“My Dear Alma,
Many thanks for the brushes. When my hair is gone—“which will be short,” as Pellegrini says—I can use them for sweeping a crossing. In the meantime they make a most excellent parting. Seriously they are beautiful.
I have never before had brushes in a case—it seems to lift one’s social status. Hitherto my brushes have lain in my portmanteau cheek by jowl with my boots, or have mingled their tears with my sponge.
Now all is changed; I feel I could stay at a country house and meet the footman on equal terms. Of course, I don’t mean that seriously—no man could hope to be the equal of a footman. I am a democrat but no revolutionist, and I have always felt that so long as liveried servants keep their supremacy the throne is safe. Compared with this the land question is a trifle. “Dieu et mon drawers” is the loyal but terrified sentiment with which I always awake on a visit, and see the footman turning my tattered underclothing inside out. But now my brushes will save me.
Yours,
Joe.”
In the later years of his life, as his friends multiplied far and wide and his social gifts became famous, he was pressed into circles unknown to me, and our country-house visits together became fewer; so that personally I remember his talk oftener at some sea-side place where we had run down for a week-end, or on the verandah of some foreign hotel where he would be immediately surrounded by a delighted audience—in later years not by any means always composed of his own countrymen. Though his associations with French artists and men of letters over pictures for the New Gallery—and, more still, over his English editorship of L’Art—had taught him enough of their tongue for his business, he was not a finished French scholar; but he was never afraid to make a shot at expressing his thought, and consequently he improved enormously at the end of his life. I remember the astonished comment of two Armenian lads and a charming Finnish lady whom we met at a Swiss mountain resort: “Mais c’est épatant! De faire des calembours comme cela dans une langue étrangère.”
He only needed an audience; and he had it every hour of the day in those two Armenian boys, who would stand for hours watching him throw his line over the lake and coax the fish out—just, they used to say, as he would coax the children to him in the roads or the visitors in the lounge—“sans se donner de la peine.”
I am not sure of the justice of that last remark. Perhaps he never purposely gave himself trouble, but he amused others because his love of his own kind was such that he must always needs be in touch with them, be they peasant or peer, and at the end of his life he preferred to lounge in the road and chat with the convalescent soldiers in a quiet village than to sit comfortably in the seclusion of a lovely garden.