freshest, of my exaltation, 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,
orchestral. I was perfectly aware that one of these great sweeps was
now gathering; 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 (if I am not mistaken) of 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 the earnest brows were virtuously
void of guesses, that we couldn't put so much as 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 anyone could discover,
prepared anything but a magnificent prospectus; so that his circulars
and programmes, of which I possess an almost complete collection, are
as 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 attenuation. 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 scarcely have eluded an observer
of the fact that no one else in the room had an appearance so
charming. I think indeed she was the only person there 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 quite
gave me the sense of a sudden extension of Saltram's sphere of
influence. He was doing better than we hoped and he had chosen this
occasion, of all occasions, to succumb to heaven knew which of his
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 spoke to me I had beguiled our sorry
interval by thinking that she brought vaguely back the first page of
some novel of Madame Sand. It didn't make her more fathomable to
perceive in a few minutes that she could only be an American; it
simply engendered depressing reflections 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 replied that
if she considered I was on my honour I would privately deprecate it.
Perhaps she didn't; at any rate something passed between us that led
us to talk until she became aware that we were almost the only people
left. I presently discovered that she knew Mrs. Saltram, and this
explained in a manner the miracle. The brotherhood of the friends of
the husband were 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 dark abyss of Mrs. Saltram's wrongs. She bored
me to extinction, and I knew but too well how she had bored her
husband; but she had her partisans, the most inveterate of whom were
indeed the handful of poor Saltram's backers. They did her liberal
justice, whereas her peculiar comforters had nothing but hatred for
our philosopher. I am 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. But I soon discovered that she was
not a partisan--she was only a generous, irresponsible inquirer. 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 minds. I saw she would
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 really a very common 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 that his wife kept
challenging you to apply to _her_. 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
admits that his mind is wonderfully clear." It was amusing to converse
with a pretty girl who could talk of the clearness of Saltram's mind.
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 find out 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 would
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 her 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."
"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 exclaimed.
"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 is!"
My hilarity may have struck my interlocutress 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 is 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 them.
"They're tragic and splendid--lights on a dangerous coast. But he
moves badly and dresses worse, and altogether he's strange to behold."
My companion appeared to reflect on this, and after a moment she
inquired: "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? Decidedly not!"
My promptitude surprised her a little, but I quickly felt that it was
not 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 schoolmaster 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 there was 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
misfortune."
"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 is 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, with nothing more
restrictive 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?"
"I've told you before that your questions are terrible! They come,
these mere exercises of genius, to a great body of poetry, of
philosophy, a notable mass of speculation, of discovery. 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
interrupted. "To 'show' if you will, there isn't much, for his
writing, mostly, isn't as fine as his talk. Moreover, two-thirds of
his work are merely colossal projects and announcements. 'Showing'
Frank Saltram is often a poor business; we endeavoured, you will have
observed, to show him to-night! However, if he _had_ lectured, he
would 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 was not
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 think about 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 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!"
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 was not till much later
that I found this had not been the case with Kent Mulville, whose hope
for the best never twirled its thumbs 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 he
ultimately confessed--more than I shall venture to confess to-day. 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 _lacunæ_, for if, as she declared, she had
washed her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this
ablution and she handed it about for inspection. 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, for there
had been a 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 am 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 daresay 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 manifestations in any other manner than as separate subjects
of woe. They were all flowers of his nature, 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 nature,
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 exemption 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 a
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 ilk. She had a house in the
Regent's Park and a Bath-chair and a page; 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 charming Miss Anvoy, but
I felt that 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 arrested, 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 might not 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 that it
would not 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
over-pressure 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 opportunity to repeat her
experiment.
We clung to the idea of the brilliant course, delivered without a
tumble, that, as a lecturer, would still make the paying public aware
of our great mind; 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 categories 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 rise and fall of a luxurious
sigh 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 conceded, "it's there, I think,
that I am 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 only charge
for admission. But here it was that the Mulvilles shamelessly broke
down; as there is 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 to be the
only 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
inquiring 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,
and they were mainly at best, alas, but 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 inquired why publication
had not 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