His hands shook as he held his knife and fork—oddly enough, the hands of great genius often do shake; now and then when he put his glass to his lips, his teeth snapped on it, and chinked.
It seemed curious that such puffy, shaky hands could hold a pencil, and draw delicate lines without a flaw.
Many who never resort to the Oracle have hands that tremble nearly as much—the nervous constitution—and yet execute artists’ work of rare excellence.
Alere’s constitution, the Flamma constitution, naturally nervous, had been shaken as with dynamite by the bottle, and the glass chinked against his teeth. Every two or three years, when he felt himself toppling over like a tree half sawn through, Alere packed his carpetbag, and ran down to Coombe Oaks. When the rats began to run up the wall as he sat at work in broad daylight, Alere put his slippers into his carpetbag and looked out some collars.
In London he never wore a collar, only a bright red scarf round his neck; the company he kept would have shunned him—they would have looked him up and down disdainfully:—“Got a collar on—had no breakfast.” They would have scornfully regarded him as no better than a City clerk, the class above all others scorned by those who use tools.
“Got a collar on—had no breakfast.” The City clerk, playing the Masher on thirty shillings a week, goes without food to appear the gentleman.
Alere, the artist, drank with the men who used hammer, and file, or set up type—a godless set, ye gods, how godless, these setters up of type at four o’clock in the morning; oysters and stout at 4 a.m.; special taverns they must have open for them—open before Aurora gleams in the east—Oh! Fleet Street, Fleet Street, what a place it is!
By no possible means could Alere work himself into a dress-coat.
Could he have followed the celebrated advice—“You put on a dress-coat and go into society”—he would soon have become a name, a fame, a taker of big fees, a maker of ten thousand yearly.
To a man who could draw like Alere, possessed, too, of the still rarer talent—the taste to see what to draw—there really is no limit in our days; for as for colour, you do not require a genius for colour in an age of dinginess—why, the point, nowadays, is to avoid colour, and in a whole Academy you shall scarcely find as much as would tint a stick of sealing-wax.
“You put on a black coat and go into society”—that is the secret of commissions, and commissions are fortune. Nothing so clever in the way of advice has been sent forth as that remark. The great Tichborne said something about folk that had money and no brains, and folk that had brains but no money; and they as has no brains ought to be so managed as to supply money to those who had. But even the greatness of the great Tichborne’s observation falls into insignificance before Chesterfield in one sentence: “Put on a black coat and go into society.”
What are the sayings of the seven wise men of Greece compared to that?
XXVII
By no possible means could Alere Flamma work himself into a dress coat. The clubs, the houses of the great, the mutual admiration dinners—those great institutions of the day—were all closed to him because of the Dress Coat.
If he had really desired to enter, of course he would have squeezed into the evening monkey-skin somehow; but, in truth, Alere did not want to enter.
Inside he might have finished a portrait a month at a thousand guineas—twelve portraits per annum equals twelve thousand guineas a year; you see I am looking up the multiplication table, preparatory to going into the tallow trade.
What he actually did was to make designs for book-covers—magnificent book-covers that will one day fetch their weight in banknotes—manipulating a good deal of it himself—“tooling”—for the libraries of noble connoisseurs. They were equal to anything ever done in Paris.
For a week’s work—say half-an-hour a day—he got perhaps about ten pounds. With the ten pounds he was satisfied—ten pounds represents a good deal of brandy, or stout, or even wine, about as much as one man can manage at a bout; besides tobacco, the gallery at the theatre, and innumerable trifles of that kind. Ten pounds represents a good deal of street life.
Sometimes he drew—and engraved—illustrations for books, being as clever with the engraver’s tools as with the pencil; sometimes he cut out those odd, fantastic “initials,” “ornaments,” “finials,” which are now so commonly seen in publications, catching the classical grotesque of the Renaissance to perfection, and deceiving the experienced; sometimes he worked in the press-room in the House of Flamma, Fleet Street, pulling artists’ proofs, or printing expensively illustrated volumes—numbered, and the plates destroyed—actual manual work, in his shirt sleeves.
He could stop when he liked and take a swig of stout. That was the Alere style.
Smoking was forbidden in the old House of Flamma because of the worm-eaten beams, the worm-eaten rafters and staircase, the dusty, decayed bookshelves, the dry, rotten planks of the floor, the thin wooden partitions, all ready to catch fire at the mere sight of a match. Also because of the piles of mouldy books which choked the place, and looked fit for nothing but a bonfire, but which were worth thousands of pounds; the plates and lithographic stones, artists’ proofs, divers and sundry Old Masters in a room upstairs, all easily destructible.
But Alere, being a son of the house, though not in command, did not choose to be amenable to rules and orders in fact, in fiction he was. He smoked and kept the glue-pot ready on the stove; if a certain step was known
