EUGENE PICKERING
CHAPTER I.
It was at Homburg, several years ago, before the gaming had been
suppressed. The evening was very warm, and all the world was
gathered on the terrace of the Kursaal and the esplanade below it to
listen to the excellent orchestra; or half the world, rather, for the
crowd was equally dense in the gaming-rooms around the tables.
Everywhere the crowd was great. The night was perfect, the season
was at its height, the open windows of the Kursaal sent long shafts
of unnatural light into the dusky woods, and now and then, in the
intervals of the music, one might almost hear the clink of the
napoleons and the metallic call of the croupiers rise above the
watching silence of the saloons. I had been strolling with a friend,
and we at last prepared to sit down. Chairs, however, were scarce.
I had captured one, but it seemed no easy matter to find a mate for
it. I was on the point of giving up in despair, and proposing an
adjournment to the silken ottomans of the Kursaal, when I observed a
young man lounging back on one of the objects of my quest, with his
feet supported on the rounds of another. This was more than his
share of luxury, and I promptly approached him. He evidently
belonged to the race which has the credit of knowing best, at home
and abroad, how to make itself comfortable; but something in his
appearance suggested that his present attitude was the result of
inadvertence rather than of egotism. He was staring at the conductor
of the orchestra and listening intently to the music. His hands were
locked round his long legs, and his mouth was half open, with rather
a foolish air. "There are so few chairs," I said, "that I must beg
you to surrender this second one." He started, stared, blushed,
pushed the chair away with awkward alacrity, and murmured something
about not having noticed that he had it.
"What an odd-looking youth!" said my companion, who had watched me,
as I seated myself beside her.
"Yes, he is odd-looking; but what is odder still is that I have seen
him before, that his face is familiar to me, and yet that I can't
place him." The orchestra was playing the Prayer from Der
Freischutz, but Weber's lovely music only deepened the blank of
memory. Who the deuce was he? where, when, how, had I known him? It
seemed extraordinary that a face should be at once so familiar and so
strange. We had our backs turned to him, so that I could not look at
him again. When the music ceased we left our places, and I went to
consign my friend to her mamma on the terrace. In passing, I saw
that my young man had departed; I concluded that he only strikingly
resembled some one I knew. But who in the world was it he resembled?
The ladies went off to their lodgings, which were near by, and I
turned into the gaming-rooms and hovered about the circle at
roulette. Gradually I filtered through to the inner edge, near the
table, and, looking round, saw my puzzling friend stationed opposite
to me. He was watching the game, with his hands in his pockets; but
singularly enough, now that I observed him at my leisure, the look of
familiarity quite faded from his face. What had made us call his
appearance odd was his great length and leanness of limb, his long,
white neck, his blue, prominent eyes, and his ingenuous, unconscious
absorption in the scene before him. He was not handsome, certainly,
but he looked peculiarly amiable and if his overt wonderment savoured
a trifle of rurality, it was an agreeable contrast to the hard,
inexpressive masks about him. He was the verdant offshoot, I said to
myself, of some ancient, rigid stem; he had been brought up in the
quietest of homes, and he was having his first glimpse of life. I
was curious to see whether he would put anything on the table; he
evidently felt the temptation, but he seemed paralysed by chronic
embarrassment. He stood gazing at the chinking complexity of losses
and gains, shaking his loose gold in his pocket, and every now and
then passing his hand nervously over his eyes.
Most of the spectators were too attentive to the play to have many
thoughts for each other; but before long I noticed a lady who
evidently had an eye for her neighbours as well as for the table.
She was seated about half-way between my friend and me, and I
presently observed that she was trying to catch his eye. Though at
Homburg, as people said, "one could never be sure," I yet doubted
whether this lady were one of those whose especial vocation it was to
catch a gentleman's eye. She was youthful rather than elderly, and
pretty rather than plain; indeed, a few minutes later, when I saw her
smile, I thought her wonderfully pretty. She had a charming gray eye
and a good deal of yellow hair disposed in picturesque disorder; and
though her features were meagre and her complexion faded, she gave
one a sense of sentimental, artificial gracefulness. She was dressed
in white muslin very much puffed and filled, but a trifle the worse
for wear, relieved here and there by a pale blue ribbon. I used to
flatter myself on guessing at people's nationality by their faces,
and, as a rule, I guessed aright. This faded, crumpled, vaporous
beauty, I conceived, was a German--such a German, somehow, as I had
seen imagined in literature. Was she not a friend of poets, a
correspondent of philosophers, a muse, a priestess of aesthetics--
something in the way of a Bettina, a Rahel? My conjectures, however,
were speedily merged in wonderment as to what my diffident friend was
making of her. She caught his eye at last, and raising an ungloved
hand, covered altogether with blue-gemmed rings--turquoises,
sapphires, and lapis--she beckoned him to come to her. The gesture
was executed with a sort of practised coolness, and accompanied with
an appealing smile. He stared a moment, rather blankly, unable to
suppose that the invitation was addressed to him; then, as it was
immediately repeated with a good deal of intensity, he blushed to the
roots of his hair, wavered awkwardly, and at last made his way to the
lady's chair. By the time he reached it he was crimson, and wiping
his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief. She tilted back, looked
up at him with the same smile, laid two fingers on his sleeve, and
said something, interrogatively, to which he replied by a shake of
the head. She was asking him, evidently, if he had ever played, and
he was saying no. Old players have a fancy that when luck has turned
her back on them they can put her into good-humour again by having
their stakes placed by a novice. Our young man's physiognomy had
seemed to his new acquaintance to express the perfection of
inexperience, and, like a practical woman, she had determined to make
him serve her turn. Unlike most of her neighbours, she had no little
pile of gold before her, but she drew from her pocket a double
napoleon, put it into his hand, and bade him place it on a number of
his own choosing. He was evidently filled with a sort of delightful
trouble; he enjoyed the adventure, but he shrank from the hazard. I
would have staked the coin on its being his companion's last; for
although she still smiled intently as she watched his hesitation,
there was anything but indifference in her pale, pretty face.
Suddenly, in desperation, he reached over and laid the piece on the
table. My attention was diverted at this moment by my having to make
way for a lady with a great many flounces, before me, to give up her
chair to a rustling friend to whom she had promised it; when I again
looked across at the lady in white muslin, she was drawing in a very
goodly pile of gold with her little blue-gemmed claw. Good luck and
bad, at the Homburg tables, were equally undemonstrative, and this
happy adventuress rewarded her young friend for the sacrifice of his
innocence with a single, rapid, upward smile. He had innocence
enough left, however, to look round the table with a gleeful,
conscious laugh, in the midst of which his eyes encountered my own.
Then suddenly the familiar look which had vanished from his face
flickered up unmistakably; it was the boyish laugh of a boyhood's
friend. Stupid fellow that I was, I had been looking at Eugene
Pickering!
Though I lingered on for some time longer he failed to recognise me.
Recognition, I think, had kindled a smile in my own face; but, less
fortunate than he, I suppose my smile had ceased to be boyish. Now
that luck had faced about again, his companion played for herself--
played and won, hand over hand. At last she seemed disposed to rest
on her gains, and proceeded to bury them in the folds of her muslin.
Pickering had staked nothing for himself, but as he saw her prepare
to withdraw he offered her a double napoleon and begged her to place
it. She shook her head with great decision, and seemed to bid him
put it up again; but he, still blushing a good deal, pressed her with
awkward ardour, and she at last took it from him, looked at him a
moment fixedly, and laid it on a number. A moment later the croupier
was raking it in. She gave the young man a little nod which seemed
to say, "I told you so;" he glanced round the table again and
laughed; she left her chair, and he made a way for her through the
crowd. Before going home I took a turn on the terrace and looked
down on the esplanade. The lamps were out, but the warm starlight
vaguely illumined a dozen figures scattered in couples. One of these
figures, I thought, was a lady in a white dress.
I had no intention of letting Pickering go without reminding him of
our old acquaintance. He had been a very singular boy, and I was
curious to see what had become of his singularity. I looked for him
the next morning at two or three of the hotels, and at last I
discovered his whereabouts. But he was out, the waiter said; he had
gone to walk an hour before. I went my way, confident that I should
meet him in the evening. It was the rule with the Homburg world to
spend its evenings at the Kursaal, and Pickering, apparently, had
already discovered a good reason for not being an exception. One of
the charms of Homburg is the fact that of a hot day you may walk
about for a whole afternoon in unbroken shade. The umbrageous
gardens of the Kursaal mingle with the charming Hardtwald, which in
turn melts away into the wooded slopes of the Taunus Mountains. To
the Hardtwald I bent my steps, and strolled for an hour through mossy
glades and the still, perpendicular gloom of the fir-woods.
Suddenly, on the grassy margin of a by-path, I came upon a young man
stretched at his length in the sun-checkered shade, and kicking his
heels towards a patch of blue sky. My step was so noiseless on the
turf that, before he saw me, I had time to recognise Pickering again.
He looked as if he had been lounging there for some time; his hair
was tossed about as if he had been sleeping; on the grass near him,
beside his hat and stick, lay a sealed letter. When he perceived me
he jerked himself forward, and I stood looking at him without
introducing myself--purposely, to give him a chance to recognise me.
He put on his glasses, being awkwardly near-sighted, and stared up at
me with an air of general trustfulness, but without a sign of knowing
me. So at last I introduced myself. Then he jumped up and grasped
my hands, and stared and blushed and laughed, and began a dozen
random questions, ending with a demand as to how in the world I had
known him.
"Why, you are not changed so utterly," I said; "and after all, it's
but fifteen years since you used to do my Latin exercises for me."
"Not changed, eh?" he answered, still smiling, and yet speaking with
a sort of ingenuous dismay.
Then I remembered that poor Pickering had been, in those Latin days,
a victim of juvenile irony. He used to bring a bottle of medicine to
school and take a dose in a glass of water before lunch; and every
day at two o'clock, half an hour before the rest of us were
liberated, an old nurse with bushy eyebrows came and fetched him away
in a carriage. His extremely fair complexion, his nurse, and his
bottle of medicine, which suggested a vague analogy with the
sleeping-potion in the tragedy, caused him to be called Juliet.
Certainly Romeo's sweetheart hardly suffered more; she was not, at
least, a standing joke in Verona. Remembering these things, I
hastened to say to Pickering that I hoped he was still the same good
fellow who used to do my Latin for me. "We were capital friends, you
know," I went on, "then and afterwards."
"Yes, we were very good friends," he said, "and that makes it the
stranger I shouldn't have known you. For you know, as a boy, I never
had many friends, nor as a man either. You see," he added, passing
his hand over his eyes, "I am rather dazed, rather bewildered at
finding myself for the first time--alone." And he jerked back his
shoulders nervously, and threw up his head, as if to settle himself
in an unwonted position. I wondered whether the old nurse with the
bushy eyebrows had remained attached to his person up to a recent
period, and discovered presently that, virtually at least, she had.
We had the whole summer day before us, and we sat down on the grass
together and overhauled our old memories. It was as if we had
stumbled upon an ancient cupboard in some dusky corner, and rummaged
out a heap of childish playthings--tin soldiers and torn story-books,
jack-knives and Chinese puzzles. This is what we remembered between
us.
He had made but a short stay at school--not because he was tormented,
for he thought it so fine to be at school at all that he held his
tongue at home about the sufferings incurred through the medicine-
bottle, but because his father thought he was learning bad manners.
This he imparted to me in confidence at the time, and I remember how
it increased my oppressive awe of Mr. Pickering, who had appeared to
me in glimpses as a sort of high priest of the proprieties. Mr.
Pickering was a widower--a fact which seemed to produce in him a sort
of preternatural concentration of parental dignity. He was a
majestic man, with a hooked nose, a keen dark eye, very large
whiskers, and notions of his own as to how a boy--or his boy, at any
rate--should be brought up. First and foremost, he was to be a
"gentleman"; which seemed to mean, chiefly, that he was always to
wear a muffler and gloves, and be sent to bed, after a supper of
bread and milk, at eight o'clock. School-life, on experiment, seemed
hostile to these observances, and Eugene was taken home again, to be
moulded into urbanity beneath the parental eye. A tutor was provided
for him, and a single select companion was prescribed. The choice,
mysteriously, fell on me, born as I was under quite another star; my
parents were appealed to, and I was allowed for a few months to have
my lessons with Eugene. The tutor, I think, must have been rather a
snob, for Eugene was treated like a prince, while I got all the
questions and the raps with the ruler. And yet I remember never
being jealous of my happier comrade, and striking up, for the time,
one of those friendships of childhood. He had a watch and a pony and
a great store of picture-books, but my envy of these luxuries was
tempered by a vague compassion which left me free to be generous. I
could go out to play alone, I could button my jacket myself, and sit
up till I was sleepy. Poor Pickering could never take a step without
asking leave, or spend half an hour in the garden without a formal
report of it when he came in. My parents, who had no desire to see
me inoculated with importunate virtues, sent me back to school at the
end of six months. After that I never saw Eugene. His father went
to live in the country, to protect the lad's morals, and Eugene
faded, in reminiscence, into a pale image of the depressing effects
of education. I think I vaguely supposed that he would melt into
thin air, and indeed began gradually to doubt of his existence, and
to regard him as one of the foolish things one ceased to believe in
as one grew older. It seemed natural that I should have no more news
of him. Our present meeting was my first assurance that he had
really survived all that muffling and coddling.
I observed him now with a good deal of interest, for he was a rare
phenomenon--the fruit of a system persistently and uninterruptedly
applied. He struck me, in a fashion, as certain young monks I had
seen in Italy; he had the same candid, unsophisticated cloister face.
His education had been really almost monastic. It had found him
evidently a very compliant, yielding subject; his gentle affectionate
spirit was not one of those that need to be broken. It had
bequeathed him, now that he stood on the threshold of the great
world, an extraordinary freshness of impression and alertness of
desire, and I confess that, as I looked at him and met his
transparent blue eye, I trembled for the unwarned innocence of such a
soul. I became aware, gradually, that the world had already wrought
a certain work upon him and roused him to a restless, troubled self-
consciousness. Everything about him pointed to an experience from
which he had been debarred; his whole organism trembled with a
dawning sense of unsuspected possibilities of feeling. This
appealing tremor was indeed outwardly visible. He kept shifting
himself about on the grass, thrusting his hands through his hair,
wiping a light perspiration from his forehead, breaking out to say
something and rushing off to something else. Our sudden meeting had
greatly excited him, and I saw that I was likely to profit by a
certain overflow of sentimental fermentation. I could do so with a
good conscience, for all this trepidation filled me with a great
friendliness.
"It's nearly fifteen years, as you say," he began, "since you used to
call me 'butter-fingers' for always missing the ball. That's a long
time to give an account of, and yet they have been, for me, such
eventless, monotonous years, that I could almost tell their history
in ten words. You, I suppose, have had all kinds of adventures and
travelled over half the world. I remember you had a turn for deeds
of daring; I used to think you a little Captain Cook in roundabouts,
for climbing the garden fence to get the ball when I had let it fly
over. I climbed no fences then or since. You remember my father, I
suppose, and the great care he took of me? I lost him some five
months ago. From those boyish days up to his death we were always
together. I don't think that in fifteen years we spent half a dozen
hours apart. We lived in the country, winter and summer, seeing but
three or four people. I had a succession of tutors, and a library to
browse about in; I assure you I am a tremendous scholar. It was a
dull life for a growing boy, and a duller life for a young man grown,
but I never knew it. I was perfectly happy." He spoke of his father
at some length, and with a respect which I privately declined to
emulate. Mr. Pickering had been, to my sense, a frigid egotist,
unable to conceive of any larger vocation for his son than to strive
to reproduce so irreproachable a model. "I know I have been
strangely brought up," said my friend, "and that the result is
something grotesque; but my education, piece by piece, in detail,
became one of my father's personal habits, as it were. He took a
fancy to it at first through his intense affection for my mother and
the sort of worship he paid her memory. She died at my birth, and as
I grew up, it seems that I bore an extraordinary likeness to her.
Besides, my father had a great many theories; he prided himself on
his conservative opinions; he thought the usual American laisser-
aller in education was a very vulgar practice, and that children were
not to grow up like dusty thorns by the wayside. "So you see,"
Pickering went on, smiling and blushing, and yet with something of
the irony of vain regret, "I am a regular garden plant. I have been
watched and watered and pruned, and if there is any virtue in tending
I ought to take the prize at a flower show. Some three years ago my
father's health broke down, and he was kept very much within doors.
So, although I was a man grown, I lived altogether at home. If I was
out of his sight for a quarter of an hour he sent some one after me.
He had severe attacks of neuralgia, and he used to sit at his window,
basking in the sun. He kept an opera-glass at hand, and when I was
out in the garden he used to watch me with it. A few days before his
death I was twenty-seven years old, and the most innocent youth, I
suppose, on the continent. After he died I missed him greatly,"
Pickering continued, evidently with no intention of making an
epigram. "I stayed at home, in a sort of dull stupor. It seemed as
if life offered itself to me for the first time, and yet as if I
didn't know how to take hold of it."
He uttered all this with a frank eagerness which increased as he
talked, and there was a singular contrast between the meagre
experience he described and a certain radiant intelligence which I
seemed to perceive in his glance and tone. Evidently he was a clever
fellow, and his natural faculties were excellent. I imagined he had
read a great deal, and recovered, in some degree, in restless
intellectual conjecture, the freedom he was condemned to ignore in
practice. Opportunity was now offering a meaning to the empty forms
with which his imagination was stored, but it appeared to him dimly,
through the veil of his personal diffidence.
"I have not sailed round the world, as you suppose," I said, "but I
confess I envy you the novelties you are going to behold. Coming to
Homburg you have plunged in medias res."
He glanced at me to see if my remark contained an allusion, and
hesitated a moment. "Yes, I know it. I came to Bremen in the
steamer with a very friendly German, who undertook to initiate me
into the glories and mysteries of the Fatherland. At this season, he
said, I must begin with Homburg. I landed but a fortnight ago, and
here I am." Again he hesitated, as if he were going to add something
about the scene at the Kursaal but suddenly, nervously, he took up
the letter which was lying beside him, looked hard at the seal with a
troubled frown, and then flung it back on the grass with a sigh.
"How long do you expect to be in Europe?" I asked.
"Six months I supposed when I came. But not so long--now!" And he
let his eyes wander to the letter again.
"And where shall you go--what shall you do?"
"Everywhere, everything, I should have said yesterday. But now it is
different."
I glanced at the letter--interrogatively, and he gravely picked it up
and put it into his pocket. We talked for a while longer, but I saw
that he had suddenly become preoccupied; that he was apparently
weighing an impulse to break some last barrier of reserve. At last
he suddenly laid his hand on my arm, looked at me a moment
appealingly, and cried, "Upon my word, I should like to tell you
everything!"
"Tell me everything, by all means," I answered, smiling. "I desire
nothing better than to lie here in the shade and hear everything."
"Ah, but the question is, will you understand it? No matter; you
think me a queer fellow already. It's not easy, either, to tell you
what I feel--not easy for so queer a fellow as I to tell you in how
many ways he is queer!" He got up and walked away a moment, passing
his hand over his eyes, then came back rapidly and flung himself on
the grass again. "I said just now I always supposed I was happy;
it's true; but now that my eyes are open, I see I was only
stultified. I was like a poodle-dog that is led about by a blue
ribbon, and scoured and combed and fed on slops. It was not life;
life is learning to know one's self, and in that sense I have lived
more in the past six weeks than in all the years that preceded them.
I am filled with this feverish sense of liberation; it keeps rising
to my head like the fumes of strong wine. I find I am an active,
sentient, intelligent creature, with desires, with passions, with
possible convictions--even with what I never dreamed of, a possible
will of my own! I find there is a world to know, a life to lead, men
and women to form a thousand relations with. It all lies there like
a great surging sea, where we must plunge and dive and feel the
breeze and breast the waves. I stand shivering here on the brink,
staring, longing, wondering, charmed by the smell of the brine and
yet afraid of the water. The world beckons and smiles and calls, but
a nameless influence from the past, that I can neither wholly obey
nor wholly resist, seems to hold me back. I am full of impulses,
but, somehow, I am not full of strength. Life seems inspiring at
certain moments, but it seems terrible and unsafe; and I ask myself
why I should wantonly measure myself with merciless forces, when I
have learned so well how to stand aside and let them pass. Why
shouldn't I turn my back upon it all and go home to--what awaits me?-
-to that sightless, soundless country life, and long days spent among
old books? But if a man IS weak, he doesn't want to assent
beforehand to his weakness; he wants to taste whatever sweetness
there may be in paying for the knowledge. So it is that it comes
back--this irresistible impulse to take my plunge--to let myself
swing, to go where liberty leads me." He paused a moment, fixing me
with his excited eyes, and perhaps perceived in my own an
irrepressible smile at his perplexity. "'Swing ahead, in Heaven's
name,' you want to say, 'and much good may it do you.' I don't know
whether you are laughing at my scruples or at what possibly strikes
you as my depravity. I doubt," he went on gravely, "whether I have
an inclination toward wrong-doing; if I have, I am sure I shall not
prosper in it. I honestly believe I may safely take out a license to
amuse myself. But it isn't that I think of, any more than I dream
of, playing with suffering. Pleasure and pain are empty words to me;
what I long for is knowledge--some other knowledge than comes to us
in formal, colourless, impersonal precept. You would understand all
this better if you could breathe for an hour the musty in-door
atmosphere in which I have always lived. To break a window and let
in light and air--I feel as if at last I must ACT!"
"Act, by all means, now and always, when you have a chance," I
answered. "But don't take things too hard, now or ever. Your long
confinement makes you think the world better worth knowing than you
are likely to find it. A man with as good a head and heart as yours
has a very ample world within himself, and I am no believer in art
for art, nor in what's called 'life' for life's sake. Nevertheless,
take your plunge, and come and tell me whether you have found the
pearl of wisdom." He frowned a little, as if he thought my sympathy
a trifle meagre. I shook him by the hand and laughed. "The pearl of
wisdom," I cried, "is love; honest love in the most convenient
concentration of experience! I advise you to fall in love." He gave
me no smile in response, but drew from his pocket the letter of which
I have spoken, held it up, and shook it solemnly. "What is it?" I
asked.
"It is my sentence!"
"Not of death, I hope!"
"Of marriage."
"With whom?"
"With a person I don't love."
This was serious. I stopped smiling, and begged him to explain.
"It is the singular part of my story," he said at last. "It will
remind you of an old-fashioned romance. Such as I sit here, talking
in this wild way, and tossing off provocations to destiny, my destiny
is settled and sealed. I am engaged, I am given in marriage. It's a
bequest of the past--the past I had no hand in! The marriage was
arranged by my father, years ago, when I was a boy. The young girl's
father was his particular friend; he was also a widower, and was
bringing up his daughter, on his side, in the same severe seclusion
in which I was spending my days. To this day I am unacquainted with
the origin of the bond of union between our respective progenitors.
Mr. Vernor was largely engaged in business, and I imagine that once
upon a time he found himself in a financial strait and was helped
through it by my father's coming forward with a heavy loan, on which,
in his situation, he could offer no security but his word. Of this
my father was quite capable. He was a man of dogmas, and he was sure
to have a rule of life--as clear as if it had been written out in his
beautiful copper-plate hand--adapted to the conduct of a gentleman
toward a friend in pecuniary embarrassment. What is more, he was
sure to adhere to it. Mr. Vernor, I believe, got on his feet, paid
his debt, and vowed my father an eternal gratitude. His little
daughter was the apple of his eye, and he pledged himself to bring
her up to be the wife of his benefactor's son. So our fate was
fixed, parentally, and we have been educated for each other. I have
not seen my betrothed since she was a very plain-faced little girl in
a sticky pinafore, hugging a one-armed doll--of the male sex, I
believe--as big as herself. Mr. Vernor is in what is called the
Eastern trade, and has been living these many years at Smyrna.
Isabel has grown up there in a white-walled garden, in an orange
grove, between her father and her governess. She is a good deal my
junior; six months ago she was seventeen; when she is eighteen we are
to marry."
He related all this calmly enough, without the accent of complaint,
drily rather and doggedly, as if he were weary of thinking of it.
"It's a romance, indeed, for these dull days," I said, "and I
heartily congratulate you. It's not every young man who finds, on
reaching the marrying age, a wife kept in a box of rose-leaves for
him. A thousand to one Miss Vernor is charming; I wonder you don't
post off to Smyrna."
"You are joking," he answered, with a wounded air, "and I am terribly
serious. Let me tell you the rest. I never suspected this superior
conspiracy till something less than a year ago. My father, wishing
to provide against his death, informed me of it very solemnly. I was
neither elated nor depressed; I received it, as I remember, with a
sort of emotion which varied only in degree from that with which I
could have hailed the announcement that he had ordered me a set of
new shirts. I supposed that was the way that all marriages were
made; I had heard of their being made in heaven, and what was my
father but a divinity? Novels and poems, indeed, talked about
falling in love; but novels and poems were one thing and life was
another. A short time afterwards he introduced me to a photograph of
my predestined, who has a pretty, but an extremely inanimate, face.
After this his health failed rapidly. One night I was sitting, as I
habitually sat for hours, in his dimly-lighted room, near his bed, to
which he had been confined for a week. He had not spoken for some
time, and I supposed he was asleep; but happening to look at him I
saw his eyes wide open, and fixed on me strangely. He was smiling
benignantly, intensely, and in a moment he beckoned to me. Then, on
my going to him--'I feel that I shall not last long,' he said; 'but I
am willing to die when I think how comfortably I have arranged your
future.' He was talking of death, and anything but grief at that
moment was doubtless impious and monstrous; but there came into my
heart for the first time a throbbing sense of being over-governed. I
said nothing, and he thought my silence was all sorrow. 'I shall not
live to see you married,' he went on, 'but since the foundation is
laid, that little signifies; it would be a selfish pleasure, and I
have never thought of myself but in you. To foresee your future, in
its main outline, to know to a certainty that you will be safely
domiciled here, with a wife approved by my judgment, cultivating the
moral fruit of which I have sown the seed--this will content me.
But, my son, I wish to clear this bright vision from the shadow of a
doubt. I believe in your docility; I believe I may trust the
salutary force of your respect for my memory. But I must remember
that when I am removed you will stand here alone, face to face with a
hundred nameless temptations to perversity. The fumes of unrighteous
pride may rise into your brain and tempt you, in the interest of a
vulgar theory which it will call your independence, to shatter the
edifice I have so laboriously constructed. So I must ask you for a
promise--the solemn promise you owe my condition.' And he grasped my
hand. 'You will follow the path I have marked; you will be faithful
to the young girl whom an influence as devoted as that which has
governed your own young life has moulded into everything amiable; you
will marry Isabel Vernor.' This was pretty 'steep,' as we used to
say at school. I was frightened; I drew away my hand and asked to be
trusted without any such terrible vow. My reluctance startled my
father into a suspicion that the vulgar theory of independence had
already been whispering to me. He sat up in his bed and looked at me
with eyes which seemed to foresee a lifetime of odious ingratitude.
I felt the reproach; I feel it now. I promised! And even now I
don't regret my promise nor complain of my father's tenacity. I
feel, somehow, as if the seeds of ultimate repose had been sown in
those unsuspecting years--as if after many days I might gather the
mellow fruit. But after many days! I will keep my promise, I will
obey; but I want to LIVE first!"
"My dear fellow, you are living now. All this passionate
consciousness of your situation is a very ardent life. I wish I
could say as much for my own."
"I want to forget my situation. I want to spend three months without
thinking of the past or the future, grasping whatever the present
offers me. Yesterday I thought I was in a fair way to sail with the
tide. But this morning comes this memento!" And he held up his
letter again.
"What is it?"
"A letter from Smyrna."
"I see you have not yet broken the seal."
"No; nor do I mean to, for the present. It contains bad news."
"What do you call bad news?"
"News that I am expected in Smyrna in three weeks. News that Mr.
Vernor disapproves of my roving about the world. News that his
daughter is standing expectant at the altar."
"Is not this pure conjecture?"
"Conjecture, possibly, but safe conjecture. As soon as I looked at
the letter something smote me at the heart. Look at the device on
the seal, and I am sure you will find it's TARRY NOT!" And he flung
the letter on the grass.
"Upon my word, you had better open it," I said.
"If I were to open it and read my summons, do you know what I should
do? I should march home and ask the Oberkellner how one gets to
Smyrna, pack my trunk, take my ticket, and not stop till I arrived.
I know I should; it would be the fascination of habit. The only way,
therefore, to wander to my rope's end is to leave the letter unread."
"In your place," I said, "curiosity would make me open it."
He shook his head. "I have no curiosity! For a long time now the
idea of my marriage has ceased to be a novelty, and I have
contemplated it mentally in every possible light. I fear nothing
from that side, but I do fear something from conscience. I want my
hands tied. Will you do me a favour? Pick up the letter, put it
into your pocket, and keep it till I ask you for it. When I do, you
may know that I am at my rope's end."
I took the letter, smiling. "And how long is your rope to be? The
Homburg season doesn't last for ever."
"Does it last a month? Let that be my season! A month hence you
will give it back to me."
"To-morrow if you say so. Meanwhile, let it rest in peace!" And I
consigned it to the most sacred interstice of my pocket-book. To say
that I was disposed to humour the poor fellow would seem to be saying
that I thought his request fantastic. It was his situation, by no
fault of his own, that was fantastic, and he was only trying to be
natural. He watched me put away the letter, and when it had
disappeared gave a soft sigh of relief. The sigh was natural, and
yet it set me thinking. His general recoil from an immediate
responsibility imposed by others might be wholesome enough; but if
there was an old grievance on one side, was there not possibly a new-
born delusion on the other? It would be unkind to withhold a
reflection that might serve as a warning; so I told him, abruptly,
that I had been an undiscovered spectator, the night before, of his
exploits at roulette.
He blushed deeply, but he met my eyes with the same clear good-
humour.
"Ah, then, you saw that wonderful lady?"
"Wonderful she was indeed. I saw her afterwards, too, sitting on the
terrace in the starlight. I imagine she was not alone."
"No, indeed, I was with her--for nearly an hour. Then I walked home
with her."
"Ah! And did you go in?"
"No, she said it was too late to ask me; though she remarked that in
a general way she did not stand upon ceremony."
"She did herself injustice. When it came to losing your money for
you, she made you insist."
"Ah, you noticed that too?" cried Pickering, still quite unconfused.
"I felt as if the whole table were staring at me; but her manner was
so gracious and reassuring that I supposed she was doing nothing
unusual. She confessed, however, afterwards, that she is very
eccentric. The world began to call her so, she said, before she ever
dreamed of it, and at last finding that she had the reputation, in
spite of herself, she resolved to enjoy its privileges. Now, she
does what she chooses."
"In other words, she is a lady with no reputation to lose!"
Pickering seemed puzzled; he smiled a little. "Is not that what you
say of bad women?"
"Of some--of those who are found out."
"Well," he said, still smiling, "I have not yet found out Madame
Blumenthal."
"If that's her name, I suppose she's German."
"Yes; but she speaks English so well that you wouldn't know it. She
is very clever. Her husband is dead."
I laughed involuntarily at the conjunction of these facts, and
Pickering's clear glance seemed to question my mirth. "You have been
so bluntly frank with me," I said, "that I too must be frank. Tell
me, if you can, whether this clever Madame Blumenthal, whose husband
is dead, has given a point to your desire for a suspension of
communication with Smyrna."
He seemed to ponder my question, unshrinkingly. "I think not," he
said, at last. "I have had the desire for three months; I have known
Madame Blumenthal for less than twenty-four hours."
"Very true. But when you found this letter of yours on your place at
breakfast, did you seem for a moment to see Madame Blumenthal sitting
opposite?"
"Opposite?"
"Opposite, my dear fellow, or anywhere in the neighbourhood. In a
word, does she interest you?"
"Very much!" he cried, joyously.
"Amen!" I answered, jumping up with a laugh. "And now, if we are to
see the world in a month, there is no time to lose. Let us begin
with the Hardtwald."
Pickering rose, and we strolled away into the forest, talking of
lighter things. At last we reached the edge of the wood, sat down on
a fallen log, and looked out across an interval of meadow at the long
wooded waves of the Taunus. What my friend was thinking of I can't
say; I was meditating on his queer biography, and letting my
wonderment wander away to Smyrna. Suddenly I remembered that he
possessed a portrait of the young girl who was waiting for him there
in a white-walled garden. I asked him if he had it with him. He
said nothing, but gravely took out his pocket-book and drew forth a
small photograph. It represented, as the poet says, a simple maiden
in her flower--a slight young girl, with a certain childish roundness
of contour. There was no ease in her posture; she was standing,
stiffly and shyly, for her likeness; she wore a short-waisted white
dress; her arms hung at her sides and her hands were clasped in
front; her head was bent downward a little, and her dark eyes fixed.
But her awkwardness was as pretty as that of some angular seraph in a
mediaeval carving, and in her timid gaze there seemed to lurk the
questioning gleam of childhood. "What is this for?" her charming
eyes appeared to ask; "why have I been dressed up for this ceremony
in a white frock and amber beads?"
"Gracious powers!" I said to myself; "what an enchanting thing is
innocence!"
"That portrait was taken a year and a half ago," said Pickering, as
if with an effort to be perfectly just. "By this time, I suppose,
she looks a little wiser."
"Not much, I hope," I said, as I gave it back. "She is very sweet!"
"Yes, poor girl, she is very sweet--no doubt!" And he put the thing
away without looking at it.
We were silent for some moments. At last, abruptly--"My dear
fellow," I said, "I should take some satisfaction in seeing you
immediately leave Homburg."
"Immediately?"
"To-day--as soon as you can get ready."
He looked at me, surprised, and little by little he blushed. "There
is something I have not told you," he said; "something that your
saying that Madame Blumenthal has no reputation to lose has made me
half afraid to tell you."
"I think I can guess it. Madame Blumenthal has asked you to come and
play her game for her again."
"Not at all!" cried Pickering, with a smile of triumph. "She says
that she means to play no more for the present. She has asked me to
come and take tea with her this evening."
"Ah, then," I said, very gravely, "of course you can't leave
Homburg."
He answered nothing, but looked askance at me, as if he were
expecting me to laugh. "Urge it strongly," he said in a moment.
"Say it's my duty--that I MUST."
I didn't quite understand him, but, feathering the shaft with a
harmless expletive, I told him that unless he followed my advice I
would never speak to him again.
He got up, stood before me, and struck the ground with his stick.
"Good!" he cried; "I wanted an occasion to break a rule--to leap a
barrier. Here it is. I stay!"
I made him a mock bow for his energy. "That's very fine," I said;
"but now, to put you in a proper mood for Madame Blumenthal's tea, we
will go and listen to the band play Schubert under the lindens." And
we walked back through the woods.
I went to see Pickering the next day, at his inn, and on knocking, as
directed, at his door, was surprised to hear the sound of a loud
voice within. My knock remained unnoticed, so I presently introduced
myself. I found no company, but I discovered my friend walking up
and down the room and apparently declaiming to himself from a little
volume bound in white vellum. He greeted me heartily, threw his book
on the table, and said that he was taking a German lesson.
"And who is your teacher?" I asked, glancing at the book.
He rather avoided meeting my eye, as he answered, after an instant's
delay, "Madame Blumenthal."
"Indeed! Has she written a grammar?"
"It's not a grammar; it's a tragedy." And he handed me the book.
I opened it, and beheld, in delicate type, with a very large margin,
an Historisches Trauerspiel in five acts, entitled "Cleopatra."
There were a great many marginal corrections and annotations,
apparently from the author's hand; the speeches were very long, and
there was an inordinate number of soliloquies by the heroine. One of
them, I remember, towards the end of the play, began in this fashion
-
"What, after all, is life but sensation, and sensation but
deception?--reality that pales before the light of one's dreams as
Octavia's dull beauty fades beside mine? But let me believe in some
intenser bliss, and seek it in the arms of death!"
"It seems decidedly passionate," I said. "Has the tragedy ever been
acted?"
"Never in public; but Madame Blumenthal tells me that she had it
played at her own house in Berlin, and that she herself undertook the
part of the heroine."
Pickering's unworldly life had not been of a sort to sharpen his
perception of the ridiculous, but it seemed to me an unmistakable
sign of his being under the charm, that this information was very
soberly offered. He was preoccupied, he was irresponsive to my
experimental observations on vulgar topics--the hot weather, the inn,
the advent of Adelina Patti. At last, uttering his thoughts, he
announced that Madame Blumenthal had proved to be an extraordinarily
interesting woman. He seemed to have quite forgotten our long talk
in the Hartwaldt, and betrayed no sense of this being a confession
that he had taken his plunge and was floating with the current. He
only remembered that I had spoken slightingly of the lady, and he now
hinted that it behoved me to amend my opinion. I had received the
day before so strong an impression of a sort of spiritual
fastidiousness in my friend's nature, that on hearing now the
striking of a new hour, as it were, in his consciousness, and
observing how the echoes of the past were immediately quenched in its
music, I said to myself that it had certainly taken a delicate hand
to wind up that fine machine. No doubt Madame Blumenthal was a
clever woman. It is a good German custom at Homburg to spend the
hour preceding dinner in listening to the orchestra in the Kurgarten;
Mozart and Beethoven, for organisms in which the interfusion of soul
and sense is peculiarly mysterious, are a vigorous stimulus to the
appetite. Pickering and I conformed, as we had done the day before,
to the fashion, and when we were seated under the trees, he began to
expatiate on his friend's merits.
"I don't know whether she is eccentric or not," he said; "to me every
one seems eccentric, and it's not for me, yet a while, to measure
people by my narrow precedents. I never saw a gaming table in my
life before, and supposed that a gambler was of necessity some dusky
villain with an evil eye. In Germany, says Madame Blumenthal, people
play at roulette as they play at billiards, and her own venerable
mother originally taught her the rules of the game. It is a
recognised source of subsistence for decent people with small means.
But I confess Madame Blumenthal might do worse things than play at
roulette, and yet make them harmonious and beautiful. I have never
been in the habit of thinking positive beauty the most excellent
thing in a woman. I have always said to myself that if my heart were
ever to be captured it would be by a sort of general grace--a
sweetness of motion and tone--on which one could count for soothing
impressions, as one counts on a musical instrument that is perfectly
in tune. Madame Blumenthal has it--this grace that soothes and
satisfies; and it seems the more perfect that it keeps order and
harmony in a character really passionately ardent and active. With
her eager nature and her innumerable accomplishments nothing would be
easier than that she should seem restless and aggressive. You will
know her, and I leave you to judge whether she does seem so! She has
every gift, and culture has done everything for each. What goes on
in her mind I of course can't say; what reaches the observer--the
admirer--is simply a sort of fragrant emanation of intelligence and
sympathy."
"Madame Blumenthal," I said, smiling, "might be the loveliest woman
in the world, and you the object of her choicest favours, and yet
what I should most envy you would be, not your peerless friend, but
your beautiful imagination."
"That's a polite way of calling me a fool," said Pickering. "You are
a sceptic, a cynic, a satirist! I hope I shall be a long time coming
to that."
"You will make the journey fast if you travel by express trains. But
pray tell me, have you ventured to intimate to Madame Blumenthal your
high opinion of her?"
"I don't know what I may have said. She listens even better than she
talks, and I think it possible I may have made her listen to a great
deal of nonsense. For after the first few words I exchanged with her
I was conscious of an extraordinary evaporation of all my old
diffidence. I have, in truth, I suppose," he added in a moment,
"owing to my peculiar circumstances, a great accumulated fund of
unuttered things of all sorts to get rid of. Last evening, sitting
there before that charming woman, they came swarming to my lips.
Very likely I poured them all out. I have a sense of having
enshrouded myself in a sort of mist of talk, and of seeing her lovely
eyes shining through it opposite to me, like fog-lamps at sea." And
here, if I remember rightly, Pickering broke off into an ardent
parenthesis, and declared that Madame Blumenthal's eyes had something
in them that he had never seen in any others. "It was a jumble of
crudities and inanities," he went on; "they must have seemed to her
great rubbish; but I felt the wiser and the stronger, somehow, for
having fired off all my guns--they could hurt nobody now if they hit-
-and I imagine I might have gone far without finding another woman in
whom such an exhibition would have provoked so little of mere cold
amusement."
"Madame Blumenthal, on the contrary," I surmised, "entered into your
situation with warmth."
"Exactly so--the greatest! She has felt and suffered, and now she
understands!"
"She told you, I imagine, that she understood you as if she had made
you, and she offered to be your guide, philosopher, and friend."
"She spoke to me," Pickering answered, after a pause, "as I had never
been spoken to before, and she offered me, formally, all the offices
of a woman's friendship."
"Which you as formally accepted?"
"To you the scene sounds absurd, I suppose, but allow me to say I
don't care!" Pickering spoke with an air of genial defiance which
was the most inoffensive thing in the world. "I was very much moved;
I was, in fact, very much excited. I tried to say something, but I
couldn't; I had had plenty to say before, but now I stammered and
bungled, and at last I bolted out of the room."
"Meanwhile she had dropped her tragedy into your pocket!"
"Not at all. I had seen it on the table before she came in.
Afterwards she kindly offered to read German aloud with me, for the
accent, two or three times a week. 'What shall we begin with?' she
asked. 'With this!' I said, and held up the book. And she let me
take it to look it over."
I was neither a cynic nor a satirist, but even if I had been, I might
have been disarmed by Pickering's assurance, before we parted, that
Madame Blumenthal wished to know me and expected him to introduce me.
Among the foolish things which, according to his own account, he had
uttered, were some generous words in my praise, to which she had
civilly replied. I confess I was curious to see her, but I begged
that the introduction should not be immediate, for I wished to let
Pickering work out his destiny alone. For some days I saw little of
him, though we met at the Kursaal and strolled occasionally in the
park. I watched, in spite of my desire to let him alone, for the
signs and portents of the world's action upon him--of that portion of
the world, in especial, of which Madame Blumenthal had constituted
herself the agent. He seemed very happy, and gave me in a dozen ways
an impression of increased self-confidence and maturity. His mind
was admirably active, and always, after a quarter of an hour's talk
with him, I asked myself what experience could really do, that
innocence had not done, to make it bright and fine. I was struck
with his deep enjoyment of the whole spectacle of foreign life--its
novelty, its picturesqueness, its light and shade--and with the
infinite freedom with which he felt he could go and come and rove and
linger and observe it all. It was an expansion, an awakening, a
coming to moral manhood. Each time I met him he spoke a little less
of Madame Blumenthal; but he let me know generally that he saw her
often, and continued to admire her. I was forced to admit to myself,
in spite of preconceptions, that if she were really the ruling star
of this happy season, she must be a very superior woman. Pickering
had the air of an ingenuous young philosopher sitting at the feet of
an austere muse, and not of a sentimental spendthrift dangling about
some supreme incarnation of levity.
