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?”
I started slightly at the question, for I had a sense of recognising it:
George Gravener, years before, that first flushed night, had put me face
to face with it. It had embarrassed me then, but it didn’t embarrass me
now, for I had lived with it and overcome it and disposed of it. “A real
gentleman? Emphatically not!”
My promptitude surprised her a little, but I quickly felt how little it
was to Gravener I was now talking. “Do you say that because he’s—what do
you call it in England?—of humble extraction?”
“Not a bit. His father was a country school-master and his mother the
widow of a sexton, but that has nothing to do with it. I say it simply
because I know him well.”
“But isn’t it an awful drawback?”
“Awful—quite awful.”
“I mean isn’t it positively fatal?”
“Fatal to what? Not to his magnificent vitality.”
Again she had a meditative moment. “And is his magnificent vitality the
cause of his vices?”
“Your questions are formidable, but I’m glad you put them. I was
thinking of his noble intellect. His vices, as you say, have been much
exaggerated: they consist mainly after all in one comprehensive defect.”
“A want of will?”
“A want of dignity.”
“He doesn’t recognise his obligations?”
“On the contrary, he recognises them with effusion, especially in public:
he smiles and bows and beckons across the street to them. But when they
pass over he turns away, and he speedily loses them in the crowd. The
recognition’s purely spiritual—it isn’t in the least social. So he
leaves all his belongings to other people to take care of. He accepts
favours, loans, sacrifices—all with nothing more deterrent than an agony
of shame. Fortunately we’re a little faithful band, and we do what we
can.” I held my tongue about the natural children, engendered, to the
number of three, in the wantonness of his youth. I only remarked that he
did make efforts—often tremendous ones. “But the efforts,” I said,
“never come to much: the only things that come to much are the
abandonments, the surrenders.”
“And how much do they come to?”
“You’re right to put it as if we had a big bill to pay, but, as I’ve told
you before, your questions are rather terrible. They come, these mere
exercises of genius, to a great sum total of poetry, of philosophy, a
mighty mass of speculation, notation, quotation. The genius is there,
you see, to meet the surrender; but there’s no genius to support the
defence.”
“But what is there, after all, at his age, to show?”
“In the way of achievement recognised and reputation established?” I
asked. “To ‘show’ if you will, there isn’t much, since his writing,
mostly, isn’t as fine, isn’t certainly as showy, as his talk. Moreover
two-thirds of his work are merely colossal projects and announcements.
‘Showing’ Frank Saltram is often a poor business,” I went on: “we
endeavoured, you’ll have observed, to show him to-night! However, if he
had lectured he’d have lectured divinely. It would just have been his
talk.”
“And what would his talk just have been?”
I was conscious of some ineffectiveness, as well perhaps as of a little
impatience, as I replied: “The exhibition of a splendid intellect.” My
young lady looked not quite satisfied at this, but as I wasn’t prepared
for another question I hastily pursued: “The sight of a great suspended
swinging crystal—huge lucid lustrous, a block of light—flashing back
every impression of life and every possibility of thought!”
This gave her something to turn over till we had passed out to the dusky
porch of the hall, in front of which the lamps of a quiet brougham were
almost the only thing Saltram’s treachery hadn’t extinguished. I went
with her to the door of her carriage, out of which she leaned a moment
after she had thanked me and taken her seat. Her smile even in the
darkness was pretty. “I do want to see that crystal!”
“You’ve only to come to the next lecture.”
“I go abroad in a day or two with my aunt.”
“Wait over till next week,” I suggested. “It’s quite worth it.”
She became grave. “Not unless he really comes!” At which the brougham
started off, carrying her away too fast, fortunately for my manners, to
allow me to exclaim “Ingratitude!”