A Passionate Pilgrim

There was really the touch of grace in my poor friend’s divagations—the disheartened dandy had so positively turned rhapsodist and seer. I was particularly struck with his having laid aside the diffidence and self-consciousness of the first days of our acquaintance. He had become by this time a disembodied observer and critic; the shell of sense, growing daily thinner and more transparent, transmitted the tremor of his quickened spirit. He seemed to pick up acquaintances, in the course of our contemplations, merely by putting out his hand. If I left him for ten minutes I was sure to find him on my return in earnest conversation with some affable wandering scholar. Several young men with whom he had thus established relations invited him to their rooms and entertained him, as I gathered, with rather rash hospitality. For myself, I chose not to be present at these symposia; I shrank partly from being held in any degree responsible for his extravagance, partly from the pang of seeing him yield to champagne and an admiring circle. He reported such adventures with less keen a complacency than I had supposed he might use, but a certain method in his madness, a certain dignity in his desire to fraternise, appeared to save him from mischance. If they didn’t think him a harmless lunatic they certainly thought him a celebrity of the Occident. Two things, however, grew evident—that he drank deeper than was good for him and that the flagrant freshness of his young patrons rather interfered with his predetermined sense of the element of finer romance. At the same time it completed his knowledge of the place. Making the acquaintance of several tutors and fellows, he dined in hall in half a dozen colleges, alluding afterwards to these banquets with religious unction. One evening after a participation indiscreetly prolonged he came back to the hotel in a cab, accompanied by a friendly undergraduate and a physician and looking deadly pale. He had swooned away on leaving table and remained so rigidly unconscious as much to agitate his banqueters. The following twenty-four hours he of course spent in bed, but on the third day declared himself strong enough to begin afresh. On his reaching the street his strength once more forsook him, so that I insisted on his returning to his room. He besought me with tears in his eyes not to shut him up. “It’s my last chance—I want to go back for an hour to that garden of Saint John’s. Let me eat and drink—to-morrow I die.” It seemed to me possible that with a Bath-chair the expedition might be accomplished. The hotel, it appeared, possessed such a convenience, which was immediately produced. It became necessary hereupon that we should have a person to propel the chair. As there was no one on the spot at liberty I was about to perform the office; but just as my patient had got seated and wrapped—he now had a perpetual chill—an elderly man emerged from a lurking-place near the door and, with a formal salute, offered to wait upon the gentleman. We assented, and he proceeded solemnly to trundle the chair before him. I recognised him as a vague personage whom I had observed to lounge shyly about the doors of the hotels, at intervals during our stay, with a depressed air of wanting employment and a poor semblance of finding it. He had once indeed in a half-hearted way proposed himself as an amateur cicerone for a tour through the colleges; and I now, as I looked at him, remembered with a pang that I had too curtly declined his ministrations. Since then his shyness, apparently, had grown less or his misery greater, for it was with a strange grim avidity that he now attached himself to our service. He was a pitiful image of shabby gentility and the dinginess of “reduced circumstances.” He would have been, I suppose, some fifty years of age; but his pale haggard unwholesome visage, his plaintive drooping carriage and the irremediable disarray of his apparel seemed to add to the burden of his days and tribulations. His eyes were weak and bloodshot, his bold nose was sadly compromised, and his reddish beard, largely streaked with grey, bristled under a month’s neglect of the razor. In all this rusty forlornness lurked a visible assurance of our friend’s having known better days. Obviously he was the victim of some fatal depreciation in the market value of pure gentility. There had been something terribly affecting in the way he substituted for the attempt to touch the greasy rim of his antiquated hat some such bow as one man of the world might make another. Exchanging a few words with him as we went I was struck with the decorum of his accent. His fine whole voice should have been congruously cracked.

“Take me by some long roundabout way,” said Searle, “so that I may see as many college-walls as possible.”

“You know,” I asked of our attendant, “all these wonderful ins and outs?”

“I ought to, sir,” he said, after a moment, with pregnant gravity. And as we were passing one of the colleges, “That used to be my place,” he added.

At these words Searle desired him to stop and come round within sight. “You say that’s YOUR college?”

“The place might deny me, sir; but heaven forbid I should seem to take it ill of her. If you’ll allow me to wheel you into the quad I’ll show you my windows of thirty years ago.”

Searle sat staring, his huge pale eyes, which now left nothing else worth mentioning in his wasted face, filled with wonder and pity. “If you’ll be so kind,” he said with great deference. But just as this perverted product of a liberal education was about to propel him across the threshold of the court he turned about, disengaged the mercenary hands, with one of his own, from the back of the chair, drew their owner alongside and turned to me. “While we’re here, my dear fellow,” he said, “be so good as to perform this service. You understand?” I gave our companion a glance of intelligence and we resumed our way. The latter showed us his window of the better time, where a rosy youth in a scarlet smoking-fez now puffed a cigarette at the open casement. Thence we proceeded into the small garden, the smallest, I believe, and certainly the sweetest, of all the planted places of Oxford. I pushed the chair along to a bench on the lawn, turned it round, toward the front of the college and sat down by it on the grass. Our attendant shifted mournfully from one foot to the other, his patron eyeing him open-mouthed. At length Searle broke out: “God bless my soul, sir, you don’t suppose I expect you to stand! There’s an empty bench.”

“Thank you,” said our friend, who bent his joints to sit.

“You English are really fabulous! I don’t know whether I most admire or most abominate you! Now tell me: who are you? what are you? what brought you to this?”

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.”

“I’m the poorer devil of the two,” said the stranger with an assurance for once presumptuous.

“Possibly. I suppose an English poor devil’s the poorest of all poor devils. And then you’ve fallen from a height. From a gentleman commoner—is that what they called you?—to a propeller of Bath-chairs. 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 with all his seriousness.

“And now,” said our friend, “I believe I can’t drop any further.”

“My dear fellow”—and Searle clasped his hand and shook it—“I too am at the very bottom of the hole.”

Mr. Rawson lifted his eyebrows. “Well, sir, there’s a difference between sitting in such a pleasant convenience and just trudging behind it!”

“Yes—there’s a shade. But I’m at my last gasp, Mr. Rawson.”

“I’m at my last penny, sir.”

“Literally, Mr. Rawson?”

Mr. Rawson shook his head with large loose bitterness. “I’ve almost come to the point of drinking my beer and buttoning my coat figuratively; but I don’t talk in figures.”

Fearing the conversation might appear to achieve something like gaiety at the expense of Mr. Rawson’s troubles, I took the liberty of asking him, with all consideration, how he made a living.

“I don’t make a living,” he answered with tearful eyes; “I can’t make a living. I’ve a wife and three children—and all starving, sir. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve 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?”

“Mercy on us,” cried Searle, “why didn’t you speak to us before?”

“I wanted to; half a dozen times I’ve 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 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.”

“Ah me!” groaned Searle. “Have I come to the most delicious corner of the ancient world to hear the praise of Yankeeland?”

“Delicious corners are very well, and so is the ancient world,” 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 in Yankeeland, that’s all!” he added with feeble force. Then brooding for a moment on his wrongs: “Have you a bloated brother? or you, sir? It matters little to you. But it has mattered to me with a vengeance! Shabby as I sit here I can boast that advantage—as he his five thousand a year. Being but a twelvemonth my elder he swaggers while I go thus. There’s old England for you! A very pretty place for HIM!”

“Poor old England!” said Searle softly.

“Has your brother never helped you?” I asked.

“A five-pound note now and then! Oh I don’t say there haven’t been times when I haven’t inspired an irresistible sympathy. I’ve not been what I should. I married dreadfully out of the way. 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 not another blessed ‘tip.’ I can’t afford to live in England.”

“THIS poor gentleman fancied a couple of months ago that he couldn’t afford to live in America,” I fondly explained.

“I’d ‘swap’—do you call it?—chances with him!” And Mr. Rawson looked quaintly rueful over his freedom of speech.

Searle sat supported there with his eyes closed and his face twitching for violent emotion, and then of a sudden had a glare of gravity. “My friend, you’re a dead failure! Be judged! Don’t talk about ‘swapping.’ Don’t talk about chances. Don’t talk about fair starts and false starts. I’m at that point myself that I’ve 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—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!”

Mr. Rawson received this sally with a countenance in which abject submission to the particular affirmed truth struggled with the comparative propriety of his general rebellion against fate. In the course of a minute a due self-respect yielded to the warm comfortable sense of his being relieved of the cares of an attitude. “Go on, sir, go on,” he said. “It’s wholesome doctrine.” 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. 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 luck may be in your country—which has brought luck to so many. I can come on the parish here of course, but I don’t want to come on the parish. Hang it, sir, I want to hold up my head. I see thirty years of life before me yet. If only by God’s help I could have a real change of air! It’s a fixed idea of mine. I’ve had it for the last ten years. It’s not that I’m a low radical. Oh I’ve no vulgar opinions. 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. In a moment I saw it was neither. “Oh my country, my country, my country!” he murmured in a broken voice; and then sat for some time abstracted and lost. I signalled our companion that it was time we should bring our small session to a close, and he, without hesitating, possessed himself of the handle of the Bath-chair and pushed it before him. We had got halfway home before Searle spoke or moved. Suddenly in the High Street, as we passed a chop-house from whose open doors we caught a waft of old-fashioned cookery and other restorative elements, he motioned us to halt. “This is my last five pounds”—and he drew a note from his pocket-book. “Do me the favour, Mr. Rawson, to accept it. Go in there and order the best dinner they can give you. Call for a bottle of Burgundy and drink it to my eternal rest!”

Mr. Rawson stiffened himself up and received the gift with fingers momentarily irresponsive. But Mr. Rawson had the nerves of a gentleman. I measured the spasm with which his poor dispossessed hand closed upon the crisp paper, I observed his empurpled nostril convulsive under the other solicitation. He crushed the crackling note in his palm with a passionate pressure and jerked a spasmodic bow. “I shall not do you the wrong, sir, of anything but the best!” The next moment the door swung behind him.

Searle sank again into his apathy, and on reaching the hotel I helped him to get to bed. For the rest of the day he lay without motion or sound and beyond reach of any appeal. The doctor, whom I had constantly in attendance, was sure his end was near. He expressed great surprise that he should have lasted so long; he must have been living for a month on the very dregs of his strength. Toward evening, as I sat by his bedside in the deepening dusk, he roused himself with a purpose I had vaguely felt gathering beneath his stupor. “My cousin, my cousin,” he said confusedly. “Is she here?” It was the first time he had spoken of Miss Searle since our retreat from her brother’s house, and he continued to ramble. “I was to have married her. 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 woman, a kind sweet woman? Or have I only 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 person in my state should have a wish. Why should one eat one’s breakfast the day one’s hanged? 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 dispatched by post a note to Miss Searle: “Your cousin is rapidly sinking. He asks to see you.” I was conscious of a certain want of consideration in this act, since it would bring her great trouble and yet no power to face the trouble; but out of her distress I fondly hoped a sufficient force might be born. On the following day my friend’s exhaustion had become so great that I began to fear his intelligence altogether broken up. But toward evening he briefly rallied, to maunder about many things, confounding in a sinister jumble the memories of the past weeks and those of bygone years. “By the way,” he said suddenly, “I’ve made no will. I haven’t much to bequeath. Yet I have 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 enormous knuckles! There must be such knuckles in the mummies of the Pharaohs. Well, when I’m gone—! No, I leave you something more precious than gold—the sense of a great kindness. But I’ve a little gold left. Bring me those trinkets.” I placed on the bed before him several articles of jewellery, relics of early foppery: his watch and chain, of great value, a locket and seal, some odds and ends of goldsmith’s work. He trifled with them feebly for some moments, murmuring various names and dates associated with them. At last, looking up with clearer interest, “What has become,” he asked, “of Mr. Rawson?”

“You want to see him?”

“How much are these things worth?” he went on without heeding me. “How much would they bring?” And he weighed them in his weak hands. “They’re pretty heavy. Some hundred or so? Oh I’m 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 our adjacent sitting-room to send and ascertain if Mr. Rawson were on the premises. He returned in a few moments, introducing our dismal friend. Mr. Rawson was pale even to his nose and derived from his unaffectedly concerned state an air of some 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 human message.

“Lord have mercy!” gasped Mr. Rawson.

“My friend,” said Searle, “there’s to be one American the less—so let there be at the same time one the more. At the worst you’ll be as good a one as I. Foolish me! Take these battered relics; you can sell them; let them help you on your way. They’re gifts and mementoes, 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,” the poor man protested, almost scared and with tears in his eyes. “Do come round and get well and I’ll stop here. I’ll stay with you and wait on you.”

“No, I’m booked for my journey, you for yours. I hope you don’t mind the voyage.”

Mr. Rawson exhaled a groan of helpless gratitude, appealing piteously from so strange a windfall. “It’s like the angel of the Lord who bids people in the Bible to rise and flee!”

Searle had sunk back upon his pillow, quite used up; 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 wondrous exercise of his imagination had plunged him my charge then gave few signs of being likely to emerge. He breathed, as he had said, and nothing more. The twilight deepened; I lighted the night-lamp. The doctor sat silent and official at the foot of the bed; I resumed my constant place near the head. Suddenly our patient opened his eyes wide. “She’ll not come,” he murmured. “Amen! she’s an English sister.” Five minutes passed; he started forward. “She’s come, she’s here!” he confidently quavered. 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 instant 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 announced you,” I said. And then with a fuller consciousness of the change in her dress and countenance: “What has happened?”

“Oh death, death!” she wailed. “You and I are left.”

There came to me with her words a sickening shock, the sense of poetic justice somehow cheated, defeated. “Your brother?” I panted.

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 accepted my support and a moment later we had entered the room and approached the bedside, from which the doctor withdrew. Searle opened his eyes and looked at her from head to foot. Suddenly he seemed to make out her mourning. “Already!” he cried audibly and with a smile, as I felt, 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 and with a slight rising inflexion: “You’re free?”

“Free, cousin. Too sadly free. And now—NOW—with what use for freedom?”

He looked steadily into her eyes, dark in the heavy shadow of her musty mourning-veil. “For me wear colours!”

In a moment more death had come, the doctor had silently attested it, and she had burst into sobs.

We buried him in the little churchyard in which he had expressed the wish to lie; beneath one of the blackest and widest 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.