IV

MRS. SALTRAM made a great affair of her right to be informed where her

husband had been the second evening he failed to meet his audience. She

came to me to ascertain, but I couldn’t satisfy her, for in spite of my

ingenuity I remained in ignorance. It wasn’t till much later that I

found this had not been the case with Kent Mulville, whose hope for the

best never twirled the thumbs of him more placidly than when he happened

to know the worst. He had known it on the occasion I speak of—that is

immediately after. He was impenetrable then, but ultimately confessed.

What he confessed was more than I shall now venture to make public. It

was of course familiar to me that Saltram was incapable of keeping the

engagements which, after their separation, he had entered into with

regard to his wife, a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite

irreproachable and insufferable person. She often appeared at my

chambers to talk over his lapses; for if, as she declared, she had washed

her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution,

which she handed about for analysis. She had arts of her own of exciting

one’s impatience, the most infallible of which was perhaps her assumption

that we were kind to her because we liked her. In reality her personal

fall had been a sort of social rise—since I had seen the moment when, in

our little conscientious circle, her desolation almost made her the

fashion. Her voice was grating and her children ugly; moreover she hated

the good Mulvilles, whom I more and more loved. They were the people who

by doing most for her husband had in the long run done most for herself;

and the warm confidence with which he had laid his length upon them was a

pressure gentle compared with her stiffer persuadability. I’m bound to

say he didn’t criticise his benefactors, though practically he got tired

of them; she, however, had the highest standards about eleemosynary

forms. She offered the odd spectacle of a spirit puffed up by

dependence, and indeed it had introduced her to some excellent society.

She pitied me for not knowing certain people who aided her and whom she

doubtless patronised in turn for their luck in not knowing me. I dare

say I should have got on with her better if she had had a ray of

imagination—if it had occasionally seemed to occur to her to regard

Saltram’s expressions of his nature in any other manner than as separate

subjects of woe. They were all flowers of his character, pearls strung

on an endless thread; but she had a stubborn little way of challenging

them one after the other, as if she never suspected that he had a

character, such as it was, or that deficiencies might be organic; the

irritating effect of a mind incapable of a generalisation. One might

doubtless have overdone the idea that there was a general licence for

such a man; but if this had happened it would have been through one’s

feeling that there could be none for such a woman.

I recognised her superiority when I asked her about the aunt of the

disappointed young lady: it sounded like a sentence from an

English-French or other phrase-book. She triumphed in what she told me

and she may have triumphed still more in what she withheld. My friend of

the other evening, Miss Anvoy, had but lately come to England; Lady

Coxon, the aunt, had been established here for years in consequence of

her marriage with the late Sir Gregory of that name. She had a house in

the Regent’s Park, a Bath-chair and a fernery; and above all she had

sympathy. Mrs. Saltram had made her acquaintance through mutual friends.

This vagueness caused me to feel how much I was out of it and how large

an independent circle Mrs. Saltram had at her command. I should have

been glad to know more about the disappointed young lady, but I felt I

should know most by not depriving her of her advantage, as she might have

mysterious means of depriving me of my knowledge. For the present,

moreover, this experience was stayed, Lady Coxon having in fact gone

abroad accompanied by her niece. The niece, besides being immensely

clever, was an heiress, Mrs. Saltram said; the only daughter and the

light of the eyes of some great American merchant, a man, over there, of

endless indulgences and dollars. She had pretty clothes and pretty

manners, and she had, what was prettier still, the great thing of all.

The great thing of all for Mrs. Saltram was always sympathy, and she

spoke as if during the absence of these ladies she mightn’t know where to

turn for it. A few months later indeed, when they had come back, her

tone perceptibly changed: she alluded to them, on my leading her up to

it, rather as to persons in her debt for favours received. What had

happened I didn’t know, but I saw it would take only a little more or a

little less to make her speak of them as thankless subjects of social

countenance—people for whom she had vainly tried to do something. I

confess I saw how it wouldn’t be in a mere week or two that I should rid

myself of the image of Ruth Anvoy, in whose very name, when I learnt it,

I found something secretly to like. I should probably neither see her

nor hear of her again: the knight’s widow (he had been mayor of

Clockborough) would pass away and the heiress would return to her

inheritance. I gathered with surprise that she had not communicated to

his wife the story of her attempt to hear Mr..Saltram, and I founded this

reticence on the easy supposition that Mrs. Saltram had fatigued by

overpressure the spring of the sympathy of which she boasted. The girl

at any rate would forget the small adventure, be distracted, take a

husband; besides which she would lack occasion to repeat her experiment.

We clung to the idea of the brilliant course, delivered without an

accident, that, as a lecturer, would still make the paying public aware

of our great man, but the fact remained that in the case of an

inspiration so unequal there was treachery, there was fallacy at least,

in the very conception of a series. In our scrutiny of ways and means we

were inevitably subject to the old convention of the synopsis, the

syllabus, partly of course not to lose the advantage of his grand free

hand in drawing up such things; but for myself I laughed at our playbills

even while I stickled for them. It was indeed amusing work to be

scrupulous for Frank Saltram, who also at moments laughed about it, so

far as the comfort of a sigh so unstudied as to be cheerful might pass

for such a sound. He admitted with a candour all his own that he was in

truth only to be depended on in the Mulvilles’ drawing-room. “Yes,” he

suggestively allowed, “it’s there, I think, that I’m at my best; quite

late, when it gets toward eleven—and if I’ve not been too much worried.”

We all knew what too much worry meant; it meant too enslaved for the hour

to the superstition of sobriety. On the Saturdays I used to bring my

portmanteau, so as not to have to think of eleven o’clock trains. I had

a bold theory that as regards this temple of talk and its altars of

cushioned chintz, its pictures and its flowers, its large fireside and

clear lamplight, we might really arrive at something if the Mulvilles

would but charge for admission. Here it was, however, that they

shamelessly broke down; as there’s a flaw in every perfection this was

the inexpugnable refuge of their egotism. They declined to make their

saloon a market, so that Saltram’s golden words continued the sole coin

that rang there. It can have happened to no man, however, to be paid a

greater price than such an enchanted hush as surrounded him on his

greatest nights. The most profane, on these occasions, felt a presence;

all minor eloquence grew dumb. Adelaide Mulville, for the pride of her

hospitality, anxiously watched the door or stealthily poked the fire. I

used to call it the music-room, for we had anticipated Bayreuth. The

very gates of the kingdom of light seemed to open and the horizon of

thought to flash with the beauty of a sunrise at sea.

In the consideration of ways and means, the sittings of our little board,

we were always conscious of the creak of Mrs. Saltram’s shoes. She

hovered, she interrupted, she almost presided, the state of affairs being

mostly such as to supply her with every incentive for enquiring what was

to be done next. It was the pressing pursuit of this knowledge that, in

concatenations of omnibuses and usually in very wet weather, led her so

often to my door. She thought us spiritless creatures with editors and

publishers; but she carried matters to no great effect when she

personally pushed into back-shops. She wanted all moneys to be paid to

herself: they were otherwise liable to such strange adventures. They

trickled away into the desert—they were mainly at best, alas, a slender

stream. The editors and the publishers were the last people to take this

remarkable thinker at the valuation that has now pretty well come to be

established. The former were half-distraught between the desire to “cut”

him and the difficulty of finding a crevice for their shears; and when a

volume on this or that portentous subject was proposed to the latter they

suggested alternative titles which, as reported to our friend, brought

into his face the noble blank melancholy that sometimes made it handsome.

The title of an unwritten book didn’t after all much matter, but some

masterpiece of Saltram’s may have died in his bosom of the shudder with

which it was then convulsed. The ideal solution, failing the fee at Kent

Mulville’s door, would have been some system of subscription to projected

treatises with their non-appearance provided for—provided for, I mean, by

the indulgence of subscribers. The author’s real misfortune was that

subscribers were so wretchedly literal. When they tastelessly enquired

why publication hadn’t ensued I was tempted to ask who in the world had

ever been so published. Nature herself had brought him out in voluminous

form, and the money was simply a deposit on borrowing the work.

V

I WAS doubtless often a nuisance to my friends in those years; but there

were sacrifices I declined to make, and I never passed the hat to George

Gravener. I never forgot our little discussion in Ebury Street, and I

think it stuck in my throat to have to treat him to the avowal I had

found so easy to Mss Anvoy. It had cost me nothing to confide to this

charming girl, but it would have cost me much to confide to the friend of

my youth, that the character of the “real gentleman” wasn’t an attribute

of the man I took such pains for. Was this because I had already

generalised to the point of perceiving that women are really the

unfastidious sex? I knew at any rate that Gravener, already quite in

view but still hungry and frugal, had naturally enough more ambition than

charity. He had sharp aims for stray sovereigns, being in view most from

the tall steeple of Clockborough. His immediate ambition was to occupy à

lui seul the field of vision of that smokily-seeing city, and all his

movements and postures were calculated for the favouring angle. The

movement of the hand as to the pocket had thus to alternate gracefully

with the posture of the hand on the heart. He talked to Clockborough in

short only less beguilingly than Frank Saltram talked to his electors;

with the difference to our credit, however, that we had already voted and

that our candidate had no antagonist but himself. He had more than once

been at Wimbledon—it was Mrs. Mulville’s work not mine—and by the time

the claret was served had seen the god descend. He took more pains to

swing his censer than I had expected, but on our way back to town he

forestalled any little triumph I might have been so artless as to express

by the observation that such a man was—a hundred times!—a man to use and

never a man to be used by. I remember that this neat remark humiliated

me almost as much as if virtually, in the fever of broken slumbers, I

hadn’t often made it myself. The difference was that on Gravener’s part

a force attached to it that could never attach to it on mine. He was

able to use people—he had the machinery; and the irony of Saltram’s being

made showy at Clockborough came out to me when he said, as if he had no

memory of our original talk and the idea were quite fresh to him: “I hate

his type, you know, but I’ll be hanged if I don’t put some of those

things in. I can find a place for them: we might even find a place for

the fellow himself.” I myself should have had some fear—not, I need

scarcely say, for the “things” themselves, but for some other things very

near them; in fine for the rest of my eloquence.

Later on I could see that the oracle of Wimbledon was not in this case so

appropriate as he would have been had the polities of the gods only

coincided more exactly with those of the party. There was a distinct

moment when, without saying anything more definite to me, Gravener

entertained the idea of annexing Mr. Saltram. Such a project was

delusive, for the discovery of analogies between his body of doctrine and

that pressed from headquarters upon Clockborough—the bottling, in a word,

of the air of those lungs for convenient public uncorking in

corn-exchanges—was an experiment for which no one had the leisure. The

only thing would have been to carry him massively about, paid, caged,

clipped; to turn him on for a particular occasion in a particular

channel. Frank Saltram’s channel, however, was essentially not

calculable, and there was no knowing what disastrous floods might have

ensued. For what there would have been to do The Empire, the great

newspaper, was there to look to; but it was no new misfortune that there

were delicate situations in which The Empire broke down. In fine there

was an instinctive apprehension that a clever young journalist

commissioned to report on Mr. Saltram might never come back from the

errand. No one knew better than George Gravener that that was a time

when prompt returns counted double. If he therefore found our friend an

exasperating waste of orthodoxy it was because of his being, as he said,

poor Gravener, up in the clouds, not because he was down in the dust.

The man would have been, just as he was, a real enough gentleman if he

could have helped to put in a real gentleman. Gravener’s great objection

to the actual member was that he was not one.

Lady Coxon had a fine old house, a house with “grounds,” at Clockborough,

which she had let; but after she returned from abroad I learned from Mrs.

Saltram that the lease had fallen in and that she had gone down to resume

possession. I could see the faded red livery, the big square shoulders,

the high-walled garden of this decent abode. As the rumble of

dissolution grew louder the suitor would have pressed his suit, and I

found myself hoping the politics of the late Mayor’s widow wouldn’t be

such as to admonish her to ask him to dinner; perhaps indeed I went so

far as to pray, they would naturally form a bar to any contact. I tried

to focus the many-buttoned page, in the daily airing, as he perhaps even

pushed the Bath-chair over somebody’s toes. I was destined to hear, none

the less, through Mrs. Saltram—who, I afterwards learned, was in

correspondence with Lady Coxon’s housekeeper—that Gravener was known to

have spoken of the habitation I had in my eye as the pleasantest thing at

Clockborough. On his part, I was sure, this was the voice not of envy

but of experience. The vivid scene was now peopled, and I could see him

in the old-time garden with Miss Anvoy, who would be certain, and very

justly, to think him good-looking. It would be too much to describe

myself as troubled by this play of surmise; but I occur to remember the

relief, singular enough, of feeling it suddenly brushed away by an

annoyance really much greater; an annoyance the result of its happening

to come over me about that time with a rush that I was simply ashamed of

Frank Saltram. There were limits after all, and my mark at last had been

reached.

I had had my disgusts, if I may allow myself to-day such an expression;

but this was a supreme revolt. Certain things cleared up in my mind,

certain values stood out. It was all very well to have an unfortunate

temperament; there was nothing so unfortunate as to have, for practical

purposes, nothing else. I avoided George Gravener at this moment and

reflected that at such a time I should do so most effectually by leaving

England. I wanted to forget Frank Saltram—that was all. I didn’t want

to do anything in the world to him but that. Indignation had withered on

the stalk, and I felt that one could pity him as much as one ought only

by never thinking of him again. It wasn’t for anything he had done to

me; it was for what he had done to the Mulvilles. Adelaide cried about

it for a week, and her husband, profiting by the example so signally

given him of the fatal effect of a want of character, left the letter,

the drop too much, unanswered. The letter, an incredible one, addressed

by Saltram to Wimbledon during a stay with the Pudneys at Ramsgate, was

the central feature of the incident, which, however, had many features,

each more painful than whichever other we compared it with. The Pudneys

had behaved shockingly, but that was no excuse. Base ingratitude, gross

indecency—one had one’s choice only of such formulas as that the more

they fitted the less they gave one rest. These are dead aches now, and I

am under no obligation, thank heaven, to be definite about the business.

There are things which if I had had to tell them—well, would have stopped

me off here altogether.

I went abroad for the general election, and if I don’t know how much, on

the Continent, I forgot, I at least know how much I missed, him. At a

distance, in a foreign land, ignoring, abjuring, unlearning him, I

discovered what he had done for me. I owed him, oh unmistakeably,

certain noble conceptions; I had lighted my little taper at his smoky

lamp, and lo it continued to twinkle. But the light it gave me just

showed me how much more I wanted. I was pursued of course by letters

from Mrs. Saltram which I didn’t scruple not to read, though quite aware

her embarrassments couldn’t but be now of the gravest. I sacrificed to

propriety by simply putting them away, and this is how, one day as my

absence drew to an end, my eye, while I rummaged in my desk for another

paper, was caught by a name on a leaf that had detached itself from the

packet. The allusion was to Miss Anvoy, who, it appeared, was engaged to

be married to Mr. George Gravener; and the news was two months old. A

direct question of Mrs. Saltram’s had thus remained unanswered—she had

enquired of me in a postscript what sort of man this aspirant to such a

hand might be. The great other fact about him just then was that he had

been triumphantly returned for Clockborough in the interest of the party

that had swept the country—so that I might easily have referred Mrs.

Saltram to the journals of the day. Yet when I at last wrote her that I

was coming home and would discharge my accumulated burden by seeing her,

I but remarked in regard to her question that she must really put it to

Miss Anvoy.