Books: A Passionate Pilgrim
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Henry James >> A Passionate Pilgrim
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6 Produced by Eve Sobol
A PASSIONATE PILGRIM
HENRY JAMES
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 mind's 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 American's enjoyment of
England an emotion more searching than anything Continental. I
had seen the coffee-room of the Red Lion years ago, at home--at
Saragossa Illinois--in 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 man's 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 table--a 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 age--
the Derby favourite of the year 1807, the Bank of England, her
Majesty the Queen. On the floor was a Turkey carpet--as old as
the mahogany almost, as the Bank of England, as the Queen--into
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 down"--he 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 train--for you see I
was interested--there 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 ha'penny for your thoughts!"
My friend, as I call him, uttered an exclamation, stared, then
laid his two hands on the other's 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! I've been on the verge of the grave. I haven't slept
six hours for three weeks." This was said with great gravity.
"Well, I've made the voyage for the last time."
"The plague you have! You mean to locate here permanently?"
"Oh it won't be so very permanent!"
There was a pause; after which: "You're the same merry old boy,
Searle. Going to give up the ghost to-morrow, eh?"
"I almost wish I were."
"You're not so sweet on England then? I've 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. You're not one of this
crowd, Clement Searle, not you. You'll go under here, sir; you'll
go under as sure as my name's Simmons."
Following this I heard a sudden clatter as of the drop of a knife
and fork. "Well, you're a delicate sort of creature, if it IS
your ugly name! I've been wandering about all day in this
accursed city, ready to cry with homesickness and heartsickness
and every possible sort of sickness, and thinking, in the absence
of anything better, of meeting you here this evening and of your
uttering some sound of cheer and comfort and giving me some
glimmer of hope. Go under? Ain't I under now? I can't do more
than get under the ground!"
Mr. Simmons's superior brightness appeared to flicker a moment in
this gust of despair, but the next it was burning steady again.
"DON'T 'cry,' Searle," I heard him say. "Remember the waiter.
I've grown Englishman enough for that. For heaven's sake don't
let's have any nerves. Nerves won't do anything for you here.
It's best to come to the point. Tell me in three words what you
expect of me."
I heard another movement, as if poor Searle had collapsed in his
chair. "Upon my word, sir, you're quite inconceivable. You never
got my letter?"
"Yes, I got your letter. I was never sorrier to get anything in
my life."
At this declaration Mr. Searle rattled out an oath, which it was
well perhaps that I but partially heard. "Abijah Simmons," he
then cried, "what demon of perversity possesses you? Are you
going to betray me here in a foreign land, to turn out a false
friend, a heartless rogue?"
"Go on, sir," said sturdy Simmons. "Pour it all out. I'll wait
till you've done. Your beer's lovely," he observed independently
to the waiter. "I'll have some more."
"For God's sake explain yourself!" his companion appealed.
There was a pause, at the end of which I heard Mr. Simmons set
down his empty tankard with emphasis. "You poor morbid mooning
man," he resumed, "I don't want to say anything to make you feel
sore. I regularly pity you. But you must allow that you've acted
more like a confirmed crank than a member of our best society--
in which every one's so sensible."
Mr. Searle seemed to have made an effort to compose himself. "Be
so good as to tell me then what was the meaning of your letter."
"Well, you had got on MY nerves, if you want to know, when I
wrote it. It came of my always wishing so to please folks. I had
much better have let you alone. To tell you the plain truth I
never was so horrified in my life as when I found that on the
strength of my few kind words you had come out here to seek your
fortune."
"What then did you expect me to do?"
"I expected you to wait patiently till I had made further
enquiries and had written you again."
"And you've made further enquiries now?"
"Enquiries! I've committed assaults."
"And you find I've no claim?"
"No claim that one of THESE big bugs will look at. It struck me
at first that you had rather a neat little case. I confess the
look of it took hold of me--"
"Thanks to your liking so to please folks!" Mr. Simmons appeared
for a moment at odds with something; it proved to be with his
liquor. "I rather think your beer's too good to be true," he said
to the waiter. "I guess I'll take water. Come, old man," he
resumed, "don't challenge me to the arts of debate, or you'll
have me right down on you, and then you WILL feel me. My native
sweetness, as I say, was part of it. The idea that if I put the
thing through it would be a very pretty feather in my cap and a
very pretty penny in my purse was part of it. And the
satisfaction of seeing a horrid low American walk right into an
old English estate was a good deal of it. Upon my word, Searle,
when I think of it I wish with all my heart that, extravagant
vain man as you are, I COULD, for the charm of it, put you
through! I should hardly care what you did with the blamed place
when you got it. I could leave you alone to turn it into Yankee
notions--into ducks and drakes as they call 'em here. I should
like to see you tearing round over it and kicking up its sacred
dust in their very faces!"
"You don't know me one little bit," said Mr. Searle, rather
shirking, I thought, the burden of this tribute and for all
response to the ambiguity of the compliment.
"I should be very glad to think I didn't, sir. I've been to no
small amount of personal inconvenience for you. I've pushed my
way right up to the headspring. I've got the best opinion that's
to be had. The best opinion that's to be had just gives you one
leer over its spectacles. I guess that look will fix you if you
ever get it straight. I've been able to tap, indirectly," Mr.
Simmons went on, "the solicitor of your usurping cousin, and he
evidently knows something to be in the wind. It seems your elder
brother twenty years ago put out a feeler. So you're not to have
the glory of even making them sit up."
"I never made any one sit up," I heard Mr. Searle plead. "I
shouldn't begin at this time of day. I should approach the
subject like a gentleman."
"Well, if you want very much to do something like a gentleman
you've got a capital chance. Take your disappointment like a
gentleman."
I had finished my dinner and had become keenly interested in poor
Mr. Searle's unencouraging--or unencouraged--claim; so interested
that I at last hated to hear his trouble reflected in his voice
without being able--all respectfully!--to follow it in his face.
I left my place, went over to the fire, took up the evening paper
and established a post of observation behind it.
His cold counsellor was in the act of choosing a soft chop from
the dish--an act accompanied by a great deal of prying and poking
with that gentleman's own fork. My disillusioned compatriot had
pushed away his plate; he sat with his elbows on the table,
gloomily nursing his head with his hands. His companion watched
him and then seemed to wonder--to do Mr. Simmons justice--how he
could least ungracefully give him up. "I say, Searle,"--and for
my benefit, I think, taking me for a native ingenuous enough to
be dazzled by his wit, he lifted his voice a little and gave it
an ironical ring--"in this country it's the inestimable privilege
of a loyal citizen, under whatsoever stress of pleasure or of
pain, to make a point of eating his dinner."
Mr. Searle gave his plate another push. "Anything may happen now.
I don't care a straw."
"You ought to care. Have another chop and you WILL care. Have
some better tipple. Take my advice!" Mr. Simmons went on.
My friend--I adopt that name for him--gazed from between his two
hands coldly before him. "I've had enough of your advice."
"A little more," said Simmons mildly; "I shan't trouble you
again. What do you mean to do?"
"Nothing."
"Oh come!"
"Nothing, nothing, nothing!"
"Nothing but starve. How about meeting expenses?"
"Why do you ask?" said my friend. "You don't care."
"My dear fellow, if you want to make me offer you twenty pounds
you set most clumsily about it. You said just now I don't know
you," Mr. Simmons went on. "Possibly. Come back with me then," he
said kindly enough, "and let's improve our acquaintance."
"I won't go back. I shall never go back."
"Never?"
"Never."
Mr. Simmons thought it shrewdly over. "Well, you ARE sick!" he
exclaimed presently. "All I can say is that if you're working out
a plan for cold poison, or for any other act of desperation, you
had better give it right up. You can't get a dose of the
commonest kind of cold poison for nothing, you know. Look here,
Searle"--and the worthy man made what struck me as a very decent
appeal. "If you'll consent to return home with me by the steamer
of the twenty-third I'll pay your passage down. More than that,
I'll pay for your beer."
My poor gentleman met it. "I believe I never made up my mind to
anything before, but I think it's made up now. I shall stay here
till I take my departure for a newer world than any patched-up
newness of ours. It's an odd feeling--I rather like it! What
should I do at home?"
"You said just now you were homesick."
"I meant I was sick for a home. Don't I belong here? Haven't I
longed to get here all my life? Haven't I counted the months and
the years till I should be able to 'go' as we say? And now that
I've 'gone,' that is that I've come, must I just back out? No,
no, I'll move on. I'm much obliged to you for your offer. I've
enough money for the present. I've about my person some forty
pounds' worth of British gold, and the same amount, say, of the
toughness of the heaven-sent idiot. They'll see me through
together! After they're gone I shall lay my head in some English
churchyard, beside some ivied tower, beneath an old gnarled black
yew."
I had so far distinctly followed the dialogue; but at this point
the landlord entered and, begging my pardon, would suggest that
number 12, a most superior apartment, having now been vacated, it
would give him pleasure if I would look in. I declined to look
in, but agreed for number 12 at a venture and gave myself again,
with dissimulation, to my friends. They had got up; Simmons had
put on his overcoat; he stood polishing his rusty black hat with
his napkin. "Do you mean to go down to the place?" he asked.
"Possibly. I've thought of it so often that I should like to see
it."
"Shall you call on Mr. Searle?"
"Heaven forbid!"
"Something has just occurred to me," Simmons pursued with a grin
that made his upper lip look more than ever denuded by the razor
and jerked the ugly ornament of his chin into the air. "There's a
certain Miss Searle, the old man's sister."
"Well?" my gentleman quavered.
"Well, sir!--you talk of moving on. You might move on the
damsel."
Mr. Searle frowned in silence and his companion gave him a tap on
the stomach. "Line those ribs a bit first!" He blushed crimson;
his eyes filled with tears. "You ARE a coarse brute," he said.
The scene quite harrowed me, but I was prevented from seeing it
through by the reappearance of the landlord on behalf of number
12. He represented to me that I ought in justice to him to come
and see how tidy they HAD made it. Half an hour afterwards I was
rattling along in a hansom toward Covent Garden, where I heard
Madame Bosio in The Barber of Seville. On my return from the
opera I went into the coffee-room; it had occurred to me I might
catch there another glimpse of Mr. Searle. I was not
disappointed. I found him seated before the fire with his head
sunk on his breast: he slept, dreaming perhaps of Abijah Simmons.
I watched him for some moments. His closed eyes, in the dim
lamplight, looked even more helpless and resigned, and I seemed
to see the fine grain of his nature in his unconscious mask. They
say fortune comes while we sleep, and, standing there, I felt
really tender enough--though otherwise most unqualified--to be
poor Mr. Searle's fortune. As I walked away I noted in one of the
little prandial pews I have described the melancholy waiter,
whose whiskered chin also reposed on the bulge of his shirt-
front. I lingered a moment beside the old inn-yard in which, upon
a time, the coaches and post-chaises found space to turn and
disgorge. Above the dusky shaft of the enclosing galleries, where
lounging lodgers and crumpled chambermaids and all the
picturesque domesticity of a rattling tavern must have leaned on
their elbows for many a year, I made out the far-off lurid
twinkle of the London constellations. At the foot of the stairs,
enshrined in the glittering niche of her well-appointed bar, the
landlady sat napping like some solemn idol amid votive brass and
plate.
The next morning, not finding the subject of my benevolent
curiosity in the coffee-room, I learned from the waiter that he
had ordered breakfast in bed. Into this asylum I was not yet
prepared to pursue him. I spent the morning in the streets,
partly under pressure of business, but catching all kinds of
romantic impressions by the way. To the searching American eye
there is no tint of association with which the great grimy face
of London doesn't flush. As the afternoon approached, however, I
began to yearn for some site more gracefully classic than what
surrounded me, and, thinking over the excursions recommended to
the ingenuous stranger, decided to take the train to Hampton
Court. The day was the more propitious that it yielded just that
dim subaqueous light which sleeps so fondly upon the English
landscape.
At the end of an hour I found myself wandering through the
apartments of the great palace. They follow each other in
infinite succession, with no great variety of interest or aspect,
but with persistent pomp and a fine specific effect. They are
exactly of their various times. You pass from painted and
panelled bedchambers and closets, anterooms, drawing-rooms,
council-rooms, through king's suite, queen's suite, prince's
suite, until you feel yourself move through the appointed hours
and stages of some rigid monarchical day. On one side are the old
monumental upholsteries, the big cold tarnished beds and
canopies, with the circumference of disapparelled royalty
symbolised by a gilded balustrade, and the great carved and
yawning chimney-places where dukes-in-waiting may have warmed
their weary heels; on the other, in deep recesses, rise the
immense windows, the framed and draped embrasures where the
sovereign whispered and favourites smiled, looking out on
terraced gardens and misty park. The brown walls are dimly
illumined by innumerable portraits of courtiers and captains,
more especially with various members of the Batavian entourage of
William of Orange, the restorer of the palace; with good store
too of the lily-bosomed models of Lely and Kneller. The whole
tone of this processional interior is singularly stale and sad.
The tints of all things have both faded and darkened--you taste
the chill of the place as you walk from room to room. It was
still early in the day and in the season, and I flattered myself
that I was the only visitor. This complacency, however, dropped
at sight of a person standing motionless before a simpering
countess of Sir Peter Lely's creation. On hearing my footstep
this victim of an evaporated spell turned his head and I
recognised my fellow lodger of the Red Lion. I was apparently
recognised as well; he looked as if he could scarce wait for me
to be kind to him, and in fact didn't wait. Seeing I had a
catalogue he asked the name of the portrait. On my satisfying him
he appealed, rather timidly, as to my opinion of the lady.
"Well," said I, not quite timidly enough perhaps, "I confess she
strikes me as no great matter."
He remained silent and was evidently a little abashed. As we
strolled away he stole a sidelong glance of farewell at his
leering shepherdess. To speak with him face to face was to feel
keenly that he was no less interesting than infirm. We talked of
our inn, of London, of the palace; he uttered his mind freely,
but seemed to struggle with a weight of depression. It was an
honest mind enough, with no great cultivation but with a certain
natural love of excellent things. I foresaw that I should find
him quite to the manner born--to ours; full of glimpses and
responses, of deserts and desolations. His perceptions would be
fine and his opinions pathetic; I should moreover take refuge
from his sense of proportion in his sense of humour, and then
refuge from THAT, ah me!--in what? On my telling him that I was a
fellow citizen he stopped short, deeply touched, and, silently
passing his arm into my own, suffered me to lead him through the
other apartments and down into the gardens. A large gravelled
platform stretches itself before the basement of the palace,
taking the afternoon sun. Parts of the great structure are
reserved for private use and habitation, occupied by state-
pensioners, reduced gentlewomen in receipt of the Queen's bounty
and other deserving persons. Many of the apartments have their
dependent gardens, and here and there, between the verdure-coated
walls, you catch a glimpse of these somewhat stuffy bowers. My
companion and I measured more than once this long expanse,
looking down on the floral figures of the rest of the affair and
on the stoutly-woven tapestry of creeping plants that muffle the
foundations of the huge red pile. I thought of the various images
of old-world gentility which, early and late, must have strolled
in front of it and felt the protection and security of the place.
We peeped through an antique grating into one of the mossy cages
and saw an old lady with a black mantilla on her head, a decanter
of water in one hand and a crutch in the other, come forth,
followed by three little dogs and a cat, to sprinkle a plant. She
would probably have had an opinion on the virtue of Queen
Caroline. Feeling these things together made us quickly, made us
extraordinarily, intimate. My companion seemed to ache with his
impression; he scowled, all gently, as if it gave him pain. I
proposed at last that we should dine somewhere on the spot and
take a late train to town. We made our way out of the gardens
into the adjoining village, where we entered an inn which I
pronounced, very sincerely, exactly what we wanted. Mr. Searle
had approached our board as shyly as if it had been a cold bath;
but, gradually warming to his work, he declared at the end of
half an hour that for the first time in a month he enjoyed his
victuals.
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