The Coxon Fund
H >>
Henry James >> The Coxon Fund
"Seeing how wonderfully you've threshed the whole thing out," I
evasively replied, "gives me an extraordinary notion of the point
your enthusiasm has reached."
She considered this remark an instant with her eyes on mine, and I
divined that it struck her I might possibly intend it as a
reference to some personal subjection to our fat philosopher, to
some aberration of sensibility, some perversion of taste. At least
I couldn't interpret otherwise the sudden flash that came into her
face. Such a manifestation, as the result of any word of mine,
embarrassed me; but while I was thinking how to reassure her the
flush passed away in a smile of exquisite good nature. "Oh you see
one forgets so wonderfully how one dislikes him!" she said; and if
her tone simply extinguished his strange figure with the brush of
its compassion, it also rings in my ear to-day as the purest of all
our praises. But with what quick response of fine pity such a
relegation of the man himself made me privately sigh "Ah poor
Saltram!" She instantly, with this, took the measure of all I
didn't believe, and it enabled her to go on: "What can one do when
a person has given such a lift to one's interest in life?"
"Yes, what can one do?" If I struck her as a little vague it was
because I was thinking of another person. I indulged in another
inarticulate murmur--"Poor George Gravener!" What had become of
the lift HE had given that interest? Later on I made up my mind
that she was sore and stricken at the appearance he presented of
wanting the miserable money. This was the hidden reason of her
alienation. The probable sincerity, in spite of the illiberality,
of his scruples about the particular use of it under discussion
didn't efface the ugliness of his demand that they should buy a
good house with it. Then, as for his alienation, he didn't,
pardonably enough, grasp the lift Frank Saltram had given her
interest in life. If a mere spectator could ask that last
question, with what rage in his heart the man himself might! He
wasn't, like her, I was to see, too proud to show me why he was
disappointed.
CHAPTER XI
I was unable this time to stay to dinner: such at any rate was the
plea on which I took leave. I desired in truth to get away from my
young lady, for that obviously helped me not to pretend to satisfy
her. How COULD I satisfy her? I asked myself--how could I tell
her how much had been kept back? I didn't even know and I
certainly didn't desire to know. My own policy had ever been to
learn the least about poor Saltram's weaknesses--not to learn the
most. A great deal that I had in fact learned had been forced upon
me by his wife. There was something even irritating in Miss
Anvoy's crude conscientiousness, and I wondered why, after all, she
couldn't have let him alone and been content to entrust George
Gravener with the purchase of the good house. I was sure he would
have driven a bargain, got something excellent and cheap. I
laughed louder even than she, I temporised, I failed her; I told
her I must think over her case. I professed a horror of
responsibilities and twitted her with her own extravagant passion
for them. It wasn't really that I was afraid of the scandal, the
moral discredit for the Fund; what troubled me most was a feeling
of a different order. Of course, as the beneficiary of the Fund
was to enjoy a simple life-interest, as it was hoped that new
beneficiaries would arise and come up to new standards, it wouldn't
be a trifle that the first of these worthies shouldn't have been a
striking example of the domestic virtues. The Fund would start
badly, as it were, and the laurel would, in some respects at least,
scarcely be greener from the brows of the original wearer. That
idea, however, was at that hour, as I have hinted, not the source
of solicitude it ought perhaps to have been, for I felt less the
irregularity of Saltram's getting the money than that of this
exalted young woman's giving it up. I wanted her to have it for
herself, and I told her so before I went away. She looked graver
at this than she had looked at all, saying she hoped such a
preference wouldn't make me dishonest.
It made me, to begin with, very restless--made me, instead of going
straight to the station, fidget a little about that many-coloured
Common which gives Wimbledon horizons. There was a worry for me to
work off, or rather keep at a distance, for I declined even to
admit to myself that I had, in Miss Anvoy's phrase, been saddled
with it. What could have been clearer indeed than the attitude of
recognising perfectly what a world of trouble The Coxon Fund would
in future save us, and of yet liking better to face a continuance
of that trouble than see, and in fact contribute to, a deviation
from attainable bliss in the life of two other persons in whom I
was deeply interested? Suddenly, at the end of twenty minutes,
there was projected across this clearness the image of a massive
middle-aged man seated on a bench under a tree, with sad far-
wandering eyes and plump white hands folded on the head of a stick-
-a stick I recognised, a stout gold-headed staff that I had given
him in devoted days. I stopped short as he turned his face to me,
and it happened that for some reason or other I took in as I had
perhaps never done before the beauty of his rich blank gaze. It
was charged with experience as the sky is charged with light, and I
felt on the instant as if we had been overspanned and conjoined by
the great arch of a bridge or the great dome of a temple.
Doubtless I was rendered peculiarly sensitive to it by something in
the way I had been giving him up and sinking him. While I met it I
stood there smitten, and I felt myself responding to it with a sort
of guilty grimace. This brought back his attention in a smile
which expressed for me a cheerful weary patience, a bruised noble
gentleness. I had told Miss Anvoy that he had no dignity, but what
did he seem to me, all unbuttoned and fatigued as he waited for me
to come up, if he didn't seem unconcerned with small things, didn't
seem in short majestic? There was majesty in his mere
unconsciousness of our little conferences and puzzlements over his
maintenance and his reward.
After I had sat by him a few minutes I passed my arm over his big
soft shoulder--wherever you touched him you found equally little
firmness--and said in a tone of which the suppliance fell oddly on
my own ear: "Come back to town with me, old friend--come back and
spend the evening." I wanted to hold him, I wanted to keep him,
and at Waterloo, an hour later, I telegraphed possessively to the
Mulvilles. When he objected, as regards staying all night, that he
had no things, I asked him if he hadn't everything of mine. I had
abstained from ordering dinner, and it was too late for
preliminaries at a club; so we were reduced to tea and fried fish
at my rooms--reduced also to the transcendent. Something had come
up which made me want him to feel at peace with me--and which,
precisely, was all the dear man himself wanted on any occasion. I
had too often had to press upon him considerations irrelevant, but
it gives me pleasure now to think that on that particular evening I
didn't even mention Mrs. Saltram and the children. Late into the
night we smoked and talked; old shames and old rigours fell away
from us; I only let him see that I was conscious of what I owed
him. He was as mild as contrition and as copious as faith; he was
never so fine as on a shy return, and even better at forgiving than
at being forgiven. I dare say it was a smaller matter than that
famous night at Wimbledon, the night of the problematical sobriety
and of Miss Anvoy's initiation; but I was as much in it on this
occasion as I had been out of it then. At about 1.30 he was
sublime.
He never, in whatever situation, rose till all other risings were
over, and his breakfasts, at Wimbledon, had always been the
principal reason mentioned by departing cooks. The coast was
therefore clear for me to receive her when, early the next morning,
to my surprise, it was announced to me his wife had called. I
hesitated, after she had come up, about telling her Saltram was in
the house, but she herself settled the question, kept me reticent
by drawing forth a sealed letter which, looking at me very hard in
the eyes, she placed, with a pregnant absence of comment, in my
hand. For a single moment there glimmered before me the fond hope
that Mrs. Saltram had tendered me, as it were, her resignation and
desired to embody the act in an unsparing form. To bring this
about I would have feigned any humiliation; but after my eyes had
caught the superscription I heard myself say with a flatness that
betrayed a sense of something very different from relief: "Oh the
Pudneys!" I knew their envelopes though they didn't know mine.
They always used the kind sold at post-offices with the stamp
affixed, and as this letter hadn't been posted they had wasted a
penny on me. I had seen their horrid missives to the Mulvilles,
but hadn't been in direct correspondence with them.
"They enclosed it to me, to be delivered. They doubtless explain
to you that they hadn't your address."
I turned the thing over without opening it. "Why in the world
should they write to me?"
"Because they've something to tell you. The worst," Mrs. Saltram
dryly added.
It was another chapter, I felt, of the history of their lamentable
quarrel with her husband, the episode in which, vindictively,
disingenuously as they themselves had behaved, one had to admit
that he had put himself more grossly in the wrong than at any
moment of his life. He had begun by insulting the matchless
Mulvilles for these more specious protectors, and then, according
to his wont at the end of a few months, had dug a still deeper
ditch for his aberration than the chasm left yawning behind. The
chasm at Wimbledon was now blessedly closed; but the Pudneys,
across their persistent gulf, kept up the nastiest fire. I never
doubted they had a strong case, and I had been from the first for
not defending him--reasoning that if they weren't contradicted
they'd perhaps subside. This was above all what I wanted, and I so
far prevailed that I did arrest the correspondence in time to save
our little circle an infliction heavier than it perhaps would have
borne. I knew, that is I divined, that their allegations had gone
as yet only as far as their courage, conscious as they were in
their own virtue of an exposed place in which Saltram could have
planted a blow. It was a question with them whether a man who had
himself so much to cover up would dare his blow; so that these
vessels of rancour were in a manner afraid of each other. I judged
that on the day the Pudneys should cease for some reason or other
to be afraid they would treat us to some revelation more
disconcerting than any of its predecessors. As I held Mrs.
Saltram's letter in my hand it was distinctly communicated to me
that the day had come--they had ceased to be afraid. "I don't want
to know the worst," I presently declared.
"You'll have to open the letter. It also contains an enclosure."
I felt it--it was fat and uncanny. "Wheels within wheels!" I
exclaimed. "There's something for me too to deliver."
"So they tell me--to Miss Anvoy."
I stared; I felt a certain thrill. "Why don't they send it to her
directly?"
Mrs. Saltram hung fire. "Because she's staying with Mr. and Mrs.
Mulville."
"And why should that prevent?"
Again my visitor faltered, and I began to reflect on the grotesque,
the unconscious perversity of her action. I was the only person
save George Gravener and the Mulvilles who was aware of Sir Gregory
Coxon's and of Miss Anvoy's strange bounty. Where could there have
been a more signal illustration of the clumsiness of human affairs
than her having complacently selected this moment to fly in the
face of it? "There's the chance of their seeing her letters. They
know Mr. Pudney's hand."
Still I didn't understand; then it flashed upon me. "You mean they
might intercept it? How can you imply anything so base?" I
indignantly demanded
"It's not I--it's Mr. Pudney!" cried Mrs. Saltram with a flush.
"It's his own idea."
"Then why couldn't he send the letter to you to be delivered?"
Mrs. Saltram's embarrassment increased; she gave me another hard
look. "You must make that out for yourself."
I made it out quickly enough. "It's a denunciation?"
"A real lady doesn't betray her husband!" this virtuous woman
exclaimed.
I burst out laughing, and I fear my laugh may have had an effect of
impertinence. "Especially to Miss Anvoy, who's so easily shocked?
Why do such things concern HER?" I asked, much at a loss.
"Because she's there, exposed to all his craft. Mr. and Mrs.
Pudney have been watching this: they feel she may be taken in."
"Thank you for all the rest of us! What difference can it make
when she has lost her power to contribute?"
Again Mrs. Saltram considered; then very nobly: "There are other
things in the world than money." This hadn't occurred to her so
long as the young lady had any; but she now added, with a glance at
my letter, that Mr. and Mrs. Pudney doubtless explained their
motives. "It's all in kindness," she continued as she got up.
"Kindness to Miss Anvoy? You took, on the whole, another view of
kindness before her reverses."
My companion smiled with some acidity "Perhaps you're no safer than
the Mulvilles!"
I didn't want her to think that, nor that she should report to the
Pudneys that they had not been happy in their agent; and I well
remember that this was the moment at which I began, with
considerable emotion, to promise myself to enjoin upon Miss Anvoy
never to open any letter that should come to her in one of those
penny envelopes. My emotion, and I fear I must add my confusion,
quickly deepened; I presently should have been as glad to frighten
Mrs. Saltram as to think I might by some diplomacy restore the
Pudneys to a quieter vigilance.
"It's best you should take my view of my safety," I at any rate
soon responded. When I saw she didn't know what I meant by this I
added: "You may turn out to have done, in bringing me this letter,
a thing you'll profoundly regret." My tone had a significance
which, I could see, did make her uneasy, and there was a moment,
after I had made two or three more remarks of studiously
bewildering effect, at which her eyes followed so hungrily the
little flourish of the letter with which I emphasised them that I
instinctively slipped Mr. Pudney's communication into my pocket.
She looked, in her embarrassed annoyance, capable of grabbing it to
send it back to him. I felt, after she had gone, as if I had
almost given her my word I wouldn't deliver the enclosure. The
passionate movement, at any rate, with which, in solitude, I
transferred the whole thing, unopened, from my pocket to a drawer
which I double-locked would have amounted, for an initiated
observer, to some such pledge.
CHAPTER XII
Mrs. Saltram left me drawing my breath more quickly and indeed
almost in pain--as if I had just perilously grazed the loss of
something precious. I didn't quite know what it was--it had a
shocking resemblance to my honour. The emotion was the livelier
surely in that my pulses even yet vibrated to the pleasure with
which, the night before, I had rallied to the rare analyst, the
great intellectual adventurer and pathfinder. What had dropped
from me like a cumbersome garment as Saltram appeared before me in
the afternoon on the heath was the disposition to haggle over his
value. Hang it, one had to choose, one had to put that value
somewhere; so I would put it really high and have done with it.
Mrs. Mulville drove in for him at a discreet hour--the earliest she
could suppose him to have got up; and I learned that Miss Anvoy
would also have come had she not been expecting a visit from Mr.
Gravener. I was perfectly mindful that I was under bonds to see
this young lady, and also that I had a letter to hand to her; but I
took my time, I waited from day to day. I left Mrs. Saltram to
deal as her apprehensions should prompt with the Pudneys. I knew
at last what I meant--I had ceased to wince at my responsibility.
I gave this supreme impression of Saltram time to fade if it would;
but it didn't fade, and, individually, it hasn't faded even now.
During the month that I thus invited myself to stiffen again,
Adelaide Mulville, perplexed by my absence, wrote to me to ask why
I WAS so stiff. At that season of the year I was usually oftener
"with" them. She also wrote that she feared a real estrangement
had set in between Mr. Gravener and her sweet young friend--a state
of things but half satisfactory to her so long as the advantage
resulting to Mr. Saltram failed to disengage itself from the merely
nebulous state. She intimated that her sweet young friend was, if
anything, a trifle too reserved; she also intimated that there
might now be an opening for another clever young man. There never
was the slightest opening, I may here parenthesise, and of course
the question can't come up to-day. These are old frustrations now.
Ruth Anvoy hasn't married, I hear, and neither have I. During the
month, toward the end, I wrote to George Gravener to ask if, on a
special errand, I might come to see him, and his answer was to
knock the very next day at my door. I saw he had immediately
connected my enquiry with the talk we had had in the railway-
carriage, and his promptitude showed that the ashes of his
eagerness weren't yet cold. I told him there was something I felt
I ought in candour to let him know--I recognised the obligation his
friendly confidence had laid on me.
"You mean Miss Anvoy has talked to you? She has told me so
herself," he said.
"It wasn't to tell you so that I wanted to see you," I replied;
"for it seemed to me that such a communication would rest wholly
with herself. If however she did speak to you of our conversation
she probably told you I was discouraging."
"Discouraging?"
"On the subject of a present application of The Coxon Fund."
"To the case of Mr. Saltram? My dear fellow, I don't know what you
call discouraging!" Gravener cried.
"Well I thought I was, and I thought she thought I was."
"I believe she did, but such a thing's measured by the effect.
She's not 'discouraged,'" he said.
"That's her own affair. The reason I asked you to see me was that
it appeared to me I ought to tell you frankly that--decidedly!--I
can't undertake to produce that effect. In fact I don't want to!"
"It's very good of you, damn you!" my visitor laughed, red and
really grave. Then he said: "You'd like to see that scoundrel
publicly glorified--perched on the pedestal of a great
complimentary pension?"
I braced myself. "Taking one form of public recognition with
another it seems to me on the whole I should be able to bear it.
When I see the compliments that are paid right and left I ask
myself why this one shouldn't take its course. This therefore is
what you're entitled to have looked to me to mention to you. I've
some evidence that perhaps would be really dissuasive, but I
propose to invite Mss Anvoy to remain in ignorance of it."
"And to invite me to do the same?"
"Oh you don't require it--you've evidence enough. I speak of a
sealed letter that I've been requested to deliver to her."
"And you don't mean to?"
"There's only one consideration that would make me," I said.
Gravener's clear handsome eyes plunged into mine a minute, but
evidently without fishing up a clue to this motive--a failure by
which I was almost wounded. "What does the letter contain?"
"It's sealed, as I tell you, and I don't know what it contains."
"Why is it sent through you?"
"Rather than you?" I wondered how to put the thing. "The only
explanation I can think of is that the person sending it may have
imagined your relations with Miss Anvoy to be at an end--may have
been told this is the case by Mrs. Saltram."
"My relations with Miss Anvoy are not at an end," poor Gravener
stammered.
Again for an instant I thought. "The offer I propose to make you
gives me the right to address you a question remarkably direct.
Are you still engaged to Miss Anvoy?"
"No, I'm not," he slowly brought out. "But we're perfectly good
friends."
"Such good friends that you'll again become prospective husband and
wife if the obstacle in your path be removed?"
"Removed?" he anxiously repeated.
"If I send Miss Anvoy the letter I speak of she may give up her
idea."
"Then for God's sake send it!"
"I'll do so if you're ready to assure me that her sacrifice would
now presumably bring about your marriage."
"I'd marry her the next day!" my visitor cried.
"Yes, but would she marry YOU? What I ask of you of course is
nothing less than your word of honour as to your conviction of
this. If you give it me," I said, "I'll engage to hand her the
letter before night."
Gravener took up his hat; turning it mechanically round he stood
looking a moment hard at its unruffled perfection. Then very
angrily honestly and gallantly, "Hand it to the devil!" he broke
out; with which he clapped the hat on his head and left me.
"Will you read it or not?" I said to Ruth Anvoy, at Wimbledon, when
I had told her the story of Mrs. Saltram's visit.
She debated for a time probably of the briefest, but long enough to
make me nervous. "Have you brought it with you?"
"No indeed. It's at home, locked up."
There was another great silence, and then she said "Go back and
destroy it."
I went back, but I didn't destroy it till after Saltram's death,
when I burnt it unread. The Pudneys approached her again
pressingly, but, prompt as they were, The Coxon Fund had already
become an operative benefit and a general amaze: Mr. Saltram,
while we gathered about, as it were, to watch the manna descend,
had begun to draw the magnificent income. He drew it as he had
always drawn everything, with a grand abstracted gesture. Its
magnificence, alas, as all the world now knows, quite quenched him;
it was the beginning of his decline. It was also naturally a new
grievance for his wife, who began to believe in him as soon as he
was blighted, and who at this hour accuses us of having bribed him,
on the whim of a meddlesome American, to renounce his glorious
office, to become, as she says, like everybody else. The very day
he found himself able to publish he wholly ceased to produce. This
deprived us, as may easily be imagined, of much of our occupation,
and especially deprived the Mulvilles, whose want of self-support I
never measured till they lost their great inmate. They've no one
to live on now. Adelaide's most frequent reference to their
destitution is embodied in the remark that dear far-away Ruth's
intentions were doubtless good. She and Kent are even yet looking
for another prop, but no one presents a true sphere of usefulness.
They complain that people are self-sufficing. With Saltram the
fine type of the child of adoption was scattered, the grander, the
elder style. They've got their carriage back, but what's an empty
carriage? In short I think we were all happier as well as poorer
before; even including George Gravener, who by the deaths of his
brother and his nephew has lately become Lord Maddock. His wife,
whose fortune clears the property, is criminally dull; he hates
being in the Upper House, and hasn't yet had high office. But what
are these accidents, which I should perhaps apologise for
mentioning, in the light of the great eventual boon promised the
patient by the rate at which The Coxon Fund must be rolling up?