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 e 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.