Books: A Passionate Pilgrim
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Henry James >> A Passionate Pilgrim
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"I'm afraid you're rather out of health," I risked.
"Yes, sir--I'm an incurable."
The little village of Hampton Court stands clustered about the
entrance of Bushey Park, and after we had dined we lounged along
into the celebrated avenue of horse-chestnuts. There is a rare
emotion, familiar to every intelligent traveller, in which the
mind seems to swallow the sum total of its impressions at a gulp.
You take in the whole place, whatever it be. You feel England,
you feel Italy, and the sensation involves for the moment a kind
of thrill. I had known it from time to time in Italy and had
opened my soul to it as to the spirit of the Lord. Since my
landing in England I had been waiting for it to arrive. A bottle
of tolerable Burgundy, at dinner, had perhaps unlocked to it the
gates of sense; it arrived now with irresistible force. Just the
scene around me was the England of one's early reveries. Over
against us, amid the ripeness of its gardens, the dark red
residence, with its formal facings and its vacant windows, seemed
to make the past definite and massive; the little village,
nestling between park and palace, around a patch of turfy common,
with its taverns of figurative names, its ivy-towered church, its
mossy roofs, looked like the property of a feudal lord. It was in
this dark composite light that I had read the British classics;
it was this mild moist air that had blown from the pages of the
poets; while I seemed to feel the buried generations in the dense
and elastic sod. And that I must have testified in some form or
other to what I have called my thrill I gather, remembering it,
from a remark of my companion's.
"You've the advantage over me in coming to all this with an
educated eye. You already know what old things can be. I've never
known it but by report. I've always fancied I should like it. In
a small way at home, of course, I did try to stand by my idea of
it. I must be a conservative by nature. People at home used to
call me a cockney and a fribble. But it wasn't true," he went on;
"if it had been I should have made my way over here long ago:
before--before--" He paused, and his head dropped sadly on his
breast.
The bottle of Burgundy had loosened his tongue; I had but to
choose my time for learning his story. Something told me that I
had gained his confidence and that, so far as attention and
attitude might go, I was "in" for responsibilities. But somehow I
didn't dread them. "Before you lost your health," I suggested.
"Before I lost my health," he answered. "And my property--the
little I had. And my ambition. And any power to take myself
seriously."
"Come!" I cried. "You shall recover everything. This tonic
English climate will wind you up in a month. And THEN see how
you'll take yourself--and how I shall take you!"
"Oh," he gratefully smiled, "I may turn to dust in your hands! I
should like," he presently pursued, "to be an old genteel
pensioner, lodged over there in the palace and spending my days
in maundering about these vistas. I should go every morning, at
the hour when it gets the sun, into that long gallery where all
those pretty women of Lely's are hung--I know you despise them!--
and stroll up and down and say something kind to them. Poor
precious forsaken creatures! So flattered and courted in their
day, so neglected now! Offering up their shoulders and ringlets
and smiles to that musty deadly silence!"
I laid my hand on my friend's shoulder. "Oh sir, you're all
right!"
Just at this moment there came cantering down the shallow glade
of the avenue a young girl on a fine black horse--one of those
little budding gentlewomen, perfectly mounted and equipped, who
form to alien eyes one of the prettiest incidents of English
scenery. She had distanced her servant and, as she came abreast
of us, turned slightly in her saddle and glanced back at him. In
the movement she dropped the hunting-crop with which she was
armed; whereupon she reined up and looked shyly at us and at the
implement. "This is something better than a Lely," I said. Searle
hastened forward, picked up the crop and, with a particular
courtesy that became him, handed it back to the rider. Fluttered
and blushing she reached forward, took it with a quick sweet
sound, and the next moment was bounding over the quiet turf.
Searle stood watching her; the servant, as he passed us, touched
his hat. When my friend turned toward me again I saw that he too
was blushing. "Oh sir, you're all right," I repeated.
At a short distance from where we had stopped was an old stone
bench. We went and sat down on it and, as the sun began to sink,
watched the light mist powder itself with gold. "We ought to be
thinking of the train back to London, I suppose," I at last said.
"Oh hang the train!" sighed my companion.
"Willingly. There could be no better spot than this to feel the
English evening stand still." So we lingered, and the twilight
hung about us, strangely clear in spite of the thickness of the
air. As we sat there came into view an apparition unmistakeable
from afar as an immemorial vagrant--the disowned, in his own rich
way, of all the English ages. As he approached us he slackened
pace and finally halted, touching his cap. He was a man of middle
age, clad in a greasy bonnet with false-looking ear-locks
depending from its sides. Round his neck was a grimy red scarf,
tucked into his waistcoat; his coat and trousers had a remote
affinity with those of a reduced hostler. In one hand he had a
stick; on his arm he bore a tattered basket, with a handful of
withered vegetables at the bottom. His face was pale haggard and
degraded beyond description--as base as a counterfeit coin, yet
as modelled somehow as a tragic mask. He too, like everything
else, had a history. From what height had he fallen, from what
depth had he risen? He was the perfect symbol of generated
constituted baseness; and I felt before him in presence of a
great artist or actor.
"For God's sake, gentlemen," he said in the raucous tone of
weather-beaten poverty, the tone of chronic sore-throat
exacerbated by perpetual gin, "for God's sake, gentlemen, have
pity on a poor fern-collector!"--turning up his stale daisies.
"Food hasn't 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 that's the
beginning and the end of me."
"Ah not the end!" I made bold to plead.
"Then it's because I HAVE no end--any more than an ill-written
book. I just stop anywhere; which means I'm 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 don't pay five cents
on the dollar. What I might have been--once!--there's nothing
left to show. I was rotten before I was ripe. To begin with,
certainly, I wasn't a fountain of wisdom. All the more reason for
a definite channel--for having a little character and purpose.
But I hadn't 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 you'll 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,
certainly--if you've got one; but most people haven't. 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 there's something left of me. But the
ghost of a donkey--what's 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, sir--whoever you are--I'm 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 nowhere--found 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 you'll 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
they'd 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 it's a bit of a muddle and a tangle, and am by no means
sure that to this hour I've got the hang of it. You look as if
you had a clear head: some other time, if you consent, we'll 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. I've been here
three days: they've 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
haven't 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 friend--shall I say I
was disappointed? I'm already resigned. I didn't 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 shouldn't be sitting in this place, in this air, under
these impressions. This is a world I could have got on with
beautifully. There's 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 won't be long enough
for it to "go back on me. There's one thing!"--and here,
pausing, he laid his hand on mine; I rose and stood before him--
"I wish it were possible you should be with me to the end."
"I promise you to leave you only when you kick me downstairs."
But I suggested my terms. "It must be on condition of your
omitting from your conversation this intolerable flavour of
mortality. I know nothing of 'ends.' I'm all for beginnings."
He kept on me his sad weak eyes. Then with a faint smile: "Don't
cut down a man you find hanging. He has had a reason for it. I'm
bankrupt."
"Oh health's money!" I said. "Get well, and the rest will take
care of itself. I'm interested in your questionable claim--it's
the question that's the charm; and pretenders, to anything big
enough, have always been, for me, an attractive class. Only their
first duty's to be gallant."
"Their first duty's to understand their own points and to know
their own mind," he returned with hopeless lucidity. "Don't ask
me to climb our family tree now," he added; "I fear I haven't the
head for it. I'll try some day--if it will bear my weight; or
yours added to mine. There's no doubt, however, that we, as they
say, go back. But I know nothing of business. If I were to take
the matter in hand I should break in two the poor little silken
thread from which everything hangs. In a better world than this I
think I should be listened to. But the wind doesn't set to ideal
justice. There's no doubt that a hundred years ago we suffered a
palpable wrong. Yet we made no appeal at the time, and the dust
of a century now lies heaped upon our silence. Let it rest!"
"What then," I asked, "is the estimated value of your interest?"
"We were instructed from the first to accept a compromise.
Compared with the whole property our ideas have been small. We
were once advised in the sense of a hundred and thirty thousand
dollars. Why a hundred and thirty I'm sure I don't know. Don't
beguile me into figures."
"Allow me one more question," I said. "Who's actually in
possession?"
"A certain Mr. Richard Searle. I know nothing about him."
"He's in some way related to you?"
"Our great-grandfathers were half-brothers. What does that make
us?"
"Twentieth cousins, say. And where does your twentieth cousin
live?"
"At a place called Lackley--in Middleshire."
I thought it over. "Well, suppose we look up Lackley in
Middleshire!"
He got straight up. "Go and see it?"
"Go and see it."
"Well," he said, "with you I'll go anywhere."
On our return to town we determined to spend three days there
together and then proceed to our errand. We were as conscious one
as the other of that deeper mystic appeal made by London to those
superstitious pilgrims who feel it the mother-city of their race,
the distributing heart of their traditional life. Certain
characteristics of the dusky Babylon, certain aspects, phases,
features, "say" more to the American spiritual ear than anything
else in Europe. The influence of these things on Searle it
charmed me to note. His observation I soon saw to be, as I
pronounced it to him, searching and caressing. His almost morbid
appetite for any over-scoring of time, well-nigh extinct from
long inanition, threw the flush of its revival into his face and
his talk.
II
We looked out the topography of Middleshire in a county-guide,
which spoke highly, as the phrase is, of Lackley Park, and took
up our abode, our journey ended, at a wayside inn where, in the
days of leisure, the coach must have stopped for luncheon and
burnished pewters of rustic ale been handed up as straight as
possible to outsiders athirst with the sense of speed. We stopped
here for mere gaping joy of its steep-thatched roof, its latticed
windows, its hospitable porch, and allowed a couple of days to
elapse in vague undirected strolls and sweet sentimental
observance of the land before approaching the particular business
that had drawn us on. The region I allude to is a compendium of
the general physiognomy of England. The noble friendliness of the
scenery, its latent old-friendliness, the way we scarcely knew
whether we were looking at it for the first or the last time,
made it arrest us at every step. The countryside, in the full
warm rains of the last of April, had burst into sudden perfect
spring. The dark walls of the hedgerows had turned into blooming
screens, the sodden verdure of lawn and meadow been washed over
with a lighter brush. We went forth without loss of time for a
long walk on the great grassy hills, smooth arrested central
billows of some primitive upheaval, from the summits of which you
find half England unrolled at your feet. A dozen broad counties,
within the scope of your vision, commingle their green
exhalations. Closely beneath us lay the dark rich hedgy flats and
the copse-chequered slopes, white with the blossom of apples. At
widely opposite points of the expanse two great towers of
cathedrals rose sharply out of a reddish blur of habitation,
taking the mild English light.
We gave an irrepressible attention to this same solar reserve,
and found in it only a refinement of art. The sky never was empty
and never idle; the clouds were continually at play for our
benefit. Over against us, from our station on the hills, we saw
them piled and dissolved, condensed and shifted, blotting the
blue with sullen rain-spots, stretching, breeze-fretted, into
dappled fields of grey, bursting into an explosion of light or
melting into a drizzle of silver. We made our way along the
rounded ridge of the downs and reached, by a descent, through
slanting angular fields, green to cottage-doors, a russet village
that beckoned us from the heart of the maze in which the hedges
wrapped it up. Close beside it, I admit, the roaring train
bounces out of a hole in the hills; yet there broods upon this
charming hamlet an old-time quietude that makes a violation of
confidence of naming it so far away. We struck through a narrow
lane, a green lane, dim with its barriers of hawthorn; it led us
to a superb old farmhouse, now rather rudely jostled by the
multiplied roads and by-ways that have reduced its ancient
appanage. It stands there in stubborn picturesqueness, doggedly
submitting to be pointed out and sketched. It is a wonderful
image of the domiciliary conditions of the past--cruelly
complete; with bended beams and joists, beneath the burden of
gables, that seem to ache and groan with memories and regrets.
The short low windows, where lead and glass combine equally to
create an inward gloom, retain their opacity as a part of the
primitive idea of defence. Such an old house provokes on the part
of an American a luxury of respect. So propped and patched, so
tinkered with clumsy tenderness, clustered so richly about its
central English sturdiness, its oaken vertebrations, so humanised
with ages of use and touches of beneficent affection, it seemed
to offer to our grateful eyes a small rude symbol of the great
English social order. Passing out upon the highroad, we came to
the common browsing-patch, the "village-green" of the tales of
our youth. Nothing was absent: the shaggy mouse-coloured donkey,
nosing the turf with his mild and huge proboscis, the geese, the
old woman--THE old woman, in person, with her red cloak and her
black bonnet, frilled about the face and double-frilled beside
her decent placid cheeks--the towering ploughman with his white
smock-frock puckered on chest and back, his short corduroys, his
mighty calves, his big red rural face. We greeted these things as
children greet the loved pictures in a storybook lost and mourned
and found again. We recognised them as one recognises the
handwriting on letter-backs. Beside the road we saw a ploughboy
straddle whistling on a stile, and he had the merit of being not
only a ploughboy but a Gainsborough. Beyond the stile, across the
level velvet of a meadow, a footpath wandered like a streak drawn
by a finger over a surface of fine plush. We followed it from
field to field and from stile to stile; it was all adorably the
way to church. At the church we finally arrived, lost in its
rook-haunted churchyard, hidden from the workday world by the
broad stillness of pastures--a grey, grey tower, a huge black
yew, a cluster of village-graves with crooked headstones and
protrusions that had settled and sunk. The place seemed so to
ache with consecration that my sensitive companion gave way to
the force of it.
"You must bury me here, you know"--he caught at my arm. "It's the
first place of worship I've seen in my life. How it makes a
Sunday where it stands!"
It took the Church, we agreed, to make churches, but we had the
sense the next day of seeing still better why. We walked over
some seven miles, to the nearer of the two neighbouring seats of
that lesson; and all through such a mist of local colour that we
felt ourselves a pair of Smollett's pedestrian heroes faring
tavernward for a night of adventures. As we neared the provincial
city we saw the steepled mass of the cathedral, long and high,
rise far into the cloud-freckled blue; and as we got closer
stopped on a bridge and looked down at the reflexion of the solid
minster in a yellow stream. Going further yet we entered the
russet town--where surely Miss Austen's heroines, in chariots and
curricles, must often have come a-shopping for their sandals and
mittens; we lounged in the grassed and gravelled precinct and
gazed insatiably at that most soul-soothing sight, the waning
wasting afternoon light, the visible ether that feels the voices
of the chimes cling far aloft to the quiet sides of the
cathedral-tower; saw it linger and nestle and abide, as it loves
to do on all perpendicular spaces, converting them irresistibly
into registers and dials; tasted too, as deeply, of the peculiar
stillness of this place of priests; saw a rosy English lad come
forth and lock the door of the old foundation-school that
dovetailed with cloister and choir, and carry his big responsible
key into one of the quiet canonical houses: and then stood musing
together on the effect on one's mind of having in one's boyhood
gone and come through cathedral-shades as a King's scholar, and
yet kept ruddy with much cricket in misty river meadows. On the
third morning we betook ourselves to Lackley, having learned that
parts of the "grounds" were open to visitors, and that indeed on
application the house was sometimes shown.
Within the range of these numerous acres the declining spurs of
the hills continued to undulate and subside. A long avenue wound
and circled from the outermost gate through an untrimmed
woodland, whence you glanced at further slopes and glades and
copses and bosky recesses--at everything except the limits of the
place. It was as free and untended as I had found a few of the
large loose villas of old Italy, and I was still never to see the
angular fact of English landlordism muffle itself in so many
concessions. The weather had just become perfect; it was one of
the dozen exquisite days of the English year--days stamped with a
purity unknown in climates where fine weather is cheap. It was as
if the mellow brightness, as tender as that of the primroses
which starred the dark waysides like petals wind-scattered
over beds of moss, had been meted out to us by the cubic foot--
distilled from an alchemist's crucible. From this pastoral
abundance we moved upon the more composed scene, the park proper
--passed through a second lodge-gate, with weather-worn gilding
on its twisted bars, to the smooth slopes where the great trees
stood singly and the tame deer browsed along the bed of a
woodland stream. Here before us rose the gabled grey front of the
Tudor-time, developed and terraced and gardened to some later
loss, as we were afterwards to know, of type.
"Here you can wander all day," I said to Searle, "like an exiled
prince who has come back on tiptoe and hovers about the dominion
of the usurper."
"To think of 'others' having hugged this all these years!" he
answered. "I know what I am, but what might I have been? What do
such places make of a man?"
"I dare say he gets stupidly used to them," I said. "But I dare
say too, even then, that when you scratch the mere owner you find
the perfect lover."
"What a perfect scene and background it forms!" my friend,
however, had meanwhile gone on. "What legends, what histories it
knows! My heart really breaks with all I seem to guess. There's
Tennyson's Talking Oak! What summer days one could spend here!
How I could lounge the rest of my life away on this turf of the
middle ages! Haven't I some maiden-cousin in that old hall, or
grange, or court--what in the name of enchantment do you call the
thing?--who would give me kind leave?" And then he turned almost
fiercely upon me. "Why did you bring me here? Why did you drag me
into this distraction of vain regrets?"
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