Alere Flamma, aged forty-nine, or nearly, was pale from other causes, and it was a different kind of paleness; not bloodlessness, like Amadis, but something lacking in the blood, a vitiated state. Too much Fleet Street, in short; too much of the Oracle—Pantagruel's Oracle of the Bottle.
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 carpet-bag, 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 carpet-bag 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.