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!”