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 _Doppelgänger_,” 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.”