第2章

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 foreordained 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 hadn't 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 even-handed justice, all 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 laughingly to call him when, later on, it happened more than once that we had some conversation about him.But Iremember accusing Mr.Offord of not doing him quite ideal justice.

That he wasn't one of the giants of the school, however, was admitted by my old friend, who really understood him perfectly and was devoted to him, as I shall show; 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 three to put into circulation.He acknowledged the inadequacy of this provision, and I'm 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 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.Iembraced this fully after I had become aware that Brooksmith's main characteristic was a deep and shy refinement, though I remember Iwas rather puzzled when, on another occasion, Mr.Offord remarked:

"What he likes is the talk--mingling in the conversation." I was conscious 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've 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--this, I mean, if he thought YOU liked them.