Transcribed from the 1887 Macmillan and Co. edition of "The Madonna of
the Future et al." by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk. Proofed
by Vanessa M. Mosher, Faith Matievich and Jonesey.
EUGENE PICKERING
by Henry James
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!"