.
“I daresay it will be rather poor, sir,” he admitted; “but
I’ve seen the fireworks, haven’t I, sir? – it can’t be
fireworks every night. After
Mansfield Street
there ain’t much choice.” There was a certain amount, however, it
seemed; for the following year, going one day to call on a country cousin,
a lady of a certain age who was spending a fortnight in town with some
friends of her own, a family unknown to me and resident in
Chester Square,
the door of the house was opened, to my surprise and gratification, by
Brooksmith in person. When I came out I had some
conversation with him, from which I gathered that he had found the large City
people too dull for endurance, and I guessed, though he didn’t say it,
that he had found them vulgar as well. I don’t know what judgement he
would have passed on his actual patrons if my relative had not been their
friend; but under the circumstances he abstained from comment.
None was necessary, however, for before the lady in
question brought her visit to a close they honoured me with an invitation to
dinner, which I accepted. There was a largeish party on the occasion, but I
confess I thought of Brooksmith rather more than of the seated company. They
required no depth of attention – they were all referable to usual,
irredeemable, inevitable types. It was the world of cheerful commonplace and
conscious gentility and prosperous density, a full-fed, material, insular
world, a world of hideous florid plate and ponderous order and thin
conversation. There was not a word said about
Byron.
Nothing would have induced me to look at Brooksmith in the course of the
repast, and I felt sure that not even my overturning the wine would have
induced him to meet my eye. We were in intellectual sympathy – we felt,
as regards each other, a kind of social responsibility. In short we had been
in Arcadia together, and we had both come to this! No wonder we were
ashamed to be confronted. When he helped on my overcoat, as I was going away,
we parted, for the first time since the earliest days in Mansfield Street, in
silence. I thought he looked lean and wasted, and I guessed that his new place
was not more ‘human’ than his previous one. There was plenty of beef
and beer, but there was no reciprocity. The question for him to have asked
before accepting the position would have been not ‘How many footmen are
kept?’ but ‘How much imagination?’
The next time I went to the house – I confess it was
not very soon – I encountered his successor, a personage who evidently
enjoyed the good fortune of never having quitted his natural level. Could any
be higher? he seemed to ask – over the heads of three footmen and even of
some visitors. He made me feel as if Brooksmith were dead; but I didn’t
dare to inquire – I couldn’t have borne his ‘I haven’t the
least idea, sir.’ I despatched a note to the address Brooksmith had given
me after Mr Offord’s death, but I received no answer. Six months
later, however, I was favoured with a visit from an elderly, dreary, dingy
person, who introduced herself to me as Mr Brooksmith’s aunt and
from whom I learned that he was out of place and out of health and had allowed
her to come and say to me that if I could spare half-an-hour to look in at him
he would take it as a rare honour.
I went the next day – his messenger had given me a new
address – and found my friend lodged in a short sordid street in
Marylebone,
one of those corners of London that wear the last expression of sickly
meanness. The room into which I was shown was above the small establishment
of a dyer and cleaner who had inflated kid gloves and discoloured shawls in
his shop-front. There was a great deal of grimy infant life up and down the
place, and there was a hot, moist smell within, as of the ‘boiling’
of dirty linen. Brooksmith sat with a blanket over his legs at a clean little
window, where, from behind stiff bluish-white curtains, he could look across
at a
huckster’s
and a tinsmith’s and a small greasy
public-house.
He had passed through an illness and was convalescent, and his mother, as
well as his aunt, was in attendance on him. I liked the mother, who was
bland and intensely humble, but I didn’t much fancy the aunt,
whom I connected, perhaps unjustly, with the opposite
public-house
(she seemed somehow to be greasy with the same grease), and whose furtive eye
followed every movement of my hand, as if to see if it were not going into my
pocket. It didn’t take this direction – I couldn’t, unsolicited,
put myself at that sort of ease with Brooksmith. Several times the door of the
room opened, and mysterious old women peeped in and shuffled back again. I
don’t know who they were; poor Brooksmith seemed encompassed with vague,
prying, beery females.
He was vague himself, and evidently weak, and much
embarrassed, and not an allusion was made between us to Mansfield Street. The
vision of the
salon
of which he had been an ornament hovered before
me, however, by contrast, sufficiently. He assured me that he was really
getting better, and his mother remarked that he would come round if he could
only get his spirits up. The aunt echoed this opinion, and I became more sure
that in her own case she knew where to go for such a purpose. I’m afraid I
was rather weak with my old friend, for I neglected the opportunity, so
exceptionally good, to rebuke the levity which had led him to throw up
honourable positions – fine, stiff, steady berths, with
morning prayers,
as I knew, attached to one of them – in
Bayswater and Belgravia.
Very likely his reasons had been profane and sentimental; he didn’t
want morning prayers, he wanted to be somebody’s dear fellow; but I
couldn’t be the person to rebuke him. He shuffled these episodes out of
sight – I saw that he had no wish to discuss them. I perceived further,
strangely enough, that it would probably be a questionable pleasure for him to
see me again: he doubted now even of my power to condone his aberrations. He
didn’t wish to have to explain; and his behaviour, in future, was likely
to need
explanation. When I bade him farewell he looked at me a moment with eyes
that said everything: ‘How can I talk about those exquisite years in
this place, before these people, with the old women poking their heads in?
It was very good of you to come to see me – it wasn’t my idea;
she brought you. We’ve said everything; it’s over;
you’ll lose all patience with me, and I’d rather you shouldn’t
see the rest.’ I sent him some money, in a letter, the next day, but I saw
the rest only in the light of a barren sequel.
A whole year after my visit to him I became aware once, in
dining out, that Brooksmith was one of the several servants who hovered behind
our chairs. He had not opened the door of the house to me, and I had not
recognised him in the cluster of retainers in the hall. This time I tried to
catch his eye, but he never gave me a chance, and when he handed me a dish I
could only be careful to thank him audibly. Indeed I partook of two
entrées
of which I had my doubts, subsequently converted into certainties, in order
not to snub him. He looked well enough in health, but much older, and wore,
in an exceptionally marked degree, the glazed and expressionless mask of the
British domestic
de race.
I saw with dismay that if I had not known him I should have taken him,
on the showing of his countenance, for an extravagant illustration of
irresponsive servile gloom. I said to myself that he had become a
reactionary, gone over to the Philistines, thrown himself into religion,
the religion of his ‘place’, like a foreign lady
sur le retour.
I divined moreover that he was only engaged for the evening – he had
become a mere waiter, had joined the band of the white-waistcoated who
‘go out’. There was something pathetic in this fact, and it was
a terrible vulgarisation of Brooksmith. It was the mercenary prose of
butlerhood; he had given up the struggle for the poetry. If reciprocity
was what he had missed, where was the reciprocity now? Only in the bottoms
of the wine-glasses and five shillings (or whatever they get), clapped
into his hand by the permanent man. However, I supposed he had taken up a
precarious branch of his profession because after all it sent him less
downstairs. His relations with London society were more superficial, but they
were of course more various. As I went away, on this occasion, I looked out for
him eagerly among the four or five attendants whose perpendicular persons,
fluting the walls of London passages, are supposed to lubricate the process of
departure; but he was not on duty. I asked one of the others if he were not in
the house, and received the prompt answer: “Just left, sir. Anything I can
do for you, sir?” I wanted to say ‘Please give him my kind
regards;’ but I abstained; I didn’t want to compromise him, and I
never came across him again.
Often and often, in dining out, I looked for him, sometimes
accepting invitations on purpose to multiply the chances of my meeting him. But
always in vain; so that as I met many other members of the casual class over
and over again, I at last adopted the theory that he always procured a list of
expected guests beforehand and kept away from the banquets which he thus learned
I was to grace. At last I gave up hope, and one day, at the end of three years,
I received another visit from his aunt. She was drearier and dingier, almost
squalid, and she was in great tribulation and want. Her sister, Mrs Brooksmith,
had been dead a year, and three months later her nephew had disappeared. He had
always looked after her a bit – since her troubles; I never knew what her
troubles had been – and now she hadn’t so
much as a petticoat to pawn. She had also a niece, to whom she had been
everything, before her troubles, but the niece had treated her most shameful.
These were details; the great and romantic fact was Brooksmith’s final
evasion of his fate. He had gone out to wait one evening, as usual, in a
white waistcoat she had done up for him with her own hands, being due at
a large party up
Kensington
way. But he had never come home again, and had never arrived at the large party,
or at any party that any one could make out. No trace of him had come to light
– no gleam of the white waistcoat had pierced the obscurity of his doom.
This news was a sharp shock to me, for I had my ideas about his real destination.
His aged relative had promptly, as she said, guessed the worst. Somehow and
somewhere he had got out of the way altogether, and now I trust that, with
characteristic deliberation, he is changing the plates of the immortal gods. As
my depressing visitant also said, he never had got his spirits up. I
was fortunately able to dismiss her with her own somewhat improved. But the dim
ghost of poor Brooksmith is one of those that I see. He had indeed been
spoiled.
THE END
part of an etext edition of
Brooksmith
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website