I laid my hand on my friend’s shoulder. “Oh sir, you’re all right!”
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.