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 bank-notes--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 to be approaching the pipe was thrust out of sight, and some dry
glue set melting, the powerful incense quite hiding the flavour of
tobacco. A good deal of dry glue is used in London in this way.
If I could but write the inside history of Fleet Street, I should be
looked upon as the most wonderful exponent of human life that had ever
touched a pen. Balzac--whom everybody talks of and nobody has read,
because the discrimination of Paternoster Row has refused him a
translation till quite lately--Zola, who professes to be realistic, who
is nothing if not realistic, but whose writings are so curiously crude
and merely skim the surface; even the great Hugo, who produced the
masterpiece of all fiction, _Les Misérables_; all three of them, the
entire host of manuscript-makers, I am sure I could vanquish them all,
if I could only write the inside life of Fleet Street.
Not in any grace of style or sweeping march of diction, but just
pencil-jotted in the roughest words to hand, just as rich and poor,
well-dressed ladies and next-door beggars are bundled into a train, so,
without choice of language, but hustling the first words anyhow, as it
were, into the first compartment. If I could only get Alere to tell me
all he had seen in Fleet Street, and could just jot it down on the
margin of a stained newspaper, all the world would laugh and weep. For
such things do go on in Fleet Street as no man has written yet.
If only Victor Hugo were alive and young again!
Alere liked pulling off the proofs in his shirt-sleeves, swigging his
stout, smoking on the sly, working with all the genius of an inspired
mechanic one moment and dropping into absolute idleness the next,
spending infinite pains in finishing one bit of work, as if his very
life depended on the smoothing of an edge of paper, putting off the next
till the end of the month, pottering, sleeping, gossiping, dreaming over
old German works, and especially dreaming over Goethe, humming old
German songs--for he had been a great traveller--sometimes scrawling a
furious Mazzinian onslaught in a semi-Nihilist foreign print, collecting
stray engravings, wandering hither and thither.
Alere Flamma, artist, engraver, bookbinder, connoisseur, traveller,
printer, Republican, conspirator, sot, smoker, dreamer, poet,
kind-hearted, good-natured, prodigal, shiftless, man of Fleet Street,
carpet-bag man, gentleman shaken to pieces.
He worked in his shirt-sleeves and drank stout, but nothing vulgar had
ever been recorded against Alere Flamma. He frequented strong
company--very strong meat--but no vile word left his lips.
There was a delicacy in all his ways in the midst of the coarsest
surroundings, just as he appeared in the press-room among the printer's
ink in the whitest of clean shirt-sleeves, fit to wear with the
abhorred dress-coat.
In his rooms at his lodgings there were literally hundreds of sketches,
done on all sorts and sizes of paper, from the inside of an envelope
hastily torn open to elephant. The bureau was full of them, crammed in
anyhow, neither sorted nor arranged; nothing, of course, could be found
if it was wanted. The drawers of the bookcase--it was his own
furniture--were full of them; the writing-table drawer; a box in one
corner; some were on the mantelpiece smoked and gritty; some inside his
books, most of which were interleaved in this manner; literally hundreds
of sketches, the subjects as numerous and varied.
Views in English country lanes, views on the Danube, bands playing in
band-loving Vienna, old Highgate Archway, studies from Canterbury
Cathedral, statuary in the Louvre, ships battling with the north wind in
the North Sea--a savage fight between sail and gale--horses in the
meadow, an aged butler, a boy whipping a top, charcoal-burners in the
Black Forest, studies from the nude--Parisian models, Jewesses, almost
life-size, a drayman heaving up a huge tankard, overshadowing his face
like Mount Atlas turned over his thumb, designs to illustrate classical
mythology, outlines expressing the ideas of Goethe--outlines of
Marguerite and Faust among the roses--"He loves me; he loves me not,"
big-armed Flemish beauties with breasts as broad as the Zuyder-Zee was
deep in the song, roofs of Nuremberg, revolutionary heroes charging
their muskets in the famous year '48, when Alere had a bullet through
his hat, in Vienna, I think; no end to them.
Sometimes when Alere had done no work for a month or two, and his ten
pounds were spent, if he wanted a few guineas he would take a small
selection of these round to the office of a certain illustrated paper;
the Editor would choose, and hand over the money at once, well aware
that it was ready money his friend needed. They were not exactly
friends--there are no friends in London, only acquaintances--but a
little chummy, because the Editor himself had had a fiery youth, and
they had met in sunny Wien. That was the only paper that ever got
sketches out of Alere.
If only Alere would have gone and sketched what he was _asked_ to
sketch! Ah! there is the difference; he could not do it, his nature
would not let him; he could draw what he saw with his own eyes, but not
what other people wanted him to see. A merry income he might have made
if he would only have consented to see what other eyes--common, vulgar
eyes--wanted to see, and which he could so easily have drawn for them.
Out of these piles of varied sketches there were two kinds the Editor
instantly snapped at: the one was wild flowers, the other little
landscape bits.
Wild flowers were his passion. They were to Flamma as Juliet to Romeo.
Romeo's love, indeed, rushed up like straw on fire, a great blaze of
flame; he perished in it as the straw; perhaps he might not have
worshipped Juliet next year. Flamma had loved his wild flowers close
upon forty years, ever since he could remember; most likely longer, for
doubtless the dumb infant loved the daisies put in his chubby hand.
His passion they were still as he drew near fifty, and saw all things
become commonplace. That is the saddest of thoughts--as we grow older
the romance fades, and all things become commonplace.
Half our lives are spent in wishing for to-morrow, the other half in
wishing for yesterday.
Wild flowers alone never become commonplace. The white wood-sorrel at
the foot of the oak, the violet in the hedge of the vale, the thyme on
the wind-swept downs, they were as fresh this year as last, as dear
to-day as twenty years since, even dearer, for they grow now, as it
were, in the earth we have made for them of our hopes, our prayers, our
emotions, our thoughts.
Sketch-book upon sketch-book in Alere's room was full of wild flowers,
drawn as he had found them in the lanes and woods at Coombe Oaks--by the
footpaths, by the lake and the lesser ponds, on the hills--as he had
found them, not formed into an artificial design, not torn up by the
roots, or cut and posed for the occasion--exactly as they were when his
eye caught sight of them. A difficult thing to do, but Alere did it.
In printing engravings of flowers the illustrated magazines usually
make one of two mistakes; either the flower is printed without any
surroundings or background, and looks thin, quite without interest,
however cleverly drawn, or else it is presented with a heavy black pall
of ink which dabs it out altogether.
These flowers the Editor bought eagerly, and the little landscapes. From
a stile, beside a rick, through a gap in a hedge, odd, unexpected
places, Alere caught views of the lake, the vale, the wood, groups of
trees, old houses, and got them in his magical way on a few square
inches of paper. They were very valuable for book illustration. They
were absolutely true to nature and fact.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]