Roderick Hudson

H >> Henry James >> Roderick Hudson


"What made him start on a long walk so suddenly?" she asked. "I saw him
at eleven o'clock, and then he meant to go to Engelberg, and sleep."

"On his way to Interlaken?" Rowland said.

"Yes," she answered, under cover of the darkness.

"We had some talk," said Rowland, "and he seemed, for the day, to have
given up Interlaken."

"Did you dissuade him?"

"Not exactly. We discussed another question, which, for the time,
superseded his plan."

Miss Garland was silent. Then--"May I ask whether your discussion was
violent?" she said.

"I am afraid it was agreeable to neither of us."

"And Roderick left you in--in irritation?"

"I offered him my company on his walk. He declined it."

Miss Garland paced slowly to the end of the gallery and then came back.
"If he had gone to Engelberg," she said, "he would have reached the
hotel before the storm began."

Rowland felt a sudden explosion of ferocity. "Oh, if you like," he
cried, "he can start for Interlaken as soon as he comes back!"

But she did not even notice his wrath. "Will he come back early?" she
went on.

"We may suppose so."

"He will know how anxious we are, and he will start with the first
light!"

Rowland was on the point of declaring that Roderick's readiness to throw
himself into the feelings of others made this extremely probable; but he
checked himself and said, simply, "I expect him at sunrise."

Miss Garland bent her eyes once more upon the irresponsive darkness, and
then, in silence, went into the house. Rowland, it must be averred, in
spite of his resolution not to be nervous, found no sleep that night.
When the early dawn began to tremble in the east, he came forth again
into the open air. The storm had completely purged the atmosphere, and
the day gave promise of cloudless splendor. Rowland watched the early
sun-shafts slowly reaching higher, and remembered that if Roderick
did not come back to breakfast, there were two things to be taken
into account. One was the heaviness of the soil on the mountain-sides,
saturated with the rain; this would make him walk slowly: the other
was the fact that, speaking without irony, he was not remarkable for
throwing himself into the sentiments of others. Breakfast, at the inn,
was early, and by breakfast-time Roderick had not appeared. Then Rowland
admitted that he was nervous. Neither Mrs. Hudson nor Miss Garland had
left their apartment; Rowland had a mental vision of them sitting there
praying and listening; he had no desire to see them more directly. There
were a couple of men who hung about the inn as guides for the ascent of
the Titlis; Rowland sent each of them forth in a different direction,
to ask the news of Roderick at every chalet door within a morning's
walk. Then he called Sam Singleton, whose peregrinations had made him an
excellent mountaineer, and whose zeal and sympathy were now unbounded,
and the two started together on a voyage of research. By the time
they had lost sight of the inn, Rowland was obliged to confess that,
decidedly, Roderick had had time to come back.

He wandered about for several hours, but he found only the sunny
stillness of the mountain-sides. Before long he parted company with
Singleton, who, to his suggestion that separation would multiply their
resources, assented with a silent, frightened look which reflected too
vividly his own rapidly-dawning thought. The day was magnificent; the
sun was everywhere; the storm had lashed the lower slopes into a deeper
flush of autumnal color, and the snow-peaks reared themselves against
the near horizon in glaring blocks and dazzling spires. Rowland made his
way to several chalets, but most of them were empty. He thumped at their
low, foul doors with a kind of nervous, savage anger; he challenged the
stupid silence to tell him something about his friend. Some of these
places had evidently not been open in months. The silence everywhere
was horrible; it seemed to mock at his impatience and to be a conscious
symbol of calamity. In the midst of it, at the door of one of the
chalets, quite alone, sat a hideous cretin, who grinned at Rowland over
his goitre when, hardly knowing what he did, he questioned him. The
creature's family was scattered on the mountain-sides; he could give
Rowland no help to find them. Rowland climbed into many awkward
places, and skirted, intently and peeringly, many an ugly chasm and
steep-dropping ledge. But the sun, as I have said, was everywhere; it
illumined the deep places over which, not knowing where to turn next,
he halted and lingered, and showed him nothing but the stony Alpine
void--nothing so human even as death. At noon he paused in his quest and
sat down on a stone; the conviction was pressing upon him that the worst
that was now possible was true. He suspended his search; he was afraid
to go on. He sat there for an hour, sick to the depths of his soul.
Without his knowing why, several things, chiefly trivial, that had
happened during the last two years and that he had quite forgotten,
became vividly present to his mind. He was aroused at last by the sound
of a stone dislodged near by, which rattled down the mountain. In a
moment, on a steep, rocky slope opposite to him, he beheld a figure
cautiously descending--a figure which was not Roderick. It was
Singleton, who had seen him and began to beckon to him.

"Come down--come down!" cried the painter, steadily making his own way
down. Rowland saw that as he moved, and even as he selected his foothold
and watched his steps, he was looking at something at the bottom of the
cliff. This was a great rugged wall which had fallen backward from
the perpendicular, and the descent, though difficult, was with care
sufficiently practicable.

"What do you see?" cried Rowland.

Singleton stopped, looked across at him and seemed to hesitate; then,
"Come down--come down!" he simply repeated.

Rowland's course was also a steep descent, and he attacked it so
precipitately that he afterwards marveled he had not broken his neck.
It was a ten minutes' headlong scramble. Half-way down he saw something
that made him dizzy; he saw what Singleton had seen. In the gorge below
them a vague white mass lay tumbled upon the stones. He let himself go,
blindly, fiercely. Singleton had reached the rocky bottom of the ravine
before him, and had bounded forward and fallen upon his knees. Rowland
overtook him and his own legs collapsed. The thing that yesterday was
his friend lay before him as the chance of the last breath had left it,
and out of it Roderick's face stared upward, open-eyed, at the sky.

He had fallen from a great height, but he was singularly little
disfigured. The rain had spent its torrents upon him, and his clothes
and hair were as wet as if the billows of the ocean had flung him upon
the strand. An attempt to move him would show some hideous fracture,
some horrible physical dishonor; but what Rowland saw on first looking
at him was only a strangely serene expression of life. The eyes were
dead, but in a short time, when Rowland had closed them, the whole
face seemed to awake. The rain had washed away all blood; it was as if
Violence, having done her work, had stolen away in shame. Roderick's
face might have shamed her; it looked admirably handsome.

"He was a beautiful man!" said Singleton.

They looked up through their horror at the cliff from which he had
apparently fallen, and which lifted its blank and stony face above
him, with no care now but to drink the sunshine on which his eyes were
closed, and then Rowland had an immense outbreak of pity and anguish. At
last they spoke of carrying him back to the inn. "There must be three or
four men," Rowland said, "and they must be brought here quickly. I have
not the least idea where we are."

"We are at about three hours' walk from home," said Singleton. "I will
go for help; I can find my way."

"Remember," said Rowland, "whom you will have to face."

"I remember," the excellent fellow answered. "There was nothing I could
ever do for him in life; I will do what I can now."

He went off, and Rowland stayed there alone. He watched for seven long
hours, and his vigil was forever memorable. The most rational of men was
for an hour the most passionate. He reviled himself with transcendent
bitterness, he accused himself of cruelty and injustice, he would
have lain down there in Roderick's place to unsay the words that had
yesterday driven him forth on his lonely ramble. Roderick had been fond
of saying that there are such things as necessary follies, and Rowland
was now proving it. At last he grew almost used to the dumb exultation
of the cliff above him. He saw that Roderick was a mass of hideous
injury, and he tried to understand what had happened. Not that it helped
him; before that confounding mortality one hypothesis after another
faltered and swooned away. Roderick's passionate walk had carried him
farther and higher than he knew; he had outstayed, supposably, the first
menace of the storm, and perhaps even found a defiant entertainment
in watching it. Perhaps he had simply lost himself. The tempest had
overtaken him, and when he tried to return, it was too late. He
had attempted to descend the cliff in the darkness, he had made the
inevitable slip, and whether he had fallen fifty feet or three hundred
little mattered. The condition of his body indicated the shorter fall.
Now that all was over, Rowland understood how exclusively, for two
years, Roderick had filled his life. His occupation was gone.

Singleton came back with four men--one of them the landlord of the inn.
They had formed a sort of rude bier of the frame of a chaise a porteurs,
and by taking a very round-about course homeward were able to follow a
tolerably level path and carry their burden with a certain decency. To
Rowland it seemed as if the little procession would never reach the inn;
but as they drew near it he would have given his right hand for a longer
delay. The people of the inn came forward to meet them, in a little
silent, solemn convoy. In the doorway, clinging together, appeared the
two bereaved women. Mrs. Hudson tottered forward with outstretched hands
and the expression of a blind person; but before she reached her son,
Mary Garland had rushed past her, and, in the face of the staring,
pitying, awe-stricken crowd, had flung herself, with the magnificent
movement of one whose rights were supreme, and with a loud, tremendous
cry, upon the senseless vestige of her love.

That cry still lives in Rowland's ears. It interposes, persistently,
against the reflection that when he sometimes--very rarely--sees her,
she is unreservedly kind to him; against the memory that during the
dreary journey back to America, made of course with his assistance,
there was a great frankness in her gratitude, a great gratitude in her
frankness. Miss Garland lives with Mrs. Hudson, at Northampton, where
Rowland visits his cousin Cecilia more frequently than of old. When he
calls upon Miss Garland he never sees Mrs. Hudson. Cecilia, who, having
her shrewd impression that he comes to see Miss Garland as much as to
see herself, does not feel obliged to seem unduly flattered, calls him,
whenever he reappears, the most restless of mortals. But he always says
to her in answer, "No, I assure you I am the most patient!"