I asked him if he often visited Bruges.
He looked up at me with a curious expression of surprise.
'I live here,' he said, 'almost always.' I have done so for years....'
Presently he added hurriedly, 'You have come back. I thought you would come
back, but you have been gone a long time--oh, a long time! It seems years
since we met. Do you remember--?' He checked himself; then he added in a
low whisper, 'We all come back, we all come back.'
He uttered a quaint, short laugh.
'One can be near--very near, even if one can never be quite close.'
He tells me that he still paints, and that the Academy, to which he sends
a picture yearly, has recently elected him an Associate. But his art does
not seem to absorb him as it did of old, and he speaks of his success drily
and as a matter of very secondary importance. He refused to dine with me,
alleging an engagement, but that so hesitatingly and with such vagueness
that I could perceive it was the merest pretext. His manner was so strange
and remote that I did not venture to press him. I think he is unhappily
conscious of his own frequent incoherencies and at moments there are quite
painful pauses when he is obviously struggling with dumb piteousness to be
lucid, to collect himself and pick up certain lost threads in his memory.
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