For Gods sake, gentlemen, he said in the raucous tone of weather-beaten poverty, the tone of chronic sore-throat exacerbated by perpetual gin, for Gods sake, gentlemen, have pity on a poor fern-collector!turning up his stale daisies. Food hasnt passed my lips, gentlemen, for the last three days. We gaped at him and at each other, and to our imagination his appeal had almost the force of a command. I wonder if half-a-crown would help? I privately wailed. And our fasting botanist went limping away through the park with the grace of controlled stupefaction still further enriching his outline.
I feel as if I had seen my Doppelganger, said Searle. He reminds me of myself. What am I but a mere figure in the landscape, a wandering minstrel or picker of daisies?
What are you anyway, my friend? I thereupon took occasion to ask. Who are you? kindly tell me.
The colour rose again to his pale face and I feared I had offended him. He poked a moment at the sod with the point of his umbrella before answering. Who am I? he said at last. My name is Clement Searle. I was born in New York, and thats the beginning and the end of me.
Ah not the end! I made bold to plead.
Then its because I HAVE no endany more than an ill-written book. I just stop anywhere; which means Im a failure, the poor man all lucidly and unreservedly pursued: a failure, as hopeless and helpless, sir, as any that ever swallowed up the slender investments of the widow and the orphan. I dont pay five cents on the dollar. What I might have beenonce!theres nothing left to show. I was rotten before I was ripe. To begin with, certainly, I wasnt a fountain of wisdom. All the more reason for a definite channelfor having a little character and purpose. But I hadnt even a little. I had nothing but nice tastes, as they call them, and fine sympathies and sentiments. Take a turn through New York to-day and youll find the tattered remnants of these things dangling on every bush and fluttering in every breeze; the men to whom I lent money, the women to whom I made love, the friends I trusted, the follies I invented, the poisonous fumes of pleasure amid which nothing was worth a thought but the manhood they stifled! It was my fault that I believed in pleasure here below. I believe in it still, but as I believe in the immortality of the soul. The soul is immortal, certainlyif youve got one; but most people havent. Pleasure would be right if it were pleasure straight through; but it never is. My taste was to be the best in the world; well, perhaps it was. I had a little money; it went the way of my little wit. Here in my pocket I have the scant dregs of it. I should tell you I was the biggest kind of ass. Just now that description would flatter me; it would assume theres something left of me. But the ghost of a donkeywhats that? I think, he went on with a charming turn and as if striking off his real explanation, I should have been all right in a world arranged on different lines. Before heaven, sirwhoever you areIm in practice so absurdly tender-hearted that I can afford to say it: I entered upon life a perfect gentleman. I had the love of old forms and pleasant rites, and I found them nowherefound a world all hard lines and harsh lights, without shade, without composition, as they say of pictures, without the lovely mystery of colour. To furnish colour I melted down the very substance of my own soul. I went about with my brush, touching up and toning down; a very pretty chiaroscuro youll find in my track! Sitting here in this old park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the misty verge of what might have been! I should have been born here and not there; here my makeshift distinctions would have found things theyd have been true of. How it was I never got free is more than I can say. It might have cut the knot, but the knot was too tight. I was always out of health or in debt or somehow desperately dangling. Besides, I had a horror of the great black sickening sea. A year ago I was reminded of the existence of an old claim to an English estate, which has danced before the eyes of my family, at odd moments, any time these eighty years. I confess its a bit of a muddle and a tangle, and am by no means sure that to this hour Ive got the hang of it. You look as if you had a clear head: some other time, if you consent, well have a go at it, such as it is, together. Poverty was staring me in the face; I sat down and tried to commit the points of our case to memory, as I used to get nine-times-nine by heart as a boy. I dreamed of it for six months, half-expecting to wake up some fine morning and hear through a latticed casement the cawing of an English rookery. A couple of months ago there came out to England on business of his own a man who once got me out of a dreadful mess (not that I had hurt anyone but myself), a legal practitioner in our courts, a very rough diamond, but with a great deal of FLAIR, as they say in New York. It was with him yesterday you saw me dining. He undertook, as he called it, to nose round and see if anything could be made of our questionable but possible show. The matter had never seriously been taken up. A month later I got a letter from Simmons assuring me that it seemed a very good show indeed and that he should be greatly surprised if I were unable to do something. This was the greatest push I had ever got in my life; I took a deliberate step, for the first time; I sailed for England. Ive been here three days: theyve seemed three months. After keeping me waiting for thirty-six hours my legal adviser makes his appearance last night and states to me, with his mouth full of mutton, that I havent a leg to stand on, that my claim is moonshine, and that I must do penance and take a ticket for six more days of purgatory with his presence thrown in. My friend, my friendshall I say I was disappointed? Im already resigned. I didnt really believe I had any case. I felt in my deeper consciousness that it was the crowning illusion of a life of illusions. Well, it was a pretty one. Poor legal adviser!I forgive him with all my heart. But for him I shouldnt be sitting in this place, in this air, under these impressions. This is a world I could have got on with beautifully. Theres an immense charm in its having been kept for the last. After it nothing else would have been tolerable. I shall now have a month of it, I hope, which wont be long enough for it to go back on me. Theres one thing!and here, pausing, he laid his hand on mine; I rose and stood before himI wish it were possible you should be with me to the end.
Henry James
A Passionate Pilgrim
I
Intending to sail for America in the early part of June, I determined to spend the interval of six weeks in England, to which country my minds eye only had as yet been introduced. I had formed in Italy and France a resolute preference for old inns, considering that what they sometimes cost the ungratified body they repay the delighted mind. On my arrival in London, therefore, I lodged at a certain antique hostelry, much to the east of Temple Bar, deep in the quarter that I had inevitably figured as the Johnsonian. Here, on the first evening of my stay, I descended to the little coffee-room and bespoke my dinner of the genius of attendance in the person of the solitary waiter. No sooner had I crossed the threshold of this retreat than I felt I had cut a golden-ripe crop of English impressions. The coffee-room of the Red Lion, like so many other places and things I was destined to see in the motherland, seemed to have been waiting for long years, with just that sturdy sufferance of time written on its visage, for me to come and extract the romantic essence of it.
The latent preparedness of the American mind even for the most characteristic features of English life was a matter I meanwhile failed to get to the bottom of. The roots of it are indeed so deeply buried in the soil of our early culture that, without some great upheaval of feeling, we are at a loss to say exactly when and where and how it begins. It makes an Americans enjoyment of England an emotion more searching than anything Continental. I had seen the coffee-room of the Red Lion years ago, at homeat Saragossa Illinoisin books, in visions, in dreams, in Dickens, in Smollett, in Boswell. It was small and subdivided into six narrow compartments by a series of perpendicular screens of mahogany, something higher than a mans stature, furnished on either side with a meagre uncushioned ledge, denominated in ancient Britain a seat. In each of these rigid receptacles was a narrow tablea table expected under stress to accommodate no less than four pairs of active British elbows. High pressure indeed had passed away from the Red Lion for ever. It now knew only that of memories and ghosts and atmosphere. Round the room there marched, breast-high, a magnificent panelling of mahogany, so dark with time and so polished with unremitted friction that by gazing a while into its lucid blackness I made out the dim reflexion of a party of wigged gentlemen in knee-breeches just arrived from York by the coach. On the dark yellow walls, coated by the fumes of English coal, of English mutton, of Scotch whiskey, were a dozen melancholy prints, sallow-toned with agethe Derby favourite of the year 1807, the Bank of England, her Majesty the Queen. On the floor was a Turkey carpetas old as the mahogany almost, as the Bank of England, as the Queeninto which the waiter had in his lonely revolutions trodden so many massive soot-flakes and drops of overflowing beer that the glowing looms of Smyrna would certainly not have recognised it. To say that I ordered my dinner of this archaic type would be altogether to misrepresent the process owing to which, having dreamed of lamb and spinach and a salade de saison, I sat down in penitence to a mutton-chop and a rice pudding. Bracing my feet against the cross-beam of my little oaken table, I opposed to the mahogany partition behind me the vigorous dorsal resistance that must have expressed the old-English idea of repose. The sturdy screen refused even to creak, but my poor Yankee joints made up the deficiency.
While I was waiting there for my chop there came into the room a person whom, after I had looked at him a moment, I supposed to be a fellow lodger and probably the only one. He seemed, like myself, to have submitted to proposals for dinner; the table on the other side of my partition had been prepared to receive him. He walked up to the fire, exposed his back to it and, after consulting his watch, looked directly out of the window and indirectly at me. He was a man of something less than middle age and more than middle stature, though indeed you would have called him neither young nor tall. He was chiefly remarkable for his emphasised leanness. His hair, very thin on the summit of his head, was dark short and fine. His eye was of a pale turbid grey, unsuited, perhaps, to his dark hair and well-drawn brows, but not altogether out of harmony with his colourless bilious complexion. His nose was aquiline and delicate; beneath it his moustache languished much rather than bristled. His mouth and chin were negative, or at the most provisional; not vulgar, doubtless, but ineffectually refined. A cold fatal gentlemanly weakness was expressed indeed in his attenuated person. His eye was restless and deprecating; his whole physiognomy, his manner of shifting his weight from foot to foot, the spiritless droop of his head, told of exhausted intentions, of a will relaxed. His dress was neat and toned downhe might have been in mourning. I made up my mind on three points: he was a bachelor, he was out of health, he was not indigenous to the soil. The waiter approached him, and they conversed in accents barely audible. I heard the words claret, sherry with a tentative inflexion, and finally beer with its last letter changed to ah. Perhaps he was a Russian in reduced circumstances; he reminded me slightly of certain sceptical cosmopolite Russians whom I had met on the Continent. While in my extravagant way I followed this trainfor you see I was interestedthere appeared a short brisk man with reddish-brown hair, with a vulgar nose, a sharp blue eye and a red beard confined to his lower jaw and chin. My putative Russian, still in possession of the rug, let his mild gaze stray over the dingy ornaments of the room. The other drew near, and his umbrella dealt a playful poke at the concave melancholy waistcoat. A penny hapenny for your thoughts!
My friend, as I call him, uttered an exclamation, stared, then laid his two hands on the others shoulders. The latter looked round at me keenly, compassing me in a momentary glance. I read in its own vague light that this was a transatlantic eyebeam; and with such confidence that I hardly needed to see its owner, as he prepared, with his companion, to seat himself at the table adjoining my own, take from his overcoat-pocket three New York newspapers and lay them beside his plate. As my neighbours proceeded to dine I felt the crumbs of their conversation scattered pretty freely abroad. I could hear almost all they said, without straining to catch it, over the top of the partition that divided us. Occasionally their voices dropped to recovery of discretion, but the mystery pieced itself together as if on purpose to entertain me. Their speech was pitched in the key that may in English air be called alien in spite of a few coincidences. The voices were American, however, with a difference; and I had no hesitation in assigning the softer and clearer sound to the pale thin gentleman, whom I decidedly preferred to his comrade. The latter began to question him about his voyage.
Horrible, horrible! I was deadly sick from the hour we left New York.
Well, you do look considerably reduced, said the second-comer.
Reduced! Ive been on the verge of the grave. I havent slept six hours for three weeks. This was said with great gravity.
Well, Ive made the voyage for the last time.
The plague you have! You mean to locate here permanently?
Oh it wont be so very permanent!
There was a pause; after which: Youre the same merry old boy, Searle. Going to give up the ghost to-morrow, eh?
I almost wish I were.
Youre not so sweet on England then? Ive heard people say at home that you dress and talk and act like an Englishman. But I know these people here and I know you. Youre not one of this crowd, Clement Searle, not you. Youll go under here, sir; youll go under as sure as my names Simmons.