Portrait of a Man with Red Hair: A Romantic Macabre

by Hugh Walpole

II

Yes, Harkness thought, looking at the rise and fall of the old man's beard, it is strange and indeed lamentable how deeply I detest a cross word! That is why I am always creeping away from things, why, too, I never make friends—not real friends—why at thirty-five I am a complete failure—that is, from the point of view of anything real.

I am filled too with self-pity, he added as he opened To Paradise again and groped for page four, and self-pity is the most despicable of all the vices.

He was not unpleasing to the eye as he sat there thinking. He was dressed with exceeding neatness, but his clothes had something of the effect of chain armour. Was that partly because his figure was so slight that he could never fill any suit of clothes adequately? That might be so. His soft white collar, his pale blue tie, his mild blue eyes, his long tranquil fingers, these things were all gentle. His chin protruded. He was called "gaunt" by undiscerning friends, but that was a poor word for him. He was too slight for that, too gentle, too unobtrusive. His hair was already retreating deprecatingly from his forehead. No gaunt man would smile so timidly. His neatness and immaculate spotless purity of dress showed a fastidiousness that granted his cowardice an excuse.

For I am a coward, he thought. This is yet another holiday that I am taking alone. Alone after all these years. And Pritchard or Mason, Major Stock or Henry Trenchard, Carstairs Willing or Falk Brandon—any one of these might have wished to go if I had had courage . . . or even Maradick himself might have come.

The only companions, he reflected, that he had taken with him on this journey were his etchings, kinder to him, more intimate with him, rewarding him with more affection than any human being. His seven etchings—the seven of his forty—Lepère's "Route de St. Gilles," Legros's "Cabane dans les Marais," Rembrandt's "Flight into Egypt," Muirhead Bone's "Orvieto," Whistler's "Drury Lane," Strang's "Portrait of Himself Etching," and Meryon's "Rue des Chantres." His seven etchings.—his greatest friends in the world, save of course Hetty and Jane his sisters. Yes he reflected, you can judge a man by his friends, and in my cowardice I have given all my heart to these things because they can't answer me back, cannot fail me when I most eagerly expect something of them, are always there when I call them, do not change nor betray me. And yet it is not only cowardice. They are intimate and individual as is no other form of graphic art. They are so personal that every separate impression has a fresh character. They are so lovely in soul that they never age nor have their moods. My Aldegrevers and Penczs, he was reflecting. . . . He was a little happier now. . . . The Browning and To Paradise fell once more to the ground. I hope the old man does not waken, he thought, and yet perhaps he will pass his station. What a temper he will be in if he does that, and then I too shall suffer!

He read a line or two of the Browning:

Ours is a great wild country;
If you climb to our castle's top,
I don't see where your eye can stop . . .

How strange that the book should have opened again at that same place as though it were that it wished him to read!

And then To Paradise a line or two, now page 376, "And the Silver Button? Would his answer defy that too? Had he some secret magic? Was he stronger than God Himself? . . ."

And then, Harkness reflected, this business about being an American. He had felt pride when he had told the old man that was his citizenship. He was proud, yes, and yet he spent most of his life in Europe. And now as always when he fell to thinking of America his eye travelled to his own home there—Baker at the portals of Oregon. All the big trains passed it on their way to the coast—three hundred and forty miles from Portland, fifty from Huntington. He saw himself on that eager arrival coming out by the 11.30 train from Salt Lake City, steaming in at 4.30 in the afternoon, an early May afternoon perhaps with the colours violet in the sky and the mountains elephant-dusk—so quiet and so gentle. And when the train has gone on and you are left on the platform and you look about you and find everything as it was when you departed a year ago—the Columbia Café. The Antlers Hotel. The mountains still with their snow caps. The Lumber Offices. The notice on the wall of the café: "You can EAT HERE if you have NO MONEY." The Crabill Hotel. The fresh sweet air, three thousand five hundred feet up. The soft pause of the place. Baker did not grow very fast as did other places. It is true that there had been but four houses when his father had first landed there, but even now as towns went it was small and quiet and unprogressive. Strange that his father with that old-cultured New England stock should have gone there, but he had fled from mankind after the death of his wife, Harkness's mother, fled with his three little children, shut himself away, there under the mountains with his books, a sad, severe man in that long, rambling ramshackle house. Still long, still rambling, still ramshackle, although Hetty and Jane, who never moved away from it, had made it as charming as they could. They were darlings, and lived for the month every year when their brother came to visit them. But he could not live there! No, he could not! It was exile for him, exile from everything for which he most deeply cared. But Europe was exile too. That was the tragedy of it! Every morning that he waked he thought that perhaps to-day he would find that he was a true European! But no, it was not so. Away from America, how deeply he loved his country! How clearly he saw its idealism, its vitality, its marvellous promise for the future, its loving contact with his own youthful dreams. But back in America again it seemed crude and noisy and materialistic. He longed for the Past. Exile in both with his New England culture that was not enough, his half-cocked vitality that was not enough. Never enough to permit his half-gods to go! But he loved America always; he saw how little these Europeans truly knew or cared about her, how hasty their visits to her, how patronising their attitude, how weary their stale conventions against her full, bursting energy. And yet——! And yet——! He could not live there. After two weeks of Baker, even though he had with him his etchings, his diary in its dark blue cover, Frazer's Golden Bough, and some of the Loeb Classics, life was not enough. Hetty and Jane bored him with their goodness and little Culture Club. It was not enough for him that Hetty had read a very good paper on "Archibald Marshall—the modern Trollope" to the inhabitants of Baker and Haines. Nevertheless they seemed to him finer women than the women of any other country, with their cheery independence, their admirable common sense, their warm hearts, their unselfishness, but—it was not enough—no, it was not enough . . . What he wanted . . .