The Coxon Fund
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The Coxon Fund
by Henry James
CHAPTER 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 soignes. 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.
CHAPTER 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
interieur' 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!"
CHAPTER 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.
"They're tragic and splendid--lights on a dangerous coast. But he
moves badly and dresses worse, and altogether he's anything but
smart."
My companion, who appeared to reflect on this, after a moment
appealed. "Do you call him a real gentleman?"