Best Short Stories - [19]

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 a curious flowered and brocaded casaque[31] which made him, especially as his head was tied up in a handkerchief to match, look, to my imagination, like the dying Voltaire,[32] held for ten minutes a sadly shrunken little salon. I felt indeed each time, as if I were attending the last coucher[33] 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 shan’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