Henry James

“ Mr. Searle at once assumed the part of cicerone, and—I had not hitherto done him justice—Mr. Searle became almost agreeable. While I lingered behind with his sister he walked in advance with his kinsman. It was as if he had said: “Well, if you want the old place you shall have it—so far as the impression goes!” He spared us no thrill—I had almost said no pang—of that experience. Carrying a tall silver candlestick in his left hand, he raised it and lowered it and cast the light hither and thither, upon pictures and hangings and carvings and cornices. He knew his house to perfection. ”

“ It was of course easy to descant on the beauties of park and mansion, and as I did so I observed our hostess. She had no arts, no impulses nor graces—scarce even any manners; she was queerly, almost frowsily dressed; yet she pleased me well. She had an antique sweetness, a homely fragrance of old traditions. To be so simple, among those complicated treasures, so pampered and yet so fresh, so modest and yet so placid, told of just the spacious leisure in which Searle and I had imagined human life to be steeped in such places as that. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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!” ”

“ 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 exactly not, sir! There it is. I’m dying for the lack of that same. You say you’re a pauper, but it takes an American pauper to go bowling about in a Bath-chair. America’s an easy country.” ”

“ Round the room there marched, breast-high, a magnificent panelling of mahogany, so dark with time and so polished with unremitted friction that by gazing a while into its lucid blackness I made out the dim reflexion of a party of wigged gentlemen in knee-breeches just arrived from York by the coach. On the dark yellow walls, coated by the fumes of English coal, of English mutton, of Scotch whiskey, were a dozen melancholy prints, sallow-toned with age—the Derby favourite of the year 1807, the Bank of England, her Majesty the Queen. ”

“ Ah Miss Searle,” he cried, “I’m a most unhappy man!”
“Oh dear, oh dear!” she almost wailed while I turned half away.
“Look at that window, that dear little window!” I turned back to see him point to a small protruding oriel, above us, relieved against the purple brickwork, framed in chiselled stone and curtained with ivy.
“It’s my little room,” she said.
“Of course it’s a woman’s room. Think of all the dear faces—all of them so mild and yet so proud—that have looked out of that lattice, and of all the old-time women’s lives whose principal view of the world has been this quiet park! ”

“ 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. ”

“ It lies neither in one’s chance nor one’s start to make one a success; nor in anything one’s brother—however bloated—can do or can undo. It lies in one’s character. You and I, sir, have had no character—that’s very plain. We’ve been weak, sir; as weak as water. Here we are for it—sitting staring in each other’s faces and reading our weakness in each other’s eyes. We’re of no importance whatever, Mr. Rawson! ”

“ The latent preparedness of the American mind even for the most characteristic features of English life was a matter I meanwhile failed to get to the bottom of. The roots of it are indeed so deeply buried in the soil of our early culture that, without some great upheaval of feeling, we are at a loss to say exactly when and where and how it begins. It makes an American’s enjoyment of England an emotion more searching than anything Continental. I had seen the coffee-room of the Red Lion years ago, at home—at Saragossa Illinois—in books, in visions, in dreams, in Dickens, in Smollett, in Boswell. ”

“ There was a pause; after which: “You’re the same merry old boy, Searle. Going to give up the ghost to-morrow, eh?”
“I almost wish I were.”
“You’re not so sweet on England then? I’ve heard people say at home that you dress and talk and act like an Englishman. But I know these people here and I know you. You’re not one of this crowd, Clement Searle, not you. You’ll go under here, sir; you’ll go under as sure as my name’s Simmons.” ”

“ Searle blazed up into enthusiasm. “Of course, you know”—with which he began to blush violently—“I should be sorry to claim any identity with the poor devil my faithless namesake. But I should be immensely gratified if the young lady’s spirit, deceived by my resemblance, were to mistake me for her cruel lover. She’s welcome to the comfort of it. What one can do in the case I shall be glad to do. But can a ghost haunt a ghost? I am a ghost!”
Mr. Searle stared a moment and then had a subtle sneer. “I could almost believe you are!”
“Oh brother—and cousin!” ”

“ 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 gentlefolk. I’m for ever put to the blush. It’s a perfect agony of spirit; everything reminds me of my younger and better self. The thing for me would be a cooling cleansing plunge into the unknowing and the unknown! I lie awake thinking of it.”
Searle closed his eyes, shivering with a long-drawn tremor which I hardly knew whether to take for an expression of physical or of mental pain. ”

“ And he wiped his eyes with what seemed his sole remnant of linen.
“Dear, dear,” sighed Searle, “I’ve made you cry! Well, we speak as from man to man. I should be glad to think 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 a little, his eyes fixed on the ground and his well-cut nose but the more deeply dyed by his agitation. Then at last looking up: “You’re a very good-natured man, sir, and you’ll never persuade me you don’t come of a kindly race. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Miss Searle, while I spoke, had fixed her eyes on my friend as he stood silent beneath Sir Joshua’s portrait. The housekeeper, agitated and mystified, fairly let herself go. “Heaven preserve us, Miss! It’s your great-uncle’s picture come to life.”
“I’m not mistaken then,” said Miss Searle—“we must be distantly related.” She had the air of the shyest of women, for whom it was almost anguish to make an advance without help. Searle eyed her with gentle wonder from head to foot, and I could easily read his thoughts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Simmons went on, “the solicitor of your usurping cousin, and he evidently knows something to be in the wind. It seems your elder brother twenty years ago put out a feeler. So you’re not to have the glory of even making them sit up.”
“I never made any one sit up,” I heard Mr. Searle plead. “I shouldn’t begin at this time of day. I should approach the subject like a gentleman.”
“Well, if you want very much to do something like a gentleman you’ve got a capital chance. Take your disappointment like a gentleman.” ”

“ Searle,” said his cousin, “what he does only for very great people. A year ago there came here a great person—a grand old lady—to see my brother. I don’t think that since then he has spread his tail as wide for any one else—not by a dozen feathers.”
“It’s not alone the peacock,” said Searle. “Just now there came slipping across my path a little green lizard, the first I ever saw, the lizard of literature! And if you’ve a ghost, broad daylight though it be, I expect to see him here. Do you know the annals of your house, Miss Searle?” ”

“ If you’re he you’ve not done a wise thing to show yourself here. He left a bad name behind him. There’s a ghost who comes sobbing about the house every now and then, the ghost of one to whom he did a wrong.”
“Oh mercy on us!” cried Miss Searle in simple horror.
“Of course you know nothing of such things,” he rather dryly allowed. “You’re too sound a sleeper to hear the sobbing of ghosts.”
“I’m sure I should like immensely to hear the sobbing of a ghost,” said my friend, the light of his previous eagerness playing up into his eyes. “Why does it sob? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Clement Searle. What would come of it?
Before many minutes the housekeeper waited upon us—a fresh rosy little old woman in a clean dowdy cap and a scanty sprigged gown; a quaint careful person, but accessible to the tribute of our pleasure, to say nothing of any other. She had the accent of the country, but the manners of the house. Under her guidance we passed through a dozen apartments, duly stocked with old pictures, old tapestry, old carvings, old armour, with a hundred ornaments and treasures. ”

“ The poor fellow blushed up to his eyes, took off his hat and wiped his forehead with an indescribable fabric drawn from his pocket. “My name’s Rawson, sir. Beyond that it’s a long story.”
“I ask out of sympathy,” said Searle. “I’ve a fellow-feeling. If you’re a poor devil I’m a poor devil as well.” ”