Some Short Stories | Page 4

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
through a smiling land, between suggestive shores, a sinuous stream of
talk. My affectionate, my pious memory of Mr. Offord contradicts this
induction only, I fear, more insidiously to confirm it. The 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 couldn't be said at all to owe its stamp to any
intervention throwing into relief the fact that there was no Mrs. Offord.
The dear man had indeed, at the most, 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 wish people to find you at home you must manage
not to be out. He had in short accepted the truth 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 as yet discovered of being 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 wasn't rich; he had nothing but his pension and
the use for life of the somewhat superannuated house.
When I'm reminded by some opposed discomfort of the present hour
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's 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 that 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 hadn't 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 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