The Coxon Fund

Henry James

The Coxon Fund

I

“They’ve got him for life!” I said to myself that evening on my way back to the station; but later on, alone in the compartment (from Wimbledon to Waterloo, before the glory of the District Railway) I amended this declaration in the light of the sense that my friends would probably after all not enjoy a monopoly of Mr. Saltram.  I won’t pretend to have taken his vast measure on that first occasion, but I think I had achieved a glimpse of what the privilege of his acquaintance might mean for many persons in the way of charges accepted.  He had been a great experience, and it was this perhaps that had put me into the frame of foreseeing how we should all, sooner or later, have the honour of dealing with him as a whole.  Whatever impression I then received of the amount of this total, I had a full enough vision of the patience of the Mulvilles.  He was to stay all the winter: Adelaide dropped it in a tone that drew the sting from the inevitable emphasis.  These excellent people might indeed have been content to give the circle of hospitality a diameter of six months; but if they didn’t say he was to stay all summer as well it was only because this was more than they ventured to hope.  I remember that at dinner that evening he wore slippers, new and predominantly purple, of some queer carpet-stuff; but the Mulvilles were still in the stage of supposing that he might be snatched from them by higher bidders.  At a later time they grew, poor dears, to fear no snatching; but theirs was a fidelity which needed no help from competition to make them proud.  Wonderful indeed as, when all was said, you inevitably pronounced Frank Saltram, it was not to be overlooked that the Kent Mulvilles were in their way still more extraordinary: as striking an instance as could easily be encountered of the familiar truth that remarkable men find remarkable conveniences.

They had sent for me from Wimbledon to come out and dine, and there had been an implication in Adelaide’s note—judged by her notes alone she might have been thought silly—that it was a case in which something momentous was to be determined or done.  I had never known them not be in a “state” about somebody, and I dare say I tried to be droll on this point in accepting their invitation.  On finding myself in the presence of their latest discovery I had not at first felt irreverence droop—and, thank heaven, I have never been absolutely deprived of that alternative in Mr. Saltram’s company.  I saw, however—I hasten to declare it—that compared to this specimen their other phoenixes had been birds of inconsiderable feather, and I afterwards took credit to myself for not having even in primal bewilderments made a mistake about the essence of the man.  He had an incomparable gift; I never was blind to it—it dazzles me still.  It dazzles me perhaps even more in remembrance than in fact, for I’m not unaware that for so rare a subject the imagination goes to some expense, inserting a jewel here and there or giving a twist to a plume.  How the art of portraiture would rejoice in this figure if the art of portraiture had only the canvas!  Nature, in truth, had largely rounded it, and if memory, hovering about it, sometimes holds her breath, this is because the voice that comes back was really golden.

Though the great man was an inmate and didn’t dress, he kept dinner on this occasion waiting, and the first words he uttered on coming into the room were an elated announcement to Mulville that he had found out something.  Not catching the allusion and gaping doubtless a little at his face, I privately asked Adelaide what he had found out.  I shall never forget the look she gave me as she replied: “Everything!”  She really believed it.  At that moment, at any rate, he had found out that the mercy of the Mulvilles was infinite.  He had previously of course discovered, as I had myself for that matter, that their dinners were soignés.  Let me not indeed, in saying this, neglect to declare that I shall falsify my counterfeit if I seem to hint that there was in his nature any ounce of calculation.  He took whatever came, but he never plotted for it, and no man who was so much of an absorbent can ever have been so little of a parasite.  He had a system of the universe, but he had no system of sponging—that was quite hand-to-mouth.  He had fine gross easy senses, but it was not his good-natured appetite that wrought confusion.  If he had loved us for our dinners we could have paid with our dinners, and it would have been a great economy of finer matter.  I make free in these connexions with the plural possessive because if I was never able to do what the Mulvilles did, and people with still bigger houses and simpler charities, I met, first and last, every demand of reflexion, of emotion—particularly perhaps those of gratitude and of resentment.  No one, I think, paid the tribute of giving him up so often, and if it’s rendering honour to borrow wisdom I’ve a right to talk of my sacrifices.  He yielded lessons as the sea yields fish—I lived for a while on this diet.  Sometimes it almost appeared to me that his massive monstrous failure—if failure after all it was—had been designed for my private recreation.  He fairly pampered my curiosity; but the history of that experience would take me too far.  This is not the large canvas I just now spoke of, and I wouldn’t have approached him with my present hand had it been a question of all the features.  Frank Saltram’s features, for artistic purposes, are verily the anecdotes that are to be gathered.  Their name is legion, and this is only one, of which the interest is that it concerns even more closely several other persons.  Such episodes, as one looks back, are the little dramas that made up the innumerable facets of the big drama—which is yet to be reported.

II

It is furthermore remarkable that though the two stories are distinct—my own, as it were, and this other—they equally began, in a manner, the first night of my acquaintance with Frank Saltram, the night I came back from Wimbledon so agitated with a new sense of life that, in London, for the very thrill of it, I could only walk home.  Walking and swinging my stick, I overtook, at Buckingham Gate, George Gravener, and George Gravener’s story may be said to have begun with my making him, as our paths lay together, come home with me for a talk.  I duly remember, let me parenthesise, that it was still more that of another person, and also that several years were to elapse before it was to extend to a second chapter.  I had much to say to him, none the less, about my visit to the Mulvilles, whom he more indifferently knew, and I was at any rate so amusing that for long afterwards he never encountered me without asking for news of the old man of the sea.  I hadn’t said Mr. Saltram was old, and it was to be seen that he was of an age to outweather George Gravener.  I had at that time a lodging in Ebury Street, and Gravener was staying at his brother’s empty house in Eaton Square.  At Cambridge, five years before, even in our devastating set, his intellectual power had seemed to me almost awful.  Some one had once asked me privately, with blanched cheeks, what it was then that after all such a mind as that left standing.  “It leaves itself!” I could recollect devoutly replying.  I could smile at present for this remembrance, since before we got to Ebury Street I was struck with the fact that, save in the sense of being well set up on his legs, George Gravener had actually ceased to tower.  The universe he laid low had somehow bloomed again—the usual eminences were visible.  I wondered whether he had lost his humour, or only, dreadful thought, had never had any—not even when I had fancied him most Aristophanesque.  What was the need of appealing to laughter, however, I could enviously enquire, where you might appeal so confidently to measurement?  Mr. Saltram’s queer figure, his thick nose and hanging lip, were fresh to me: in the light of my old friend’s fine cold symmetry they presented mere success in amusing as the refuge of conscious ugliness.  Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener looked as blank and parliamentary as if he were fifty and popular.  In my scrap of a residence—he had a worldling’s eye for its futile conveniences, but never a comrade’s joke—I sounded Frank Saltram in his ears; a circumstance I mention in order to note that even then I was surprised at his impatience of my enlivenment.  As he had never before heard of the personage it took indeed the form of impatience of the preposterous Mulvilles, his relation to whom, like mine, had had its origin in an early, a childish intimacy with the young Adelaide, the fruit of multiplied ties in the previous generation.  When she married Kent Mulville, who was older than Gravener and I and much more amiable, I gained a friend, but Gravener practically lost one.  We reacted in different ways from the form taken by what he called their deplorable social action—the form (the term was also his) of nasty second-rate gush.  I may have held in my ‘for intérieur’ that the good people at Wimbledon were beautiful fools, but when he sniffed at them I couldn’t help taking the opposite line, for I already felt that even should we happen to agree it would always be for reasons that differed.  It came home to me that he was admirably British as, without so much as a sociable sneer at my bookbinder, he turned away from the serried rows of my little French library.

“Of course I’ve never seen the fellow, but it’s clear enough he’s a humbug.”

“Clear ‘enough’ is just what it isn’t,” I replied; “if it only were!”  That ejaculation on my part must have been the beginning of what was to be later a long ache for final frivolous rest.  Gravener was profound enough to remark after a moment that in the first place he couldn’t be anything but a Dissenter, and when I answered that the very note of his fascination was his extraordinary speculative breadth my friend retorted that there was no cad like your cultivated cad, and that I might depend upon discovering—since I had had the levity not already to have enquired—that my shining light proceeded, a generation back, from a Methodist cheesemonger.  I confess I was struck with his insistence, and I said, after reflexion: “It may be—I admit it may be; but why on earth are you so sure?”—asking the question mainly to lay him the trap of saying that it was because the poor man didn’t dress for dinner.  He took an instant to circumvent my trap and come blandly out the other side.

“Because the Kent Mulvilles have invented him.  They’ve an infallible hand for frauds.  All their geese are swans.  They were born to be duped, they like it, they cry for it, they don’t know anything from anything, and they disgust one—luckily perhaps!—with Christian charity.”  His vehemence was doubtless an accident, but it might have been a strange foreknowledge.  I forget what protest I dropped; it was at any rate something that led him to go on after a moment: “I only ask one thing—it’s perfectly simple.  Is a man, in a given case, a real gentleman?”

“A real gentleman, my dear fellow—that’s so soon said!”

“Not so soon when he isn’t!  If they’ve got hold of one this time he must be a great rascal!”

“I might feel injured,” I answered, “if I didn’t reflect that they don’t rave about me.”

“Don’t be too sure!  I’ll grant that he’s a gentleman,” Gravener presently added, “if you’ll admit that he’s a scamp.”

“I don’t know which to admire most, your logic or your benevolence.”

My friend coloured at this, but he didn’t change the subject.  “Where did they pick him up?”

“I think they were struck with something he had published.”

“I can fancy the dreary thing!”

“I believe they found out he had all sorts of worries and difficulties.”

“That of course wasn’t to be endured, so they jumped at the privilege of paying his debts!”  I professed that I knew nothing about his debts, and I reminded my visitor that though the dear Mulvilles were angels they were neither idiots nor millionaires.  What they mainly aimed at was reuniting Mr. Saltram to his wife.  “I was expecting to hear he has basely abandoned her,” Gravener went on, at this, “and I’m too glad you don’t disappoint me.”

I tried to recall exactly what Mrs. Mulville had told me.  “He didn’t leave her—no.  It’s she who has left him.”

“Left him to us?” Gravener asked.  “The monster—many thanks!  I decline to take him.”

“You’ll hear more about him in spite of yourself.  I can’t, no, I really can’t resist the impression that he’s a big man.”  I was already mastering—to my shame perhaps be it said—just the tone my old friend least liked.

“It’s doubtless only a trifle,” he returned, “but you haven’t happened to mention what his reputation’s to rest on.”

“Why on what I began by boring you with—his extraordinary mind.”

“As exhibited in his writings?”

“Possibly in his writings, but certainly in his talk, which is far and away the richest I ever listened to.”

“And what’s it all about?”

“My dear fellow, don’t ask me!  About everything!” I pursued, reminding myself of poor Adelaide.  “About his ideas of things,” I then more charitably added.  “You must have heard him to know what I mean—it’s unlike anything that ever was heard.”  I coloured, I admit, I overcharged a little, for such a picture was an anticipation of Saltram’s later development and still more of my fuller acquaintance with him.  However, I really expressed, a little lyrically perhaps, my actual imagination of him when I proceeded to declare that, in a cloud of tradition, of legend, he might very well go down to posterity as the greatest of all great talkers.  Before we parted George Gravener had wondered why such a row should be made about a chatterbox the more and why he should be pampered and pensioned.  The greater the wind-bag the greater the calamity.  Out of proportion to everything else on earth had come to be this wagging of the tongue.  We were drenched with talk—our wretched age was dying of it.  I differed from him here sincerely, only going so far as to concede, and gladly, that we were drenched with sound.  It was not however the mere speakers who were killing us—it was the mere stammerers.  Fine talk was as rare as it was refreshing—the gift of the gods themselves, the one starry spangle on the ragged cloak of humanity.  How many men were there who rose to this privilege, of how many masters of conversation could he boast the acquaintance?  Dying of talk?—why we were dying of the lack of it!  Bad writing wasn’t talk, as many people seemed to think, and even good wasn’t always to be compared to it.  From the best talk indeed the best writing had something to learn.  I fancifully added that we too should peradventure be gilded by the legend, should be pointed at for having listened, for having actually heard.  Gravener, who had glanced at his watch and discovered it was midnight, found to all this a retort beautifully characteristic of him.

“There’s one little fact to be borne in mind in the presence equally of the best talk and of the worst.”  He looked, in saying this, as if he meant great things, and I was sure he could only mean once more that neither of them mattered if a man wasn’t a real gentleman.  Perhaps it was what he did mean; he deprived me however of the exultation of being right by putting the truth in a slightly different way.  “The only thing that really counts for one’s estimate of a person is his conduct.”  He had his watch still in his palm, and I reproached him with unfair play in having ascertained beforehand that it was now the hour at which I always gave in.  My pleasantry so far failed to mollify him that he promptly added that to the rule he had just enunciated there was absolutely no exception.

“None whatever?”

“None whatever.”

“Trust me then to try to be good at any price!” I laughed as I went with him to the door.  “I declare I will be, if I have to be horrible!”

III

If that first night was one of the liveliest, or at any rate was the freshest, of my exaltations, there was another, four years later, that was one of my great discomposures.  Repetition, I well knew by this time, was the secret of Saltram’s power to alienate, and of course one would never have seen him at his finest if one hadn’t seen him in his remorses.  They set in mainly at this season and were magnificent, elemental, orchestral.  I was quite aware that one of these atmospheric disturbances was now due; but none the less, in our arduous attempt to set him on his feet as a lecturer, it was impossible not to feel that two failures were a large order, as we said, for a short course of five.  This was the second time, and it was past nine o’clock; the audience, a muster unprecedented and really encouraging, had fortunately the attitude of blandness that might have been looked for in persons whom the promise of (if I’m not mistaken) An Analysis of Primary Ideas had drawn to the neighbourhood of Upper Baker Street.  There was in those days in that region a petty lecture-hall to be secured on terms as moderate as the funds left at our disposal by the irrepressible question of the maintenance of five small Saltrams—I include the mother—and one large one.  By the time the Saltrams, of different sizes, were all maintained we had pretty well poured out the oil that might have lubricated the machinery for enabling the most original of men to appear to maintain them.

It was I, the other time, who had been forced into the breach, standing up there for an odious lamplit moment to explain to half a dozen thin benches, where earnest brows were virtuously void of anything so cynical as a suspicion, that we couldn’t so much as put a finger on Mr. Saltram.  There was nothing to plead but that our scouts had been out from the early hours and that we were afraid that on one of his walks abroad—he took one, for meditation, whenever he was to address such a company—some accident had disabled or delayed him.  The meditative walks were a fiction, for he never, that any one could discover, prepared anything but a magnificent prospectus; hence his circulars and programmes, of which I possess an almost complete collection, are the solemn ghosts of generations never born.  I put the case, as it seemed to me, at the best; but I admit I had been angry, and Kent Mulville was shocked at my want of public optimism.  This time therefore I left the excuses to his more practised patience, only relieving myself in response to a direct appeal from a young lady next whom, in the hall, I found myself sitting.  My position was an accident, but if it had been calculated the reason would scarce have eluded an observer of the fact that no one else in the room had an approach to an appearance.  Our philosopher’s “tail” was deplorably limp.  This visitor was the only person who looked at her ease, who had come a little in the spirit of adventure.  She seemed to carry amusement in her handsome young head, and her presence spoke, a little mystifyingly, of a sudden extension of Saltram’s sphere of influence.  He was doing better than we hoped, and he had chosen such an occasion, of all occasions, to succumb to heaven knew which of his fond infirmities.  The young lady produced an impression of auburn hair and black velvet, and had on her other hand a companion of obscurer type, presumably a waiting-maid.  She herself might perhaps have been a foreign countess, and before she addressed me I had beguiled our sorry interval by finding in her a vague recall of the opening of some novel of Madame Sand.  It didn’t make her more fathomable to pass in a few minutes from this to the certitude that she was American; it simply engendered depressing reflexions as to the possible check to contributions from Boston.  She asked me if, as a person apparently more initiated, I would recommend further waiting, and I answered that if she considered I was on my honour I would privately deprecate it.  Perhaps she didn’t; at any rate our talk took a turn that prolonged it till she became aware we were left almost alone.  I presently ascertained she knew Mrs. Saltram, and this explained in a manner the miracle.  The brotherhood of the friends of the husband was as nothing to the brotherhood, or perhaps I should say the sisterhood, of the friends of the wife.  Like the Kent Mulvilles I belonged to both fraternities, and even better than they I think I had sounded the abyss of Mrs. Saltram’s wrongs.  She bored me to extinction, and I knew but too well how she had bored her husband; but there were those who stood by her, the most efficient of whom were indeed the handful of poor Saltram’s backers.  They did her liberal justice, whereas her mere patrons and partisans had nothing but hatred for our philosopher.  I’m bound to say it was we, however—we of both camps, as it were—who had always done most for her.

I thought my young lady looked rich—I scarcely knew why; and I hoped she had put her hand in her pocket.  I soon made her out, however, not at all a fine fanatic—she was but a generous, irresponsible enquirer.  She had come to England to see her aunt, and it was at her aunt’s she had met the dreary lady we had all so much on our mind.  I saw she’d help to pass the time when she observed that it was a pity this lady wasn’t intrinsically more interesting.  That was refreshing, for it was an article of faith in Mrs. Saltram’s circle—at least among those who scorned to know her horrid husband—that she was attractive on her merits.  She was in truth a most ordinary person, as Saltram himself would have been if he hadn’t been a prodigy.  The question of vulgarity had no application to him, but it was a measure his wife kept challenging you to apply.  I hasten to add that the consequences of your doing so were no sufficient reason for his having left her to starve.  “He doesn’t seem to have much force of character,” said my young lady; at which I laughed out so loud that my departing friends looked back at me over their shoulders as if I were making a joke of their discomfiture.  My joke probably cost Saltram a subscription or two, but it helped me on with my interlocutress.  “She says he drinks like a fish,” she sociably continued, “and yet she allows that his mind’s wonderfully clear.”  It was amusing to converse with a pretty girl who could talk of the clearness of Saltram’s mind.  I expected next to hear she had been assured he was awfully clever.  I tried to tell her—I had it almost on my conscience—what was the proper way to regard him; an effort attended perhaps more than ever on this occasion with the usual effect of my feeling that I wasn’t after all very sure of it.  She had come to-night out of high curiosity—she had wanted to learn this proper way for herself.  She had read some of his papers and hadn’t understood them; but it was at home, at her aunt’s, that her curiosity had been kindled—kindled mainly by his wife’s remarkable stories of his want of virtue.  “I suppose they ought to have kept me away,” my companion dropped, “and I suppose they’d have done so if I hadn’t somehow got an idea that he’s fascinating.  In fact Mrs. Saltram herself says he is.”

“So you came to see where the fascination resides?  Well, you’ve seen!”

My young lady raised fine eyebrows.  “Do you mean in his bad faith?”

“In the extraordinary effects of it; his possession, that is, of some quality or other that condemns us in advance to forgive him the humiliation, as I may call it, to which he has subjected us.”

“The humiliation?”

“Why mine, for instance, as one of his guarantors, before you as the purchaser of a ticket.”

She let her charming gay eyes rest on me.  “You don’t look humiliated a bit, and if you did I should let you off, disappointed as I am; for the mysterious quality you speak of is just the quality I came to see.”

“Oh, you can’t ‘see’ it!” I cried.

“How then do you get at it?”

“You don’t!  You mustn’t suppose he’s good-looking,” I added.

“Why his wife says he’s lovely!”

My hilarity may have struck her as excessive, but I confess it broke out afresh.  Had she acted only in obedience to this singular plea, so characteristic, on Mrs. Saltram’s part, of what was irritating in the narrowness of that lady’s point of view?  “Mrs. Saltram,” I explained, “undervalues him where he’s strongest, so that, to make up for it perhaps, she overpraises him where he’s weak.  He’s not, assuredly, superficially attractive; he’s middle-aged, fat, featureless save for his great eyes.”

“Yes, his great eyes,” said my young lady attentively.  She had evidently heard all about his great eyes—the beaux yeux for which alone we had really done it all.