‘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 de tout,[30]’ 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
