Books: A Passionate Pilgrim
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Henry James >> A Passionate Pilgrim
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I paused for some moments before speaking, to allow his passion
fully to expend itself and to flicker up again if it chose; for
so far as I was concerned in the whole awkward matter I but
wanted to deal with him discreetly. "Your apprehensions, sir," I
said at last, "your not unnatural surprise, perhaps, at the
candour of our interest, have acted too much on your nerves.
You're attacking a man of straw, a creature of unworthy illusion;
though I'm sadly afraid you've wounded a man of spirit and
conscience. Either my friend has no valid claim on your estate,
in which case your agitation is superfluous; or he HAS a valid
claim--"
Mr. Searle seized my arm and glared at me; his pale face paler
still with the horror of my suggestion, his great eyes of alarm
glowing and his strange red hair erect and quivering. "A valid
claim!" he shouted. "Let him try it--let him bring it into
court!"
We had emerged into the great hall and stood facing the main
doorway. The door was open into the portico, through the stone
archway of which I saw the garden glitter in the blue light of a
full moon. As the master of the house uttered the words I have
just repeated my companion came slowly up into the porch from
without, bareheaded, bright in the outer moonlight, dark in the
shadow of the archway, and bright again in the lamplight at the
entrance of the hall. As he crossed the threshold the butler made
an appearance at the head of the staircase on our left, faltering
visibly a moment at sight of Mr. Searle; after which, noting my
friend, he gravely descended. He bore in his hand a small silver
tray. On the tray, gleaming in the light of the suspended lamp,
lay a folded note. Clement Searle came forward, staring a little
and startled, I think, by some quick nervous prevision of a
catastrophe. The butler applied the match to the train. He
advanced to my fellow visitor, all solemnly, with the offer of
his missive. Mr. Searle made a movement as if to spring forward,
but controlled himself. "Tottenham!" he called in a strident
voice.
"Yes, sir!" said Tottenham, halting.
"Stand where you are. For whom is that note?"
"For Mr. Clement Searle," said the butler, staring straight
before him and dissociating himself from everything.
"Who gave it to you?"
"Mrs. Horridge, sir." This personage, I afterwards learned, was
our friend the housekeeper.
"Who gave it Mrs. Horridge?"
There was on Tottenham's part just an infinitesimal pause before
replying.
"My dear sir," broke in Searle, his equilibrium, his ancient
ease, completely restored by the crisis, "isn't that rather my
business?"
"What happens in my house is my business, and detestable things
seem to be happening." Our host, it was clear, now so furiously
detested them that I was afraid he would snatch the bone of
contention without more ceremony. "Bring me that thing!" he
cried; on which Tottenham stiffly moved to obey.
"Really this is too much!" broke out my companion, affronted and
helpless.
So indeed it struck me, and before Mr. Searle had time to take
the note I possessed myself of it. "If you've no consideration
for your sister let a stranger at least act for her." And I tore
the disputed object into a dozen pieces.
"In the name of decency, what does this horrid business mean?" my
companion quavered.
Mr. Searle was about to open fire on him, but at that moment our
hostess appeared on the staircase, summoned evidently by our
high-pitched contentious voices. She had exchanged her dinner-
dress for a dark wrapper, removed her ornaments and begun to
disarrange her hair, a thick tress of which escaped from the
comb. She hurried down with a pale questioning face. Feeling
distinctly that, for ourselves, immediate departure was in the
air, and divining Mr. Tottenham to be a person of a few deep-
seated instincts and of much latent energy, I seized the
opportunity to request him, sotto voce, to send a carriage to the
door without delay. "And put up our things," I added.
Our host rushed at his sister and grabbed the white wrist that
escaped from the loose sleeve of her dress. "What was in that
note?" he quite hissed at her.
Miss Searle looked first at its scattered fragments and then at
her cousin. "Did you read it?"
"No, but I thank you for it!" said Searle.
Her eyes, for an instant, communicated with his own as I think
they had never, never communicated with any other source of
meaning; then she transferred them to her brother's face, where
the sense went out of them, only to leave a dull sad patience.
But there was something even in this flat humility that seemed to
him to mock him, so that he flushed crimson with rage and spite
and flung her away. "You always were an idiot! Go to bed."
In poor Searle's face as well the gathered serenity had been by
this time all blighted and distorted and the reflected brightness
of his happy day turned to blank confusion. "Have I been dealing
these three hours with a madman?" he woefully cried.
"A madman, yes, if you will! A man mad with the love of his home
and the sense of its stability. I've held my tongue till now, but
you've been too much for me. Who the devil are you, and what and
why and whence?" the terrible little man continued. "From what
paradise of fools do you come that you fancy I shall make over to
you, for the asking, a part of my property and my life? I'm
forsooth, you ridiculous person, to go shares with you? Prove
your preposterous claim! There isn't THAT in it!" And he kicked
one of the bits of paper on the floor.
Searle received this broadside gaping. Then turning away he went
and seated himself on a bench against the wall and rubbed his
forehead amazedly. I looked at my watch and listened for the
wheels of our carriage.
But his kinsman was too launched to pull himself up. "Wasn't it
enough that you should have plotted against my rights? Need you
have come into my very house to intrigue with my sister?"
My friend put his two hands to his face. "Oh, oh, oh!" he groaned
while Miss Searle crossed rapidly and dropped on her knees at his
side.
"Go to bed, you fool!" shrieked her brother.
"Dear cousin," she said, "it's cruel you're to have so to think
of us!"
"Oh I shall think of YOU as you'd like!" He laid a hand on her
head.
"I believe you've done nothing wrong," she brought bravely out.
"I've done what I could," Mr. Searle went on--"but it's arrant
folly to pretend to friendship when this abomination lies between
us. You were welcome to my meat and my wine, but I wonder you
could swallow them. The sight spoiled MY appetite!" cried the
master of Lackley with a laugh. "Proceed with your trumpery case!
My people in London are instructed and prepared."
"I shouldn't wonder if your case had improved a good deal since
you gave it up," I was moved to observe to Searle.
"Oho! you don't feign ignorance then?" and our insane entertainer
shook his shining head at me. "It's very kind of you to give it
up! Perhaps you'll also give up my sister!"
Searle sat staring in distress at his adversary. "Ah miserable
man--I thought we had become such beautiful friends."
"Boh, you hypocrite!" screamed our host.
Searle seemed not to hear him. "Am I seriously expected," he
slowly and painfully pursued, "to defend myself against the
accusation of any real indelicacy--to prove I've done nothing
underhand or impudent? Think what you please!" And he rose, with
an effort, to his feet. "I know what YOU think!" he added to Miss
Searle.
The wheels of the carriage resounded on the gravel, and at the
same moment a footman descended with our two portmanteaux. Mr.
Tottenham followed him with our hats and coats.
"Good God," our host broke out again, "you're not going away?"--
an ejaculation that, after all that had happened, had the
grandest comicality. "Bless my soul," he then remarked as
artlessly, "of course you're going!"
"It's perhaps well," said Miss Searle with a great effort,
inexpressibly touching in one for whom great efforts were visibly
new and strange, "that I should tell you what my poor little note
contained."
"That matter of your note, madam," her brother interrupted, "you
and I will settle together!"
"Let me imagine all sorts of kind things!" Searle beautifully
pleaded.
"Ah too much has been imagined!" she answered simply. "It was
only a word of warning. It was to tell you to go. I knew
something painful was coming."
He took his hat. "The pains and the pleasures of this day," he
said to his kinsman, "I shall equally never forget. Knowing you,"
and he offered his hand to Miss Searle, "has been the pleasure of
pleasures. I hoped something more might have come of it."
"A monstrous deal too much has come of it!" Mr. Searle
irrepressibly declared.
His departing guest looked at him mildly, almost benignantly,
from head to foot, and then with closed eyes and some collapse of
strength, "I'm afraid so, I can't stand more," he went on. I gave
him my arm and we crossed the threshold. As we passed out I heard
Miss Searle break into loud weeping.
"We shall hear from each other yet, I take it!" her brother
pursued, harassing our retreat.
My friend stopped, turning round on him fiercely. "You very
impossible man!" he cried in his face.
"Do you mean to say you'll not prosecute?" Mr. Searle kept it up.
"I shall force you to prosecute! I shall drag you into court, and
you shall be beaten--beaten--beaten!" Which grim reiteration
followed us on our course.
We drove of course to the little wayside inn from which we had
departed in the morning so unencumbered, in all broad England,
either with enemies or friends. My companion, as the carriage
rolled along, seemed overwhelmed and exhausted. "What a beautiful
horrible dream!" he confusedly wailed. "What a strange awakening!
What a long long day! What a hideous scene! Poor me! Poor woman!"
When we had resumed possession of our two little neighbouring
rooms I asked him whether Miss Searle's note had been the result
of anything that had passed between them on his going to rejoin
her. "I found her on the terrace," he said, "walking restlessly
up and down in the moonlight. I was greatly excited--I hardly
know what I said. I asked her, I think, if she knew the story of
Margaret Searle. She seemed frightened and troubled, and she used
just the words her brother had used--'I know nothing.' For the
moment, somehow, I felt as a man drunk. I stood before her and
told her, with great emphasis, how poor Margaret had married a
beggarly foreigner--all in obedience to her heart and in defiance
to her family. As I talked the sheeted moonlight seemed to close
about us, so that we stood there in a dream, in a world quite
detached. She grew younger, prettier, more attractive--I found
myself talking all kinds of nonsense. Before I knew it I had gone
very far. I was taking her hand and calling her 'Margaret, dear
Margaret!' She had said it was impossible, that she could do
nothing, that she was a fool, a child, a slave. Then with a
sudden sense--it was odd how it came over me there--of the
reality of my connexion with the place, I spoke of my claim
against the estate. 'It exists,' I declared, 'but I've given it
up. Be generous! Pay me for my sacrifice.' For an instant her
face was radiant. 'If I marry you,' she asked, 'will it make
everything right?' Of that I at once assured her--in our marriage
the whole difficulty would melt away like a rain-drop in the
great sea. 'Our marriage!' she repeated in wonder; and the deep
ring of her voice seemed to wake us up and show us our folly. 'I
love you, but I shall never see you again,' she cried; and she
hurried away with her face in her hands. I walked up and down the
terrace for some moments, and then came in and met you. That's
the only witchcraft I've used!"
The poor man was at once so roused and so shaken by the day's
events that I believed he would get little sleep. Conscious on my
own part that I shouldn't close my eyes, I but partly undressed,
stirred my fire and sat down to do some writing. I heard the
great clock in the little parlour below strike twelve, one, half-
past one. Just as the vibration of this last stroke was dying on
the air the door of communication with Searle's room was flung
open and my companion stood on the threshold, pale as a corpse,
in his nightshirt, shining like a phantom against the darkness
behind him. "Look well at me!" he intensely gasped; "touch me,
embrace me, revere me! You see a man who has seen a ghost!"
"Gracious goodness, what do you mean?"
"Write it down!" he went on. "There, take your pen. Put it into
dreadful words. How do I look? Am I human? Am I pale? Am I red?
Am I speaking English? A ghost, sir! Do you understand?"
I confess there came upon me by contact a kind of supernatural
shock. I shall always feel by the whole communication of it that
I too have seen a ghost. My first movement--I can smile at it now
--was to spring to the door, close it quickly and turn the key
upon the gaping blackness from which Searle had emerged. I seized
his two hands; they were wet with perspiration. I pushed my chair
to the fire and forced him to sit down in it; then I got on my
knees and held his hands as firmly as possible. They trembled and
quivered; his eyes were fixed save that the pupil dilated and
contracted with extraordinary force. I asked no questions, but
waited there, very curious for what he would say. At last he
spoke. "I'm not frightened, but I'm--oh excited! This is life!
This is living! My nerves--my heart--my brain! They're throbbing
--don't you feel it? Do you tingle? Are you hot? Are you cold?
Hold me tight--tight--tight! I shall tremble away into waves--
into surges--and know all the secrets of things and all the
reasons and all the mysteries!" He paused a moment and then went
on: "A woman--as clear as that candle: no, far clearer! In a blue
dress, with a black mantle on her head and a little black muff.
Young and wonderfully pretty, pale and ill; with the sadness of
all the women who ever loved and suffered pleading and accusing
in her wet-looking eyes. God knows I never did any such thing!
But she took me for my elder, for the other Clement. She came to
me here as she would have come to me there. She wrung her hands
and she spoke to me 'marry me!' she moaned; 'marry me and put an
end to my shame!' I sat up in bed, just as I sit here, looked at
her, heard her--heard her voice melt away, watched her figure
fade away. Bless us and save us! Here I be!"
I made no attempt either to explain or to criticise this
extraordinary passage. It's enough that I yielded for the hour to
the strange force of my friend's emotion. On the whole I think my
own vision was the more interesting of the two. He beheld but the
transient irresponsible spectre--I beheld the human subject hot
from the spectral presence. Yet I soon recovered my judgement
sufficiently to be moved again to try to guard him against the
results of excitement and exposure. It was easily agreed that he
was not for the night to return to his room, and I made him
fairly comfortable in his place by my fire. Wishing above all to
preserve him from a chill I removed my bedding and wrapped him in
the blankets and counterpane. I had no nerves either for writing
or for sleep; so I put out my lights, renewed the fuel and sat
down on the opposite side of the hearth. I found it a great and
high solemnity just to watch my companion. Silent, swathed and
muffled to his chin, he sat rigid and erect with the dignity of
his adventure. For the most part his eyes were closed; though
from time to time he would open them with a steady expansion and
stare, never blinking, into the flame, as if he again beheld
without terror the image of the little woman with the muff. His
cadaverous emaciated face, his tragic wrinkles intensified by the
upward glow from the hearth, his distorted moustache, his
extraordinary gravity and a certain fantastical air as the red
light flickered over him, all re-enforced his fine likeness to
the vision-haunted knight of La Mancha when laid up after some
grand exploit. The night passed wholly without speech. Toward its
close I slept for half an hour. When I awoke the awakened birds
had begun to twitter and Searle, unperturbed, sat staring at me.
We exchanged a long look, and I felt with a pang that his
glittering eyes had tasted their last of natural sleep. "How is
it? Are you comfortable?" I nevertheless asked.
He fixed me for a long time without replying and then spoke with
a weak extravagance and with such pauses between his words as
might have represented the slow prompting of an inner voice. "You
asked me when you first knew me what I was. 'Nothing,' I said,
'nothing of any consequence.' Nothing I've always supposed myself
to be. But I've wronged myself--I'm a great exception. I'm a
haunted man!"
If sleep had passed out of his eyes I felt with even a deeper
pang that sanity had abandoned his spirit. From this moment I was
prepared for the worst. There were in my friend, however, such
confirmed habits of mildness that I found myself not in the least
fearing he would prove unmanageable. As morning began fully to
dawn upon us I brought our curious vigil to a close. Searle was
so enfeebled that I gave him my hands to help him out of his
chair, and he retained them for some moments after rising to his
feet, unable as he seemed to keep his balance. "Well," he said,"
I've been once favoured, but don't think I shall be favoured
again. I shall soon be myself as fit to 'appear' as any of them.
I shall haunt the master of Lackley! It can only mean one thing--
that they're getting ready for me on the other side of the
grave."
When I touched the question of breakfast he replied that he had
his breakfast in his pocket; and he drew from his travelling-bag
a phial of morphine. He took a strong dose and went to bed. At
noon I found him on foot again, dressed, shaved, much refreshed.
"Poor fellow," he said, "you've got more than you bargained for--
not only a man with a grievance but a man with a ghost. Well, it
won't be for long!" It had of course promptly become a question
whither we should now direct our steps. "As I've so little time,"
he argued for this, "I should like to see the best, the best
alone." I answered that either for time or eternity I had always
supposed Oxford to represent the English maximum, and for Oxford
in the course of an hour we accordingly departed.
IV
Of that extraordinary place I shall not attempt to speak with any
order or indeed with any coherence. It must ever remain one of
the supreme gratifications of travel for any American aware of
the ancient pieties of race. The impression it produces, the
emotions it kindles in the mind of such a visitor, are too rich
and various to be expressed in the halting rhythm of prose.
Passing through the small oblique streets in which the long grey
battered public face of the colleges seems to watch jealously for
sounds that may break upon the stillness of study, you feel it
the most dignified and most educated of cities. Over and through
it all the great corporate fact of the University slowly throbs
after the fashion of some steady bass in a concerted piece or
that of the mediaeval mystical presence of the Empire in the old
States of Germany. The plain perpendicular of the so mildly
conventual fronts, masking blest seraglios of culture and
leisure, irritates the imagination scarce less than the harem-
walls of Eastern towns. Within their arching portals, however,
you discover more sacred and sunless courts, and the dark verdure
soothing and cooling to bookish eyes. The grey-green quadrangles
stand for ever open with a trustful hospitality. The seat of the
humanities is stronger in her own good manners than in a
marshalled host of wardens and beadles. Directly after our
arrival my friend and I wandered forth in the luminous early
dusk. We reached the bridge that under-spans the walls of
Magdalen and saw the eight-spired tower, delicately fluted and
embossed, rise in temperate beauty--the perfect prose of Gothic--
wooing the eyes to the sky that was slowly drained of day. We
entered the low monkish doorway and stood in the dim little court
that nestles beneath the tower, where the swallows niche more
lovingly in the tangled ivy than elsewhere in Oxford, and passed
into the quiet cloister and studied the small sculptured monsters
on the entablature of the arcade. I rejoiced in every one of my
unhappy friend's responsive vibrations, even while feeling that
they might as direfully multiply as those that had preceded them.
I may say that from this time forward I found it difficult to
distinguish in his company between the riot of fancy and the
labour of thought, or to fix the balance between what he saw and
what he imagined. He had already begun playfully to exchange his
identity for that of the earlier Clement Searle, and he now
delivered himself almost wholly in the character of his old-time
kinsman.
"THIS was my college, you know," he would almost anywhere break
out, applying the words wherever we stood--"the sweetest and
noblest in the whole place. How often have I strolled in this
cloister with my intimates of the other world! They are all dead
and buried, but many a young fellow as we meet him, dark or fair,
tall or short, reminds me of the past age and the early
attachment. Even as we stand here, they say, the whole thing
feels about its massive base the murmurs of the tide of time;
some of the foundation-stones are loosened, some of the breaches
will have to be repaired. Mine was the old unregenerate Oxford,
the home of rank abuses, of distinctions and privileges the most
delicious and invidious. What cared I, who was a perfect
gentleman and with my pockets full of money? I had an allowance
of a thousand a year."
It was at once plain to me that he had lost the little that
remained of his direct grasp on life and was unequal to any
effort of seeing things in their order. He read my apprehension
in my eyes and took pains to assure me I was right. "I'm going
straight down hill. Thank heaven it's an easy slope, coated with
English turf and with an English churchyard at the foot." The
hysterical emotion produced by our late dire misadventure had
given place to an unruffled calm in which the scene about us was
reflected as in an old-fashioned mirror. We took an afternoon
walk through Christ-Church meadow and at the river-bank procured
a boat which I pulled down the stream to Iffley and to the
slanting woods of Nuneham--the sweetest flattest reediest stream-
side landscape that could be desired. Here of course we
encountered the scattered phalanx of the young, the happy
generation, clad in white flannel and blue, muscular fair-haired
magnificent fresh, whether floated down the current by idle punts
and lounging in friendly couples when not in a singleness that
nursed ambitions, or straining together in rhythmic crews and
hoarsely exhorted from the near bank. When to the exhibition of
so much of the clearest joy of wind and limb we added the great
sense of perfumed protection shed by all the enclosed lawns and
groves and bowers, we felt that to be young in such scholastic
shades must be a double, an infinite blessing. As my companion
found himself less and less able to walk we repaired in turn to a
series of gardens and spent long hours sitting in their greenest
places. They struck us as the fairest things in England and the
ripest and sweetest fruit of the English system. Locked in their
antique verdure, guarded, as in the case of New College, by
gentle battlements of silver-grey, outshouldering the matted
leafage of undisseverable plants, filled with nightingales and
memories, a sort of chorus of tradition; with vaguely-generous
youths sprawling bookishly on the turf as if to spare it the
injury of their boot-heels, and with the great conservative
college countenance appealing gravely from the restless outer
world, they seem places to lie down on the grass in for ever, in
the happy faith that life is all a green old English garden and
time an endless summer afternoon. This charmed seclusion was
especially grateful to my friend, and his sense of it reached its
climax, I remember, on one of the last of such occasions and
while we sat in fascinated flanerie over against the sturdy back
of Saint John's. The wide discreetly-windowed wall here perhaps
broods upon the lawn with a more effective air of property than
elsewhere. Searle dropped into fitful talk and spun his humour
into golden figures. Any passing undergraduate was a peg to hang
a fable, every feature of the place a pretext for more
embroidery.
"Isn't it all a delightful lie?" he wanted to know. "Mightn't one
fancy this the very central point of the world's heart, where all
the echoes of the general life arrive but to falter and die?
Doesn't one feel the air just thick with arrested voices? It's
well there should be such places, shaped in the interest of
factitious needs, invented to minister to the book-begotten
longing for a medium in which one may dream unwaked and believe
unconfuted; to foster the sweet illusion that all's well in a
world where so much is so damnable, all right and rounded, smooth
and fair, in this sphere of the rough and ragged, the pitiful
unachieved especially, and the dreadful uncommenced. The world's
made--work's over. Now for leisure! England's safe--now for
Theocritus and Horace, for lawn and sky! What a sense it all
gives one of the composite life of the country and of the
essential furniture of its luckier minds! Thank heaven they had
the wit to send me here in the other time. I'm not much visibly
the braver perhaps, but think how I'm the happier! The misty
spires and towers, seen far off on the level, have been all these
years one of the constant things of memory. Seriously, what do
the spires and towers do for these people? Are they wiser,
gentler, finer, cleverer? My diminished dignity reverts in any
case at moments to the naked background of our own education, the
deadly dry air in which we gasp for impressions and comparisons.
I assent to it all with a sort of desperate calmness; I accept it
with a dogged pride. We're nursed at the opposite pole. Naked
come we into a naked world. There's a certain grandeur in the
lack of decorations, a certain heroic strain in that young
imagination of ours which finds nothing made to its hands, which
has to invent its own traditions and raise high into our morning-
air, with a ringing hammer and nails, the castles in which we
dwell. Noblesse oblige--Oxford must damnably do so. What a
horrible thing not to rise to such examples! If you pay the pious
debt to the last farthing of interest you may go through life
with her blessing; but if you let it stand unhonoured you're a
worse barbarian than we! But for the better or worse, in a myriad
private hearts, think how she must be loved! How the youthful
sentiment of mankind seems visibly to brood upon her! Think of
the young lives now taking colour in her cloisters and halls.
Think of the centuries' tale of dead lads--dead alike with the
end of the young days to which these haunts were a present world,
and the close of the larger lives which the general mother-scene
has dropped into less bottomless traps. What are those two young
fellows kicking their heels over on the grass there? One of them
has the Saturday Review; the other--upon my soul--the other has
Artemus Ward! Where do they live, how do they live, to what end
do they live? Miserable boys! How can they read Artemus Ward
under those windows of Elizabeth? What do you think loveliest in
all Oxford? The poetry of certain windows. Do you see that one
yonder, the second of those lesser bays, with the broken cornice
and the lattice? That used to be the window of my bosom friend a
hundred years ago. Remind me to tell you the story of that broken
cornice. Don't pretend it's not a common thing to have one's
bosom friend at another college. Pray was I committed to common
things? He was a charming fellow. By the way, he was a good deal
like you. Of course his cocked hat, his long hair in a black
ribbon, his cinnamon velvet suit and his flowered waistcoat made
a difference. We gentlemen used to wear swords."
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