A Passionate Pilgrim
James, Henry, 1843-1916
English
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A PASSIONATE PILGRIM
HENRY JAMES
I
Intending to sail for America in the early part of June, I
determined to spend the interval of six weeks in England, to
which country my mind's eye only had as yet been introduced. I
had formed in Italy and France a resolute preference for old
inns, considering that what they sometimes cost the ungratified
body they repay the delighted mind. On my arrival in London,
therefore, I lodged at a certain antique hostelry, much to the
east of Temple Bar, deep in the quarter that I had inevitably
figured as the Johnsonian. Here, on the first evening of my stay,
I descended to the little coffee-room and bespoke my dinner of
the genius of "attendance" in the person of the solitary waiter.
No sooner had I crossed the threshold of this retreat than I felt
I had cut a golden-ripe crop of English "impressions." The
coffee-room of the Red Lion, like so many other places and things
I was destined to see in the motherland, seemed to have been
waiting for long years, with just that sturdy sufferance of time
written on its visage, for me to come and extract the romantic
essence of it.
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. It was small and subdivided into six
narrow compartments by a series of perpendicular screens of
mahogany, something higher than a man's stature, furnished on
either side with a meagre uncushioned ledge, denominated in
ancient Britain a seat. In each of these rigid receptacles was a
narrow table--a table expected under stress to accommodate no
less than four pairs of active British elbows. High pressure
indeed had passed away from the Red Lion for ever. It now knew
only that of memories and ghosts and atmosphere. 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. On the floor was a Turkey carpet--as old as
the mahogany almost, as the Bank of England, as the Queen--into
which the waiter had in his lonely revolutions trodden so many
massive soot-flakes and drops of overflowing beer that the
glowing looms of Smyrna would certainly not have recognised it.
To say that I ordered my dinner of this archaic type would be
altogether to misrepresent the process owing to which, having
dreamed of lamb and spinach and a salade de saison, I sat down in
penitence to a mutton-chop and a rice pudding. Bracing my feet
against the cross-beam of my little oaken table, I opposed to the
mahogany partition behind me the vigorous dorsal resistance that
must have expressed the old-English idea of repose. The sturdy
screen refused even to creak, but my poor Yankee joints made up
the deficiency.
While I was waiting there for my chop there came into the room a
person whom, after I had looked at him a moment, I supposed to be
a fellow lodger and probably the only one. He seemed, like
myself, to have submitted to proposals for dinner; the table on
the other side of my partition had been prepared to receive him.
He walked up to the fire, exposed his back to it and, after
consulting his watch, looked directly out of the window and
indirectly at me. He was a man of something less than middle age
and more than middle stature, though indeed you would have called
him neither young nor tall. He was chiefly remarkable for his
emphasised leanness. His hair, very thin on the summit of his
head, was dark short and fine. His eye was of a pale turbid grey,
unsuited, perhaps, to his dark hair and well-drawn brows, but not
altogether out of harmony with his colourless bilious complexion.
His nose was aquiline and delicate; beneath it his moustache
languished much rather than bristled. His mouth and chin were
negative, or at the most provisional; not vulgar, doubtless, but
ineffectually refined. A cold fatal gentlemanly weakness was
expressed indeed in his attenuated person. His eye was restless
and deprecating; his whole physiognomy, his manner of shifting
his weight from foot to foot, the spiritless droop of his head,
told of exhausted intentions, of a will relaxed. His dress was
neat and "toned down"--he might have been in mourning. I made up
my mind on three points: he was a bachelor, he was out of health,
he was not indigenous to the soil. The waiter approached him, and
they conversed in accents barely audible. I heard the words
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