Chapter Text
Basil adjusted the easel on his back, trying to ease the way the strap dug into his left shoulder more than the right. His task was made more difficult by the painting in his hand, most of which was still wet. Painting en plein air was all well and fun until it came time to go to and from the vantage point, wet oils refusing to stay where they were put and instead decorating the shirts and satchels and skin of the art student who dared disturb them.
He could not find it in himself, however, to be very mad; not on a day like today that simply begged to be painted. Sunlight filtered through spring leaves and illuminated them a brilliant yellow-green, making them into rustling shining little things dancing in the breeze and casting scampering shadows on the dirt path beneath his feet. It was no time at all until he reached the spot he was attempting to immortalize, marked by the derelict little boat moored on a single pole.
It was a beautiful view of the river, a large tree branch dipping down to skim the gently rushing water. Splitting an outdoor painting into multiple days was famously a terrible idea, but he had timed this sitting to exactly the hour of the previous, so the light made the blades of grass just the same green and cast the same shadows over the scene. The composition was brilliant without him having to change so much as a leaf. Basil’s Grandad had always told him that God was the finest artist of them all, and when he was five he was inclined to agree - if only because Grandad had a lovely collection of paintings so he must have known everything about art.
It was caught up in lovely memories of his grandfather’s gallery that Basil realised he wasn’t alone. No, there was a man sitting against a tree and flipping through a book right in the centre of his composition. The man was young, certainly a fellow student; tall and brown-haired and finely dressed with a straw boater hat completing his outfit. In essence, he looked exactly the same as every third student at Oxford.
“Good day?” Basil said, an unintended amount of trepidation in his voice.
“Oh,” the man replied, looking up as if he had been asleep. “Well, quite, I suppose.” He then looked down again.
Basil was at a slight loss, having expected the man to be even a bit conversational. No mind, he told himself, he must have simply been sleepy.
“I, er- I am painting the river here, you see, and you are right in the center of my composition. Unfortunately.”
The man only hummed in response and didn’t even look up, which Basil thought was quite rude considering he had made every effort to be polite. He had even amended his statement with “unfortunately”! That almost always worked.
“And I don’t imagine you have plans to leave anytime soon? ” Basil said, his voice gaining more bite towards the end of his sentence than intended. He attempted to correct with a smile and a sort-of-half-bow.
“Not particularly, no,” the man replied, smiling and adjusting his hat before returning to his book. There was a slight chuckle in his voice.
Basil took a deep breath. “Would you mind moving just a bit over, then? It’s only that I’ll fail my class if I can’t finish this.”
The man tilted his head and appeared to be deep in thought for much longer than Basil wished. Eventually he rose to his feet, walking a grand total of two meters before sitting down once again, leaning against another tree just out of the area Basil was painting. He put his open book on the grass pages-down and pulled a silver case from a pocket somewhere in his gaudy brocade waistcoat, removing a cigarette and holding it between his fingers as he lit it with a match. He held the lit cigarette in one hand and picked his book up in the others, flipping to a random page. He was looking at it, but certainly not reading, when he decided to grace Basil with his commentary once more.
“You know, if we are to talk, you ought to tell me your name.”
“Basil,” he said before he could stop himself. “But I don’t recall agreeing to talk.”
“I’m Lord Henry, but do call me Harry. All my friends do, and they’re about as close to me as you are,” the man - Henry - replied, unprompted.
Basil ignored his commentary, or at least tried to appear like he was. He thought about where he had placed his easel yesterday - to the left of the stump, certainly, but had it been lined up exactly with the birch across the river? When he was nearing the point of trying to identify blades of grass he decided to give up, finally taking the weight of the easel off his shoulders and putting his painting down on it.
It took him a moment to set himself up, not only arranging his materials and securing his painting to the easel but including stretches for his shoulders and pushing back his hair. He had almost forgotten about the man in front of him, but he was reminded once again as soon as he surveyed his view. He attempted to begin work, but it felt terribly awkward. He hated to work in emotional distress, no matter so slight, and he thought a bit of conversation might clear the air.
“What sort of book are you reading?” he asked.
“It’s French,” Henry replied, with all the pretentiousness a statement like that deserved.
“That’s hardly a genre, is it?”
“You wouldn’t know, would you?”
Basil refused to give his statement a response, instead rummaging through his bag for his apron. Forgetting for a moment that he wasn’t alone, he held his brush in his teeth while he tied the apron at his back.
“You know, I always enjoy watching painters work. It’s such a respite from everyday life, where everyone cares so much about propriety and looking put-together. Artists will act like perfect savages as long as it suits them and it is perfectly worth it, I believe, if they can truly make something beautiful.”
God damn this man! Basil huffed and turned his eye to the painting, before immediately looking back at Henry.
“What are you studying? I mean, it must be very professional and gentlemanly if seeing a man hold a paintbrush in his mouth offends you so.”
“I object to the idea that I am doing any studying here, but that is besides the point. I will leave with a degree in philosophy. Don’t bother telling me you are an art student, you reek of it - I don’t mean that literally, don’t make that face at me.”
“And what job do you plan to get with that, hm?” Basil asked, feeling a flash of anger. He took a breath and reminded himself to be calm and that embarrassing himself in front of strangers was hardly the “professionalism” his professors stressed the importance of when they discussed finding clients.
“I won’t have a job,” Henry laughed as if it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. “I am a Lord, “Oxford” is just another box to tick next to “loveless marriage” and “alcohol dependency”. I plan to use my time here to make my father very angry and to perfect my own philosophy.”
“What will it be called, then? Your philosophy, I mean,” Basil replied, letting himself take the bait just once.
“Giving an idea a name is the fastest way to kill it. An idea, by definition, is fleeting, incommunicable. Every thought one has is the tangled ball of all the threads that have ever run through their mind, each idea and experience woven into each other, the mind pulling on every string to put it together. To have a name means it must be removed, all the strands cut from their infinite context so it can be understood by the world. No, I don’t think I’ll name it.”
“Well then it shall be known as Henry-ism, I suppose.”
“Henry-ism? Well that’s just-”
“People, annoying as they are, feel the need to label each and every thing. Every beautiful thought is a butterfly, it must be put in a jar, gassed, and pinned to a board by its wings. So your ‘philosophy’ will be named, and if you don’t do it yourself you can’t complain if they do the same to you as they did to Socrates and Plato.”
“I shall certainly complain if they do the same to me as they did to Socrates. I’d at least ask for a faster poison.”
Basil really, really didn’t want to laugh, but he couldn’t help it. Henry smirked for a triumphant moment before putting his cigarette out on the ground and tossing it across the path.
The air having been cleared somewhat, Basil finally turned his attention to the work at hand. He could finally focus, and added his first work of the day; a few highlights on the leaves to show how they were rustling. A calm settled over him as he dragged his brush through the oil-colours and attended carefully to each leaf, stepping back occasionally to smile or frown at his overall progress (today, luckily, it was mostly smiles). And so, it felt like no time at all before Henry interrupted him again.
“So where in the North do you hail from?” he asked, a passing fancy guiding him to remove his hat and fan himself with it. He had a very well-built face, Basil realised, fine features in good proportion to each other and with such striking green eyes… Wait, he realised, what did he say about me?
“A small village, not very far from Sheffield. I didn’t think you could tell,” he answered, somewhat offended that Henry would make such an assumption (even if it was true).
“Oh, I assure you everyone certainly can,” Henry replied. Basil felt himself flush and was about to sputter a response when Henry did what Basil was quickly learning he was best at – interrupting him.
“Do not change,” Henry replied, a strange almost-earnestness creeping into his voice. “You should not allow yourself to be shaped into the same dull person that these rich toffs think all men should be. They will only talk about you if you do something, anything, that they didn’t see at Eton. They laugh, of course, but being laughed at is the only good way of being discussed in this age.”
Basil could not come up with any response for that, oddly overwhelmed. It was not mean, it was quite touching if anything, but it seemed out of character for this man. He simply nodded and returned to his work with a deal more to think about than before.
Basil sat down, precariously balancing his tea in one hand and a book in the other. It was a warm day, so he was down to his undershirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, which made up for the warmth of his tea. He had not made himself tea before Oxford, with that being firmly the cook’s job, but he had found his way quickly.
After today, however, he could really go for a person who would make him tea while he sat and sketched. Not only had he dealt with that strange man by the river - oh, what was his name again? - who had stayed by him for the entire painting process making little quips and trying to bait Basil into a conversation, but after that was all over Basil had smudged the corner of the picture that he had just painted, which made him desire for a moment to throw it into the river in its entirety. He then had to have supper with his “friends”, two boys from his class who were dreadfully annoying but had glued themselves to Basil in the first term and refused to let go.
He wallowed for a moment, sipping his tea and reading his deeply melodramatic gothic novel, his encounter by the river still with him.
“ I’m a Lord, I read French novels and smoke cigarettes, and you’re going to listen to my nonsense all afternoon because you’re just so much lesser than me!” He said under his breath. Perhaps Henry - ah, yes, his name was Henry - hadn’t said all of that, but it was implied.
Basil huffed and sunk further into the armchair. Sleeping here wouldn’t be a terrible idea, he decided, as he suddenly felt too tired to walk across the room to his bed and change into his nightshirt, but he was taken from his daze by the thick smell of… smoke?
That was enough to get him to his feet, walking to his window where he saw black smoke rising in a distant column on the other end of the campus. Basil’s breath caught in his throat and he cracked open the window - only to immediately nearly cough up a lung and throw it shut again. The smoke was thick and burned his throat and tasted and smelled nothing like a fireplace, infinitely more acrid and overwhelming. He stumbled away from the window and took deep breaths
For a moment he considered going out to help, before deciding that it looked quite far away and really, what could he do to assist when the city had a fire department? It looked far enough that it couldn’t spread to him, at least not in only a few hours. He took one more look out the window before drawing the blinds. It was terrible, of course, and he would certainly hear about it for weeks, but he said his thanks that the fire would not affect him any more than that.