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Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874 (128 page)

BOOK: Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874
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Page 766
didn't; moreover it was devoted wholly to one topic and always had the air of being already overbeginning, as it were, at the end. But it was always interestingit always gave me something to think about. It is true that the subject of my meditation was ever the sameever 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 solicitudeanxiety 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 itI 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 an-
 
Page 767
swered: 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 circulatedMr. Brooksmith will continue to receive on the old premises from four to seven; business carried on as usual during the alterationsthe majority of us would have rallied.
Several times he took me upstairsalways by his own proposaland our dear old friend, in bed, in a 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 concernedquite as if the Constitution provided for the caseabout his successor. He glided over
our
sufferings charmingly, and none of his jokesit was a gallant abstention, some of them would have been so easywere 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 personwas relegated to eternal stillness like a butler upstairs? His aspect for several days after the expected event may be imagined, and the multiplication by
 
Page 768
funereal observance of the things he didn't say. When everything was overit was late the same dayI 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 formthough 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 situationwith a good deal of elegant generalityat 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 otherhe mentioned it only at the last, with hesitationthat 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 judgment 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 ex-
 
Page 769
pectedin short I was disappointed. Eighty pounds might stock a little shopa
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, sirI 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 terriblymiss 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 daresaynot 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 freelyfor all his blessed memory has to fear from itwith 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
 
Page 770
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 addressthe 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 suitedcommitted 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
 
Page 771
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 judgment 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 attentionthey 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 sympathywe 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 houseI confess it was not very soonI encountered his successor, a personage who evidently enjoyed the good fortune of never having quitted his
BOOK: Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874
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