The Coxon Fund

rank 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 sti

ith 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

n the fellow, but it’s cl

t 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 c

w 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 fo

my dear fellow — th

they’ve got hold of one this

wered, “if I didn’t reflect t

s a gentleman,” Gravener presently adde

admire most, your log

t he didn’t change the subject

struck with somethi

cy the dre

t he had all sorts of wo

reminded my visitor that though the dear Mulvilles were angels they were neither idiots nor millionaires. What they mainly aimed at was reuniting M

ulville had told me. “He didn’t leave

sked. “The monster — many th

an’t resist the impression that he’s a big man.” I was already mastering

urned, “but you haven’t happened to me

y boring you with — hi

ted in his

inly in his talk, which is far and a

t’s it a

e 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

eman. 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,

what

what

” I laughed as I went with him to the door. “I