‘You’re an invalid?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘A hopeless one!’
The little village of Hampton Court stands clustered about the broad entrance of Bushey Park. After we had dined we lounged along into the hazy vista of the great avenue of horse-chestnuts. There is a rare emotion, familiar to every intelligent traveller, in which the mind, with a great passionate throb, achieves a magical synthesis of its impressions. You feel England; you feel Italy. The reflection for the moment has an extraordinary poignancy. 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 arrival in England I had been waiting for it to come. A bottle of excellent Burgundy at dinner had perhaps unlocked to it the gates of sense; it came now with a conquering tread. Just the scene around me was the England of my visions. Over against us, amid the deep-hued bloom of its ordered gardens, the dark red palace, with its formal copings and its vacant windows, seemed to tell of a proud and splendid past; the little village nestling between park and palace, around a patch of turfy common, with its tavern of gentility, its ivy-towered church, its parsonage, retained to my modernised fancy the lurking semblance of a feudal hamlet. It was in this dark composite light that I had read all English prose; it was this mild moist air that had blown from the verses of English poets; beneath these broad acres of rain-deepened greenness a thousand honoured dead lay buried.
‘Well,’ I said to my friend, ‘I think there is no mistake about this being England. We may like it or not, it’s positive! No more dense and stubborn fact ever settled down on an expectant tourist. It brings my heart into my throat.’
Searle was silent. I looked at him; he was looking up at the sky, as if he were watching some visible descent of the elements. ‘On me too,’ he said, ‘it’s settling down!’ Then with a forced smile: ‘Heaven give me strength to bear it!’
‘O mighty world,’ I cried, ‘to hold at once so rare an Italy and so brave an England!’
‘To say nothing of America,’ added Searle.
‘O,’ I answered, ‘America has a world to herself!’
‘You have the advantage over me,’ my companion resumed, after a pause, ‘in coming to all this with an educated eye. You already know the old. I have never known it but by report. I have always fancied I should like it. In a small way at home, you know, I have tried to stick to the old. I must be a conservative by nature. People at home – a few people – used to call me a snob.’
‘I don’t believe you were a snob,’ I cried. ‘You look too amiable.’
He smiled sadly. ‘There it is,’ he said. ‘It’s the old story! I’m amiable! I know what that means! I was too great a fool to be even a snob! If I had been I should probably have come abroad earlier in life – before – before –’ He paused, and his head dropped sadly on his breast.
The bottle of Burgundy had loosened his tongue. I felt that my learning his story was merely a question of time. Something told me that I had gained his confidence and he would unfold himself. ‘Before you lost your health,’ I said.
‘Before I lost my health,’ he answered. ‘And my property, – the little I had. And my ambition. And my self-esteem.’
‘Come!’ I said. ‘You shall get them all back. This tonic English climate will wind you up in a month. And with the return of health, all the rest will return.’
He sat musing, with his eyes fixed on the distant palace. ‘They are too far gone, – self-esteem, especially! I should like to be an old genteel pensioner, lodged over there in the palace, and spending my days in maundering about these classic haunts. 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 pay them compliments. Poor, precious, forsaken creatures! So flattered and courted in their day, so neglected now! Offering up their shoulders and ringlets and smiles to that inexorable solitude!’
I patted my friend on the shoulder. ‘You shall be yourself again yet,’ I said.
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 lovely budding gentlewomen, perfectly mounted and equipped, who form to American eyes the sweetest incident of English scenery. She had distanced her servant, and, as she came abreast of us, turned slightly in her saddle and looked back at him. In the movement she dropped her whip. Drawing in her horse, she cast upon the ground a glance of maidenly alarm. ‘This is something better than a Lely,’ I said. Searle hastened forward, picked up the whip, and removing his hat with an air of great devotion, presented it to the young girl. Fluttered and blushing, she reached forward, took it with softly murmured gratitude, and the next moment was bounding over the elastic turf. Searle stood watching her; the servant, as he passed us, touched his hat. When Searle turned toward me again, I saw that his face was glowing with a violent blush. ‘I doubt of your having come abroad too late!’ I said, laughing.
A short distance from where we had stopped was an old stone bench. We went and sat down on it and watched the light mist turning to sullen gold in the rays of the evening sun. ‘We ought to be thinking of the train back to London, I suppose,’ I said at last.
‘O, hang the train!’ said Searle.
‘Willingly! There could be no better spot than this to feel the magic of an English twilight.’ So we lingered, and the twilight lingered around us, – a light and not a darkness. As we sat, there came trudging along the road an individual whom, from afar, I recognised as a member of the genus ‘tramp’. I had read of the British tramp, but I had never yet encountered him, and I brought my historic consciousness to bear upon the present specimen. 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 greasy earlocks 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 green stuff in the bottom. His face was pale, haggard, and degraded beyond description, – a singular mixture of brutality and finesse. He had a history. From what height had he fallen, from what depth had he risen? Never was a form of rascally beggarhood more complete. There was a merciless fixedness of outline about him which filled me with a kind of awe. I felt as if I were in the presence of a personage, – an artist in vagrancy.
‘For God’s sake, gentlemen,’ he said, in that raucous tone of weather-beaten poverty suggestive of chronic sore-throat exacerbated by perpetual gin, – ‘for God’s sake, gentlemen, have pity on a poor fern-collector!’ – turning up his stale dandelions. ‘Food hasn’t passed my lips, gentlemen, in the last three days.’
We gaped responsive, in the precious pity of guileless Yankeeism. ‘I wonder,’ thought I, ‘if half a crown would be enough?’ And our fasting botanist went limping away through the park with a mystery of satirical gratitude super-added to his general mystery.
‘I feel as if I had seen my doppel-ganger,’ said Searle. ‘He reminds me of myself. What am I but a tramp?’
Upon this hint I spoke. ‘What are you, my friend?’ I asked. ‘Who are you?’
A sudden blush rose to his pale face, so that 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. I have lived in New York. What am I? That’s easily told. Nothing! I assure you, nothing.’
‘A very good fellow, apparently,’ I protested.
‘A very good fellow! Ah, there it is! You’ve said more than you mean. It’s by having been a very good fellow all my days that I’ve come to this. I have drifted through life. I’m a failure, sir, – a failure as hopeless and helpless as any that ever swallowed up the slender investments of the widow and the orphan. I don’t pay five cents on the dollar. Of what I was to begin with no mem
ory remains. I have been ebbing away, from the start, in a steady current which, at forty, has left this arid sand-bank behind. To begin with, certainly, I was not a fountain of wisdom. All the more reason for a definite channel, – for will and purpose and direction. I walked by chance and sympathy and sentiment. Take a turn through New York and you’ll find my tattered sympathies and sentiments 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 dreams I cherished, the poisonous fumes of pleasure, amid which nothing was sweet or precious 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 God and not in man! I believed in eating your cake and having it. I respected Pleasure, and she made a fool of me. Other men, treating her like the arrant strumpet she is, enjoyed her for the hour, but kept their good manners for plain-faced Business, with the larger dowry, to whom they are now lawfully married. My taste was to be delicate; well, perhaps I was so! I had a little money; it went the way of my little wit. Here in my pocket I have forty pounds of it left. The only thing I have to show for my money and my wit is a little volume of verses, printed at my own expense, in which fifteen years ago I made bold to sing the charms of love and idleness. Six months since I got hold of the volume; it reads like the poetry of fifty years ago. The form is incredible. I hadn’t seen Hampton Court then. When I was thirty I married. It was a sad mistake, but a generous one. The young girl was poor and obscure, but beautiful and proud. I fancied she would make an incomparable woman. It was a sad mistake! She died at the end of three years, leaving no children. Since then I have idled long. I have had bad habits. To this impalpable thread of existence the current of my life has shrunk. To-morrow I shall be high and dry. Was I meant to come to this? Upon my soul I wasn’t! If I say what I feel, you’ll fancy my vanity quite equal to my folly, and set me down as one of those dreary theorisers after the fact, who draw any moral from their misfortunes but the damning moral that vice is vice and that’s an end of it. Take it for what it’s worth. I have always fancied that I was meant for a gentler world. Before heaven, sir, – whoever you are, – I’m in practice so absurdly tender-hearted that I can afford to say it, – I came into the world an aristocrat. I was born with a soul for the picturesque. It condemns me, I confess; but in a measure, too, it absolves me. I found it nowhere. I 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 land, I feel – 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 vulgar idleness would have been – don’t laugh now! – would have been elegant leisure. How it was that I never came abroad is more than I can say. It might have cut the knot; but the knot was too tight. I was always unwell or in debt or entangled. Besides, I had a horror of the sea – with reason, heaven knows! A year ago I was reminded of the existence of an old claim to a portion of an English estate, cherished off and on by various members of my family for the past eighty years. It’s undeniably slender and desperately hard to define. I am by no means sure that to this hour I have mastered it. You look as if you had a clear head. Some other time, if you’ll consent, we’ll puzzle it out, such as it is, together. Poverty was staring me in the face; I sat down and got my claim by heart, as I used to get nine times nine as a boy. I dreamed about it for six months, half expecting to wake up some fine morning to hear through a latticed casement the cawing of an English rookery. A couple of months since there came out here on business of his own a sort of half-friend of mine, a sharp New York lawyer, an extremely common fellow, but a man with an eye for the weak point and the strong point. It was with him yesterday that you saw me dining. He undertook, as he expressed it, to “nose round” and see if anything could be made of this pretended right. The matter had never seriously been taken up. A month later I got a letter from Simmons, assuring me that things looked mighty well, that he should be vastly amased if I hadn’t a case. I took fire in a humid sort of way; I acted, for the first time in my life; I sailed for England. I have been here three days: it seems three months. After keeping me waiting for thirty-six hours, last evening my precious Simmons makes his appearance, and informs me, with his mouth full of mutton, that I was a blasted fool to have taken him at his word; that he had been precipitate; that I had been precipitate; that my claim was moonshine; and that I must do penance and take a ticket for another fortnight of seasickness in his agreeable society. My friend, my friend! Shall I say I was disappointed? I’m already resigned. I doubted the practicability of my claim. I felt in my deeper consciousness that it was the crowning illusion of a life of illusions. Well, it was a pretty one. Poor Simmons! I forgive him with all my heart. But for him I shouldn’t be sitting in this place, in this air, with these thoughts. This is a world I could have loved. There’s a great fitness in its having been kept for the last. After this nothing would have been tolerable. I shall now have a month of it, I hope, and I shall not have a chance to be disenchanted. 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,’ I said, ‘to leave you only at your own request. But it must be on condition of your omitting from your conversation this intolerable flavour of mortality. The end! Perhaps it’s the beginning.’
He shook his head. ‘You don’t know me. It’s a long story. I’m incurably ill.’
‘I know you a little. I have a strong suspicion that your illness is in great measure a matter of mind and spirits. All that you’ve told me is but another way of saying that you have lived hitherto in yourself. The tenement’s haunted! Live abroad! Take an interest!’
He looked at me for a moment with 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.’
‘O, health is money!’ I said. ‘Get well, and the rest will take care of itself. I’m interested in your claim.’
‘Don’t ask me to expound it now! It’s a sad muddle. Let it alone. I know nothing of business. If I myself were to take the matter in hand, I should break short off the poor little silken thread of my expectancy. In a better world than this I think I should be listened to. But in this hard world there’s small bestowal of ideal justice. There is no doubt, I fancy, that, a hundred years ago, we suffered a palpable wrong. But we made no appeal at the time, and the dust of a century now lies heaped upon our silence. Let it rest!’
‘What is the estimated value of your interest?’
‘We were instructed from the first to accept a compromise. Compared with the whole property, our utmost right is extremely small. Simmons talked of eighty-five thousand dollars. Why eighty-five I’m sure I don’t know. Don’t beguile me into figures.’
‘Allow me one more question. Who is actually in possession?’
‘A certain Mr Richard Searle. I know nothing about him.’
‘He is in some way related to you?’
‘Our great-grandfathers were half-brothers. What does that make?’
‘Twentieth cousins, say. And where does your twentieth cousin live?’
‘At Lockley Park, Herefordshire.’
I pondered awhile. ‘I’m interested in you, Mr Searle,’ I said. ‘In your story, in your title, such as it is, and in this Lockley Park, Herefordshire. Suppose we go down and see it.’
He rose to his feet with a certain alertness. ‘I shall make a sound man of him, yet,’ I said to myself.
‘I shouldn’t have the heart,’ he said, ‘to accomplish the melancholy pilgrimage alone. But with you I’ll go anywhere.’
On our return to London we determined to spend three days there together,
and then to go into the country. We felt to excellent purpose the sombre charm of London, the mighty mother-city of our mighty race, the great distributing heart of our traditional life. Certain London characteristics – monuments, relics, hints of history, local moods and memories – are more deeply suggestive to an American soul than anything else in Europe. With an equal attentive piety my friend and I glanced at these things. Their influence on Searle was deep and singular. His observation I soon perceived to be extremely acute. His almost passionate relish for the old, the artificial, and social, wellnigh extinct from its long inanition, began now to tremble and thrill with a tardy vitality. I watched in silent wonderment this strange metaphysical renascence.
Between the fair boundaries of the counties of Hereford and Worcester rise in a long undulation the sloping pastures of the Malvern Hills. Consulting a big red book on the castles and manors of England, we found Lockley Park to be seated near the base of this grassy range, – though in which county I forget. In the pages of this genial volume, Lockley Park and its appurtenances made a very handsome figure. We took up our abode at a certain little wayside inn, at which in the days of leisure the coach must have stopped for lunch, and burnished pewters of rustic ale been tenderly exalted to ‘outsides’ athirst with breezy progression. Here we stopped, for sheer admiration of its steep thatched roof, its latticed windows, and its homely porch. We allowed a couple of days to elapse in vague, undirected strolls and sweet sentimental observance of the land, before we prepared to execute the especial purpose of our journey. This admirable region is a compendium of the general physiognomy of England. The noble friendliness of the scenery, its subtle old-friendliness, the magical familiarity of multitudinous details, appealed to us at every step and at every glance. Deep in our souls a natural affection answered. The whole land, 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 was streaked with a ranker freshness. We went forth without loss of time for a long walk on the hills. Reaching their summits, you find half England unrolled at your feet. A dozen broad counties, within the vast range of your vision, commingle their green exhalations. Closely beneath us lay the dark, rich flats of hedgy Worcestershire and the copse-chequered slopes of rolling Hereford, white with the blossom of apples. At widely opposite points of the large expanse two great cathedral towers rise sharply, taking the light, from the settled shadow of their circling towns, – the light, the ineffable English light! ‘Out of England,’ cried Searle, ‘it’s but a garish world!’