The Coxon Fund

IV

Mrs. Saltram made a great affair of her right to be informed where her husband had been the second evening he failed to meet his audience.  She came to me to ascertain, but I couldn’t satisfy her, for in spite of my ingenuity I remained in ignorance.  It wasn’t till much later that I found this had not been the case with Kent Mulville, whose hope for the best never twirled the thumbs of him more placidly than when he happened to know the worst.  He had known it on the occasion I speak of—that is immediately after.  He was impenetrable then, but ultimately confessed.  What he confessed was more than I shall now venture to make public.  It was of course familiar to me that Saltram was incapable of keeping the engagements which, after their separation, he had entered into with regard to his wife, a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproachable and insufferable person.  She often appeared at my chambers to talk over his lapses; for if, as she declared, she had washed her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution, which she handed about for analysis.  She had arts of her own of exciting one’s impatience, the most infallible of which was perhaps her assumption that we were kind to her because we liked her.  In reality her personal fall had been a sort of social rise—since I had seen the moment when, in our little conscientious circle, her desolation almost made her the fashion.  Her voice was grating and her children ugly; moreover she hated the good Mulvilles, whom I more and more loved.  They were the people who by doing most for her husband had in the long run done most for herself; and the warm confidence with which he had laid his length upon them was a pressure gentle compared with her stiffer persuadability.  I’m bound to say he didn’t criticise his benefactors, though practically he got tired of them; she, however, had the highest standards about eleemosynary forms.  She offered the odd spectacle of a spirit puffed up by dependence, and indeed it had introduced her to some excellent society.  She pitied me for not knowing certain people who aided her and whom she doubtless patronised in turn for their luck in not knowing me.  I dare say I should have got on with her better if she had had a ray of imagination—if it had occasionally seemed to occur to her to regard Saltram’s expressions of his nature in any other manner than as separate subjects of woe.  They were all flowers of his character, pearls strung on an endless thread; but she had a stubborn little way of challenging them one after the other, as if she never suspected that he had a character, such as it was, or that deficiencies might be organic; the irritating effect of a mind incapable of a generalisation.  One might doubtless have overdone the idea that there was a general licence for such a man; but if this had happened it would have been through one’s feeling that there could be none for such a woman.

I recognised her superiority when I asked her about the aunt of the disappointed young lady: it sounded like a sentence from an English-French or other phrase-book.  She triumphed in what she told me and she may have triumphed still more in what she withheld.  My friend of the other evening, Miss Anvoy, had but lately come to England; Lady Coxon, the aunt, had been established here for years in consequence of her marriage with the late Sir Gregory of that name.  She had a house in the Regent’s Park, a Bath-chair and a fernery; and above all she had sympathy.  Mrs. Saltram had made her acquaintance through mutual friends.  This vagueness caused me to feel how much I was out of it and how large an independent circle Mrs. Saltram had at her command.  I should have been glad to know more about the disappointed young lady, but I felt I should know most by not depriving her of her advantage, as she might have mysterious means of depriving me of my knowledge.  For the present, moreover, this experience was stayed, Lady Coxon having in fact gone abroad accompanied by her niece.  The niece, besides being immensely clever, was an heiress, Mrs. Saltram said; the only daughter and the light of the eyes of some great American merchant, a man, over there, of endless indulgences and dollars.  She had pretty clothes and pretty manners, and she had, what was prettier still, the great thing of all.  The great thing of all for Mrs. Saltram was always sympathy, and she spoke as if during the absence of these ladies she mightn’t know where to turn for it.  A few months later indeed, when they had come back, her tone perceptibly changed: she alluded to them, on my leading her up to it, rather as to persons in her debt for favours received.  What had happened I didn’t know, but I saw it would take only a little more or a little less to make her speak of them as thankless subjects of social countenance—people for whom she had vainly tried to do something.  I confess I saw how it wouldn’t be in a mere week or two that I should rid myself of the image of Ruth Anvoy, in whose very name, when I learnt it, I found something secretly to like.  I should probably neither see her nor hear of her again: the knight’s widow (he had been mayor of Clockborough) would pass away and the heiress would return to her inheritance.  I gathered with surprise that she had not communicated to his wife the story of her attempt to hear Mr..Saltram, and I founded this reticence on the easy supposition that Mrs. Saltram had fatigued by overpressure the spring of the sympathy of which she boasted.  The girl at any rate would forget the small adventure, be distracted, take a husband; besides which she would lack occasion to repeat her experiment.

We clung to the idea of the brilliant course, delivered without an accident, that, as a lecturer, would still make the paying public aware of our great man, but the fact remained that in the case of an inspiration so unequal there was treachery, there was fallacy at least, in the very conception of a series.  In our scrutiny of ways and means we were inevitably subject to the old convention of the synopsis, the syllabus, partly of course not to lose the advantage of his grand free hand in drawing up such things; but for myself I laughed at our playbills even while I stickled for them.  It was indeed amusing work to be scrupulous for Frank Saltram, who also at moments laughed about it, so far as the comfort of a sigh so unstudied as to be cheerful might pass for such a sound.  He admitted with a candour all his own that he was in truth only to be depended on in the Mulvilles’ drawing-room.  “Yes,” he suggestively allowed, “it’s there, I think, that I’m at my best; quite late, when it gets toward eleven—and if I’ve not been too much worried.”  We all knew what too much worry meant; it meant too enslaved for the hour to the superstition of sobriety.  On the Saturdays I used to bring my portmanteau, so as not to have to think of eleven o’clock trains.  I had a bold theory that as regards this temple of talk and its altars of cushioned chintz, its pictures and its flowers, its large fireside and clear lamplight, we might really arrive at something if the Mulvilles would but charge for admission.  Here it was, however, that they shamelessly broke down; as there’s a flaw in every perfection this was the inexpugnable refuge of their egotism.  They declined to make their saloon a market, so that Saltram’s golden words continued the sole coin that rang there.  It can have happened to no man, however, to be paid a greater price than such an enchanted hush as surrounded him on his greatest nights.  The most profane, on these occasions, felt a presence; all minor eloquence grew dumb.  Adelaide Mulville, for the pride of her hospitality, anxiously watched the door or stealthily poked the fire.  I used to call it the music-room, for we had anticipated Bayreuth.  The very gates of the kingdom of light seemed to open and the horizon of thought to flash with the beauty of a sunrise at sea.

In the consideration of ways and means, the sittings of our little board, we were always conscious of the creak of Mrs. Saltram’s shoes.  She hovered, she interrupted, she almost presided, the state of affairs being mostly such as to supply her with every incentive for enquiring what was to be done next.  It was the pressing pursuit of this knowledge that, in concatenations of omnibuses and usually in very wet weather, led her so often to my door.  She thought us spiritless creatures with editors and publishers; but she carried matters to no great effect when she personally pushed into back-shops.  She wanted all moneys to be paid to herself: they were otherwise liable to such strange adventures.  They trickled away into the desert—they were mainly at best, alas, a slender stream.  The editors and the publishers were the last people to take this remarkable thinker at the valuation that has now pretty well come to be established.  The former were half-distraught between the desire to “cut” him and the difficulty of finding a crevice for their shears; and when a volume on this or that portentous subject was proposed to the latter they suggested alternative titles which, as reported to our friend, brought into his face the noble blank melancholy that sometimes made it handsome.  The title of an unwritten book didn’t after all much matter, but some masterpiece of Saltram’s may have died in his bosom of the shudder with which it was then convulsed.  The ideal solution, failing the fee at Kent Mulville’s door, would have been some system of subscription to projected treatises with their non-appearance provided for—provided for, I mean, by the indulgence of subscribers.  The author’s real misfortune was that subscribers were so wretchedly literal.  When they tastelessly enquired why publication hadn’t ensued I was tempted to ask who in the world had ever been so published.  Nature herself had brought him out in voluminous form, and the money was simply a deposit on borrowing the work.

V

I was doubtless often a nuisance to my friends in those years; but there were sacrifices I declined to make, and I never passed the hat to George Gravener.  I never forgot our little discussion in Ebury Street, and I think it stuck in my throat to have to treat him to the avowal I had found so easy to Mss Anvoy.  It had cost me nothing to confide to this charming girl, but it would have cost me much to confide to the friend of my youth, that the character of the “real gentleman” wasn’t an attribute of the man I took such pains for.  Was this because I had already generalised to the point of perceiving that women are really the unfastidious sex?  I knew at any rate that Gravener, already quite in view but still hungry and frugal, had naturally enough more ambition than charity.  He had sharp aims for stray sovereigns, being in view most from the tall steeple of Clockborough.  His immediate ambition was to occupy à lui seul the field of vision of that smokily-seeing city, and all his movements and postures were calculated for the favouring angle.  The movement of the hand as to the pocket had thus to alternate gracefully with the posture of the hand on the heart.  He talked to Clockborough in short only less beguilingly than Frank Saltram talked to his electors; with the difference to our credit, however, that we had already voted and that our candidate had no antagonist but himself.  He had more than once been at Wimbledon—it was Mrs. Mulville’s work not mine—and by the time the claret was served had seen the god descend.  He took more pains to swing his censer than I had expected, but on our way back to town he forestalled any little triumph I might have been so artless as to express by the observation that such a man was—a hundred times!—a man to use and never a man to be used by.  I remember that this neat remark humiliated me almost as much as if virtually, in the fever of broken slumbers, I hadn’t often made it myself.  The difference was that on Gravener’s part a force attached to it that could never attach to it on mine.  He was able to use people—he had the machinery; and the irony of Saltram’s being made showy at Clockborough came out to me when he said, as if he had no memory of our original talk and the idea were quite fresh to him: “I hate his type, you know, but I’ll be hanged if I don’t put some of those things in.  I can find a place for them: we might even find a place for the fellow himself.”  I myself should have had some fear—not, I need scarcely say, for the “things” themselves, but for some other things very near them; in fine for the rest of my eloquence.

Later on I could see that the oracle of Wimbledon was not in this case so appropriate as he would have been had the polities of the gods only coincided more exactly with those of the party.  There was a distinct moment when, without saying anything more definite to me, Gravener entertained the idea of annexing Mr. Saltram.  Such a project was delusive, for the discovery of analogies between his body of doctrine and that pressed from headquarters upon Clockborough—the bottling, in a word, of the air of those lungs for convenient public uncorking in corn-exchanges—was an experiment for which no one had the leisure.  The only thing would have been to carry him massively about, paid, caged, clipped; to turn him on for a particular occasion in a particular channel.  Frank Saltram’s channel, however, was essentially not calculable, and there was no knowing what disastrous floods might have ensued.  For what there would have been to do The Empire, the great newspaper, was there to look to; but it was no new misfortune that there were delicate situations in which The Empire broke down.  In fine there was an instinctive apprehension that a clever young journalist commissioned to report on Mr. Saltram might never come back from the errand.  No one knew better than George Gravener that that was a time when prompt returns counted double.  If he therefore found our friend an exasperating waste of orthodoxy it was because of his being, as he said, poor Gravener, up in the clouds, not because he was down in the dust.  The man would have been, just as he was, a real enough gentleman if he could have helped to put in a real gentleman.  Gravener’s great objection to the actual member was that he was not one.

Lady Coxon had a fine old house, a house with “grounds,” at Clockborough, which she had let; but after she returned from abroad I learned from Mrs. Saltram that the lease had fallen in and that she had gone down to resume possession.  I could see the faded red livery, the big square shoulders, the high-walled garden of this decent abode.  As the rumble of dissolution grew louder the suitor would have pressed his suit, and I found myself hoping the politics of the late Mayor’s widow wouldn’t be such as to admonish her to ask him to dinner; perhaps indeed I went so far as to pray, they would naturally form a bar to any contact.  I tried to focus the many-buttoned page, in the daily airing, as he perhaps even pushed the Bath-chair over somebody’s toes.  I was destined to hear, none the less, through Mrs. Saltram—who, I afterwards learned, was in correspondence with Lady Coxon’s housekeeper—that Gravener was known to have spoken of the habitation I had in my eye as the pleasantest thing at Clockborough.  On his part, I was sure, this was the voice not of envy but of experience.  The vivid scene was now peopled, and I could see him in the old-time garden with Miss Anvoy, who would be certain, and very justly, to think him good-looking.  It would be too much to describe myself as troubled by this play of surmise; but I occur to remember the relief, singular enough, of feeling it suddenly brushed away by an annoyance really much greater; an annoyance the result of its happening to come over me about that time with a rush that I was simply ashamed of Frank Saltram.  There were limits after all, and my mark at last had been reached.

I had had my disgusts, if I may allow myself to-day such an expression; but this was a supreme revolt.  Certain things cleared up in my mind, certain values stood out.  It was all very well to have an unfortunate temperament; there was nothing so unfortunate as to have, for practical purposes, nothing else.  I avoided George Gravener at this moment and reflected that at such a time I should do so most effectually by leaving England.  I wanted to forget Frank Saltram—that was all.  I didn’t want to do anything in the world to him but that.  Indignation had withered on the stalk, and I felt that one could pity him as much as one ought only by never thinking of him again.  It wasn’t for anything he had done to me; it was for what he had done to the Mulvilles.  Adelaide cried about it for a week, and her husband, profiting by the example so signally given him of the fatal effect of a want of character, left the letter, the drop too much, unanswered.  The letter, an incredible one, addressed by Saltram to Wimbledon during a stay with the Pudneys at Ramsgate, was the central feature of the incident, which, however, had many features, each more painful than whichever other we compared it with.  The Pudneys had behaved shockingly, but that was no excuse.  Base ingratitude, gross indecency—one had one’s choice only of such formulas as that the more they fitted the less they gave one rest.  These are dead aches now, and I am under no obligation, thank heaven, to be definite about the business.  There are things which if I had had to tell them—well, would have stopped me off here altogether.

I went abroad for the general election, and if I don’t know how much, on the Continent, I forgot, I at least know how much I missed, him.  At a distance, in a foreign land, ignoring, abjuring, unlearning him, I discovered what he had done for me.  I owed him, oh unmistakeably, certain noble conceptions; I had lighted my little taper at his smoky lamp, and lo it continued to twinkle.  But the light it gave me just showed me how much more I wanted.  I was pursued of course by letters from Mrs. Saltram which I didn’t scruple not to read, though quite aware her embarrassments couldn’t but be now of the gravest.  I sacrificed to propriety by simply putting them away, and this is how, one day as my absence drew to an end, my eye, while I rummaged in my desk for another paper, was caught by a name on a leaf that had detached itself from the packet.  The allusion was to Miss Anvoy, who, it appeared, was engaged to be married to Mr. George Gravener; and the news was two months old.  A direct question of Mrs. Saltram’s had thus remained unanswered—she had enquired of me in a postscript what sort of man this aspirant to such a hand might be.  The great other fact about him just then was that he had been triumphantly returned for Clockborough in the interest of the party that had swept the country—so that I might easily have referred Mrs. Saltram to the journals of the day.  Yet when I at last wrote her that I was coming home and would discharge my accumulated burden by seeing her, I but remarked in regard to her question that she must really put it to Miss Anvoy.

VI

I had almost avoided the general election, but some of its consequences, on my return, had smartly to be faced.  The season, in London, began to breathe again and to flap its folded wings.  Confidence, under the new Ministry, was understood to be reviving, and one of the symptoms, in a social body, was a recovery of appetite.  People once more fed together, and it happened that, one Saturday night, at somebody’s house, I fed with George Gravener.  When the ladies left the room I moved up to where he sat and begged to congratulate him.  “On my election?” he asked after a moment; so that I could feign, jocosely, not to have heard of that triumph and to be alluding to the rumour of a victory still more personal.  I dare say I coloured however, for his political success had momentarily passed out of my mind.  What was present to it was that he was to marry that beautiful girl; and yet his question made me conscious of some discomposure—I hadn’t intended to put this before everything.  He himself indeed ought gracefully to have done so, and I remember thinking the whole man was in this assumption that in expressing my sense of what he had won I had fixed my thoughts on his “seat.”  We straightened the matter out, and he was so much lighter in hand than I had lately seen him that his spirits might well have been fed from a twofold source.  He was so good as to say that he hoped I should soon make the acquaintance of Miss Anvoy, who, with her aunt, was presently coming up to town.  Lady Coxon, in the country, had been seriously unwell, and this had delayed their arrival.  I told him I had heard the marriage would be a splendid one; on which, brightened and humanised by his luck, he laughed and said “Do you mean for her?”  When I had again explained what I meant he went on: “Oh she’s an American, but you’d scarcely know it; unless, perhaps,” he added, “by her being used to more money than most girls in England, even the daughters of rich men.  That wouldn’t in the least do for a fellow like me, you know, if it wasn’t for the great liberality of her father.  He really has been most kind, and everything’s quite satisfactory.”  He added that his eldest brother had taken a tremendous fancy to her and that during a recent visit at Coldfield she had nearly won over Lady Maddock.  I gathered from something he dropped later on that the free-handed gentleman beyond the seas had not made a settlement, but had given a handsome present and was apparently to be looked to, across the water, for other favours.  People are simplified alike by great contentments and great yearnings, and, whether or no it was Gravener’s directness that begot my own, I seem to recall that in some turn taken by our talk he almost imposed it on me as an act of decorum to ask if Miss Anvoy had also by chance expectations from her aunt.  My enquiry drew out that Lady Coxon, who was the oddest of women, would have in any contingency to act under her late husband’s will, which was odder still, saddling her with a mass of queer obligations complicated with queer loopholes.  There were several dreary people, Coxon cousins, old maids, to whom she would have more or less to minister.  Gravener laughed, without saying no, when I suggested that the young lady might come in through a loophole; then suddenly, as if he suspected my turning a lantern on him, he declared quite dryly: “That’s all rot—one’s moved by other springs!”