Chapter 2

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