The poor fellow blushed up to his eyes, took off his hat, and wiped his forehead with a ragged handkerchief. ‘My name is Rawson, sir. Beyond that, it’s a long story.’
‘I ask out of sympathy,’ said Searle. ‘I have a fellow-feeling! You’re a poor devil; I’m a poor devil too.’
‘I’m the poorer devil of the two,’ said the stranger, with a little emphatic nod of the head.
‘Possibly. I suppose an English poor devil is the poorest of all poor devils. And then, you have fallen from a height. From Wadham College as a gentleman commoner (is that what they call you?) to Wadham College as a Bath-chair man! Good heavens, man, the fall’s enough to kill you!’
‘I didn’t take it all at once, sir. I dropped a bit one time and a bit another.’
‘That’s me, that’s me!’ cried Searle, clapping his hands.
‘And now,’ said our friend, ‘I believe I can’t drop further.’
‘My dear fellow,’ and Searle clasped his hand and shook it, ‘there’s a perfect similarity in our lot.’
Mr Rawson lifted his eyebrows. ‘Save for the difference of sitting in a Bath-chair and walking behind it!’
‘O, I’m at my last gasp, Mr Rawson.’
‘I’m at my last penny, sir.’
‘Literally, Mr Rawson?’
Mr Rawson shook his head, with a world of vague bitterness. ‘I have almost come to the point,’ he said, ‘of drinking my beer and buttoning my coat figuratively; but I don’t talk in figures.’
Fearing that the conversation had taken a turn which might seem to cast a rather fantastic light upon Mr Rawson’s troubles, I took the liberty of asking him with great gravity how he made a living.
‘I don’t make a living,’ he answered, with tearful eyes, ‘I can’t make a living. I have a wife and three children, starving, sir. You wouldn’t believe what I have come to. I sent my wife to her mother’s, who can ill afford to keep her, and came to Oxford a week ago, thinking I might pick up a few half-crowns by showing people about the colleges. But it’s no use. I haven’t the assurance. I don’t look decent. They want a nice little old man with black gloves, and a clean shirt, and a silver-headed stick. What do I look as if I knew about Oxford, sir?’
‘Dear me,’ cried Searle, ‘why didn’t you speak to us before?’
‘I wanted to; half a dozen times I have been on the point of it. I knew you were Americans.’
‘And Americans are rich!’ cried Searle, laughing. ‘My dear Mr Rawson, American as I am, I’m living on charity.’
‘And I’m not, sir! There it is. I’m dying for the want of charity. You say you’re a pauper; it takes an American pauper to go bowling about in a Bath-chair. America’s an easy country.’
‘Ah, me!’ groaned Searle. ‘Have I come to Wadham gardens to hear the praise of America?’
‘Wadham gardens are very well!’ said Mr Rawson; ‘but one may sit here hungry and shabby, so long as one isn’t too shabby, as well as elsewhere. You’ll not persuade me that it’s not an easier thing to keep afloat yonder than here. I wish I were there, that’s all!’ added Mr Rawson, with a sort of feeble-minded energy. Then brooding for a moment on his wrongs: ‘Have you a brother? or you, sir? It matters little to you. But it has mattered to me with a vengeance! Shabby as I sit here, I have a brother with his five thousand a year. Being a couple of years my senior, he gorges while I starve. There’s England for you! A very pretty place for him!’
‘Poor England!’ said Searle, softly.
‘Has your brother never helped you?’ I asked.
‘A twenty-pound note now and then! I don’t say that there have not been times when I have sorely tried his generosity. I have not been what I should. I married dreadfully amiss. But the devil of it is that he started fair and I started foul; with the tastes, the desires, the needs, the sensibilities of a gentleman, – and nothing else! I can’t afford to live in England.’
‘This poor gentleman,’ said I, ‘fancied a couple of months ago that he couldn’t afford to live in America.’
‘I’d change chances with him!’ And Mr Rawson gave a passionate slap to his knee.
Searle reclined in his chair with his eyes closed and his face twitching with violent emotion. Suddenly he opened his eyes with a look of awful gravity. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘you’re a failure! Be judged! Don’t talk about chances. Don’t talk about fair starts and foul starts. I’m at that point myself that I have a right to speak. It lies neither in one’s chance nor one’s start to make one a success; nor in anything one’s brother can do or can undo. It lies in one’s own will! You and I, sir, have had none; that’s very plain! We have been weak, sir; as weak as water. Here we are, sitting staring in each other’s faces and reading our weakness in each other’s eyes. We are of no account!’
Mr Rawson received this address with a countenance in which heartfelt conviction was oddly mingled with a vague suspicion that a proper self-respect required him to resent its unflattering candour. In the course of a minute a proper self-respect yielded to the warm, comfortable sense of his being understood, even to his light dishonour. ‘Go on, sir, go on,’ he said. ‘It’s wholesome truth.’ And he wiped his eyes with his dingy handkerchief.
‘Dear me!’ cried Searle. ‘I’ve made you cry. Well! we speak as from man to man. I should be glad to think that you had felt for a moment the side-light of that great undarkening of the spirit which precedes – which precedes the grand illumination of death.’
Mr Rawson sat silent for a moment, with his eyes fixed on the ground and his well-cut nose more deeply tinged by the force of emotion. Then at last, looking up: ‘You’re a very good-natured man, sir; and you’ll not persuade me that you don’t come of a good-natured race. Say what you please about a chance; when a man’s fifty, – degraded, penniless, a husband and father, – a chance to get on his legs again is not to be despised. Something tells me that my chance is in your country, – that great home of chances. I can starve here, of course; but I don’t want to starve. Hang it, sir, I want to live. I see thirty years of life before me yet. If only, by God’s help, I could spend them there! It’s a fixed idea of mine. I’ve had it for the last ten years. It’s not that I’m a radical. I’ve no ideas! Old England’s good enough for me, but I’m not good enough for old England. I’m a shabby man that wants to get out of a room full of staring gentlefolks. I’m forever put to the blush. It’s a perfect agony of spirit. Everything reminds me of my younger and better self. O, for a cooling, cleansing plunge into the unknowing and the unknown! I lie awake thinking of it.’
Searle closed his eyes and shivered with a long-drawn tremor which I hardly knew whether to take for an expression of physical or of mental pain. In a moment I perceived it was neither. ‘O my country, my country, my country!’ he murmured in a broken voice; and then sat for some time abstracted and depressed. I intimated to our companion that it was time we should bring our séance to a close, and he, without hesitating, possessed himself of the little handrail of the Bath-chair and pushed it before him. We had got half-way home before Searle spoke or moved. Suddenly in the High Street, as we were passing in front of a chop-house, from whose open doors there proceeded a potent suggestion of juicy joints and suet puddings, he motioned us to halt. ‘This is my last five pounds,’ he said, drawing a note from his pocket-book. ‘Do me the favour, Mr Rawson, to accept it. Go in there and order a colossal dinner. Order a bottle of Burgundy and drink it to my immortal health!’ Mr Rawson stiffened himself up and received the gift with momentarily irresponsive fingers. Bur Mr Rawson had the nerves of a gentleman. I saw the titillation of his pointed finger-tips as they closed upon the crisp paper; I noted the fine tremor in his empurpled nostril as it became more deeply conscious of the succulent flavour of the spot. He crushed the crackling note in his palm with a convulsive pressure.
‘It shall be Chambertin!’ he said, jerking a spasmodic bow. The next moment the door swung behind him.
Searle relapsed into his feeble stupor, and on reaching the hotel I
helped him to get to bed. For the rest of the day he lay in a half-somnolent state, without motion or speech. The doctor, whom I had constantly in attendance, declared that his end was near. He expressed great surprise that he should have lasted so long; he must have been living for a month on a cruelly extorted strength. Toward evening, as I sat by his bedside in the deepening dusk, he aroused himself with a purpose which I had vaguely felt gathering beneath his quietude. ‘My cousin, my cousin,’ he said, confusedly. ‘Is she here?’ It was the first time he had spoken of Miss Searle since our exit from her brother’s house. ‘I was to have married her,’ he went on. ‘What a dream! That day was like a string of verses – rhymed hours. But the last verse is bad measure. What’s the rhyme to “love”? Above! Was she a simple person, a sweet person? Or have I dreamed it? She had the healing gift; her touch would have cured my madness. I want you to do something. Write three lines, three words: “Good-bye; remember me; be happy.” And then, after a long pause: ‘It’s strange a man in my condition should have a wish. Need a man eat his breakfast before his hanging? What a creature is man! what a farce is life! Here I lie, worn down to a mere throbbing fever-point; I breathe and nothing more, and yet I desire! My desire lives. If I could see her! Help me out with it and let me die.’
Half an hour later, at a venture, I despatched a note to Miss Searle: ‘Your cousin is rapidly dying. He asks to see you.’ I was conscious of a certain unkindness in doing so. It would bring a great trouble, and no power to face the trouble. But out of her distress I fondly hoped a sufficient energy might be born. On the following day my friend’s exhaustion had become so total that I began to fear that his intelligence was altogether gone. But towards evening he rallied awhile, and talked in a maundering way about many things, confounding in a ghastly jumble the memories of the past weeks and those of bygone years. ‘By the way,’ he said suddenly, ‘I have made no will. I haven’t much to bequeath. Yet I’ve something.’ He had been playing listlessly with a large signet-ring on his left hand, which he now tried to draw off. ‘I leave you this,’ working it round and round vainly. ‘If you can get it off. What mighty knuckles! There must be such knuckles in the mummies of the Pharaohs. Well, when I’m gone! Nay, I leave you something more precious than gold, – the sense of a great kindness. But I have a little gold left. Bring me those trinkets.’ I placed on the bed before him several articles of jewelry, relics of early elegance: his watch and chain, of great value, a locket and seal, some shirt-buttons and scarf-pins. He trifled with them feebly for some moments, murmuring various names and dates associated with them. At last, looking up with a sudden energy, ‘What’s become of Mr Rawson?’
‘You want to see him?’
‘How much are these things worth?’ he asked, without heeding me. ‘How much would they bring?’ And he held them up in his weak hands. ‘They have a great weight. Two hundred pounds? I am richer than I thought! Rawson – Rawson – you want to get out of this awful England.’
I stepped to the door and requested the servant, whom I kept in constant attendance in the adjoining sitting-room, to send and ascertain if Mr Rawson was on the premises. He returned in a few moments, introducing our shabby friend. Mr Rawson was pale, even to his nose, and, with his suppressed agitation, had an air of great distinction. I led him up to the bed. In Searle’s eyes, as they fell on him, there shone for a moment the light of a high fraternal greeting.
‘Great God!’ said Mr Rawson, fervently.
‘My friend,’ said Searle, ‘there is to be one American the less. Let there be one the more. At the worst, you’ll be as good a one as I. Foolish me! Take these trinkets; let them help you on your way. They are gifts and memories, but this is a better use. Heaven speed you! May America be kind to you. Be kind, at the last, to your own country!’
‘Really, this is too much; I can’t,’ our friend protested in a tremulous voice. ‘Do get well, and I’ll stop here!’
‘Nay; I’m booked for my journey, you for yours. I hope you don’t suffer at sea.’
Mr Rawson exhaled a groan of helpless gratitude, appealing piteously from so awful a good fortune. ‘It’s like the angel of the Lord,’ he said, ‘who bids people in the Bible to rise and flee!’
Searle had sunk back upon his pillow, exhausted: I led Mr Rawson back into the sitting-room, where in three words I proposed to him a rough valuation of our friend’s trinkets. He assented with perfect good breeding; they passed into my possession and a second bank-note into his.
From the collapse into which this beneficent interview had plunged him, Searle gave few signs of being likely to emerge. He breathed, as he had said, and nothing more. The twilight deepened: I lit the night-lamp. The doctor sat silent and official at the foot of the bed; I resumed my constant place near the head. Suddenly Searle opened his eyes widely. ‘She’ll not come,’ he murmured. ‘Amen! she’s an English sister.’ Five minutes passed. He started forward. ‘She has come, she is here!’ he whispered. His words conveyed to my mind so absolute an assurance, that I lightly rose and passed into the sitting-room. At the same moment, through the opposite door, the servant introduced a lady. A lady, I say; for an instant she was simply such; tall, pale, dressed in deep mourning. The next moment I had uttered her name – ‘Miss Searle!’ She looked ten years older.
She met me, with both hands extended, and an immense question in her face. ‘He has just spoken your name,’ I said. And then, with a fuller consciousness of the change in her dress and countenance: ‘What has happened?’
‘O death, death!’ said Miss Searle. ‘You and I are left.’
There came to me with her words a sort of sickening shock, the sense of poetic justice having been grimly shuffled away. ‘Your brother?’ I demanded.
She laid her hand on my arm, and I felt its pressure deepen as she spoke. ‘He was thrown from his horse in the park. He died on the spot. Six days have passed. – Six months!’
She took my arm. A moment later we had entered the room and approached the bedside. The doctor withdrew. Searle opened his eyes and looked at her from head to foot. Suddenly he seemed to perceive her mourning. ‘Already!’ he cried, audibly; with a smile, as I believe, of pleasure.
She dropped on her knees and took his hand. ‘Not for you, cousin,’ she whispered. ‘For my poor brother.’
He started in all his deathly longitude as with a galvanic shock. ‘Dead! he dead! Life itself!’ And then, after a moment, with a slight rising inflection: ‘You are free?’
‘Free, cousin. Sadly free. And now – now – with what use for freedom?’
He looked steadily a moment into her eyes, dark in the heavy shadow of her musty mourning veil. ‘For me,’ he said, ‘wear colours!’
In a moment more death had come, the doctor had silently attested it, and Miss Searle had burst into sobs.
We buried him in the little churchyard in which he had expressed the wish to lie; beneath one of the mightiest of English yews and the little tower than which none in all England has a softer and hoarier grey. A year has passed. Miss Searle, I believe, has begun to wear colours.
THE MADONNA OF THE FUTURE
WE had been talking about the masters who had achieved but a single masterpiece, – the artists and poets who but once in their lives had known the divine afflatus, and touched the high level of the best. Our host had been showing us a charming little cabinet picture by a painter whose name we had never heard, and who, after this one spasmodic bid for fame, had apparently relapsed into fatal mediocrity. There was some discussion as to the frequency of this phenomenon; during which, I observed, H— sat silent, finishing his cigar with a meditative air, and looking at the picture, which was being handed round the table. ‘I don’t know how common a case it is,’ he said at last, ‘but I’ve seen it. I’ve known a poor fellow who painted his one masterpiece, and’ – he added with a smile – ‘he didn’t even paint that. He made his bid for fame, and missed it.’ We all knew H— for a clever man who had seen much of men and manners, and had a great s
tock of reminiscences. Some one immediately questioned him further, and while I was engrossed with the raptures of my neighbour over the little picture, he was induced to tell his tale. If I were to doubt whether it would bear repeating, I should only have to remember how that charming woman, our hostess, who had left the table, ventured back in rustling rose-colour, to pronounce our lingering a want of gallantry, and, finding us a listening circle, had sunk into her chair in spite of our cigars, and heard the story out so graciously, that when the catastrophe was reached she glanced across at me, and showed me a tender tear in each of her beautiful eyes.
It relates to my youth, and to Italy: two fine things! (H—began). I had arrived late in the evening at Florence, and while I finished my bottle of wine at supper, had fancied that, tired traveller though I was, I might pay the city a finer compliment than by going vulgarly to bed. A narrow passage wandered darkly away out of the little square before my hotel, and looked as if it bored into the heart of Florence. I followed it, and at the end of ten minutes emerged upon a great piazza, filled only with the mild autumn moonlight. Opposite rose the Palazzo Vecchio, like some huge civic fortress, with the great bell-tower springing from its embattled verge like a mountain-pine from the edge of a cliff. At its base, in its projected shadow, gleamed certain dim sculptures which I wonderingly approached. One of the images, on the left of the palace door, was a magnificent colossus, shining through the dusky air like some embodied Defiance. In a moment I recognised him as Michael Angelo’s David. I turned with a certain relief from his sinister strength to a slender figure in bronze, stationed beneath the high, light loggia, which opposes the free and elegant span of its arches to the dead masonry of the palace; a figure supremely shapely and graceful; gentle, almost, in spite of his holding out with his light nervous arm the snaky head of the slaughtered Gorgon. His name is Perseus, and you may read his story, not in the Greek mythology, but in memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini. Glancing from one of these fine fellows to the other, I probably uttered some irrepressible commonplace of praise, for, as if provoked by my voice, a man rose from the steps of the loggia, where he had been sitting in the shadow, and addressed me in good English, – a small, slim personage, clad in a sort of black velvet tunic (as it seemed), and with a mass of auburn hair, which gleamed in the moonlight, escaping from a little mediaeval berretta. In a tone of the most insinuating deference, he asked me for my ‘impressions’. He seemed picturesque, fantastic, slightly unreal. Hovering there in this consecrated neighbourhood, he might have passed for the genius of aesthetic hospitality, – if the genius of aesthetic hospitality were not commonly some shabby little custode, flourishing a calico pocket-handkerchief, and openly resentful of the divided franc. This fantasy was made none the less plausible by the brilliant tirade with which he greeted my embarrassed silence.