

Transcribed from the 1915 Martin Secker edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

                          [Picture: Book cover]





                                   THE
                                COXON FUND


                              BY HENRY JAMES

                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]

                                * * * * *

                          LONDON: MARTIN SECKER
                     NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI

                                * * * * *

                    This edition first published 1915

                       The text follows that of the
                            Definitive Edition

                                * * * * *




I


“THEY’VE got him for life!” I said to myself that evening on my way back
to the station; but later on, alone in the compartment (from Wimbledon to
Waterloo, before the glory of the District Railway) I amended this
declaration in the light of the sense that my friends would probably
after all not enjoy a monopoly of Mr. Saltram.  I won’t pretend to have
taken his vast measure on that first occasion, but I think I had achieved
a glimpse of what the privilege of his acquaintance might mean for many
persons in the way of charges accepted.  He had been a great experience,
and it was this perhaps that had put me into the frame of foreseeing how
we should all, sooner or later, have the honour of dealing with him as a
whole.  Whatever impression I then received of the amount of this total,
I had a full enough vision of the patience of the Mulvilles.  He was to
stay all the winter: Adelaide dropped it in a tone that drew the sting
from the inevitable emphasis.  These excellent people might indeed have
been content to give the circle of hospitality a diameter of six months;
but if they didn’t say he was to stay all summer as well it was only
because this was more than they ventured to hope.  I remember that at
dinner that evening he wore slippers, new and predominantly purple, of
some queer carpet-stuff; but the Mulvilles were still in the stage of
supposing that he might be snatched from them by higher bidders.  At a
later time they grew, poor dears, to fear no snatching; but theirs was a
fidelity which needed no help from competition to make them proud.
Wonderful indeed as, when all was said, you inevitably pronounced Frank
Saltram, it was not to be overlooked that the Kent Mulvilles were in
their way still more extraordinary: as striking an instance as could
easily be encountered of the familiar truth that remarkable men find
remarkable conveniences.

They had sent for me from Wimbledon to come out and dine, and there had
been an implication in Adelaide’s note—judged by her notes alone she
might have been thought silly—that it was a case in which something
momentous was to be determined or done.  I had never known them not be in
a “state” about somebody, and I dare say I tried to be droll on this
point in accepting their invitation.  On finding myself in the presence
of their latest discovery I had not at first felt irreverence droop—and,
thank heaven, I have never been absolutely deprived of that alternative
in Mr. Saltram’s company.  I saw, however—I hasten to declare it—that
compared to this specimen their other phoenixes had been birds of
inconsiderable feather, and I afterwards took credit to myself for not
having even in primal bewilderments made a mistake about the essence of
the man.  He had an incomparable gift; I never was blind to it—it dazzles
me still.  It dazzles me perhaps even more in remembrance than in fact,
for I’m not unaware that for so rare a subject the imagination goes to
some expense, inserting a jewel here and there or giving a twist to a
plume.  How the art of portraiture would rejoice in this figure if the
art of portraiture had only the canvas!  Nature, in truth, had largely
rounded it, and if memory, hovering about it, sometimes holds her breath,
this is because the voice that comes back was really golden.

Though the great man was an inmate and didn’t dress, he kept dinner on
this occasion waiting, and the first words he uttered on coming into the
room were an elated announcement to Mulville that he had found out
something.  Not catching the allusion and gaping doubtless a little at
his face, I privately asked Adelaide what he had found out.  I shall
never forget the look she gave me as she replied: “Everything!”  She
really believed it.  At that moment, at any rate, he had found out that
the mercy of the Mulvilles was infinite.  He had previously of course
discovered, as I had myself for that matter, that their dinners were
soignés.  Let me not indeed, in saying this, neglect to declare that I
shall falsify my counterfeit if I seem to hint that there was in his
nature any ounce of calculation.  He took whatever came, but he never
plotted for it, and no man who was so much of an absorbent can ever have
been so little of a parasite.  He had a system of the universe, but he
had no system of sponging—that was quite hand-to-mouth.  He had fine
gross easy senses, but it was not his good-natured appetite that wrought
confusion.  If he had loved us for our dinners we could have paid with
our dinners, and it would have been a great economy of finer matter.  I
make free in these connexions with the plural possessive because if I was
never able to do what the Mulvilles did, and people with still bigger
houses and simpler charities, I met, first and last, every demand of
reflexion, of emotion—particularly perhaps those of gratitude and of
resentment.  No one, I think, paid the tribute of giving him up so often,
and if it’s rendering honour to borrow wisdom I’ve a right to talk of my
sacrifices.  He yielded lessons as the sea yields fish—I lived for a
while on this diet.  Sometimes it almost appeared to me that his massive
monstrous failure—if failure after all it was—had been designed for my
private recreation.  He fairly pampered my curiosity; but the history of
that experience would take me too far.  This is not the large canvas I
just now spoke of, and I wouldn’t have approached him with my present
hand had it been a question of all the features.  Frank Saltram’s
features, for artistic purposes, are verily the anecdotes that are to be
gathered.  Their name is legion, and this is only one, of which the
interest is that it concerns even more closely several other persons.
Such episodes, as one looks back, are the little dramas that made up the
innumerable facets of the big drama—which is yet to be reported.




II


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